Without Warning (8 page)

Caitlin was surprised at the hysterical undertow that was already running so strongly in the Pitié-Salpêtrière. But then, the place was full of people who were already stressed out and had nothing much to do beyond watching television while they waited for some sort of traumatic medical procedure. On the way down to checkout she witnessed any number of pedal-to-the-metal, full-bore freak-outs. One woman even barreled right into her; a large, bug-eyed Parisian Mack truck, she knocked Maggie right off her feet, screaming about the end of days before disappearing down the hallway with her enormous, deeply dimpled butt swinging free in the rear of a badly strung hospital gown.

“I’ll be a lot better off out of here,” Caitlin assured her companions.

Apart from Monique, who remained suspicious after discovering Caitlin’s hidden gift for her native tongue, the secret squirrels weren’t doing much better than any of the ranting, unbalanced Frenchies around them. Maggie, after picking herself up off the floor, was blabbering on about needing to phone her sister in Connecticut. And Auntie Celia had settled on a never-ending string of curses and oaths as her favored response. They’d all made perfunctory efforts to get her to stay in the hospital, to argue with Colbert that she was too ill to move, but Caitlin could tell that each was spinning off into her own little world of free-floating and violently unstable anxiety. The whole city was probably going to be like this. The whole fucking world.

For her part, she didn’t know what to think about the news out of the States. It was bordering on schizoid. But she did know that even if this all
turned out to be some postmillennial
War of the Worlds
shakedown, if she’d been cut off from Echelon, she was traveling blind and unarmed in a world of predators. She had to run to ground as soon as possible, reestablish contact with Wales Larrison, her controller, and get some updated instructions. Christ only knew what had gone down while she’d been out of it. Plus, of course, Monique was eyeing her with increasing suspicion.

A single television suspended from the ceiling in the main waiting room had drawn a huge pool of onlookers, all muttering and gasping at every new revelation from the French-language news service. Caitlin ignored it. She was having trouble negotiating her release with the large, distracted black woman on the front desk. Like everyone else she seemed incapable of dragging her attention away from the TV for more than a few seconds. Monique tugged at her elbow, saying in French, “
I want to speak to you,
“ while Maggie, who had spied a bank of pay phones, exclaimed, “All righty then!”

She took off past Caitlin and Monique and her head suddenly burst open.

Ropy strands of blood, bone chips, and gobbets of brain tissue splattered everybody within two meters. As Maggie’s oversize, badly dressed, and utterly lifeless frame began to drop to the floor, Caitlin was already in midair, having launched herself without thought toward the nearest cover. She sailed over the counter, crashing bodily into the nurse with whom she’d been making so little headway. A cheap pink radio exploded on top of a filing cabinet. The screams began as the hundred or more people crammed into the foyer finally realized that somebody was shooting into their midst, but Caitlin was already on the move, belly-crawling toward an open door that she hoped would give onto another exit point.

“Wait!”

She felt a hand on her ankle and lashed back with a heel strike, only checking the move as she recognized the voice. Monique. The blow still caught the French girl heavily on one cheek, and she cried out in pain. Caitlin swore and reached back behind her, grabbing Monique by her collar and roughly dragging her up into a crouching run. She slipped once, losing her footing and painfully twisting one knee.
“Move,”
she yelled.
“If you want to live, move your ass!”

Behind them a riot had seemingly erupted. She heard two muffled shots and the crash of breaking glass, barely masked by the uproar of the terrorized crowd. A frightened nurse stood in their way, her eyes wide and staring. Caitlin elbowed her aside and made for a doorway behind her.

“What is happening?” cried Monique before Caitlin cut her off.

“Shut up and run!”

Crashing out into the corridor, they ran headlong into a couple of security guards, one fat and wheezing and another who looked like he might have started his career as a public security professional back in the days of the Maginot Line. “That way,” yelled Caitlin, throwing a glance back over her shoulder, where she caught the briefest glimpse of pandemonium in the hospital foyer. Snaking around the guards, she sped up again, turning left and right, slamming through a series of swinging rubber doors without regard for who or what she might find on the other side. She’d let go of Monique and didn’t much care whether she was keeping up or not, as she blew through yet another set of swinging doors, crashing into an orderly and the trolley he’d been pushing. It tipped over and fell to the tiles with a great metallic clattering of medical instruments and stainless-steel bowls. Never stopping, Caitlin swooped down on a foil package, slipping it into her sleeve as she hurried on.

“Wait, Cathy, wait.”

Monique was still with her.

They’d found the treatment area of the hospital’s emergency ward, and even by the usually chaotic standards of an ER their entrance drew attention. With no televisions in this ward and almost everyone distracted by whatever injuries or raging illnesses had gained them access to the overstretched facility, the sudden noisy appearance of two women, covered in gore and moving at great speed with no apparent regard for their own safety or anybody else’s, caused heads to turn and all conversation to halt. Monique was obviously about to start demanding answers, and looked like she might just put down roots on the spot where she’d slid to a halt. A formidable gray-haired woman in a matron’s uniform started moving toward them with her head down and eyes glaring murderously. She put Caitlin in mind of a big blue bulldozer.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Monique. “What is going on?”

Before Caitlin could answer, or even just spin around and keep running, the same heavy rubber doors swung inward and two men, both of them armed, muscled through. They were dressed in suits, one of them badly bloodstained, and their eyes swept the room, quickly settling on their quarry. Caitlin knew there was no chance of running.

Two bullets took the formidable-looking matron in the chest, throwing her through the air and rendering her a whole lot less imposing as her body crashed into a bed and dropped to the floor, twitching and pulsing extravagant amounts of blood onto the yellowing tiles. Monique screamed and
ducked, covering her ears with both hands. Her cries were lost in the bedlam as patients and medical staff exploded into panic. Having no cover and no safe exit, Caitlin took the only option left. She attacked.

One of her assailants had been caught with an empty magazine, leaving his partner as the primary threat. She grabbed the only ranged weapons on hand, a couple of stainless-steel bowls, and launched them with great force like bright metal Frisbees directly at his head. He had no choice but to duck and weave, firing anyway, the bullets heading downrange unaimed, uncontrolled. One splattered an IV bag. Another struck a patient in one arm. Taking the foil pack from inside the sleeve at her wrist as she charged, Caitlin stripped the silver wrapping away from a disposable scalpel, and focusing her
kjai,
her war shout, into the very center of her target, she closed the short distance between them as quickly as she could.

To those normal, mortal beings around her, she moved as a fluid blur of violent action, suddenly airborne, one long leg pistoning out and into the sternum of the armed attacker. The gun fired again, bringing down a shower of plaster dust from the ceiling as he slammed backward into a wall. His head struck a metal oxygen tap with a wet crunch, and he began a slow drop to the ground, trailing a greasy organic smear down the wall. Without pause Caitlin’s whole body swept around in a small, self-contained tornado, one foot lashing out to strike squarely at the gun hand of her second foe, who had just jacked in a fresh mag as she struck. The pistol, a Glock 23, discharged a single round, shattering an overhead fluorescent light. Turning tightly with the direction of the kick, getting right inside the circle of her man, Caitlin shot out her free hand, grabbing his wrist, extending it up, and slamming her other arm in under the elbow to snap the vulnerable joint with a terrible crack. In a flash, her weapon hand whipped backward and she opened his throat with the razor-sharp scalpel. A geyser of hot blood spilled out in a rush as she continued to spin, dragging the bulk of her victim around between her and the first man. Only then did she strip the Glock from the weak, rubbery grip of the man, who was already slumping out of her grasp. She felt fingers breaking as she wrenched it away.

In the space of less than three seconds she stood over her would-be killers. The pistol was already cocked. Two loud, flat cracks rang out and she finished off the prone figure by the wall. A slight shift in stance as she swung around and double-tapped the man at her feet, even though his life was already bleeding out of him. Almost no thought went into the actions. She hadn’t indulged herself in the luxury of conscious thought since the two of them had burst into the ER. She had simply reacted, her mind and body running
along tracks that had been laid down for her by thousands of hours of training.

“No!”
screamed a voice. Monique’s.
“What are you? You fucking monster!” I’m Echelon,
thought Caitlin, as she took the weapon from the lifeless hand of the first man she had killed. The ER was unnaturally still all around her. No one had yet recovered from the shock of such extreme and unexpected violence. Her gun hand seemed to float toward the weeping French girl. A slow, inhuman movement, machinelike in its lack of compassion. Monique was no longer an asset, a resource to be exploited for the mission. She was a loose end.

The Cuban officer’s salute was crisp, and his posture ramrod-straight, but his eyes betrayed confusion and anxiety. Musso returned the salute before dropping into a more relaxed posture. The two men stood in a bare office, borrowed for the meeting. Until two days ago it had been the domain of a navy lieutenant, but he had transferred back home, and nobody had yet arrived to fill his berth.
And five’ll get you fifty that nobody ever will,
Musso thought bleakly.

“Major,” he said, to open the discussion, “welcome to Guantánamo Naval Station.”

Major Eladio Núñez bobbed his head up and down in an agitated fashion.

“Would you care to sit?” asked Musso.

“Sí.
Thank you.”

Núñez dropped into a chair with some relief. His aide, a captain, remained at attention by the door. Lieutenant Colonel Stavros stood at ease by the cheap government-issue desk on which Musso had leaned back. Outside, the base was locked down on its highest alert. Two marines in full battle rattle double-timed past. They were ready. The question was simple enough. Ready for what?

“This … ah … this is very difficult… you understand?” said Núñez. He leaned forward, his hands rubbing together nervously. “We do not… I don’t…”

“You’ve lost contact with Havana,” Musso offered.

“Sí.
But more than that. Something strange. A few miles to the north of my position. A sort of heat curtain. We can see the land behind it, through a haze, and it looks normal. But nothing, or no people, move there. There is a town, not far beyond the line, on the road north. Nothing. Not a soul.”

Musso nodded. Núñez was deeply agitated, but Musso was not so stupid as to make any judgments about the man’s character on that basis. The major had been chosen by the Cuban military to face off a mortal enemy squatting on the very soil of his motherland. He would be neither a fool nor a coward.

“Have you sent anybody in?” he asked. “To investigate.”

The captain standing by the door moved fractionally. A tic flickered under one eye. Núñez nodded.

“Sí.
Yes. I send in some scouts. They appear to, uh, to disappear in the heat haze. It was very thick, very powerful, no? Near the effect? It seemed much hotter. And so my men they walk in, slowly. They …”

He groped for the right word.

“They shimmer? Yes? In the haze? And they are gone.”

“Just gone?” asked Stavros.

Núñez nodded vigorously. “Yes. Sometimes the haze seems to shift, like a curtain, just for a second, and we can see farther down the road, say two hundred meters. It is like looking into a fish tank, yes, in a restaurant? It is a very strange sight. Like a curtain of air? I do not see how that can be but it… ah …” He rolled his hands in a helpless gesture, seeking the right words again. “You can see this curtain. But the scouts, they never emerge on the far side. Their uniforms. They fall in a heap. Charred and smoking.”

Musso frowned. He thought he understood what Núñez was describing. The heat wall sounded a little like a blast wave, the front of supercompressed air that moves outward from the point of an explosion. But in this case it wasn’t moving, or compressed. It merely hung in the air “like a curtain,” as Núñez had called it.