As far as workplaces go, it wasn’t bad. The Mediterranean in July, ten hours out of Cagliari, sailing to Palermo. A glass of beer in each hand and weaving through a gaggle of Germans to get back to his table. De Payns ducked around a dancing drunk who was Living la Vida Loca and arrived at his table. Michael Lambardi looked up from his corner of the ferry’s top deck bar, grabbed his Peroni and muttered santé before his moustache cut the head like a guillotine.
‘That’s better.’ Lambardi smiled, setting his glass on the table.
The early evening was starting to colour the sky purple and the ferry smelled of sunscreen and spilled beer. The bar contained the contrasts of what Europe had become—loud, happy Germans at the neighbouring table, hand-wringing Belgians trying to lip-read the news on a muted TV, and a couple of sullen Turkish gentlemen hunched at a table by the windows, making a big point of not drinking. De Payns wasn’t a great fan of the Teutons, but they at least knew what a bar was for.
‘So, Alain,’ said Lambardi, as de Payns leaned back in his white plastic chair, ‘will these documents work?’
De Payns looked at Lambardi. ‘They’ll work.’
‘Hundred per cent?’ asked the Italian.
‘Just like the first ones,’ said de Payns, taking a sip of his own beer.
Lambardi was an Italian migration agent in his early forties, with a body that couldn’t decide if it was heavily muscled or going to seed. De Payns had procured for Lambardi a bunch of Croatian ID cards a month ago, which gave the Italian’s clients unimpeded passage into France and Europe. As an officier traitant of France’s external intelligence service, de Payns was trying to get close enough to his new friend to find out who Lambardi was dealing with and why so many of his clients ended up in France with the smell of Semtex in their prayer mats. He’d infiltrated the Italian’s world and joined him drinking around the bars of the Sicilian capital, helping him out where he could, building affinity and listening to the struggles of Italian men when they divorce.
Earning Lambardi’s trust wasn’t so hard, because with his Marseille-based cover as Alain Dupuis, a migration consultant, and his access to travel documents, de Payns was of use to the Italian. They both liked drinking and looking at pretty women, which were common pastimes in Palermo during summer. But de Payns felt the danger of this assignment. One of Lambardi’s clients, according to the Company, was Sayef Albar, a splinter group of AQIM, the North African branch of al-Qaeda. They were resourced and organised and had a homicidal hatred of France. They’d behead de Payns’ children in front of him if they knew his real identity. Lambardi wouldn’t fare well, either.
De Payns casually scanned the bar and looked out the window, where a couple of Japanese kids climbed on the deck rail of the ferry only to be slapped off by their mother.
Lambardi cleared his throat. ‘The reason I ask, Alain, is that, as you know, my next traveller—’
‘And his friends,’ de Payns interjected.
‘And his friends,’ agreed Lambardi, ‘don’t look European, so the Croatian cards …’
De Payns smiled. The Croatian ID cards were top-shelf forgeries, accepted at any EU port. But de Payns had something better for the Italian.
‘I took the liberty,’ said de Payns. ‘The package waiting for me in Palermo includes five French passports.’
Lambardi paused, doubtful.
De Payns leaned in. ‘I’m serious. Your clients can land in Paris as French citizens.’
De Payns was playing on greed. The fees Lambardi could charge for the passports would override paranoia. And paranoia was relevant—AQIM was not an outfit to double-cross. But while greed would get Lambardi on the hook, coercion would be how they’d reel him in. When it came time to perform the devoilement—the moment when a target is told that he now works for Paris—Lambardi had to be right where the French secret services wanted him. He had to be shitting himself. When de Payns’ team had photographs and video of Lambardi receiving those passports and selling them to AQIM, the Italian would have nowhere to turn. He’d be scared of going to prison in Italy, but even more scared of what the terrorists would do if they saw those pictures.
Lambardi turned his attention to his smartphone, stood and weaved to the toilet. De Payns crossed his legs and poured his beer into the carpet beside his right ankle. He had to stay sharp. As he inveigled his way further into Lambardi’s life, he had expected Sayef Albar security to emerge. He assumed those two Turks in the bar were watching him. They had probably staked out de Payns’ office, a serviced space two blocks back from Palermo’s harbour, although he hadn’t yet detected a tail when he took a room in one of the scores of private hotels in Old Palermo. There were so many ten-room hotels in the city that he could dodge the tails by hopping from one to another, if he was careful. And Alec de Payns was careful like a cat.
Lambardi’s apartment was another story. It was in the city’s west, and the Sayef Albar security people had an irregular overwatch on the flat and were probably intercepting Lambardi’s calls and emails. De Payns fully expected that when he tried to get Lambardi alone at his apartment and have him filmed accepting the French passports, the terrorists would be listening with enhanced audio in the neighbouring apartment or have two men in a van on the street. The French mission team supporting Operation Falcon knew there were no bugs in Lambardi’s apartment; they’d checked when they set up the cameras. But there might be an emergency signal system for Lambardi to use if he detected a threat. And although the French mission teams had access to the best techs, de Payns had been unable to get his hands on Lambardi’s phone to have it checked and perhaps trapped.
De Payns was mindful of Sayef Albar but he was not overly worried. A man he knew well was sitting in the far corner of the bar, chatting with German tourists. His real name was Guillaume Tibet, but in the intelligence world he was known as Shrek. He was short and solid and his hand-to-hand skills came from Wing Chun kung fu, making him devastating in a fight. The fact that he’d been plucked from an academic and writing career to join the external intelligence services meant he exuded an air of bespectacled innocence.
Shrek was only one part of the mission team—the rest of its members would be waiting at the Palermo ferry terminal and they’d leapfrog one another in vans, on foot and on a motorbike along the route to Michael Lambardi’s apartment. If Lambardi—codenamed ‘Commodore’ by the Company—wanted another drink, the mission team would deploy people around the bars to check for Sayef Albar operatives. If Lambardi wanted to go straight home, the team would coalesce around his apartment, watching the terrorists’ surveillance. The whole operation would work like a ballet and be undetectable even to experienced field people.
To ensure the set-up was clean, de Payns had to wait for final confirmation from the mission team in Palermo. De Payns had received a last-minute request to join Lambardi for a meeting in Cagliari, and so there’d been no communication with his team since he’d left Marseille to travel to the Sardinian capital. The mission team used démarqués phones, purchased in shitty suburbs with no ID attached, to coordinate among themselves. But once in the field, the support team had no electronic connection with the phone of ‘Alain’: this phone had been registered with the false Alain ID and was connected only with the legend that went with the identity. When an operation was in-field, the two different worlds—the support team and de Payns—never intersected. There was no communication between them.
De Payns had other ways of contacting his team. Called liaisons clandestines, they included dead letterboxes and unobservable visual signals. One of these involved gommettes, or stickers—on a wall-mounted poster that advertised Peroni, the support team would leave a round white sticker in the final half-hour before the ship docked in Sicily. If the white gommette was on that poster, the op was on.
Lambardi reappeared at the table, and for a split second de Payns thought he caught a pair of eyes look at him then dart away. They belonged to a tall, swarthy man in his mid-thirties who was entering the restrooms that Lambardi had just exited. Just the blue rats, de Payns assured himself, a reference to the paranoia that can haunt field operators. The man was most likely a polite Pakistani who didn’t want to make eye contact.
The revs lowered on the ferry engines and the vessel tipped forward. De Payns took a quick breath and glanced over his shoulder at the beer poster.
In the bottom right-hand corner was a white gommette. Palermo loomed and the game was on. Falcon was go.