De Payns heated up a breakfast of pain au chocolat for Patrick and Oliver and made a coffee for Romy as she emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel. He ate with the boys and they had a laugh at SpongeBob while Romy checked her emails. He made a full round of hot chocolates, kissed his wife for six seconds and ducked out of his building’s side entrance, hitting the street at 8.06 a.m. He headed east for two blocks to a small lane which ended in a stone staircase that rose under a building to a cross street. He slowed as he arrived at the stairs, and at the top of them turned to his right, giving him a view of the two hundred metres he had just walked. There was no one behind him.
He took a bus, changed to the Metro, and when he emerged in the southern part of the thirteenth arrondissement, he walked to the Company’s changeover house. He removed his phone and battery, his watch and wallet, and his Ray-Ban sunglasses, and placed them in what OTs called the ‘life box’—the section of his secure locker that contained his genuine effects. He looked down—he was wearing grey NB trainers and blue Levi’s. They could stay. He took off his dark blue polo and replaced it with a pale green button-up shirt from the locker. Removing his black windbreaker, he turned it inside out and put it on again. Now he was wearing a cream windbreaker. He poured the contents of the Clement Vinier manila folder onto the tallboy shelf in the locker, and, checking the Vinier wallet, he found a Metro card which had around thirty euro on it, a sheaf of cash, a genuine driver’s licence with his fake address and a membership card for the SRF, the Société des Réalisateurs de Films. He picked up the Clement Vinier Nokia, took a battery from the charger, and kept them separated in his windbreaker’s inside pocket. He would not fire up a phone until he was well clear of the safe house.
He caught a bus to Charenton and plunged into the narrow side streets, eventually entering an unfashionable building with the sign Café Internet over the door. Inside he dished out five euro and asked for computer eleven, which was near the back of the shop, out of range of the security CCTV.
He manoeuvred between stacks of cell phone boxes and slabs of bottled water and dodged the backpacks that had been left in the walkway by two students engrossed in a Skype call. De Payns took a seat, checked for eyes and switched off the computer. He waited until the screen was completely blank before he rebooted it and inserted a USB key which contained a Mozilla program. He launched his internet navigation from the USB key, obeying the Company rule to never navigate from an unknown computer’s browser. Now he opened his Clement Vinier LinkedIn account. It had him as a researcher, AD and director at Capital Films in Paris, with some of his industry skills confirmed by other LinkedIn users. He navigated his account and linked with people, issued ‘likes’ on other film industry workers who were editing and writing, and joined in a discussion among SRF professionals about protectionism in French film—a drawn-out argument that had been active for decades. Then he entered a post about travelling to Pakistan where he was scouting for a shoot on his new film, Lake Forgiveness. He dropped a stock picture of Islamabad on it. He did the same thing on his Facebook account then went into the SRF website and contributed a comment in a blog featuring Frédéric Jouve. Having left a few Clement Vinier crumbs, de Payns ejected the Mozilla USB and cleared the history and cookies seven times. Any less than seven wipes and smart people with good equipment could access his shadow data.
He caught the Metro to Gare du Nord and walked to the Montmartre area, where he found an oldish building now converted to offices. He let himself into the building foyer and cleared the mail from one of the boxes. He sorted through it, binning the junk and opening the two envelopes addressed to Clement Vinier, Capital Films. One offered low-rate credit for business owners and the other was for life insurance.
There was a convenience store on the corner, and de Payns walked in and greeted the Tamil woman behind the counter. ‘Hi, Ezzy, how’s business?’ he asked.
‘Hello, Monsieur Clement,’ she said with a smile. ‘I got the film magazine. Let me show you.’
The short middle-aged woman led de Payns to her magazine section and put one of the publications in his hand. ‘Came in yesterday, and look at date.’
‘It’s the current one,’ said de Payns, clocking the masthead of the American Variety magazine. ‘Well done.’
‘More,’ she said, showing him the English-language Empire and Hollywood Reporter.
‘Great,’ he said, grabbing the Empire and moving back to the counter. ‘I’m scouting locations in Pakistan. I’ll need some reading.’
Leaving the convenience store, he crossed the road to the Polish barber and took a seat while Igor finished with a customer. He read the football and boxing magazines, and shifted along the bench seat when two more customers entered. After eleven minutes, Igor took the money from the previous customer and gave de Payns the nod.
‘Ah, it is my friend the Cecil B. DeMille of Paris,’ said the Pole, who seemed to see the humour in everything.
The Naugahyde squeaked as de Payns dropped into the chair. ‘Just the usual, thanks, Igor.’
‘Steve McQueen in The Getaway?’
‘Let’s do that,’ said de Payns, smiling at himself in the mirror as the white bib was clipped around his throat. ‘That’s my favourite McQueen.’
Fifteen minutes later, sporting his new haircut, de Payns dropped into a Ukrainian-owned travel agency down the block from the barber shop. It advertised Kiev–Odessa river cruises on faded posters. Nadja, the elderly heavy smoker who owned the agency, was happy to see her filmmaking neighbour.
‘What can I do for the Frankish Ford Coppola?’ she asked, making her usual joke as she motioned for de Payns to sit. She had a hairdo like the mother in The Simpsons, but black rather than blue.
‘Four tickets to Islamabad,’ said de Payns, lighting up. ‘Cash okay?’
‘Of course,’ said Nadja, waving him away and tapping on her keyboard. ‘You have hotel?’
‘We don’t have a big budget. We need six nights, two rooms, arriving next Sunday. You know of any nice three-stars, in the city?’
She tapped a few keys. ‘I have the Pearl Continental. Is clean, is cheap and has the bar.’
‘Sounds okay,’ said de Payns, having already researched it and decided he wanted the Pearl Continental. ‘Safe?’
‘Oh, yes. Secret police make sure of that,’ she said, chuckling so hard that her hair shook like a building in an earthquake. No one did secret police jokes like the comrades of the former Soviet Union.
He caught a bus north, alighted at a Metro station and descended to the platforms, where he caught connecting trains that took him west, into the Muette Sud area. He walked the leafy boulevards till he reached a superette, where he bought a litre of milk, two pastries and a loaf of bread, and made small talk with the owner, who knew him as Clement.
Half a block from there he let himself into the foyer of a rundown but once-grand apartment building where he’d found an unoccupied flat. It was just before midday and the building seemed quiet. He’d placed his name—C.J. Vinier—on the letterbox in the portico from which he pulled seven letters, two of which were in his name. There were credit card offers and a letter from a person in the neighbourhood with a long-term parking spot to sublet. He climbed the stairs to his assumed apartment on the second floor, where he checked his bouletage, a needle squeezed into the hinge side of the door. It was in place, meaning no one had been in the apartment since he last checked ten days ago. He used the key he’d had made and let himself in. The apartment looked untouched. It had a varnished wooden floor, so having shut the door he kneeled and looked across the living room floor and saw undisturbed dust reflected in the sunlight. No one had walked the floor. Next, he checked the three-point alignment he’d made between the transistor radio on the kitchen counter, the trinket box on the coffee table and the leather-bound copy of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris in the bookcase. He walked to his ‘bullseye’, or the place the operative would stand which would be used as the reference point. From the bullseye he could define three axes, one in front of him, one on his right and one on the left. When a premises had been checked over, at least one of the three axes would be slightly changed. His alignment was intact. He remained at the rear of the main room, focusing through the gap between the partially pulled curtains and on the building opposite his apartment. He was looking for large camera lenses or people with binoculars lifted to their face.
He dropped the Empire magazine on the coffee table and moved to the kitchen, took the bottle of milk and loaf of bread from the fridge and placed them in the rubbish bin under the kitchen sink. He put one of the pastries in the fridge and ate the other as he moved to the bedrooms. In the master bedroom he rearranged the sheets of the bed so the turn-down was different from how he had left it, and changed the book on the bedside table from Proust to Flaubert. In the shelf under the table he put the copy of Variety, opened to page nine. He brushed his teeth in the bathroom, taking care to allow bits of toothpaste foam to hit the mirror. Then he washed his face and, having dried his hands, he left the towel on the vanity counter. As he was leaving he turned on the hall light in the small entryway to the apartment, and jammed a bouletage into the door as he eased it shut.
De Payns’ light IDs had to be nurtured and attended to, so when one of his assumed names was checked by the Russians or the Saudis, the people doing the digging into his life were coming up with cafe owners and bartenders who said, Oh, yeah, Clement the filmmaker? I talked with him last week. The entire visit to Clement Vinier’s apartment, including buying groceries, took a shade over fifteen minutes, and in that time de Payns built details into his cover that could save his life, if they hadn’t done so already.
He thought about the discipline of his job, and the fact that not only did he owe his own life to observing the detail, but so did his family. This was his truth and his lifeline, and as he descended into the Metro to head back to the Bunker, he made a decision to maintain the discipline. With his right hand he broke down Manerie’s burner phone in his windbreaker pocket, and without slowing his stride he deposited the pieces in two garbage bins as he approached his platform. He might be on the hook to Manerie and Jim, but he wouldn’t let them undermine his basic security.