Briffaut dragged on his smoke and regarded de Payns. ‘That’s not what Frasier wants to hear right now. He thinks there’s some credible good news for the President.’

De Payns agreed. ‘I’m not terminating the operation, but I’m probably not the person to take the contact where it might have to go.’

‘Gone far enough with her?’

‘Something like that,’ said de Payns. ‘She’s shitting herself about saying too much last night.’

‘She’s worried about your welfare?’

De Payns nodded. ‘I’ve seen this before. She’s scared that her association with her brother is a negative for me. There’s panic about divulging too much.’

‘Okay,’ said Briffaut. ‘And then she stops communicating because she doesn’t want you running a mile from her?’

‘That’s a real possibility.’

‘Why?’ Briffaut chuckled. ‘Because she’s got a crush on you?’

‘Don’t make fun of me.’

‘You going to tell Marie this?’ asked Briffaut, shaking his head. ‘She’s a hard thing.’

De Payns took them through his report and made his case early.

‘The relationship is getting very close,’ he said. ‘Too close. It could wreck any chance of a contact on Bijar.’

‘We got a pseudo for Bijar?’ asked Briffaut.

‘Timberwolf okay with everyone?’ asked Lafont, to nods. De Payns could see her tensing up, wanting to argue with him. ‘Can I ask you, what is too close?’

Briffaut leaped in. ‘If a target says too much, they’ll sometimes back off because they want to keep the frisson the way it was. We might be in that position.’

Marie Lafont gave a wry smile. ‘So, Alec, how close?’

‘Drinking together, laughs, friendship,’ he said.

‘Did you fuck her?’ asked Lafont.

Garrat and Lafont started laughing and de Payns joked along rather than take offence. ‘No, I haven’t done that.’

Garrat said to Lafont, ‘I told you so.’

‘Come on, people, cut it out,’ growled Briffaut.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Lafont. ‘I’d like to make the point that too close generally means you’ve fucked, and now the relationship has changed, become complicated, and it might be harder to manipulate the target because the leverage is gone.’

‘Then I haven’t got too close, and perhaps I maintain some leverage?’ asked de Payns, regretting it as he said it. Female agents were regularly expected to include sex in a contact.

‘How nice for you,’ said Lafont sarcastically.

‘The aim of Alamut is to find a human access to the MERC,’ said de Payns. ‘We’re doing that through Raven, but if Raven is worried about her admissions to me, I don’t think a sexual relationship is going to help us.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Garrat.

There was a pause for two seconds and then the meeting broke into laughter. It got so bad that Briffaut had to thump his own chest against his smoker’s cough, even as Garrat blushed with embarrassment.