‘So, Zac,’ he asked, after they’d dealt with Paris Saint-Germain’s injury woes and Macron’s new petroleum tax, ‘what do you know about a tough guy called Jim, guards someone high up in the DGS?’

Zac smiled as he turned away from the vice, his bespectacled face becoming even more youthful. ‘So, you’ve met Jim Valley?’

‘Valley?’

Zac nodded. ‘Former Marines special forces, I believe. Deployed under Manerie in Africa.’

De Payns had another bite of the macaron, the sweetness of the biscuit failing to subdue the smell of gun oil. ‘He’s a good guy?’

Zac chuckled. ‘Well, Aguilar, like you said—he’s a tough guy. Better a friend than an enemy.’

De Payns caught the elevator back to his office and leaned back in his chair, observing the nondescript office, the safe in the corner and the view through the sash windows over the wooded areas of eastern Paris. He had eleven minutes before his meeting started and he closed his eyes, calming his thoughts.

‘My father had died,’ said a woman’s voice.

De Payns sat up straight, slightly startled. Marie Lafont stood in the doorway.

‘I didn’t flame out of the Y Division training,’ she said, folding her arms and leaning against the doorjamb. She was wearing a pleated skirt with an expensive-looking silk shirt.

‘Okay,’ said de Payns, coming back to earth.

‘There’s a story doing the rounds, isn’t there, that the DGS found me curled up on a bridge because I couldn’t handle the blue rats?’

‘Perhaps I heard that,’ said de Payns.

‘My father had a stroke, he was on life support. The rest of the family wanted to unplug him.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said de Payns.

As if she hadn’t heard him, she continued, ‘I needed a few days out of Paris. I should have told the Company.’

De Payns didn’t know what to say.

‘But what would I have told them? Hey, I’m going drinking for three days? It’ll get messy, guys. You might like to look the other way.’

De Payns laughed and eased back in his chair. If you drank to get sane, you were one of the gang.

‘I’m briefing the op,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘Want to walk me over?’

The meeting was a small one. Some operations briefings could run to twenty people jammed into a secure room, but there were five in this one. There was Briffaut—who’d discarded his suit jacket—and Mattieu Garrat, his deputy at the Y Division; they sat together at the pointy end of the oval table. Lafont, sat opposite de Payns with her 2IC—Josef Ackermann, the deputy-BER of CP—beside her. Ackermann had a mournful, elongated face—hence his nickname of ‘Mantis’. He was also a former university lecturer in chemical engineering, and his expertise in counter-proliferation operations was invaluable.