Alix was already a few paces ahead of Carver, making her way through the sweaty, food-stained kitchen staff at their stations. A couple of them gave her a whistle and a filthy remark as she went by. Then they saw the look in Carver’s eye as he followed and decided that if she belonged to him, they’d be well advised to shut up.

Beyond the kitchen more swing doors opened into a narrow hallway. To the left, it led to a staircase that dropped away to ground level. There were a couple of doors on the far side of the corridor: a storeroom, an office. The lights were out. There was no one in either of them.

“Keep moving,” said Carver. “Go down the stairs. Make a lot of noise. Go!”

He listened to her running along the uncarpeted floorboards, then ducked into the office. The door opened inward. He stood behind it, holding it almost shut, without letting the catch close completely.

A few seconds later Carver heard the door to the kitchen burst open. He pictured the man with the ponytail standing in the corridor, gun held in front of him, surveying the emptiness in front of him, then hearing the sound of Alix’s feet on the stairs.

There were footsteps as the man went by. Carver eased the door open and stepped out into the corridor. He took three quick steps forward. The man heard him on the third step, but it was too late. He couldn’t stop, turn, and bring his gun around before Carver raised his left hand, brushed his right arm away and, in the same cobra-fast movement, jabbed two fingers into his eyes.

The Russian squealed in pain, dropped his gun, and held his hands up to his blinded eyes. Carver kept moving. He shifted his weight onto his right foot, rotated his shoulders, and slammed the heel of his right palm into the man’s chin. Another shoulder rotation and a shift of weight through the hips brought Carver’s left elbow up to crack into the man’s cheekbone. Now his right knee piled into the man’s defenseless groin. As he doubled over in pain, Carver karate-chopped the back of his neck. The Russian dropped unconscious to the floor. It was the basic five-second knockout – lesson one in the special forces’ fighting handbook. Worked every time. Unless the other guy had read the same book.

Carver thought about pulling the man back down the passage by his stupid ponytail, but decided against it and grabbed him under the armpits instead. He dragged the unconscious body into the empty office, then stepped back out into the passage. Now came the interesting bit. He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the stairwell. In the dim light from the passage, he could see a flight of steps, then a small landing, then another flight, which turned back the other way and disappeared beneath him.

“Alix?” he hissed.

He wondered if she’d be there. If she’d run he knew for certain he was on his own. If she’d stayed, it wasn’t so simple. She might be on his side. Or she could be sticking close so she could help someone else.

Alix appeared on the landing. She looked at Carver.

“So, what are we going to do now?”

“The only thing we can do for now. Disappear.”

The operations director tried to rub the exhaustion from his bloodshot eyes. The job was falling apart around him. He was standing with Papin in the street outside the mansion. The city would soon be waking up to discover the horrors that had taken place while it was asleep.

“Okay,” said Papin. “Let’s go through it from the beginning. Forget for the moment whatever happened in the Alma, concentrate on what happened here. No French citizens have been harmed. We will do our best to make it all disappear. But if I am to help you, I must know what happened. And you must deal with any – what do you say? – loose ends. So, to begin. Who owns the house?”

“I don’t know. I imagine that when your people start trying to trace the ownership, they will find a mass of shell companies in different tax havens. But I don’t know who owns them. And even if I did, I couldn’t tell you.”

“How can I help if you play games with me?”

“I’m not playing games. I honestly do not know. And I guarantee that any names I gave you would not appear on any ownership documents anywhere.”

“Okay, I understand. Next problem: Who did this?”

The operations director thought for a moment. Then he breathed a plume of smoke into the early-morning air and said, “Carver. It has to be. He knew about the explosives in that flat because he put them there. Kursk had no idea. If he’d gone in, he’d have been killed, and the woman with him.”

Papin nodded. “Okay, so we know a man and a woman went into that apartment. We agree the man must have been Carver. So could the woman be Petrova? Are they working together now? If so, they must have come out together too, because no one died in the explosion. Next question: Did they come here? Well, we have evidence of two weapons. The simplest explanation for that is two shooters. Do we have any other suspects? No. Did Carver have any other female accomplice?”

“No.”

“Eh bien, let’s assume that Carver and Petrova were responsible for the killings here. Clearly, they must be eliminated before they cause any more trouble. We need descriptions. So tell me, Charlie, are you sure you do not know what Carver looks like?”

The operations director ground his cigarette stub under his heel. “We had him watched on a couple of his early jobs. It was an obvious precaution. He’s a shade under six feet tall. Call it a meter eighty; maybe seventy-five kilos in weight; dark hair; thin face, intense looking. Other than that, no distinguishing features that I know of. Actually, there is something else…”

“What?”

“Max wasn’t wearing his jacket when he died. And it wasn’t where he’d left it, the last time I saw him, hanging on the back of his chair. Carver could have dumped the black jacket and taken Max’s. It’s a gray one, same fabric as the trousers.”

“Okay. And the woman?”

“All I know is her reputation. She’s meant to be a blond model type.”

Papin raised his eyebrows knowingly. “Now we have a reason why Carver might want to be with Petrova. But if she was Kursk’s partner, what is she doing on the back of a motorcycle with the man who killed him? Why is she running in and out of apartments with Carver? Why is she joining him in a gunfight?”

“How the hell would I know? She’s a bloody woman. Maybe she fancies him. Maybe she changed her mind.”

“Or maybe she hasn’t.” Papin smiled. “What is it you English say about the female of the species?”

“It was Kipling. He said the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

“Alors, an Englishman who understands women. Incroyable!”

They were sitting in an all-night bistro, tucked between the sex shops and tourist traps of Châtelet-les-Halles. It was a quarter past five. Even the local hookers had given up for the night and come inside for a nightcap.

Alix looked exhausted, her adrenalin rush long gone. Carver got her a cappuccino with a double espresso and a pain au chocolat to dip into it. It wasn’t exactly a healthy diet, but she needed the energy the fat and sugar would provide. Alix ignored the pastry, took a sip of the coffee, then lit a cigarette.

Carver leaned across the table like a lover. “Who was he, that man in the club, the one who sent his goons after us? What’s his name? What’s his interest in you?”

She took another drag on her Marlboro, made a show of blowing a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling, but said nothing.

“Come on, Alix, don’t jerk me around. You knew him. He certainly knew you. Why? And why did he send his men after us?”

She shrugged. “His name is Ivan Sergeyevich Platonov. Everyone calls him Platon. He belongs to what you would call the Russian mafia. But the gangs – we say ‘clans’ – are not just Russian. They come from every race – Chechen, Azeri, Kazakh, Ukrainian. They have names, like rock groups or football teams. The Chechens are Tsentralnaya, Ostankinskaya, Avtomobil’naya. The Russians are Solntsevskaya, Pushinskaya, Podolskaya – that is Platon’s gang. Every gang hates all the others, but when you are a woman, they are all the same. They all want to fuck you, or beat you, or both. They are all pigs.”