But I did learn something from the newspapers: Doc Levy had lied to me. Rachel was not in London. She was in Tel Aviv. I didn’t blame him. He must have been desperate to keep his daughter out of the messed-up world of Max McLean. And fair play to him. Hitmen don’t take lovers; they take hostages. My copy of The New York Times cited a story originally run by the Israeli paper Haaretz. The combined reporting tentatively connected the ‘firebombing’ of Chappie Connor’s cottage with another violent attack the following day: the shootout at Doc’s. While no named deaths were attributed to the former, the latter was illustrated with an old photo of Jacob Levy from his army days. It was illuminated, too, by a quote from ‘his daughter Rachel, 44, the Azriel Jacobs research fellow at the Kolymsky School of Computer Sciences at Tel Aviv University’ – who, the report said, had ‘made aliyah to Israel in 1991’. She praised the Irish authorities for attempting to apprehend the attacker and hoped that ‘the coward who murdered her father’ would meet a similar fate. After the inquest, his body would be flown to Israel for burial.

I folded the pages and massaged my temples.

Fuck.

Twenty-seven years, and the first words I heard from Rachel were that she wished me dead. The waiter set the ham, egg and cheese sandwich down wordlessly on the crumpled paper. My appetite had dissolved into the newsprint. I forced myself to eat.

Maybe one day the Pyrenees, or wherever those mountains on the horizon turned out to be, would be an option – but not now. On the station platform in England I’d decided what to do, but didn’t know how to do it. Now the world had shifted on its axis. Not only was Rachel plausibly in danger because of me, but in all likelihood she’d believe she was in danger from me.

Getting into Israel on a hot passport to convince her otherwise was not possible. Nor was buying a clean one from the mafia in nearby Montreuil. I had three hundred euros left, not three thousand, and the gangsters in the banlieue didn’t give credit. Jack Nazzar had been my last lifeline in the UK: there was no one left in Britain or Ireland I could call on for a favour, not even in UKN – which was impenetrable, and purposefully so.

UKN personnel had half a dozen aliases to choose from – all backed up, where necessary, by social media profiles, school reports, employment references, criminal records … whatever it took to create a robust, three-dimensional, deniable avatar. Each avatar was firewalled from the others, and from the operator’s real identity. Although MI6 and the Special Forces mob all knew me as ‘Max McLean’, I had no official documents issued in that name. And in my case, it was a double bluff: ‘Max McLean’ was, itself, an invention – but my own, not UKN’s.