His wife, Romy, used to tell him that she liked his youthfulness, which she was sure came from him doing what he enjoyed. By which she meant his time in the air force flying fighter jets. By which she meant she was sick of his subsequent intelligence career and the strain it was putting on their marriage. By which she meant, he wasn’t so boyish anymore, which was basically true. He sometimes wondered how he’d got to be like this—reserving his light-heartedness and laughter for when he was drinking with his colleagues, the only people he truly felt safe with. He’d heard this was an occupational hazard but he hadn’t known what it meant until he realised that his DGSE buddies were the ones who saw the real him while his wife was seeing someone else. It was a professional trade-off that ended in suicide for some and alcoholism for others. Divorce was the rule, not the exception.

He finished the apple, grabbed his smokes and made for the deck outside his room. He torched the cigarette and exhaled the smoke like he was blowing his stress into the sea. The warm breeze from Africa washed over him; the swish of the sea against the ferry was hypnotic. To his left, a bunch of drunk English tourists hee-hawed over something on a smartphone. He smoked methodically, relaxed by the rolling swell and the fragrance of the Med in summer. It had been a long road to get here, and he wasn’t even that old. His journey into the Company started after the Kosovo War, when he was based at Villacoublay Air Base outside Paris, flying special forces and intelligence personnel into the Balkans to find war criminals. It was an uncertain time in his life, when he’d left fighter jets because of his back injury and was trying to establish a new reputation in the TBM 700—a powerful, nimble turboprop plane that could take off and land on very short air strips. He flew without name or insignia on his suit. He flew low at night, without flight plans in VFR mode, relying on sight rather than instruments, sometimes with the IFF identification transponder switched off, or its ‘Mode C’ deactivated, meaning the control towers on the ground couldn’t ascertain his altitude. His destination would often be relayed to him only after they’d cleared the Adriatic. He was told to ignore the usual rules of aviation, and de Payns once landed in three feet of snow at Sarajevo, at two in the morning, without clearance and in total darkness. It was dangerous, stressful work and he loved it.