The taxi next to us began to move, veering across the intersection. It was rolling, lifting. My head tilted. The winter sky slipped away. I could see the cab’s ceiling. Then the right-hand window. A child waiting to cross the road was standing on his head, screaming, but his feet were on the ground. Then the grey clouds were underneath us. The driver was turning, his phone suspended, dancing in front of him. My face against the plexiglass.

We were rolling.

Silence.

And then a deafening wrench-roar of hard energy compressed into a decelerated pop of pulverized glass imploding around me. Blood in my mouth. My eyes. The world snapped out of slow motion and spun in crazy corkscrew spirals until my head found asphalt and the white winter sun turned black.

Shouting.

Pain.

And then white light and focus.

I was lying on my back in the middle of the intersection. I turned my head and spat the remains of a tooth on the frozen ground. I sat up. The world rocked, faded. I braced, elbows on the ground, and the darkness ebbed away. I was half in the taxi, half on the road. The car was upturned, turtle-like. There was no smoke. There had been no blast. I pushed myself clear of the wreckage and on to all fours. The driver was dead, neck snapped, nose flattened in a red smear across his face. The goon next to him hung from his seat belt, unresponsive.

The woman who’d been in the taxi next to mine weaved across the road, holding her hands to her head. A brand-new Mercedes, bonnet wrecked, steam pouring from the engine, had come to a halt in front of her; its driver clambered clear of the airbags and jumped out of the passenger side away from me – five-eleven, athletic, head down and sprinting for safety. The Merc had run the red light and ploughed straight into my cab. I hadn’t been blown up: I’d been T-boned.

I tried to stand. My right leg was injured. The bullet wounds in my thigh and shoulder had torn. As I found my feet, the Range Rover swerved around me. The doors opened. Two men stepped out – dressed in black fatigues and respirators, AKS carbines in their shoulders. I moved back, gripped with pain, nausea. Another Range Rover screeched to a halt, spilling more men on to the street. I retreated further. The front passenger of the second Range Rover stepped into view. Leather shoes, black wool coat, light build – and a gash splayed across his right temple: Doctor Leonid Avilov, the GRU officer who’d hounded me from the ship, through the tunnels and all the way to Moscow.

He moved towards me, fast. I staggered backwards, covered on both sides by shooters.

‘I didn’t expect to find you in Paris,’ he said, closing on me.