‘This,’ said de Payns, flicking through the images until he reached a list of phone calls under the number associated with the IMSI that made the ten-minute call. ‘Most of the other calls from this phone were junk. They were internal and seemed to be government-allocation cell phone numbers. His average call is three minutes and nine seconds. He’s not chatty.’

‘So a ten-minute call stands out,’ Frasier observed. ‘Especially a regular one.’

De Payns clicked to a new page of phone calls, this time with the ten-minute calls highlighted in orange.

‘We went over these calls and, as you can see, all the ten-minute calls were to the same cell phone number, and they all occurred just after 6 p.m. Islamabad time, on a Thursday.’

De Payns knew his audience was transfixed. It was important to get the narrative right if you wanted to push forward to ‘actions’. The raw product had to be made to mean something, especially to Frasier, the man who could make big things happen.

‘For the last seventeen months, every Thursday, at the same time, for ten minutes, never more.’

Lafont smiled. ‘Are you going to tell us who this scientist is calling?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t—but our tech teams estimate the recipient is in Mons.’

‘In Belgium,’ said Lafont, eyes wide.

‘Just over the border,’ snarled Frasier. ‘And the answer’s yes.’

‘I’ll need a full support team,’ said de Payns.

‘I said yes—get on it.’ The director of operations shook his head. ‘Belgium! Holy fuck.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

The climbing frames and bright plastic tubes were a vast improvement on what de Payns remembered playing on as a child. The playground to the west of their Montparnasse apartment even had a bouncy rubber mat running under the length of it, making the daredevil antics of those girls who swung upside down by the crook of their knees a little less scary. De Payns was starting work late, taking Oliver to the park while Romy had a meeting for a potential job. Given her academic qualifications she was looking for work with the IMF or the OECD. UNESCO and the European Union also had operations in Paris. That’s where de Payns wanted her to be—something with a big salary that would challenge her intellect and enable them to pay the rent on their apartment without tapping into her savings. Instead, she was interviewing at a global economic think tank that he’d never heard of.

She’d texted him fifteen minutes earlier, suggesting they meet for coffee. She said nothing about how the interview had gone, from which he surmised that it had gone well. Romy wasn’t one for emotional declarations. When she had found out she was expecting their first child she’d merely smiled and said, We’re pregnant, then asked if he wanted the extra garlic in his mussels.