The acceleration of Operation Alamut forced him to delay meetings that his other identities were having. He didn’t like to do that, because his Paris-bound weeks were fairly structured, with each day committed to a different identity. He would usually fix an appointment with a target by phone or email and, having set up a meeting, he would plan his trip with logistics and decide whether he needed a team. The DGSE didn’t like to waste money, so resources had to shrink and expand with the operational needs. With Raven, the team had shrunk from nine to four, including a long-range photographer who was shooting footage of Raven and de Payns at the cafe.

Although he wasn’t prepared to sleep with Raven, he was prepared to make the contact more romantic. Raven’s private conversations revealed she had feelings for Sébastien, and he would capitalise on that without betraying his wife.

The previous evening he and Romy had enjoyed two glasses of wine and an early night. It was never going to be the way it was when they met—he a dashing air force pilot and she a policy worker at an economic think tank. Their single, child-free selves had been very different. He smiled remembering how he’d met Romy at a bar when she was with her boyfriend. He’d manipulated the man into drinking too much—so much that he vomited. He’d then approached Romy at her workplace and told her that since she was a real Frenchwoman, she needed a real Frenchman, one who could hold his drink.

‘I actually have a boyfriend,’ she’d said.

‘And yet, here I am.’

They’d never lost their shared sense of humour but romance had not been easy to maintain once they had kids. The standard longevity in the field for a Y Division chef de mission was five years before he or she flamed out with exhaustion or alcoholism, or was promoted to a desk, as Garrat had been. Five years of field work at the Company was all it took to wreck a marriage. De Payns had been in the field for seven years and his workload was extreme. He had to keep alive five fictive IDs at a time, which meant constant gardening, constant pretending and lying, constant breaking down of phones and powering them up again to assume another identity. He couldn’t talk to Romy about what he did, and he could only divulge half of what he was doing to his clan—and even then, only once the operation was over. It was isolating, and the policy of the DGSE was to keep the chefs de mission apart, to prevent them from talking and comparing notes.