They started with the technical environment, established by the DT in Mons. It had to start from scratch because the phone number that received the ten-minute call every Thursday was also démarqué and therefore carried no data on the owner or an address. The receiving phone was not even Belgian. The DT people confirmed it had been bought in France and used a French network. From the back of the sub, the techs used the IMSI spinner to find which three cell towers the phone of interest was connected to, searching at night to find the general zone where the person lived. With the phone not moving, the IMEI of the phone could be established and tied to an address. They were able to trace it to a modern apartment block in the north-west of Mons, in the old city. De Payns covered the operation from a nearby hotel room, through a radio headset. When the owner of the phone went to work, the phone moved and the team followed and took pictures of the people moving at the same time the phone moved, often on a nature strip in front of the identified apartment building. They put a team of followers in front of the building, and one of the techs in the sub rang the phone of interest. One of de Payns’ team saw the target—a woman answering a phone when no one else was in the vicinity.
She was in her mid-thirties, a well-dressed Arab woman, and she was walking with two girls, aged around nine and twelve. De Payns was happy with the progress but he wanted to confirm a phone call from the Mercedes-Benz in Islamabad. A call from Islamabad at 6.15 p.m. would be received in Mons at 3.15. The woman stayed in her apartment on Thursdays until 3.25 before leaving for the school to pick up her children. So they had the phone that was called from Islamabad and the owner of the phone, but the Alamut team was yet to see the woman actually taking the call from the MERC employee.
They followed her. Having dropped her children at school, on foot, the woman went to a cafe and one of de Payns’ technicians followed her in and sat at the neighbouring table with a spinner the size of an iPhone to confirm that the woman was carrying the phone.
De Payns also had a filature planned for when she left the cafe. The filature entailed a team of five people putting the woman under surveillance and reporting in real time back to the sub, where de Payns sat with the DT operatives.
Before she left the cafe, de Payns checked everyone was on the net.
‘Y radio check,’ he said into the mic on a necklace under his T-shirt. The activation button was in his pants pocket.
The confirmations came back, one after the other. ‘Jéjé’; ‘Danny’; ‘Paulin’; ‘Vehicle’.
De Payns confirmed he was hearing them. ‘Okay Y. Loud and clear. Jéjé, you have the alert.’
‘Jéjé. Copy.’
Jéjé was a former naval diver who’d been recruited into the DGSE in his late twenties. He was smart and tough and the operation would start at his lead.
After forty-five minutes of radio silence, Jéjé broke into de Payns’ earpiece.
‘Alert, alert, alert,’ he said. ‘Target. Brown jacket, jeans, black handbag. Just exited the cafe, walking south towards Place de Vannes, on Borgnagache, odd number side of the road. Coming towards you, Paulin.’
‘Aguilar copy,’ said de Payns. ‘We’re moving to de Vannes.’
As the sub started moving, the filature actively communicated.
‘Danny copy. Visual. On the other side of the road. Keeping visual.’
‘Paulin. Copy. I’ll take Echelon 1 when she walks past.’
‘Vehicle copy, on standby,’ said the driver of a small Citroën. Her passenger was ready to alight from the car and pursue on foot.
‘Jéjé. Going to the Mons Metro. Danny, you stay at Echelon 2 after Paulin takes her.’
‘Danny, copy.’
‘Paulin. Visual. I’m on it. Turning right from Borgnagache onto Place de Vannes, opposite way of the car flow, even numbers side of the street, level with number forty-two, walking slow.’
‘Danny, visual.’
The sub was now heading towards Boulevard Charles Quint, which looked down towards the Mons Metro station.
‘Aguilar. Boulevard Charles Quint, anticipating target.’
Twenty seconds later they could see the target in her brown leather jacket leaving Place de Vannes. She was into Boulevard Charles Quint and turning left for the Metro.
‘Aguilar. Visual on target. Walking south on Charles Quint towards Mons Metro. Odd numbers.’
‘Jéjé, pre-positioning Mons Metro,’ said the former frogman.
De Payns said, ‘Aguilar for vehicle, drop one pedestrian at the Mons Metro on south line.’
‘Vehicle copy,’ came the response.
De Payns had constructed the classic filature for train travel. They would follow her to the station, where one of his team was waiting on the opposite platform. When the woman descended to her own platform, the team member watching from the other platform radioed another team member waiting at the previous railway station, telling him the woman’s position on the platform. That follower would take the next train and sit where the target was most likely to enter, so that when she entered the train she suspected nothing. The job was to identify which station she travelled to two days in a row.
De Payns’ team followed the target one station north, into an area of low-rise corporate suites and medical centres with good stands of trees and parks between them. The shops were fairly upmarket without being high-end. They followed her to a modern white building with management consultants, engineers and bioscience firms on the tenant board. One of the filature team reported that she got off the elevator on the second level, where the only tenant was a Belgian bioscience company called GrowTEK.
While the filature team tracked the target’s daily movements, the DT set up the gear to make a trombinoscope of the building she lived in. The trombinoscope was basically a gallery of images, names, associates and habits of the main players and locations in an operation, collected in an operations room, and eventually converted to a book.
Having established which door was hers—2206, which translated to the second block, second level, number six—the tech team placed cameras in the green exit sign in the hallway in front of her door, so that de Payns and his team could see who was living with her or visiting. The persons of interest were followed and photographed until they could be identified.
Back at the Bunker in Noisy, de Payns used the incoming pictures and intelligence to build the body of knowledge—the dispositif—on a corkboard in one of the operations rooms.
De Payns worked on identifying the woman’s name and her work, not hidden as evidenced by a name on the letterbox and on the apartment doorbell, and confirmed by the field team’s checking of her mail. An identity not covered up could mean a deception, so the team cross-checked the declared name with utility bills and the Belgian driver’s licence.
His team moved fast, and within two weeks de Payns was sitting in his office at Noisy, re-reading the brief he’d written for Mattieu Garrat. Garrat, Briffaut’s 2IC, was running the operation in Mons. They had confirmed to ninety per cent certainty that the woman with the phone of interest—the one receiving weekly ten-minute calls from a senior figure at the MERC in Pakistan—was Anoush al-Kashi. The team had her migrating from Pakistan two years earlier with her husband and two children. No trained intelligence behaviours were detected in her. But the team had not seen a husband after two weeks of solid surveillance, which was a missing piece that de Payns and Garrat would rather have in place. Spouses who could not be sighted or investigated raised uncertainties and risks. Regardless, de Payns was ready to go to the ‘contact’ phase and show his face. No more hiding in a hotel room, huddling in a van or building pretty pictures on a corkboard. It was time to go and do what he was trained for. All he needed was Garrat’s green light, and he’d be entering Anoush al-Kashi’s life.
He made a final check of his report and pushed ‘send’, waited for thirty seconds then shut down his computer. It was summer in Paris, and de Payns wanted to kick a football with his sons and drink wine with his wife.