On Friday morning, de Payns woke early and stood in the shower for longer than he needed. He was getting his mind in gear, tweaking his attitude—a habit he learned in the air force, where they taught pilots to navigate, communicate, aviate as a response to all anomalies and emergencies. Not every crisis could be resolved by the pilot, but most could. And nothing ever ended well by bringing fear and panic into the equation. He often looked back on an episode where he was flying his Mirage 2000 at high altitude and had to pass over an electrical storm. Lightning fired upwards from the storm cloud, struck the Mirage and knocked out the plane’s electrical generator, which he couldn’t restart. He ‘took the top’, which meant he started the chronometer timer—he had twenty minutes of fuel, no instruments, no navigation. And it was pitch-black.
The base received a warning signal and sent up another plane to guide de Payns home. De Payns had to maintain visual contact with the wingman in order to follow him to the air base, and he could only do it by closing up to three metres on the wingman’s plane—any further apart and de Payns would have lost his ‘shepherd’ in the darkness. De Payns landed at Cazaux Air Base on an undercarriage that had luckily opened with gravity—in the absence of power—with enough fuel in his tanks to fill a Zippo lighter.
He wasn’t brave or a hero—he stayed calm and followed the training. And that’s what was in his mind on the morning of the final full day in-country. Palermo had reminded him that there was no such thing as too much caution, that no procedure was so trivial that it could be overlooked, and he wanted his team to slip out of this country as coolly as they arrived. He watched Brent and Templar picking warm croissants from the buffet and head back to the table. Thierry peeled a mandarin.
‘That’s it for the spinning,’ said de Payns as Brent and Templar landed in their chairs. ‘Let’s go sightseeing.’
‘Seen plenty of sights,’ said Brent with a smile, only to realise it wasn’t a joke.
‘Play it out?’ asked Templar carefully.
‘Film guys who have done their scouting and are being pure tourists before they fly out on Saturday. Brent?’ he prompted, looking at the tech spy.
‘We have a load of IMSIs. It’s good data and we’ll find out how many calls were sent and received by those IMSIs once we’re back in Paris. We’re good to go.’
De Payns switched his gaze to Templar.
‘Good shots of the VIP and the two bodyguards, and we’ve got the car rego, the residential address and a working routine for our VIP. I’m happy. That good enough for you?’
Forensic work on the phones and faces would only occur once they were back in Paris. That’s where the jigsaw would be put together and they’d decide how to access the MERC. ‘I think we have enough for now. Those hard drives been swept?’
Templar and Brent nodded.
‘Okay, let’s play it out today. No more patterns for the ISI to follow.’
De Payns’ central concern on these operations was avoiding patterns, especially around places like the MERC. It was precisely the kind of thing that he would look for—a group of outsiders driving around a classified site. They do it once, it’s a coincidence; they do it twice, it gets your attention; do it three days in a row and you’re on them like flies on shit.
They’d entered the VIP’s world for four days in a row, at different times and different angles. They’d been smart, patient and professional, never entering the route at the same place at the same time. If there was an overwatch on the VIP, de Payns was certain they hadn’t given themselves away. It was now Friday morning and with the recon product in the can, and seats booked on a flight the next day, there was no reason to push their luck.
‘Okay,’ said Templar, biting into the croissant. ‘You want us to split up, blend in?’
‘Yeah, why not,’ said de Payns, knowing that his friend was sensing something. Templar’s gaze shifted to look over de Payns’ shoulder, and then there was a smile on his face so gormless it could only be for public effect.
De Payns turned slowly. Two official-looking Pakistani men stood over them. Not friendly, not hostile, just watching.
‘Nice day, gentlemen,’ said the slimmer and taller of the two, in fairly good English. He was a hawk-faced forty-year-old in a well-cut brown suit and mid-price shoes.
‘Good morning, monsieur, how are you?’ replied de Payns, not offering his hand. ‘Parlez-vous Français?’
‘Un peu,’ said Hawk-face. ‘But English is better.’
De Payns kept his smile. ‘You from the government? Did we ask too many times about how drunk we’re allowed to get?’
The Hawk paused slightly but then smiled. ‘We are used to our French friends wondering about our alcohol laws.’
De Payns offered his hand. ‘Don’t mind my friend,’ he said, nodding at Templar. ‘He’s a piss-head.’
Hawk’s English wasn’t that good. ‘Major Dubash,’ he said, offering de Payns a card.
As he took it, de Payns saw the green shield of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI. On the green shield was a silver markhor—a native mountain goat—with a snake in its mouth.
De Payns didn’t hesitate as they shook hands. ‘Were we speeding again? We did that in Poland a few weeks ago. We get carried away …’
‘Do you mind if I sit?’ asked Dubash, pulling a chair from another table. His offsider—a burly, round-faced plod with dead eyes—remained standing, unintroduced.
‘You must be Clement Vinier, yes?’ asked Dubash.
‘That’s me,’ said de Payns, reaching for his coffee to prove his hands weren’t shaking.
‘And this is your … crew? Is that the word?’ asked the ISI man.
‘Yes,’ said de Payns, adding with a laugh, ‘though they’re often referred to by less complimentary terms.’
‘Because you are filmmakers, yes?’
‘You can call them that, yes,’ said de Payns.
‘What are the names of these films?’ asked Dubash, crossing his legs.
‘This current one that we’re scouting locations for is Lake Forgiveness,’ said de Payns. ‘We’ve made probably five films between us, including the short feature Change, which had a run in Cannes …’
‘Change?’ said Dubash. ‘What’s it about?’
De Payns remembered the hurried shoot he did with a new recruit who had a film background, along with a couple of trainee actors. ‘It’s about a teenage girl realising that if she can change herself, she can change the world. But changing herself is not that easy.’
Dubash made a face and looked straight at Templar. ‘He’s a good filmmaker, this Clement Vinier?’
‘He’s very good,’ said Templar. ‘Very funny but also sensitive.’
‘He uses very good writers,’ said Thierry.
De Payns introduced the group, but Dubash kept his eyes firmly on the chef de mission.
‘Islamabad is a good place to make a movie, I think,’ said the ISI man. ‘So, where have you scouted?’
‘North, south, east and west,’ said de Payns. He had his film notebook in front of him and offered it to Dubash, who took it and flipped through the pages, pausing at a page and squinting at the bad handwriting. ‘Okay, so the Raja Bazar Road, the great food and shopping, yes?’
De Payns nodded. ‘We had a couple of great pizzas down there.’
‘Excuse me for my poor reading of the French. But I believe this says that the girls—the women?—in Raja Bazar are very sexy. No hijabs. Great place for Ravi to lose his innocence?’
De Payns shrugged but Dubash wasn’t smiling. ‘Explain to me this innocence?’
‘Well,’ said de Payns, treading carefully, ‘Ravi is young and has had a sheltered upbringing—he has never seen girls like this before.’
Dubash looked confused. ‘These are Pakistani girls? You mean like teenagers?’
De Payns tried to smile. ‘It’s part of the coming of age, when a fourteen-year-old boy discovers himself …’
‘Fourteen? That’s not marrying age in Pakistan. We’re not in Afghanistan.’
‘No, no,’ said de Payns, trying to rescue the conversation. ‘Not coming of age so he gets married.’
Dubash and his sidekick stared at de Payns, waiting.
De Payns tried to play it out. ‘You know, teenagers, love, sex, experimenting …’
Dubash looked genuinely embarrassed. ‘You have the camera?’
Templar produced it from his bag, powered it up and switched it to viewing mode.
Dubash scrolled through the hundreds of shots, not seeing anything sexy. He gave up after forty seconds and handed the camera to his number two.
‘You do know that along with alcohol, we don’t have pornography in Pakistan?’ asked Dubash, focusing on de Payns. ‘You don’t have daughters, yes?’
De Payns was caught off guard. ‘Ah, no. No, I don’t.’
‘It is obvious,’ said the ISI man, shaking the notebook. ‘No one with daughters would disrespect women with this filth.’
De Payns searched for something light to say but the intel man was on his feet. ‘Your notebook says you were in the west of the city?’
‘You mean the airport?’ replied de Payns.
‘I was thinking further west and a little south of the airport,’ said Dubash, smiling. ‘See any sexy young girls out there?’
‘No, afraid not,’ said de Payns, his heart banging in his chest. Had they been spotted around the MERC?
‘You see anything out there that might fit in your movie?’
De Payns thought fast. The best lie was always eighty per cent of the truth. ‘We liked a petrol station with a yellow awning. It had a great coffee shop on the side of the building. We like it for a scene. Liked the coffee too—it would pass in Paris.’
Dubash weighed the notebook as if deciding on a verdict, and then handed it back to de Payns.
‘I think you’re leaving tomorrow,’ said Dubash. ‘But you keep that card, Monsieur Vinier, because if you want to make your movie here, I can give the script to the right officials, and I can tell you what to keep out of it, yes?’
‘Thank you, Major,’ said de Payns, offering his hand again.
When the ISI men had left, the team stayed in character with their legends and moved towards the street. De Payns noticed, as they filed past the hotel desk, that the ashen-faced manager looked scared enough to cry.