Only Commander Frank Knight knew that Gordon Sim was one of my covers; and only he knew where to look for him: on the servers at Her Majesty’s Passport Office. That was the sole place where any trace of Gordon Sim could be found. Mr Sim was just another innocuous citizen, his details filed alongside those of millions upon millions of other innocuous citizens. There was nowhere else to look. But now, short of announcing my arrival from the top of the Eiffel Tower, I was about as exposed as it was possible to be.

I wiped up the last of the egg yolk with the last of the fried bread and swallowed it down with the last of the coffee. I left the price of the meal on the table and found the blue-tiled pissoir at the back of the bistrot and washed my face. Outside, I got rid of The Times, dropping my printed paper face into the trash, and bought a cheap tan overcoat and a box of Marlboro Reds from the row of shops opposite. Then I struck out into the city with Chappie Connor’s hundred-dollar bill burning a hole in my pocket.

I turned right, off the square and on to Boulevard de Magenta for three hundred metres, before bearing right again on Boulevard de Strasbourg. From there it was a half-hour straight shot south to the Île de la Cité and the cathedral of Notre-Dame. It was eleven a.m. I walked against the flow of the traffic. I kept my head down and clung to the scant protection afforded by shop awnings and the tangled cover of winter-bare trees from the prying eyes of CCTV cameras.

Low on the skyline to my left the sun broke free of the clouds on the horizon, picking out the ivory buildings on the west side of the boulevard with long shafts of mellow winter light. But as I walked on, the long perspective of the street gave the impression that the walls were closing in. Rising up on either side of the road like an urban canyon, the monumental architecture was purposefully wide enough to carry cannon and cavalry to the heart of the city in case of rebellion. Getaway drivers in Paris needed to know their shit. The cops could lock down the centre in minutes.

But there were no revolutionaries on the march that morning, just an endless parade of people braced against the chill. Aimless tourists in Gore-Tex meandering across black and white striped crosswalks; haughty women in belted coats; men sporting trimmed beards and half-smiles. And me. On the outside I was just on the right side of ignorable. But inside, my bullet wounds chafed, my ankles burned from the rope that had held me up two days before, and the scratches I’d sustained on the beach shed their scabs under my clothes. Above all, though, I felt sick to my stomach: ‘coward’ was a bitter pill to swallow.