It was an adaptation of the same simple system of waypoints he’d first taught me as a child. Together we’d marked the tree trunks in the plantation that stretched out behind our house in County Wicklow so that I could find my way home again if I lost my compass. Alone, I’d mapped on to the bark of the trees themselves vast tracts of the woodland that swallowed me for hours. My wanderings were stopped abruptly when my mother had realized how far from home her nine-year-old was venturing.

‘If you did this where mamka and babushka grew up, you would have been eaten by wolves,’ she told me firmly in Russian – which meant there was no arguing with her. I never looked at the forest in the same way again.

I snapped out of the reverie and willed myself to concentrate. The calm of being underground was deceptive. Only a couple of minutes before I’d been running a full-scale escape and evasion. Just because I’d paused didn’t mean my pursuers would, too. The gunfight was bound to trigger a manhunt on an epic scale. The helicopter, the police vans, the army and the Foreign Legion would all still be up there – but that was just for starters. They’d already been joined by the mystery bike rider and whoever else had been stirred up by Benjamin Franklin.

The Navy SEAL, if that’s what he was, could have still been working for the Americans if he was out, or he could have been working freelance. The guys in keffiyehs, the phoney cop – all of them could have been on anyone’s payroll, from the Brits to the Bulgarians, the CIA to the FSB. In a strange twist of irony probably the only people not after me were the IRA – although I wasn’t ruling them out, either.

But sting-ball grenades and tasers weren’t what I usually went up against. And if I’d been on the other end of that sniper rifle, I’d have shot me dead vaulting that bar. The only firm conclusion I could draw was that the people actually trying to kill me were the French. And fair enough.

I steadied myself against the wall, and slowed my breathing.

Clarity in darkness.