“Who was that, René?”

“No one. Wrong number.”

Emily closed her eyes again, but a moment later came another sound: two cars colliding on the bridge. A minivan had smashed into the rear end of a Peugeot sedan, the asphalt littered with shattered glass, traffic at a standstill. The drivers jumped out and began screaming at each other in rapid French. Emily could tell they weren’t French-Arabs, North Africans perhaps. René snatched up his backpack and walked into the roadway, picking his way through the motionless cars.

“René! What are you doing?”

But he acted as though he hadn’t heard her. He kept walking, not toward the wrecked cars but toward a long black limousine caught in the traffic jam. Along the way he unzipped the bag and pulled something out of it: a small sub-machine gun.

Emily couldn’t believe what she was seeing. René, her lover, the man who had slipped into her life and stolen her heart, walking across the Pont Alexandre III with a machine gun in his hand. Then the pieces began falling into place. The nagging suspicion that René was keeping something from her. The long, unexplained absences. The dark-haired stranger at the bistro that afternoon. Leila?

The rest of it she saw as slow-moving half images, as though it were taking place beneath murky water. René running across the bridge. René tossing his backpack beneath the limousine. A flash of blinding light, a gust of fiercely hot air. Gunfire, screams. Someone on a motorbike. Black ski mask, two pools of black staring coldly through the eyeholes, damp lips glistening behind the slit for the mouth. A gloved hand nervously revving the throttle. But it was the eyes that captured Emily’s attention. They were the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen.

Finally, in the distance, she could hear the two-note song of a Paris police siren. She looked away from the motorcyclist and saw René advancing slowly toward her through the carnage. He expelled the spent magazine from his weapon, casually inserted another, pulled the slide.