Fancy shopfronts, chic cafés, parked cars … all reduced to a smudge of sound and colour. Faces blinked past, pressed to plate glass. No one was on the street. I kept my face behind the peppered windshield and carried on – straight, steady. Speeding. My jacket billowed in the slipstream. Freezing cold air whirled around me. My ears stung; my knuckles went white on the grips. The rifle magazines I’d stashed in my jacket worked free of the overfilled pockets, clattering to the ground behind me.

I swung right but came off the brake too late and felt the rear wheel drifting me into a lowside crash. I held my nerve and the rubber held the asphalt. Just. I sat upright and pulled a left, skirting bicycles and bollards, and rolled under a garret into a cobbled alleyway. I thundered through a courtyard, hooked left under a wide, bare tree, then roared under another building and out into a wider passage. I put on the sunglasses I’d taken from the dead SEAL. There was no time to put my gloves on, too. My eyes were already streaming. I blinked and checked my mirrors. Four uniformed cops followed on Yamahas, and, behind them, a plainclothes rider on a BMW rig. Pistol shots blew lumps out of the walls, shattered my left mirror. Two children dived for cover, their father shouting, colouring the air blue in my wake. I pushed right. Then right again, nosing out on to Avenue Ledru-Rollin.

Make or break. Five engines growled behind me. The chopper circled around in front. I touch-checked the Glock in my jeans and the M4 across my back. All good. As my mate Roberts in Freetown would have said: Come on, old girl. Let’s be ’avin’ ya.

Revs up. Clutch out. Rock and roll.

I kicked through the gears, keeping the throttle wide open and my head down, counting the seconds as the speedo climbed again. The chopper banked to my left. I checked my right mirror. The five bikes were hot in pursuit. The avenue curved a kilometre south-west all the way to the River Seine.

The city strobed past. Trees. Lamp posts. People. I leaned left and right with my shoulders, weaving through the Sunday-chicane of cars and tourists. Car horns and police sirens screeched past, harmonics distorting, mutating, whining, whizzing, fusing as I rode faster into one long wailing corridor of noise. Cortisol coursed through my brain, shutting down everything unnecessary to surviving that moment, blanking out everything behind me. One hundred kilometres per hour down an unknown Parisian street. The slightest miscalculation will kill you, or stay with you for ever. I saw the river ahead, the bridge, and the main road across me.