De Payns lay on Briffaut’s sofa, exhausted and depressed. He felt sick, with worry and guilt. He’d spent so much of his life away from his kids and now he’d introduced them to a danger of his own making. Every spy’s nightmare.
At his desk Briffaut worked two phones. He hung up from a call, and asked Shrek what had happened with the shipment investigation from Sicily.
‘DR is getting back to us. They were going to use Interpol. They track suspicious freight.’
‘Chase them,’ said Briffaut and went back to his own calls.
A television played the France 24 news service and de Payns heard a phrase that got his attention. He grabbed the remote from the coffee table and turned up the volume—the screen was now filled with a colour picture of a good-looking blonde woman in her mid-thirties. He knew that face—or, more accurately, Sébastien Duboscq knew that face. The reporter’s voice-over continued: ‘The DCPJ have identified the body found in the Seine three days ago as Claire Fouchet, a thirty-four-year-old insurance broker from Paris. Her badly disfigured body was discovered by a tour boatoperator, and investigators have appealed for any witnesses to come forward …’ The scene shifted to a detective, who referred to torture without spelling it out.
‘You okay, Alec?’ asked Briffaut.
De Payns collapsed back on the sofa. ‘Claire Fouchet,’ he said, pointing at the TV screen. ‘She works in the neighbouring office to Sébastien Duboscq.’
‘Tortured?’ asked Shrek.
De Payns nodded, trance-like. ‘Whoever we’re dealing with, they’re in Paris.’
‘Get our police liaison on it,’ said Briffaut to Shrek. ‘And I need Interpol’s intel on Sicily freight movements.’
De Payns’ phone rang. The caller ID said ‘T’, but when he picked up, it was Romy.
‘Wow, that was annoying,’ she said, sounding happy. ‘But it’s made the boys’ holiday. We’re about to get on a helicopter. Ollie is beside himself.’
De Payns found it difficult to speak as the emotion welled up in him. He suppressed it by pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘So you’re okay, you and the boys?’
‘Sure,’ said Romy. ‘Gael’s got a broken nose. Apparently he walked into a door.’
‘Yes,’ said de Payns, laughing. ‘He’s known for that.’
He sagged when he got off the phone. ‘I can’t go back to that apartment. We’re compromised.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Briffaut. ‘Leave it with me.’
They moved into an SCIF, Briffaut seated at the head of the boardroom table. Lafont and the chemicals genius, Josef Ackermann, arrived and Garrat sat with Templar and Shrek. There was a map of Europe and Asia projected on the screen in the room.
‘We have a lot of information but it doesn’t add up right now,’ said Briffaut. ‘Jim Valley is being held at the Cat. We haven’t yet told DGS. We’ll start on the questions soon.’
The faces all looked downwards. No one at the Company liked the topic of traitors.
‘But this is what we do have,’ said Briffaut. ‘We have a strain of weaponised clostridium found in a Palermo warehouse, and that same strain has been tested on a village in Afghanistan, where it killed more than thirty people. Our informant—Fazel—became seriously ill just from contaminated water on his face.’
Josef Ackermann chimed in. ‘We’ve got the results from the Red Cross on the Burmese village poisoning. It’s the same weaponised clostridium that was found in Palermo and Afghanistan.’
Briffaut aimed a laser pointer at Islamabad on the map. ‘Here’s the MERC. We have no proof that this is where the bioweapon comes from, but we have two people connected to what we believe was produced there.’
Briffaut nodded at Lafont and three pictures appeared on the screen. ‘This is the man we know as Murad,’ he said, pointing to the grainy CCTV picture on the left. ‘A Sayef Albar commander who has pledged to position the terror group in the heart of Europe and who was trying to buy five French passports to do just that.’
Briffaut moved his pointer to the middle picture. ‘This is Michael Lambardi, also known as Commodore. Commodore was a Sicilian migration consultant working for Murad, and was killed by him. Fine traces of weaponised clostridium were discovered on chlorine granules in a Palermo warehouse leased by Commodore’s brother, David Lambardi.’
Briffaut moved to the final picture. ‘This is Yousef Bijar. We call him Timberwolf. He’s the head scientist at the MERC in Islamabad. When Aguilar slipped out of the city after a failed dinner date, Timberwolf received a call from a voice that we believe belongs to Murad, based on intercepts over the years. Murad knew Aguilar’s pseudo, and that he works for us. This phone call to Timberwolf is crucial—the MERC is an ISI-run facility.’
Briffaut paused. ‘The conclusion is that the MERC, under the auspices of the ISI, is making a bioweapon, and a client organisation of the ISI—Sayef Albar—is going to use it in Europe.’
Everyone present nodded in agreement.
‘The question is,’ said Briffaut, ‘where is this bioweapon, how much of it do they have and what is Sayef Albar planning to do with it?’
When they broke for the team to make their phone calls, de Payns grabbed a coffee and went back to his office with Shrek. They got the DR office at the Cat on speaker, and asked for an update on the outgoing sea and air freight logs from Palermo. But nothing really stood out. The biggest problem was the size of what they were looking for. A small canister of the weaponised clostridium could be carried by a person in their hand luggage and introduced to a small water supply. The test uses of the gas gangrene were conducted in local sources of drinking water, targeting village populations. But what would a bigger attack look like, and how would the terrorists transport the bacteriological material without being detected? Shrek’s report described the Palermo warehouse as being about thirty metres by twenty. You didn’t need a warehouse of that size for a few canisters carried by couriers. The ETX clostridium that had been transhipped through the Palermo warehouse had to be much bigger than a few capsules in a rucksack. Sayef Albar would not take the risk of renting such a large space unless they needed it.
There was a movement in the doorway. De Payns looked up. Templar and Ackermann were standing there.
‘We’re going down to the cafeteria,’ said Templar. ‘Any orders?’
De Payns leaned back in his chair. ‘Josef, you were quiet in there.’
The scientist shrugged. ‘I wait for Marie to call me in.’
‘How about I call you in?’ suggested de Payns. ‘If we narrow this right down, the Pakistanis have developed a gas gangrene agent that works best when it’s added to water, something we all need to use every day.’
‘Sure,’ said Ackermann.
‘So if you were the terrorist, and you wanted to deploy this in Europe, what method of distribution would you use to create the biggest impact?’
Ackermann looked at the ceiling, thinking. ‘The best way would be to add as much as I could to the water supply of a major city—say, London, Paris, Madrid. But …’
‘That wouldn’t work,’ said de Payns.
‘Well, not really. You’d need a lot of bacteria to influence a metropolitan water supply, and the major cities have filters and chemical treatments that can defeat bacteriological pathogens.’
‘Even man-made, weaponised ones?’
‘This one from the MERC is very strong and very resilient,’ said Ackermann. ‘And it has this added sialidase feature, which negates the dilutive effects of water. It can still work when it reaches the intestine.’
‘But?’
‘But you’d have to get it past the water treatment stations and all their chemicals. Once it was in the pipes, that would be another story. That’s when you’d kill a large number of people.’