Templar drove quickly but smoothly into the heart of the sixth arrondissement via the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Danny beside him in the passenger seat and Lolo perched in the rear seat with his IMSI-detecting spinner laptop. It was 10.52 p.m. In eight minutes from now, Starkand was expected to contact his handler, Christine Zeitz. On the other side of the Seine—somewhere in the ninth arrondissement—Jéjé’s team was also poised, waiting for Zeitz’s phone call, with Tranh on the spinner and Paulin riding shotgun.
Templar calculated there was a fifty-fifty chance that the Americans had seen Starkand’s abduction from the clean energy conference, and Zeitz was aware that her agent of influence was now controlled by the DGSE. If they had been detected, Zeitz’s burner phone would now be in pieces in various garbage bins, probably around a busy Metro station. But if the Starkand snatch had gone undetected, they might have a chance to find Zeitz through her phone activity.
They found a park at the north end of Montparnasse Cemetery and waited. At 11.01, Lolo muttered that they had a connection on Zeitz’s phone. It opened a connection for the twenty seconds required for a text message, from somewhere off the Boulevard Raspail, east of the Rennes Metro station. They drove to Lolo’s instructions and the connection opened up again, for twenty seconds. She’d responded to her agent of influence and confirmed her location.
‘Get a location?’ asked Templar.
‘Just up ahead,’ said Lolo, pointing. ‘It’s in behind the shopping galerie, right there.’
Templar pulled into the kerb fifty metres from the Metro, and saw a grouping of older buildings with a narrow alley disappearing among them.
‘In there?’ asked Templar. ‘Where does it lead?’
‘The map shows an internal courtyard, one of those used for parking,’ said Danny. ‘She could be in a car?’
Templar grabbed a handgun from under his seat and put a small but powerful camera inside his lined jacket. ‘I’m having a look,’ he said, pulling down the brim of his cap and slipping out the van door.
It was a traditional part of Paris, the five-storey buildings of the Haussmann period dominating. He walked across the road, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, and keyed his radio to check the connection with Danny and Lolo.
He walked down the alley and reached a square that formed the rear parking area for three buildings. It was here that Lolo had identified as the most likely location of Zeitz’s IMSI and IMEI signal. The air was still; passive light fell from a few apartment windows and an entrance foyer. He stood still, listening hard but hearing mostly TV sound echoing across the square.
There was a flash of light so brief he almost missed it. He froze, waiting, and then saw it again. Someone lighting a cigarette, in a car, then sharing it with another person? He strolled forward, assuming it was innocent yet also being careful. He kept his gait casual and untrained. As he approached the car hidden in the darkness, an engine revved—a motorbike—and suddenly it was coming at him. He moved to his right but his hip hit a car’s hood, and the front wheel of the bike collided with his left kneecap, twisting him sideways and throwing him to the ground.
He rolled a couple of times on the wet tarmac, the shock of the impact worse than the pain.
‘I’m down,’ said Templar into the radio, trying to regain his feet. ‘Hit by a motorbike now heading towards you.’
‘Danny copy,’ came the reply.
As he tried to put weight on his leg, a car revved to life and squealed out of its parking spot, accelerating in the opposite direction. Templar squinted and caught the registration plate.
‘From Templar,’ he said into the radio again. ‘I have visual on a car—it’s moving in the opposite direction. I make it a silver BMW—five series, I think.’
‘Danny copy—I have visual on the bike. We’re following.’
Templar asked Lolo to write down the licence plate of the car and get it to the Paris police. ‘Call the Bunker first and get them to trigger the support protocol,’ he said.
Templar steadied himself on his injured leg and limped towards where the car and motorbike had been parked. Turning on his phone torch, he looked around. The tarmac was damp as a result of rainfall earlier in the night. But there was nothing left on the ground. He felt his knee shaking and lowered himself to sit on the kerb. An elderly man walking a dog approached Templar with caution. ‘Are you okay, monsieur?’ he asked, his face a mix of pity and disgust.
‘I’m fine,’ said Templar, wiping the street dirt off his jacket. ‘I’m just really sober.’
The man smiled broadly. ‘Well, there’s always a cure for that, non?’
‘Believe me,’ said Templar, ‘I’m going to be working on it.’
■
She kept to the speed limit but stayed off the main boulevards, until she could find a side street that contained no surveillance cameras. She found a series of narrow streets off the Boulevard de Magenta, north of Place de la République, and parked beside a restaurant dumpster in a service lane. Removing the Paris licence plates, she swapped them for a ‘56’ plate from Brittany. Both plates were compliant and legal, registered to a 2021 silver BMW 530i. She placed the Paris plates in the spare tyre well and then broke down her burner phone and disposed of it in the dumpster. Next, she drove south into the thirteenth arrondissement, where she descended to the B2 level of a private car storage facility, parked the BMW in one of the lock-up garages and left the building via the stairwell.
She walked four blocks, feeling nervy, and found a bar. In the corner was a spare table, which she took, ordering a black coffee and a glass of amaretto. She cycled her breathing and thought about the events of the evening. What were the loose ends? What had she missed? What was her exposure? She’d been sitting in the BMW, in their usual liaison. Christine had arrived and debriefed, clarified the final product drops in the concluded operation and explained how she would keep her asset on ice until he was needed again. They were about to go their separate ways when a dark mass had moved out of the night and into the square behind the apartment buildings. Chris had glanced at him first, as she lit a cigarette, and then on taking a closer look had sat bolt upright, scared. The person moving towards them was a large but athletic man who also moved carefully. Obviously trained and clearly dangerous.
‘Go!’ she’d said, and Christine had slipped out of the car and onto her motorbike. As she’d started the machine, the man had focused on the rider the way a tiger brings its entire body to concentrate on a deer. She’d pulled out and ridden the bike at the man, who, astonishingly, didn’t jump out of the way but seemed to lean away from the bike, as if accepting the pain in advance and already planning his next move. The reactions of a professional.
She drank half of the amaretto and chased it with coffee. It felt good and she drank the rest of the liqueur and sipped at her coffee, annoyed that France didn’t allow smoking in its bars.
She’d left the scene in the other direction, giving the man the opportunity to see her licence plate: it didn’t matter that he was sprawled on the ground; if he was from a service then he’d have captured the registration number, which was why she’d switched plates and hidden the car. Having her numberplate logged by an adversary could result in grave consequences. But her main concern was the fact that the man was in the square at all. Had he followed either of the two women?
She signalled for another amaretto and thought some more about her exposure. Besides being tailed, there were two other risks. First, Christine could be caught, and she might talk. If that was the case, they would have her right now, and there’d be no way to neutralise the threat, except that Chris didn’t know the name of her handler and probably didn’t have a photograph. The other problem was the burner phone. She’d followed every protocol on the phone, only ever using it with one person, as recommended by the CIA, and the phone was never left switched on. She would assemble it, use it quickly for voice or text communication, and then depower and disassemble it again, leaving the pieces in the lockbox under the driver’s seat of the BMW, where she also kept her SIG Sauer 9mm.
The second amaretto arrived. She picked it up, gazed into its mysterious colour and inhaled the fragrance. It calmed her. There was a wrinkle in her phone protocol: one short call, one evening, when she was running late and her personal iPhone had no charge. She’d made the call for family reasons but the person at the other end was so random, with so little connection to her world, that she’d deemed it low risk. Very low risk.
She smiled to herself, and drank the amaretto in one hit. The DGSE were good, but not that good.