Alamut was a Persian castle from which the Assassins—a secret group of medieval warriors—launched their attacks on various Middle Eastern rulers, Islamic and Christian. The naming of the operation for a sect that engaged in political assassination seemed a little presumptive to de Payns, when he had more prosaic matters to attend to. As the chef de mission of Alamut, de Payns was responsible for designing the operations, seeking sign-off from Briffaut and collating the resources to execute. The first operation in Pakistan would be a technical environment of the MERC structure and its personnel—essentially a search for COMINT, or communications intelligence, which could be done without ‘contact’. If the technical environment yielded enough information to proceed to an operational environment, operatives would be put in the field, and then—if that yielded someone interesting, with good potential for MICE leverage—they would move to a contact environment on a target. That’s when someone like de Payns was sent to meet, befriend, manipulate and turn the target. Contact was never attempted until the other environments had been established. Contact should always feel seamless to the target—if one day you wake up with a new best friend after one week, he might not be your friend.
It would have to be human because the computer systems at MERC were inaccessible to the Company without more information, such as email addresses of employees, IP addresses or a network signature. Those clues were not visible to the DGSE—another reason to believe that the MERC was controlled by the ISI.
De Payns’ team would have to determine one or more human targets to approach; de Payns guessed the target would be senior, but at the outset, the Company didn’t even have a name.
De Payns spelled these things out to the three other people in the meeting room: Gael Py, Brent Clercq and Thierry Suquet.
He didn’t have to recite the basics to these experienced people, but it was the protocol for briefing on an operation. ‘I want a low-key observation platform around the MERC. Count the cars and trucks, log the rego plates, assess the hierarchy and get them on camera.’
‘We looking for anyone in particular?’ asked Py, his nickname, Templar, thanks to the Crusader tattoo on his back. ‘We got a POI?’
‘No,’ said de Payns. ‘We’ll log traffic in and out of the MERC compound and assess the best human asset, the one who gives the Company the best chance of access.’
De Payns didn’t want to rely on luck. He counted himself lucky that the mission team was headed by Templar.
‘This was from a drone?’ asked Templar, sorting through the photographic prints of the MERC aerial shots. He sat to de Payns’ right at the long briefing desk, his oversized upper body straining through his lightweight sweatshirt. He was one of the best support team operators in Europe, an expert in tricky exfiltrations, workable disguises, breakouts and ambushes. If someone needed to be secretly plucked from the street of a major city and rendered to a safe site, Templar was your man. The only thing he couldn’t do was lie convincingly, which was why he was never assigned approaches and manipulations. He’d be the only support team that de Payns would have on this first mission. The other two operatives would be techs from Y-9—the Bunker’s technical espionage section.
‘The briefing didn’t tell us if a drone took the photos,’ said de Payns, feeling like he could have done with another twelve hours’ sleep. ‘Anyone have an idea?’ he asked, looking from Templar to Clercq, the head of Y-9. Clercq was a grey-haired forty-something who dressed in cargo pants, sneakers and a polo shirt. He was a smoker with silly jokes but he had a fast brain and careful instincts, and de Payns always liked having him on board. Beside him, in jeans and a sweatshirt, was his colleague Thierry Suquet. At twenty-five he could have passed for a university student—in fact, he had been plucked from an engineering PhD at a polytechnic university in Toulouse—but despite his youthful appearance he was an experienced field operative who had worked in clandestine roles all over Europe and the Middle East.
Clercq pointed his pen at the photograph that showed a main entrance road to the MERC. ‘We’ll situate our IMSI catchers somewhere on the road to the centre. It will be not too far, not too close. We’ll identify phone numbers associated with a few vehicles, based on people we find interesting. We’ll refine it as we go, as it becomes clearer. That okay?’ IMSI was the international mobile subscriber identity, which identified phone network users by country and cellular network. The IMSI was subdivided into a global format of country code, network code and sequential number. It was unique and all stored on a SIM card.
‘Hopefully one of them will be more interesting than others,’ said de Payns.
Templar said, ‘If that works we’ll follow and identify them, and go from there.’
De Payns nodded; the plan was to scan for cell phone signals using a ‘spinner’, and then try to work back and discover the owners of the phones and who they were talking to. If the MERC campus was jammed or was a non-device/non-transmission zone, then it was a good bet that the scientists and engineers would reach for their phones and fire up as they exited at the end of their working days. Once the Alamut team had identified a person of interest and their phone, Templar would follow them and find out further details.
De Payns wanted the reconnaissance phase of the operation to use one small team and be completed inside two weeks. ‘It will just be the four of us in-country.’
‘In one car?’ asked Clercq.
Yes,’ said de Payns, opening a second package. ‘The cover will be scouting for a film in beautiful Pakistan.’
De Payns pulled a sheet of paper from the pack. It listed the personnel in the briefing room and their assigned ID for Operation Alamut. A single source of truth about false IDs was essential, because when an agent was questioned, or their bona fides checked while they were operational, any verification done by the Company had to be made on the right IDs.
All four people in the briefing room would travel on fictive IDs, with passports, and they needed credible backstories for why they were in Pakistan and why they were lurking around an alleged bioweapons factory. The legends had been established by the DO at the Cat, and each Alamut team member had to do their own work-ups on their legends. A good legend wasn’t just committing life details to memory. To sustain a legend the operative needed believable predicates for when they were stopped by police or intel, or just asked questions by a hotel concierge or a taxi driver. New IDs were supported with LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, but the operatives were also expected to find a disused apartment and have mail sent to them there, to reinforce their false credentials.
De Payns looked down the list and saw that they were all existing IDs, so his team would have to do some gardening and ensure their addresses were viable, that mail was being delivered there, and that their social media was up to date. De Payns would again be using his Clement Vinier ID, that came with a business front, Capital Films.
Templar asked if he would be going into Islamabad to establish the équipement de ville, which was the design of the jeux de rendez-vous and points de passage obligés that the Company used to check for surveillance of their OTs when they were in the field. The jeux de rendez-vous were a set of clandestine tools that allowed the team to see one another with no collusion visible to outsiders. They included hand symbols and coloured gommettes, but also included where to meet up in case of emergency, meeting points for transmitting documents clandestinely, dead drop boxes and agreed timings.
De Payns shook his head. He and Briffaut had agreed on a fast, four-man recon and technical surveillance operation, and while they’d use basic tradecraft to check for surveillance, there’d be no ISs or tourniquets. They’d need vehicles with no connections to the French government, and they’d have to be careful sneaking the spinning machine in-country and driving around with it. Pakistan’s secret police and ISI both operated with impunity. There were no legal consequences for a Pakistani intelligence agent getting it wrong and seizing on French filmmakers inside their country.
Looking at his watch, de Payns stood up. The initial meeting was over. There’d be more, and the DA—the administration people at the Cat—would come up with final budgets and disbursements. Daily living money would only amount to less than twenty euros per meal, if an OT was not in contact with a target. And even then, you needed to bring back a receipt. It was a vexed issue, because in many circumstances asking for a receipt could complicate an already-complicated situation. As the operatives often joked, the DGSE had forgotten to put the Aston Martin in its staff packages.
De Payns collected his materials as the team filed out. He noticed Templar waiting by the door.
‘Seen Shrek?’ asked Templar.
‘No,’ said de Payns. ‘Not since Falcon.’
‘I think he’s been doing ISs,’ said Templar, voice low. ‘And not just down south.’
‘Here?’
Templar looked at de Payns and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I hear he was trapped in Saint-Denis, kept pulling out of the IS.’
‘Shrek plays it safe, that’s all. Especially after that thing with DGSI.’
Two years earlier an officer of the DGSI—the internal French security service—had walked into his house in Paris to find Russian GRU agents holding his wife and daughter. The event had been a wake-up call to people like de Payns, Shrek and Templar—always check the last mile; never relax your security.
Templar didn’t look convinced. ‘He finally cleared the IS at midday, apparently.’
‘He’s safe?’
‘Safe, yes,’ said Templar. ‘But we all need a drink, non? You up for it?’
‘Text me,’ said de Payns, as he moved past his friend’s bulky frame.
A drink with Templar would involve red wine and Jack Daniel’s, but the hangover would be worth it. He needed to be somewhere he could relax, among people he trusted with his life. He needed to be in a cocoon and get totally shit-faced.