I stopped for a moment and looked out across Metsitsim Beach. The sun was sinking like a fireship, setting the pale blue sky ablaze, lengthening the shadows of a gaggle of children jostling past me. A couple of surfers in wetsuits dragged themselves out of the waves and on to the darkening sand. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, nearly twenty degrees; after the steel-grey cold of northern Europe it was good to feel the heat of the sun before it slid completely beneath the horizon.

Seventeen hundred.

I pressed on, and after a few minutes arrived at The Lemon Tree – a boutique four-star joint set back slightly from the sea, between the beach and the old port area. I paid for three nights in cash, in advance, and told the desk clerk I was not, under any circumstances, to receive visitors. Once in the room I checked the door and window locks – none of which would have stopped even the most inept of housebreakers – and plucked a sanitary bag from the dispenser in the bathroom. I untucked the Grach from the back of my jeans, dropped the magazine, ejected the round in the breech and checked and rechecked the mechanism. Thanks to a sticky can of 3-en-Un machine oil under Baaz’s kitchen sink, the slide was smooth, the metalwork gleaming.

The Grach MP-443 was a good pistol – reliable and rugged enough to withstand the Russian military’s most extreme postings. It wouldn’t stand up to a SIG on the fifty-metre range. But I wasn’t planning on target shooting. I wasn’t planning on doing any shooting. I put the Grach’s magazine back on, chambered a round and reset the hammer. Then I put the pistol into the sanitary bag, which I tied shut. I removed the top of the lavatory cistern and dropped the plastic-wrapped bundle into the water reservoir.

Walking around Tel Aviv with an unlicensed pistol was asking for trouble. Shopping centres, cafés, bars – not to mention official buildings – could all be protected by metal detectors. Avoiding them would hamstring my movements more than they were already. Bribery wouldn’t help, either. The private security guards who operated the scanners and bag searches had skin and not just salary in the game: the first to get hit in an attack, they were the last people in whose interest it was not to do a thorough job. If I was found with a weapon and no licence I would be in a world of pain. Getting out of Paris after a firefight would look like a walk in the Champ de Mars compared to trying to flee Israel. I’d narrowly survived the attentions of the French Foreign Legion. I fancied my chances with the Israel Defence Forces even less.