De Payns sipped on his third coffee and nibbled on the edge of a macaron that Zac, the Y Division armourer, had offered him from a Tupperware box. Armourers always had interesting hobbies and Zac’s was baking. Zac was an ex-Legionnaire who ensured that the firearms and other devices distributed to Y Division operatives actually worked when they needed to. De Payns was standing in Zac’s basement workshop watching him work on a suppressor held in an elaborate vice.
‘So, Zac,’ he asked, after they’d dealt with Paris Saint-Germain’s injury woes and Macron’s new petroleum tax, ‘what do you know about a tough guy called Jim, guards someone high up in the DGS?’
Zac smiled as he turned away from the vice, his bespectacled face becoming even more youthful. ‘So, you’ve met Jim Valley?’
‘Valley?’
Zac nodded. ‘Former Marines special forces, I believe. Deployed under Manerie in Africa.’
De Payns had another bite of the macaron, the sweetness of the biscuit failing to subdue the smell of gun oil. ‘He’s a good guy?’
Zac chuckled. ‘Well, Aguilar, like you said—he’s a tough guy. Better a friend than an enemy.’
De Payns caught the elevator back to his office and leaned back in his chair, observing the nondescript office, the safe in the corner and the view through the sash windows over the wooded areas of eastern Paris. He had eleven minutes before his meeting started and he closed his eyes, calming his thoughts.
‘My father had died,’ said a woman’s voice.
De Payns sat up straight, slightly startled. Marie Lafont stood in the doorway.
‘I didn’t flame out of the Y Division training,’ she said, folding her arms and leaning against the doorjamb. She was wearing a pleated skirt with an expensive-looking silk shirt.
‘Okay,’ said de Payns, coming back to earth.
‘There’s a story doing the rounds, isn’t there, that the DGS found me curled up on a bridge because I couldn’t handle the blue rats?’
‘Perhaps I heard that,’ said de Payns.
‘My father had a stroke, he was on life support. The rest of the family wanted to unplug him.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said de Payns.
As if she hadn’t heard him, she continued, ‘I needed a few days out of Paris. I should have told the Company.’
De Payns didn’t know what to say.
‘But what would I have told them? Hey, I’m going drinking for three days? It’ll get messy, guys. You might like to look the other way.’
De Payns laughed and eased back in his chair. If you drank to get sane, you were one of the gang.
‘I’m briefing the op,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘Want to walk me over?’
The meeting was a small one. Some operations briefings could run to twenty people jammed into a secure room, but there were five in this one. There was Briffaut—who’d discarded his suit jacket—and Mattieu Garrat, his deputy at the Y Division; they sat together at the pointy end of the oval table. Lafont, sat opposite de Payns with her 2IC—Josef Ackermann, the deputy-BER of CP—beside her. Ackermann had a mournful, elongated face—hence his nickname of ‘Mantis’. He was also a former university lecturer in chemical engineering, and his expertise in counter-proliferation operations was invaluable.
The sticker on the front of the file in front of de Payns read ALAMUT. That’s what they were calling the operation. He flipped the cover to reveal the administration sheet—dates, authorisation numbers, signatures and the collections of letters that indicated the DR was running Alamut, in pursuit of more intelligence requested by the Counter-Proliferation desk. The DGSE name and logo did not appear on any of the operational documents. If you didn’t know what all the letters and numbers meant, then you probably didn’t know what you were looking at. De Payns found himself mentioned under CDM—or chef de mission—his OT number inside crosshatches. The crosshatches meant his OT number was an official designation of the DGSE and it was the only identifier to be used during or in reference to the operation. There was a list of six designations on the administration sheet—the only person not in attendance was the DR director, Christophe Sturt.
Marie Lafont introduced Alamut as a reconnaissance and intelligence operation that revolved around a facility in Pakistan. Although the building had the words Pakistan Agricultural Chemical Company painted on the outside, among Western intelligence operatives it was called the MERC, a rough translation being Material and Energy Research Centre.
Lafont switched on the projector suspended from the ceiling above the table, which also dimmed the lights. The screen showed an aerial shot of the MERC—it looked like a compound of around fifteen squarish concrete buildings arranged in a campus around one main building.
‘The SVR has some great shots of the MERC compound,’ said Lafont, starting with a joke about the leakiness of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. ‘This is in the south-western outskirts of Islamabad, eighteen kilometres from the city. It’s serviced by a suburb nearby that we believe houses the scientists and engineers from MERC.’
She cycled through a few photos taken from different angles but none of them were very good. The 1990s-era buildings were contained in parklands and there was a security fence around the compound and a security gate.
‘Despite signing the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993, which was supposed to prohibit Pakistan’s bioweapons ambitions,’ said Lafont, ‘we believe their bacteriological weapons program is reaching maturity, probably from this facility. The declared purpose of this compound is agricultural research, but we doubt that’s its primary role. For a start, it seems the people who work there have dedicated their lives to the centre.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Briffaut.
‘Employees are obliged to report everything, from the briefest chance meeting to the most innocuous phone call.’
‘Sounds like intel rules,’ Briffaut noted. ‘So it’s run by the ISI?’
Lafont nodded. ‘The employee’s family and social life is monitored and they have to give up their passports for fifteen years. It’s certainly the ISI playbook.’
De Payns kept his eyes on Lafont, aware that some of the other attendees were now looking at him.
She continued. ‘Current intelligence points to bacteriological agents being developed at MERC. We’ve only had a third-hand glimpse through some Russian sources, but if these are accurate, we’re looking at a bioweapons facility in Islamabad, so this is where the Y Division comes in.’
Briffaut and de Payns exchanged a glance.
‘We need means of access to the MERC,’ said Lafont. ‘We’d like their internal organisation chart, their lines of work and research, their current projects and their financing. If there is information on potential weaponisation and targets, that’s a bonus. But for a start, we need to know what they have, what they want to make and how far they are from achieving it.’
Briffaut leaned on the table and put his fingertips together, a clear sign that he wanted a smoke. He looked at de Payns. ‘You have three months to get us initial results.’
‘I’m on it,’ said de Payns.
‘Of course you are,’ said Briffaut. ‘But we’re talking about Pakistan, so let’s do this softly softly, okay?’