The Frenchman, page 17
‘I destroyed the passports at the wharf adjacent to the Palermo ferry terminal.’
‘How?’ asked Portmann.
‘Tore the pages and the covers into thirty or forty pieces, ensured they went into different garbage bins.’
‘Who was with you?’
‘No one.’
‘Who saw you?’
‘No one.’
‘You can confirm that?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t sell them to this Murad?’ asked Laval, blue eyes narrowing with suspicion as he looked down at de Payns’ report. ‘Three million euros. Pas dégueulasse!’
‘I don’t need three million euros,’ said de Payns, instantly realising the conversation had been herding him there.
‘Really?’ snapped Laval. ‘What about that apartment of yours?’
De Payns sighed. ‘What about it?’
Laval sneered. ‘You don’t have a Ministry-subsidised apartment.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said de Payns, suppressing his desire to say, Because cocktail-sipping cocksuckers like you spend your careers jockeying for the best government-owned Paris apartments.
‘Paris is expensive,’ Laval remarked. ‘Especially when your wife wants to live in the fourteenth.’
De Payns said nothing.
‘Three-quarters of your income goes on housing,’ Portmann said. ‘Your wife doesn’t work.’
‘And she spent the last year doing a doctorate at the Sorbonne,’ Laval added.
De Payns knew what they were saying. ‘My wife’s smarter than all the IQs in this room added together, and she’s got a piece of paper from the Sorbonne to prove it. So what’s your point?’
‘My point, Alec,’ said Laval, ‘is that you have one government income, you’re living in Montparnasse and your wife’s tuition fees must hurt.’
‘And then an Italian migration agent offers you three million euros for a packet of genuine French passports,’ said Portmann. ‘Passports that you conveniently have to throw away anyway because an operation went sour.’
De Payns levelled a flat, dangerous gaze at Portmann. ‘Two people died that night—“convenient” might be the wrong word to describe what happened.’
Portmann broke the eye contact and cleared his throat.
De Payns continued. ‘I know what Commodore offered and I declared it.’
‘Who pays for the Montparnasse apartment?’ asked Laval.
‘I have a living-in-Paris allowance,’ said de Payns.
The DGS men chuckled at that. The Paris living allowance was two hundred and eighty euros per month. Some agents called it the ‘Grigny allowance’—referring to a far-flung suburb south of the city—because you sure as shit couldn’t live on it in Paris.
Laval grinned. ‘So how does it work? Wifey has a rich daddy?’
De Payns stood, the scraping chair legs seeming very loud. He could feel himself flexing into an assault stance.
There was a knock on the door and it opened to reveal Philippe Manerie. He smiled at a wide-eyed Laval, then turned to Portmann. ‘I’ll take it from here, thanks.’
When the two DGS agents had left the interview room, carefully avoiding de Payns, Manerie inclined his head and they walked, without talking, down one flight of stairs and through the doors that opened onto the lawns around the old fort.
‘I heard you were overseas,’ said Manerie as they strolled east. ‘Anything you’d like to share?’
‘Jim needs to stand back. I don’t shit where I sleep.’
‘Okay,’ said Manerie. ‘I’ll have a word. So, where were you? Turkey? Syria?’
‘You know I can’t talk about that. By the way, have you shared that photo of me and Moran?’
‘No, but you are the one answering my questions at the moment. Did Shrek see where you disposed of the passports? Are you protecting him?’
De Payns shook his head. ‘What is it with DGS and the fucking passports?’
‘Three million euros is a lot of money, Alec. I’ve seen with my own eyes what some OTs will do if they can get away with it.’
They stopped at the old copse of trees by the fort’s eastern wall.
‘Forget the passports,’ said Manerie, lighting a cigarette. ‘I want to know who sold us out in Sicily.’
‘It wasn’t Shrek,’ said de Payns reflexively.
‘You know that for a fact?’
‘I know that better than I trust you,’ said de Payns.
‘If I put a red flag on you, it’s desk duties,’ said Manerie. ‘And by the way, you owe me for stopping all that shit with Laval. If you’d punched him you’d be on weekly head checks. So no more dodging me, Alec. I want to know who Briffaut and Frasier are fingering for the mole. There’s a bigger game being played and I need to be in front of it.’
When Manerie had left, de Payns walked quickly to the foyer of the Bunker, his head spinning with Operation Falcon, the unsolved leak and the three million euros.
He used his swipe card to go to the top floor, Briffaut’s office. He had to head off any attempt by Manerie, Portmann or Laval to sabotage him and eject him from Operation Alamut. The MERC investigation was important and he had to keep up the momentum, no distractions. As he rounded the corner into a wood-panelled area he paused. Briffaut was in the antechamber, where the executive assistants sat, talking to Frasier and a second man. De Payns stayed hidden behind a credenza and watched as the three men nodded, as if agreeing on something. A few seconds later, Briffaut returned to his office with Frasier, and the other man walked away. Shrek.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
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.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Mattieu Garrat’s office sat on a corner of the Bunker, giving a southerly view across Paris’s trees and rooflines. De Payns took it in as he paused at the door, coffee mug in hand and Advils in his belly.
‘Alec, Alec,’ said Garrat, gesturing for him to enter. ‘Come in. Sit.’
De Payns took a seat and Garrat regarded him with shrewd, intelligent eyes. ‘Great work on Operation Alamut. You got a team?’
‘Templar’s leading the support team,’ said de Payns.
‘Excellent,’ said Garrat, his shaved head glinting in the morning sun. ‘You look ready for a contact environment.’
‘We’re ready,’ said de Payns. ‘We have to stay on her—she’s our only connection to the MERC.’
De Payns didn’t have to push it too hard. Frasier, Briffaut and Lafont wanted Alamut to go to the next level and Garrat would not stop it.
‘There’s nine of you at the moment,’ said Garrat, tapping on his keyboard and peering at the screen. ‘What am I requisitioning?’
‘A continuation of the current Alamut team. That’ll give us enough people to form a PEC if we need it.’
‘Okay, sounds fair,’ said Garrat. The PEC was prise en compte—a controlled zone where the team could conduct meetings and surveillance activities with a lot of unseen security.
‘What are we calling the person of interest?’
‘Raven,’ said de Payns.
‘Okay,’ said Garrat, typing. ‘What’s the approach?’
De Payns took him through the operation—Templar’s team would continue surveillance on Raven, while the tech team infiltrated her computer and her email and put a tracking device on her car. De Payns covered the research and he took Garrat through the pack—she was of Pakistani origin, married to a pharmacist, also Pakistani; her daughters were nine and thirteen years old. She was a freelance translator from French to Urdu, not an uncommon profession so close to Brussels, and she also listed Pashto and Punjabi as languages she could translate into French and English. There was a report on her phones. She had a Belgian cell phone number that seemed to be her daily usage phone, and also a démarqué French-network phone—the phone of interest—that she used every Thursday afternoon and at no other time. The seemingly lone Pakistani woman with kids could mean a divorce but it could also be a soft exile, in which case that might be used as leverage to recruit her. The translation business could be another leverage, if she needed clients.
‘We’ll pick up what she’s emailing and who her friends and family are,’ said de Payns, ‘and I should be able to give you a plan for contact in a couple of weeks.’
‘Don’t be a stranger,’ said Garrat. ‘With the budget we’re burning on this I need ammunition to keep it going. Understand?’
De Payns smiled. ‘Sure.’
‘I mean it,’ said Garrat. ‘Lafont is pushing for this, and because it’s bioweapons it has some political goodwill, but you have to keep giving me the good stuff—you know what the bean counters are like around here.’
‘You got it,’ said de Payns.
Garrat leaned back, stroked his tie. ‘By the way, the DDC came back.’
‘Oh, that,’ said de Payns, remembering the vetting he’d requested on Ana and her Husband, Rafi. ‘I got back from down south and my wife had a new friend. Just being too careful.’
‘Can’t be that,’ said Garrat. ‘Too careful, I mean. Anyway, the Homsi husband and wife checked out—no flags.’
Garrat smirked slightly and de Payns could sense a comment forming.
‘If a dame like that was pushed my way, I’d think twice about blowing the whistle on her, know what I mean? Maybe blow a whistle at her?’
De Payns felt embarrassed for the guy, but Garrat wasn’t picking up on it. He turned the computer monitor to face de Payns. ‘Now that lady could get undercover with me any day of the week, non?’
The picture was one that the DGS had sent when they’d cleared Ana Homsi of being on a French government database or watchlist. They’d appended a digital photograph from the personnel files of an accounting firm where she’d worked before becoming a full-time mother. It verified that the agent and DGS were talking about the same person. It showed a woman with long dark hair and big round eyes, not unlike Claudia Cardinale in her heyday. He reckoned the picture had been taken eight or nine years ago.
‘She’s not my type,’ said de Payns, standing.
