De Payns and Templar kept it light during the eight-minute drive to the Cat. Templar—a former Marines paratrooper—could have used the Périphérique, the ring road around Paris, to get them to their meeting faster, but instead he’d taken a zigzag route around the Père Lachaise cemetery, and from his old friend’s mutterings into a micro earpiece, de Payns guessed a motorbike was behind them and doing parallels. De Payns didn’t know the man in the passenger seat and he took his cue from Templar: Quand tu ne sais pas, fermes ta gueule. When you don’t know, shut up.
They used the secured vehicle entry at the Cat, on Boulevard Mortier. The Citroën’s licence plates were scanned by cameras, and when the armoured doors swung open Templar drove the car into a bomb-proof box with cameras pointing up from the floor. Now they were trapped until the DGS guardians decided otherwise. A voice over the speaker system told the occupants of the car to wind down their windows and the two men in the front seats handed their IDs to one of the two blue-suited DGS men who approached. Templar told them that de Payns was without ID, so the second DGS man produced an iPad with a camera hooked on the top and took a photo of de Payns’ face, which was then scanned. The process took seven seconds and the DGS man was close enough that de Payns could smell the gun oil of his MP5, but not so close that he could grab the weapon.
‘OT number?’ asked the man with the iPad, referring to the officier traitant number that was issued to a DGSE operative when first commissioned. When de Payns’ answer matched with the DGS file, the security doors opened in front of the car and they drove into the compound.
There was a below-ground car park, where a lot of vans and motorbikes were housed, but Templar drove them alongside the lawn quad in front of the main three-storey stone building and around the side of DGSE headquarters to an outdoor car park.
The three of them walked into the employees’ area off to the side of the Cat’s secured reception. De Payns noticed the unintroduced man was physically fit, slightly taller than de Payns’ own one hundred and eighty-two centimetres, and carried a sidearm under his left armpit, making him a right-hander.
They entered the officers’ anteroom. De Payns walked to his safe, entered a PIN and retrieved his lanyard. There was a rule at the Cat: no swipe card, no entry. If you lost your swipe card it invited drawn-out interrogations from the DGS, who immediately suspected the employee of being compromised. It didn’t matter how you lost it, the replacement would see one hundred euros missing from your next pay packet—but only if the DGS allowed you to regain your clearance.
They swiped through the security gates, overseen by DGS guards, and rode the elevator to the third floor. There was none of the buzz and work atmosphere of the lower floors, where the DR—the intelligence section—and the administration people operated. Those people were not allowed to meet de Payns or members of the Y Division. No one could access the Y files or see the true identities of the Y operatives. To the DR analysts, Alec de Payns was known only by his OT number. The DR analysts were not even allowed to read a Y agent’s ‘R’ reports. Those contained personal observations and incriminating information gleaned by the agent and they were reserved for the eyes of the BER—the ‘area’ executive—and locked in his or her safe. The analysts could only read the ‘O’ reports from Y agents; they contained the open or objective information, and on reading them it was unlikely that an analyst could detect who had provided the secret information or what the agent had done to secure such intelligence. In the parlance of the Company, there was no R in O—which came out in French as no air in eau.
They paused at a small kitchenette in front of a wood-panelled door. The red-headed man told Templar he was getting the managers and he moved out of sight.
‘You okay?’ asked Templar, taking a capsule from the rack and placing it in the coffee machine.
‘I’m fine,’ said de Payns, though his head was swampy with fatigue and he was preoccupied with the approach from Manerie.
‘Haven’t seen Shrek yet,’ said Templar, his heavy-featured face impassive under a mat of short black hair. ‘I mean, not in Paris.’
De Payns knew Templar wanted to hear about Palermo, but he couldn’t discuss it before going through the debrief. He took the proffered coffee as two men came around the corner. Christophe Sturt, the DR director, looked sharp in his four-thousand-euro suit and that famous grooming that required weekly visits to the barber. Directors of the DR were generally very well educated, and had done a few ‘postes’ as the declared DGSE representative in embassies. They were always a pure product of the system, a person who could say France as if she were his wife. Sturt was accompanied by his deputy, Charlotte Rocard, the BER–Europe, technically responsible for the oversight of Operation Falcon. De Payns smiled at Rocard but inside he was bristling. Charlotte Rocard, apart from having sartorial tastes almost as expensive as her boss’s, was an aggressive teacher’s pet who had no field experience in her CV. She was known for showing little interest in Y Division operations, until Sturt was in the room and then she became an expert.
They all filed into the panelled meeting room, dropping phones into a box held by the attendant. Lafont bolted the security door and joined the group, so there were five other people taking their seats around the oval conference table. Directly across from de Payns sat the director of the DO, Anthony Frasier, a large middle-aged man with a crown of thin black hair pushed straight back from his clean-shaven face. To his left sat Dominic Briffaut, the head of the Y Division; his big lumpy knuckles would make him the senior manager of no office in the DGSE other than Y. He assigned the operatives and authorised the planning of the operations. Every other department—Technical, Administration, Intelligence—dealt with the enemy at arm’s length, but Briffaut’s people lived among France’s adversaries. He was known to give his people the benefit of the doubt, but he visited hell upon those who abused his trust. He also had a big sense of humour—Briffaut’s ethnic background was obviously West African but when polite Franks asked him where he was from, Briffaut took great delight in telling them he was from Alsace. Which was true. He even had the terrible accent to prove it.
‘Aguilar,’ said Frasier, nodding at de Payns.
De Payns nodded back. Frasier had used de Payns’ pseudo, which was the policy at the Y Division. While other divisions knew de Payns and his colleagues only by OT numbers, internally they were referred to by pseudonyms: Templar, Shrek, Aguilar. There was only one official source in the French bureaucracy where the OT numbers, real names and pseudo titles were recorded in one place. The three most senior officers of the DGS—which included Manerie—held a hard copy of that information.
‘Let’s start this,’ said Frasier, who liked to pretend he was always in a hurry, but who missed nothing. He pushed a piece of paper across the desk to de Payns. ‘That anything to do with us?’
The sheet was a Reuters printout, with the previous day’s date and headlined: Two Murders in Palermo, Italy. Police had found a Mercedes-Benz SUV burned out in the Palermo shipyards in the early hours of the morning; it contained a body, as yet unidentified. Sicilian police were also seeking witnesses to the murder of a Turkish national in a popular cafe-bar called Bar Luca, in Palermo’s old town.
De Payns leaned back in the leather boardroom chair, knowing his words were being recorded. He breathed out and told himself to relax, that he’d just play it straight. He only had to tell one lie. Nine years in the DGSE, seven of them at Y, enduring all sorts of privation and being the good agent who never took black money and never lied to the Company. He’d earned the right to one fib, especially one that was being forced on him. When this debrief was over he would write his report and he’d go home and have a bath, kiss his kids and have a glass of wine with Romy. Heck, he might not even have to lie because they might not even ask.
‘So just to confirm,’ started Frasier, ‘have you spoken about Operation Falcon with anyone prior to this meeting?’
‘Of course not,’ said de Payns. ‘I travelled directly to the Cat and detected no surveillance. I’ve discussed Falcon with nobody.’
‘Okay,’ said Frasier, his gaze flinty. ‘Tell us about Sicily.’