He tried to stay calm. Which wasn’t easy. The cravings were getting intense. He clung to the hope that he might find a stash of drugs at Lang’s apartment. Lang himself didn’t smoke or drink, but he was known to host parties for his friends. Celebrities, financiers, models. The kind of people who dabbled in narcotics. Bowman didn’t know for sure, but there was a slim chance he might find something there. Maybe pills. Maybe something else. Right now, he’d take anything.

The Agusta approached Monaco from seaward. Below them, Bowman spied a harbour crammed with small fast boats and flashy yachts. Apartment blocks hugged the edge of the marina. From this height they seemed as small and white as sugar cubes. Further inland he glimpsed the football stadium, partially obscured behind a cluster of offices and hotels.

Seven minutes after they had taken off, the chopper descended towards the marina. They landed at the heliport at the water’s edge, the engine whined and then the team piled out and made for the terminal. Casey consulted her phone, verifying Lang’s last known location, pinching and swiping. Bowman avoided the border official’s gaze as he gave his passport a quick scan. The tremors were much worse now. His left hand began shaking as he strolled out of the terminal building. An hour from now, he would be a shivering wreck.

You need to get something in your body, the voice in his head warned. Any opioid will do. It doesn’t matter. Just get to Lang’s apartment and find something.

An enormously overweight man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts waited for them outside. His face was glossed with sweat. A great hammock of flesh sagged beneath his chin. He had no neck; it had been submerged beneath the fleshy folds of his jowls and shoulders. His arms and legs protruded from his torso like sticks out of a snowman. The man wiped perspiration from his brow with a pocket handkerchief, a seemingly futile exercise, and offered a moist hand to Mallet.

‘You must be Peter,’ he said, using the name of Mallet’s ghost ID. UKNs were never told the real names of the people they worked with.

Mallet shook the man’s hand with great reluctance.

‘I’m Barry Vokes,’ the man went on. He spoke with a strong Mancunian accent. ‘I was told to expect you guys.’

Bowman had been given a few details about Vokes, the UKN, during the briefing. Vokes was ex-Special Branch, a retired detective who had worked with Five and Six on several occasions in the past, carrying out basic surveillance duties, setting up weapons caches and scouting escape routes. He had sold up his place in leafy Hertfordshire and now lived in the south of France, although Bowman couldn’t understand why. The climate clearly didn’t agree with him.

Mallet surveyed the car park and said, ‘Where’s your ride?’

‘This way, guys.’