McCall moved toward the noise, half-crouched, his gun at his shoulder ready to fire, pointing away from Carver. It gave him a fractional opening. He lunged for Max’s throat, gripping it with all his force, ignoring the fists with which Max desperately tried to pummel him and the footsteps of the man running up the stairs behind him.

The butt of the gun slammed into Carver’s kidneys, sending a shock of pain and nausea charging through his body. He let go of Max’s throat and fell retching to the floor.

“Bring him into the dining room,” said Max.

McCall lifted Carver up by the scruff of his neck, then prodded him again in the back, this time with the gun barrel. “You heard him, walk.”

He didn’t walk. He staggered into the dining room through the connecting door, bent over like a chimp. Max had been getting ready to go. There were open cases for a laptop computer, a separate high-speed modem, and a twenty-inch flat-screen strewn across the table, wires unplugged and wound up, ready to be packed away. Max’s suit jacket was draped across the back of a chair. Carver tried to ignore the agony in his back. He wanted to stand up straight, get his dignity back, and create the illusion, at least, that he and Max were talking on equal terms.

Max was not impressed. “Think of yourself as a dead man,” he said, walking around to the table and pulling wires from the back of the computer. “Do me a favor, Carver, make it easy. Answer my questions. What happened to Kursk?”

“Who the hell is Kursk?”

“The Russian.”

“He’s dead.”

“And his partner, the woman?”

“What do you reckon? I’m here. She isn’t. Dead.”

“How?”

“I flushed them down the sewers. Like shit. I think you know that.”

Max said nothing for a moment as he slipped the computer into its case, then asked, “Colclough saw two people return to the apartment. Who were they?”

“I’ve no idea. I don’t know anyone called Colclough. And I’m not going to answer any more of your questions until you answer mine. Why do you want me dead?”

Max sighed as he zipped up the case. “Please, don’t treat me like an idiot. You went back to the apartment. But why? You had no reason to do that. Not unless you wanted me to think that the woman was dead. And the only reason to go to such trouble would be if-”

“I was alive?”

Alix was standing in another doorway at the far side of the room, holding her Uzi, moving it from side to side, trying to cover Max and McCall at the same time. She was carrying the gun properly, high on the shoulder, sighting along the barrel. The gun trembled slightly in her grip, betraying her tension. She looked like a little girl playing with her big brother’s toys.

For half a second they all just stood there. Any longer and it would have been too late. If McCall had done nothing, forced Alix to take the initiative, dared her to shoot in cold blood, she might have lost her nerve. But he got cocky, staking his life on her inability to turn the threat of her gun into action. He grabbed Carver with his left hand and threw him to one side, clearing the space to bring up his own weapon. But Alix fired first.

She did it properly, just like a training exercise. She didn’t spray bullets all over the place. She fired a three-shot burst into McCall. There was nothing girlish about her now, just a fierce, almost manic concentration in her eyes as she turned toward Max, who was desperately backing against the wall. Another burst hit his chest, shoulder, and neck – the hits rising as the force of the shots lifted the barrel in Alix’s hand. He spun around, blood from a ripped artery spraying in a scarlet arc across the wall. Then he fell to the floor, dead.

Carver got to his feet, wincing, and made his way across the room. The air reeked of cordite and blood. Alix was standing stock still, her eyes wide open. Then suddenly she turned away from Carver, bent over, and started shaking. She was dry retching, streaming tears and snot. Carver stood next to her, rested a hand on her shoulder, and offered her a handkerchief.

“First time?”

Alix nodded.

“You did well,” Carver said. “You saved my life. Thank you.”

He was seized by a deep, familiar emotion, the comradeship that exists between those who have experienced combat together and survived. Carver had experienced feelings like this in the Falklands, Iraq, and the bandit country of South Armagh. He’d known what it was to have that bond between fighting men. But a blond Russian woman in a short silk dress, well, that might take a bit of getting used to.

Gradually, her body stilled, her breathing steadied. Alix stood up, wiping her face. She looked at the two bodies for a second or two. Then she looked at Carver as if seeing her reflection in his eyes. “Oh my God,” she said. “I must look terrible.”

Carver gave a clipped, dry laugh. “Not half as bad as they do. Listen, you’ll be fine. But we’ve got to get out of here. Wipe your prints off the gun. Stick it in Max’s hands – the guy with the gray hair. Make it look like they shot each other.”

It would take at least a day for the police forensic lab to work out that all the bullets had come from the same gun. By then, he planned to be long gone.

He turned his attention to the computer in its case on the table. Somewhere inside it was everything he needed to know about the people who’d hired him and everything anyone else would need to know about him. For both reasons, it was coming with him.

So was Max’s gray jacket. Carver needed to get out of the clothes he’d been wearing all night, to do something to change his appearance. He looked at the dead men on the floor. Even their trousers were spattered with blood.

Then he struck lucky. Beside the table there was a soft brown leather overnight bag. Max must have had it beside him, ready to leave. Inside there was a fresh white shirt, still in its laundry wrapper. He put it on, then slipped the jacket over the top.

Carver picked up the back nylon computer case. “Time to go,” he said. But as he walked from the room, he was thinking: If Alix Petrova had never fired a gun in anger before, what the hell had she been doing on this mission?

The Pitié-Salpêtrière medical complex in southeast Paris dates back to 1656 and the time of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Over the past century it has been modernized and massively increased in size until it is almost a city of its own, devoted to the sick and those who care for them. But tonight its emergency department had turned into a cross between a war zone and a diplomatic cocktail party.

The French minister of the interior was there, along with the prefect of police and the British ambassador. It was past two a.m. when the guest of honor arrived. She was fashionably late, as befitted the world’s most famous woman. But she came in an ambulance, rather than the usual limousine.

The operations director was waiting at the hospital. He found himself getting angry with the delay. It was irrational: The more inefficient the Paris ambulance services were, the better it was for him. He wanted the woman dead, after all. More than anything, however, he wanted it all to be over. He turned to the tanned, compact, leather-jacketed man next to him. “Jesus Christ, Pierre, what took so long?”

Pierre Papin worked in French intelligence. He didn’t have a job title. Officially, he didn’t have a job. This gave him a certain freedom. Sometimes, for example, he worked on projects even his bosses – the ones he did not officially have – knew nothing about.

“Relax, mon ami,” Papin said, pulling a packet of Gitanes from the pocket of his linen jacket. He wore a pristine white T-shirt and a pair of snug-fitting black jeans. He looked like he’d just come from a night out in Saint-Tropez. “We don’t like to rush things in France. You Anglo-Saxons throw trauma victims into ambulances, drive at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, and then wonder why your patients are dead on arrival. We prefer to stabilize them at the scene, then take them très doucement – gently, no? – to the hospital.”