I stood with my back to the wall. It was warm on my shoulder blades. The air was fizzing, energy-snapping. Nerves tight. I watched it closely, the mass demonstration in the street. The mass thoughts. The mass mind. Drawing power to itself with every shout. The placards with their messages of hate and the voices hitched together like horses in a yoke by their chants of rage.

‘Yankee bastards! Out! Out! Out!’

‘No nukes here! No nukes here!’

I took a few quick snaps of the crowd with my camera, but I found it hard to keep my eyes off Léon in his uniform, coolly efficient as he went about his job. Prowling at the edges of the crowd, watching, digging out the troublemakers like weeds. Isaac had vanished. And the crowd was growing quieter because on the steps of the town hall Mayor Durand stood and addressed them, his powerful tones carrying over their heads as he sought to beguile them down the path of negotiation and debate.

He spoke well, but I did not stop to listen. I had work to do. The grey clouds had lowered a tin lid above our heads, trapping the anger in the town.

*

The back door of the town hall was locked, of course it was. But this was Serriac. It wasn’t Paris, was it? So it was nothing more than an old brass warded lock, a simple basic design that was begging to be picked. They’d spent more money on the ornate brass door-knocker with its floral festoon than on the security lock itself.

I extracted two L-shaped picks from the pouch of tools in my bag, inserted one to slide the bolt across and one to raise the single lever. And voilà. A knife through butter. Job done. I slipped inside the building, quietly closed the door behind me and took a look around. I was in a rear vestibule of some sort, closed doors leading off it, a corridor straight ahead. High ceilings and fancy cornices even back here, and a woodblock floor of a silky pale oak that Papa would have loved. I made no sound.

I listened hard.

Silence. Except for the thump of blood through my veins. I could hear no voices, no sound of any kind, because everyone would be crowded out on the street to watch and listen to the events unfolding on their front steps.

Behind them lay an open goal.

*

Foolish Mayor Durand.

I thought he would know better. He hadn’t stopped to lock his office door. I could picture it. The sudden alarm, blood pressure shooting up to danger zone, a flight-or-fight response. He stayed to fight, needless to say, because that was his job and that was the kind of man Durand was. But he would have heard the shouts and angry chants of the protesters coming closer and experienced a flicker of panic. A door left unlocked.