De Payns closed the latest DR file sent to him via Marie Lafont. It was depressing reading—French teams had taken control of the poisoned village in Afghanistan, testing the ancient water cistern and the dead bodies. It had been a week since Fazel had been delivered to Villacoublay and the DO science team had now concluded that the samples taken in Afghanistan were manipulated strains of Clostridium perfringens suspended in drinking water. Manipulated because the strain detected was epsilon toxin type D—ETX-D—a type of Clostridium perfringens not found naturally in humans. There were no animals or animal organs found in the cistern or upstream of the cistern. The bacterium had caused massive internal haemorrhaging in the victims and multiple organ failure, and at death the body was filled with gassy pustules. The Company could not isolate where it came from, but through intercepted military communications the DGSE knew the Russians suspected a weaponised clostridium was being developed at the MERC.
De Payns put down the report and rubbed his face. The photographs of the deceased were hideous and he had only been able to look at a few before pushing them aside. He had to accelerate Alamut. During the week de Payns had conducted a second meeting with Raven in Mons and the Company wanted him to push harder and faster than he normally would. He checked his watch, then headed for a meeting with Garrat, Lafont and Templar.
Garrat summarised de Payns’ second meeting with Raven. The important milestone was getting Raven’s signature on an NDA and engagement contract. As de Payns’ association with Raven became stronger he would ask for information and insights that took her into the grey areas of legality and loyalty. This escalation should lead to an upgraded contract to reflect greater secrecy. It was that second, grey-zone documentation that could eventually propel the target into the black zone. It was easier to ask someone to break the law if they had already bent it. And it was the second contract that contained the clauses that could later be used to blackmail the target: What do you mean we tricked you? That’s your signature, isn’t it? And this is a picture of you signing the contract with a French spy? Having got that far, a person like de Payns—when faced with a pull-back from a target—could waive the contract and discuss the facts of life: I wonder if the head of counterintelligence at the ISI would be interested in your contractual agreement to deliver us classified material from the Pakistani government? He can even read how much we paid you.
The entrapment was driven by money. Escalating amounts of it for darkening shades of grey. Up to a point. The French secret services were notoriously tight on the purse strings, and having taken a target ‘black’, the Company usually withdrew the money and made it simple blackmail: Keep it coming, my friend, or we go to the ISI.
De Payns wasn’t going to do it that way initially. He wanted Raven to trust him and like him; he’d use that to discover who was calling her from the MERC.
Garrat moved to the subject of electronic surveillance in Mons. The reports showed Raven’s emails to friends saying she’d met ‘a cute French guy’. In phone calls on her non-MERC phone she made it clear to one of her friends that she’d have an affair with Sébastien Duboscq, if he was keen.
Garrat shook with mirth as he read aloud from a transcript: ‘It’s not just his looks—he’s a real gentleman.’
‘And look at this,’ Garrat continued. ‘The friend says, But he is French—is he not arrogant? And Raven says, He is sure of himself, yes, but he is also very funny.’
‘Enough with the jokes,’ said de Payns. ‘Has she shown those contracts to anyone else?’
Garrat shook his head. ‘She hasn’t emailed the documents and she hasn’t used either of her two cell phones or her landline to ask about signing the docs.’
Turning to Templar, de Payns asked, ‘Does she have surveillance around her?’
‘No,’ said Templar. ‘We’ve been on this for more than a month and we’re clean.’
It was one thing to have established contact with Raven, but she was only a stepping stone. The point of Operation Alamut was to discover the identity of the senior person at the MERC and attempt a contact on him. De Payns wanted to hasten things along without entangling himself too much with Raven. He knew what the agents at the Bunker wanted him to do but he wanted to maintain his record of no sex.
‘It’s a go,’ said de Payns. ‘We’ll take it to the next level. Mattieu?’
‘Green light from me,’ said Garrat. ‘Can you get up there tomorrow?’
The Thalys train to Brussels left Gare du Nord on time at 9.25 a.m. and de Payns eased back in the airline-like seat as the train picked up speed. After the Garrat meeting, he’d called Raven with a last-minute request to have lunch and talk about projects. Raven had said yes and now he was Sébastien again, dressed in a good suit and travelling to Belgium with a waft of Paco Rabanne.
The acceleration of Operation Alamut forced him to delay meetings that his other identities were having. He didn’t like to do that, because his Paris-bound weeks were fairly structured, with each day committed to a different identity. He would usually fix an appointment with a target by phone or email and, having set up a meeting, he would plan his trip with logistics and decide whether he needed a team. The DGSE didn’t like to waste money, so resources had to shrink and expand with the operational needs. With Raven, the team had shrunk from nine to four, including a long-range photographer who was shooting footage of Raven and de Payns at the cafe.
Although he wasn’t prepared to sleep with Raven, he was prepared to make the contact more romantic. Raven’s private conversations revealed she had feelings for Sébastien, and he would capitalise on that without betraying his wife.
The previous evening he and Romy had enjoyed two glasses of wine and an early night. It was never going to be the way it was when they met—he a dashing air force pilot and she a policy worker at an economic think tank. Their single, child-free selves had been very different. He smiled remembering how he’d met Romy at a bar when she was with her boyfriend. He’d manipulated the man into drinking too much—so much that he vomited. He’d then approached Romy at her workplace and told her that since she was a real Frenchwoman, she needed a real Frenchman, one who could hold his drink.
‘I actually have a boyfriend,’ she’d said.
‘And yet, here I am.’
They’d never lost their shared sense of humour but romance had not been easy to maintain once they had kids. The standard longevity in the field for a Y Division chef de mission was five years before he or she flamed out with exhaustion or alcoholism, or was promoted to a desk, as Garrat had been. Five years of field work at the Company was all it took to wreck a marriage. De Payns had been in the field for seven years and his workload was extreme. He had to keep alive five fictive IDs at a time, which meant constant gardening, constant pretending and lying, constant breaking down of phones and powering them up again to assume another identity. He couldn’t talk to Romy about what he did, and he could only divulge half of what he was doing to his clan—and even then, only once the operation was over. It was isolating, and the policy of the DGSE was to keep the chefs de mission apart, to prevent them from talking and comparing notes.
Templar was divorced. Shrek was still married, but he didn’t have kids. There was only so much he could talk about with them. So his marriage had become an anchor, even as it had to sit like a psychological island, divorced from the mainland of his career. Romy was his rock, his trigonometry point for sanity. He was going to entrap the Pakistani woman they called Raven, but he wasn’t going to screw her.