He wrote quickly and without flourish, just as his instructors had taught him so many years ago. No piece of writing from an officier traitant should betray any personality. We should have no sense of who you are based on your writing style. That meant short sentences with one idea confined to one sentence. No art, no personality. The screen was linked to an internal computer but all de Payns could see was a screen, a keyboard and a mouse. No slot for USB sticks, no DVD drive and no functionality for ‘print’. The only way into this system was to open his DGSE account.
He wrote in third person, through nine sections that started with Modalities and ended with Intentions, and took in such niceties as Manipulations, Directives and Connaissances Nouvelles Acquises, Newly Acquired Knowledge, to which de Payns was tempted to append: We now know there’s a mole in the Company who fucked us. But he didn’t write that. Instead he wrote that Sayef Albar had a paramilitary wing operating in Italy; that it was prepared to pay around six hundred thousand euros for a real French passport; and it had at least one Italian national assigned to its cause. He avoided referencing the Reuters report that Frasier had tabled. Intelligence reports avoided a priori knowledge, so he didn’t surmise the actual fate of Michael Lambardi. He could only report the facts as he saw them in the conduct of Operation Falcon—if the Sicilian police identified the body in the burned-out Mercedes as Michael Lambardi, then the Company could add the information to its file.
He wrote important nouns and names in capitals. He covered the overnight in Cagliari, where he’d joined Michael Lambardi (referred to as Commodore by the DGSE), and the subsequent ferry crossing to Palermo as well as the events of that early evening. He listed his exfiltration, his multiple itinéraires de sécurité and ruptures, and he declared every conversation he’d had from the moment he left his ‘office’ in Marseille to the second he sat at the debriefing table with the directors and heads of sections. He told the truth about the passports—they were destroyed in Palermo and discarded in three wharfside rubbish bins. He played it straight, except for the conversation with Manerie and Jim, which was a small gap in his exfiltration that would be incredibly hard to verify unless someone at the Cat knew where to ask.
He had now officially lied for a DGS man. De Payns had entrapped and manipulated so many people in his career that to be in the grip of Manerie’s coercion because of the Amsterdam photograph was both humbling and confusing. If there was a mole in the Y division, de Payns wanted to find it. But if the price was spying on Shrek? Or spying on his own directors? These people were beyond the abstractions of national loyalty—they were the only reason he could do his job, and also be a husband and father, without losing his mind.
And yet the debrief had been unsatisfactory. Frasier wanted to know what parts of Falcon were compromised; if his people had any traps on them that they could drag back to Paris. His main concerns about the passports were ensuring Murad’s crew would neither have them to use, nor be able to reverse-engineer them and confirm the supplier of documents was the French government.
Sturt was different—ever the politician, he rested his elbows on the boardroom table and asked non-questions such as: So you didn’t hand over the passports for our cameras? So I guess you’d call the operation a failure? So you left behind a corpse in a bar and a packet of French passports at the docks?
The fact that the operation had veered off-course was de Payns’ fault. He was the chef de mission and he technically should have called off the passport transaction when Lambardi tried to change the time and place. But the reason that Lambardi wanted those passports there and then—because Murad was in Palermo—presented France with a much bigger opportunity. Eyes-on, personal interaction was the most powerful connaissance available to a service like the DGSE. De Payns had taken the risk, knowing that the Company did not even have a photograph of Murad.
While Frasier and Sturt had reluctantly accepted the trade-off in risk, Sturt’s deputy, Charlotte Rocard, asked him to specify the ‘product’ from Falcon. What do we have now that we didn’t have before this operation? De Payns listed a possible sighting of Murad, the elusive commander of Sayef Albar’s Europe operation; confirmation that al-Qaeda considered the going rate for a genuine French passport to be around six hundred thousand euros; and evidence that Sayef Albar had an operation in Sicily, not just a representative such as Michael Lambardi.
When the debrief was over, de Payns helped the Company’s artist sketch a facial likeness of Murad, or the man he thought was probably the Sayef Albar commander.
He finished typing and reached for his coffee, realised it was cold. Then he hit ‘save’, logged out of his DGSE account and switched off the computer screen. It was now 5.53 p.m. He’d written his report in a little over two hours, which was relatively fast. He stretched, picked up his pack and made for the elevators. He wanted nothing more than a smoke and to shuffle around the house aimlessly for a few days. The deaths at Bar Luca and the requirement to recall them in minute detail were exhausting. The elevator’s down-arrow chimed and someone cleared their throat. He turned and saw Dominic Briffaut, still strong in the neck and back, despite being well into middle age.
‘Could we have a word?’
It wasn’t a request. Briffaut held the elevator door, and when they were both inside he hit the button that would take them to the management’s parking level.
They said nothing in the elevator, as per the protocol. They walked through the underground garage to an area adjacent to the mechanics’ station, Moroccan hip-hop pounding out of a Bluetooth speaker. Briffaut paused beside a fire hose and grimaced at the music.
‘They could use that at Guantanamo,’ he mumbled, pulling a pack of Camels from his inside jacket pocket and offering one to de Payns.
‘The ID people at the DO are freaking about those passports,’ said Briffaut, lowering his voice as a man and woman exited the elevator and walked to a blue BMW. ‘They’re unusable?’
‘I don’t know how often the bins are cleared,’ said de Payns. ‘But I never handed them over. I certainly destroyed them.’
Briffaut nodded.
‘We sure Commodore is dead?’
De Payns looked at him. ‘I didn’t verify it. I couldn’t.’
There was silence between them—Briffaut hadn’t cornered him for a smoke and de Payns waited for him to get to the point.
‘Now it’s just you and me,’ Briffaut said at last, ‘who fucked us down there? Any idea?’
De Payns shook his head. ‘Perhaps Commodore was always a useful idiot for Sayef Albar …’ He let the sentence hang.
‘Or?’ asked Briffaut.
‘Well,’ said de Payns, exhaling a plume of smoke at the underground plumbing, ‘I wonder … Did the conversation go, Youdidn’t bring the passports—bang, bang you’re dead? Seems like a wasteful way to deal with useful idiots.’
‘Or,’ said Briffaut, ‘Murad said to Commodore, You’re drunk, you don’t have the passports and now this French consultant is walking towards us. Too-hard basket.’
‘What if Murad’s final words to Commodore were more like, You brought a French spy into our circle. You’re dead?’
They gave each other a look.
‘I’ve opened an investigation; the director needs a report,’ said Briffaut. ‘Tell me if anyone’s crawling up your arse, okay? You don’t have to take that shit on your own. Promise me?’
‘Promise,’ said de Payns.
They smoked in silence before Briffaut sighed. ‘I need you at Noisy tomorrow. Two o’clock.’
De Payns looked away.
‘Sorry about the timing,’ said Briffaut. ‘I know you need some time with the family, but you can’t duck this one.’
‘What is it?’ asked de Payns.
‘I don’t know much,’ said Briffaut. ‘Marie Lafont has an operation—I think they’re looking at Pakistan.’
De Payns took that in. Marie Lafont was the new head of Counter-Proliferation at the DR, having already made a splash under Christophe Sturt as the BER of the Arabic desk. She was smart and classy, and she liked to be associated with success—she wouldn’t be initiating an operation as a fishing expedition, it would be victory at all costs. But a story dogged her—she’d allegedly once trained for the Y Division but had flamed out. She’d failed to show up for training one morning and when the DGS went looking they found her phones, wallet and car keys on the coffee table in her apartment and no sign of a struggle. The police discovered her days later on the Pont de Poissy, in a fetal position, convinced that the watchers had infiltrated her phones and her apartment. The blue rats had claimed her before the training was even finished, but Y’s loss was the DR’s gain.
‘I see,’ said de Payns. His eyelids were drooping with fatigue. ‘You know I have other IDs to tend to, and two of them have meetings coming up. I can’t be the only candidate for Lafont’s operation?’
‘The only one Lafont asked for, and Sturt agrees,’ said Briffaut, dragging on the smoke. ‘So you’re up. But I’ll tell you what, let’s get through the next couple of months and I’ll find you some extra leave, okay?’
De Payns didn’t argue. Taking extra leave in the French secret services was more theoretical than it was actual. But the offer of it was an acknowledgement you were overworked.
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ said de Payns, smiling.
‘Oh, and make sure you get to the Bunker by midday, okay?’
‘Midday?’ asked de Payns.
‘Yeah,’ said his boss, tapping his temple. ‘Head check.’