Alec de Payns sensed a presence and looked up from his screen. Dominic Briffaut’s PA stood in his office doorway. ‘Boss wants to see you.’
De Payns stood and followed the middle-aged woman down the corridor to the elevator.
When they arrived at Briffaut’s upstairs office she held the door for him.
‘This,’ said the boss, pushing a piece of paper across his desk.
De Payns looked at the page. It was a report from a source in Pakistan, the romantically named CRS 00218. The source had a robot’s name, but he had a ‘B’ grading inside the DGSE, France’s foreign secret service, which signified the highest level of trust and reliability that could be attributed to a human. Only documents, videos and images could be graded ‘A’.
The report from CRS 00218 claimed that the missile engineer Amin Sharwaz, thirty-six, his wife—government scientist Anita Sharwaz, thirty-three—and their son Javed Sharwaz, seven, had been killed the previous week by torture at the hands of the ISI, probably with a power drill, at the Pakistan Agricultural Chemical Company (aka the MERC) in Islamabad.
De Payns sat heavily in the visitor’s chair, stunned by what he was reading. He flashed back to their final meeting at the bar in Singapore. Amin had been in a hurry to get to the airport because of a family emergency, but there was something more, something almost haunted about the engineer whom he’d come to regard as a friend. His voice had been constricted and there had been little eye contact. De Payns had spent seven years at the DGSE, six of those years in the Y Division—the DGSE’s highly secretive section responsible for clandestine activities. He knew how to read people and was very attentive to sources who might be watched over by the ISI. He recalled Amin’s use of the French adieu—a deliberate usage, since they communicated in English. The finality of the word had not escaped de Payns. Amin was ‘off’ and de Payns had been incredibly careful leaving that bar in Singapore and making his way back to his hotel. He suspected Amin had spilled to the ISI—told them he was trading missile secrets for a life in Paris.
And now he saw the picture more clearly—Amin’s employers had some suspicions, used leverage to get him back to Pakistan, where they’d tortured the family to death. De Payns guessed the wife and child would have been tortured in front of the traitor, prompting him to tell them everything, before he himself was subjected to the slowest and most painful death.
De Payns threw the report on Briffaut’s desk and exhaled loudly as he looked at the ceiling. De Payns had dealt with hundreds of sources whose motives were mercenary and who behaved in a purely transactional way. But Amin was different; they’d become close. In a different life they would have been friends.
‘I know you liked this one,’ said Briffaut, gesturing to the report. ‘But back to business—along with the source being dead, you’re now blown.’
‘You’re right,’ said de Payns, shaking off the shock. ‘I’ll start disassembling the Aubrac ID. It’ll be disappeared by tomorrow lunchtime. Clean slate.’
Briffaut looked at him, his face expressionless. ‘No, don’t do that. They mustn’t know we have a source on the other side. I’m guessing they’ll try to set up a meeting, pretending to be Amin. If they do, we’ll put you into a trapped meeting and we’ll see who they are.’
In other words, de Payns was going to be used as live bait.
He looked at his boss and nodded.
He left early from the Bunker, the headquarters of the DGSE’s Y Division in Noisy, a suburb east of Paris. The Bunker was inside an old fort and was deliberately separated from the main HQ of France’s foreign intelligence service, the Centre Administratif des Tourelles, colloquially known as the Cat. The Cat was housed in an imposing Napoleonic building on Boulevard Mortier, in the twentieth arrondissement, a total contrast to the cloistered walled fort of the Y Division.
He caught two trains and was outside his apartment building in Montparnasse shortly before 6 p.m., having performed basic hygiene measures to ensure he wasn’t being followed. As he let himself into the small but beautiful apartment, he heard the splashing of kids in a bath. Romy intercepted him at the kitchen entrance and gave him a hug, while keeping her food-covered hands off him.
‘Excellent timing,’ she said. ‘Boys are in the bath—can you deal with them?’
Throwing his keys on the counter, de Payns kicked off his shoes and entered the bathroom, where the younger of his sons—four-year-old Oliver—was standing in the bath pointing at Patrick with a loofah, demanding the return of a Smurf toy that the six-year-old was hiding.
‘Hi, Dad’ said Patrick, putting on a great show of insouciance about the Smurf.
‘Give it to me!’ yelled the younger boy, wielding the loofah like a sword.
De Payns kneeled, noticing mud on his youngest son’s knees.
‘I’ll take that,’ he said, taking the loofah and putting it on the bathroom counter. ‘That’s your mother’s—this is what you need.’ He plucked a washcloth from the bath water.
As he started scrubbing Oliver’s legs, a terrible dread welled up in him as he felt the tiny, perfect knee of his son. Amin had a son; he’d shown de Payns photos of the boy, flipping through them on his phone as only a doting parent could do, showing twenty-five pictures when four would have sufficed. Holding his own son’s leg in his hand, guilt washed through him like a tidal wave. His chest constricted and he felt himself struggling for breath as he fought against the mental image of Amin’s son and wife being tortured with a power drill. He leaned back from the bath, hitting his head on the cabinet, and he was aware of Patrick calling out, ‘Mum!’
Footsteps, and Romy’s face hovered above him, framed with wisps of blonde hair.
‘You okay, honey?’ she asked, calm but concerned, her cool hand strong on his jaw.
De Payns shook his head almost imperceptibly.
‘Really bad?’ she asked in a whisper, and de Payns nodded, tears forming in his eyes.
‘Fuck,’ she murmured, and helped him to his feet.
He jumped off the Metro at Jussieu, beside the university campus, and found a bar set back from the main tourist strip. It was a low-slung student dive which could do with a clean. He found a table in the unpopulated far corner, and ordered a Scotch. The conversation with Romy could have been handled better, but after his small breakdown there was nothing else he wanted to do but drink until he felt numb.
The middle-aged barmaid brought him the glass and he drained it, relishing the burn in his throat and the hit of smoky flavour. He asked for another, and a beer, and was feeling almost good by the time he headed for the exit. Fishing a pack of Marlboros from his windbreaker, he lit one and observed the street—crowds of students going to restaurants, leaving bars. He walked a block and a half west and found another local bar, this one with an Irish theme, and stood at the end of the mahogany counter. He drank three shots of Jameson and washed it down with a tap beer, trying to find a way through his predicament. How guilty should he feel about the death of Amin’s family? And if Javed could fall prey to the ISI, what did that mean for Oliver or Patrick? What about Romy? Who could save them, if not de Payns?
He left the Irish bar and found another—a quiet establishment for quiet drunks. Even the music—Django Reinhardt’s greatest hits—was more like musical wallpaper than entertainment. He drank for a few more rounds, three whiskies to one beer, replaying memories of a smart and fun-loving Pakistani engineer who’d thought he was doing the right thing for peace in the Middle East, while also creating a pay-off for his family. And his son had been tortured for it, probably right in front of him.
After the ninth drink, he knew he was shaking his head and mumbling too loud. When the woman behind the bar approached him she raised one finger and de Payns agreed. Only one more.
He left the bar carefully, gasping slightly at the chill air. He lit a Marlboro, observing the streetscape. It looked clean. He couldn’t safely return to his family home in this state—drunken mistakes didn’t carry any discount; they could get people killed just as easily as the sober mistake. So he picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker at a market and wandered in a daze until he found himself outside a seedy private hotel. The woman at reception rented him a room and he fell on his face as he opened the door. Collapsing on the bed he felt an emotional weight that the whisky had only sidestepped, not resolved. He wanted another drink but didn’t have the energy, and he fell asleep wondering where the off switch for the bedside lamp was.
He might have quit his job that week, but for the niggling need for retribution, something felt strongly among the whole Y Division at Noisy. Besides, the entire rationale of the Company—as the DGSE was known to its employees—was to engage in human intelligence, to get close to targets, earn their trust and inveigle oneself into their world. If that meant feeling the wolf’s breath on your neck, then that’s what you did.
There was an aeronautical engineers convention in Paris in two weeks and de Payns set the meet for the last day of the conference, as usual. Amin’s email address was still active and someone was operating it, judging by the response written in precisely the way de Payns had taught Amin. All the communications protocols were correct—Amin must have given them up. Clearly someone at the ISI wanted to keep the liaison operating long enough to get a look at Marcus Aubrac, while the French were keen to see who the Pakistanis sent to photograph—or kill or kidnap—the operative who’d been running Amin. Failures could be turned to their advantage, the French reasoned, so long as they had an officer who was smart and strong enough to play his part.
The Company spent two weeks preparing the Marriott Rive Gauche for the operation, while de Payns stayed away from the hotel. If the Pakistanis came with muscle, they had to be shut down quickly. If they came to photograph Marcus Aubrac, the Company needed its own photographic and eyes-on verification of the ISI operators. The French had to know who they were dealing with before judging how much danger their agent was in and what they were going to do in response. It was a game—one that both sides were playing with their eyes wide open. De Payns and Briffaut had decided there was a high probability that the Pakistanis knew that the French were aware that Amin was dead. Heck, thought de Payns, they might have deliberately planted the news with the source named CRS 00218 in order to get a good look at de Payns. The mission team would be positioned carefully to look for the Pakistani watchers and undertake their own counter-surveillance. But more important to de Payns was knowing that his mission team would foil a kidnap or an assassination, even as he walked into the wolf’s mouth.
The mission was complicated for de Payns not only by the friendship he’d developed with Amin but by the hotel’s proximity to his family’s apartment in Montparnasse. The Marriott Rive Gauche was on Boulevard Saint-Jacques, only a ten-minute walk from Patrick’s school. It felt too close to home, especially given how ruthlessly the ISI had exploited Amin’s greatest weakness—his family. Usually de Payns operated overseas; the prospect of engaging with the ISI so close to home had him on edge.
He watched a Netflix movie with Romy the night before the operation, his bare feet on the coffee table and nursing a glass of riesling. He didn’t say much—usually he kept up a running commentary, which Romy would quell with a few shut ups. She was doing a PhD on political economics, with a complicated thesis about east–west wealth discrepancies within Europe, and de Payns would usually tease her by attributing a Marxist or Anarcho-syndicalist motive to the most stupid character in a given movie. If he was having fun, he could drive her to throw something at him. But tonight he was nervy and she knew it. Rather than ask him about it, she switched off the TV set and took him to bed shortly after nine o’clock.
They sent an email after lunch on the final day of the conference, and the stand-in for Amin texted the burner phone number about ten minutes later. De Payns returned the text, suggesting they meet at Café L’Ecir, not far from the hotel, at 5 p.m. De Payns caught the Metro in from the north-west, making three changes of train, before emerging at Glacière Metro station at 4.45. He climbed the stairs to the northern side of the Boulevard Saint-Jacques and walked towards the meet through the early office-leavers.
He was wired up with radio equipment, the battery pack and transmitter strapped to his ankle, wired into a receiver for the earpiece that was attached under his shirt. He put in his earplug and pressed the ‘talk’ button in his pants pocket.
‘Y—check?’
‘Y—good copy,’ came the reply.
Satisfied the system was working, he signed off with ‘Aguilar—copy’ and then went to radio silence.
De Payns’ team was sitting in vans, planted in other shops and sitting in the cafe as patrons. When operating inside French territory, the Company usually handed over to the DGSI, the French internal security services, equivalent to the FBI or MI5. However on short operations the DGSE would usually work undeclared, as they were on this day. The DGSI were more like the police, and they operated with an arrest and prosecution mandate, whereas the Company might monitor a terrorist for a year and never interdict. Besides, the paperwork required to involve the domestic security services was too laborious for what amounted to a two-hour operation. De Payns relied instead on three of his regular mission team operators—tough people whom he’d worked with in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo. He knew they would intercede if the Pakistanis turned nasty.
He strolled in the late afternoon sunlight that streamed through the overhead trees, passing a Franprix supermarket on his right, aware of a team around him though he was unable to see them.
Stopping at the pedestrian crossing, de Payns caught a glimpse of the cafe through the trees and walked towards it. His senses were on high alert despite his calm demeanour. Agreeing to take part in an operation so close to his family was difficult to justify to himself—and it would be impossible to explain to Romy if she knew.
De Payns found a table inside with a view of the door, the street and the outside tables, and ordered a Kronenbourg. The clock above the bar showed 5 p.m. exactly.
His beer arrived and he acted like any other customer, looking at his phone and sipping at his drink. He was too well trained to look for his team. Even a quick glance of recognition would be picked up by an experienced watcher. He waited and he drank in a painful charade of waiting for a dead man—a man he’d liked—but no one showed. This wasn’t unexpected. The Pakistanis had probably never intended for someone to meet de Payns in person; what the ISI wanted was his face on camera.
The earpiece crackled briefly. ‘For Y from Jéjé,’ came Jéjé’s voice. ‘I have two guys at the north corner dressed in blue jeans, cheap leather shoes, dark jackets. Looks like they’re waiting.’
‘Copy from Danny,’ came Danny’s voice. ‘One grey Peugeot in front of the cafe, dark windows, rego 648 RGU 75. One guy waiting inside and looking. Nothing else.’
De Payns didn’t respond or change his demeanour. He’d spent half his adult life being followed.
At 5.21 p.m., with no one approaching him in the cafe, he left and walked to the Saint-Jacques Metro. He took two lines, emerging in the middle of Paris. He found a seat in a cafe on the edge of the Place de la République and waited there for ten minutes, then started to walk north-east, counting in his head. When he reached two hundred and sixty, he climbed the stairs with the tourists, turned right at the top and jumped on the back of a motorbike which started immediately and sped off into the traffic.
After ten minutes of expert riding through selected choke points and one-way streets, he was dropped at the Champ de Mars, the large park stretching from the Eiffel Tower to the École Militaire. He walked across to its south-east corner and descended to the Metro, taking two trains to the Gare d’Austerlitz area of Paris. It was almost dark when he emerged, and he walked straight to the Company’s changeover house to the west of the station’s impressive facade, in a secondary street tucked behind a precinct of bars and restaurants. He walked up to the apartment, opened it using the combination lock, and punched in his security code on the keypad inside the door. It looked like a typical Paris apartment, with a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms, one of which contained the lockers used by the Company’s Y Division operatives. De Payns opened his locker and deposited his watch, phone and wallet in the manila envelope with Marcus Aubrac printed on a white label. As he decompressed, he could feel the nerves buzzing inside him and he leaned forward with his arms on the locker, breathing deeply to gain composure before stripping off his Aubrac clothes and stashing them in the locker. He took a quick shower, working through every step of the operation and every person he saw. It was possible there was no one from the ISI in or around that cafe. It was possible the whole thing was a psychological ploy, the Pakistanis signalling that they’d already resolved their traitor problem and could now afford to play games with the vaunted DGSE, right there in Paris, on their home turf. Maybe those men in the car were engaged on some other business entirely? Where had they gone after de Payns left? Were they the only ones? Were they official spies, attached to the Pakistan embassy, or were they ‘undeclareds’, living anonymously in Paris or flown in directly from Islamabad? He cycled faces in his mind, counted steps and audited his memory for mistakes. He pushed himself towards paranoia without getting lost in it, knowing that extreme attention to detail was the difference between success and failure.
Dressed in his jeans, windbreaker and running shoes, he was Alec de Payns once again, and he stepped into the night via an alternative door, leading to the street behind the building, and caught a train west through the fifth arrondissement and into Montparnasse. As he climbed the stairs to the apartment, he made a decision—when he stepped through the door, the Amin operation was over and so was his guilt. Tomorrow was a new day.
He opened his door and smelled fish curry.
‘That you, Alec?’ came Romy’s voice from the kitchen.
‘Hi, honey,’ said de Payns, a smile spreading across his face. ‘I’m home.’