In de Payns’ career, many hours were spent alone on the streets, using his thinking and internal voice to keep himself safe and on-mission. One of the things that consistently occurred to him was the fact that he was living in a different world, with different players, from those around him. He even had a different soundtrack, if he was wired into the support team with his micro earpiece. It reminded him of a movie called The Matrix, in which most people lived life on one plane while a tiny group operated in a world parallel to the common reality. It wasn’t glamorous or cool. It was mentally isolating and had pushed many agents away from the one thing that pegged them to reality—their family. Being back in Paris brought on these feelings in overwhelming waves.

He continued east, moving with no hint that he was trained. In contrast to how spies were depicted in the movies, de Payns’ job was to put the followers to sleep, which was best done by behaving like anyone else on the streets of Paris. He did this by habit—he was already sure he wasn’t being followed, but putting followers to sleep had to be practised at all times. As he did so, he attempted to keep his family at the back of his mind. Oliver, his five-year-old son was a forty-minute walk away, enjoying his last days of true childhood before starting school after the summer break. His eight-year-old—Patrick—was probably working on a video game in a bedroom that looked like a clothes-bomb had hit. It was also the end of Romy’s full-time mothering role; with the PhD in her back pocket and Oliver at school, she would be returning to the workforce, even if only part-time. They had discussed some of the risks, which mainly revolved around Romy being used by a foreign agency for an approach of some kind. He’d trained her to be suspicious of every new face, especially the friendly ones, and her computer habits were now decidedly OCD. But she didn’t want to be micro-managed, so de Payns settled for painting the big picture and letting her make day-to-day decisions. He believed that if she was happy, she was more likely to go the distance with what was a less-than-ideal marriage from her perspective. As he walked beside the Seine he felt his family’s presence but also their distance, but he couldn’t dwell on it.

The wide stone stairway loomed and de Payns climbed it. When he reached the top he turned left to cross the bridge. The traffic was one-way, so if there were followers with a van or motorbike, the vehicles would have to circle around the long way to keep eyes on de Payns, and he’d get to see every vehicle as it approached.