De Payns checked his watch. He had twenty minutes before his scheduled meeting with Templar and Brent. The two men had spent the day over the border in Mons, doing an initial recce and getting a feel for the area that was covered by one of the three cell towers that the Pakistani VIP’s phone connected to when he made the calls every Thursday afternoon. They’d already gone over it on the maps—the area that could be served by all three towers was slightly to the west of the city, outside the old medieval walled precinct, and north and south of the leafy area of the Rue des Compagnons. It was what Templar called a ‘look-see’, a chance to scope the neighbourhood and ascertain if there were going to be obvious impediments to an operation, such as a police station in the middle of the mission zone or a primary school where parents would crowd the street with their cars every afternoon at pick-up time.

‘Watch out for gypsies,’ de Payns had joked before Templar left.

Two years earlier, Templar and de Payns were staking out a French Navy scientist who was meeting with his Mossad handler. Having tracked the scientist across the Pont d’Arcole, Templar was approached by a gypsy woman while her pickpocket brother came in from behind, thinking he was a tourist. When the pair wouldn’t back off, Templar had taken matters into his own hands. The video footage of the scene became famous, showing Templar grabbing the man by the shirtfront and belt buckle and then, in one smooth movement, the gypsy was sailing over the bridge railing into the Seine. If you’d blinked, you would have missed it.

De Payns decided he had time to finish the demande de criblage, or DDC, he was working on. His first meeting with Ana Homsi, and then the subsequent dinner with her husband, had made him wary of Romy’s new friend, and the meeting in the park that morning had done nothing to ease his discomfort. A week after receiving her PhD, Romy has a job offer—not from the OECD or the IMF, but a think tank operating out of Geneva. He’d researched the Tirol Council—they wanted all of Africa vaccinated and a debt-forgiveness program in the developing world.

Ana Homsi troubled him. He’d let two annoyances go by with her—one was her skilful burrowing into the de Payns family, via preschool and then karate; and second, her constant pouring of wine for the guests while barely touching her own drink. Now, Ana had intercepted Romy on her way back from her city interview before she could debrief with her husband. It was the kind of intervention that de Payns made with his assets on a regular basis.