The Frenchman, page 14
The seatbelt sign was switched off and he snapped into tourist chatter with Brent and Thierry, who had been seated beside him for the almost-eight-hour flight. He reached into the overhead locker and retrieved his backpack, which contained a Canon 6D camera and zoom lens. It was a professional’s camera but didn’t have the size of the upscale models, meaning it attracted less attention from customs people and police. Yet it could still be operated manually to achieve high ISOs and long fields of focus, which was crucial in reconnaissance photography.
They moved through the passport gates with no problems, wheeling their cabin luggage straight to the taxi stands outside the new terminal building. A little under fifty minutes later and they were at the Pearl Continental Hotel, waiting at the reception desk as the clerk photocopied their passports. Templar arrived as they stood there and made a show of greeting his fellow tourists and filmmakers, talking excitedly about the sights around the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, expressing his eagerness to get on the road and scout some shooting locations, especially for scenes seven and thirteen.
They adjourned to their rooms, de Payns bunking with Brent, Templar sharing with Thierry. They were good-sized rooms and very clean and comfortable for a mid-tier hotel. De Payns moved to the windows and squinted through the small crack between the heavy curtains. The room was on the second floor and the view was north-facing, taking in a park in front of the hotel and, in the distance, what looked like a very large water tower. He shifted his body to the side of the curtain gap and looked down onto a busy street. According to his map, this was Mall Road. He switched to the other side of the curtains and looked down on another angle of the street. No followers or watchers that he could detect. But that didn’t mean the hotel staff weren’t talking to the secret police. While de Payns checked the street, Brent checked the in-room phone, furniture and light fittings for electronic surveillance. He gave the thumbs-up after a few minutes. No surveillance.
They took the afternoon off and met the following morning at the hotel restaurant where they chatted over breakfast. The hotel was in Rawalpindi, the ancient side of the twin cities. Adjoining in the north-west was the capital Islamabad, which had been built to house government departments, embassies and grand hotels. Rawalpindi was more raffish and it suited the Alamut team.
They finished breakfast and walked onto the street just before 9 a.m. Templar waited at the kerb in a pale blue Nissan Maxima, rented from Hertz in cash, but with the rental papers in the name of Clement Vinier and Capital Films.
They drove south, Templar looking for tails in the mirror. It was an interesting city, with all the ancient buildings of Damascus or Amman, but with evidence of modern civil infrastructure—there were souks, but there were also bright storefronts that would not be out of place in Paris or Frankfurt.
Templar swung west and aimed for the MERC. They unpacked the camera and laptop and hooked the Canon to Brent’s Toshiba. He opened the scene folders; the pictures they wanted to use in their movie would be downloaded into the laptop. De Payns took the Lake Forgiveness script from his backpack along with a notebook and pen.
‘Take this and read me the beginning of scene seven,’ said de Payns, handing the bound screenplay to Thierry.
They drove through the south-west of the sprawling city, Thierry reading the scene’s opening descriptions, de Payns jotting them down as points in the notebook. Scene seven was an exterior shot of Rawalpindi’s city streets during the day. The hero was going to be running down the footpath and through a souk to deliver a message to his dying mother. De Payns wrote the street name—Ganj Mandi—and made notes that would please a secret policeman: modern clothes, no hijabs, clean streets … Then he wound down the window and took his first photographs of the streetscape and people.
The team relaxed a little with the first pictures in the can. Templar drove them out of the city blocks and got them onto the Islamabad Expressway, where he accelerated into the fast traffic going south. The ability of a Western person to drive safely and inconspicuously in Asia was an underrated skill, and one that de Payns always relied on with Templar.
Templar jammed the Maxima between two overloaded trucks and settled into the traffic. ‘From here, eleven minutes,’ he said.
The Material and Energy Research Centre crouched like a provincial high school in the near distance as they took an off-ramp from the expressway on the south-western outskirts of Rawalpindi. Further west was the international airport and the M2 road to Lahore. The land around the MERC looked as if it had been put aside for government uses—there were trees and patches of grazing areas but not a lot of buildings or houses. As they slowed in a small bunch of shops de Payns noticed dogs on the street, and he took photographs. He needed his camera filled with images consistent with a movie scouting mission.
‘In three seconds, look to your right,’ said Templar, guiding the car out of a clutch of shops and low-rise office buildings and up a hill. De Payns looked to his right—they were clear of buildings and looking down on the MERC complex, about two kilometres away across brownish scrublands. Inside the perimeter fencing de Payns recognised a collection of low-rise, commercial structures with driveways connecting them and a single gatehouse at the lone exit and entry.
A large roundabout loomed at the western end of the road they were on. Templar took a right, so they were driving in a northerly direction on a single-lane main road with high-quality asphalt.
‘Okay,’ said Templar. ‘In one kilometre on the right is the road to the MERC. Check out the service station on the left before the turn-off, and then we’ll go through a bunch of shops which includes the cafe.’
They drove north in the traffic, doing around seventy kilometres an hour. The car was silent. On the left was a mid-sized petrol station, with a yellow awning featuring Urdu lettering across it. De Payns could see a small mini-mart and some tables and chairs at the side. Ten seconds further north, the turn-off for the MERC was on their right. The road went straight for several hundred metres, through low scrublands, and terminated at the MERC gatehouse. Having driven for five minutes past the MERC road, through a small section of shops and homes, Templar looped back and they stopped at the shops and parked where they could see the T-junction. They went into the cafe, bought coffees and small homemade biscuits, then left the small township and spent the day practising their legends. In the afternoon, they looped back to the area. They were trying to ascertain knock-off time at the MERC, when they’d have a wave of vehicles to assess and surveil.
The four of them watched the road. At 4.03 p.m., a long-wheelbase Fiat van coming from the south turned into the road and drove towards the complex. A lightweight truck with a closed-in box on the back made the same manoeuvre at 4.09.
‘So it’s not four o’clock,’ said Brent.
Their research suggested that government departments finished work between four and six, but not on the half-hour. And government employees in Pakistan finished work en masse; there was none of the flexi-time that operated in the bureaucracies of Western Europe.
For the next thirty minutes they drove around the area playing their legend, taking photographs and making notes, and keeping away from the T-junction. They had to frequent the area sufficiently to find a pattern, but not so they’d look like they were spending too much time in one place.
They timed their return for shortly after five, making a northbound pass at 5.04 and then a southbound one at 5.08. Still no flood of cars.
‘So it’s six,’ said de Payns.
They kept the atmosphere light and stayed in character with banter about the movie as they took a long circular route west of the MERC. Approaching from the south shortly before six o’clock, they drove straight to the service station where they made a show of getting out and stretching, while Templar filled the car with petrol. Brent went into the small coffee shop on the side of the service station and bought four bottles of water. As he emerged, a small green Peugeot sedan arrived at the T-junction from the MERC, turned into the traffic and headed north, past the cafe where they’d bought coffee that morning. It was 6.02 p.m.
‘Keen to get out of there,’ said Brent, sitting beside Thierry, who started the IMSI spinner in his laptop. ‘Must have Mustafa Briffaut as a manager.’
They laughed and chatted, letting the service station owner see that they were a noisy film crew with nothing to hide. The T-junction started filling fast, the Peugeot’s place quickly filled by a Nissan Pulsar, a VW Golf and then a white Toyota RAV4. All the cars looked newish and they all turned to the north.
Within a few minutes, traffic built up at the T-junction as a dozen cars from the MERC queued to get onto the main road, all of them turning north and driving through the small section of shops.
‘We’re catching IMSIs,’ said Thierry quietly as he watched his laptop. ‘It’s working.’
Near the rear of the line-up de Payns noticed a black late-model Mercedes sedan and, right behind it, a black LandCruiser with heavily tinted windows. All the vehicles turned north, and the Alamut team slowly got back into the car.
‘Well, we’ve got our time,’ said de Payns as Templar accelerated into the southbound lane and headed back to the hotel. ‘Let’s get something to eat and play up the legend for the hotel workers.’
‘I researched the film industry,’ said Thierry. ‘They drink a lot.’
‘I researched Pakistan,’ said de Payns. ‘They’ll let us drink but they don’t accept public intoxication.’
‘Shit, these people,’ said Templar, shaking his head and reaching for a cigarette. ‘Why do they want to live in France if booze annoys them so much?’
De Payns looked out of the window, saw the sun getting low in the sky as they headed for the hotel. ‘We’ll drink like a French film crew, but with a great deal of care.’
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
The next day was a Tuesday—their third day in Pakistan and the chance to make progress given they now had the leaving time and they knew how the roads and traffic worked. The team concentrated on the south of the twin cities, capturing images that would fit with the film’s soccer-playing scenes. The hero had a sporting aspect, so they cruised some of the football fields and made a big deal of taking photographs and scribbling notes. It was a chance to interact with locals and have a friendly chat with shop owners, a legend-building exercise in itself. Templar and de Payns even discovered that the smoking bans were not strict outside the centre of the city and they could smoke with their coffees.
They ate an early evening meal at the hotel, letting the staff see them in one happy group, and just before 5.30 p.m. they exited separately. When they met up in the street, they headed west in the Nissan. They tanked at the service station with the yellow awning at 6 p.m., with the car aimed north, and waited for the parade of cars which started queuing at the T-junction at 6.06. Templar drove past the T-junction, giving them a look at the cars.
‘Big Mercedes is seven back,’ mumbled de Payns as Templar stopped the Nissan north of the T-junction and left it idling. Templar kept his eye on the rear-view mirror and Brent tapped on his Toshiba keyboard, switching the machine to spinner mode. No one turned back to look.
‘And … we’re go,’ said Templar, hitting the indicator stalk and easing into the traffic. As they hit the flow of vehicles, the black Mercedes was three cars in front of them.
De Payns couldn’t waste time on the small fry. The Company wanted to be in the top-secret layer, not in the slops. They needed a vehicle belonging to a senior person, someone with status and probably travelling with bodyguards, and the most obvious vehicle was the black Mercedes.
‘What do we have on the radar?’ asked de Payns, not taking his eyes off the Mercedes.
‘Thirteen IMSIs and growing,’ said Brent. ‘Make that eighteen.’
When a cell phone was switched on, it registered with the closest cell tower it could find: the spinner. After ten minutes of driving north, most of the IMSI numbers had dropped off the spinner’s list as cars turned off the main road and connected to another cell tower.
Fifteen minutes after they started their hunt, there was only one vehicle—a white VW van—between the Alamut crew and the black Mercedes, and the spinner had just four IMSI numbers that had stayed connected since the MERC.
‘That van come from the MERC?’ asked Templar as they backed off slightly.
‘I think it was already on the main road,’ said Thierry.
The question was potentially important. If there was a senior person from the MERC in the black Mercedes-Benz, did he or she have a bodyguard. And if so, were they in the car or were they following in a van? It might not mean much the first time the team followed the black Mercedes, but if there were bodyguards in another vehicle, they’d eventually pick up the team’s Nissan. The white van’s indicator blinked on the right side and turned off. They now had three IMSI numbers at the top of the spinner screen and they pulled back, allowing a car to get between the Nissan and the Mercedes.
It was getting towards dusk and the car’s interior suddenly filled with red flashing lights. Templar swore under his breath and pulled onto the gravel shoulder of the road, waiting as an ambulance roared past. De Payns pointed his pen ahead through the windscreen, getting his mind back on the job.
The traffic sorted itself out again, and Templar got the Nissan positioned two cars back from the Mercedes. One of the cars in front of them turned off, and there were three IMSI numbers at the top of the list.
‘All the cell phones are probably in the Mercedes,’ said Brent from the back seat. ‘They’re all connecting.’
‘Scientist and two bodyguards?’ suggested Templar.
‘Three co-workers, sharing a ride?’ offered de Payns.
‘Husband and wife,’ said Thierry. ‘One of them has two phones—one for home, one for their lover.’
‘Ha ha!’ said Templar, slapping the wheel. ‘Be careful with that kind of thinking—they’ll put you in actions teams, right, Aguilar?’
De Payns smiled. ‘Like he said, Thierry, be careful with that.’
The convoy continued north through scrub and market gardens as daylight faded. De Payns checked his watch: 6.31 p.m. They had a strict commitment to stop following at seven o’clock.
A modern-looking suburb loomed out of the scrublands, and as they closed on it the Mercedes’ indicator light started blinking. The brake lights came on and the black vehicle was rolling to a stop at the traffic lights on the edge of the residential area. Templar switched on the headlights and pulled back. The atmosphere in the Nissan was tense as they rolled closer to their prey and waited for the tell-tale signs of a head in the car turning to see who was behind. The heads didn’t turn.
The traffic lights turned green and they turned left into suburbia, with modern, wide streets and detached houses. The verges were green and there were established trees and acacias, suggesting this was an area that was irrigated, and not for agriculture. A status symbol in Pakistan.
They followed the Mercedes into the comfortable suburb, losing sight of it as the convoy of three cars took a long bend. On the other side of the bend, de Payns couldn’t see the Mercedes.
‘Side streets,’ said de Payns. Templar slowed and de Payns saw the Mercedes’ brake lights down a side street on their right, as it stopped and turned left into a driveway.
Templar slowed and did a U turn, circling back and into the side street. They crept down the street, keeping a constant speed as they drove past the Mercedes, parked in a driveway beside a medium-sized house. One man in a black suit was opening the rear door of the car and another man, also in a black suit, was entering the side door of the house.
Templar kept driving. They made their way back to the main road and headed south, back to the expressway and into the heart of Rawalpindi. Now they had a street and a number, and they’d seen at least two people. But neither looked like a scientist.
‘Three occupants of the car,’ said Templar. ‘Those two are the bodyguards. Our VIP was in the back seat.’
‘The one at the door was doing a security sweep of the house?’ asked de Payns.
‘That’s what I saw,’ said Templar.
‘We need some surveillance and a photograph of the VIP,’ said de Payns.
‘Copy,’ said Templar. ‘I’ll return tonight, confirm the house set-up.’
‘Pictures in the morning?’ asked de Payns.
‘Consider it done.’
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
De Payns was in the middle of his third breakfast coffee, but with no hangover thanks to the Islamic Republic’s attitude to public intoxication. It was easier just to have two beers and call it a night. It didn’t concern de Payns that much, but Templar finished most days with several glasses of something and he wasn’t impressed.
Now it was after 9 a.m., the other guests had already cleared out and Brent and Thierry were upstairs, calibrating their spinning equipment. De Payns was ill at ease. He’d woken up early and stressed, thinking about Manerie and Shrek and wondering at what point he had to talk to Briffaut … or Shrek himself? Manerie’s belief that there was a mole at the Bunker was not far-fetched. Someone had sabotaged the Palermo operation—probably a Company insider, or someone being fed by such a person. He had a head filled with Murad, Manerie, Lambardi and a mole with no name. Too many loose ends. He hadn’t dwelled on it since the night Lambardi was killed, but he’d woken thinking about it and the blue rats were gnawing.
‘Coffee still on?’
De Payns looked up and saw Templar, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a Reebok backpack on his shoulder, back from his overnight recon. The waitress approached and took an order for two coffees.
