She continued. ‘Current intelligence points to bacteriological agents being developed at MERC. We’ve only had a third-hand glimpse through some Russian sources, but if these are accurate, we’re looking at a bioweapons facility in Islamabad, so this is where the Y Division comes in.’

Briffaut and de Payns exchanged a glance.

‘We need means of access to the MERC,’ said Lafont. ‘We’d like their internal organisation chart, their lines of work and research, their current projects and their financing. If there is information on potential weaponisation and targets, that’s a bonus. But for a start, we need to know what they have, what they want to make and how far they are from achieving it.’

Briffaut leaned on the table and put his fingertips together, a clear sign that he wanted a smoke. He looked at de Payns. ‘You have three months to get us initial results.’

‘I’m on it,’ said de Payns.

‘Of course you are,’ said Briffaut. ‘But we’re talking about Pakistan, so let’s do this softly softly, okay?’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Alamut was a Persian castle from which the Assassins—a secret group of medieval warriors—launched their attacks on various Middle Eastern rulers, Islamic and Christian. The naming of the operation for a sect that engaged in political assassination seemed a little presumptive to de Payns, when he had more prosaic matters to attend to. As the chef de mission of Alamut, de Payns was responsible for designing the operations, seeking sign-off from Briffaut and collating the resources to execute. The first operation in Pakistan would be a technical environment of the MERC structure and its personnel—essentially a search for COMINT, or communications intelligence, which could be done without ‘contact’. If the technical environment yielded enough information to proceed to an operational environment, operatives would be put in the field, and then—if that yielded someone interesting, with good potential for MICE leverage—they would move to a contact environment on a target. That’s when someone like de Payns was sent to meet, befriend, manipulate and turn the target. Contact was never attempted until the other environments had been established. Contact should always feel seamless to the target—if one day you wake up with a new best friend after one week, he might not be your friend.

It would have to be human because the computer systems at MERC were inaccessible to the Company without more information, such as email addresses of employees, IP addresses or a network signature. Those clues were not visible to the DGSE—another reason to believe that the MERC was controlled by the ISI.

De Payns’ team would have to determine one or more human targets to approach; de Payns guessed the target would be senior, but at the outset, the Company didn’t even have a name.

De Payns spelled these things out to the three other people in the meeting room: Gael Py, Brent Clercq and Thierry Suquet.