They all filed into the panelled meeting room, dropping phones into a box held by the attendant. Lafont bolted the security door and joined the group, so there were five other people taking their seats around the oval conference table. Directly across from de Payns sat the director of the DO, Anthony Frasier, a large middle-aged man with a crown of thin black hair pushed straight back from his clean-shaven face. To his left sat Dominic Briffaut, the head of the Y Division; his big lumpy knuckles would make him the senior manager of no office in the DGSE other than Y. He assigned the operatives and authorised the planning of the operations. Every other department—Technical, Administration, Intelligence—dealt with the enemy at arm’s length, but Briffaut’s people lived among France’s adversaries. He was known to give his people the benefit of the doubt, but he visited hell upon those who abused his trust. He also had a big sense of humour—Briffaut’s ethnic background was obviously West African but when polite Franks asked him where he was from, Briffaut took great delight in telling them he was from Alsace. Which was true. He even had the terrible accent to prove it.

‘Aguilar,’ said Frasier, nodding at de Payns.

De Payns nodded back. Frasier had used de Payns’ pseudo, which was the policy at the Y Division. While other divisions knew de Payns and his colleagues only by OT numbers, internally they were referred to by pseudonyms: Templar, Shrek, Aguilar. There was only one official source in the French bureaucracy where the OT numbers, real names and pseudo titles were recorded in one place. The three most senior officers of the DGS—which included Manerie—held a hard copy of that information.

‘Let’s start this,’ said Frasier, who liked to pretend he was always in a hurry, but who missed nothing. He pushed a piece of paper across the desk to de Payns. ‘That anything to do with us?’

The sheet was a Reuters printout, with the previous day’s date and headlined: Two Murders in Palermo, Italy. Police had found a Mercedes-Benz SUV burned out in the Palermo shipyards in the early hours of the morning; it contained a body, as yet unidentified. Sicilian police were also seeking witnesses to the murder of a Turkish national in a popular cafe-bar called Bar Luca, in Palermo’s old town.