The Frenchman, page 19
‘One of Templar’s female team-members followed Raven to a Latin club,’ said de Payns. ‘She reported that the dance leader at the club was a good-looking man in a sleazy sort of way. It’s in the reports section.’
Briffaut made a face as he scanned the photographs. ‘We picking up any counter-measures?’
‘We’ve found nothing,’ said de Payns. ‘The environment is clean.’
Garrat directed the meeting to emails Raven had exchanged with other female Middle Eastern migrants living in Europe. In them, she complained about wanting to get away from Fadi—the absent husband—whom she accused of controlling her and becoming radicalised.
Briffaut shut the ring-binder file, pushed it back towards Garrat. Then he turned to de Payns. ‘If we go to contact, do you have a plan for Raven?’
‘I know how to approach her,’ said de Payns.
Briffaut nodded, his mind already shifting to something else. ‘It’s a yes from me. I’ll take it to Frasier. You’ll know by tonight.’
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
The new Gare de Mons was a sweeping temple of white concrete, as if the old LAX flying-saucer building had had a love child with the Sydney Opera House. De Payns alighted from the Intercity train he’d caught from Brussels, having taken the Thalys from Paris, and walked the clean Belgian concourse to the taxi ranks outside. He gave the address of the Hôtel Saint Georges, selected for its location off the main streets and paid for in advance with cash through a travel agent in Paris, claiming his wallet had been stolen and he’d had to revert to his emergency cash. He checked in as Sébastien Duboscq and went to the third floor, where he did his sweeps of the room. He observed the street from his window and looked for people sitting in cars and service vans that seemed to be doing more parking than servicing.
He switched on the TV, which received Belgian and French services, and lay on the double bed. He’d called Raven from Paris two days before, introduced himself and told her he was going to be in Brussels later in the week. He’d asked if they could meet in Mons to discuss some translation work for his website. His adrenaline was now elevated. This was the ‘action’ work that the Y Division was created to do, and de Payns had been trained specifically for the task. Yes, he could drive fast, use firearms and make bombs. But accessing a human’s life, becoming part of it and betraying the trust created with that person, was on another level. It was difficult to initiate, hard to maintain and, if the target was protected in any way, it was dangerous. In order to appear calm and natural, an OT had to be meticulous and hard-working. It was like the proverbial duck on the pond—just because the effort was hidden from view, it didn’t mean there was no frantic paddling beneath the surface.
He lay on the bed and ticked boxes in his head—AlphaPharma Consulting had an address known to other businesses, and a business registration; it had a list of clients and engagements that could be checked. If ISI went nosing around the Paris offices of AlphaPharma, they might not find Sébastien Duboscq behind his desk, but they’d probably run into Claire, who could tell them all about the man she’d shared a smoke with just the other day. Sébastien had a personal identity, a driver’s licence, an address and a trail of social network activity on Facebook and LinkedIn. His work phone number was backed up and his two most recent clients would be verified by someone in the administration section of Y Division. This preparation was critical—if a target was being monitored by a secret service, they would test de Payns’ fictive ID; if there was one loose thread, a good intelligence operative would pull at it until the entire fabric unravelled.
Raven and Sébastien were planning to meet at Café Havre at 6 p.m.—early enough to make it professional but informal enough to start on a sociable footing. It had to be a good first meeting. De Payns took a shower and opened the Paco Rabanne toilette set he’d bought, using the deodorant and splashing on the cologne after he’d shaved. He dressed casually at first and made a pass of the venue at 5.28 p.m. He wanted to memorise the global picture so when he turned up for the actual meeting he’d be able to spot if something wasn’t right. The cafe was located on the corner of the main street and a well-used cross street. De Payns knew how an intelligence team would set up around and inside the cafe, and he could see nothing amiss.
He returned to the hotel, dressed in his suit and English shoes, and walked the three blocks to the cafe with a small leather satchel, arriving two minutes early. He sat against a wall so he could see the street, the entrance and the hallway that led to the WCs. There was virtually no one in the place—the Belgians ate even later the French. As the waitress poured a water and asked if anyone else was joining him, Raven walked into the cafe, dressed in a stylish dark blue silk blouse and white flared pants with medium heels. De Payns sprang to his feet, all smiles, and she blushed.
‘Hi, Anoush?’ he said, putting out his hand. ‘Sébastien Duboscq from AlphaPharma.’
She seemed a little flustered. ‘Hello, Monsieur Duboscq.’
‘Call me Seb, please,’ he said, hurrying around the table to pull
out the chair for her. ‘You’re on time. Such a refreshing change.’
De Payns found that a positive comment about a person’s professionalism always worked better than flattery about their looks or clothes.
‘So you’ve had some bad experiences with translators?’ asked Raven, as she sat in the proffered chair.
De Payns explained that he sometimes required translations at short notice, and occasionally these were technical—not all translators were up to it.
‘What kind of technical material?’ she asked.
‘Obviously, some of the writing is purely pharmaceutical and chemical, and there are trials and testing regimes to explain, which don’t always translate well from European languages,’ he said.
She laughed and he could see good dentistry. ‘You’ve had some experience with scientific work?’ He smiled as he looked at the menu.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But some of the translations I’ve seen are hilarious.’
De Payns found her personable although she was heavy-handed with the Opium. He pushed on, telling her he had a website he wanted translated into Urdu and Pashto, and his main body of work was for clients in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries who saw developing markets in Pakistan, Iran and the Stans.
‘But I will have to ask you to sign an NDA,’ said de Payns, once he knew she was interested and had the technical experience. ‘I only have a business if my clients are satisfied that I’m not disclosing anything about them to my other clients.’
He kept things charming but distant, and when they’d finished their meals de Payns made it clear he was not ordering another bottle of wine, keeping their meeting clearly in the ‘business’ category. As he put her in a taxi, he shook her hand, thanked her for the meeting, and suggested they meet again in a week when he’d have the NDA and the commercial engagement paperwork ready to sign.
‘Thank you for that,’ she said, slipping sideways into the taxi. ‘It looks like interesting work.’
As she disappeared into the long dusk, de Payns felt a rush of excitement at the first contact. It was always like this for him—out of the shadows, a ghost no more.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
De Payns was supposed to spend the next day in Paris tending to his five other IDs, and arranging for meetings with his contacts. At the second internet cafe he visited, he picked up an email message with Briffaut’s acronym and number, and once he was three hundred metres from the cafe he used a démarqué phone to call a service number. When he gave his own identifier, the woman on the other end told him he had an emergency meeting at the Bunker at midday.
When he arrived at Briffaut’s office, Marie Lafont was sitting on the visitors’ sofa while Briffaut finished a call on his landline. As he took a seat he saw his boss had taken off his tie, usually a sign that Dominic Briffaut was going into the field.
‘Anything more on that bioweapons rubbish?’ asked de Payns, as Lafont looked up from her phone.
‘We’re about to find out,’ she said.
Briffaut ended his call. ‘There’s a car waiting in the garage,’ he said, standing.
They drove in a silver Mercedes van, which had seats facing one another in the back and a soundproof barrier between the rear seats and the driver. The section heads’ vans were supposed to be SCIFs on wheels, but de Payns had never been convinced. They drove in a southerly direction, beyond the Périphérique, Briffaut briefing de Payns along the way about the Afghan national lying in the secure hospital of Villacoublay Air Base.
‘He was picked up by an RPIMa patrol in Kapisa Province,’ said Briffaut.
‘Kapisa?’ said Lafont. ‘We still have paras operating in Afghanistan?’
‘Logistics and humanitarian,’ said Briffaut, deadpan.
Lafont shook her head, tired of the same old shit. ‘Okay, so a French logistics unit discovers this guy and flies him to Paris. Why?’
‘Let’s find out,’ said Briffaut.
They veered off the N118 south onto the A86, and Villacoublay Air Base loomed to de Payns’ left. Having been cleared by the gate security, they drove to a large administration building, parked, and de Payns walked with Briffaut and Lafont to a rear tradesmen’s entrance. De Payns felt old emotions rising. He’d never been inside this building, controlled as it was by the French secret services. During his air force career he’d been billeted at a more modern operations centre further west on the base. He paused at the door, allowing Marie Lafont to enter in front of him, and looked into the sky, where two Mirages flew in a formation of leader and wingman. As he tried to make out their markings, he was transported to another time and place—11 September 2001. They were on dogfight exercises when the ground signal came through:
‘Marcou Hotel, Dijon.’
De Payns had responded, ‘Marcou Hotel.’
‘Marcou Hotel. Knock it off, knock it off. Report steady.’
‘Hotel steady,’ de Payns replied, curious about the command.
‘Hotel, ready for TOP TOD?’ asked Dijon Tower.
‘Hotel ready,’ said de Payns.
‘Hotel three-two-one TOP TOD.’
After switching to encrypted radio frequency, he heard, ‘Marcou Hotel, check?’
De Payns replied, ‘Hotel on freq.’
‘Copy. Hotel, RTB ASAP, clear speed and altitude.’
That’s when de Payns’ pulse had stepped up. RTB was ‘return to base’, and ‘clear speed and altitude’ meant ‘do whatever it takes, just get here as fast as possible’. In the controlled environment of the French Air Force, it was almost unheard of to be given clear speed and altitude.
‘Hotel copy,’ said de Payns. ‘Reason for the RTB ASAP?’
‘Will be specified on the ground.’
‘Hotel copy,’ said de Payns. ‘Heading to Dijon.’
Hitting speeds of over Mach 2 at any altitude that suited the pilot was a rarity and he recalled the adrenaline pumping as he was cleared for landing at Dijon and had to taxi into the ‘armed’ area before being pushed backwards into the bomb-proof hangars. Live air-to-air missiles were attached to the Mirage’s underwings while the single engine was still running. The pilots were required to remain in their seats. It wasn’t until de Payns’ mechanic climbed the mobile ladder to deactivate his ejector seat that de Payns got to ask what the hell was going on.
‘New York is under attack,’ said the mechanic, the stress visible on his face. ‘The World Trade Center is on fire. It’s World War Three.’
De Payns remembered sitting in the cockpit and hearing the news, thinking that not only was there no better place to be seated for the beginning of a world war than in a combat-armed Mirage at Dijon, but that this war wouldn’t be like the others and that intelligence would be the key to winning it.
The technicians reset the Mirages to activate the Magic II infrared guidance systems and MICA EM ‘fire-and-forget’ targeting systems which aided the twin 30mm cannons and the missiles. The radios were set to half quick and the switch from normal TOD comms to QOD—which changed frequency a thousand times per second—was locked in. The squadron was switched to a ‘two-minute posture’, which meant from the first scramble alert the pilots had to be wheels-up in at least two minutes—war footing. To achieve a two-minute posture the pilots had to remain seated in their planes at the end of the runway for hours, waiting for the scream of the scramble alert. Headings and orders would be given when the planes were in the air.
De Payns could still feel remnants of the stress and excitement surging through his body as he watched Lafont and Briffaut move into the building. He recalled the subsequent missions over Afghanistan and Iraq and the fatigue reignited inside him as if it had been sitting in his bones all these years. He shook it off and walked through the door, interested to see what Afghanistan had sent his way in his new career.
The intelligence section had its own hospital as well as its own prison, sleeping quarters and restaurant. The hospital looked 1970s American, down to the scalloped-glass partitions and the water-dispenser nooks along the linoleum-floored corridor. De Payns, Lafont and Briffaut followed a large male intelligence staffer to a private hospital room where Anthony Frasier stood over a bed, a white mask covering most of his face.
Frasier nodded at the staffer, who handed out face masks to the new arrivals and left the room.
‘They’re calling him Fazel’ said Frasier, pointing to a man lying in the bed. ‘Arrived an hour ago.’
They drew closer and de Payns observed ‘Fazel’. He looked to be around thirty, clean-shaven with cropped dark hair. He could have been from Iran, Pakistan or Afghanistan, and was connected to all sorts of tubes and machines. De Payns saw that a Middle Eastern man in his twenties was standing beside Frasier.
‘French military entered a village two days ago,’ said Frasier. ‘Thirty-seven people dead—the only one still alive was Fazel here. The unit’s medical officer attended some of the bodies and suspected some sort of agent had been used because of the extensive haemorrhaging. The unit evacuated the one survivor to hospital in Kabul, but he became steadily sicker and the medical officer suggested he be brought to France, where we might like to question him about his condition.’
‘Why did he survive?’ asked Briffaut, nodding at Fazel.
Frasier shrugged. ‘He’s been in a coma but we’re going to kick him out of that and we have a translator to help us. Our DO medical team is in the lab a few doors down, testing his blood.’
The translator standing beside Frasier nodded at the group as Frasier walked to the door and called in the doctor. ‘We’re ready,’ said Frasier.
The military doctor entered the room and walked to the patient, checked the vital signs on the monitors, then produced a large syringe.
‘Give it about two minutes,’ said the doctor to Frasier.
They waited as the patient opened his eyes, blinked several times and gradually focused on his surrounds. The doctor checked him with a torch in the eyes and then Frasier cleared his throat.
The doctor looked up. ‘All yours,’ he said, and he left the room.
Frasier turned to the translator. ‘Tell him we’re friendly, he’s in France and he is safe now.’
The translator rattled it off and Fazel shook his head as he responded.
The translator said, ‘He asks what happened to the village.’
‘The village? Doesn’t it have a name?’ asked Frasier.
The translator repeated the question, and Fazel responded in a rambling monologue. The translator nodded a lot and asked his own questions. ‘He says he was travelling to Kabul from the north, and he was dropped by a truck driver at a crossroads near the village. This is just east of the Nuristan Forest, near the Pakistani border. He walked into the village around four-thirty a.m. and used an old cistern to wash himself. He didn’t drink the water from the cistern because he had his own bottle. He was going to wait for the village to wake up and try to buy food, but after waiting for an hour he felt very sick. He’d washed his face with the cistern water and he assumed it was a bad supply. His sickness got worse and he vomited three times. He didn’t see it at first, because it was dark, but as dawn came he realised he’d vomited blood. He panicked and went into the village, but no one was around. He knocked on doors, no reply. He looked in a window and saw three people, including one child, lying on the floor in a circle of blood. He pushed the door open and went in, and found they were dead, bleeding from all orifices. He realised he might have the same illness and drank all his bottled water. By now he couldn’t walk very well, he had diarrhoea and it was blood. He checked other houses but everyone was dead. Massive blood loss from the mouth, nose and rectum. He was feeling weaker and unable to move and he must have passed out. He was woken by foreign soldiers at what he thought was around six-thirty or seven.’
‘What then?’ asked Frasier.
The translator asked and Fazel responded.
‘He says he remembers thinking that the soldiers weren’t American or Australian, so maybe they were French. He thought he was dying and then he woke up here, just now. He wonders what the date is. He thinks he’s lost some days?’
The intelligence section of Villacoublay had its own secure communications system and SCIFs, and the DGSE team adjourned to the serviced offices where the DO team was waiting. Frasier conferred with the lead scientist, took a sheaf of papers and returned to the group who were sitting around a meeting table.
‘It’s clostridium,’ said Frasier, shaking his head. ‘Now where have I heard that name recently?’
‘This is the bacterium the Russians think is being made at the MERC?’ asked Briffaut. ‘This is what it does to people?’
