‘Well, thank God for your translations. I had them in my computer and printed them out to show our marketing partners.’

She was bursting to talk about their dinner date. ‘Yousef is coming over to the flat on Sunday evening. Please tell me you can make it.’

De Payns told her he’d be there. ‘I might go out to the Taxila ruins on the Saturday and see you on Sunday?’

He ate a meal in a cafe down the street from his hotel and flew out the next morning, landing in Islamabad in time for lunch. He checked into the Marriott in the north of the city; it was within a twenty-minute walk of Raven’s flat.

He got a room on the fifth floor, looking eastwards to Rawal Lake and beyond to the uplands of Pir Panjal in the distance. He checked his room for listening devices and cameras. Then—having put a needle as a bouletage in the doorjamb—he walked north-east along Aga Khan road. After two minutes of walking he came to a bus stop and waited as the traffic sped past. When he was sure he was unobserved he put a white gommette on the side of the glass covering the timetable. This was the plan de support of his infiltration. He kept walking and explored the city, passing the parliament building on his way to the Lake View Park, where he checked the time. He walked back to the bus stop exactly two hours after depositing his white gommette and searched for the response to his signal. There were four gommettes arranged around de Payns’ white one, meaning the support team was in place and had acknowledged the arrival of their chef de mission. De Payns ‘cleaned’ the plan de support by removing all the gommettes and placing a new one in the top right-hand corner. The ‘arrived safely’ stickers were some of the most important because they signalled the entire team was in place and ready to get into the operation. For de Payns it meant he could now start to live his legend. If he needed to contact his support team, he’d put a yellow gommette on the bus timetable then come back in an hour. If there was a second yellow gommette on the board, that meant he would meet Templar in the hotel’s ground-floor toilets in one hour. A white gommette with a black cross would mean there was a complication or a setback and he needed six hours to set it right, after which he’d put a plain white gommette on the board.