Judging by the angle of the shot that killed Lukov, the sniper had most likely been working in one of the apartments on Rue Basfroi. In the time it had taken me to kill the phoney cop and the SEAL gunman, he could have relocated anywhere. I pulled the pin on one of the smoke grenades and took a chance, lobbing it through the shattered windows upwind and into the middle of the crossroads outside. A thick grey plume billowed in its wake, an expanding snake filling the junction with an impenetrable dirty haze.

As I emerged into the street, the sound of the police sirens grew immediately louder. To my left the smoke had temporarily cut off the south-eastern stretch of Rue de la Roquette and Rue Basfroi. To my right the rest of Rue de la Roquette was clear for three blocks. But what I needed was parked dead ahead. The phoney motorcycle cop’s Yamaha stood propped up on its side-stand outside the bakery, nose pointing north-west out of the crossroads.

I hovered in the café doorway with the M4 in my shoulder – right index finger on the trigger, left hand around the forward grip on the Picatinny rail. I scanned sight lines and doorways, shopfronts and rooftops. Nothing moved. No civilians, no cops, no shooters. Not even a cat. But the window panes around me flashed with the blue lights of approaching police cars. And above the windows came the drone-whine of an inbound chopper. I combed the bodies of the three men wearing keffiyehs through the magnified sight. No movement. I edged out further into the street.

And then, a couple of hundred metres to the east, a swarm of blue and white police motorbikes and vans led by unmarked saloon cars – single blue lights flashing inside their windscreens – poured into the wide traffic circle where Rue de la Roquette met Boulevard Voltaire. I crouched and looked in the opposite direction. A red laser sight strobed through the swirling smokescreen. Then another, fragmenting and strengthening and dying back again as the beam formed and dissipated in the billowing, choking cloud. And then a dozen electric-vermilion death-fingers clawed at the fog – probing, reaching, searching for a solid human target.

I pulled the pin on the second smoke grenade and flung the canister towards the police fleet approaching to the right. It bounced along the middle of the street, a fresh spiral of dense smoke expanding in its wake. The cops ground to a halt, dismounted immediately, and fired a salvo of shots directly at me as the grey cloud expanded between us. I pressed myself to the pavement. Bullets snapped past my head, shoulders, smacking against the brickwork further down the street behind me.