He carried a detailed map of Normandy in the glove compartment. Fetching it from the car he spread it out over the bonnet. The metallic blue paintwork was filmed with dust and the metal was hot to the touch. He leaned over the map and studied the familiar road layout in the hope that something would come to him. He quickly found Vaucottes, an almost unnoticeable dot on the northern coastline. From there, his eye traced two descending, diverging routes. The one he’d first expected Nazim to take, and the one they were following instead. The former tracing a line south-eastwards towards Paris, the latter breaking further and further away the more it edged towards the west. The two lines formed a lopsided inverted V with the starting point at the top, Paris on the end of the bottom right fork, and Nazim’s unknown destination somewhere on the bottom left. That was assuming that Nazim kept to his current course and hit the A28 motorway heading further south. If he continued on that path he’d eventually reach Le Mans, the home of Ben’s reclusive billionaire acquaintance Auguste Kaprisky.

Ben couldn’t understand why Nazim would want to travel so far south. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe his destination lay closer. Just a few kilometres after the road merged with the motorway lay the northern edge of the Normandie-Maine Regional Natural Park, a huge area of protected forest, pastureland and Alpine meadows covering over half a million acres. It was a haven for trail walkers, climbers, canoeists and nature lovers. Perhaps it could offer sanctuary to escaping terrorists carrying enough deadly pharmaceuticals to eliminate the entire population of the country. Ben pictured Nazim in a canoe, paddling through some scenic river valley, cackling with glee as he emptied gallons of fentanyl into the water. The image was ludicrous.

Ben sighed and stared at the map, trying to put himself in Nazim’s shoes, to get into his mind. Which was relatively easy to do, in some ways. He and his enemy had much in common. Like him, the Iraqi was a dedicated and uncompromising warrior who wouldn’t turn away from his objective once his intention was set. A man for whom failure was not an option. When challenged by the failure of one strategic plan, he would do what any clever tactician does: adapt, improvise, overcome that challenge by whatever means possible and form an alternative strategy that the enemy hadn’t anticipated. And when presented with a golden opportunity to strike a punishing blow against the opposition, he would use it with great intelligence and ruthless efficiency.