2

The runway of Paris–Le Bourget Airport shimmered like molten glass in the heat of the June afternoon. A Gulfstream G450 descended from a cloudless sky, landed softly as a kiss and taxied to a spot on the tarmac where two vehicles stood side by side, their engines idling to keep their waiting drivers cool. The first was a black Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates. The second was a small white Renault out of which stepped a young officer of the Police aux Frontières.

A door opened outwards from the rear of the aircraft’s hull, revealing a set of four inverted steps on its inner face. Three passengers disembarked. At their head was a dark-haired woman in her late thirties with an air of confidence that could only have been possessed by an American. She was followed by two tall athletic men of indeterminate nationality. All three were dressed in business suits and carried identical dark navy holdalls bearing government insignia and the words Sac Diplomatique. The police officer glanced at their passports, issued them with permits allowing them to exit the airport and swiftly departed.

The driver of the Mercedes took care of their luggage, which felt heavy and cumbersome as he stowed it in the boot, like equipment for a mountaineering expedition. He returned to his seat behind the wheel and found the woman sitting alongside him. There was no doubt she was the senior of the three.

‘Rue Christophe Colomb?’

‘Oui, merci,’ she answered in chilly, though perfectly accented French.

These were the only words she spoke throughout the forty-minute drive to their destination, an apartment building a short distance from the Avenue George V in central Paris. The two men also remained silent. When, from time to time, the driver glanced at them in his mirror, he noticed their eyes scanning the traffic with a level of unblinking concentration that was scarcely human. Their behaviour bore little resemblance to that of the diplomats he was accustomed to driving and they gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his gut.

Immediately after he had dropped them off, he felt an urge to call at a car wash in Saint-Denis where he paid twenty-five euros for the full Valet Magnifique. But even after the crew of shirtless Somalis had done their work, the smell of those three still lingered like a dead rat under the floorboards.