It was a short walk from the station to the start of Le Marais—the Place Vendôme, one of those Paris squares where even the trees manage to look expensive. From there we headed down toward a big, elegant building that turned out to be the Picasso museum. I’d studied Picasso at school. He’s the guy who painted women with eyes in the sides of their necks and tables with legs going the wrong way. It’s called surrealism. Maybe I should have taken Tim in, as he’s pretty surreal himself. But we didn’t have time.

We backtracked and found ourselves in a series of long, narrow streets with buildings rising five stories on both sides. But I knew we were on the right track. There was no singing, but here and there I saw blue stars—the same stars I had glimpsed as I was bundled into the van. I knew what it was now: the six-pointed Star of David. There was one in every kosher food store and restaurant in the area.

We’d been following the Rue des Rosiers—the one I’d read about in the guidebook—but with no sign of the building where we’d been held. So now we started snaking up and down, taking the first on the right and the next on the left and so on. It was a pretty enough part of Paris, I’ll say that for it. Tim had even forgotten our mission and stopped once or twice to take photographs. We’d been chased and threatened at knifepoint. We’d been kidnapped, drugged, and threatened again—this time by the French police. And he still thought we were on vacation!

And then, suddenly, we were there.

It was on one of the main streets of the area—the Rue de Sévigné. I recognized it at once: the burned face of the building, the broken windows, the ugly smokestacks . . . And there was the archway that we had driven through. There was a courtyard on the other side that was where the white van had been parked. I stood there in the sunlight, with people strolling past on the sidewalks, some carrying shopping bags, others pushing strollers. And none of them knew. The biggest drug factory in Paris was right in front of them, just sitting there between a café and a cake shop, right in the middle of the Marais. I couldn’t believe I had found it so easily. It was hard to believe it was there at all.

“Nick . . . !” Tim whispered.