The Company’s shrink didn’t have her own rooms at the Bunker in Noisy. She used one of the senior manager offices that sat vacant until an expert from the Cat or the military was brought in to brief a Y team. It was a modern office in an old building, which was the plight of the French security apparatus. The ceilings were high and patterned but the furniture could have come out of an Ikea catalogue from 2003. Bare desk, an Olivetti electric typewriter on a small wheeled trolley, a landline phone and a safe in the corner. No smartphones, no wi-fi, no data switches, and the only computer screens were hooked into an internal system. The Bunker was an ‘air bridge’ facility. There was no email or internet connection and cell phones didn’t work, even if one could be snuck past the DGS security people. Even hard copy was limited—it was against French law to take written material out of a DGSE facility, unless you were at least a director or two-star general, and then only if you were accompanied by an authorised person.
De Payns sat on a sofa and watched the shrink, known only as Dr Marlene, organise her leather compendium. She was in her late forties, trim, with a black bob and very bright red lipstick. He assessed her as neurotic and more concerned with status and appearance than love or sex. If he wanted to leverage her, he would use flattery, probably focusing on her intellect or superior taste.
‘So, Alec. May I call you Alec?’
‘Sure,’ he said, reaching for his coffee in a white mug emblazoned with the golden cockerel of the French rugby team.
‘I like your mug. You’re a rugby player?’
‘I played at school.’
‘Which school?’
‘Saint-Joseph of Reims.’
‘That was your grandfather’s school?’
De Payns paused. The shrinks were going to do this again. Raise the fact that, when he was fifteen, he secretly enrolled himself in the Jesuit boarding school once attended by his paternal grandfather in order to escape a toxic home environment—one dominated by the ceaseless fights between his highly independent English mother and traditional French father.
‘Yes, it was my grandfather’s school, and no, my father didn’t know I was enrolling.’
She smiled at him, and he waited for the inevitable comment about how most teenagers are sent to boarding school against their will; they didn’t enrol themselves. But Dr Marlene seemed to get it.
She switched topic. ‘How many firearms incidents have you been involved in?’
‘Four.’
‘When?’ she asked, jotting this on a pad. He noticed she had small handwriting.
‘Two in Kosovo, one in Tunis, one in Lebanon.’
‘Discharges?’
‘Two were discharges—one from my sidearm, one from my colleague’s. The other two instances were me threatening an adversary with my sidearm, and one time I had a Beretta nine millimetre held to my temple.’
She smiled. ‘No discharge, I gather?’
‘Thankfully, no.’
‘What about violence? Seen any deaths in your career?’
‘As an air force pilot, there were many. Not so many in my intelligence career.’
She raised an eyebrow.
‘There was Sicily, two nights ago, I guess,’ said de Payns. He suppressed a smile. One of the things they asked him when he was being inducted to the Y Division at Cercottes was whether he could kill kittens. And then they took him into the room where the kittens were! Asking him now about violence seemed a little redundant.
‘Palermo, wasn’t it?’
He gave her a look.
‘Palermo’s in my briefing,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
‘A couple of thugs were shadowing a person I befriended in Palermo. When I tried to leave a bar, one of the thugs followed me and was reaching for his pistol.’
‘You saw this?’
‘I saw him going for the small of his back, saw the pistol in the reflection of a glass door.’
‘What happened?’
‘I turned to confront him and he had a hole in his neck.’
They looked at each other for two seconds.
‘A hole?’ she asked, breaking her gaze and writing. ‘You mean, like …’
‘A hole with blood coming out of it. Big enough for a pen or a chopstick.’
Dr Marlene nodded. ‘So, was there someone close by who had a pen or a chopstick?’
‘There was a man.’
‘A man?’
‘Yes,’ said de Payns, ‘from the bar.’
‘Did you know the man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me his name?’
‘No,’ said de Payns.
‘You can’t, or you won’t?’ she asked.
‘Both. I can’t tell you his name.’
‘Was it Guillaume?’
‘Why ask me if you already have a name?’
She placed her pen on the compendium and pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘I’m not here to play games, Alec. I’m here to assess you.’
‘How am I doing?’
‘Well, you tell me.’
‘A thug got a hole in his neck before he could shoot me,’ said de Payns. ‘On balance I’d say I’m happy, when you consider the alternative.’
‘What about this contact of yours, this target?’
‘Commodore,’ said de Payns.
‘Yes, him. How did he fare in this incident?’
De Payns shrugged. ‘It was dark and I assumed he was in a car.’
‘And?’
‘And there was a show of blood and viscera on the inside of the rear window.’
‘Leading you to believe …’
‘That Commodore had been shot. Possibly in the head.’
Dr Marlene sat back. ‘Let’s assume Commodore is dead, that you saw him being killed. How do you feel about that? I mean, you developed a friendship with him, non?’
‘He was going through a nasty divorce. He needed money, kept telling me how men in Italy are really screwed in a divorce.’
‘How did you respond to that?’
‘It was a leverage, the need for money. We work on MICE—money, ideology, coercion and ego. You have to find one to work with, and money was his.’
‘What about his divorce?’
‘I told him that Italy couldn’t be that bad, but he said the man has to pay all the court costs and then punitive child support. He was stressed about seeing his two kids.’
‘Do you think about him?’
‘Sure,’ said de Payns, wanting to steer away from this. ‘Kids aren’t part of the life, but then again, I guess they are. I like coming home to my own kids, but Commodore chose his friends, I didn’t.’
‘Did you do enough?’
‘For France?’ asked de Payns.
‘No, for Commodore. Do you have regrets?’
That stumped de Payns. Would someone seriously ask a spy if he had regrets? The entire profession was regret-management. ‘If he was killed, it was by his own side. I didn’t select his friends,’ he repeated.
She seemed satisfied with de Payns’ answer, and flipped her compendium to a file at the back.
‘Your sense of focus is very strong, yes?’
‘I’m sorry?’ replied de Payns, confused by the change of subject.
‘At the age of twenty you were cleared by the air force for combat training on the Mirage 2000.’
‘That’s a long time ago.’
She pushed on. ‘Fighter pilots focus on what’s in front on them and they shut out everything else.’
‘I used to shut my eyes,’ he said, pretending to shudder. ‘Too much speed, too many Gs.’
She allowed herself a brief smile. ‘My point is that in your current job you’re still shutting out everything except what’s in front of you.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘It comes at a price,’ she said. ‘You know that, right?’
‘I’m not sure …’
‘Most people’s jobs don’t involve the risk of being shot in the back. You can talk about it if you want. Talking about something like that would be normal.’
De Payns smiled. ‘I thought you were here to assess me? Now we’re going to talk?’
He was misdirecting because he didn’t want to discuss his own personality. What he called his shut down was a state that he’d practised since school—the ability to block out everything that was redundant and extraneous and bring one hundred and ten per cent to the task at hand. It was what had made him a good rugby player despite not being the most muscle-bound student at his school. Dr Marlene was right; it was the quality that elevated him so quickly to fighter jets. He owed everything to that ability and the price he paid was exhaustion, emptiness, social isolation. A sortie out of Dijon Air Base might last a total of four hours; an operation in the DGSE could last between a week and a month. The mental strain was acute. Sometimes he wanted to sleep for a week; other times he wanted to stand in a bar and get shit-faced, both alone and with the clan.
Both, but neither.
‘How are you sleeping?’ she asked.
‘With one eye open,’ said de Payns.
Now she laughed. ‘How’s your marriage? Does she accept what you do?’
‘She accepts what I do and that’s the only reason I have a marriage,’ said de Payns. ‘She needs this chat more than I do; she can’t talk about this with anyone.’
De Payns was surprised at himself for bringing Romy into the mix. It was unusual for him to be candid about his marriage with the shrinks and Romy was forbidden to discuss details beyond saying that her husband worked for the Defence Ministry. She had no wife or girlfriend to unburden herself to. She was not allowed to see a counsellor, was not allowed to reveal anything about her own husband.
Marlene nodded. ‘Panic attacks?’
‘No.’
‘Blackouts?’
‘No.’
‘Rage, aggression? Unwarranted, I mean.’
‘No.’
‘Road rage?’
‘It’s Paris, not Copenhagen,’ he said. ‘If you’re calm on Paris roads, you’re on drugs.’
She flipped the compendium shut. ‘Final question—how many hours do you sleep each night?’
‘Seven and three-quarters,’ he said.
‘You seem fine,’ she said standing. ‘Tired, but fit. My number’s in the Company system. You ever want to talk, let me know.’
He shook her hand and watched her leave the office, wondering if perhaps he should have told the truth about his sleep problems. She might have some pills for that.