When he hit the pavement again it was 7.21 and Paris was starting to pump. Delivery vans were double parking and filling the street with West African rap as their drivers ran to building porticos with their parcels; commuters on mountain bikes shouted at drivers and hundreds of pedestrians walked the wide footpaths. The street looked safe, and he caught the crowded Metro south to the interchange then changed to a northbound line which hooked around to Odéon. Catching a bus east, he alighted at a stop in Noisy before wending through an IS into the side street, where a hidden side entrance of the Bunker was situated. He felt alert and a little paranoid, which he put down to the hangover. Even small leaks from intelligence services made people antsy, and the worst affected were the field operatives. The problems in Palermo gnawed at him, not the least because it reminded him of how he’d never resolved the torture-death of Amin Sharwaz, and how it was that the Pakistani engineer was revealed to the ISI. De Payns sometimes wondered if he should acknowledge the true extent of his concern to Romy, but he always stopped short—the day he divulged all to the mother of his children would be the day she pulled the plug on their marriage.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

The vials of prototype were sealed inside polystyrene canisters, which were in turn secured within the five stainless steel capsules that resembled a construction worker’s thermos, with a small combination lock on the screw lid.

‘Are we in agreement?’ the Doctor asked the man who sat on the other side of his desk. ‘Small rural settlements, with an observable population?’

‘I have the sites,’ replied the man, nodding to the piece of paper he’d supplied to the Doctor. ‘Operation Scimitar will be conducted as agreed and you’ll get photographic evidence.’

‘And stool samples and swabs,’ said the Doctor, too quickly.

The Doctor didn’t like this man who lounged before him. He was tall, well dressed and altogether too smooth, like a movie star or a salesman. He was Pakistani, which was in his favour, but he was a contractor with the ISI, foisted on him by the Colonel. As such he had a codename—Murad—and the Doctor knew nothing else about him, except that he had security clearance to be here, in the basement levels of the facility, which implied a certain seniority. He’d heard gossip that Murad managed an al-Qaeda cell on behalf of the ISI, giving the intelligence agency influence and control in North Africa. It wouldn’t have surprised the Doctor—the ISI also operated the Taliban in Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan, using it as a tool for control over an area much larger than the Pakistani government’s official reach.