The police sirens were getting closer, too close. He hurried back to the Alpina, stumbling once. His driver’s seat was red with blood. He got in behind the wheel, managed to squeeze past the wrecked motorcycle and the Mercedes, out of the T-junction with Rue Notre-Dame des Champs and away. By the time the first cop cars turned up, he’d be long gone.

Chapter 28

Ben drove for five kilometres across the city before the pain forced him to find a place to stop and check his injuries. He pulled into a littered back alley and clambered out of his blood-smeared driver’s seat into the back of the car, where he kept a small first-aid kit and a few other essentials. After gingerly peeling off his jacket and the blood-soaked denim shirt under it, he examined the sources of the bleeding. One of the bullets that had shattered the café window to the left of where he’d been sitting had scored a crease about a quarter of an inch deep across the peak of his left bicep and the curve of his pectoral muscle. He also had pieces of glass embedded in his chest, side and shoulder from the shattered window, which were digging into his flesh every time he moved.

In other words, he’d been incredibly lucky. If the bullet had struck an inch further to the right it would have carved through his heart and at least one lung. End of story, right there.

The medical kit contained a scalpel, tweezers, antiseptic cream, butterfly sutures and a pack of special painkillers called sufentanil, heavy-duty stuff designed for alleviating battlefield injuries. He spent the next uncomfortable twenty minutes closing the lips of his chest wound and extracting as many of the shards of glass as he could find, some of which had gone quite deep and needed cutting around with the razor-sharp scalpel blade before he could get a purchase with the tweezers.

By the time he’d finished he was feeling faint with pain and his left side looked like raw steak. He swabbed himself with antiseptic and patched and dressed the wounds as best he could before swallowing a couple of sufentanil. He sat back with his eyes closed and waited a few minutes longer for the drug to start kicking in, then decided it was time to move on. His old green army bag contained a fresh pair of jeans and a clean shirt left over from his India travels. He put both on, used his bloodied clothes as rags to clean up the mess on the car seat, then bundled them up and dumped them in a nearby bin.

‘You’ll survive,’ he muttered to himself. ‘You’ve had worse.’ Which was definitely true. Once healed, the scars would be a minor addition to the collection he’d already accrued over the years.