Shrek said, ‘I only saw one.’

‘The one Commodore got into?’ Templar asked.

De Payns nodded and drank.

Templar seemed distracted. ‘Tell me about Commodore and this person outside the ferry toilet.’

‘It might have been an opportunity that came up on the ferry,’ said de Payns. ‘They saw it and took it.’

‘Opportunity?’ echoed Templar. ‘You mean the passports?’

De Payns nodded.

‘But if Murad was outside the toilet—’

‘I don’t know if it was Murad,’ de Payns reminded him.

‘Then how did he know that you had passports?’ Templar finished. ‘That was a surprise, non?’

‘When did you reveal you had passports for Commodore?’ asked Shrek.

‘Right before he went to the WC,’ de Payns said slowly.

‘So?’ replied Shrek, looking from de Payns to Templar. ‘Murad knew about the passports before the contact with Commodore. He moved to the toilet door to tell his asset something, give him instructions.’

‘His instruction was, Get those passports and we’ll find you in Palermo,’ said Templar with a nasty smile. ‘But that doesn’t answer the question—how did Murad know about the passports?’

De Payns almost whispered, ‘How would we know?’

The obvious answer—that Sayef Albar had Michael Lambardi wired—hung unspoken between them. The three operatives had already leaped to their next question. If Sayef Albar and Murad were running a wire on their guy against the DGSE, they were confident about who they were targeting. And if it was as bad as they were guessing, the terrorists had planned to shoot de Payns behind Bar Luca along with Lambardi. Planned, professional, targeted and reliably informed. The Sayef Albar organisation had inside knowledge.

The beer mirror behind the bar had the windmill of Brasserie de Saint Sylvestre etched into it, although the mirror was so old and distressed that you’d have to know the brewery to understand what was being advertised. De Payns stared into it as he ordered another round, squinting through the whisky bottles and mirror flaws to get a proper glimpse of himself. What stared back was a patchwork of a man: part husband, part father, all spy. He wanted to be with Romy, Patrick and Oliver, but he also needed to be with people who wouldn’t scold him for his occupation. He needed to unwind with the people who kept him alive. It might be contributing to the slow death of his marriage, but he needed to be with his crew—his clan—like a shark needed to keep moving. And somehow he needed to work out what he and Shrek were going to do about Manerie and the DGS. He wasn’t going to spy on his friend, a person who had saved him from certain death in Sicily. But he was holding back for some reason, and it was eating at him.