De Payns wandered the concourses of the Milano Centrale, an hour to kill waiting for his train to Marseille. The Italians had created a new railway terminal in the middle of a nineteenth-century building, somehow retaining the original architecture around a labyrinth of shops and escalators as modern as Frankfurt’s. It felt light and clean, but within a domed cathedral of polished marble and massive curved skylights.
Grabbing a takeaway coffee, he headed for a side entrance where he could have a smoke, drink his coffee and see who was around. He walked to an alcove at the side of the main entrance and stood under a large analogue clock watching the taxis and the buses leaving and arriving. Two women in cafe-worker shirts were also in the alcove, and as de Payns lit up they crushed their smokes and headed back to work.
De Payns sipped at the coffee and thought about his family. Romy couldn’t call him when he was operational because he didn’t carry his personal phone when he worked. Six months after they were married, he’d explained this to Romy—separating himself totally from his family while he was in the field was a mandatory sanitation exercise to preserve her and, later, the kids. When he took on a fictive ID, he was someone else during the mission, and this fictitious person would not know Romy de Payns. She could call as much as she wanted but his cell phone would be in a cupboard in the DGSE safe house, with its battery next to it. They’d talked it through over a few wines, and he’d explained that if the temptation ever arose to send an email to her from a cyber cafe, it would be a huge mistake—one he would never commit. If he was under surveillance when he sent such an email from the field, it would give the bad guys the real ID of the operative and reveal the fact he had a family. And in de Payns’ world, family was leverage. Family was a vulnerability.
Romy was solid, like him. And like him, she’d spent her teenage years in a boarding school developing independence and discipline that matched her husband’s. With two children to protect, there was now no greater advocate of secrecy in France’s national security apparatus than Romy de Payns. In many respects she was more solid than her husband, especially when combining parenting with the demands of the DGSE.
There was a catch. Romy had gone back to university when their youngest, Oliver, started day care. Her PhD was going to be awarded in ten days’ time, on a Saturday night—the date had been seared in his brain because Romy’s parents were coming to Paris and they were all going out for a boozy dinner after the graduation ceremony.
De Payns nodded to himself as he exhaled a plume of smoke. The marital trade-off had always fallen in his favour. In the de Payns household, the Company came first. But this was one date that had to be honoured for Romy. This was her night. He took another sip of coffee and a man paused in front of him, pulling out a cigarette.
‘Bonjour,’ he said, and asked de Payns for a light in French. De Payns tensed—the stranger looked military, from the bull neck and regulation haircut to the way he held his cigarette long-wise inside his furled fist.
‘Do I know you?’ asked de Payns, smiling.
‘Manerie wants to see you,’ said the man, serious but not threatening.
De Payns’ mind spun. He only knew one Manerie, and if this was the same Manerie it was not a friendly call. ‘And you are?’
‘I’m the help,’ said the man. ‘But you can call me Jim.’
‘Maybe you have the wrong person?’ suggested de Payns, scanning the apron for vans.
‘If you’re Aguilar, I have the right person.’ This was de Payns’ pseudo, only ever used inside the Company.
‘Aggi Hula?’ echoed de Payns, keeping the smile on his face. ‘You Algerian?’
‘No, but I’m used to getting my way.’
‘I bet you say that to all the boys.’
‘The director won’t see the humour in that,’ said Jim. ‘But maybe I will when you’re in the back of a van with a hood over your head, and I’m reminding you that I tried to be nice.’
De Payns decided this Jim had definitely been a paratrooper, perhaps in the Legion. He smiled and tossed the cigarette lighter to the bulky Frenchman.
‘Director will meet you at your seat in ten minutes,’ said Jim, lighting his smoke and tossing the lighter back to de Payns. Then he walked away. As far as tradecraft went, it wasn’t bad. A watcher would have seen a fellow smoker getting a light and moving on. He didn’t linger and monologue. His body language said ‘stranger’.
De Payns stayed calm as Jim moved out of sight. Manerie meant Philippe Manerie, the director of the security side of the DGS—the internal affairs division of the Company. The DGS was feared by de Payns and his fellow officers because it represented the potential for either a speedy end to one’s career or a long stay in one of the DGS’s basements after passage through a French security court. France was haughty and somewhat cynical about the ways of the world, but she abhorred a traitor. There were French people of a certain age who would spit on your shoes for the mention of Vichy France. The DGS represented that attitude and more.
De Payns was tired and questions bounced in his mind—was Jim real or bullshit? Was this actually DGS or someone from another service trying to make him talk? An approach, or a test? The kind of test the DGS performed often.
If the approach was real, why would they contact him in the middle of his exfiltration, against every basic rule of security, rather than find de Payns at the Bunker in Noisy? But if it was bullshit, how had they found him? Was he followed, or did someone who knew the exfiltration plan talk? Someone in his team?
De Payns had a choice—to escape quickly and use an unplanned itinerary, or go to the ‘Manerie’ meeting to see the face of the person, report it and, if it was an approach, do a counter-manipulation.
He was tired but he was still nosy. De Payns checked his ticket and crushed his smoke under his heel. Then he headed to platform 18.