The cabin was an outside double, giving him a view of the starboard decks through a window rather than a porthole. De Payns hadn’t realised there was a choice, but now counted himself lucky to have a cabin with an alternative exit should someone come through the door.
Having showered, he sat in the darkness, sitting on one of the single beds but leaning against the wall so he could see the deck when he looked sideways through the curtains. The arrival time in Naples was shortly before 7 a.m., and he was sure no one from that silver Mercedes had followed him onto the ferry. If they really thought Alain Dupuis was a problem, the Sayef Albar operators would use their limited resources to surveil Palermo’s hotels and the airport – the ferry terminus at Naples would probably not be a priority. Taking the ferry gave him the night to think through what he was going to do. He had no phone, no credit card, no gun. The red sticker with the cross through it was a signal from de Payns—he was on his own, expected to reappear at the Bunker without Company assistance.
He pulled his pack from the floor and turned on the cabin’s bedside light. He upturned the pack and an apple and a muesli bar in its wrapper fell onto the grey blanket, along with his wallet and sunglasses, a half-pack of Marlboro Lights and a cheap plastic lighter. He took two bites of the apple and, as he chewed, stood and looked in the mirror of the vanity basin. He was fairly well preserved for thirty-eight; the pale eyes still lively, the sandy blond hair short and swept back and his skin still glowing with outdoors activity rather than being ravaged by the sun. His bare torso showed a couple of scars, and his arms and back contained a map of fights and high school rugby accidents etched into the skin. The white line down his left forearm came from the surgeons’ attempt to put his shattered arm together after a motorbike accident in his last year of boarding school, and the wounds at the base of his spine were reminders of the surgery he underwent after injuring his back as a fighter pilot in the air force. But for someone who was almost forty, he thought, he had at least retained enough muscle to look after himself in a fight.
His wife, Romy, used to tell him that she liked his youthfulness, which she was sure came from him doing what he enjoyed. By which she meant his time in the air force flying fighter jets. By which she meant she was sick of his subsequent intelligence career and the strain it was putting on their marriage. By which she meant, he wasn’t so boyish anymore, which was basically true. He sometimes wondered how he’d got to be like this—reserving his light-heartedness and laughter for when he was drinking with his colleagues, the only people he truly felt safe with. He’d heard this was an occupational hazard but he hadn’t known what it meant until he realised that his DGSE buddies were the ones who saw the real him while his wife was seeing someone else. It was a professional trade-off that ended in suicide for some and alcoholism for others. Divorce was the rule, not the exception.
He finished the apple, grabbed his smokes and made for the deck outside his room. He torched the cigarette and exhaled the smoke like he was blowing his stress into the sea. The warm breeze from Africa washed over him; the swish of the sea against the ferry was hypnotic. To his left, a bunch of drunk English tourists hee-hawed over something on a smartphone. He smoked methodically, relaxed by the rolling swell and the fragrance of the Med in summer. It had been a long road to get here, and he wasn’t even that old. His journey into the Company started after the Kosovo War, when he was based at Villacoublay Air Base outside Paris, flying special forces and intelligence personnel into the Balkans to find war criminals. It was an uncertain time in his life, when he’d left fighter jets because of his back injury and was trying to establish a new reputation in the TBM 700—a powerful, nimble turboprop plane that could take off and land on very short air strips. He flew without name or insignia on his suit. He flew low at night, without flight plans in VFR mode, relying on sight rather than instruments, sometimes with the IFF identification transponder switched off, or its ‘Mode C’ deactivated, meaning the control towers on the ground couldn’t ascertain his altitude. His destination would often be relayed to him only after they’d cleared the Adriatic. He was told to ignore the usual rules of aviation, and de Payns once landed in three feet of snow at Sarajevo, at two in the morning, without clearance and in total darkness. It was dangerous, stressful work and he loved it.
He ended up in intelligence because of the general who was the passenger on so many of his clandestine flights. The general was conducting a DGSE operation to find Serbian war criminals, and one of the flights involved a top-secret meeting in Podgorica. De Payns smiled now at the passing sea, thinking back to that fancy lunch where the Serbians hadn’t realised the general spoke their language and thus was aware that the translator the Serbs had supplied was lying to the French. There were eight men at lunch around that rectangular table in the hotel’s huge dining room, and after they’d eaten the general had whispered to de Payns: At my signal, you drop your napkin. And when you pickup the napkin, look under the table—if they all have guns on their knees, put the napkin on the table; if they don’t have guns, put the napkin on your knee.
De Payns dropped his napkin and looked—all the Serbs had guns on their knees. He put his napkin on the table and the general started to talk in Serbian, letting the Serbs know that for the last eighteen months the French had been listening in to their private discussions.
Then the two Frenchmen had stood and walked out to the driver waiting in the Audi A8 and were whisked to the plane at high speed. They took off for Mostar without lights and flew at low altitude to avoid detection by the Serbs.
That early informal work with the Company had been noticed, probably by the general himself. And after his second spinal surgery, when de Payns was grounded for a while, he was asked to apply to the DGSE. After a tough year-long induction course, a new career had unfolded.
He took one last look up and down the ship’s deck, then returned to his cabin, where he washed his hands and hit the lights.
De Payns lay awake in the dark, thinking about an old source of his that he had managed to entice to turn on his country. And how, when the source was caught, the first response of his own secret service was to harm his wife and son. It seemed likely that the episode had resulted from a leak in Paris. And now de Payns wondered about the operation that had gone wrong in Palermo. Had it too been subject to a leak? And, if so, was the same person involved?
He had to avoid leaping at shadows, he warned himself, as he consciously slowed his breathing and waited for the day.
Shortly after 7 a.m., de Payns walked with the crowds down the rear ramp and onto firm ground at the western side of Naples harbour. He moved with the families onto the concrete quay, joking and smiling with the kids around him while scanning for watchers. The sky was overcast but the air was warm. In front of him was the service road that buses and taxis used to drop passengers at the terminal buildings, parallel with a main city boulevard, though separated by concrete barriers. To his left were mid-nineteenth-century maritime buildings, and to his right Vesuvius overlooked the bay. He walked towards the service road, past parked taxis and people greeting each other and putting their bags in the back of cars. A bus’s diesel hummed as tourists waited for the driver to pull their suitcases out of the belly of the vehicle.
Nothing out of place. Only tourists. No one unattached. No loitering vans. Any watchers would have stood out. De Payns had reversed his windbreaker jacket, so that what was black yesterday was cream-coloured as he left the ferry—a desilhouettage. He’d usually do that in a rupture—a disappearance act once a follower had been ‘put to sleep’. But he was feeling edgy, and he stayed in the middle of two groups as they walked off the quay and across the main road at the pedestrian crossing. He walked north along the Corso, stopping at a panetteria that had its entry on a cross street just around the corner from the Corso. He bought a cup of coffee and a cornetto, while waiting for followers to barrel around the corner and realise they’d lost the Frenchman. But no one came. In the normal run of events, an itinéraire de sécurité that took him out of the mission zone, followed by an effective rupture that lost any residual followers, would have been enough. It would have meant a return to being a relaxed ‘tourist’ on the street. But Operation Falcon had ended badly and he was on high alert.
He scanned the still-quiet street as he stepped onto the pavement, sipping his coffee. He seemed to be clean. After a ten-minute walk, de Payns turned east into the precinct of railway stations and bus terminals and walked to the vast entrance of Napoli Centrale. Inside the double doors, Naples’ main railway station was buzzing. He moved to the cigarette machine and bought a packet of Marlboros with change, ensuring there was no one either on the ground level or the mezzanines looking down on him. The Centrale had a modern interior of the type that would have surveillance cameras. It was something that couldn’t be avoided in most European train stations, especially in the major terminals that serviced trains from other countries. De Payns pulled on his cap and, crossing the concourse, waited in the ticketing queue behind an Italian woman who yelled into her phone. He put on a smile as he reached the counter.
‘One to Marseille—standard, thanks,’ said de Payns, speaking in English to further misdirect any tails.
‘To Marseille leaves at nine twenty-five. One stop, Milan,’ the woman told him.
De Payns paid for the ticket in cash and wandered to the platform, where he found a seat that let him see both ends of the platform, then lit a smoke. It was one of the guilty pleasures of Italian train travel that they still allowed smokers on the platforms.
His carriage was second-to-last and had only ten other passengers in it—mothers with kids, Nonna and Poppa and a bunch of schoolgirls who seemed to be returning from a weekend in Naples.
As the train pulled from the station, he thought about what had happened in Sicily. How far back had the Sayef Albar people been on to him? That polite Pakistani he saw on the ferry to Palermo—was that a hand-off from Lambardi to his handler? And was the handler Murad? Sayef Albar must have been told that de Payns had French passports. Had Lambardi been ordered to confirm this?
De Payns realised he’d been holding his breath. He let it out in a hiss. He suspected his adversaries knew more than him, and he didn’t like it; he had to build up his own side of the story. How had Shrek known to call off the operation? Was his Alain Dupuis identity compromised? Had Shrek got out of Bar Luca without the cops or the terrorists grabbing him? Where had they slipped up?
If he had ten questions, the Company would have one hundred. The DGSE was famously hard on its field operatives when they came home to debrief. As one of his old instructors had warned him, building a genuine cover is only part of the puzzle; the other part is getting your story straight for the debriefers at the Cat. The administration people wanted to know where the money was spent and the managers wanted to know who the officer met. The intelligence officers—the DR, or Direction du Renseignement, the Intelligence Directorate—wanted to know exactly what words and phrases were used in conversations, and the specialist groups might sit in and pepper an agent with questions about nuclear triggers, bioweapons or whatever the operation had touched on. But most of all, if an operation initiated by the Company was called off and someone had been killed, the senior levels would arrive with their ambitious hangers-on and an OT would spend all day with four or five people trying to outdo one another with their suspicions. Such was the French secret services: Pas vu, pas pris; pris, pendu—not seen, not caught; caught, hanged.
His version of events would have to pass muster with two different masters. The first was Christophe Sturt, the director of the Direction du Renseignement. The DR was home to highly educated and ambitious analysts and managers whose requests for information were the initial triggers for missions such as Operation Falcon. Sturt would feel ownership of Falcon, and so would de Payns’ other master, the director of the Direction des Opérations, Anthony Frasier. Frasier would make an appearance because someone had died, in a foreign country, on an operation he was legally responsible for. He would have the right to chair the debrief, but his 2IC—the head of Y Division, Dominic Briffaut—would run the blow-by-blow questioning. Briffaut was a former army special forces operator who had switched to the DGSE twenty years ago. He could be hard on his operators, but was also very protective.
But if his masters had a plethora of questions for him, de Payns had one big question for them: Was there a traitor inside the Company?