After ten minutes of expert riding through selected choke points and one-way streets, he was dropped at the Champ de Mars, the large park stretching from the Eiffel Tower to the École Militaire. He walked across to its south-east corner and descended to the Metro, taking two trains to the Gare d’Austerlitz area of Paris. It was almost dark when he emerged, and he walked straight to the Company’s changeover house to the west of the station’s impressive facade, in a secondary street tucked behind a precinct of bars and restaurants. He walked up to the apartment, opened it using the combination lock, and punched in his security code on the keypad inside the door. It looked like a typical Paris apartment, with a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms, one of which contained the lockers used by the Company’s Y Division operatives. De Payns opened his locker and deposited his watch, phone and wallet in the manila envelope with Marcus Aubrac printed on a white label. As he decompressed, he could feel the nerves buzzing inside him and he leaned forward with his arms on the locker, breathing deeply to gain composure before stripping off his Aubrac clothes and stashing them in the locker. He took a quick shower, working through every step of the operation and every person he saw. It was possible there was no one from the ISI in or around that cafe. It was possible the whole thing was a psychological ploy, the Pakistanis signalling that they’d already resolved their traitor problem and could now afford to play games with the vaunted DGSE, right there in Paris, on their home turf. Maybe those men in the car were engaged on some other business entirely? Where had they gone after de Payns left? Were they the only ones? Were they official spies, attached to the Pakistan embassy, or were they ‘undeclareds’, living anonymously in Paris or flown in directly from Islamabad? He cycled faces in his mind, counted steps and audited his memory for mistakes. He pushed himself towards paranoia without getting lost in it, knowing that extreme attention to detail was the difference between success and failure.

Dressed in his jeans, windbreaker and running shoes, he was Alec de Payns once again, and he stepped into the night via an alternative door, leading to the street behind the building, and caught a train west through the fifth arrondissement and into Montparnasse. As he climbed the stairs to the apartment, he made a decision—when he stepped through the door, the Amin operation was over and so was his guilt. Tomorrow was a new day.

He opened his door and smelled fish curry.

‘That you, Alec?’ came Romy’s voice from the kitchen.

‘Hi, honey,’ said de Payns, a smile spreading across his face. ‘I’m home.’

… TWO YEARS LATER

… TWO YEARS LATER

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER

ONE