Without warning

She was sick. Increasingly nauseous, and occasionally close to vomiting. Caitlin had no idea whether it was a side effect of the headache, which had been constant for three days now, or an entirely new symptom of whatever was eating her brain from the inside out. Of course, it could also be a result of breathing in the soupy miasma of toxins and burnt chemicals that had rolled over the city on Tuesday and stayed for the last three days. The charred, atomised memory of America. Some Guardian writer with a very dark sense of humour and a taste for DeLillo had named it ‘the airborne toxic event’, and the tag had stuck.

French government warnings played on a loop across every radio station, advising listeners to stay indoors whenever possible. Caitlin couldn’t believe anyone would need telling twice. Millions of dead seabirds had washed up on the coast of western France just before the tsunami of pollutants arrived, and thousands of pigeons – flying rats, as she thought of them – had been dropping from the sick, leaden skies over Paris ever since. She could see dozens of little grey carcasses from the apartment window. City council workers had already cleaned the streets below of twitching, broken birds, but that was on Wednesday, and they hadn’t been back.

The few times Caitlin had ventured outside to stock up on fresh food, she’d returned with her eyes stinging and her airways burnt. It reminded her of the time she’d done a job in Linfen, a city in China’s Shanxi Province, where you could feel the acids and poisons leaching through your skin every extra minute you were exposed.

She splashed a handful of cold water on her waxy face. She looked bad. Bruised, puffy eyes; hollow cheeked. All the lines on her face etched too long and deep. Then again, almost everyone in Paris looked like that now. There weren’t too many parties celebrating the new world order these days. People were either keeping to themselves, holed up with their families, or they were out in mobs, heedless of the poisoned atmosphere. The ring of fire that surrounded the old core of the city was down to them. What had begun as small-scale opportunistic looting had escalated into a rolling series of street battles between the police and ever-greater numbers of rioters from the banlieue. In the last twenty-four hours, the radio had carried reports of wider clashes, between ‘migrant gangs’ and ‘white youths’.

Between Muslim zohackjobs and fascist skinheads, Caitlin thought to herself. The first sparks.

She scrubbed her face with a damp cloth before towelling off.

The old bathroom at the rear of the apartment, a dark, depressing closet tiled in deep green and featuring a small faded yellow tub, wasn’t the most flattering place in which to examine herself in a mirror. But there was nowhere else in the tiny flat. The fit-out was very basic, funded entirely from a black, discretionary account that she’d kept off the books at Echelon. One bed; a couch and a table; a bar fridge in the kitchenette, a two-ring gas burner, a microwave oven. And a small armoury under the floorboards in the bathroom where she had also stashed some money – increasingly useless – and three passports – ditto. Nobody knew about this place, not even Wales.

And for now at least, it remained off the grid, undiscovered by her hunters and relatively safe, unlike the first sanctum near the cemetery. It made sense, she supposed. If they’d known to try grabbing her up at the hospital, they had probably taken down her control cell, and possibly even the whole Echelon network.

Normally, she’d be gone by now. Disappeared off the map. But her illness seemed to grow worse by the day, and she had realised with horror some time ago that she actually needed Monique’s help just to get through the day. A lone run through hostile territory was out of the question.

And anyway, where could she go? Wales was uncontactable, probably because they’d grabbed him. The cell structure of Echelon’s wetwork sections meant she was floating, alone. There were no convenient fronts or trapdoors through which she could slip. Beyond a few dead drops and compromised lay-up points, the network had no permanent presence on the continent. No outposts or operational centres. Just a transient pool of operators like her, who came and went with each mission. And she was being hunted.

But why now? What was the fucking point?

A small tic tugged at her cheek in the fly-spotted bathroom mirror. ‘Relatively safe’ didn’t really mean much in Paris at the moment. Caitlin pulled down on a string, killing the power to the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. She couldn’t be sure it would come back on when next she needed it. The city’s electricity supply was getting patchy. They’d been blacked out for three hours yesterday, and this morning the water had run brown and cold from all of the taps.