Briffaut took the meeting at the Cat through the events of the previous twenty-four hours: the Maypole with the Turks, the reticence about talking publicly of the risk of a terrorist attack and the agreement with the Turkish services to deal with it below the radar. Since the Turks would never interfere with a Russian operation, the French had told the Turks the attack had been planned by their enemy General Haftar but would be carried out under the false flag of a Libyan militia.
‘Turkey is always careful with the bear,’ said Briffaut, ‘but they also hate terrorists.’
Christophe Sturt frowned. ‘Will the two of them—Zelenskyy and Kolomoisky—be at this gas conference?’
Briffaut shrugged. ‘It could go that way. They’ve appeared together before, and the Tirol Council consultant believes they might have something to announce.’
The DR director was under pressure; Briffaut could tell by the way he chewed his bottom lip. Sturt would be required to advise the Director General of the DGSE, whose office would impart the day’s intelligence to the President’s office at the Élysée. While such a position gave Sturt standing within the Company, it also put him in the headlights. If the French services were interrupting a Russian operation, then the fiction of French neutrality towards Russia started to look thin.
Sturt asked, ‘If Ukraine makes so much money from hosting Russian gas pipelines into Europe, why would they invest in the EastMed pipeline?’
‘They’d do it for money,’ said Magnus, ‘but they’d also do it as a hedge against Putin switching off the gas through Ukraine. The United States has withdrawn support for EastMed, so Kolomoisky has an opportunity to take leadership and ensure his investment is successful.’
■
Back at the Bunker, Briffaut sat at his desk and brooded. It wasn’t unusual for politics and national security to collide at a SCIF meeting, but the inclusion of gas was making him nervous. When the Élysée had been lobbying the Merkel government to drop its plans for Nord Stream 2, the French Ministry of Economics and Finance had concluded that a sudden switching-off of Russian gas—if Germany was relying on Nord Stream 2—would have catastrophic effects on Western Europe. Energy would quickly become too expensive for households and businesses, and the real winners would be LNG exporters, the United States and Qatar, who would charge the spot price, pushing up the price of gas and electricity even further. The efforts of the French government to stop Germany going ahead with Nord Stream 2 had been unsuccessful, and had been complicated by Berlin’s campaign to have France’s nuclear power excluded from Europe’s green energy framework.
Briffaut felt responsible for cracking the information racket that was luring France into a position on Russia. He stared at a blue file that sat on his desk. It contained the printed still shots from Shrek’s surveillance of the Red Lion hotel. The pictures had already been run through France’s database of ‘faces’ but there had been no matches. The images had also been disseminated in the DR section, with no luck there either. Perhaps the Red Lion really had ceased to be the CIA’s antenna in Paris, and Gabby Castigan had a genuine reason to be there?
He was about to put the folder into his safe but decided the pictures could be of use on the Operation Ellipse or Operation Bellbird trombinoscopes. He walked into op room four and found Templar there.
‘How’s the leg?’ asked Briffaut, taking a seat beside him at the table.
‘Not broken, but it’s swollen,’ said Templar. ‘At least I’ve still got my looks.’
‘Did you see the note from the techs?’ asked Briffaut, indicating a white ring binder labelled Operation Bellbird—Handler Calls.
Templar looked: a post-it stuck on the hard cover noted that in eighteen days of phone logs from the handler’s phone, only one looked genuine and had not been verified.
‘I want all the boxes ticked on this Krause–Zeitz ring,’ said Briffaut. ‘Short of finding them, let’s work out who they were talking to.’
Templar flipped to the marked page and saw the pink highlighter underlining the unverified number. It was registered in the name of Jabir Okimba, with an address in the eastern Paris suburb of Gagny.
‘I’ll get Paulin on it, leave it with me.’
‘Go easy on the Percodan,’ said Briffaut as he left the room. ‘I need you sharp.’