Shortly after 7 a.m., de Payns walked with the crowds down the rear ramp and onto firm ground at the western side of Naples harbour. He moved with the families onto the concrete quay, joking and smiling with the kids around him while scanning for watchers. The sky was overcast but the air was warm. In front of him was the service road that buses and taxis used to drop passengers at the terminal buildings, parallel with a main city boulevard, though separated by concrete barriers. To his left were mid-nineteenth-century maritime buildings, and to his right Vesuvius overlooked the bay. He walked towards the service road, past parked taxis and people greeting each other and putting their bags in the back of cars. A bus’s diesel hummed as tourists waited for the driver to pull their suitcases out of the belly of the vehicle.

Nothing out of place. Only tourists. No one unattached. No loitering vans. Any watchers would have stood out. De Payns had reversed his windbreaker jacket, so that what was black yesterday was cream-coloured as he left the ferry—a desilhouettage. He’d usually do that in a rupture—a disappearance act once a follower had been ‘put to sleep’. But he was feeling edgy, and he stayed in the middle of two groups as they walked off the quay and across the main road at the pedestrian crossing. He walked north along the Corso, stopping at a panetteria that had its entry on a cross street just around the corner from the Corso. He bought a cup of coffee and a cornetto, while waiting for followers to barrel around the corner and realise they’d lost the Frenchman. But no one came. In the normal run of events, an itinéraire de sécurité that took him out of the mission zone, followed by an effective rupture that lost any residual followers, would have been enough. It would have meant a return to being a relaxed ‘tourist’ on the street. But Operation Falcon had ended badly and he was on high alert.