If he had ten questions, the Company would have one hundred. The DGSE was famously hard on its field operatives when they came home to debrief. As one of his old instructors had warned him, building a genuine cover is only part of the puzzle; the other part is getting your story straight for the debriefers at the Cat. The administration people wanted to know where the money was spent and the managers wanted to know who the officer met. The intelligence officers—the DR, or Direction du Renseignement, the Intelligence Directorate—wanted to know exactly what words and phrases were used in conversations, and the specialist groups might sit in and pepper an agent with questions about nuclear triggers, bioweapons or whatever the operation had touched on. But most of all, if an operation initiated by the Company was called off and someone had been killed, the senior levels would arrive with their ambitious hangers-on and an OT would spend all day with four or five people trying to outdo one another with their suspicions. Such was the French secret services: Pas vu, pas pris; pris, pendu—not seen, not caught; caught, hanged.

His version of events would have to pass muster with two different masters. The first was Christophe Sturt, the director of the Direction du Renseignement. The DR was home to highly educated and ambitious analysts and managers whose requests for information were the initial triggers for missions such as Operation Falcon. Sturt would feel ownership of Falcon, and so would de Payns’ other master, the director of the Direction des Opérations, Anthony Frasier. Frasier would make an appearance because someone had died, in a foreign country, on an operation he was legally responsible for. He would have the right to chair the debrief, but his 2IC—the head of Y Division, Dominic Briffaut—would run the blow-by-blow questioning. Briffaut was a former army special forces operator who had switched to the DGSE twenty years ago. He could be hard on his operators, but was also very protective.

But if his masters had a plethora of questions for him, de Payns had one big question for them: Was there a traitor inside the Company?

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER

FIVE

De Payns wandered the concourses of the Milano Centrale, an hour to kill waiting for his train to Marseille. The Italians had created a new railway terminal in the middle of a nineteenth-century building, somehow retaining the original architecture around a labyrinth of shops and escalators as modern as Frankfurt’s. It felt light and clean, but within a domed cathedral of polished marble and massive curved skylights.