“Well, I hope you explain that to the media. Believe me, they’ll sniff a conspiracy in the delay.”

The Frenchman smiled. “Perhaps that is because there truly is a conspiracy, huh?”

“Not over the bloody ambulance there isn’t.”

The operations director’s mood was not improved by the trouble he was having getting through to Max. They had not spoken for about an hour, not since Max had called to report that the Russians had been eliminated, exactly according to plan.

It wasn’t unknown for Max to disappear off the radar from time to time. His obsessive concern for security, secrecy, and personal survival saw to that. But it was unlike him to go missing before the operation was complete.

The operations director pressed his speed dial again. Again he got no answer. He turned back to Papin.

“What’s the latest news from the doctors?”

The Frenchman took a long drag on his cigarette. “The left ventricle vein was ripped from the heart. The poor woman has been pumping blood into her chest.” Papin looked at the operations director. “This was not a clean operation. The princess will not survive. But a bullet would have been more merciful.”

“Yes, well, that option wasn’t available, was it? What are you doing about the autopsy?”

“The pathologist is waiting outside the room, along with all the other vultures.”

“And the formaldehyde?”

“It will be pumped into the body, immediately after the postmortem. But why is this so important to you?”

“It will create a false positive on any subsequent pregnancy test.”

“So the world will think she was pregnant?”

“So the world will never know for sure.”

Papin frowned. “Tell me, then, why did she have to die?”

The operations director smiled but did not answer the question. “Excuse me one moment.”

He turned away from Papin and dialed again. Still no answer from Max. What the bloody hell was going on?

There was no way out of Paris at that hour of the morning. Trains weren’t running. Carver wasn’t going anywhere near an airport. You couldn’t hire a car. He could easily steal one, but he never liked to commit minor offenses when he was working. They got Al Capone for failing to pay his taxes. They weren’t going to bust him for a stolen car.

So they were stuck. They couldn’t risk checking into a hotel, even under assumed names. They needed somewhere to go for a few hours, a place that would stay open till dawn, where they could be anonymous. He didn’t think that would be too hard to find, not on a Saturday night.

They walked down the main stairs – Carver, carrying the laptop, stopped to pick up his SIG-Sauer – then out the back of the house, through formal gardens to a small door set into the back wall, where Alix had left her bag. Then they headed down to the Rue de Rivoli. Carver threw his old T-shirt and jacket in a trash can on the way. His actions were methodical and unhurried. Nothing about his manner betrayed the intensity of what he had been through that night. Then, without warning, he came to a sudden stop.

He was standing in front of a shuttered electronics store. Half a dozen televisions in the front window were tuned to the same channel. A news reporter was standing in the middle of a road silently speaking into the camera. He was standing in front of a police line, surrounded by a crowd of other journalists, photographers, and TV cameras. The reporter stepped slightly to one side so that his cameraman could shoot past him.

“Hang on a second,” said Carver, putting out a hand to hold Alix back.

Six images of the Alma Tunnel filled the shop window. The camera zoomed into the tunnel, where an ambulance was parked by the crumpled wreck of a black Mercedes.

Alix stood next to Carver, watching the same images with a look of incomprehension that gave way to shock as their meaning struck her. “Dear God. Is that the car? The one we…”

“Yeah. That’s what I did to it after you and Kursk whipped it in my direction. But what the hell’s that doing there?”

“What do you mean?”

“The ambulance. I can’t believe anyone got out alive. But if they did, surely they’d be in the hospital by now. I mean, the crash was” – he looked at his watch – “an hour ago. What are they hanging around there for?”

“An hour?” she murmured, half to herself. “Is that all?”

The pictures had changed. They’d cut back to the studio. A news anchor was sitting behind her desk, a picture of the Princess of Wales inset into the screen. She said a few words, then the picture cut to footage of the princess lounging on a massive yacht, surrounded by smaller boats packed with people trying to get her picture. Carver shook his head. He had nothing against the princess. She’d visited his unit once and charmed every man on the base. When he’d served under an oath of loyalty to the Crown, he’d taken that oath seriously. He’d never had any interest whatever in gossip columns or celebrity gossip.

“Come on, this isn’t going to tell us anything we need to know,” he said, moving on down the road.

He walked to the edge of the pavement and watched the late-night traffic cruising down the Rue de Rivoli.

“We need a cab,” he said.

The impish, cheeky grin that broke across her face brought an unexpected light to her eyes.

“Leave that to me,” she said.

Jack Grantham sipped bad coffee from a plastic cup and wondered just how much worse his weekend could possibly get. Still in his thirties, he was one of the highest flyers at the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 as it was known to the world outside. But stardom had its drawbacks. He’d been dragged into Whitehall for a crisis meeting at one in the morning, which was bad enough. But there was more, much more. The crisis involved a terrible accident, a beautiful princess, and the entire world’s media. And then, of course, there were his fellow civil servants.

Looking around the table, Grantham could see some typically unctuous undersecretary from the foreign office oozing oily Old Etonian smugness, and next to him the flinty, tight-mouthed, sharp-eyed presence of Dame Agatha Bewley from MI5. So now the infighting would begin. Each department would do its best to avoid the shit storm that would burst upon them just as soon as the great British public discovered what had happened to their beloved Queen of Hearts, while ensuring they dumped as much crap as possible on everyone else. Well, that would be fun. And just to make life really enjoyable, Ronald bloody Trodd had decided to stick his oar in.

Grantham had more faith in hard facts than in Freudian psychology. But he couldn’t help thinking of Ron Trodd as the foul-mouthed, unrestrained id that lurked beneath the prime minister’s bright and shiny ego. He was the ultimate henchman, always ready to do anything, no matter how distasteful, so that his master could keep his lily-white hands clean.

The foreign office man spoke first. “Well, as you know, our ambassador is already at the hospital. The French are terribly embarrassed, as you can imagine. Not the sort of thing one likes having in one’s backyard, as it were. Naturally, we’ve made it clear we don’t hold them responsible. Meanwhile, we’re making preparations to get His Royal Highness out to Paris as soon as possible. He’s at Balmoral. I gather the young princes have already been informed that their mother has been in an accident.”

“Thank you, Sir Claude,” said Trodd, with a contempt that made the knighthood sound more like an insult than an honor. “Jack, what has SIS got?”

“Total chaos,” said Grantham, trying to work out how much to reveal, and when. “Someone’s turning Paris into a war zone. There’ve been reports of muffled explosions coming from somewhere underground, just across the Seine from the scene of the crash. An apartment got blown to smithereens, south of the river. The police are telling the locals it was a gas leak, but a car was seen driving away at high speed. Fifteen minutes later, the same car exploded in the courtyard of a mansion in the Marais district. A team of armed police got inside the house a few minutes ago. They found bodies everywhere. And several of them seem to be British.”