‘So you’ve had some bad experiences with translators?’ asked Raven, as she sat in the proffered chair.

De Payns explained that he sometimes required translations at short notice, and occasionally these were technical—not all translators were up to it.

‘What kind of technical material?’ she asked.

‘Obviously, some of the writing is purely pharmaceutical and chemical, and there are trials and testing regimes to explain, which don’t always translate well from European languages,’ he said.

She laughed and he could see good dentistry. ‘You’ve had some experience with scientific work?’ He smiled as he looked at the menu.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But some of the translations I’ve seen are hilarious.’

De Payns found her personable although she was heavy-handed with the Opium. He pushed on, telling her he had a website he wanted translated into Urdu and Pashto, and his main body of work was for clients in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries who saw developing markets in Pakistan, Iran and the Stans.

‘But I will have to ask you to sign an NDA,’ said de Payns, once he knew she was interested and had the technical experience. ‘I only have a business if my clients are satisfied that I’m not disclosing anything about them to my other clients.’

He kept things charming but distant, and when they’d finished their meals de Payns made it clear he was not ordering another bottle of wine, keeping their meeting clearly in the ‘business’ category. As he put her in a taxi, he shook her hand, thanked her for the meeting, and suggested they meet again in a week when he’d have the NDA and the commercial engagement paperwork ready to sign.

‘Thank you for that,’ she said, slipping sideways into the taxi. ‘It looks like interesting work.’

As she disappeared into the long dusk, de Payns felt a rush of excitement at the first contact. It was always like this for him—out of the shadows, a ghost no more.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

De Payns was supposed to spend the next day in Paris tending to his five other IDs, and arranging for meetings with his contacts. At the second internet cafe he visited, he picked up an email message with Briffaut’s acronym and number, and once he was three hundred metres from the cafe he used a démarqué phone to call a service number. When he gave his own identifier, the woman on the other end told him he had an emergency meeting at the Bunker at midday.

When he arrived at Briffaut’s office, Marie Lafont was sitting on the visitors’ sofa while Briffaut finished a call on his landline. As he took a seat he saw his boss had taken off his tie, usually a sign that Dominic Briffaut was going into the field.

‘Anything more on that bioweapons rubbish?’ asked de Payns, as Lafont looked up from her phone.