The restaurant was situated just east of the Square Louis XIII, and catered more for Parisians than tourists in every way except the opening hours. Romy had agreed to a dinner meeting with David if she could be out of there by 7.45 p.m., allowing her to get to Ana’s and pick up the boys post-karate.
She felt guilty, despite telling herself that this was a business meeting and she was doing nothing wrong.
‘So, your husband—Alec, is it?’ asked David, pushing away the work files as their grilled sole arrived. ‘Did you say he worked for the government?’
‘Yes, he’s a bureaucrat at the Defence Ministry,’ she said, complying with Alec’s cover story. ‘He’s in logistics and procurement.’
‘Ah,’ said David, tearing his bread. ‘He’s close to the purse strings. Is he interested in any of your public–private funding structures? Getting Defence into renewables would be a great influence on industry.’
Romy chuckled and reached for her wine. At the neighbouring table was a couple who looked like an executive with his secretary, and Romy realised this was a place that opened early deliberately to capture the illicit workplace-lover market.
‘Alec is not interested in renewable energy?’ David asked, disingenuous.
‘Oh, he’s interested,’ Romy assured him. She held her poker face for two seconds then laughed, looking away.
David’s smile was slightly condescending. ‘You don’t sound sure about that.’
‘Look, he gets it, he understands the issues and the science …’
‘But?’
‘But he …’ Romy paused as she thought about how to put it. ‘His job is defence—protecting France—and he’s serious about it.’
‘But so are we,’ said David, leaning in. ‘Two degrees of warming is catastrophic for France, not to mention Europe.’
Romy nodded. ‘Yes, that’s true, but the French military’s mission is rather more immediate. Generals don’t have a choice to switch to intermittent energy sources.’
David opened his mouth in a silent O. ‘I see. I haven’t heard that argument for a decade.’
Romy wanted to make a smart retort, but she held back. ‘At Tirol we’re finding ways to transform the economy, but our armed forces need the means to defend the country. Different missions, both of them worthwhile.’
David leaned back, out of the intimate zone, and reached for his wine. ‘Some truths don’t need to be aired, Romy, okay?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, taking a mouthful of the excellent fish.
‘I mean, when you meet Klaus, dazzle him with this stuff,’ he said, tapping a folder of her work. ‘Perhaps leave out the military commentary.’
Romy was relieved she’d avoided a romantic trajectory, and without sabotaging her career. ‘Is that a sore point for him?’
David shrugged, and looked around the room. ‘Klaus is too busy saving the world to worry about securing the country.’
■
Oliver had lost a shoe, but before de Payns could go and look for it, Romy told her youngest son to go and find his shoe for himself.
‘You can’t do everything for them,’ she chided, munching on a corner of toast, her briefcase sitting on the table where de Payns was nursing his coffee. ‘They’ll never grow up.’
He smiled. ‘I hope not.’
‘Did you see your suit?’
De Payns could see the suit bag from a hire shop hanging near the TV set. ‘I haven’t seen this one, but I know what a dinner suit looks like.’
‘Can you try it on?’ she asked, sipping her coffee. ‘If it’s not right, I’ll change it today.’
‘Shit,’ he murmured, walking over to fetch the suit bag. ‘I’ve just got dressed.’
‘I’ve never asked you to be my plus-one, ever,’ she said, primed for the fight. ‘You’re going to make me feel bad about this one time?’
‘No, I’m excited about it,’ he said, unzipping the bag and pulling out the pants.
‘Those are a thirty-six,’ she said, watching like a hawk as he took off his jeans and pulled on the suit pants. ‘Try the jacket too.’
De Payns slipped on the jacket and Romy looked him up and down. ‘It’ll do,’ she said. ‘The tie’s in there and I got you a new shirt.’
‘Just like James Bond,’ he said, giving her a wink.
‘Bond doesn’t fall asleep watching SpongeBob,’ she said, checking her watch and suddenly tensing. ‘You all set for tomorrow? You’ll leave plenty of time to get to the Palais?’ The gala was to be held in the giant Palais des Congrès convention centre west of the Arc de Triomphe.
‘Sure,’ he said.
‘Nothing looming from Dominic?’ She stood and reached for her briefcase.
‘He knows better than to tell me what to do.’
‘Bullshitter,’ she said, shaking her head.
Oliver wandered into the room with a schoolbag, wearing one shoe, and looked at his father. ‘Are you going to a funeral?’
‘Maybe my own,’ said de Payns, laughing, but trying to hide it.
■
De Payns was thinking about the mysterious Brenda as he climbed out of the République Metro, and he was also wondering how the Wagner Group mercenaries knew to target Paul Degarde for a piece of information he didn’t know he had. Did the Russians already have their eye on the person who was leaking product to Lotus, as suggested by Keratine?
As he walked into dull sunshine, a text pinged on his phone and, after reading it, he turned and went back to the Metro, made two changes of train and emerged at the Champ de Mars station twenty minutes later. He bought coffee at a vendor and crossed the street into the Champ de Mars, moving to his right and walking for two minutes until he saw Mike Moran, sitting on their usual meeting bench in one of the leafy glades, away from the tourist circuit.
‘Still in town?’ asked de Payns, taking a seat but not looking at his friend.
‘Wanted another chat,’ said the Englishman.
‘You mean, your bosses weren’t happy with the Maypole and wanted to get more?’
‘Not a bad guess,’ said Moran. ‘Don’t you want more?’
‘Well, given we have credible intelligence about an assassination in Europe—and France is in Europe—I’d say, yes, I’d like to know more about all of this.’
A small gust of wind ripped through the park, which Moran reacted to by pulling up the zip on his winter jacket so the collar surrounded his jaw. ‘I was building a map of which prod came from where, and something didn’t really fit.’
‘Which part?’
Moran shook his head, his eyes inscrutable behind aviator sunglasses. ‘Okay, follow the ball,’ he said, as an elderly woman walked a small dog on the other side of the glade. ‘We did a Maypole with the Germans.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘They had everything we had from those embassy drops, and there wasn’t much to go on. I mean, the Russians want to ring fence Europe with petro-extortion, and they’ll use whatever means to do that. Some of those documents are jaw-dropping but they’re not an unknown Russian pattern.’
‘So, what’s out of the pattern?’ asked de Payns, fishing a cigarette from his jacket pocket.
‘Azzam,’ said Moran.
‘Tell me,’ said de Payns.
‘Azzam seemed to be part of the embassy series of prod, but it didn’t come from there, did it?’
‘No,’ said de Payns, dragging on his smoke. ‘Azzam wasn’t part of it. That was just our sidebar.’
‘This is important,’ said Moran, turning his body towards his friend. ‘I mean, Azzam is where we got the assassination information, so establishing who sent us to the yacht could resolve a few things.’
De Payns laughed. ‘You have me intrigued. Why don’t you kick off?’
‘Okay,’ the Englishman said, ‘listen to this. Our man in the East was coming back to Blighty a couple of weeks ago with a Ukrainian army file. He scanned it in his hotel room and sent it on the secure connection.’
‘Okay,’ said de Payns, sipping his coffee.
‘So, he gets back to London, but he’s brought the originals hidden in his briefcase. They contained lots of written comments in the margins from a general and he wanted them analysed.’
‘Okay.’
‘So, he’s putting together a report, and then he goes to the debriefing and the bosses are saying, Why is there prod missing from our debriefing packs?’
‘What was missing?’ asked de Payns.
‘They have a pack put together from the electronic files he sent, but when he started going through his version of the prod, the hard-copy file has one extra page in it.’
‘I see,’ said de Payns, smoking.
‘Our man looks at the extra paper in the hard-copy file of originals, and says, Well I don’t remember this being in the prod.’
‘The added paper was about Azzam?’ asked de Payns.
‘Yes,’ said Moran, ‘which got us started on the same trail that you hopped on.’
‘It was slipped in?’
‘Our colleague remembered a woman in the business centre of the hotel who was very helpful and friendly.’
‘Anything memorable?’
‘Well, she was very attractive and smart, but our colleague recalls her being a redhead with non-matching eyebrows,’ said Moran, ‘and our friend pondered that she might have been wearing a wig.’
‘She slipped some prod into your friend’s collection,’ said de Payns, ‘hoping it would be taken to London and included in the briefings?’
‘And it was, and it checked out, and we got someone on that yacht.’
De Payns smiled, realising his friend wanted him to run the same checks on the material Paul Degarde had brought in from Lotus. Given Manturov’s revelations that Paul Degarde wasn’t totally sure how the Azzam mentions landed in his product, it was worth investigating.
‘I’ll look into it,’ said de Payns. ‘Any pictures of the mystery woman?’
‘A still from the hotel lobby security footage,’ said Moran, pushing a small envelope across the park bench.
De Payns stood, flicked his cigarette. ‘I’m interested, but I want to hear your theory before I go frightening the horses.’
‘I think another service put us up to it,’ said Moran, looking up at his friend. ‘Someone wants the French and British to engage with Russia, confront them on what’s happening in Europe.’
‘So they don’t have to do the confronting themselves?’
Moran looked back at him. ‘I hope it’s that simple. Anything for me?’
De Payns hesitated but decided to risk it. ‘Any insights on the name Brenda? Probably a pseudonym.’
Moran stayed impassive. ‘Linked to the Russian prod?’
‘That’s the assumption,’ said de Payns. ‘We can’t see much.’
‘I’ll ask around,’ said Moran, standing to go. ‘Happy hunting.’