Then I was on it. Pont Louis Philippe. No room for error driving against the one-way system. I came in as tight as I could to the kerb on the left and let the brake go, left knee skimming stone. The back wheel held. A patrol car handbrake-turned parallel to me, the officers inside shouting, weapons drawn. But they were too slow and I outpaced their pistols as they fought with windows and door frames. I checked over my shoulder as I straightened up. The motorcycle cops were still on me, but one of them oversteered. Another gave it too much front brake and their bikes collided – fibreglass fragmenting as the frames skidded side-on into the patrol car. One rider hopped clear; the other catapulted over the handlebars, walking first on air and then turning somersaults into the windshield of the stricken patrol car. Two cops and the plainclothes pursuer stayed on me.

My tyres hit cobbles and the timbre of the road changed to a fast rip as the little square stones shook the Yamaha’s suspension. Either side of the road the bridge’s stone balustrade was punctuated with apertures, capturing the bateaux mouches plying the river in dozens of frozen images juddering past like a reel from an old movie camera. Ahead and close, the red awning of a café on the south-west corner of the bridge; far distant, the colonnaded dome of the Panthéon crowning the urban horizon.

I twisted the throttle, leaning right and low, cutting the corner off the little island and burning over the pedestrianized Pont Saint-Louis on to the Île de la Cité. The M4’s suppressor hung down behind me, scraping for an instant on the road as I stooped into the turn. Water flashed to the left of me and I was beside Notre-Dame, rising above the winter-dead gardens that spread out beyond the cathedral’s iconic east end. In seconds I was back on to Pont de l’Archevêché, which I’d crossed the day before on the way to Lukov’s apartment.

I was far enough away now from the gunfight in La Fée Verte for pedestrians to be ignorant of the shootout. People fell back. Couples grabbed each other. Near-misses swore and flipped me out – but I heard nothing except the rattle-roar of the engine on cobbles and stone and asphalt; that, and the thump-thump, thump-thump of my own heart pounding a metronomic pulse in my ears. From the moment the Bulgarian had bitten the dust until I crossed Boulevard Saint-Germain and came screaming out on to Rue Monge, less than ten minutes had passed. I got my face down behind the Perspex that remained intact in the battered bike’s windshield and gritted my teeth, eyes half-closed, squinting through the sunglasses against the hurricane breeze blown back by the surge forward.