André offered no explanation. He was a man who used words sparsely and those he did use were often shaped into lies. To distract. To make you look in the wrong direction. He was good at that.

*

My brother worked for the CIA, the American Intelligence agency. I don’t say that lightly. I say it with reverence. It was the job I yearned for, in vain. To follow in my brother’s footsteps. I wanted to be part of those who help keep France safe in these dangerous times, and yes, I know it sounds over-dramatic, but the life of a field agent can be dangerous, André kept assuring me. I was learning the truth of that myself right now.

André had spent his whole childhood being both mother and father to me – far more than Papa had ever been. So when the telephone rang this evening and it was André’s voice telling me to be in my car outside a certain house on a certain street, I was there within a heartbeat.

Whoever was chasing André’s tail didn’t stand a chance. He was too quick, too smart. André was . . . I want to say invincible. But it is the wrong word. My brother was the kind of man who, if you were hanging by a slippery thread, dangling over a raging pit of hellfire, you’d want him there.

Believe me, you would. You’d want him and his cool certainty that he could outwit all the hard-eyed bastards that the Kremlin could throw at him. As children growing up in the wide marsh delta of the Camargue, he taught me the delights of creating codes and the thrills of the dead letter drop, and later in Paris he took me to secret meetings in places my father would skin the hide off me for setting foot in. Paris, you must understand, was not a city in 1953. It was a cesspit. It rotted the soul. It was the devil’s own vile hairy arsehole, according to Papa. I’d learned from him already that bulls and horses mattered more than motherless children, and that up in the towering mountains God rumbled his disapproval each time I went skinny-dipping in the sweet pools of the River Rhône.

My father looked like Abraham in my children’s Bible. Long beard. Ebony staff. And like Abraham, my father performed a sacrifice to God once a year up among the rugged sun-bleached cliffs of Les Beaux de Provence. Not of his son; of course not. No, even Abraham was spared that.