She’d been expecting either a small storeroom or a water closet. It was the latter, as filthy and unkempt as the rest of the place, but she didn’t care. A sash-window, grey and completely opaque with grime, opened onto a rear courtyard below. The pulley ropes were broken and hung uselessly, one of them trailing its frayed end through a petrified blob of toothpaste. Caitlin ignored it, safed and shouldered her weapons, and hauled herself awkwardly through the window.
It was a straight drop into the muddy courtyard, with no shed or ledge to step on. She levered herself out, and hung down as far as possible; then she pushed out and dropped. Her knees folded up under her, just as she had been trained to do by the good folks at the US Army Airborne School at Fort Benning.
There was nothing elegant about the move, which ended with her rolling in the wet earth. The submachine-gun squelched underneath her, digging painfully into her ribs, but she mostly kept the Benelli out of the muck, and with no time to check and clean the guns, she chose that as her primary. Pulling out more shells from the side saddle, she finished reloading on the run towards the small wooden fence that separated the courtyard from the property behind.
The muted rattling cough of the FAMAS reached her, adding urgency to her flight. But as she stood, a wave of disorientation swept over her and threatened to steal her balance. Caitlin took one precious second to stand perfectly still, draw in a fresh breath and attempt to centre herself, to gain some measure of control over her traitorous body. Then there was nothing for it but to forge on, leaning forward into the vertigo that had seized her and biting down a rising tide of bile that was trying to erupt upwards out of her stomach.
She leapt over the wooden fence, catching her jeans and almost crashing down in a heap on the other side as she lost her footing on a dead pigeon. Her momentum was enough to carry her forward, however, and she brought the shotgun around, flicked off the safety and jacked a round into the chamber.
In front of her now was the rear door of a building that faced onto the Rue du Bac d’Asnieres, the other side of the elongated triangular block formed by its convergence with the similarly named route – from her point of view, the quiet, uncontested side. The van was at the apex of the triangle, flat tyres and all. An empty bakery stood before her, if she recalled correctly. This just might work…
The small frosted window embedded in the door was covered with a wire grill, but there were no other obvious security measures. No wires, no cams, no back-to-base relays that she could spot. Her head was still spinning and her balance was off, but the door was a stationary target. She drove a powerful side kick into it, just inches below the rusted key lock. It gave way with a report like a gunshot and she hurried inside as the sound of more automatic fire drifted over the roof line from the street behind her.
She entered a storeroom, mostly empty, with just two large paper bags of flour lying on the concrete floor. Rats had chewed both of them open. A doorway led through to the baking room, where big commercial ovens stood cold and unattended, presumably for want of supplies. Or perhaps the boulanger, more closely attuned to the city’s increasingly serious hunger, had already taken his family and left.
Caitlin didn’t give a shit. She found the door she was looking for – the shop’s front door – punched through it, and emerged into the flat dismal light that leached through the thick blanket of toxic clouds now overhead. Rain started to spatter down again, burning her eyes and exposed skin. A black crow, seemingly unaffected by the pollution, picked at the carcass of a squirrel in the gutter just in front of her. She swore at her lack of goggles, a pair of which lay in the bag she’d left with Monique.
The assassin was caught unawares by the strength of her feelings for the girl. They were not comrades, more allies of convenience, thrown together only because of the extreme circumstances of the last week. And she had never allowed herself to grow attached to a target or an asset, but nor had she ever been diagnosed with a brain tumour or woken up to discover her whole world had vanished like a dream. As she ignored the increasingly difficult symptoms of her illness and pushed herself to the limits of endurance, Caitlin tried to convince herself she was simply worried, quite reasonably, at losing the vital support of a key asset.
A rising, ungovernable anger threatened to overwhelm her as she remembered her last sighting of Monique, jackknifed in pain, bleeding out onto the filthy floor of the old tenement. The girl was a ditz, but she had stuck by Caitlin when, really, she would have been better off lighting out on her own. If nothing else, the American owed her a settlement with whoever had shot her.
There were a dozen or more people milling about nervously on this street, flinching at the gunfire. Seeing her approaching, a young man called out a warning – ‘Attention, elle a une arme! - and they scattered like birds startled from a tree. Caitlin ran five doors down the street, back towards the hairpin corner around which she’d walked with Monique a lifetime ago. When she judged herself far enough along, she diverted in through the open garage doors of an auto repair business, yelling that she was the police and warning everyone to get down. ‘Tout le monde, planquez vouz! She heard more cries of alarm and noted two figures in coveralls cowering out of her way, but ignored them.
This building sat on the point formed by the meeting of the two roadways, so it had no back courtyard. The only open ground it boasted was a triangular concrete apron at the apex of the two streets, which appeared to be used as a parking bay for the business. It was possible to cut right across the workshop and emerge, hopefully, behind the white van and the last shooter. She quickly weaved her way through, dodging around a couple of pits over which sat a new Honda Accord and an ancient Trabant. A pair of double doors, identical to the ones she’d come through from the Rue du Bac, stood ajar, opening onto the wider thoroughfare of the Route d’Asnieres. She could just make out the rear of the van, splattered with blood, and an outstretched hand, lifeless on the sidewalk.
The FAMAS roared again, a long guttural snarl of fully automatic fire, none of it directed at her. Nonetheless, her heart lurched forward. She saw smoke and a muzzle flash light up the darkened cave of the tenement entrance where the last shooter had holed up – the doorway of the building in which Monique lay, disintegrated as the bullets struck.
Clearing burst, she thought. Right where she’s lying.
Caitlin took a second to check the shotgun and finish racking shells into the magazine. It was good to go, as near as she could tell. After she reloaded her Glock with a full mag, she stopped to think for a moment. What if there were more of them? There had to be more… Her eyes scanned the windows and rooftops, into stopped cars, taking in the few people still crazy enough to be on the street.
‘Nothing for it,’ she told herself. ‘Surprise is everything.’