There was a time in his career when de Payns would have buckled under if Manerie cornered him and forced him into fealty. Even he was surprised that he’d stonewalled the DGS man on Falcon. De Payns was a product of France’s elite boarding school system and the French air force. His grandfather was one of the first to join de Gaulle’s Free French Forces when de Gaulle was trapped in London, trying to keep Free France alive. He understood chains of command and narrowly held information. The fact he’d quoted the rule book at a person who could destroy his career and make him unemployable gave him a sense of empowerment and also unease. He was right not to acknowledge Falcon to an outsider, but it was the wrong person to withhold information from.
The Airbus banked over the southern reaches of Paris and lined up for landing, on time for the 12.30 arrival from Marseille. He’d been jittery in that city, which was unusual since he’d spent so much of his DGSE training there. Marseille now felt too much like Palermo—just another dangerous Mediterranean city with all those small lanes, grand boulevards and thousands of windows and balconies hiding an army of watchers. By the time he’d left the train at Marseille Provence Airport he was on the verge of a blue rats episode, where a spy sees only watchers and senses only followers. Every person on the street—from kids playing to the oldest grandmother—could be part of the game. To fight it, he’d resisted doing any more IS routes, no more ruptures.
Now, as they approached the runway in Paris, he tried to clear his head. He knew the reputation of the DGS, but the suddenness of Manerie’s appearance and the bluntness of his request was a shock. Shrek?! It didn’t seem possible. He remembered the first time he’d worked with Shrek. An opposition party figure from Syria was hiding out in Libya, wanting all sorts of gifts from the French government in exchange for information about the Syrian economy, weapons programs and intelligence activity—all the usual bargaining chips that Middle East politicians and generals used to get foreign governments on their side. Shrek had been on the mission team, not the least because of his academic background in the area of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor and the ‘Stans’—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan. De Payns and Shrek had formed a friendship at the Bunker during the briefings and they bonded over their love of beer and a shared Templar lineage. While France was the home of the Enlightenment and European liberalism, it was still a nation of secret societies, old family ties and undeclared oligarchy. The Templars were the oldest and most powerful of France’s secret societies and many people in de Payns’ world claimed a Templar lineage. His friendship with Shrek would have been nothing more than a professional association if it hadn’t been for the after-events of the Libya operation. The Syrian politician was conditionally accepted by France, but during the intelligence debriefings the Syrian must have picked up on a line of questioning and realised that his past actions were going to expose him, which would force the French to drop him. He’d obviously decided to cover his tracks and eliminate those who could divulge criminality to the DGSE, because a week after the debrief a French honorary consul was assassinated in Beirut. She was a banker who also worked for the DGSE and was popular at the Company. As it transpired, she had been the Syrian politician’s private banker and knew all his offshore accounts and various trust structures. She’d been executed to keep the politician a ‘cleanskin’ in the eyes of the French.
The DGSE detained the Syrian politician at Évreux Air Base while they decided what to do with him. New assets who backwashed their histories in order to appear ‘clean’ to the Company were usually executed or fed to their rival factions. But before he could be dumped, he was found hanged by his bedsheets in his cell. Shrek had been the last person to visit him and the legend grew of the genius academic who’d hypnotised the Syrian into suicide, making him believe it was the only way he could spare his family. Mind control, puppet mastery—the man who could peel the onion from the inside. Shrek had never confirmed it, not even to de Payns or the rest of the clan, which included Templar and his other close colleagues, Rocket and Renan. He’d smile like a shark, wink and say something like, Who wouldn’t want a power like that?
Shrek was inner circle, blood brother. Fingering him for treason was outrageous.
De Payns moved with the summer tourist crowds at Orly, wearing jeans and a polo shirt, and carrying a small backpack across one shoulder. He caught the Orlyval shuttle train to Antony station and waited a few minutes before the fast RER train arrived. He took the first carriage and looked down the platform to see who was watching, jumping sideways into the carriage only when the doors hissed. He left the train at St Michel–Notre Dame and emerged into a mild summer’s day in Paris. Crossing the road with the crowds he reached the left bank of the Seine and dropped down onto the Port de Montebello, the riverside walkway that might have been the best-used river path in the world. He headed east, making for the Pont de la Tournelle. To his left, across the river, was the burned-out Notre-Dame cathedral—now covered in a massive tarpaulin—and in front of him were swirling tourists, the gendarmes moving among them to ward off the pickpockets and bag-snatchers who plagued this part of Paris.
A Canadian woman waved her smartphone at de Payns and made the international gesture of Can you take our picture? De Payns smiled and took the phone, walking around the newlyweds so he could catch a glimpse of who was behind him. He smiled, took the shot with the cathedral as the backdrop and wished them luck.
In de Payns’ career, many hours were spent alone on the streets, using his thinking and internal voice to keep himself safe and on-mission. One of the things that consistently occurred to him was the fact that he was living in a different world, with different players, from those around him. He even had a different soundtrack, if he was wired into the support team with his micro earpiece. It reminded him of a movie called The Matrix, in which most people lived life on one plane while a tiny group operated in a world parallel to the common reality. It wasn’t glamorous or cool. It was mentally isolating and had pushed many agents away from the one thing that pegged them to reality—their family. Being back in Paris brought on these feelings in overwhelming waves.
He continued east, moving with no hint that he was trained. In contrast to how spies were depicted in the movies, de Payns’ job was to put the followers to sleep, which was best done by behaving like anyone else on the streets of Paris. He did this by habit—he was already sure he wasn’t being followed, but putting followers to sleep had to be practised at all times. As he did so, he attempted to keep his family at the back of his mind. Oliver, his five-year-old son was a forty-minute walk away, enjoying his last days of true childhood before starting school after the summer break. His eight-year-old—Patrick—was probably working on a video game in a bedroom that looked like a clothes-bomb had hit. It was also the end of Romy’s full-time mothering role; with the PhD in her back pocket and Oliver at school, she would be returning to the workforce, even if only part-time. They had discussed some of the risks, which mainly revolved around Romy being used by a foreign agency for an approach of some kind. He’d trained her to be suspicious of every new face, especially the friendly ones, and her computer habits were now decidedly OCD. But she didn’t want to be micro-managed, so de Payns settled for painting the big picture and letting her make day-to-day decisions. He believed that if she was happy, she was more likely to go the distance with what was a less-than-ideal marriage from her perspective. As he walked beside the Seine he felt his family’s presence but also their distance, but he couldn’t dwell on it.
The wide stone stairway loomed and de Payns climbed it. When he reached the top he turned left to cross the bridge. The traffic was one-way, so if there were followers with a van or motorbike, the vehicles would have to circle around the long way to keep eyes on de Payns, and he’d get to see every vehicle as it approached.
On the other side of the bridge, he stepped onto the Île Saint-Louis and slow-walked with the tourists for two blocks onto the old Pont Marie.
Still no followers.
On the northern side of the Pont Marie he veered right into a series of narrow lanes that took him eastwards again, alongside the Jardin de l’Hôtel de Sens and into the maze around the Rue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, a series of medieval streets that became more nonsensical the further east he walked. This area had once been used by the Company to attune agents to the signature sounds of footwear on Paris streets. The echoes rang like a bell and even the rubber soles of de Payns’ sneakers made a lingering sound. If there was anyone behind him, he’d have heard it by the time he turned north onto the Rue Saint-Paul.
At the Place de la Bastille he did a broad loop around the square, at the centre of which stood the massive July Column, commemorating the revolution of July 1830—a strange idea of revolution, since the revolt simply replaced a Bourbon king with one from the Orléans line. De Payns moved with the pace of the sightseers and confirmed yet again that he was clean. He looked at his watch—it was 2.26 p.m. Across the square was the Café Français, which, if he wanted to come in to the debriefing, he’d have to enter at the half-hour. This was the plan that Manerie wanted him to follow, as if nothing were amiss.
He sauntered towards the cafe’s blue canvas awnings, aiming to be inside and at a table at 2.30 precisely but knowing he had a –1/+2 minute window.
The place was crowded with Americans and Australians, and de Payns looked around for a place to sit before moving to one of the multi-coloured tables outside. He sat where he could watch the square and also look in the cafe’s main window, where he saw a male patron with a green golf cap resting on his table. The waitress approached him quickly, probably thinking that de Payns’ clothing was the sign of a foreigner who would tip too much. He ordered a coffee and leaned back, giving himself a view of the golf cap through the window. Before the waitress could return, the man sitting beside the cap put it on his head and walked out of the Café Français. De Payns dropped a few euros on the table and followed.
They walked with a space of thirty metres between them, the man in front dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with no markings. They headed north, taking a zigzag route through the streets of Paris, playing what the Company called ‘the tourniquet’, a game of turnstiles where the job of the officer running the tourniquet was to clear the participant through at least three DGSE checkpoints by two operatives from the Company, called ‘Candles’. The Candles were in radio communication with each other via small wireless earpieces, and their job at each checkpoint of the pedestrian route was to watch for followers. When de Payns was cleared of followers, the tourniquet vehicle would swoop and pick up their officer.
After fifteen minutes the man leading him took a right off the Rue de Charonne, and de Payns found himself in a narrow lane with an idling silver Citroën C-series. The man with the green cap kept walking and the rear left door of the car popped open. De Payns got in and the car accelerated down the lane.
There was a red-headed man de Payns didn’t know in the passenger seat. At the wheel was his friend Gael, better known as Templar.
‘Nice work, my friend,’ said Templar as they emerged from the lane into the mainstream traffic.
‘How are you?’ asked de Payns, not using his name. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To see the boss,’ said Templar.