He wrote important nouns and names in capitals. He covered the overnight in Cagliari, where he’d joined Michael Lambardi (referred to as Commodore by the DGSE), and the subsequent ferry crossing to Palermo as well as the events of that early evening. He listed his exfiltration, his multiple itinéraires de sécurité and ruptures, and he declared every conversation he’d had from the moment he left his ‘office’ in Marseille to the second he sat at the debriefing table with the directors and heads of sections. He told the truth about the passports—they were destroyed in Palermo and discarded in three wharfside rubbish bins. He played it straight, except for the conversation with Manerie and Jim, which was a small gap in his exfiltration that would be incredibly hard to verify unless someone at the Cat knew where to ask.

He had now officially lied for a DGS man. De Payns had entrapped and manipulated so many people in his career that to be in the grip of Manerie’s coercion because of the Amsterdam photograph was both humbling and confusing. If there was a mole in the Y division, de Payns wanted to find it. But if the price was spying on Shrek? Or spying on his own directors? These people were beyond the abstractions of national loyalty—they were the only reason he could do his job, and also be a husband and father, without losing his mind.

And yet the debrief had been unsatisfactory. Frasier wanted to know what parts of Falcon were compromised; if his people had any traps on them that they could drag back to Paris. His main concerns about the passports were ensuring Murad’s crew would neither have them to use, nor be able to reverse-engineer them and confirm the supplier of documents was the French government.

Sturt was different—ever the politician, he rested his elbows on the boardroom table and asked non-questions such as: So you didn’t hand over the passports for our cameras? So I guess you’d call the operation a failure? So you left behind a corpse in a bar and a packet of French passports at the docks?

The fact that the operation had veered off-course was de Payns’ fault. He was the chef de mission and he technically should have called off the passport transaction when Lambardi tried to change the time and place. But the reason that Lambardi wanted those passports there and then—because Murad was in Palermo—presented France with a much bigger opportunity. Eyes-on, personal interaction was the most powerful connaissance available to a service like the DGSE. De Payns had taken the risk, knowing that the Company did not even have a photograph of Murad.