De Payns had a day before heading for St Petersburg, so he used the time to do some gardening on the false identity he’d be using on Azzam. At all times he maintained five IDs, mainly presenting himself as a consultant or adviser when he went abroad under a cover. One of his IDs was for a film director, but on Azzam he’d be Frédéric Ruesche, a Parisian hospitality worker with various employers, including hotels and ski resorts. Having established the false ID, de Payns had to nurture it, which entailed regular visits to Ruesche’s neighbourhood to ensure that he was known to the community in the area. When the agents of the Iranian or Russian services came knocking to verify Ruesche’s bona fides, there had to be shop owners saying, Yeah, I know Frédéric—he was in here having a beer last week.
He was dressed in jeans and trainers and a down-lined windbreaker when he emerged from Riquet station in the nineteenth arrondissement. He turned right onto Rue Riquet, walking towards the canal, and paused at a small convenience store at the base of a building where he bought a carton of milk, a loaf of bread and the latest edition of L’Équipe. He continued on towards the canal where there was a modernish apartment building to his right. He loitered outside the foyer until he saw a tenant walk towards the glass doors. De Payns held the door for her, smiled as she passed, and then stepped inside. A letterbox with the number 412 bore the name Ruesche, and he jiggled the cheap lock until it opened and removed his mail: low-rate credit cards, phone offers and a letter from the building manager about parking.
He rode the elevator to the fourth floor, and let himself into apartment 12 with the key he’d had cut a year ago. The Company’s OTs were discouraged from renting apartments for their IDs. They had to find one that was uninhabited and use it as an address. In Paris, the level of verification required for a residential tenancy was heavy and it was easier to be a glorified squatter. It allowed the OT to dismantle the premises within twenty-four hours, if the need arose.
Before pushing back the door he checked the bouletage, a small needle jammed into the space between the door and the jamb. The bouletage was still stuck in the door meaning it was highly unlikely anyone had been in the apartment.
Inside the small apartment he paused and looked around after the door closed behind him. In a room with floorboards, he’d look at an angle of the sunlight and see if there were footprints in the dust on the floor. On the carpeted floor of 412 he instead checked for anything out of place. It looked okay: there was a small galley kitchen to his right and a sofa and TV set in the main room. He walked to a point beside the coffee table in the middle of the room and checked his three-point alignment: this was three items at the points of a three-pointed star. One was a landline phone that sat on a small table against the wall next to the main door. It was still aligned to point to where de Payns was standing. The second point of the star was a copy of Time Out, sitting on the sofa and lined up to point to his current position. The last point was a pen on a pad, sitting on the small counter in front of the galley kitchen. It was still pointing at de Payns.
No one had disturbed the three-point alignment, suggesting no unwanted visitors.
He entered the tiny bedroom, where he opened a sock drawer then pulled a shirt from the wardrobe, placing it on the bed. In the bathroom he ran the shower for one minute and brushed his teeth, and then went to the refrigerator. He took out the old milk and bread and threw it in the garbage and put his fresh milk and bread in the fridge, which still contained two Heinekens and an orange.
He placed the copy of L’Équipe on the coffee table and threw the ageing Time Out in the rubbish. Then he tied off the rubbish bag and picked it up, replaced the bouletage in the door and threw the rubbish in the disposal chute before leaving the building.
Two minutes’ walk along the Avenue de Flandre was a series of bars and cafes—not the most fashionable watering holes in Paris but good places to be seen and known. He dropped into le Bastringue, a cosy neighbourhood bar near the canal.
‘Back from St Moritz already, Fred?’ asked the barmaid Yvette, while she chopped lemons. ‘No snow?’
‘There’s plenty of snow,’ said de Payns, smiling as he pointed to the Kronenbourg handle and reached for his wallet. ‘I was only at the hotel for the peak season; they let thirty of us go as it got quieter.’
Yvette poured the beer and rolled her eyes slightly as a male voice in a back room demanded to know who had hidden the key to the cellar. ‘On the hook beside the desk,’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘Where it always is.’
De Payns paid and sipped the beer. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a gig on a yacht in Monte Carlo. Should be fun.’
‘Hobnobbing with the rich and famous, huh?’ she teased. ‘You’ll have to send me a photo.’
Thirty-five minutes later, de Payns bought a packet of smokes from the Tamil lady in the newsagency and they had a laugh about the ongoing mask requirements of the pandemic response, and by 1.30 p.m. he was seated at a small outdoor table at a neighbourhood cafe, making small talk with the waiter and ordering the ham omelette—‘with extra capsicum’, said the waiter, before de Payns could finish his sentence.
By the time he’d used two trains and a bus to get back to the Bunker, his face and presence would be fresh in the minds of his local community if another service started sniffing around. No assumed ID was perfect, but Frédéric Ruesche was looking pretty solid.