The climbing frames and bright plastic tubes were a vast improvement on what de Payns remembered playing on as a child. The playground to the west of their Montparnasse apartment even had a bouncy rubber mat running under the length of it, making the daredevil antics of those girls who swung upside down by the crook of their knees a little less scary. De Payns was starting work late, taking Oliver to the park while Romy had a meeting for a potential job. Given her academic qualifications she was looking for work with the IMF or the OECD. UNESCO and the European Union also had operations in Paris. That’s where de Payns wanted her to be—something with a big salary that would challenge her intellect and enable them to pay the rent on their apartment without tapping into her savings. Instead, she was interviewing at a global economic think tank that he’d never heard of.
She’d texted him fifteen minutes earlier, suggesting they meet for coffee. She said nothing about how the interview had gone, from which he surmised that it had gone well. Romy wasn’t one for emotional declarations. When she had found out she was expecting their first child she’d merely smiled and said, We’re pregnant, then asked if he wanted the extra garlic in his mussels.
Oliver, standing on the bridge of the playground’s ‘ship’, pointed and yelled, ‘Maman!’
De Payns caught sight of Romy through the trees, walking along the path with a coffee in each hand. She was smiling and so was the woman beside her—Ana Homsi. Ana’s son, Charles, ran ahead, calling to Oliver.
Shifting along on the park bench, de Payns made room for the women and took his coffee from Romy.
‘Hi Alec,’ said Ana, letting Romy sit next to her husband. ‘Sorry to gatecrash. Charles really wanted to see Ollie.’
De Payns smiled as he got a kiss on the cheek from Romy. She’d come from her interview so she was dressed like a typical Parisienne in summer—sleeveless and classy.
‘So, how did it go?’ he asked, taking a sip of coffee.
Romy beamed. ‘We got along well. I really liked them.’
‘Who is them?’
Romy said, ‘The Tirol Council.’
De Payns hadn’t heard of it. ‘Tirol, like schnapps and lederhosen?’
‘No,’ said Romy, laughing. ‘They’re based in Geneva, former World Bank economists and thinkers.’
De Payns didn’t bite at that. In his world a thinker was either a bullshitter or a Communist. ‘What do they do?’
‘Policy work and research with the OECD and EU. They want someone to work on the historical drivers of wealth disparity between Western and Eastern Europe. It’s my thing.’
De Payns raised his coffee cup in a toast while Oliver and Charles argued about who was going down the slide first. ‘I knew that PhD would be useful.’
Ana leaned forward and looked at him, her dark hair falling across her face. ‘Talking of useful, you wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you, Alec?’
‘Not officially,’ he said, fishing his Marlboros and lighter from his windbreaker pocket and handing them over.
‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, wincing at Romy.
‘It’s not a big deal,’ said Romy, a little peeved. ‘I just don’t want the boys to see their father smoking.’
De Payns held up his empty hands as Ana lit a cigarette and handed back the pack.
‘I feel terrible,’ said Ana, biting her bottom lip. ‘But I can’t drink coffee and not have a cigarette.’
Her cell phone sounded and Ana looked at it, excused herself and stood to take the call.
‘So, happy about the interview?’ he asked Romy.
‘It went really well,’ she said. ‘They asked all the right questions.’
When Ana was back on the park bench de Payns looked at the two women. ‘So how come you guys are together?’
‘We bumped into each other at Port-Royal station,’ said Romy.
‘We were coming back from the doctor,’ said Ana. ‘Charles’s ears play up in summer. Must be the pollen.’
‘It was a real coincidence,’ said Romy.
De Payns checked his watch. He had twenty minutes before his scheduled meeting with Templar and Brent. The two men had spent the day over the border in Mons, doing an initial recce and getting a feel for the area that was covered by one of the three cell towers that the Pakistani VIP’s phone connected to when he made the calls every Thursday afternoon. They’d already gone over it on the maps—the area that could be served by all three towers was slightly to the west of the city, outside the old medieval walled precinct, and north and south of the leafy area of the Rue des Compagnons. It was what Templar called a ‘look-see’, a chance to scope the neighbourhood and ascertain if there were going to be obvious impediments to an operation, such as a police station in the middle of the mission zone or a primary school where parents would crowd the street with their cars every afternoon at pick-up time.
‘Watch out for gypsies,’ de Payns had joked before Templar left.
Two years earlier, Templar and de Payns were staking out a French Navy scientist who was meeting with his Mossad handler. Having tracked the scientist across the Pont d’Arcole, Templar was approached by a gypsy woman while her pickpocket brother came in from behind, thinking he was a tourist. When the pair wouldn’t back off, Templar had taken matters into his own hands. The video footage of the scene became famous, showing Templar grabbing the man by the shirtfront and belt buckle and then, in one smooth movement, the gypsy was sailing over the bridge railing into the Seine. If you’d blinked, you would have missed it.
De Payns decided he had time to finish the demande de criblage, or DDC, he was working on. His first meeting with Ana Homsi, and then the subsequent dinner with her husband, had made him wary of Romy’s new friend, and the meeting in the park that morning had done nothing to ease his discomfort. A week after receiving her PhD, Romy has a job offer—not from the OECD or the IMF, but a think tank operating out of Geneva. He’d researched the Tirol Council—they wanted all of Africa vaccinated and a debt-forgiveness program in the developing world.
Ana Homsi troubled him. He’d let two annoyances go by with her—one was her skilful burrowing into the de Payns family, via preschool and then karate; and second, her constant pouring of wine for the guests while barely touching her own drink. Now, Ana had intercepted Romy on her way back from her city interview before she could debrief with her husband. It was the kind of intervention that de Payns made with his assets on a regular basis.
So now de Payns completed a short screening request. It was written in the third person—as all OT-generated reports in the Company had to be—and covered the appearance of the Homsi family in his personal life. It named the main people of interest—#ANA HOMSI# and #RAFI HOMSI#—and included their address and all the information that de Payns could remember about them, which wasn’t much. He didn’t know who Rafi worked for or anything about Ana’s background. He included the conversations he’d had with Ana, and the more he wrote the weaker it sounded. Reading the DDC back he realised he had nothing incriminating on Ana or her family, so he requested a check of them on the basis that Ana had asked Romy about her husband’s employer. By the time he hit ‘send’, he knew that it looked like a standard instance of new people entering an OT’s life. He knew he was going to appear paranoid, but he also held to the advice given to him by an old instructor in DGSE training—better to be paranoid and embarrassed than complacent and dead.