Rowland raised his eyes slowly up the façade of Madame Duval’s building. On its roof, and the roof opposite, he saw black shapes as police snipers moved into place.

“It’s that apartment up there,” Martigny said. “The one with the closed blinds.”

“I know which it is,” Rowland said.

“We’ll make a telephone connection in about ten minutes. He hasn’t ripped out the lines apparently, which helps. We don’t want to start talking too soon, and when we do talk to him, we have to do it the right way. We need your help—English, French? Possible approaches we could use? You know more about him than anyone else does…”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Look.” Martigny took his arm. “I told you. She’s not alone with him. That helps.”

“You think so? Since around eight o’clock this morning, he’s killed six people.”

“Even so. In this situation, you can never predict. She’ll probably be all right. They’ll both be all right. He needs them alive—they’re his ticket out. Listen—have a cigarette…”

Rowland shook his head. He kept his eyes on the building opposite.

Martigny was not a fool. “All right. Okay,” he said, “he probably doesn’t need both of them—I admit that.”

“You know damn well he doesn’t.” Rowland turned on him angrily. “Two makes it worse, not better. He loves an audience. He’ll kill one of them and keep the other alive—for a while.”

“He’ll keep the woman alive,” Martigny said. “We both know that. That’s obvious enough—the woman is physically weaker, easier to intimidate.”

He paused. He met this Englishman’s cold green gaze, and he knew exactly what was passing through his mind, since it was also passing through his own.

“Don’t,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t help to imagine the worst—not in this situation. Wait. Within the next half hour we’ll be talking to them, we’ll have the listening devices in place, we’ll have the plans to the apartment, we’ll know exactly where he’s standing—if he blinks, we’ll know.” He shrugged. “Near enough anyway… Come on through here. This van. They’re setting up the tapes and the telephone link.”

Rowland followed him slowly. As they had spoken, another three vans and five cars had turned up. The first TV crews were arriving, the first clutch of cameramen. He stepped over cables and wires; he watched another posse of GIGN don helmets and flak jackets. He had seen it in a hundred movies, a hundred news reports—and at that he felt the same sense of foreboding he had experienced earlier. It was like a movie, he thought, because Star intended it that way, and because Star was still, in every sense, calling the shots.

“Don’t you see?” he said to the quiet, dark-suited psychologist who would make the first telephone contact and who was sitting opposite him now. “Don’t you see? This is what he wants. Maximum coverage—prime-time reports. He’s scripting this. This is his movie. This is when he finally gets to be a star, when he’s been a nothing, a nobody, for most of his life.”