I was cornered, but not trapped. But if I didn’t get over the river before they cut the bridges, I was fucked.

I revved harder. And then I let it go. I felt the pull in my chest as I took off. I kicked up through neutral into second and up again. I hit sixty in three seconds and dropped my head low, just like I had done hacking horses under woodland branches with Rachel back home.

The pop and snap of incoming rounds barely registered above the rush of air and growl of the engine. But come they did. Three punched through the windshield. One sparked off the engine block. Another scraped the toe of my right boot. But I was too fast, too close. My front wheel hit the improvised ramp dead straight, pushing seventy. I held hard and kept the revs high and felt the ground slip away. The plank came up behind me, flying up with tatters of cardboard and sheets of old newspaper caught in the draft.

Airborne.

I held my breath and counted slow.

One thousand.

The police passed to my right, the barrels of their assault rifles tracing my arc in the air, unable to shoot for the faces in the apartment windows opposite.

Two thousand.

I cleared the skip and a police Yamaha identical to the one I was jumping. A flash-bang went off behind me, ineffectual.

Three thousand.

The pavement raced up to meet me. I kept the front fork steady; its wheel lifted higher.

Four thousand.

The back tyre hit the tarmac, squashed by the impact. The fork twisted an inch to the right. The rear wheel slid sideways a fraction and reformed. I corrected the front wheel and brought it down straight. I braked, released, and took a left past a Carrefour supermarket and punched on, dog-legging back over Rue de la Roquette and then due south against the traffic to Rue de Charonne. The chopper was as low as it was safe to fly, banking overhead, shadowing my movements. Police motorcycles roared in pursuit. I snapped my right wrist down. The LCD speedometer raced like a stopwatch. Eighty. Ninety. One hundred klicks per hour. French police 1300s are limited to a hundred brake horsepower. Not this one. Wherever the rider with the Glock had come from, he knew where he was at with his bike. And if he’d fitted it with a tracker, his handler would know where I was at, too.