The Czech Škorpion submachine gun carries a magazine payload of twenty rounds and pumps them out of its short barrel at a cyclic rate of eight hundred a minute. Multiplied by three, that made for sixty rounds firing through the café window in the space of one-point-four seconds. Just the blink of an eye, but as all hell broke loose and glass rained down and bullets raked the inside of the café and thudded into walls and tables and bodies and people cried out in terror and Ben tried to drag Françoise Schell out of the field of fire, it was the longest one-point-four seconds anyone would ever live through.

Or not live through.

And then it was all over. The last pieces of jagged glass fell from the shattered window frame. Gunsmoke swirled around the interior of the café. Ben heard people groaning and shrieking around him. He was lying on the floor beside the capsized table they’d been sitting at moments earlier, with Françoise Schell under him, and broken glass and spilled coffee everywhere. And blood. He could smell its coppery tang and feel its warmth. It was all over him.

It wasn’t all his blood. He’d been quick enough to pull Françoise down out of her seat to escape the worst of the point-blank gunfire directed at them through the window, but he’d been too slow to save her from all of it. A bullet had ploughed a hole in the side of the head and gone straight through. She was dead.

Then Ben felt the pain, and knew that he was injured too. How badly, he wouldn’t have time to think about until later. If later ever came. He rolled off Françoise Schell’s body and scrambled for cover behind the fallen table. The face of a dead waiter stared at him from inches away, covered in blood. The gunmen had stepped over the lower edge of the window frame and were striding into the café. Crunching broken glass underfoot. Smoke trickling from the hot receivers of their machine guns. All three Škorpions were empty. The shooters let them dangle loose on their slings, reached inside their jackets and drew out pistols. One of the older, heavily-bearded ones stepped over Françoise Schell’s body, glanced down and spotted the three mobile phones on the floor among the glass and the blood. His eyes lit up. He bent down to scoop them up with his free hand.

That was when Ben knew that this wasn’t just any old terrorist attack on a bunch of Parisians enjoying their afternoon coffee. This was a targeted hit aimed specifically at eliminating him and recovering the evidence that someone up the food chain had obviously known, or guessed, was contained inside the phone memories.

Either way, he wasn’t going to stand there and let them do it.