‘Either way’s a risk,’ said Briffaut, slicing up a breakfast apple with a pocket knife. Lying in front of him was de Payns’ mission plan for Alamut. The operations were briefed from the DR and authorised by the section heads, such as Dominic Briffaut. But the owner of the plan was the chef de mission.
‘I like the simplicity of your plan,’ said Briffaut. ‘One team, one car. But doesn’t that leave us exposed?’
The plan detailed how the Alamut team would ascertain the main arrival and departure times at the MERC and then base themselves in a petrol station located at the end of the road leading to the centre, or a cafe north of the junction, in a group of shops. They’d wait two hours in the morning before leaving to live their legends around Islamabad, then return to the access road for the two hours when people departed their workplace. All the cars coming or going from the MERC would drive past them, and if a car recurred and looked important, they’d follow it to isolate the phone number with their spinning machine. Then they’d identify the house and take a picture of the person associated with the car.
De Payns’ temples were still tight from the previous evening’s Jack Daniel’s—left to their own choices, Shrek and de Payns drank vodka, but Templar always insisted on the American whiskey. ‘We don’t need a full support team; it would just draw attention. Our cover should be okay.’
Briffaut made a face. ‘Palermo ended well because you had a support team.’
De Payns knew what Briffaut was saying, but he still had confidence in his plan. ‘I’d rather stay low profile and slightly exposed than have teams in-country. The film company cover feels strong.’ ‘Film scouts in Pakistan? The police might buy that, but what about the ISI?’
De Payns nodded. ‘We’ll mix it up, and the legends are clever. We even have a screenplay.’
‘It’s all light ID,’ said Briffaut, poking his finger at one of de Payns’ pages. Light ID meant the names generated would pass at customs and immigration and would satisfy a cursory inspection with a call to the film company office. But there wouldn’t be bank accounts in his name or credit cards that he could use. They’d be travelling with cash. ‘And you’ll need a car,’ he added.
‘We have an honourable correspondent in Islamabad—she’ll make sure Hertz rents us a car in cash.’
An honourable correspondent was a French person living abroad who used their occupation or social influence to voluntarily assist the DGSE, but de Payns could see his boss still looked apprehensive. ‘I want you flying in next Sunday. That gives you five straight days of recon, and then I want you the hell out of there.’
‘I’ll know more when I get on the ground and have a good look, but we’re going to be very tight, very careful,’ he assured him.
‘And fast,’ said Briffaut as he ate another slice of apple. ‘Careful and fast.’
When the meeting with Briffaut wrapped up, de Payns headed into the basement level of the Bunker to see how his mission team was progressing. He found Thierry and Brent in one of the workrooms, hovering over a laptop.
Brent stood. ‘You seen these new spinners, boss?’
De Payns looked down and saw a silver Toshiba laptop with a fifteen-inch screen. It looked unremarkable.
‘That’s it?’ asked de Payns.
‘Yes,’ said Brent, smiling like a child with a Christmas present. ‘Built-in antennas, can accept multiple cell phone signals, can isolate IMSI and IMEI, and still operates as a computer. Show him, Thierry.’
Thierry’s hands flew across the keyboard, and the screen opened in a standard desktop format with apps down the side and folders on the right. There was a logo for Capital Films etched into the wallpaper.
‘Let’s see the locations,’ said Brent, and Thierry opened a folder called ‘Lake Forgiveness’—the name of their fictitious film. It contained a synopsis, a screenplay and a document called ‘Production Notes’, which itself had twenty-eight subfolders, each labelled by scene.
‘Open a folder,’ said Brent.
De Payns reached forward and clicked the folder labelled ‘Scene 22’. It opened at 22. EXT.—ISLAMABAD SUBURBS—DAY. Below were stock photographs and maps of the city, with specific buildings prominent.
‘I’m thinking we have two photographers in the car, and they’re shooting for locations that we file to these folders,’ said Brent, indicating the Canon DSLR kits on the neighbouring desk.
‘Good,’ said de Payns, liking the attention to detail. When police or intel—or even just a hotel manager—asked an agent what they were doing and where they were going, the worst thing to do was hesitate. An operator in character had to have a pretext ready to go at any moment, and it had to come out quickly, because humans were the best readers of other humans—a flicker of hesitation, a roll of the eyes up to the left or a simple umm could bring the whole show undone. So all operations had to start with proper preparation.
‘And there’s this,’ said Brent, opening a folder and showing de Payns its contents—a distressed screenplay called Lake Forgiveness, with a pale blue cover sheet and two brass lugs in the holes of the screenplay paper. De Payns picked it up and saw the name of the screenwriter, David Keller, and in the bottom left corner the owner of the property, Capital Films, with the Paris address.
De Payns smiled, recognising the false ID. ‘So, Brent, you’re the writer? Where did we get the screenplay?’
‘Used screenwriter software, totally untraceable,’ Brent replied.
‘How so?’ asked de Payns.
‘Thierry wrote the code.’
De Payns looked at the squinting whiz-kid. ‘Code?’
‘Yeah,’ said Thierry. ‘I trained it to find screenplays stored in the cloud from a criterion that included father–son themes, Kashmir conflict, Muslim versus Hindu, dispossession and Islamophobia …’
‘You can do that?’
‘Sure. Then we bring it into a smart database and we use some AIs we wrote to assemble a ninety-minute screenplay—in French, of course. We changed a few names and did some editing, but basically the AI put it together.’
De Payns realised they were serious. ‘Is it any good?’
‘Sex, violence, war …’ said Thierry.
‘And a coming-out scene,’ said Brent. ‘It’s very tasteful.’
‘I’ll need to read it,’ said de Payns. ‘Can you courier it to the film company? What about the spinner?’
Thierry executed a series of workarounds on the keyboard, and the computer transformed from a filmmaker’s laptop to a cell phone spinner, which used graphic boxes. Having locked on to an IMSI number, the number would be allocated to the box and other data such as time and connections would be filled in. Spinning machines did not operate the way they were portrayed in the movies—it was almost impossible to simply pick up someone’s cell phone and ‘track’ them with coordinates. The spinner—in reality, an IMSI catcher—just acted as a telecom tower connection on the local network. So what the mission team would see on the spinning laptop were the IMSI numbers from nearby phones connecting to the ‘tower’ that sat inside this laptop. If there were a lot of people with phones around, there’d be a lot of numbers. If a phone was not moving, the number would remain on the screen, but other numbers would come and go, meaning those phones were moving in relation to the laptop. After a few days, the team would have a group of numbers which could be of interest and which would be registered in the system. That’s when the team would follow the car of interest, and because the mission team’s car would be following at the same speed, only the phones located in that car would stay connected to the laptop. Those numbers would switch from one antenna to another along the travel route, but the phones would always be connected to the spinning laptop, as if the laptop were a permanently available cellular tower.
Brent continued. ‘We use the antennas around the screen to line up our target, and when we lock on we harvest the IMSI and the IMEI numbers.’
While IMSI was stored on a SIM card, the IMEI was the international mobile equipment identity—the identity number given to each phone, behind the battery. Most networks also stored the IMEI in an equipment identity register which contained all legitimate cell phone IMEIs, allowing the cell network owners to identify stolen or non-complying phones.
‘Excellent,’ said de Payns. ‘Briffaut wants us in-country by next Sunday, which gives us a whole working week to do our thing. Everyone okay with that?’
‘We’re good,’ said Brent.