‘Still no report of a body that we could confirm as Commodore. We have a name for the dead Turkish bodyguard, but we’re doing more work on who he really is,’ said de Payns. ‘All the debrief reports are in, and when the director of operations has formed his own view of what went wrong, he’ll show it to me and ask me to comment.’

‘What is his view?’

‘We were fucked by someone close enough to know what we had planned in Palermo that night.’

‘What’s your view?’ asked Manerie.

‘Sayef Albar knew about the passports before I left the ferry in Palermo. Maybe it was Commodore and maybe someone was wired up.’

Manerie rose to his feet.

‘Just one thing,’ said de Payns. ‘Who’s the mole? Any ideas?’

‘Lots,’ said Manerie, walking for the door.

The kids played an Xbox game on the living room television while de Payns, Romy and Ana sat around the kitchen table drinking Beaujolais. It was a comfortable apartment but not ostentatious—three bedrooms and two bathrooms was doing well in Montparnasse, but the place was compact. The husband, Rafi, stood at the stove, tending a ceramic device that looked like a cooling tower for a nuclear power plant, but it was emitting delicious smells that filled the apartment.

‘… so I say to this boss manager, why would I need a praying room? And he say, for your praying rug.’

At this, Rafi made the Middle Eastern version of a Gallic shrug, and Ana and Romy laughed. De Payns went along with it, but not wholeheartedly.

‘So, Rafi,’ he said, ‘I guess you’re a Christian, right?’

‘By upbringing, yes,’ said Rafi. ‘But not so much the choirboy.’

He was a chatty engineer, enjoying his life in Paris, and his wife was a Frenchwoman, although one of her grandparents was Syrian. It was very Parisian, and if de Payns wasn’t professionally paranoid he would have liked to relax and have a few drinks. However, stories that self-advertised the teller as non-Muslim simply made him edgy. And women who were beautiful, intelligent and confident—but made nothing of it—were worthy of suspicion. When he was first plucked from the Intelligence Division and inducted into the Y Division at the Bunker, he was taught the skills of counterintelligence, especially when countering female operatives. It hadn’t been until de Payns was firmly inside the Bunker that he realised how devastating a female operative could be when pitted against the male ego. Even the most unappealing man, who had never been with a beautiful woman, could be flattered into feeling entitled to such beauty and intelligence. As they said in the spy game, a beautiful woman doesn’t bring you undone—she makes you bring yourself undone.