De Payns yawned and asked Lolo to start the third video file. It was 10 p.m. and he’d been looking through video since he’d been dragged back into the Bunker by Briffaut and set to work on finding Christine Zeitz, the former BND agent who seemed to be operating against the Company. They were in the Y-9 basement of the Bunker, a bank of screens in front of them, Lolo and Tranh doing the tech work on the security camera footage from Paul Degarde’s Prague hotel, sent over by the DGSE chief of post in the Czech Republic. De Payns had assumed that because Paul Degarde was a courier of product from Lotus, he only spent twenty-four hours in a city—sometimes less—before returning to Paris. However, on his final job for the Company, Paul Degarde had spent a second night in Prague. The product inserted into the Lotus files would have had to occur after the source meeting in Prague and—he assumed—before getting into the taxi at CDG. The taxi company had confirmed one passenger. Given de Payns’ experience of field work, he considered the most likely place for the insertion was Degarde’s hotel in Prague, with a human contact. It was certainly how de Payns would do it.
‘Okay,’ said Tranh, shuffling his mouse and indicating three screens. ‘I’ve got our person of interest tracked.’
De Payns scraped forward in his chair and watched over Tranh’s shoulder.
Lolo pointed at the left-most screen. ‘This is the Old Royal Post’s main bar—it’s twenty seventeen Prague time when our man walks in from the restaurant.’
They watched Paul Degarde order a whisky and sit at a table against the far wall, his eyes wandering to a wall-mounted TV screen that played a news service.
‘At twenty thirty-one, our POI enters the bar,’ said Lolo, as Tranh jumped the video to the new time code.
De Payns leaned forward. The person of interest was a blonde woman in her early thirties, dressed in expensive jeans and a green woollen jumper with a half-zip. De Payns knew the face—Christine Zeitz. On the security video she ordered a glass of white wine at the bar and turned to inspect the room.
‘She takes the table beside our man,’ said Lolo, signalling for Tranh to switch the video feeds. The angle showed Zeitz taking a seat at a neighbouring table, so Degarde was ninety degrees to her right. She put her small tourist backpack on the table and rummaged in it, uninterested in the neighbouring French tourist.
‘Here’s the approach,’ said Tranh, and they watched Zeitz unfold a map on her table, sip at her wine, make a confused face, and then look around before settling her gaze on Paul Degarde, who—rather than look at the pretty woman—watched the TV news. Degarde turned to face her, and they seemed to talk about the map. Zeitz then moved to Degarde’s table, with her map and backpack.
De Payns allowed himself a chuckle: even without having an audio track, he knew exactly what she was saying to Paul Degarde, and how Degarde would be agreeing that some of the Czech words bore no relation to what the French or English translation would look like.
‘They’re having a great old laugh,’ said Lolo, ‘but after twenty-three minutes, our man is on his feet and going to the bar.
Tranh jumped to the next time code, and they watched Degarde stand. As he moved to the bar, Zeitz grabbed his room swipe key—in its Royal Post cardboard wallet—and put it in her backpack. De Payns watched the blonde spy leave her hand in the backpack for seven seconds before removing the room card and placing it back on the table.
‘Bitch,’ he murmured. ‘She scanned the room card.’
‘It gets better,’ said Tranh.
‘I have no doubt,’ said de Payns, as the video showed Degarde arriving back at the table with a whisky in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, his arrival causing Zeitz to stand, obviously excusing herself to go to the bathroom.
‘Let’s go to person of interest number two,’ said Lolo, indicating the middle screen where the time was 21.07. It showed the hotel lobby, where several people sat in the lounge area. As Christine Zeitz emerged into view, walking to the restrooms, a middle-aged man in a blue windbreaker who’d been reading a magazine in the lounge stood and followed. Zeitz emerged two minutes later and returned to the bar.
‘No cameras in the restroom approaches,’ said Lolo. ‘But look.’
The man in the blue windbreaker reappeared a minute later and headed for the elevators. ‘Our man’s room is on the third floor, over here,’ said Lolo, pointing to the screen on the right.
The man in the blue windbreaker left the elevator at 21.12, now wearing a baseball cap pulled low on his face. He walked towards the security camera and used a white swipe card to open room 312, the card he’d constructed using data stolen from Degarde’s room key.
‘This is our man’s room,’ said Lolo. ‘And this guy is fast. Watch this.’
The time code showed the man in the blue windbreaker spent eighty-two seconds in Paul Degarde’s room.
Yes, thought de Payns, it was fast, but plenty of time to find Degarde’s camera, photograph new prod, and delete it from the card.
■
Christine Zeitz had stayed at the Old Royal Post hotel and the Company’s Prague team was able to access the hotel system and confirm that she’d used the name Giselle Hess. They ran credit card and airline cross-checks on ‘Giselle Hess’, looking for her movements after infiltrating Paul Degarde in Prague. They found an Air France booking in her name, travelling Prague–Paris the morning after she’d met Degarde. She boarded the flight and it landed at 11.22 a.m. The photographs they had from her meetings with Starkand and Zeitz’s field operation at the Old Royal Post showed two different looks: one with brunette hair, the other blonde. Briffaut’s briefing on Zeitz was that she used disguises and could turn up as anything.
In Portofino, Lolo had captured IMSI and IMEI data when Zeitz used her phone—or what they concluded was her phone by the spinner’s tracking of the number when the German transferred from the Portofino quay to the superyacht Melissa. There were no guarantees that she’d be using the same phone in Paris, but if she was—or if the phone was sitting in her handbag switched off but still pinging to find the closest tower—it would show up.
The search for phone activity on cell towers had to be done with the cooperation of the phone companies, and the speed with which they responded was inconsistent. However, Tranh had developed a relationship inside France’s cell phone regulator and he had the data eighteen minutes after de Payns asked for it.
They crouched around Tranh’s screen, and he searched the spreadsheet attachment for the day that Paul Degarde flew into Paris. There was no activity.
‘Okay,’ said de Payns. ‘Try the next day.’
Tranh searched, and there were three entries.
The first started at 9.51 a.m. on a cell tower listed as 610552.
Lolo searched the cell tower map on his laptop and found it, near the Champs-Élysée, just west of the Arc. The connection lasted one minute forty-eight seconds and then passed to a tower labelled 610496.
Lolo entered it in his map software and it showed further west on the Champs-Élysée, and this tower connection held for one minute eight seconds, before it passed to the third cell tower, 612330. The phone disconnected at 9.55 a.m.
Lolo entered the third tower number, got its location and allowed the Venn diagrams from the three towers to overlap and graphically tell the team what they already knew: the day after planting material in Paul Degarde’s camera, Christine Zeitz had been in a vehicle moving westwards along the Champs-Élysée.
‘Sitting in a cab?’ asked Lolo.
‘It’s possible,’ said de Payns. ‘I guess it depends on the call. This is a burner phone so she’s talking to someone who’s in the game, and she may or may not do that in front of a taxi driver.’
‘So, she’s with someone else in Paris?’
‘Or she’s driving the car?’
De Payns tried to put himself in her shoes. ‘It’s heading up to ten o’clock, so I’m thinking she’s on her way to a rendezvous of some sort.’
■
De Payns took the still prints of Christine Zeitz from the Royal Post and added them to the trombinoscope for Operation Ellipse. He attached the name and her alias and stood back from the board: he had Zeitz occurring on both the ELLIPSE and BELLBIRD boards, since Zeitz was connected to the Azzamassassination material, as well as being connected to Starkand. Something wasn’t clear: was Zeitz giving source material to Starkand? If that was the case, why would she have to drop prod into Lotus’s files? It was most likely that Zeitz was giving one set of material to Starkand to send to the Occidental services by mail, but she had another game: to make fake prod look like it came from trusted Russian sources of the type cultivated by Lotus. It was a clear tactic of ‘confuse by informing’: not just delivering many shards of prod into a service’s catchment but dropping them in different channels to hide the source of them.
So Zeitz and Starkand had their roles, but what of Brenda? He grabbed a piece of paper, wrote Brenda on it and pinned the paper between the two corkboards. He didn’t know how they connected, except that the Russians had asked about Brenda in the context of Starkand and the Azzam prod. He was fairly sure Starkand was the delivery agent, and Zeitz was running him. They’d seen her in Portofino and Bern, and she was in charge. So where did that leave Brenda? Was she Zeitz? Or was Brenda another person, deciding what went in the mail and what was slipped into the services product that was walked out of Eastern Europe? If Brenda was a Paris-based operative being hunted by the Kremlin, the Company needed to find her before the Russians did.
De Payns looked at the clock on the wall. It was just after 11 p.m. and he was tired. He stood and heard a knock at the door: Lolo.
‘Thought I told you to go home?’ said de Payns.
‘Tranh asked me if you wanted the other tower connections for Zeitz’s phone?’
‘There were others?’
‘Yes,’ said Lolo. ‘Today.’
De Payns descended to the Y-9 basement with Lolo, and leaned over Tranh’s shoulder to look at the telecom spreadsheet. The Zeitz burner phone had been activated and connected to tower 1931 for twenty-one seconds at 11.19 a.m.
‘Twenty-one seconds,’ said Lolo. ‘Quick conversation.’
‘She turned on the phone, got an incoming text message, and then typed an answer and sent it,’ said de Payns, who was well versed in such liaison management. ‘Twenty-one seconds is doing well. Where’s the tower?’
Lolo opened up his cell tower map and inserted 1931. It dropped a red digital pin on an area de Payns knew too well.
‘Southern edge of Jardin du Luxembourg,’ said Lolo, looking up and smiling. ‘Right in the middle of the Bobos. What’s she looking for? An open marriage?’
De Payns couldn’t help a smile, but his paranoia was rising. ‘That’s our job for tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Why is Christine Zeitz in the heart of Paris?’