De Payns turned and quickly walked to the end of the hallway, his heart thumping and his hand inside the pack, still unsure what the mission team had seen. Why was the operation being called off? He pushed through the glass door and into a small loading area. A silver-grey Mercedes SUV was parked side on, wheels on the kerb, its dark windows obscuring the occupants. Was that Lambardi in the back seat? De Payns couldn’t confirm it. As he approached the Mercedes it rocked. There was a popping sound and then the rear window of the car darkened. Someone on the inside had lost a lot of blood and tissue. De Payns’ hand went instinctively to the CZ as the Mercedes revved and accelerated out of the car park, a face staring from the front passenger window as it sped away.

De Payns was stunned, the adrenaline pumping, breaths coming short and sharp. He looked back through the bar door to where the Turk was flat on his back in the hallway, as yet undiscovered. He threw the pack over his shoulder and set off quickly into the night, joining the throng of tourists in the early summer evening. He was dressed for it, in jeans, polo shirt and a pack, his black cap reducing silhouette recognition that watchers might pick up. His heart pounded as crickets chirped and accordion music drifted on the sweet evening breeze, with the smell of marinara and cigarettes. He scanned parked vans and glanced at reflections in plate-glass windows, watching for the watchers. His spatial awareness was finely honed as he aimed for a landmark a few blocks inland, where he could sanitise himself with an IS, an itinéraire de sécurité. This would clear him from the mission zone and let him know if he was being followed. Having quit his mission zone, he would head straight to his exfiltration, planned back in Paris. Just before leaving Sicily, he would put his gommette at the emergency exfiltration plan de support—usually a public display such as a bus stop advertisement—which would be checked later by the support team to make sure he’d left the country. Only when they sighted de Payns’ gommette would the team also leave. No gommette would mean something happened to him, and they would stay to find out what. If he could get off this island in one piece, his next port of call would be the debriefing in Paris.

As he walked south on the Via Principe di Scordia, an image dominated his thoughts—the face that had peered from the front window of the Mercedes. De Payns was pretty sure it was the polite Pakistani man who’d waited for Lambardi to leave the WC on the ferry from Sardinia. He’d been on that ferry, and therefore he’d been in Cagliari. And he was clearly the boss.