Shrek had spent most of Friday morning following a low-level Hungarian diplomat to his twice-weekly visits to the Champde-Mars, and he’d still seen no meeting or handoff. Now back at the Bunker, he was tired, his feet hurt, and the surveillance work seemed endless and fruitless. He pushed off his Adidas trainers and flexed his feet under his desk. His office, on the first floor of the Bunker, looked west across Paris, and as he stared out the window he thought through his next moves: write his surveillance report, catch the Metro home, and give his sore feet a rest with the aid of a quiet drink. He might even get in the door before five o’clock for once and be home before his wife.
He opened his DGSE account to write the report and remembered back to his university days and how his colleagues in the history department used to complain about being overworked and underpaid. It seemed a lifetime removed from his visit to Katie Degarde earlier in the week. He hadn’t known Paul well, but he felt an intense affinity with the Degarde family. Not only were the wife and daughter suffering the loss of a husband and father, but they had the additional agony of relocation, a new school and being prohibited to breathe a word of the grief to anyone.
He shook it out of his head, selected the ‘Surveillance’ template in the computer system, and was about to type his first word when the landline buzzed beside him. Briffaut’s assistant, Margot, calling him to the boss’s office.
He went straight up. Margot waved him in, and as the door closed behind him the boss rubbed his face and Shrek noticed that the most indefatigable person in the Bunker was tired.
‘Before I forget,’ said Briffaut, not bothering with a greeting, ‘Degarde’s memorial is to be held at the Cat this afternoon. I’d like you to be there.’
Shrek had seen the internal email and then forgotten. ‘Of course. Four, was it?’
‘Five. And drag Aguilar along. Templar, if you can find him. Degarde might have been DR but he was working with a source that we created and transmitted.’ He leaned forward and looked at a file on his desk. ‘Speaking of Paul Degarde, I’ve just been with Marie Lafont—she had an update.’
‘From DGS?’ asked Shrek, as Briffaut handed him a stapled sheaf of papers which looked like printed photographs.
‘Yep,’ said Briffaut. ‘They have a possible lead on a vehicle that might be connected to the Degarde murder. See the rego number?’
Shrek looked at the first sheet of paper, saw a ‘75’ series numberplate, meaning it was Parisian.
‘Final page,’ said Briffaut.
Shrek flipped to the photograph on the final page. It was a dimly lit picture, taken at a distance, in poor light. He could make out what looked like a black van, maybe a Renault or Iveco. On the penultimate page of the document was a blown-up and enhanced picture of the van’s rego plate. It looked heavily pixelated. ‘Is this plate accurate or guesswork?’ he asked.
‘It’s the best we have, is what it is,’ said Briffaut. ‘This is potentially the only evidence of Degarde’s killers. The footage comes from a garbage truck, taken around 4.51 a.m.’
‘It came from a video?’
‘Dashcam, from inside the truck,’ Briffaut elaborated. ‘It’s a still from the footage.’
‘Why is the van of interest?’ asked Shrek. ‘It’s a common model.’
‘Because it matches the time that the DGS investigators think Degarde died. It was just around the corner from the Degarde house, and they didn’t turn on their lights.’
‘We know who owns it?’
‘Monsieur Hertz, with fake ID,’ said Briffaut. ‘DGS think they’ve hit a dead end, but I’d like a second opinion.’
‘I’m on it,’ said Shrek.
‘Put another way,’ said Briffaut, ‘you have forty-eight hours.’
■
De Payns sat between Shrek and Briffaut at the rear of the hall that was tucked away in the oldest part of the Cat building on Boulevard Mortier. The large room’s ornate ceilings and polished wood gave the affair a sense of ceremony, while its location inside the DGSE headquarters meant the Company’s events could be conducted with some candour, with no need for speakers to censor themselves as they would if they spoke in public.
It was obvious that the men and women of the DR department of the Company liked Paul Degarde, judging by the funny stories they told about the Russian-speaking analyst.
‘Paul was not a classic spy,’ said a teary CP analyst named Romain, nodding at the large photo of Degarde mounted on an easel. ‘Hotel rooms made him lonely, so the field was not so good for him …’
The crowd erupted in laughter at this characterisation of their former colleague, and de Payns laughed himself, understanding too well the human dimension of the work which was a million miles from what the movies portrayed. You could use a false name and build a credible legend, but despite all the training an OT was still a man making his way in life. There was still the core of the real person, having to negotiate with himself, around fears and around family sacrifice.
A woman walked to the front of the room and talked about Degarde’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Russian novelists. ‘He was proud to go into the field if he was asked,’ she said. ‘He knew he wasn’t one of those macho DO guys, he was realistic about who he was, but he would do his bit for France.’
De Payns shrunk into his seat, praying that his career didn’t end with one of these memorials. The thought of Romy and the boys being exiled from their own lives and not even allowed to hear the colleagues’ stories about his job made him queasy.
When it was over, the three DGSE men moved to the rear door and found Templar leaning against the doorjamb. He’d been a Marines paratrooper before he joined the Company, and he still carried an aura of menace that eight years of intelligence training had not fully eliminated. They watched the DR employees congregate around the makeshift bar and it didn’t seem right to join in with Degarde’s core crowd.
‘I’m good for one round,’ said Briffaut, looking at his watch. ‘Then I have a meeting.’
They adjourned to a bar a couple of blocks south of the Cat, and Briffaut ordered two rounds of whisky. ‘To Paul,’ he said, raising his glass.
‘To Paul,’ the other men chorused, and downed their drinks.
Briffaut reached for his second glass. ‘It isn’t your fault,’ he said, nodding at de Payns. ‘Lotus was cleared by the system. It wasn’t your call alone.’
‘But I knew Lotus was dangerous,’ de Payns replied. ‘Enough that I told Paul to keep it non-verbal.’ He sipped at his second Scotch, slowly scanning the bar.
‘But he was trained for it,’ Templar pointed out. ‘If we think too much about what might happen, we’d never do what has to be done.’
Silence fell around the table, and Briffaut looked at Templar. ‘You hungover?’
Laughter seized the group, and Templar’s poker face finally broke. ‘Shit, boss. It’s that obvious?’
‘Only when you’re profound,’ said Briffaut, standing and draining his glass. ‘Don’t get too drunk.’
■
Templar, Shrek and de Payns—three members of the clan, de Payns’ crew—leaned into their table in the semi-dark of the Croix de Rosey, Paris’s least-salubrious bar. It was an anonymous drinking hole on a long-forgotten lane in Le Marais, run by Tomas, a Franco-Austrian soldier who had fought for the Legion in the worst parts of Africa. The interior looked jumbled together, with faded 1970s beer mirrors, low-wattage light bulbs and threadbare carpets from an era of landlines and typewriters. Still, this was the clan’s safety zone, and Tomas didn’t water his whisky or put a surcharge on the Jack Daniel’s—which was handy, because when Templar wanted to drink, it was red wine and Jack Daniel’s all night long.
‘We’ll have to get these bastards,’ said Templar as the resident singer—a middle-aged woman—walked past them and took a seat beside the accordion player in the darkest corner of the bar. ‘Can’t let them come into Paris and kill one of our own.’
‘We’re working on it,’ said Shrek, who was the least gregarious of the trio, but probably the smartest given he’d been a university lecturer before joining the Company. His black belt in Wing Chun kung fu was also handy. ‘But I’d like to get an idea of what we’re looking for.’
De Payns noticed both men were staring at him. ‘Early days yet,’ he said.
Shrek nodded, looking into his drink. ‘So Degarde was handling Lotus,’ he said. ‘Any idea what he was carrying, and if it got him killed?’
De Payns couldn’t divulge details, and Shrek knew it. ‘I think it was more about what he knew.’
They were both aware that this had some connection with Azzam, but Shrek didn’t let on.
‘Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but do you reckon Lotus was dropping breadcrumbs?’ asked Shrek.
‘Or his source was feeding him breadcrumbs,’ said de Payns, watching the singer take a slug of wine and tune her guitar. ‘You’re saying this could be a manipulation?’
Shrek shrugged. ‘Maybe one group of Russians feeds a story to Lotus, and another group comes into Paris to work out where that story is going?’
The singer greeted the dozen or so patrons and took a request from a table of drunks near the window.
‘So, you’re sad, mon cher?’ said the singer, with a smile. ‘Time for a sad song.’
She tapped three times on her guitar and launched into ‘There’s a Tear in My Beer’, which snapped the clan out of their grim moods. As Templar sang along to the song, de Payns felt a smile form on his lips. He was sitting with the two men he trusted most in the world, and even though they’d just left a memorial service for a deceased colleague, he felt a sense of security in the overwatch they provided for one another. As the singer switched to a verse of the song in French, de Payns decided that Shrek was right: they might be overthinking the mail drops.
Templar was right too: they’d have to get the bastards who killed Paul Degarde.