The entrapment was driven by money. Escalating amounts of it for darkening shades of grey. Up to a point. The French secret services were notoriously tight on the purse strings, and having taken a target ‘black’, the Company usually withdrew the money and made it simple blackmail: Keep it coming, my friend, or we go to the ISI.

De Payns wasn’t going to do it that way initially. He wanted Raven to trust him and like him; he’d use that to discover who was calling her from the MERC.

Garrat moved to the subject of electronic surveillance in Mons. The reports showed Raven’s emails to friends saying she’d met ‘a cute French guy’. In phone calls on her non-MERC phone she made it clear to one of her friends that she’d have an affair with Sébastien Duboscq, if he was keen.

Garrat shook with mirth as he read aloud from a transcript: ‘It’s not just his looks—he’s a real gentleman.’

‘And look at this,’ Garrat continued. ‘The friend says, But he is French—is he not arrogant? And Raven says, He is sure of himself, yes, but he is also very funny.’

‘Enough with the jokes,’ said de Payns. ‘Has she shown those contracts to anyone else?’

Garrat shook his head. ‘She hasn’t emailed the documents and she hasn’t used either of her two cell phones or her landline to ask about signing the docs.’

Turning to Templar, de Payns asked, ‘Does she have surveillance around her?’

‘No,’ said Templar. ‘We’ve been on this for more than a month and we’re clean.’

It was one thing to have established contact with Raven, but she was only a stepping stone. The point of Operation Alamut was to discover the identity of the senior person at the MERC and attempt a contact on him. De Payns wanted to hasten things along without entangling himself too much with Raven. He knew what the agents at the Bunker wanted him to do but he wanted to maintain his record of no sex.

‘It’s a go,’ said de Payns. ‘We’ll take it to the next level. Mattieu?’

‘Green light from me,’ said Garrat. ‘Can you get up there tomorrow?’

The Thalys train to Brussels left Gare du Nord on time at 9.25 a.m. and de Payns eased back in the airline-like seat as the train picked up speed. After the Garrat meeting, he’d called Raven with a last-minute request to have lunch and talk about projects. Raven had said yes and now he was Sébastien again, dressed in a good suit and travelling to Belgium with a waft of Paco Rabanne.