The Frenchman, page 3
The mission was complicated for de Payns not only by the friendship he’d developed with Amin but by the hotel’s proximity to his family’s apartment in Montparnasse. The Marriott Rive Gauche was on Boulevard Saint-Jacques, only a ten-minute walk from Patrick’s school. It felt too close to home, especially given how ruthlessly the ISI had exploited Amin’s greatest weakness—his family. Usually de Payns operated overseas; the prospect of engaging with the ISI so close to home had him on edge.
He watched a Netflix movie with Romy the night before the operation, his bare feet on the coffee table and nursing a glass of riesling. He didn’t say much—usually he kept up a running commentary, which Romy would quell with a few shut ups. She was doing a PhD on political economics, with a complicated thesis about east–west wealth discrepancies within Europe, and de Payns would usually tease her by attributing a Marxist or Anarcho-syndicalist motive to the most stupid character in a given movie. If he was having fun, he could drive her to throw something at him. But tonight he was nervy and she knew it. Rather than ask him about it, she switched off the TV set and took him to bed shortly after nine o’clock.
They sent an email after lunch on the final day of the conference, and the stand-in for Amin texted the burner phone number about ten minutes later. De Payns returned the text, suggesting they meet at Café L’Ecir, not far from the hotel, at 5 p.m. De Payns caught the Metro in from the north-west, making three changes of train, before emerging at Glacière Metro station at 4.45. He climbed the stairs to the northern side of the Boulevard Saint-Jacques and walked towards the meet through the early office-leavers.
He was wired up with radio equipment, the battery pack and transmitter strapped to his ankle, wired into a receiver for the earpiece that was attached under his shirt. He put in his earplug and pressed the ‘talk’ button in his pants pocket.
‘Y—check?’
‘Y—good copy,’ came the reply.
Satisfied the system was working, he signed off with ‘Aguilar—copy’ and then went to radio silence.
De Payns’ team was sitting in vans, planted in other shops and sitting in the cafe as patrons. When operating inside French territory, the Company usually handed over to the DGSI, the French internal security services, equivalent to the FBI or MI5. However on short operations the DGSE would usually work undeclared, as they were on this day. The DGSI were more like the police, and they operated with an arrest and prosecution mandate, whereas the Company might monitor a terrorist for a year and never interdict. Besides, the paperwork required to involve the domestic security services was too laborious for what amounted to a two-hour operation. De Payns relied instead on three of his regular mission team operators—tough people whom he’d worked with in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo. He knew they would intercede if the Pakistanis turned nasty.
He strolled in the late afternoon sunlight that streamed through the overhead trees, passing a Franprix supermarket on his right, aware of a team around him though he was unable to see them.
Stopping at the pedestrian crossing, de Payns caught a glimpse of the cafe through the trees and walked towards it. His senses were on high alert despite his calm demeanour. Agreeing to take part in an operation so close to his family was difficult to justify to himself—and it would be impossible to explain to Romy if she knew.
De Payns found a table inside with a view of the door, the street and the outside tables, and ordered a Kronenbourg. The clock above the bar showed 5 p.m. exactly.
His beer arrived and he acted like any other customer, looking at his phone and sipping at his drink. He was too well trained to look for his team. Even a quick glance of recognition would be picked up by an experienced watcher. He waited and he drank in a painful charade of waiting for a dead man—a man he’d liked—but no one showed. This wasn’t unexpected. The Pakistanis had probably never intended for someone to meet de Payns in person; what the ISI wanted was his face on camera.
The earpiece crackled briefly. ‘For Y from Jéjé,’ came Jéjé’s voice. ‘I have two guys at the north corner dressed in blue jeans, cheap leather shoes, dark jackets. Looks like they’re waiting.’
‘Copy from Danny,’ came Danny’s voice. ‘One grey Peugeot in front of the cafe, dark windows, rego 648 RGU 75. One guy waiting inside and looking. Nothing else.’
De Payns didn’t respond or change his demeanour. He’d spent half his adult life being followed.
At 5.21 p.m., with no one approaching him in the cafe, he left and walked to the Saint-Jacques Metro. He took two lines, emerging in the middle of Paris. He found a seat in a cafe on the edge of the Place de la République and waited there for ten minutes, then started to walk north-east, counting in his head. When he reached two hundred and sixty, he climbed the stairs with the tourists, turned right at the top and jumped on the back of a motorbike which started immediately and sped off into the traffic.
After ten minutes of expert riding through selected choke points and one-way streets, he was dropped at the Champ de Mars, the large park stretching from the Eiffel Tower to the École Militaire. He walked across to its south-east corner and descended to the Metro, taking two trains to the Gare d’Austerlitz area of Paris. It was almost dark when he emerged, and he walked straight to the Company’s changeover house to the west of the station’s impressive facade, in a secondary street tucked behind a precinct of bars and restaurants. He walked up to the apartment, opened it using the combination lock, and punched in his security code on the keypad inside the door. It looked like a typical Paris apartment, with a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms, one of which contained the lockers used by the Company’s Y Division operatives. De Payns opened his locker and deposited his watch, phone and wallet in the manila envelope with Marcus Aubrac printed on a white label. As he decompressed, he could feel the nerves buzzing inside him and he leaned forward with his arms on the locker, breathing deeply to gain composure before stripping off his Aubrac clothes and stashing them in the locker. He took a quick shower, working through every step of the operation and every person he saw. It was possible there was no one from the ISI in or around that cafe. It was possible the whole thing was a psychological ploy, the Pakistanis signalling that they’d already resolved their traitor problem and could now afford to play games with the vaunted DGSE, right there in Paris, on their home turf. Maybe those men in the car were engaged on some other business entirely? Where had they gone after de Payns left? Were they the only ones? Were they official spies, attached to the Pakistan embassy, or were they ‘undeclareds’, living anonymously in Paris or flown in directly from Islamabad? He cycled faces in his mind, counted steps and audited his memory for mistakes. He pushed himself towards paranoia without getting lost in it, knowing that extreme attention to detail was the difference between success and failure.
Dressed in his jeans, windbreaker and running shoes, he was Alec de Payns once again, and he stepped into the night via an alternative door, leading to the street behind the building, and caught a train west through the fifth arrondissement and into Montparnasse. As he climbed the stairs to the apartment, he made a decision—when he stepped through the door, the Amin operation was over and so was his guilt. Tomorrow was a new day.
He opened his door and smelled fish curry.
‘That you, Alec?’ came Romy’s voice from the kitchen.
‘Hi, honey,’ said de Payns, a smile spreading across his face. ‘I’m home.’
… TWO YEARS LATER
CHAPTER
ONE
As far as workplaces go, it wasn’t bad. The Mediterranean in July, ten hours out of Cagliari, sailing to Palermo. A glass of beer in each hand and weaving through a gaggle of Germans to get back to his table. De Payns ducked around a dancing drunk who was Living la Vida Loca and arrived at his table. Michael Lambardi looked up from his corner of the ferry’s top deck bar, grabbed his Peroni and muttered santé before his moustache cut the head like a guillotine.
‘That’s better.’ Lambardi smiled, setting his glass on the table.
The early evening was starting to colour the sky purple and the ferry smelled of sunscreen and spilled beer. The bar contained the contrasts of what Europe had become—loud, happy Germans at the neighbouring table, hand-wringing Belgians trying to lip-read the news on a muted TV, and a couple of sullen Turkish gentlemen hunched at a table by the windows, making a big point of not drinking. De Payns wasn’t a great fan of the Teutons, but they at least knew what a bar was for.
‘So, Alain,’ said Lambardi, as de Payns leaned back in his white plastic chair, ‘will these documents work?’
De Payns looked at Lambardi. ‘They’ll work.’
‘Hundred per cent?’ asked the Italian.
‘Just like the first ones,’ said de Payns, taking a sip of his own beer.
Lambardi was an Italian migration agent in his early forties, with a body that couldn’t decide if it was heavily muscled or going to seed. De Payns had procured for Lambardi a bunch of Croatian ID cards a month ago, which gave the Italian’s clients unimpeded passage into France and Europe. As an officier traitant of France’s external intelligence service, de Payns was trying to get close enough to his new friend to find out who Lambardi was dealing with and why so many of his clients ended up in France with the smell of Semtex in their prayer mats. He’d infiltrated the Italian’s world and joined him drinking around the bars of the Sicilian capital, helping him out where he could, building affinity and listening to the struggles of Italian men when they divorce.
Earning Lambardi’s trust wasn’t so hard, because with his Marseille-based cover as Alain Dupuis, a migration consultant, and his access to travel documents, de Payns was of use to the Italian. They both liked drinking and looking at pretty women, which were common pastimes in Palermo during summer. But de Payns felt the danger of this assignment. One of Lambardi’s clients, according to the Company, was Sayef Albar, a splinter group of AQIM, the North African branch of al-Qaeda. They were resourced and organised and had a homicidal hatred of France. They’d behead de Payns’ children in front of him if they knew his real identity. Lambardi wouldn’t fare well, either.
De Payns casually scanned the bar and looked out the window, where a couple of Japanese kids climbed on the deck rail of the ferry only to be slapped off by their mother.
Lambardi cleared his throat. ‘The reason I ask, Alain, is that, as you know, my next traveller—’
‘And his friends,’ de Payns interjected.
‘And his friends,’ agreed Lambardi, ‘don’t look European, so the Croatian cards …’
De Payns smiled. The Croatian ID cards were top-shelf forgeries, accepted at any EU port. But de Payns had something better for the Italian.
‘I took the liberty,’ said de Payns. ‘The package waiting for me in Palermo includes five French passports.’
Lambardi paused, doubtful.
De Payns leaned in. ‘I’m serious. Your clients can land in Paris as French citizens.’
De Payns was playing on greed. The fees Lambardi could charge for the passports would override paranoia. And paranoia was relevant—AQIM was not an outfit to double-cross. But while greed would get Lambardi on the hook, coercion would be how they’d reel him in. When it came time to perform the devoilement—the moment when a target is told that he now works for Paris—Lambardi had to be right where the French secret services wanted him. He had to be shitting himself. When de Payns’ team had photographs and video of Lambardi receiving those passports and selling them to AQIM, the Italian would have nowhere to turn. He’d be scared of going to prison in Italy, but even more scared of what the terrorists would do if they saw those pictures.
Lambardi turned his attention to his smartphone, stood and weaved to the toilet. De Payns crossed his legs and poured his beer into the carpet beside his right ankle. He had to stay sharp. As he inveigled his way further into Lambardi’s life, he had expected Sayef Albar security to emerge. He assumed those two Turks in the bar were watching him. They had probably staked out de Payns’ office, a serviced space two blocks back from Palermo’s harbour, although he hadn’t yet detected a tail when he took a room in one of the scores of private hotels in Old Palermo. There were so many ten-room hotels in the city that he could dodge the tails by hopping from one to another, if he was careful. And Alec de Payns was careful like a cat.
Lambardi’s apartment was another story. It was in the city’s west, and the Sayef Albar security people had an irregular overwatch on the flat and were probably intercepting Lambardi’s calls and emails. De Payns fully expected that when he tried to get Lambardi alone at his apartment and have him filmed accepting the French passports, the terrorists would be listening with enhanced audio in the neighbouring apartment or have two men in a van on the street. The French mission team supporting Operation Falcon knew there were no bugs in Lambardi’s apartment; they’d checked when they set up the cameras. But there might be an emergency signal system for Lambardi to use if he detected a threat. And although the French mission teams had access to the best techs, de Payns had been unable to get his hands on Lambardi’s phone to have it checked and perhaps trapped.
De Payns was mindful of Sayef Albar but he was not overly worried. A man he knew well was sitting in the far corner of the bar, chatting with German tourists. His real name was Guillaume Tibet, but in the intelligence world he was known as Shrek. He was short and solid and his hand-to-hand skills came from Wing Chun kung fu, making him devastating in a fight. The fact that he’d been plucked from an academic and writing career to join the external intelligence services meant he exuded an air of bespectacled innocence.
Shrek was only one part of the mission team—the rest of its members would be waiting at the Palermo ferry terminal and they’d leapfrog one another in vans, on foot and on a motorbike along the route to Michael Lambardi’s apartment. If Lambardi—codenamed ‘Commodore’ by the Company—wanted another drink, the mission team would deploy people around the bars to check for Sayef Albar operatives. If Lambardi wanted to go straight home, the team would coalesce around his apartment, watching the terrorists’ surveillance. The whole operation would work like a ballet and be undetectable even to experienced field people.
To ensure the set-up was clean, de Payns had to wait for final confirmation from the mission team in Palermo. De Payns had received a last-minute request to join Lambardi for a meeting in Cagliari, and so there’d been no communication with his team since he’d left Marseille to travel to the Sardinian capital. The mission team used démarqués phones, purchased in shitty suburbs with no ID attached, to coordinate among themselves. But once in the field, the support team had no electronic connection with the phone of ‘Alain’: this phone had been registered with the false Alain ID and was connected only with the legend that went with the identity. When an operation was in-field, the two different worlds—the support team and de Payns—never intersected. There was no communication between them.
De Payns had other ways of contacting his team. Called liaisons clandestines, they included dead letterboxes and unobservable visual signals. One of these involved gommettes, or stickers—on a wall-mounted poster that advertised Peroni, the support team would leave a round white sticker in the final half-hour before the ship docked in Sicily. If the white gommette was on that poster, the op was on.
Lambardi reappeared at the table, and for a split second de Payns thought he caught a pair of eyes look at him then dart away. They belonged to a tall, swarthy man in his mid-thirties who was entering the restrooms that Lambardi had just exited. Just the blue rats, de Payns assured himself, a reference to the paranoia that can haunt field operators. The man was most likely a polite Pakistani who didn’t want to make eye contact.
The revs lowered on the ferry engines and the vessel tipped forward. De Payns took a quick breath and glanced over his shoulder at the beer poster.
In the bottom right-hand corner was a white gommette. Palermo loomed and the game was on. Falcon was go.
CHAPTER
TWO
Michael Lambardi wanted to drink, so they headed for Bar Luca, their regular watering hole. They dodged tourists who were drinking and lounging around in the famous glow as dusk settled on Old Palermo. The day’s breeze had died down and the warm air was infused with seafood, wine and music—typical of the Mediterranean. De Payns sensed Shrek behind him, but didn’t look, as they worked their way through the summer crowds.
Lambardi turned to him. ‘Let’s do this tonight,’ he said, then moved with the foot traffic across Via Francesco Crispi into the bar and restaurant district.
‘Do what?’ de Payns asked, feeling the reassuring weight of the CZ 9mm handgun in the outer pocket of his Adidas pack. He didn’t make a habit of carrying arms when operating under an assumed identity, but the trip from Cagliari to Palermo with Lambardi had been a spontaneous decision and the support team hadn’t had time to establish the usual safeguards. So he’d collected the CZ from a dead drop at Cagliari’s Bonario cemetery before meeting Lambardi at a cafe with some rich Nigerian clients.
