The Frenchman, page 16
He unlocked the door and pushed through, holding the flowers in front of him. He padded down the hallway and started talking, hoping to surprise Romy and the boys. But there was no one in the kitchen and the TV wasn’t on in the living room. The curtains were drawn, making it quite dark.
‘Romy!’ he said, dropping his pack on the floor. His heart picked up and his breath rasped in his own ears as he checked the bedrooms and bathroom. No one. He checked wardrobes and the broom closet in the hall. Picking up his phone, he hit Romy’s number and waited. It rang out, ending with her voice asking him to leave a message.
‘Fuck!’ he said, casting around, his mind buzzing with possibilities. Grabbing his keys, he walked to the elevator and caught the lift to the basement, where their VW Polo was parked. He walked around it, looking for damage. He touched the hood—it was cold—and looked through the windows to see if there was anything out of place in there. Romy had the car keys.
He took the elevator back up to the ground floor and burst out onto the footpath, making another call to her. Still no response.
He walked the block and a half to a collection of neighbourhood boutiques and cafes. Romy and the boys weren’t in their usual cafe and Valerie, the woman who ran the small épicerie where they bought newspapers and milk, hadn’t seen the de Payns family that afternoon.
He walked the block, trying Romy’s number again. Nothing. His blood pressure rose, the fear rising along with it. He paused as he walked north through a leafy street behind their apartment, and above the traffic he heard the chanting of young kids. He followed his ears to an open door at the church hall. It was a Saturday afternoon, which meant karate with sensei John. Inside the hall parents were sitting around the walls on fold-down wooden chairs, and in the middle of the floor a bunch of young kids in white canvas gi yelled in unison as they ran through their kata on blue and white mats. In the first row of kids he caught sight of Patrick’s blond head. His son had that serious look on his face, lips pursed as he concentrated, mouth wide as he roared back at sensei’s prompts. A spitting image of de Payns himself at the same age. A hand waved from along the watching parents and de Payns’ eye was drawn to his wife, smiling and beautiful, while his youngest—dark-haired Oliver—mimicked the kata from the sidelines.
He tried to make his legs move towards Romy and Oliver, but his thighs felt like jelly. He was frozen, a wave of emotion moving up and through him like a drug. He was overwhelmed—he’d been running through a list of plans and contingencies for dealing with his kidnapped wife and here they were, and here he was, stranded in the midst of his neighbourhood life. It was too much. He longed to be elsewhere—to be sitting in Big Nose’s bar with Templar and Shrek, drinking in a place where he belonged and he could be himself. Before he could make himself leave the doorway, Oliver was in his arms, yelling, ‘Papa!’ so loud that the mothers laughed.
He picked up his son and swung him around so no one could see his emotional state.
‘I love you, Ollie,’ he whispered, as he held him. It was the best he could do.
‘Dad, can I do karate and soccer?’ asked his five-year-old. ‘Mum won’t let me.’
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
De Payns dimmed the lights of the top-floor SCIF and switched on the projector. In the room were Frasier, Briffaut, Lafont, de Payns and Garrat. The Alamut team had worked for the past week and put in an eleven-hour Monday to assemble the package that de Payns hoped would green light the next phase.
He started with the MERC itself, the images coming up nicely from deleted shadows on a CF card. He pointed to the double security fences, the barren ground and scrub between the MERC fences and the roads. He also had some good shots of the 6 p.m. queue of cars leaving the MERC, and with a laser pointer he indicated the black Mercedes-Benz waiting to enter the T-junction and turn north on the main road. Templar’s photographs of the VIP and his house were excellent. They showed a medium-height man in his late forties, with middle-management clothing worn shabbily. He had a greyish beard clipped close to his olive skin and a full head of hair, also greying and cut short.
‘We don’t have a name or a position for our person of interest, but as you can see, he is well protected.’
He clicked between the shots of the bodyguards—one was bigger in the chest and arms than the other, but they were both in their late thirties, wore black suits and white shirts, and gave themselves away with black tactical boots on their feet. Operators required to do the physical stuff liked a solid footing.
‘One bodyguard stays in the car and does random loops and circuits,’ said de Payns, clicking to a close-up of the more slightly built man. ‘The other lives in the house with our VIP.’ He brought up a photograph of a heavy-jowled man. ‘The car is registered to the Pakistani Ministry of Agriculture and the house is owned by a government agency that validates pesticides and herbicides for farm use.’
‘Anyone else of interest from the MERC?’ asked Lafont.
‘Not really,’ said de Payns. ‘This was the most expensive car exiting the facility, and from the beginning we were tracking three IMSI numbers from it. We can say this person is senior at the MERC, he’s guarded and under surveillance.’
De Payns switched tack. ‘I asked the DT to do an environnement téléphonique on this number,’ said de Payns, referring to the Technical Directorate, which along with Operations, Intelligence and Administration, made up the four directorates of the DGSE. ‘We know that on the Thursday of our operation, there was a call from one of the three IMSIs that lasted exactly ten minutes. It seemed like a trained thing to do. The DT went back for two years and found that the call occurs every Thursday at the same time, for ten minutes.’
‘And?’ asked Garrat.
‘This,’ said de Payns, flicking through the images until he reached a list of phone calls under the number associated with the IMSI that made the ten-minute call. ‘Most of the other calls from this phone were junk. They were internal and seemed to be government-allocation cell phone numbers. His average call is three minutes and nine seconds. He’s not chatty.’
‘So a ten-minute call stands out,’ Frasier observed. ‘Especially a regular one.’
De Payns clicked to a new page of phone calls, this time with the ten-minute calls highlighted in orange.
‘We went over these calls and, as you can see, all the ten-minute calls were to the same cell phone number, and they all occurred just after 6 p.m. Islamabad time, on a Thursday.’
De Payns knew his audience was transfixed. It was important to get the narrative right if you wanted to push forward to ‘actions’. The raw product had to be made to mean something, especially to Frasier, the man who could make big things happen.
‘For the last seventeen months, every Thursday, at the same time, for ten minutes, never more.’
Lafont smiled. ‘Are you going to tell us who this scientist is calling?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t—but our tech teams estimate the recipient is in Mons.’
‘In Belgium,’ said Lafont, eyes wide.
‘Just over the border,’ snarled Frasier. ‘And the answer’s yes.’
‘I’ll need a full support team,’ said de Payns.
‘I said yes—get on it.’ The director of operations shook his head. ‘Belgium! Holy fuck.’
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
The climbing frames and bright plastic tubes were a vast improvement on what de Payns remembered playing on as a child. The playground to the west of their Montparnasse apartment even had a bouncy rubber mat running under the length of it, making the daredevil antics of those girls who swung upside down by the crook of their knees a little less scary. De Payns was starting work late, taking Oliver to the park while Romy had a meeting for a potential job. Given her academic qualifications she was looking for work with the IMF or the OECD. UNESCO and the European Union also had operations in Paris. That’s where de Payns wanted her to be—something with a big salary that would challenge her intellect and enable them to pay the rent on their apartment without tapping into her savings. Instead, she was interviewing at a global economic think tank that he’d never heard of.
She’d texted him fifteen minutes earlier, suggesting they meet for coffee. She said nothing about how the interview had gone, from which he surmised that it had gone well. Romy wasn’t one for emotional declarations. When she had found out she was expecting their first child she’d merely smiled and said, We’re pregnant, then asked if he wanted the extra garlic in his mussels.
Oliver, standing on the bridge of the playground’s ‘ship’, pointed and yelled, ‘Maman!’
De Payns caught sight of Romy through the trees, walking along the path with a coffee in each hand. She was smiling and so was the woman beside her—Ana Homsi. Ana’s son, Charles, ran ahead, calling to Oliver.
Shifting along on the park bench, de Payns made room for the women and took his coffee from Romy.
‘Hi Alec,’ said Ana, letting Romy sit next to her husband. ‘Sorry to gatecrash. Charles really wanted to see Ollie.’
De Payns smiled as he got a kiss on the cheek from Romy. She’d come from her interview so she was dressed like a typical Parisienne in summer—sleeveless and classy.
‘So, how did it go?’ he asked, taking a sip of coffee.
Romy beamed. ‘We got along well. I really liked them.’
‘Who is them?’
Romy said, ‘The Tirol Council.’
De Payns hadn’t heard of it. ‘Tirol, like schnapps and lederhosen?’
‘No,’ said Romy, laughing. ‘They’re based in Geneva, former World Bank economists and thinkers.’
De Payns didn’t bite at that. In his world a thinker was either a bullshitter or a Communist. ‘What do they do?’
‘Policy work and research with the OECD and EU. They want someone to work on the historical drivers of wealth disparity between Western and Eastern Europe. It’s my thing.’
De Payns raised his coffee cup in a toast while Oliver and Charles argued about who was going down the slide first. ‘I knew that PhD would be useful.’
Ana leaned forward and looked at him, her dark hair falling across her face. ‘Talking of useful, you wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you, Alec?’
‘Not officially,’ he said, fishing his Marlboros and lighter from his windbreaker pocket and handing them over.
‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, wincing at Romy.
‘It’s not a big deal,’ said Romy, a little peeved. ‘I just don’t want the boys to see their father smoking.’
De Payns held up his empty hands as Ana lit a cigarette and handed back the pack.
‘I feel terrible,’ said Ana, biting her bottom lip. ‘But I can’t drink coffee and not have a cigarette.’
Her cell phone sounded and Ana looked at it, excused herself and stood to take the call.
‘So, happy about the interview?’ he asked Romy.
‘It went really well,’ she said. ‘They asked all the right questions.’
When Ana was back on the park bench de Payns looked at the two women. ‘So how come you guys are together?’
‘We bumped into each other at Port-Royal station,’ said Romy.
‘We were coming back from the doctor,’ said Ana. ‘Charles’s ears play up in summer. Must be the pollen.’
‘It was a real coincidence,’ said Romy.
De Payns checked his watch. He had twenty minutes before his scheduled meeting with Templar and Brent. The two men had spent the day over the border in Mons, doing an initial recce and getting a feel for the area that was covered by one of the three cell towers that the Pakistani VIP’s phone connected to when he made the calls every Thursday afternoon. They’d already gone over it on the maps—the area that could be served by all three towers was slightly to the west of the city, outside the old medieval walled precinct, and north and south of the leafy area of the Rue des Compagnons. It was what Templar called a ‘look-see’, a chance to scope the neighbourhood and ascertain if there were going to be obvious impediments to an operation, such as a police station in the middle of the mission zone or a primary school where parents would crowd the street with their cars every afternoon at pick-up time.
‘Watch out for gypsies,’ de Payns had joked before Templar left.
Two years earlier, Templar and de Payns were staking out a French Navy scientist who was meeting with his Mossad handler. Having tracked the scientist across the Pont d’Arcole, Templar was approached by a gypsy woman while her pickpocket brother came in from behind, thinking he was a tourist. When the pair wouldn’t back off, Templar had taken matters into his own hands. The video footage of the scene became famous, showing Templar grabbing the man by the shirtfront and belt buckle and then, in one smooth movement, the gypsy was sailing over the bridge railing into the Seine. If you’d blinked, you would have missed it.
De Payns decided he had time to finish the demande de criblage, or DDC, he was working on. His first meeting with Ana Homsi, and then the subsequent dinner with her husband, had made him wary of Romy’s new friend, and the meeting in the park that morning had done nothing to ease his discomfort. A week after receiving her PhD, Romy has a job offer—not from the OECD or the IMF, but a think tank operating out of Geneva. He’d researched the Tirol Council—they wanted all of Africa vaccinated and a debt-forgiveness program in the developing world.
Ana Homsi troubled him. He’d let two annoyances go by with her—one was her skilful burrowing into the de Payns family, via preschool and then karate; and second, her constant pouring of wine for the guests while barely touching her own drink. Now, Ana had intercepted Romy on her way back from her city interview before she could debrief with her husband. It was the kind of intervention that de Payns made with his assets on a regular basis.
So now de Payns completed a short screening request. It was written in the third person—as all OT-generated reports in the Company had to be—and covered the appearance of the Homsi family in his personal life. It named the main people of interest—#ANA HOMSI# and #RAFI HOMSI#—and included their address and all the information that de Payns could remember about them, which wasn’t much. He didn’t know who Rafi worked for or anything about Ana’s background. He included the conversations he’d had with Ana, and the more he wrote the weaker it sounded. Reading the DDC back he realised he had nothing incriminating on Ana or her family, so he requested a check of them on the basis that Ana had asked Romy about her husband’s employer. By the time he hit ‘send’, he knew that it looked like a standard instance of new people entering an OT’s life. He knew he was going to appear paranoid, but he also held to the advice given to him by an old instructor in DGSE training—better to be paranoid and embarrassed than complacent and dead.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
They were waiting for him at the kitchenette when he went looking for a glass of water—Alain Portmann, a DGS straight-shooter, and his sidekick, Julien Laval.
‘Hi, Alec,’ said Portmann in that awkward tone between authority and collegiality. ‘Can you join us for a chat?’
De Payns smiled. Portmann was what they called ‘very FBI’—dark suit, plain white shirt, unremarkable tie and a taupe trench coat, even in the middle of summer. They’d been in the same intake year for French intelligence, and had done a number of rotations together at Cercottes, including firearms proficiency and locks. Portmann had taken the DGS route and de Payns was where he was.
‘Sure,’ said de Payns.
They adjourned to an interview room which featured a white rectangular laminated table, two fabric-covered office chairs on either side and a mirror down one wall. There was a glass dome in the ceiling for the cameras and every word was being recorded.
Portmann started straight in, reading from a page in his folder rather than looking at de Payns. ‘Are you aware of the national security waiver you signed in relation to legal counsel?’
‘Yes,’ said de Payns. If you worked in the French secret services you did not have the right to an attorney and you did not have the right to remain silent. You got to sit in a room and have your colleagues throw accusations at you. It wasn’t personal and it certainly wasn’t open to lawyers.
Portmann recited his first few questions in a robotic tone. ‘Have you told the truth in regards to the destruction of five French passports in Palermo?’ ‘Is there any reason why you cannot speak honestly?’ ‘Have you discussed this matter with any person outside of the DGSE?’
It was a standard opening, but then Portmann got to the point. ‘Three million euros is a lot of money for a commander at the Company, n’est ce pas? Could you do with that kind of pay-day?’
De Payns shrugged.
‘You were offered three million euros for five French passports,’ said Portmann, holding up a printout of de Payns’ report on Operation Falcon. ‘And you declared them destroyed.’
‘I did destroy—’
‘They were real French passports, Alec,’ said Laval, his slab-sided face making him look like a farmer without a tan. ‘They had to be good enough to pass muster with Sayef Albar …’
‘… and to keep your head on your body,’ Portmann finished, with an unnecessary flourish.
‘I know what Falcon was all about, thanks, gentlemen,’ said de Payns.
‘Good to hear,’ said Portmann. ‘So when Falcon was a bust, what did you do?’
