The moment Ben had realised what Nazim was planning, he’d called Jeff Dekker at Le Val and outlined the urgent situation. Jeff’s instant response: ‘Are you kidding, mate? We’re on our way.’

And wherever Jeff went, the irrepressible Tuesday Fletcher was sure to follow. But Le Val was more than a two-hour drive from where they needed to be, and there wasn’t time for that. Which was Ben’s reason for appealing to help from the third friend. Someone who could make things happen much more quickly.

Not so very long ago, Ben had rescued Auguste Kaprisky’s beloved great-niece Valentina and her father from some bad men in Russia. The octogenarian billionaire would do anything for Ben. And Ben didn’t know too many other people who possessed a private collection of some of the world’s fastest civil aircraft, kept on permanent standby with a team of pilots. Within minutes of his call to Kaprisky at his estate near Le Mans, the old man’s Learjet was in the sky and whooshing northwards at 858 kilometres an hour towards Cherbourg, the nearest airport to Le Val.

Meanwhile, Jeff and Tuesday were piling towards Cherbourg in Jeff’s souped-up Ford Ranger, a journey of just twenty-odd kilometres that Jeff broke every rule in the book to cover in record time. They met the jet at a private terminal and were immediately back in the air heading south for Le Mans, where an Airbus H155 helicopter capable of over 320 kilometres an hour was waiting to fly them to their destination. Total time in the air: just under forty-seven minutes, plus the short while it had taken Jeff to drive like a bat out of hell to Cherbourg. The ever-resourceful Kaprisky had even supplied an arsenal of weapons from his personal bodyguard retinue, to save Jeff and Tuesday having to tote the hardware from the Le Val armoury into a public airport. The old man was thoughtful like that.

While all this was going on, Ben and Roth had been screaming southwards in the Alpina and somehow managing not to get pursued by the traffic police. They arrived at the water treatment plant outside Alençon just before the helicopter appeared. With every passing minute Ben had been getting increasingly worried that he might have misjudged the whole situation. What if his instinct was wrong? What if he couldn’t read Nazim’s intentions as well as he thought he could? What if Nazim was somewhere else, far away, laughing?

But Ben’s fears were grimly put to rest when he saw the thick black smoke belching from the main building and rising over the facility, and the mangled hole where the front gates used to be. Fire alarms were going off inside the building. It wouldn’t be long before the police and emergency services got here. Ben wanted to be in, out and gone before that happened.