While Templar and de Payns recovered from their injuries, Shrek was on Operation Alamut duties, and three days after the attack at Saint-Cloud, he responded to a strange sighting in Palermo. The owner of a private hotel in the old part of the city had a guest—a tall, suspiciously acting Pakistani. The proprietor thought the guest was not who he pretended to be, and he also looked like the terrorist who was all over the European TV news services—the man they called Murad.

Shrek visited the hotel in Palermo and inquired about the guest. The owner showed him the photocopy he’d taken of the man’s passport—it was a Pakistani passport in the name of Amin Sharwaz.

Shrek pocketed the photocopy and vowed never to tell Alec de Payns what he’d found in the hotel. The people of the MERC would simply have to go on The List: those who would be dealt with in the future.

Terrorists come and go, but the DGSE never forgets.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER

SIXTY-EIGHT

Philippe Manerie emerged from the arrivals terminal at Islamabad International Airport and squinted at the sunlight. He’d been on and off planes for twenty hours, given he didn’t have the time to wait for a direct flight from Paris. He’d touched down in Rome and spent several hours in transit, and now he had found sanctuary. He had money in a British Virgin Islands account and his luggage held twelve vintage wristwatches collectively valued at around half-a-million US dollars.

He didn’t feel hard done by, and he didn’t feel proud. The choices he had made had cost him his marriage and landed him in a compromising position in Macao. He could blame the drinking and gambling, but he knew in his heart how young that girl was and he hadn’t said no. And when Murad, the Pakistani intel contractor, came knocking with the photographic evidence, the rest was just a formality—a mix of blackmail to keep him on the hook, and money to egg him along.

A blue Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled up outside the terminal building and the door was pushed open. He got in with his small suitcase, and was driven to a compound in the north of Islamabad, on the border of the diplomatic section. The two men he’d driven with walked him to a motel-like quarters at the back of an office building, and when he ducked out for a cigarette he realised that the ring fence of the compound might be designed to keep people in as much as keep people out.

He was fed well, and the next day a thick-set, silver-haired middle-aged man with a military bearing but plain clothes interviewed him in an air-conditioned room.