As far as workplaces go, it wasn’t bad. The Mediterranean in July, ten hours out of Cagliari, sailing to Palermo. A glass of beer in each hand and weaving through a gaggle of Germans to get back to his table. De Payns ducked around a dancing drunk who was Living la Vida Loca and arrived at his table. Michael Lambardi looked up from his corner of the ferry’s top deck bar, grabbed his Peroni and muttered santé before his moustache cut the head like a guillotine.

‘That’s better.’ Lambardi smiled, setting his glass on the table.

The early evening was starting to colour the sky purple and the ferry smelled of sunscreen and spilled beer. The bar contained the contrasts of what Europe had become—loud, happy Germans at the neighbouring table, hand-wringing Belgians trying to lip-read the news on a muted TV, and a couple of sullen Turkish gentlemen hunched at a table by the windows, making a big point of not drinking. De Payns wasn’t a great fan of the Teutons, but they at least knew what a bar was for.

‘So, Alain,’ said Lambardi, as de Payns leaned back in his white plastic chair, ‘will these documents work?’

De Payns looked at Lambardi. ‘They’ll work.’

‘Hundred per cent?’ asked the Italian.

‘Just like the first ones,’ said de Payns, taking a sip of his own beer.

Lambardi was an Italian migration agent in his early forties, with a body that couldn’t decide if it was heavily muscled or going to seed. De Payns had procured for Lambardi a bunch of Croatian ID cards a month ago, which gave the Italian’s clients unimpeded passage into France and Europe. As an officier traitant of France’s external intelligence service, de Payns was trying to get close enough to his new friend to find out who Lambardi was dealing with and why so many of his clients ended up in France with the smell of Semtex in their prayer mats. He’d infiltrated the Italian’s world and joined him drinking around the bars of the Sicilian capital, helping him out where he could, building affinity and listening to the struggles of Italian men when they divorce.

Earning Lambardi’s trust wasn’t so hard, because with his Marseille-based cover as Alain Dupuis, a migration consultant, and his access to travel documents, de Payns was of use to the Italian. They both liked drinking and looking at pretty women, which were common pastimes in Palermo during summer. But de Payns felt the danger of this assignment. One of Lambardi’s clients, according to the Company, was Sayef Albar, a splinter group of AQIM, the North African branch of al-Qaeda. They were resourced and organised and had a homicidal hatred of France. They’d behead de Payns’ children in front of him if they knew his real identity. Lambardi wouldn’t fare well, either.