Alec de Payns sensed a presence and looked up from his screen. Dominic Briffaut’s PA stood in his office doorway. ‘Boss wants to see you.’

De Payns stood and followed the middle-aged woman down the corridor to the elevator.

When they arrived at Briffaut’s upstairs office she held the door for him.

‘This,’ said the boss, pushing a piece of paper across his desk.

De Payns looked at the page. It was a report from a source in Pakistan, the romantically named CRS 00218. The source had a robot’s name, but he had a ‘B’ grading inside the DGSE, France’s foreign secret service, which signified the highest level of trust and reliability that could be attributed to a human. Only documents, videos and images could be graded ‘A’.

The report from CRS 00218 claimed that the missile engineer Amin Sharwaz, thirty-six, his wife—government scientist Anita Sharwaz, thirty-three—and their son Javed Sharwaz, seven, had been killed the previous week by torture at the hands of the ISI, probably with a power drill, at the Pakistan Agricultural Chemical Company (aka the MERC) in Islamabad.

De Payns sat heavily in the visitor’s chair, stunned by what he was reading. He flashed back to their final meeting at the bar in Singapore. Amin had been in a hurry to get to the airport because of a family emergency, but there was something more, something almost haunted about the engineer whom he’d come to regard as a friend. His voice had been constricted and there had been little eye contact. De Payns had spent seven years at the DGSE, six of those years in the Y Division—the DGSE’s highly secretive section responsible for clandestine activities. He knew how to read people and was very attentive to sources who might be watched over by the ISI. He recalled Amin’s use of the French adieu—a deliberate usage, since they communicated in English. The finality of the word had not escaped de Payns. Amin was ‘off’ and de Payns had been incredibly careful leaving that bar in Singapore and making his way back to his hotel. He suspected Amin had spilled to the ISI—told them he was trading missile secrets for a life in Paris.

And now he saw the picture more clearly—Amin’s employers had some suspicions, used leverage to get him back to Pakistan, where they’d tortured the family to death. De Payns guessed the wife and child would have been tortured in front of the traitor, prompting him to tell them everything, before he himself was subjected to the slowest and most painful death.

De Payns threw the report on Briffaut’s desk and exhaled loudly as he looked at the ceiling. De Payns had dealt with hundreds of sources whose motives were mercenary and who behaved in a purely transactional way. But Amin was different; they’d become close. In a different life they would have been friends.