Louis pressed the buttons for the third and fifth floors. No one else entered and the doors slid closed. The elevator rattled upward and did not stop until it reached the third floor. The doors opened again, and Marković exited. Louis nodded at him as he passed, but Marković did not respond. Just as the doors were about to close for the second time, Louis halted their progress with a foot, stepped out, and called to Marković.

‘Monsieur, vous avez oublié quelque chose!’

Louis was holding up a key card. Marković turned back, saw the key card, and displayed his own, which was when Louis shot him twice with the Rohrbaugh concealed in the folded newspaper. The first bullet took Marković in the belly, the second in the chest. Marković stumbled backward, landing hard against the wall, and slid to the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the paintwork. Louis advanced and fired one more time as Marković raised his right hand as though to shield himself. The third bullet passed through the palm of Marković’s hand and entered his brain through his right eye. The hand dropped, and Marković was still.

The shots had sounded loud in the low hallway, even with the suppressor, but no one emerged from a doorway to investigate the source of the disturbance. Maybe, Louis reflected, the hotel was under-occupied; that, or its residents were endowed with enough sense not to display obvious interest in what might have been gunfire. Either way, Louis wasn’t going to wait around long enough to find out. He took the stairs to the lobby and left through the front entrance. There was no point trying to hide his face as his presence had already been recorded by the cameras in the lobby and the elevator, but the baseball cap would help, along with the inability of ignorant men to distinguish one Black face from another. What mattered now was getting out of Paris. Harris and his people could sort out the mess, which would be easier for them if the police hadn’t yet laid hands on a suspect.

Louis turned right at the corner and climbed in the back of the rental Peugeot idling by the curb. It pulled away quickly but not recklessly, and attracted no attention. The two Japanese men in the front did not look back at him, although the driver raised an inquisitive eyebrow in the rearview mirror.

‘One down,’ said Louis. ‘Four to go. You have my stuff?’

‘It’s in the trunk,’ said the driver.

‘Then take me to the airport.’