Lambardi’s apartment was another story. It was in the city’s west, and the Sayef Albar security people had an irregular overwatch on the flat and were probably intercepting Lambardi’s calls and emails. De Payns fully expected that when he tried to get Lambardi alone at his apartment and have him filmed accepting the French passports, the terrorists would be listening with enhanced audio in the neighbouring apartment or have two men in a van on the street. The French mission team supporting Operation Falcon knew there were no bugs in Lambardi’s apartment; they’d checked when they set up the cameras. But there might be an emergency signal system for Lambardi to use if he detected a threat. And although the French mission teams had access to the best techs, de Payns had been unable to get his hands on Lambardi’s phone to have it checked and perhaps trapped.

De Payns was mindful of Sayef Albar but he was not overly worried. A man he knew well was sitting in the far corner of the bar, chatting with German tourists. His real name was Guillaume Tibet, but in the intelligence world he was known as Shrek. He was short and solid and his hand-to-hand skills came from Wing Chun kung fu, making him devastating in a fight. The fact that he’d been plucked from an academic and writing career to join the external intelligence services meant he exuded an air of bespectacled innocence.

Shrek was only one part of the mission team—the rest of its members would be waiting at the Palermo ferry terminal and they’d leapfrog one another in vans, on foot and on a motorbike along the route to Michael Lambardi’s apartment. If Lambardi—codenamed ‘Commodore’ by the Company—wanted another drink, the mission team would deploy people around the bars to check for Sayef Albar operatives. If Lambardi wanted to go straight home, the team would coalesce around his apartment, watching the terrorists’ surveillance. The whole operation would work like a ballet and be undetectable even to experienced field people.

To ensure the set-up was clean, de Payns had to wait for final confirmation from the mission team in Palermo. De Payns had received a last-minute request to join Lambardi for a meeting in Cagliari, and so there’d been no communication with his team since he’d left Marseille to travel to the Sardinian capital. The mission team used démarqués phones, purchased in shitty suburbs with no ID attached, to coordinate among themselves. But once in the field, the support team had no electronic connection with the phone of ‘Alain’: this phone had been registered with the false Alain ID and was connected only with the legend that went with the identity. When an operation was in-field, the two different worlds—the support team and de Payns—never intersected. There was no communication between them.