On Friday morning, de Payns woke early and stood in the shower for longer than he needed. He was getting his mind in gear, tweaking his attitude—a habit he learned in the air force, where they taught pilots to navigate, communicate, aviate as a response to all anomalies and emergencies. Not every crisis could be resolved by the pilot, but most could. And nothing ever ended well by bringing fear and panic into the equation. He often looked back on an episode where he was flying his Mirage 2000 at high altitude and had to pass over an electrical storm. Lightning fired upwards from the storm cloud, struck the Mirage and knocked out the plane’s electrical generator, which he couldn’t restart. He ‘took the top’, which meant he started the chronometer timer—he had twenty minutes of fuel, no instruments, no navigation. And it was pitch-black.

The base received a warning signal and sent up another plane to guide de Payns home. De Payns had to maintain visual contact with the wingman in order to follow him to the air base, and he could only do it by closing up to three metres on the wingman’s plane—any further apart and de Payns would have lost his ‘shepherd’ in the darkness. De Payns landed at Cazaux Air Base on an undercarriage that had luckily opened with gravity—in the absence of power—with enough fuel in his tanks to fill a Zippo lighter.

He wasn’t brave or a hero—he stayed calm and followed the training. And that’s what was in his mind on the morning of the final full day in-country. Palermo had reminded him that there was no such thing as too much caution, that no procedure was so trivial that it could be overlooked, and he wanted his team to slip out of this country as coolly as they arrived. He watched Brent and Templar picking warm croissants from the buffet and head back to the table. Thierry peeled a mandarin.

‘That’s it for the spinning,’ said de Payns as Brent and Templar landed in their chairs. ‘Let’s go sightseeing.’

‘Seen plenty of sights,’ said Brent with a smile, only to realise it wasn’t a joke.

‘Play it out?’ asked Templar carefully.

‘Film guys who have done their scouting and are being pure tourists before they fly out on Saturday. Brent?’ he prompted, looking at the tech spy.

‘We have a load of IMSIs. It’s good data and we’ll find out how many calls were sent and received by those IMSIs once we’re back in Paris. We’re good to go.’

De Payns switched his gaze to Templar.

‘Good shots of the VIP and the two bodyguards, and we’ve got the car rego, the residential address and a working routine for our VIP. I’m happy. That good enough for you?’