He felt a deep dread. As he walked to his building he took a look at the parked tradesman’s van. The passenger door opened and a man stepped out. It was dark, but he knew that shape.

CHAPTER SIXTY

CHAPTER

SIXTY

Briffaut and Shrek walked towards him out of the dark. The van accelerated past them.

‘Shall we go up?’ asked Briffaut. ‘We don’t have much time.’

Shrek made coffee in the kitchen while Briffaut and de Payns spoke at the table, smoking.

‘Templar and Brent are in the van, running the spinners on Manerie,’ said Briffaut. ‘Do you know where he’s headed?’

‘It has to be the airport, but I don’t know where he’s flying,’ said de Payns. ‘How did you know there was a problem over here?’

Briffaut looked sheepish. ‘You made a call.’

‘Ana?’ he asked. ‘Shit, you’re bugging me?’

Briffaut opened his hands. ‘As soon as Palermo went bad the Company wanted to keep tabs on you. Sorry.’

‘So when did you know it was Manerie?’ asked de Payns.

‘Something you said last night, about who knew the details of your dinner date with Raven and Timberwolf,’ said Briffaut. ‘You, me and Templar. We didn’t leak it, so it must have been Lafont. I called and asked her and she angrily denied it. That left Frasier, the last person indoctrinated on Alamut.’

‘Not Frasier?’

‘I thought that. I called him and he said the update to the file had been placed in the DO’s safe and he hadn’t read it. He’d accepted my verbal heads-up. So who had access to that safe?’

‘The director of DGS,’ said de Payns, shaking his head. ‘The failsafe for compromised operations.’

‘I asked the night duty at DGS to check the access logs to Frasier’s safe on the day of your dinner. It was accessed four times, so we checked the CCTV against those times.’

‘Manerie,’ said de Payns.

‘He accessed the safe at eleven minutes past midday—while Frasier was at lunch—and that evening, Islamabad time, Templar recorded Timberwolf taking a call.’

Shrek brought the coffees to the table.

‘Can we match the voice to Manerie?’ asked de Payns.

‘It’s not Manerie’s,’ said Briffaut. ‘We’re working on the assumption that it’s Murad.’

He pulled out his phone. ‘Listen to this.’ The voice file was a smooth, cultured South Asian voice with an English undertone.

De Payns nodded. ‘So we have a loop between Dr Death and the epsilon toxin, and the Sayef Albar operation in Palermo?’

Briffaut’s phone trilled. He took it and asked a few questions before disconnecting. ‘That’s Templar. They just caught a call from Manerie’s car. Now we run it through the phone company systems and see where the call terminated. Could take an hour.’

De Payns sat back with his coffee and looked at his old friend Shrek. ‘So where have you been lately?’

Shrek shrugged.