I turned and twisted the blade around and up and pushed it harder into him, through him, so that the point stuck fast in the door frame. We stood close, touching, locked in a final embrace, like blood-sodden lovers fucking in a doorway. The machine pistol clattered to the floor. His fingers scrabbled at my face, seeking but not finding eyes to gouge. His own collapsing weight drove the cutting edge up. His belly split. His guts unravelled into the room and fouled the air with the stench of bile. His arms went limp, and as the light guttered out of his eyes he hissed in Russian.

‘Yob tvoiu mat’, McLean.’

‘No. Fuck your mother.’

I wrenched the knife free. He fell, covered in his own gore, with a snarl on his lips. I drove the blade into the back of his neck. Whoever he was, he died like a dog.

The chef was cowering against the back wall. There were no windows, no doors to be seen; no visible exit at all – though there must have been one in the kitchen somewhere. The jet-engine drone of industrial extractor fans filled the room. Back in the bar the fusillade continued, muffled by the kitchen walls. Pistol rounds, rifle rounds, and then the erratic rat-a-tat-tat of an assault rifle, like corn popping in a pan. I bent down to pick up the machine pistol – a Russian SR-3MP – and checked the mag. Empty. I dropped it. The barmaid stumbled through the doorway and tripped over the disembowelled assassin, collapsing like a heavy-headed ear of wheat. I dragged her to one side and rolled her into the recovery position. She was still breathing, but her hair was matted with blood. Whether it was hers or one of her customers’, there was no time to check.

A dozen frantic, shouting civilians followed her into the kitchen. I considered who among them might be harbouring a grudge or a weapon, but they were too wrapped up in their own private hell to worry about anything other than themselves. No one broke ranks; no one confronted me. But the fact they’d made it safely through the doorway meant I could, too. I dropped my shoulders, braced myself and headed back into the maelstrom.

La Fée Verte had been transformed from a classic Parisian café into a shitshow of a close-contact firefight. Who was shooting at whom was hard to unravel; but why they were shooting each other was, I suspected, folded up in my jeans pocket. The Russians, and God only knew who else, had tracked Lukov to the bar.