Mattieu Garrat’s office sat on a corner of the Bunker, giving a southerly view across Paris’s trees and rooflines. De Payns took it in as he paused at the door, coffee mug in hand and Advils in his belly.
‘Alec, Alec,’ said Garrat, gesturing for him to enter. ‘Come in. Sit.’
De Payns took a seat and Garrat regarded him with shrewd, intelligent eyes. ‘Great work on Operation Alamut. You got a team?’
‘Templar’s leading the support team,’ said de Payns.
‘Excellent,’ said Garrat, his shaved head glinting in the morning sun. ‘You look ready for a contact environment.’
‘We’re ready,’ said de Payns. ‘We have to stay on her—she’s our only connection to the MERC.’
De Payns didn’t have to push it too hard. Frasier, Briffaut and Lafont wanted Alamut to go to the next level and Garrat would not stop it.
‘There’s nine of you at the moment,’ said Garrat, tapping on his keyboard and peering at the screen. ‘What am I requisitioning?’
‘A continuation of the current Alamut team. That’ll give us enough people to form a PEC if we need it.’
‘Okay, sounds fair,’ said Garrat. The PEC was prise en compte—a controlled zone where the team could conduct meetings and surveillance activities with a lot of unseen security.
‘What are we calling the person of interest?’
‘Raven,’ said de Payns.
‘Okay,’ said Garrat, typing. ‘What’s the approach?’
De Payns took him through the operation—Templar’s team would continue surveillance on Raven, while the tech team infiltrated her computer and her email and put a tracking device on her car. De Payns covered the research and he took Garrat through the pack—she was of Pakistani origin, married to a pharmacist, also Pakistani; her daughters were nine and thirteen years old. She was a freelance translator from French to Urdu, not an uncommon profession so close to Brussels, and she also listed Pashto and Punjabi as languages she could translate into French and English. There was a report on her phones. She had a Belgian cell phone number that seemed to be her daily usage phone, and also a démarqué French-network phone—the phone of interest—that she used every Thursday afternoon and at no other time. The seemingly lone Pakistani woman with kids could mean a divorce but it could also be a soft exile, in which case that might be used as leverage to recruit her. The translation business could be another leverage, if she needed clients.
‘We’ll pick up what she’s emailing and who her friends and family are,’ said de Payns, ‘and I should be able to give you a plan for contact in a couple of weeks.’
‘Don’t be a stranger,’ said Garrat. ‘With the budget we’re burning on this I need ammunition to keep it going. Understand?’
De Payns smiled. ‘Sure.’
‘I mean it,’ said Garrat. ‘Lafont is pushing for this, and because it’s bioweapons it has some political goodwill, but you have to keep giving me the good stuff—you know what the bean counters are like around here.’
‘You got it,’ said de Payns.
Garrat leaned back, stroked his tie. ‘By the way, the DDC came back.’
‘Oh, that,’ said de Payns, remembering the vetting he’d requested on Ana and her Husband, Rafi. ‘I got back from down south and my wife had a new friend. Just being too careful.’
‘Can’t be that,’ said Garrat. ‘Too careful, I mean. Anyway, the Homsi husband and wife checked out—no flags.’
Garrat smirked slightly and de Payns could sense a comment forming.
‘If a dame like that was pushed my way, I’d think twice about blowing the whistle on her, know what I mean? Maybe blow a whistle at her?’
De Payns felt embarrassed for the guy, but Garrat wasn’t picking up on it. He turned the computer monitor to face de Payns. ‘Now that lady could get undercover with me any day of the week, non?’
The picture was one that the DGS had sent when they’d cleared Ana Homsi of being on a French government database or watchlist. They’d appended a digital photograph from the personnel files of an accounting firm where she’d worked before becoming a full-time mother. It verified that the agent and DGS were talking about the same person. It showed a woman with long dark hair and big round eyes, not unlike Claudia Cardinale in her heyday. He reckoned the picture had been taken eight or nine years ago.
‘She’s not my type,’ said de Payns, standing.
‘You lying bastard,’ laughed Mattieu Garrat, as de Payns retreated down the hallway. ‘That dame is everyone’s type!’