I continued to wind my way south, past the Pompidou Centre and deeper into the heart of the city. It felt safer turning on to the little streets but I had no idea who, if anyone, was tracking me – or how. The Pont Notre-Dame carried me over the Seine, and before I knew it the twin towers of the cathedral reared up above me. I stood and stared at the famous edifice, at the massive rose window, at the angels and demons beneath whose wings the city spread. Statues of the damned and the saved stood sealed in their stone fates above the west door, presided over by an Eternal King who’d encouraged his followers to turn the other cheek and then thrashed the money-changers in the Temple with a whip.

I lit a Marlboro and dragged on it, hard. I hadn’t walked here by accident. When I was fifteen, my father and I had explored what felt like every inch of those streets. I dived with him into the underground soul of the City of Light, flexing my French, learning how to drink and how to smoke. It was the last trip we made together before I was told that his plane had come down over the African savannah. The avenues and cobbled lanes were etched into my memory. Twenty-five years later I’d been operational there, protecting an asset – and buying myself some credit in the process.

Beneath my feet was Point Zéro – a stone disc set with a metal sun-like compass from which all distances in France were measured, the point to which all roads led. Fifteen minutes’ walk across the Pont de l’Archevêché and into the Latin Quarter and I’d find my way to Rue Rollin. I wasn’t supposed to know the address, much less who lived there. But there were a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t sure precisely how I was going to get to Rachel. But I knew which way to turn. I crushed out the half-smoked cigarette under the sole of my shoe and turned my back on the church.

It was time to sell my cloak and buy a sword.

11

‘Max McLean? Are you out of your fucking mind?’

Sergei Lukov was a bad Bulgarian. Five-eight, a hundred and forty pounds, trussed up in an old leather jacket as black as his heart. He must have been pushing sixty but looked a decade younger – his face all angles and suntan, eyes gleaming like two black marbles. He sized me up, and his expression turned from incredulity to horror. I looked, and felt, awful. I gave him a tight-lipped smile and shrugged, showing him my empty palms. It was inconceivable he didn’t know my picture was in the papers. He shook his head.

‘OK. Come in.’