Prague in early February wasn’t all that bad, thought Paul Degarde, even for a southern Frenchman accustomed to the Mediterranean warmth. There was no snow on the ground in the Czech capital, but Degarde waited in the Jungmann Square Starbucks, where his toes wouldn’t freeze. He’d been in his holding zone for forty minutes. He’d walked his safety route before arriving at the coffee shop, however last night’s insomnia and the seven coffees he’d drunk were not calming. For now, he focused on not fidgeting or looking impatient, both ‘tells’ that watchers would look for.
At forty-four minutes, Degarde wrapped a plain scarf around his neck, covertly dismantled his phone and poured the pieces into his jacket pocket. Standing, he picked up a tourist camera from the table in front of him, dropped it in his other pocket, and emerged into the afternoon. The cold air tightened his jaw as he moved through Jungmann Square, his gait relaxed but his mind a laundry list of actions and contingencies. Paul Degarde may have been a fully commissioned case officer—an officier traitant, or OT—of the DGSE, France’s foreign secret service, but he was not from Operations. His academic background in Russian foreign policy, and his fluency in the Russian language, had seen him recruited as an analyst by the Company twenty years earlier. For analysts who worked with the DR—the Direction du Renseignement, the Intelligence Division of the Company—some basic training in clandestine liaison was required, which he’d used at his two embassy external posts in Greece and Turkey. There were rules for how he conducted himself in the field, even if his job was the relatively low risk processing of human sources.
He had six minutes between Starbucks and his contact point. He had to be nonchalant while detecting and memorising everything on the route. He knew from his field work that once he was back in Paris someone from the DO—Direction des Operations—could gatecrash a debrief and start asking detailed questions about who and what was around him during a meeting or a route.
He walked across Františkánská Zahrada Park, through the Světozor passage with the tourist crowds and came out in Vodičkova Street, where he turned right to create a visual ‘loss’ for potential followers. He walked fifty metres up the street before crossing it, giving him an excuse to look for traffic and determine followers.
He moved into a medieval walkway, past a line of eight advertising panels and walked at a slight angle to them so as to remove a convenient line of sight for any followers. He advanced to a set of steps at the end of the lane where a luminous sign indicated Kino Lucerna. Inside the building’s gallery, a horse was suspended upside down from the vaulted ceiling. He took a few photos, playing out his tourist legend and allowing a final check for followers. By the time he lowered his camera he knew he was clean. If things went wrong, the camera shots would let the Company know his location before he disappeared. He pushed the thought of capture from his head. Unlike the DO operatives, he had his secret weapon, right against his heart in his jacket pocket: his diplomatic passport.
He climbed the stairs to the cafe, choosing a table located slightly back from the bay windows, with a view of the gallery and the stairs. Lotus was due to arrive at 3 p.m., which left Degarde fifteen minutes to sit and watch.
He ordered a coffee and prepared for the wolf to show the tip of his nose. The main operational security method he had to adhere to when managing clandestine ‘drops’ was the itinéraire de sécurité—IS—which involved walking routes, finding angles, checking in reflections and creating points de passage obligés—zones that a follower had to commit to in order to maintain their ‘tail’, and which made it obvious they were following. Besides the IS there was also a hygiene protocol called the ‘tourniquet’, which involved a team of least two OTs, who would overwatch a security route and ‘clear’ an operative out of their mission zone, ensuring no followers. He didn’t have a team overwatching this operation so he focused on his tradecraft and waited, controlling his breathing and refraining from fidgeting. If Lotus was a no-show after twenty-five minutes, he’d play it by the book: there was never a compelling need to wait more than ten minutes past the agreed meet time.
He’d arrived from Paris the previous morning and at his hotel, the Old Royal Post, he’d asked to be moved to another room immediately after check-in. Then he’d walked to the French embassy, located west of the Vltava River. Degarde considered the Vltava to be the natural demarcation between his life and mission zones: in his mission zone, he was a spy whose every movement and interaction was controlled by the Company; in his life zone he was a mid-level diplomat with declared duties, none of them controversial.
At the baroque palace that housed the French embassy, Degarde had met the chief of station, who worked under the cover of cultural attaché of the embassy. He’d briefed the local DGSE man on the real purpose of his visit and the backup he would need if the contact with his source did not go as planned. Contact with an already-recruited source did not usually necessitate a DO protection scheme, so Degarde was responsible for his own safety.
Now, as he sipped his coffee in the Café Lucerna, his Paris apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement, where his wife Katie and daughter, Louise, were waiting for him, seemed very far away. He tried not to think about Paris. Some operatives in the Company could spend weeks in the field under these conditions, somehow remaining calm and focused and keeping their families in a separate mental compartment. He didn’t know how they did it. Instead, he turned his mind to the meeting with Lotus—the codename for Lado Devashvili, a former member of the Georgian government who’d branched into the business world in the early 1990s when the Soviet bloc fell. Devashvili spent very little time in Tbilisi with his family, given his job kept him so busy meeting prostitutes at luxury hotels. Lotus provided everything that might be required by a foreign government or its contractors: drugs, escorts, boats, planes, IDs and weapons. What the DGSE required was hard-to-come-by intelligence. There was no collusion between the Company and Lotus, only an exchange of documents for cash. Degarde had spoken to him once, through the operational agent of the DO who had recruited Lotus and transitioned Degarde to become the handler. That three-way meeting in Vienna had been a memorable one for Degarde—not just because he’d met Lotus for the first time, but because he’d met the well-known Aguilar, from the DGSE’s Y Division, the section responsible for clandestine operations. Lotus’s face resembled a metal plate chiselled for many years by expensive vodka bottles, in the centre of which sat two small, sunken eyes. Even Lotus had been wary around Aguilar, Degarde noted. After the meeting, Aguilar had warned Degarde to be particularly cautious around Lotus. ‘Avoid talking to him, and always be very careful to carry out your personal security measures. Imagine you’re dealing with a cobra in a round room.’
Since that initial encounter, Degarde had met Lotus clandestinely in the major cities of various European countries, always under the guise of business trips. Degarde contacted Lotus via the standard liaison plan, making an appointment and stating his needs, and the Georgian appeared miraculously to pass on information that was generally considered high quality. While impressed by the level of information, Degarde would have preferred not to come within five hundred kilometres of the man.
At 3.01 p.m., a tall, fat man wearing a long coat entered the Lucerna’s gallery. Lotus was well within the Company’s accepted –1/+2 minutes window for a contact. His tweed trilby hat was in his hand rather than on his head, indicating that he didn’t think he’d been followed, however Degarde’s position gave him a view of everyone who came into the building behind the Georgian. Degarde took the green Geo magazine from his bag and put it on the table in front of him, indicating to Lotus that he’d detected no followers and the exchange could proceed.
Lotus crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and climbed the marble stairs to the cafe, where he sat at a free table between Degarde and the exit. He put his hat on the table, took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and put it next to the hat, then signalled to a waitress and ordered a whisky. Degarde paid his bill—keeping the receipt so he could charge his coffee to his mission expenses—and stood up. Tucking his magazine under his arm, he walked to the exit. As he passed Lotus’s table, he let his hand drag and retrieved the packet of cigarettes. Lotus did not react. Everything happened so naturally that only a trained observer would have seen the drop.
Degarde walked down the marble stairs to the foyer, and left through an exit that neither man had used when they arrived. He turned right and headed towards the National Museum, pausing along the way to take tourist snaps. At the statue of Saint Wenceslas he entered the adjacent Metro station, turned left at the bottom of the stairs, and walked with the crowd towards the disabled toilet. After locking himself in, Degarde pulled the packet of cigarettes from his pocket and opened it to reveal four tightly folded A4 sheets. Three of them were printouts of emails, containing the names and addresses of the senders. Degarde skimmed them: in Russian, the writers of the emails asked Lotus to set up various services for their benefit in the Cypriot city of Larnaca, and also on the Lebanese and Syrian coasts in the Mediterranean. Degarde felt his blood run cold as he unfolded the fourth sheet and saw the letterhead. It was a classified document from the Russian defence ministry indicating the appointment of specialist agents from the SVR, the civil foreign intelligence agency, at the Russian military base at Tartus in Syria, and the deployment of intelligence drones at the Khmeimim Air Base, another Russian facility in Syria. He wondered how such a significant document had fallen into Lotus’s hands, and decided it warranted staying an extra night in Prague to play out his tourist legend. His training emphasised that if an OT had any doubts while in the field, or had a sense of heightened risk, they should put any followers ‘to sleep’ by spending hours wandering a city in tourist mode, with no hint of training.
He took his small camera out of his pocket and, after setting the sheets flat on the floor, photographed them twice each, making sure to erase each photo as soon as it was taken. His glasses slipped over his nose and his hand was shaking. The Company’s Technical Division would retrieve data from the camera’s memory card upon its return, and the numbers of the remaining photos would follow each other in the event of an inspection.
Having roughly verified the content of the drop, it was time to move to the second phase of his contact: remuneration. Degarde tore the sheets into tiny pieces and let them fall into the toilet. He would have liked to proudly exhibit the Russian classified document to colleagues at his intelligence desk, or ‘BER’—it was quite a coup—but he wasn’t going to travel across Europe with such a dangerous prize in his possession. He flushed the toilet several times, removed an envelope from his bag which he placed in his jacket pocket, then he left the bathroom and took the westbound Metro line. No longer carrying compromising material, he began to feel calmer as the train picked up speed. But he would only breathe easily on the plane back to Paris, he knew, when this was all over.
He emerged from Mustek station and walked through the pretty streets of old Prague until he arrived at Svateho Jilji church, entering the building through the side door on Zlatá Street. Lotus sat alone in the first row of the left aisle, seemingly deep in prayer. Degarde wondered which saint would listen to him. Apart from a few tourists and a priest checking his candles, the church was otherwise empty. Degarde sat at the other end of Lotus’s pew and, without turning his head from the transept, took the envelope from his pocket and placed it gently between them. Inside was ten thousand euros, which Lotus would probably spend on vodka and a girl. With this Christian thought, Degarde stood and crossed himself, as Lotus put his hat on the envelope.
Degarde walked down the central aisle and stepped out onto Husova Street. He plunged into the small passage in front of the church, to the left of the beer museum, and set about exiting his mission zone.
He walked past the medieval torture museum and over the seven-hundred-year-old Charles Bridge, which was the point de passage obligé leading to his life zone. For followers to stay on his heels, they would have to reveal themselves on the bridge. He breathed out slowly when he reached the far bank and took some tourist snaps, turning to face the way he’d come. He was on the alert for someone he might have noticed earlier in the day, without announcing that he was looking. But he saw no faces he’d seen before, and no ‘parasite gestures’ that were supposed to look natural but were forced.
He took another photo, committing to the role of tourist now. He would spend the next twenty-four hours meandering the streets and visiting museums, taking a hundred shots of Prague. He wished he could show his wife and daughter this city, so beautiful under the late winter sun, and so relaxing when you didn’t have to retrieve secret documents from one of the Company’s most dangerous sources.
Considering himself clean, he hurried up the stairs into the lobby of the Old Royal Post and asked to extend his stay for an extra night; there was just so much to see in this beautiful city, he told the woman on reception. Then he went up to his room and changed his flight.
■
After buying souvenirs in the airport’s departures concourse, Degarde sat at the bar and ordered a whisky. He was exhausted. The extra day in Prague had been spent walking in his office shoes, and his feet ached. Easing back in his seat, he rummaged in his jacket pocket, took out the various pieces of his phone, put it together, and turned it on. He was pleased to see that there was no missed call from Katie. Even though he’d been away a night longer than planned, she would have understood that he couldn’t break from his legend to call her. He sent a text to the embassy’s ‘cultural attaché’, thanking him for his time and his welcome, then pulled the battery from the phone again. The chief of station would understand that Degarde was at the airport and all was well.
Degarde took a sip of his drink, thinking of those documents he had briefly seen in the bathroom. Tartus and Khmeimim. Why would Moscow send more SVR men there? What were the Russians preparing in the Mediterranean?
The flight to Paris was announced. Degarde drained his whisky and joined the queue to board, thinking that James Bond could not have done better.