Parisians endured the water being turned down to a trickle while the damage was fixed and all pipes checked for contamination. The true nature of the attack—that Murad and Operation Scimitar was designed to pump an enhanced Clostridium perfringens epsilon toxin type D into the Paris water supply—was a tightly held secret. The poisoning of water and food supplies had always had its greatest effect in the psychological impacts. Once humans could not trust the water they drank, the city could not last for long. So the French security apparatus did what it had done for centuries—it lied to the people of Paris, for their own good.

De Payns watched the media circus from his hospital bed as they patched his broken ribs. He pondered the paradox of having chased Murad for so long, only to have his ribs busted by an over-eager transit cop. He also wondered where Murad could possibly hide. Paris was a big place, but he’d never seen the intel and policing world so focused on one individual. The DGSE, DGSI, military intelligence, all the French police forces, Interpol, Europol and the French Customs service all joined the effort. Foreign intelligence services lined up to help, too—the Americans, British, German and Israeli. One in particular—the ISI—was among the first to visit the Cat, offering every assistance.

The DGSE executives had smiled sweetly at the Pakistani intelligence envoy, but Dominic Briffaut continued to drive Operation Alamut, tasked with finding Murad and Yousef Bijar. The aim was to render the terrorists to French control and not only take these monsters out of the game but to apply whatever drugs and torture was necessary to root out every contact they had ever made. The Company had the expertise to extract such information, and it certainly had the will. Word of the de Payns family’s abduction had filtered through the organisation and Murad and Timberwolf lived with targets on their backs. But Murad was in the wind, and while Yousef Bijar was known to be living in Islamabad, the Pakistani government closed ranks around its favourite scientist and his research centre. The Russian, US and French governments complained that Islamabad was harbouring terrorists, but Pakistan disavowed knowledge, just as they had with Osama bin Laden.

In Paris the DGSI took possession of around ninety thousand litres of the MERC’s weaponised ETX clostridium, contained in five-hundred-litre tubes with an ingenious paper seal on each. They’d been inserted into the chloramine canisters in place of the chlorine chemicals, and rather than clean the water, they would have poisoned it with the most lethal bacterial toxin known to man. As the military scientists commented when they had studied the haul, it was enough to kill at least two million people and severely incapacitate the entire city.