Without warning

by John Birmingham

  The doors closed on the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre with a chime and the protesting grumble of old rubber wheels in dirty guide rails. Early evening had come with a hard frost and she shivered inside the jacket, thankful for its warmth. Transport was her first and most urgent need, then shelter. When they were safely hidden away she would contact Wales, her overwatch coordinator. Her cover was blown. Her image and the fight in the emergency room had certainly been captured on hospital security video.

  ‘Where the fuck are we going, Cathy? What are you going to do? You killed those men. Murdered them.’ Monique’s tone was shrill, accusatory.

  Caitlin shrugged her off, scanning the cars parked in front of the building as she hastened down the steps. A blue Renault Fuego had caught her eye – a good car, easily stolen, and as close to invisible in Paris as she could get on short notice. The front passenger-side window was open a crack.

  ‘It’s not the same,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Monique demanded to know, hurrying to catch up beside her.

  Sirens were audible, but there seemed to be hundreds of them, the distinctive warble and wail coming from all points of the compass. The city was alive with their discordant jangling sound.

  Traffic along the roads around the hospital grounds was heavy, but grinding forward in fits and starts. Caitlin could see the strobing lights of both police and ambulance vehicles in three separate places. It was impossible to tell whether they were headed in her direction.

  ‘Killing and murdering are not the same thing. I killed them, sure. But I had good reason. That isn’t murder. It’s self-defence.’

  ‘Self-defence!’ Monique made a grab for her arm but Caitlin slipped out of her grip with practised ease. ‘You expect me to believe that? You attacked them and killed them like… a… machine! A thing. You are no activist. You are no surfer!’ Monique spat the last word at her.

  ‘Well, I used to surf, but I’m also a soldier,’ Caitlin replied. ‘Now, get in the fucking car, if you want to get out of this alive. Those men back there, they were soldiers too, like me. And there’ll be more of them looking for us.’

  Caitlin retrieved one of the pistols from the leather jacket and swung the butt of the handle into the window, smashing it open and causing Monique to jump with surprise. There were over a dozen witnesses watching her, but nobody made any attempt to intervene as she popped the lock. More people came spilling out of the ER doors, some of them pointing her way, but none made any move towards her. It wouldn’t be long, however, before hospital security, the gendarmes or something worse turned up.

  ‘Clock’s a-tickin’, Monique. Hop in.’

  The front seat of the Fuego was cluttered with papers, a bag of onions and a purse from which spilled a chequebook, iPod, mobile phone, make-up and more keys.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Caitlin. ‘Why not just get a big fucking bumper sticker that says “Steal my stuff”?’

  She snatched a sturdy-looking steel pen from the jumble of items and used it to lever her way into the car’s accessory circuits, cracking open the plastic cover beneath the wheel with a couple of violent jerks. She sensed Monique hovering outside and swept the detritus from the seat. ‘Just get in. We’re running out of time.’

  The French girl climbed in carefully, as if unwilling to touch the belongings of the unknown owner. Caitlin swore softly as she sparked the engine to life, giving herself a small electrical shock in the process. A brief glance over her shoulder revealed a growing knot of people on the steps of the hospital, all of them gesturing in her direction, some of them shouting. She threw the car into reverse, stamped on the gas and peeled out backwards from the parking slot with a squeal and the harsh smell of burnt rubber, reefing on the handbrake to tighten her turning circle. Both she and Monique jerked forward in their seats and she slammed the disc brakes, changed gear and accelerated away, barely missing the tail-lights of an adjacent Fiat.

  ‘You are not Cathy Mercure, are you?’ asked Monique as they negotiated a twisting course through the car park towards the exit and out into the traffic stream.

  Caitlin’s first, unthinking reaction was to lie. Deceit and betrayal were so deeply ingrained by her training and the demands of her work that they had become elements of her true nature. But unless she was psychotic, her mission concerns were no longer relevant. Something bigger had happened, something infinitely worse than anything she had been prepared to fight. A painful throbbing on the injured side of her head grew more insistent as she allowed herself to contemplate anything beyond fight or flight for the first time since the shooting had begun back at the hospital.

  ‘No,’ she conceded to Monique. ‘I’m not Cathy Mercure. My name’s Caitlin. That’s all you need to know. That, and also that you’re in a lot of trouble.’

  Blaring horns and some muffled Gallic abuse greeted their high-speed entry into the crowded Parisian road net. Caitlin opted to cut across the main flow of traffic, and forced her way through an intersection onto a lesser boulevard. She wasn’t familiar with the road but it had everything she wanted right at that moment. It was navigable at a good speed and it was taking them away from the place where somebody had just tried to put the zap on her.

  ‘I’m in trouble?’ Monique shot back. ‘I have not killed anybody or stolen a car. I am not some sort of criminal. I did not get my friends shot back at…’

  Her voice hitched and cracked as the emotional blow-back of the battle at the Pitiй-Salpкtriиre finally struck her. She had seen at least one of her friends shot down in front of her eyes, before watching another morph into a homicidal destroyer. Monique’s mouth gaped and her shoulders trembled as a squall of wild animus blew through her.

  Caitlin rammed the little blue car through a series of gear changes as she threaded a course through a thicker pulse of traffic. Once they’d cleared the moving obstruction, she plucked a couple of paper tissues from a box jammed into the cup holder that lay between them.

  ‘I didn’t get your friends killed, Monique,’ she said firmly, but quietly. ‘I didn’t pull that trigger. But I took down the assholes who did. They’re avenged, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘Nothing! It’s worth nothing,’ shouted Monique, as the tears came at last.

  ‘Fair enough,’ shrugged Caitlin, checking the mirrors for any sign of pursuit as she dialled back on their speed to blend in to the surrounding traffic flow, and began to look for a landmark with which she could place them. She didn’t fancy asking the French girl for anything just yet.

  The street had narrowed to just one lane running in each direction. Stunted, leafless trees lined the footpath, which was thick with people hurrying home from work, or out to dinner in one of the many bistros and wine bars that huddled up close together on the ground floors of the old four- and five-storey buildings. Warm, golden light spilled out through their windows, affording brief glimpses of packed tables and bars at which drinkers stood beneath thick clouds of cigarette smoke. For all the cosmopolitan charms, it was all so conventional. Had she been able to drive along here twenty-four hours earlier, Caitlin was certain she would have passed by almost exactly the same scene. Surely the only topic of conversation at those crowded tables would be the day’s news from the US; from the driver’s seat of the stolen Renault, however, she could not tell.

  Beside her, Monique was trying valiantly to control her crying, but she had already gone through at least a third of the tissues. The young woman searched inside a pocket for a small flip-top cell phone, sniffling as she tried to key in a number. Caitlin slapped it out of her hands.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing? Don’t you read your own conspiracy theories? You can be tracked with that thing. In fact…’

  She reached over and roughly jammed her hand between Monique’s legs to retrieve the little Samsung.

  ‘I’m just calling Billy!’ she protested. ‘He can come for me. I don’t want to be alone with you or anywhere near you – whoever you are.’

  Monique gasped in shock as Ca
itlin threw the phone out of the window.

  ‘It won’t be Billy who comes for you if you make that call, dar-lin’. It’ll be more guys in ties, toting big fucking guns.’

  ‘You bitch! That was my phone!’ cried Monique, genuinely affronted.

  ‘No. That was a chip tracking your every movement,’ Caitlin corrected her. ‘And forget about your boyfriend. His phone is being monitored too.’

  Caitlin checked her watch. They had been driving for nearly fifteen minutes, more than enough time for their descriptions and the car’s licence plate to have been pushed out over the police nets.

  ‘We have to change cars, Monique,’ she said. ‘I’m going to pull off the street up ahead at that corner and ditch this ride. I’m gonna ask you to come with me, but I’m not going to make you.’

  She allowed herself a brief, measuring glance at her passenger. Monique’s eyes were puffy and tear tracks had washed runnels of make-up from her face. It must have been expertly applied. Caitlin hadn’t even noticed before. Monique was upset, naturally, but she was angry too. Very angry.

  ‘Why should I come with you? I should go right to the police and report you.’

  ‘You could do that,’ Caitlin said as she turned the wheel to take them off the narrow street and into an even narrower alleyway. ‘But those men I killed – the men who shot Maggie in the head – they were from your state security service. Secret police, if you like. If you walk into the gendarmes and tell them what happened, your details will go onto their network and within half an hour more guys like that will turn up at the police station and take you away. The cops won’t stop them. But they will stop you leaving if you try.’

  ‘But why? That is ridiculous.’

  Caitlin pulled over, running the Fuego’s wheels up onto the very narrow footpath. It couldn’t have been more than two feet wide. She was glad she hadn’t had to reverse-park. Her head and neck were aching.

  ‘They were after me, Monique, and I was with you, so now they’re after you too. You have family? They’re being watched. Your boyfriend? Him too. It’s not you they want, it’s me. Your security service is conducting a hard target search for me, and as of half an hour ago, you are the key. Every phone call you have made for the last five years, every address you’ve lived at, or just stayed at, that can be tracked, is being tracked. Every movement across every border, every purchase with your credit card, every transaction in your bank account, every mailing list your name appears on, every email you’ve ever sent, every chat room or website you’ve ever visited, every net search you’ve ever done, they are all being sifted through and analysed right now, by people way smarter than you, because you are alive, and free, and running from them. With me.’

  Monique shook her head, refusing to believe what she was hearing. As she spoke, her words became clipped and fiercer. ‘This is bullshit. You are bullshit. You come to us as a friend. You say you are against the war. But you are part of the war. You are a killer just like Bush and Blair. Those men, if they were from the police or the secret service, it was their duty to arrest you. And you killed them and got Maggie killed as well.’

  Monique’s anger overwhelmed her and she emphasised her last point by slapping at Caitlin’s face. The American brushed off the ineffectual blows with one swift hand, not even flinching as Monique cried out with frustration and attempted to rake out her eyes. Caitlin grabbed one of the girl’s hands and turned it sharply back in on the wrist, making her gasp with pain and shock.

  ‘Knock it off, princess,’ Caitlin warned. ‘I didn’t come here to hurt you or your dumbass friends. I came to protect you.’

  ‘What?’

  At that point, three young men, obviously drunk and in high spirits, came around the corner and past the car, banging on the windows and calling out to the two women to come out and play, to have a drink and celebrate with them. Caitlin glared back, but they just laughed. One held up two fingers in a V and stuck his tongue between them, waggling it obscenely. This was obviously the funniest thing his friends had seen all night and they fell into the cobbled roadway, laughing hysterically.

  ‘Assholes,’ muttered Caitlin.

  ‘What did you -’

  ‘I said, “Assholes”.’

  ‘Non. What did you say about “protecting” us?’

  The drunks helped each other off the cold, damp road surface and continued on their way to the next bar, one of them turning awkwardly to grab his crotch and give it a bit a squeeze for the benefit of the two dykes. Caitlin had no trouble translating the slurred words that followed, but the body language said it all: See what you are missing, ladies?

  ‘How could you have been protecting us?’ Monique repeated, ignoring her oafish countrymen. ‘From those skinheads at the Tunnel? You couldn’t have known about that.’

  Caitlin opened the door and stepped out, taking a handful of banknotes from the handbag. She left the keys in the ignition and the door ajar. The Renault would not be here for long. Monique squeezed out on the other side, the car’s proximity to a brick wall making for a tight fit. The wall was covered with an inch of peeling posters, most of them for awful French rock bands, but the uppermost layer called for a ‘National Day of Action’ to stop the ‘Anglo War’. That was the gig her merry little band had been headed for when set upon by the National Front thugs, who got lucky and put her in hospital. Where I got lucky and caught a fucking brain tumour…

  Caitlin had to stop for a moment and lean against the wall as her head reeled. Whether from the illness, her injuries or an adrenalin backwash, she couldn’t tell. She stood still, closed her eyes and sucked in a long draught of air. It was unpleasantly cold now, but the alleyway still reeked of garbage and dog shit – the signature smell of Paris behind the coffee and pain au chocolat.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Monique asked grudgingly.

  ‘I’ll be fine. Just give me a second.’

  And the dizzy spell did pass quickly. She felt a little lightheaded as they stepped off towards the street again, but nothing too crippling. Monique supported Caitlin at the elbow anyway, a gesture she was happy to accept.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ the Frenchwoman said, a little petulantly. ‘What did you mean before, about protecting us?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me, not yet.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘No. If we’re still alive in a few days, I’ll tell you – and you will believe me, every word I say. But for now, no. Come with me, or make your own way home, where they’ll be waiting for you. It’s all the same to me.’

  They stopped at the intersection, where bright lights and heavy foot traffic created an effect a little like stepping back into the real world from some underground realm. A bus rumbled by, coughing thick gouts of acrid smoke into the air. Shoes scuffed and clicked on wet, grey flagstones, and around them roared hundreds of voices, all discussing the same thing: ‘la Disparition’. The Disappearance.

  Caitlin’s heart sank. She had been hoping, irrationally, that the apparent normality of the street scene implied there was some sort of disorder within her, some malady of the brain caused by her illness, and that it had manifested itself as a perverse hallucination of cataclysm. But no, the Parisians were agog with the news. And further confirmation for her that it was real was the sound of so many voices raised in good cheer and even merriment. That is what the three jerks who’d abused them before were drinking to: a world without America.

  Fucking assholes.

  ‘Excuse-moi!’ Monique had stopped in her tracks, affronted enough to revert to her native tongue.

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t think I was speaking aloud,’ said Caitlin. ‘It’s nothing. We’ve got to get moving. Let’s go.’

  They set off again, heading uphill. Caitlin’s eyes swept the road and the footpath ahead of them on both sides of the street for any sign of hostile action, but all she could see was heavy traffic and throngs of boulevardiers, many of them seemingly toasting the day. Not all, admittedly. Here and there, argu
ments raged in that Gallic way, all sound and fury without any real danger of violent contention.

  ‘… It is a disaster, I tell you, a world-ending disaster.’

  ‘No. A second chance is what it is, gifted by the gods.’

  ‘So, you are a believer now, eh?’

  ‘… This will mean horror, horror on an unimaginable scale…’

  ‘… I shall be leaving for my farm this very night. Mark my words, leave the city now or you will have – ‘

  ‘All I will have is another glass of Billecart…’

  Caitlin set her mouth in a grim, thin line and pushed on with her head down. Monique fell silent beside her. After a few minutes it became obvious that for each individual who saw the Disappearance as a malign catastrophe, another two or three thought it a fine thing. From the snatches of conversation she picked up as they hurried along, it seemed that in this part of the world at least, a rough consensus had settled on a conspiracy theory about the Americans having destroyed themselves when testing some super-weapon for use in Iraq. Nobody seemed to imagine that any such fate might befall them here in Paris. But then, if they did, they’d hardly be out scarfing down dinner and aperitifs, would they? Perhaps the freeways out of the city were jammed with more people like the man she’d heard planning to leave for his farm later that night. (Although, why he thought he’d be safe there from something that gobbled whole continents was a mystery.)