“If you say so,” she murmured. She stood, looked around. “I really should make sure that nobody knows I’ve been here.”
“Yep, we should, but chances are it’s too late for that.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if you’ve been living here for a couple days …”
“Not quite.”
“Right, then chances are you have already touched more things than just the two of us can clear.”
She frowned. “We don’t have a clean-up team anymore, right?”
“No,” he murmured, “not yet. We will have one set up again soon though.”
“Let me get my things.”
“Are they here?”
“Yes, I took everything that was important out of there and brought it here, in case I needed to run.”
“Smart thinking,” When she came out of the bedroom with one suitcase and a bag of personal stuff, he nodded. “It’s still a bit much but not bad.”
She snorted. “I wasn’t exactly expecting to run on the fly. This was my home.”
“And I’m sorry about that.”
At least he sounded sincere. But the two to them had been studiously avoiding being too friendly for so long that it was a habit. What she really wanted was for him to hold her and to tell her it would be okay. Instead she said, “Well, I wasn’t planning on staying anyway. That’s what’s so darn frustrating. You know? If we’d been told that we had to go home, it would be a different story.”
“What it did, in this case, was to have you sitting in your place, nice and quiet, holing up for them to reach you.”
“You mean, making me an easy target on purpose?”
He nodded slowly.
“Assholes,” she muttered, as she took her suitcase to the front door. She looked around and swore. “I hope these people don’t find out I was here.”
“Hopefully they won’t even notice. But, just in case, do you have a towel or something?”
She nodded, pulling one out, and they removed as much of her fingerprints and tracks as they could. As she stood at the doorway afterward, she nodded. “It looks pretty good.”
“What about your place?”
“Nothing to do. I threw out the bedding and flipped the mattress and ran. I didn’t even look for bullets”
“They won’t make much difference in this case he said quietly. “This was a pro job.”
“The lease is up in a couple days, and it was a furnished apartment.”
“Good enough, as long as you didn’t leave anything behind.”
She hesitated and then shrugged. “Maybe I better take another look.” And, with that, they skipped across the hall into her apartment, where they did a quick walk-through.
“A few things are here,” he noted.
She nodded, grabbed a garbage bag. “We can at least throw it into recycling.”
With a quick glance around, he added, “Some of this could be what you just left behind.”
“Exactly,” she agreed.
With one final look, he walked out. She followed; they closed the doors, and, after checking that the other apartment was locked, they proceeded to dump the garbage bag into the bin. Carrying her suitcase, he led the way down the back stairs and outside. At the rear door he stopped and just let his senses fill in.
“What are you doing?” she murmured just behind him.
“Looking for danger.”
“But your senses?”
“I’m at about halfway,” he admitted, “which is bad because it’s enough that I think that I can use them, but it’s not enough that I’ll know of any blind spots.”
“Well, I can tell you that it doesn’t look like anybody is out here.”
“But, if it were you out there somewhere,” he noted, “and you were trying to completely terminate a whole group of people, wouldn’t you keep up surveillance?”
“Not if I was cocky enough to assume I had already hit everybody.”
“I got the impression that Mera was hit before you. Do you think so?”
“Yes. So maybe our hitman assumed that, having got her, he also got me.”
“We need to find Wilson.”
“Agreed.” She looked over at his ride. “You ready to make a go to the truck?”
He smiled at her. “You saw me arrive, didn’t you?”
“I’ve been staring outside all day, trying to figure out what my next move was. I didn’t recognize the truck, but you’re pretty hard to hide.”
“I guess,” he agreed, “even though that’s bad news too. I was so worried about you that I bolted straight here, instead of putting on a disguise.”
“Well, you changed your walk and the way you hold yourself,” she noted, “but I’ve worked with you for three, four years now. So fooling me is a different story.” Not to mention her heart recognized him right away.
Back at the truck, he turned on the engine. “Do you have an address for Wilson?”
She shook her head. “I don’t.”
“I had one on file, but I don’t know if it’s any good anymore.”
“He lived on Rue Borda, didn’t he?”
He nodded. And they headed out.
“Why are we even still in Paris?” She rubbed her forehead. “I should have just left.”
“And yet you were working right up until five o’clock yesterday, right? Or two days ago, I guess.”
She nodded. “And?”
“When would you have left?”
“The next day, so yesterday!” At that he nodded. “Meaning?” she asked.
“You were shot at that night. The only way you would have been safe was if you had booked flights out of the country right after work.”
“So …” It took her a moment, and then she continued that thought in a low voice. “They really didn’t plan on us leaving, did they?”
“No,” he replied quietly, “I don’t think they did.”
“Or it was meant to look that way, but it wasn’t our government who did this.”
“And I would love to think that, but, with all the communication taken down, we have no way of finding out.”
“Right. That’s a problem too. What if our bosses were also hit?”
He shot her a look, as he pulled out and turned a corner. “Now that hadn’t occurred to me.”
“It is a possibility though, right?” she murmured.
“Well, we’ll have to wait until we get secure lines to find out because we can’t take a chance of anybody else tracking us.”
“I get it, but what if they’re in trouble?”
“They have support.”
“Which is something we don’t, right? Got it.” She shook her head. “I really don’t like the sound of that. We’ve always had money, flights, equipment, whatever we needed. We’ve always been able to call and have it ready and available for us.”
“Yeah, and that is past tense.” He looked at her. “Now we’re on our own.”
She looked at him. “You do remember that I don’t work for them anymore, right?”