‘Don’t you think, Ricky, my friend. You just do. You good at doing. Stick with that.’

I laughed too, because this was Francisco’s way of making me feel good. If he’d been six inches taller, he’d have ruffled my hair like a big-hearted older brother.

‘Yeah. I was just thinking, though…’

I stopped. For thirty seconds we both sat a little straighter in our seats as a dark-blueGendarme Peugeot cruised past. Francisco eased fractionally off the accelerator and let it go.

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘like when I paid the check at the hotel, you know… and I thought, like, that’s a lot of money… you know… like six of us… hotels and stuff… plane tickets… lots of money. And I thought… like, where’s it coming from? You know, somebody’s paying, right?’

Francisco nodded wisely, as if he was trying to help me with a complicated problem involving girlfriends.

‘Sure, Ricky. Somebody’s paying. Somebody’s got to pay, all the time.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘That’s what I thought. Somebody’s got to pay. So, like, I thought… you know… who?’

He kept his eyes to the front for a while, then slowly turned and looked at me. For a long time. So long, that I had to keep flicking my eyes to the road in front to make sure there wasn’t a fleet of jack-knifing lorries ahead of us.

In between these glances, I shone back at him with as much innocent stupidity as I could manage. Ricky’s not dangerous, I was trying to say. Ricky’s an honest infantryman. Ricky’s a simple soul who just wants to know who’s paying his wages. Ricky is not - never has been, and never will be - a threat.

I chuckled, nervously.

‘You going to watch the road?’ I said. ‘I mean, like… you know’

Francisco chewed his lip for a moment, then suddenly laughed with me and turned back to face the front.

‘You remember Greg?’ he said, in a happy, sing-song way. I frowned, heavily, because unless a thing happened in the last few hours, Ricky’s not sure he can remember it too well. ‘Greg,’ he said again. ‘With the Porsche. With the cigars. Took your picture for the passport.’

I waited a while, and then nodded vigorously.

‘Greg, sure, I remember him,’ I said. ‘Drove a Porsche.’ Francisco smiled. Maybe he was thinking that it didn’t matter what he told me, because I’d have forgotten it all by the time we got toParis.

‘That’s him. Well now, Greg, he is a clever guy.’

‘Yeah?’ I said, as if this was a new concept to me.

‘Oh sure,’ said Francisco. ‘Real clever. Clever guy with money. Clever guy with a lot of things.’

I thought about this for a while. ‘Seemed like an asshole to me,’ I said. Francisco looked at me in surprise, then let out a yell of delighted laughter, and hammered the steering-wheel with his fist.

‘Sure he’s an asshole,’ he shouted. ‘A fucking asshole, yeah.’

I laughed along with him, glowing with pride at having said something to please the master. Eventually, gradually, we both calmed down, and then he reached out a hand and turned off the Bruce Springsteen. I could have kissed him.

‘Greg works with another guy,’ said Francisco, his face becoming suddenly serious. ‘Zurich. They are like finance people. They move money around, do deals, handle a lot of big stuff. Varied stuff. You know?’ He looked across at me, and I frowned dutifully back, showing some hard concentration. That seemed to be what he wanted. ‘Anyhow, Greg gets a call. Money coming in. Do this with it, do that with it. Sit on it. Lose it. Whatever.’

‘You mean, like, we got a bank account?’ I said, grinning. Francisco grinned too.

‘Sure, we got a bank account, Ricky. We got a lot of bank accounts.’

I shook my head in wonder at the ingenuity of this, and then frowned again.

‘So Greg pays money for us, right? But not his money?’

‘No, not his money. He deals with it, takes his cut. Big cut, I think, seeing as how he drives a Porsche, and all I got is this fucking Alfa. But it ain’t his money.’

‘Sowho?’ I said. Probably too quickly. ‘I mean, like one guy? Or a lot of guys, or what?’

‘One guy,’ said Francisco, then took a last, long, deciding look at me - auditing me, weighing me up - trying to remember all the times I’d annoyed him, all the times I’d pleased him; figuring out whether I’d done enough to earn this one piece of information that I had no right or reason to know. Then he sniffed, which is a thing Francisco always did when he was getting ready to say something important.

‘I don’t know his name,’ he said. ‘His real name, I mean. But he uses a name for the money. For the banks.’

‘Yeah?’ I said.

I was trying to make it look as if I wasn’t holding my breath. Cisco was teasing me now, drawing the whole thing out for fun.

‘Yeah?’ I said again.

‘The name is Lucas,’ he said at last. ‘Michael Lucas.’ I nodded.

‘Cool,’ I said.

After a while I settled my head back against the window, and pretended to sleep.

There’s a thing, I thought, as we thrummed along towardsParis, and Christ knew what. There’s a strange piece of philosophy in action. I just hadn’t realised that before.

Thou Shalt Not Kill, I’d always assumed, was top of the list. The Big One. Coveting neighbour’s asses, obviously, was a thing to avoid; likewise, committing adultery, not honouring thy father and thy mother, and bowing down before graven images.

But Thou Shalt Not Kill. Now that is a Commandment. That’s the one everyone can remember, because it seems the rightest, the truest, the most absolute.

The one that everyone forgets is the one about not bearing false witness against thy neighbour. It seems paltry by comparison to Thou Shalt Not Kill. Nit-picking. A parking offence.

But when it’s thrust in your face, and when your gut reacts to it seconds before you brain has had a chance even to digest what it’s heard, you realise that life, morality, values - they just don’t seem to work the way you thought they did.

Murdahshot Mike Lucas through the throat, and that was one of the wickedest things I’d ever seen, in a life not unmarked by the seeing of wicked things. But when Murdah decided, for reasons of convenience, or amusement, or administrative neatness, to bear false witness against the man he’d killed - to take away not just his physical life, but his moral life too; his existence, his memory, his reputation; using his name, blackening it, just to cover his own tracks - so that he could hang the blame for what was to come on a twenty-eight-year-old CIA man who went a little funny in the head, well, that was the point when things started to change for me. That was the point when I started to get really angry.