He left the Irish bar and found another—a quiet establishment for quiet drunks. Even the music—Django Reinhardt’s greatest hits—was more like musical wallpaper than entertainment. He drank for a few more rounds, three whiskies to one beer, replaying memories of a smart and fun-loving Pakistani engineer who’d thought he was doing the right thing for peace in the Middle East, while also creating a pay-off for his family. And his son had been tortured for it, probably right in front of him.

After the ninth drink, he knew he was shaking his head and mumbling too loud. When the woman behind the bar approached him she raised one finger and de Payns agreed. Only one more.

He left the bar carefully, gasping slightly at the chill air. He lit a Marlboro, observing the streetscape. It looked clean. He couldn’t safely return to his family home in this state—drunken mistakes didn’t carry any discount; they could get people killed just as easily as the sober mistake. So he picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker at a market and wandered in a daze until he found himself outside a seedy private hotel. The woman at reception rented him a room and he fell on his face as he opened the door. Collapsing on the bed he felt an emotional weight that the whisky had only sidestepped, not resolved. He wanted another drink but didn’t have the energy, and he fell asleep wondering where the off switch for the bedside lamp was.

He might have quit his job that week, but for the niggling need for retribution, something felt strongly among the whole Y Division at Noisy. Besides, the entire rationale of the Company—as the DGSE was known to its employees—was to engage in human intelligence, to get close to targets, earn their trust and inveigle oneself into their world. If that meant feeling the wolf’s breath on your neck, then that’s what you did.

There was an aeronautical engineers convention in Paris in two weeks and de Payns set the meet for the last day of the conference, as usual. Amin’s email address was still active and someone was operating it, judging by the response written in precisely the way de Payns had taught Amin. All the communications protocols were correct—Amin must have given them up. Clearly someone at the ISI wanted to keep the liaison operating long enough to get a look at Marcus Aubrac, while the French were keen to see who the Pakistanis sent to photograph—or kill or kidnap—the operative who’d been running Amin. Failures could be turned to their advantage, the French reasoned, so long as they had an officer who was smart and strong enough to play his part.