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.
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
‘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 Caitlin 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.’
