‘I know you liked this one,’ said Briffaut, gesturing to the report. ‘But back to business—along with the source being dead, you’re now blown.’

‘You’re right,’ said de Payns, shaking off the shock. ‘I’ll start disassembling the Aubrac ID. It’ll be disappeared by tomorrow lunchtime. Clean slate.’

Briffaut looked at him, his face expressionless. ‘No, don’t do that. They mustn’t know we have a source on the other side. I’m guessing they’ll try to set up a meeting, pretending to be Amin. If they do, we’ll put you into a trapped meeting and we’ll see who they are.’

In other words, de Payns was going to be used as live bait.

He looked at his boss and nodded.

He left early from the Bunker, the headquarters of the DGSE’s Y Division in Noisy, a suburb east of Paris. The Bunker was inside an old fort and was deliberately separated from the main HQ of France’s foreign intelligence service, the Centre Administratif des Tourelles, colloquially known as the Cat. The Cat was housed in an imposing Napoleonic building on Boulevard Mortier, in the twentieth arrondissement, a total contrast to the cloistered walled fort of the Y Division.

He caught two trains and was outside his apartment building in Montparnasse shortly before 6 p.m., having performed basic hygiene measures to ensure he wasn’t being followed. As he let himself into the small but beautiful apartment, he heard the splashing of kids in a bath. Romy intercepted him at the kitchen entrance and gave him a hug, while keeping her food-covered hands off him.

‘Excellent timing,’ she said. ‘Boys are in the bath—can you deal with them?’

Throwing his keys on the counter, de Payns kicked off his shoes and entered the bathroom, where the younger of his sons—four-year-old Oliver—was standing in the bath pointing at Patrick with a loofah, demanding the return of a Smurf toy that the six-year-old was hiding.

‘Hi, Dad’ said Patrick, putting on a great show of insouciance about the Smurf.

‘Give it to me!’ yelled the younger boy, wielding the loofah like a sword.

De Payns kneeled, noticing mud on his youngest son’s knees.

‘I’ll take that,’ he said, taking the loofah and putting it on the bathroom counter. ‘That’s your mother’s—this is what you need.’ He plucked a washcloth from the bath water.