It was 9.32 p.m. when Paul disembarked at Charles de Gaulle and headed for the RER to get lost in the crowds and complete his last safety route alone before returning home. At the boarding area for the Paris-bound RER, the information panel indicated that the next train had been delayed by forty-five minutes due to a signal failure. Degarde was tired and wanted to go home. Though he knew he should follow procedures, he considered that no opposing service was following him, so he returned to the terminal and went to the taxi stand. Putting a slight feeling of professional guilt to the back of his mind, he got into his assigned taxi and gave the driver his address, then he turned on his phone and texted his wife: Just leaving the airport. I’ll be home in 35 minutes.
■
The following morning, Degarde ate breakfast with Katie and Louise and then took the Metro to Porte des Lilas, emerging in the twentieth arrondissement just before 9 a.m. It was still cold enough to warrant gloves and his black woollen beanie as he walked towards the Company’s headquarters. He wasn’t too concerned with his ‘hygiene’—he’d walked his security routes the previous day in Prague before going to the airport, and he didn’t feel the need to do another before entering the Centre Administratif des Tourelles, known colloquially as the Cat, even though he knew many OTs did. Instead, he was anticipating his debriefing with sector manager, Marie Lafont, at 3 p.m. He’d have time to drop the camera’s SD card with the Technical Division—the DT—before writing his report. He was eager to get the photos of the documents before lunch so he could analyse them before the debriefing. Lafont could be forensic about source materials.
He entered the DGSE building on Boulevard Mortier, known as La Piscine by many employees because it was beside an indoor swimming pool where so many of them exercised. He passed through the many security points. A hotchpotch of Napoleonic and late 1960s architecture, with a modern American overlay, the headquarters of France’s foreign intelligence service looked like it had been constructed to completely confuse an outsider.
He walked downstairs to the DT’s basement level, which was vast and ran under Boulevard Mortier into the building over the road. In the administrative area he dropped the SD card with a techie who sported a Flock of Seagulls haircut and a t-shirt with a picture of an audio cassette, and asked for the ‘prod’ to be sent to his office.
Degarde went back upstairs to the cafeteria to grab a coffee and pain au chocolat, and seeing four of his colleagues on the velvet benches at one of the round tables he wandered over to join them.
‘Haven’t seen you for a couple of days, Paul,’ said Stefan, a DR analyst on Degarde’s floor who worked at the Africa section. ‘You been on a trip?’
‘Yes,’ said Degarde, unable to repress a proud smile. ‘But I can’t tell you more than that. You don’t have the need to know.’
His colleagues laughed.
‘James Bond for a day,’ said Romain Precheur, the Counter-Proliferation analyst.
‘Well, he’d better learn to drink a martini,’ said Stefan. ‘Last time I saw Paul drinking gin, he threw up on himself.’
‘Bond drinks vodka martinis,’ said Romain.
‘Even worse,’ said Stefan. ‘Paul passes out with vodka.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Degarde, smiling as he stirred sugar into his coffee. ‘The only thing I can tell you is that the quality of the prod is as good as the girls in the country I visited.’
‘Let’s hope you weren’t in Pakistan then, mon pote,’ said Stefan, which triggered more laughter.
He walked the stairs up into the main building, and entered his office by inputting the week’s digital code. In front of him were various files containing information grabbed by sources over the previous months. He was expected to take in strands of information and synthesise pieces of a puzzle. He had barely closed the door behind him when there was a knock. He opened it to find an internal courier, who handed him a sealed envelope containing the printed documents retrieved from his SD card. Closing the door again, he perused the contents closely. One of the documents Lotus had supplied was an email in Russian about an event scheduled for two weeks’ time in Monaco, aboard a yacht called Azzam. Degarde couldn’t remember this email from his quick verification in Prague. The Russian term for ‘making a deal’ was used in the email and the language suggested a very high level of discussion. There was also a phone number listed for an unidentified person who seemed to be a person of interest, a POI, for the Russians.
Degarde knew immediately that Lafont would want more detail, so he left his office and walked down to the department that generated intelligence from Open Sources. He asked them to research Azzam and have the information for him by 2 p.m. Back in his office he called the DT, thanked them for the SD images and asked for a ‘phone environment’ on the phone number in the email; if they succeeded, it would tell him where the phone was being used. Then he opened the reports section of the DGSE computer system and wrote two reports. One was for the analysts, an ‘O’ report written objectively that did not allow the reader to see the identity of the writer or the sources of the intelligence, and the other one was called ‘R’ and explained how the contact with Lotus was done and the security measures he took around it.
As Degarde filed the reports, the internal courier knocked at his door and dropped off a file that contained pictures, specifications and ownership details of Azzam. It was an eighty-two-metre, ten-stateroom motor yacht, Degarde learned, built in the Netherlands in 2017 at a cost of seventy-eight million euros. It was owned by a UAE shell company and its home port was Port Vell, Barcelona. It didn’t feature in any social pages and it didn’t appear to be owned by a movie star or a Silicon Valley billionaire. There wasn’t much on Azzam, but that wouldn’t stop Lafont asking for more.
■
At 2.58 p.m. Degarde dropped his iPhone in the box outside the E sector briefing room on the third floor and took a seat at the large oval meeting table, across from the current head of BER–Europe, Lars Magnus. Magnus was tall and youngish and seemed a little spooked by the presence of his immediate predecessor in the role, Marie Lafont, who sat beside him. Marie Lafont was a well-dressed brunette in her early forties. She was smart and driven and had field experience, which set her apart from many of the careerists at the Company. Now a sector manager, she was running this operation. She didn’t acknowledge Degarde’s arrival; she was on the phone, asking someone to join them. After a quick conversation she hung up and turned to Degarde. ‘Based on the prod I received this morning, I asked Briffaut to sit in. He should be here soon.’
Degarde nodded and smiled but his stomach clenched. Dominic Briffaut was the head of Y Division; he didn’t often leave the Bunker, as the headquarters of clandestine operations was known, to come for idle chats at the Cat.
‘We need to know what they’re planning on that boat,’ said Lafont. ‘And we need a phone environment to locate this number in the email.’
‘It’s done, boss,’ Degarde said, relieved he’d taken the initiative.
The bearish form of Dominic Briffaut entered the room, mug of coffee in his hand. He threw his coat on one of the spare chairs before taking a seat. ‘I have twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you’ve got.’
Lafont took Briffaut through the document drop in Prague and the information gained from it, including the intelligence drones being staged in Khmeimim Air Base, the new SVR intelligence postings at Tartus, and the meeting in Monaco aboard Azzam; so far, there was nothing to connect the phone number of the POI to the meeting on the yacht, she added.
Briffaut nodded through the briefing, asking only a few clarifying questions. The two senior people were economical with their words, Degarde noticed. And Magnus—despite being the head of BER–E—stayed out of it.
When Lafont had finished, Briffaut turned to Degarde, focusing on him. ‘You’ve dealt with Lotus more than anyone. Was there anything different about our Georgian friend in Prague?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Degarde. ‘I never talk to him. I collect the prod and I give him the money.’
‘Sometimes a man doesn’t speak with words,’ said Lafont, with a very faint smile.
‘Was there more eye contact than you’re used to?’ Briffaut pushed. ‘Did he try to start a conversation?’
Degarde shook his head. ‘It was business as usual.’
The Y Division chief stared at Degarde in silence for a few seconds, then he stood, grabbed his coat and, talking to Lafont, said, ‘I’ll leave you to find out more about that phone number and I’ll investigate a way on to the boat. Let’s talk tomorrow.’
And then he was gone.
■
Back in his office, Degarde found a message from the DT: the phone number on the Lotus prod had been used in Genoa several times in the past twenty-four hours. He sent an internal email to Lafont to let her know, then put all the material he’d amassed in his office safe, shut down his computer and headed to the Metro. He mulled over the debriefing as he travelled home. It had not gone terribly—after all, he’d retrieved the documents without screwing up the mission—but the prod had delivered more questions than answers. The Russians were increasing their presence on the Syrian coast, and the Palais de l’Élysée would expect the French security services to tell them why. And it was important that the Company get the information to the President before the Americans or the British could do it.
It was a little before 7 p.m. when he turned the key in the door to the mid-nineteenth-century apartment in the thirteenth—the rent was subsidised, thanks to Katie’s connections—and let himself in. No murmur of a TV or squawk from an Xbox. That meant Louise might be reading, which made Degarde happy; he was tired of nagging her about screen time.
He hung up his coat, walked past the kitchen and froze at the tableau before him.
Three men in black balaclavas. His child on the sofa, crying. His wife on her knees, hands tied behind her back, a hand holding her blonde hair in a gloved fist.
‘Who are you?’ Degarde demanded, but instead of answering the man closest to him took one step towards him and swung a black handgun that caught Degarde in front of the right ear. Degarde staggered sideways into the sideboard, and a vase toppled from it and smashed on the floor.
‘Dad!’ screamed Louise, and the third masked man slapped the child hard with the back of his hand. Her mother screamed before a big hand was clamped over her mouth.
As Degarde pushed himself off the sideboard, he could see his wife’s blue panties on the Persian rug beside the television screen, ripped at the sides. As he tried to stand, his vision swimming, his assailant kicked him in the balls. Degarde sagged to his knees, retching from the pain.
‘So,’ said the man holding his struggling wife. ‘Our friend lives like a king in beautiful Paris, eh boys?’
His French was good but heavily accented. Russian.
‘What do you want?’ gasped Degarde, switching to Russian. ‘My family have no part in this.’
‘So why bring them into it?’ asked the Russian, his grip on Katie’s face tightening. ‘You make another country your business and then claim you are immune? The French have such a sense of humour.’
Louise stirred on the floor. Degarde could see she was crying, tears running down her bruised face onto her Paris Saint-Germain shirt. She didn’t have Katie’s blonde hair, but the dark curls of Degarde’s mother. They framed a face full of fear and despair, and this hurt Degarde more than his aching testicles.
‘Let them go,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
The lead man chuckled. ‘You hear that, boys? He’s offering to talk.’
The man who’d assaulted Degarde also laughed. He grabbed the collar of Degarde’s woollen jumper and leaned in. ‘You’ll talk, all right, Comrade. You’ll beg to do it.’
Degarde tried to reply but the handgun slammed into his face again, and the scene before him went black.