The Frenchman, page 15
‘How we looking?’ asked de Payns, embarrassed that his friend had caught him in a pensive moment.
Templar leaned forward on his forearms. ‘The person of interest is a middle-aged Arab male with a cheap suit and shoes,’ said Templar. ‘But they all dress that way, even at the top of the government. He may not be running the whole MERC, but he’s high enough to ride in an S-Class Mercedes. Remember, people are more modest about displaying wealth in this country. It’s not like Syria.’
‘Habits?’ asked de Payns.
‘Black Mercedes arrived to pick him up at seven thirty-six this morning, one driver and one bodyguard,’ said Templar, pausing and leaning back as the waitress brought two black coffees. ‘It’s all on the card, but it’s wiped for now.’
Templar was talking about the protocol for recon photographs in the DGSE. You took your shots amid lots of filler that supported your legend. But the photographer deleted the shots to be used back in Paris immediately after taking them. They were retrieved with special software that could reconstitute shadow data, but the trick was to wipe the shots immediately after taking them or the numbering of the shots on the SD card would reflect missing images, something the ISI would look for.
‘So, a middle-aged man and two bodyguards; they all get in the car and go to work?’ asked de Payns.
‘They took off on the same route they used last night.’
‘So now we have three people and three IMSIs,’ said de Payns. ‘We have to isolate the VIP’s.’
‘We go back?’ asked Templar, draining one cup of coffee and reaching for the second.
‘We go back,’ said de Payns.
They made three-point alignments in their hotel rooms and headed out after 10 a.m. They concentrated their photography and driving in the north of the city, taking notes and using a map for directions. The mission phones were usually cheap and démarqué, specifically built to suit the operative’s legend but not capable of being used for navigation. They’d load them with pictures of family and colleagues, and a contacts list that reflected their fake profession. French secret service operatives almost never carried smartphones on missions because they carried so much personal data that the data would give away the operative. Even the lack of data on a smartphone would ring alarm bells.
They filled up the Canon’s storage cards with images and downloaded them onto the laptop, and de Payns continued to fill his notebook with observations and suggestions for locations and scenes. He even made thought bubbles for songs that would play well.
They ate in reasonably priced cafes, tipped the waitresses and engaged in conversations about the Islamabad Museum, which contained a two-million-year-old human tool, a product of the ancient Indus civilisations.
They moved southwards at the end of the day, and at 5.32 p.m. bought their coffees at the petrol station with the yellow awning. They stretched, lit cigarettes and played with their phones, waiting for the evening exodus from the MERC. They had three IMSIs listed in the black Mercedes and their job was to whittle it down to one. One person of interest from the MERC, matched with one cell phone IMSI—that’s when the Company could make inroads into the facility.
They spotted the first car speeding from the MERC gatehouse towards the T-junction at the main road, and they crushed their cigarettes and moved to their Nissan. The black Mercedes drove past and the team found a slot in the traffic so there were two vehicles between the two cars as they headed north. After ten minutes, they had the same three IMSIs that they’d caught the day before. They followed the Mercedes, now staying further back and verifying the IMSIs being used in the car.
They drove back into the city and arrived at the Pearl Continental in time to freshen up and go out for dinner at a restaurant around the corner that had left discount vouchers at the hotel. The waitress brought water and menus to their table, and departed without smiling. When she was out of earshot de Payns asked Templar if everything was okay.
‘They searched our room,’ said Templar, deadpan. ‘Yours?’
‘Ours too,’ said de Payns. ‘They were smart enough to return the bouletage.’
‘But not good enough to spot the three-point alignment,’ said Thierry.
The four of them looked at their menus, seeing only Urdu script and what appeared to be bad English translations.
‘The game is on,’ said de Payns. ‘Time to play.’
De Payns kept the pressure on the team the next day. They established that the VIP lived alone, except for a live-in bodyguard and a driver who made random circuits of the suburb while the VIP was sleeping.
Templar had been meticulous about wiping the shots of the VIP as soon as practical after they were taken. In the French secret services operatives had to be able to take a good photograph—from up close, from two miles away, from a suitcase, from a phone, from a plane and underwater. People didn’t work in the field until they could do that, and do it using a range of equipment.
During the daylight hours of the fifth day, the Thursday, Templar disappeared, leaving de Payns to drive the car. In the early evening he met Templar at a cafe in the south of the city. Templar was sitting under a TV that was blaring out a soccer match because he preferred to have public conversations in an area where there was white noise. He reported that during the day a cheap and battered car was parked in front of the VIP’s house and unshaven, badly dressed men were inside.
‘Your conclusion?’ asked de Payns.
‘That house is clearly under surveillance, and by the way these guys were occupying his house, I’d say it’s a common event. The place is checked every day.’
‘ISI?’ asked de Payns.
‘Probably, but not their A-team.’
De Payns shook his head. ‘We’re not getting into that house then.’
‘No, we’re not,’ agreed Templar. ‘That driver does passes as well. They might even have an overwatch operating, that’s why my hide is so far back.’
De Payns sipped on his coffee and thought about it—they were Day Five in Pakistan, their rooms had been searched and they had identified a VIP who was minded by the ISI. They had yet to isolate the VIP’s phone number, but they had three numbers—one of which was the VIP’s—and the techs back at the Bunker now had something to monitor. De Payns wasn’t exactly elated with the results, but they were all still in one piece and he didn’t want to push his luck.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
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.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
The hot water washed away the traces of Clement Vinier and the odour of Pakistan. He stepped out of the shower at the safe house, dried off and dressed in the Alec de Payns clothing that he’d left home in a week earlier. He splashed on some cologne, collected his home-life watch, keys, wallet and phone, and headed for the street. It was mid-afternoon in Paris, thanks to the time difference with Pakistan. De Payns used two changes on the Metro—where he put the battery back in his phone and fired it up—finally coming out at Port-Royal. He was very careful when coming back from countries such as Pakistan or Iran, because of the reach of their intelligence services and the number of well-trained people they could mobilise in Paris. He’d already used one Company-run IS to clear him to his safe house—as insisted upon by the Company with returning OTs—and remained vigilant as he made for home.
He picked up a bunch of flowers from the woman who ran the local cafe-bar and carried the peonies in the crook of his arm as he made his way up the stairs. His heart pounding as he got to the door of the apartment that Romy’s savings was helping them to afford. The Ministry for Defence owned residential properties all over Paris to allow people earning government wages to live in one of the world’s most expensive cities, but the best apartments went to the ‘Hot and Cold Waters’, the military and intelligence officers who awarded themselves the red collar pip of the Légion d’Honneur and the blue ribbon of the National Order of Merit. They dominated the Ministry-subsidised apartments in the seventh, fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements. Such apartments were referred to as the Hot and Cold Water buildings, in reference to the red and blue strings worn around the occupants’ suit collars, when not in military uniform.
