Briffaut was exhausted as he approached his office. Too many sleepless nights were eroding his sharpness and he hoped he wouldn’t miss a small but crucial detail.
He was reaching for his door when Mattieu Garrat, his 2IC, stepped into his path.
‘Dominic, can I grab you for a second?’ asked Garrat, looking around furtively.
They adjourned to op room four, where the trombinoscopes of two operations loomed on the far wall and a long trestle table contained files and mounds of paper in various states of organisation. It was an operation still in progress, not at conclusion.
‘The picture file from the SIS Maypole was in my office,’ said Garrat, ‘so I brought it down for Aguilar to file.’
‘Okay,’ said Briffaut, stifling a yawn.
‘Aline was in here stacking the prod,’ his deputy continued, ‘so I gave her the file and we had a quick look through it. It wasn’t considered of interest the first time around, since the British had what we had, but this time I saw something …’
‘Yes?’ prompted Briffaut, almost swooning with fatigue.
Garrat flipped to a page with a photograph of a good-looking woman in her mid-thirties, dark hair. The image was not good, reflecting the fact it was probably grabbed from CCTV footage, and made more indistinct by the sunglasses the woman wore.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Briffaut, pulling the file towards him. He squinted. ‘Shit, is that Christine Zeitz?’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Garrat. ‘It’s just a file picture that the SIS uses for Zeitz. It was taken in Larnaca a year ago. It’s not considered important to our operation.’
‘Okay,’ said Briffaut, getting impatient. ‘So why are you showing it to me?’
‘Look closely at the picture,’ said Garratt. ‘It’s been blown up to get Zeitz’s face, but there’s someone else’s hair in the background. I don’t know why, I just had a feeling about it, so I called the SIS and asked for the original frame.’
‘And they sent it?’
‘I was owed a favour for that time when—’
‘Don’t tell me.’
‘So, this is the original frame,’ said Garrat, producing another print. In it, a woman was standing beside Christine Zeitz at the foot of the gangway onto a yacht.
‘Do we know the boat?’ asked Briffaut, interested now.
‘It’s the Melissa,’ said Garrat, smiling broadly. ‘Our British friends have access to the security cameras at its home port of Larnaca.’
‘Who’s the woman beside Zeitz? Is she anyone?’
‘She’s this person,’ said Garrat, presenting him with a glossy 8 × 10 print. ‘I did a demande de criblage on her a year ago.’
Briffaut stared at him. ‘We checked this woman?!’
‘Yes, full security clearance, and DGS came back negative.’
‘Who asked for the DDC?’ asked Briffaut.
Garrat flipped to the note from the DGS, the internal security division of the DGSE.
Briffaut read it and his breath caught in his throat. ‘Holy shit. Don’t tell a soul about this—that’s an order!’