The Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 777 landed at Islamabad International just after 2 p.m. and taxied to the air bridge. It was a fine, warm afternoon but de Payns felt frosty cool, a habit he’d developed from his first field operations—start the operation with the attitude you intend to strike for the duration; get in character, be the legend, stay alive and return with the goods. In the back of his mind was a life-saving night at the Sorbonne’s Grand Hall, paying homage to his wife as she received her PhD. Patrick and Oliver on either side of him, his parents-in-law to his left, he felt blessed and proud and almost at peace in that amazing building. When the speeches started he’d glanced up to the vaulted ceilings and saw the twin spirits of the Université de Paris, looking down on the gathering. They were the marble statues of Archimedes and Homer, representing the sciences and the arts, coming together in one place. There was little academic instinct in de Payns, but seeing his wife glowing in the pride showed by her parents when they went to dinner, was something that moved him deeply. When Romy grabbed his hand and whispered thank you in his ear, he almost cried.
As the Boeing reached the gate, de Payns thought about the two spirits inhabiting his own body—the manipulating spy and the proud husband and father. Romy had been right about him—he did leverage families, he did use them where he could. And the look on her face—disgust—was a normal human reaction. He wondered what it meant that he needed the respect of his wife more than he needed self-respect.
The seatbelt sign was switched off and he snapped into tourist chatter with Brent and Thierry, who had been seated beside him for the almost-eight-hour flight. He reached into the overhead locker and retrieved his backpack, which contained a Canon 6D camera and zoom lens. It was a professional’s camera but didn’t have the size of the upscale models, meaning it attracted less attention from customs people and police. Yet it could still be operated manually to achieve high ISOs and long fields of focus, which was crucial in reconnaissance photography.
They moved through the passport gates with no problems, wheeling their cabin luggage straight to the taxi stands outside the new terminal building. A little under fifty minutes later and they were at the Pearl Continental Hotel, waiting at the reception desk as the clerk photocopied their passports. Templar arrived as they stood there and made a show of greeting his fellow tourists and filmmakers, talking excitedly about the sights around the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, expressing his eagerness to get on the road and scout some shooting locations, especially for scenes seven and thirteen.
They adjourned to their rooms, de Payns bunking with Brent, Templar sharing with Thierry. They were good-sized rooms and very clean and comfortable for a mid-tier hotel. De Payns moved to the windows and squinted through the small crack between the heavy curtains. The room was on the second floor and the view was north-facing, taking in a park in front of the hotel and, in the distance, what looked like a very large water tower. He shifted his body to the side of the curtain gap and looked down onto a busy street. According to his map, this was Mall Road. He switched to the other side of the curtains and looked down on another angle of the street. No followers or watchers that he could detect. But that didn’t mean the hotel staff weren’t talking to the secret police. While de Payns checked the street, Brent checked the in-room phone, furniture and light fittings for electronic surveillance. He gave the thumbs-up after a few minutes. No surveillance.
They took the afternoon off and met the following morning at the hotel restaurant where they chatted over breakfast. The hotel was in Rawalpindi, the ancient side of the twin cities. Adjoining in the north-west was the capital Islamabad, which had been built to house government departments, embassies and grand hotels. Rawalpindi was more raffish and it suited the Alamut team.
They finished breakfast and walked onto the street just before 9 a.m. Templar waited at the kerb in a pale blue Nissan Maxima, rented from Hertz in cash, but with the rental papers in the name of Clement Vinier and Capital Films.
They drove south, Templar looking for tails in the mirror. It was an interesting city, with all the ancient buildings of Damascus or Amman, but with evidence of modern civil infrastructure—there were souks, but there were also bright storefronts that would not be out of place in Paris or Frankfurt.
Templar swung west and aimed for the MERC. They unpacked the camera and laptop and hooked the Canon to Brent’s Toshiba. He opened the scene folders; the pictures they wanted to use in their movie would be downloaded into the laptop. De Payns took the Lake Forgiveness script from his backpack along with a notebook and pen.
‘Take this and read me the beginning of scene seven,’ said de Payns, handing the bound screenplay to Thierry.
They drove through the south-west of the sprawling city, Thierry reading the scene’s opening descriptions, de Payns jotting them down as points in the notebook. Scene seven was an exterior shot of Rawalpindi’s city streets during the day. The hero was going to be running down the footpath and through a souk to deliver a message to his dying mother. De Payns wrote the street name—Ganj Mandi—and made notes that would please a secret policeman: modern clothes, no hijabs, clean streets … Then he wound down the window and took his first photographs of the streetscape and people.
The team relaxed a little with the first pictures in the can. Templar drove them out of the city blocks and got them onto the Islamabad Expressway, where he accelerated into the fast traffic going south. The ability of a Western person to drive safely and inconspicuously in Asia was an underrated skill, and one that de Payns always relied on with Templar.
Templar jammed the Maxima between two overloaded trucks and settled into the traffic. ‘From here, eleven minutes,’ he said.
The Material and Energy Research Centre crouched like a provincial high school in the near distance as they took an off-ramp from the expressway on the south-western outskirts of Rawalpindi. Further west was the international airport and the M2 road to Lahore. The land around the MERC looked as if it had been put aside for government uses—there were trees and patches of grazing areas but not a lot of buildings or houses. As they slowed in a small bunch of shops de Payns noticed dogs on the street, and he took photographs. He needed his camera filled with images consistent with a movie scouting mission.
‘In three seconds, look to your right,’ said Templar, guiding the car out of a clutch of shops and low-rise office buildings and up a hill. De Payns looked to his right—they were clear of buildings and looking down on the MERC complex, about two kilometres away across brownish scrublands. Inside the perimeter fencing de Payns recognised a collection of low-rise, commercial structures with driveways connecting them and a single gatehouse at the lone exit and entry.
A large roundabout loomed at the western end of the road they were on. Templar took a right, so they were driving in a northerly direction on a single-lane main road with high-quality asphalt.
‘Okay,’ said Templar. ‘In one kilometre on the right is the road to the MERC. Check out the service station on the left before the turn-off, and then we’ll go through a bunch of shops which includes the cafe.’
They drove north in the traffic, doing around seventy kilometres an hour. The car was silent. On the left was a mid-sized petrol station, with a yellow awning featuring Urdu lettering across it. De Payns could see a small mini-mart and some tables and chairs at the side. Ten seconds further north, the turn-off for the MERC was on their right. The road went straight for several hundred metres, through low scrublands, and terminated at the MERC gatehouse. Having driven for five minutes past the MERC road, through a small section of shops and homes, Templar looped back and they stopped at the shops and parked where they could see the T-junction. They went into the cafe, bought coffees and small homemade biscuits, then left the small township and spent the day practising their legends. In the afternoon, they looped back to the area. They were trying to ascertain knock-off time at the MERC, when they’d have a wave of vehicles to assess and surveil.
The four of them watched the road. At 4.03 p.m., a long-wheelbase Fiat van coming from the south turned into the road and drove towards the complex. A lightweight truck with a closed-in box on the back made the same manoeuvre at 4.09.
‘So it’s not four o’clock,’ said Brent.
Their research suggested that government departments finished work between four and six, but not on the half-hour. And government employees in Pakistan finished work en masse; there was none of the flexi-time that operated in the bureaucracies of Western Europe.
For the next thirty minutes they drove around the area playing their legend, taking photographs and making notes, and keeping away from the T-junction. They had to frequent the area sufficiently to find a pattern, but not so they’d look like they were spending too much time in one place.
They timed their return for shortly after five, making a northbound pass at 5.04 and then a southbound one at 5.08. Still no flood of cars.
‘So it’s six,’ said de Payns.
They kept the atmosphere light and stayed in character with banter about the movie as they took a long circular route west of the MERC. Approaching from the south shortly before six o’clock, they drove straight to the service station where they made a show of getting out and stretching, while Templar filled the car with petrol. Brent went into the small coffee shop on the side of the service station and bought four bottles of water. As he emerged, a small green Peugeot sedan arrived at the T-junction from the MERC, turned into the traffic and headed north, past the cafe where they’d bought coffee that morning. It was 6.02 p.m.
‘Keen to get out of there,’ said Brent, sitting beside Thierry, who started the IMSI spinner in his laptop. ‘Must have Mustafa Briffaut as a manager.’
They laughed and chatted, letting the service station owner see that they were a noisy film crew with nothing to hide. The T-junction started filling fast, the Peugeot’s place quickly filled by a Nissan Pulsar, a VW Golf and then a white Toyota RAV4. All the cars looked newish and they all turned to the north.
Within a few minutes, traffic built up at the T-junction as a dozen cars from the MERC queued to get onto the main road, all of them turning north and driving through the small section of shops.
‘We’re catching IMSIs,’ said Thierry quietly as he watched his laptop. ‘It’s working.’
Near the rear of the line-up de Payns noticed a black late-model Mercedes sedan and, right behind it, a black LandCruiser with heavily tinted windows. All the vehicles turned north, and the Alamut team slowly got back into the car.
‘Well, we’ve got our time,’ said de Payns as Templar accelerated into the southbound lane and headed back to the hotel. ‘Let’s get something to eat and play up the legend for the hotel workers.’
‘I researched the film industry,’ said Thierry. ‘They drink a lot.’
‘I researched Pakistan,’ said de Payns. ‘They’ll let us drink but they don’t accept public intoxication.’
‘Shit, these people,’ said Templar, shaking his head and reaching for a cigarette. ‘Why do they want to live in France if booze annoys them so much?’
De Payns looked out of the window, saw the sun getting low in the sky as they headed for the hotel. ‘We’ll drink like a French film crew, but with a great deal of care.’