The four men entered the concourse. Fouad glanced to his right, and his gaze froze before moving on. It was only the minutest of pauses, but Marković caught it, and it seemed to him that Fouad slowed down, falling farther behind Baba and the Syrians. Marković saw a couple, a man and a woman, cease their examination of a ticket machine and begin closing fast on Baba and the Syrians. Meanwhile, by the exit, a young black man in a clean tracksuit and an older male in a dark suit, a misbaha wrapped around his fingers, brightened as they took in the Syrians’ approach.

Suddenly there was shouting, and the couple from the ticket machine reached for guns, the butts visible to Marković beneath their jackets. At the same moment, heavily armed officers from RAID, the National Police’s tactical unit, emerged from a pair of unmarked doorways and moved in on the Syrians. Marković instinctively looked around, expecting to see more armed personnel closing on him. He was carrying a pistol but wasn’t so foolish as to believe he would stand a chance against a cadre of antiterrorist operatives. The best he could hope for was to be taken alive. So far, though, it seemed that he remained unnoticed, and so he began planning his escape.

Curiously, at that point the couple quickly separated, vanishing into the crowd, and Marković thought he saw at least three other men, all in civilian clothing, head for the exits. They didn’t run, unlike some of the passengers at the station who had immediately panicked at the sight of assault weapons, nor did they remain frozen in place like so many others. In common with Marković, who was already on his feet, their instinct was to remove themselves from the scene before they were spotted.

Marković immediately identified it for what it was: a fuckup, two operations being conducted independently of each other on the same target. One unit was clearly French, given the presence of RAID, but the likelihood of two French teams working in ignorance of each other was slim. The French had learned a lot of hard lessons from the terrorist attacks of 2015, one of which was the importance of integration and coordination. UCLAT, the Unité de coordination de la lutte antiterroriste, representing all branches of the National Police, was responsible for the centralization of operational information and decisions. It existed to ensure that, theoretically at least, the main gauche always knew what the main droite was doing. Regardless of divisional rivalries, no French agency would risk a takedown at a site such as the Gare de Lyon without first clearing the operation at the highest levels. That left a foreign power or independent operators as the second team, and Marković was leaning toward the former.