“No,” agreed the chairman, “We certainly can’t have that.” He thought for a while, tapping his fingers against the surface of the desk, then continued. “How are we supposed to make contact again?”

“He’s calling at twelve thirty our time.”

“Fine, then have his call patched through to me. I shall persuade our French friend that he has more to gain by keeping us happy in the long term than by making a fast buck now.”

“And if he isn’t persuaded?”

“I shall make him pay for his stubbornness.”

Bill Selsey, a twenty-two-year veteran at MI6, a man whose chief ambitions were a steady career and a solid pension at the end of it, sidled up to Jack Grantham’s glass-fronted office at the far end of one of the open-plan offices that lent MI6 headquarters a deceptive appearance of corporate normality.

“Busy, Jack?”

Grantham looked up from the screen where he was checking files on the world’s professional hit men and wondering why so many of their whereabouts were listed as “Unknown.” What was the point of knowing about the bad guys if you didn’t have the resources to keep proper tabs on them?

“Nothing urgent. What can I do for you?”

Selsey parked his ample backside on the edge of Grantham’s desk, ignoring his colleague’s disapproving frown.

“There’s an interesting development in the Paris investigation,” he said. “We just received a call from one of our European partners – Papin, one of the more interesting characters in the French intelligence community. He seems to float around without any formal job title, but he has a habit of popping up in unexpected places.”

“So?”

“So, he says he knows where to find the people responsible for the crash in the Alma Tunnel.”

Grantham sat up in his chair, his mood changing in an instant from polite indifference to total concentration. “Really? Where does he say they are?”

“Well, that’s the catch. He wants us to pay for the information. Says he won’t consider anything under half a million dollars.”

“He wants us to pay? Bloody hell, even by French standards that’s a bit steep. Whatever happened to interservice cooperation?”

“He’s not doing this for his service, Jack. This one’s strictly off the books.”

“Do we trust him?”

“Of course not, he’s French. Which means he’s self-centered, unscrupulous, and couldn’t give a monkey’s about anything except his own immediate advantage.”

“But is he any good?”

“Not bad. Yeah. If he says he knows where these people are, I believe him.”

“All right, but if he thinks we’ve got half a million dollars to chuck his way, he’s obviously not been informed about our budget cuts. Can we get to him for free?”

Selsey’s hangdog face brightened. “Ah, that’s the good news. Not only is he working off the books, he’s sending his message from a humble payphone rather than one of DGSE’s secure lines – presumably doesn’t want any record of his communications with us and the other bidders appearing on their logs.”

“Bit amateur. We’ll have much less trouble tracking that.”

“Perhaps greed is getting the better of him. It’s amazing what the prospect of easy money does to the human brain. And he probably underestimates our ability to track him. We only let the Frogs see a fraction of our signals intelligence, after all. Their officers won’t necessarily realize just how powerful Echelon and GCHQ really are.”

“Can we find him?”

“Working back to the site of his call is tricky but not impossible. We may manage it. But our real chance will come when he calls back. We’ve got to conduct some sort of negotiation. If we keep him talking, we’ll get an exact position.”

“He’s not going to be that daft, surely?”

“He stands to make half a mill. He might take a risk for that.”

Grantham frowned. “I can see why he’s not worried about us. Even if we don’t shell out any cash, we’re hardly going to hurt a fellow professional from a country that’s one of our allies.”

“Even if he is French?”

“No, not even then. But there’ll be other people out there who are a lot less scrupulous. Papin’s got to get his money, take his clients to the killers’ location, then get out in one piece himself. Tell you what, Bill, you said this guy’s not bad.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s going to have to be a hell of a lot better than that to pull this one off.”

Alix watched Carver as he worked his way through an enormous helping of venison stew and noodles in the restaurant of the Hotel Beau-Rivage. It was called Le Chat-Botté.

“That means Puss in Boots,” Carver had said with a cheeky, naughty schoolboy glint in his eye. There was something boyish about the gusto with which he attacked his food too, as though he didn’t have a care in the world, nothing to think about except for the plate in front of him and the glass of red wine at its side. His appetite seemed completely unaffected by the prospect of what they had to do in a few hours’ time. Then again, he wasn’t the one who’d have to squeeze into a tight-cut skirt.

Even as they went upstairs to his suite, she was still trying to figure Carver out, to uncover the true self he kept so carefully hidden – from himself as much as everyone else. So many men she had known had struggled to be even one-dimensional, but not this one. He was so assured in his own world, so uncertain in hers; so cold at some moments, so emotional at others. Yet it sometimes seemed to her as though Carver’s emotions were obvious to everyone but him.

She wondered if he knew how powerfully his eyes expressed his feelings. In the short time she had known him, she had seen icy rage and aching tenderness, ebullient laughter and exhausted vulnerability. She thought of the books, records, and paintings in his apartment, the consideration he could show when he was at ease. Then she thought of him walking into the mansion in Paris, gunning down two men, finishing them off with a shot to the head, and walking away from their bodies without a second glance. She remembered lying on the ground by that bus stop, her face pressed against the sidewalk, his knee digging into her spine. How could she reconcile that man with the one who had lain beside her that morning, who was taking her in his arms again this afternoon?

She pulled away a fraction. “Should we be doing this? I thought we were here on…” she tried to find the right words. “On business.”

“We are,” he replied. “We have one chance to find out what we need to know. In a few hours, Magnus Leclerc is going to walk into the bar downstairs. You are going to seduce him. I am going to scare him witless. Then I’m going to start asking him questions. Leclerc is our only lead. If we can make him talk, we can find the people who betrayed us. If not, well, it’s just a matter of time till they find us, no matter how far or fast we run.”

“So shouldn’t we be doing something else? You know, something useful or important?”

“Such as what? This is like any other operation. Most of the time you spend just waiting around. We don’t know if the operation’s going to work. We don’t know if we’ll be alive tomorrow. What could be more important than seizing every moment we can?”

She considered what he had said, weighing the merits of his case. Then she smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s seize the moment.”