De Payns leaned back in the leather boardroom chair, knowing his words were being recorded. He breathed out and told himself to relax, that he’d just play it straight. He only had to tell one lie. Nine years in the DGSE, seven of them at Y, enduring all sorts of privation and being the good agent who never took black money and never lied to the Company. He’d earned the right to one fib, especially one that was being forced on him. When this debrief was over he would write his report and he’d go home and have a bath, kiss his kids and have a glass of wine with Romy. Heck, he might not even have to lie because they might not even ask.

‘So just to confirm,’ started Frasier, ‘have you spoken about Operation Falcon with anyone prior to this meeting?’

‘Of course not,’ said de Payns. ‘I travelled directly to the Cat and detected no surveillance. I’ve discussed Falcon with nobody.’

‘Okay,’ said Frasier, his gaze flinty. ‘Tell us about Sicily.’

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER

NINE

He wrote quickly and without flourish, just as his instructors had taught him so many years ago. No piece of writing from an officier traitant should betray any personality. We should have no sense of who you are based on your writing style. That meant short sentences with one idea confined to one sentence. No art, no personality. The screen was linked to an internal computer but all de Payns could see was a screen, a keyboard and a mouse. No slot for USB sticks, no DVD drive and no functionality for ‘print’. The only way into this system was to open his DGSE account.

He wrote in third person, through nine sections that started with Modalities and ended with Intentions, and took in such niceties as Manipulations, Directives and Connaissances Nouvelles Acquises, Newly Acquired Knowledge, to which de Payns was tempted to append: We now know there’s a mole in the Company who fucked us. But he didn’t write that. Instead he wrote that Sayef Albar had a paramilitary wing operating in Italy; that it was prepared to pay around six hundred thousand euros for a real French passport; and it had at least one Italian national assigned to its cause. He avoided referencing the Reuters report that Frasier had tabled. Intelligence reports avoided a priori knowledge, so he didn’t surmise the actual fate of Michael Lambardi. He could only report the facts as he saw them in the conduct of Operation Falcon—if the Sicilian police identified the body in the burned-out Mercedes as Michael Lambardi, then the Company could add the information to its file.