Jack Beaumont is the pseudonym of a former operative in

the clandestine operations branch of the French foreign

secret service, the DGSE. He joined ‘The Company’ after
being an air force fighter pilot and later flying special
operations and intelligence missions. In 2021 his debut
book The Frenchman quickly became a bestseller and is
now published internationally and in translation. Dark
Arena, his second book, continues the story of French
spy Alec de Payns. Beaumont’s background gives his
novels a level of authenticity that few other spy thrillers
have been able to achieve.

@jackbeaumont_official

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ARENA

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 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in 2024

Copyright © Jack Beaumont 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
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 PAUL

Prague in early February wasn’t all that bad, thought Paul Degarde,
even for a southern Frenchman accustomed to the Mediterranean
warmth. There was no snow on the ground in the Czech capital,
but Degarde waited in the Jungmann Square Starbucks, where
his toes wouldn’t freeze. He’d been in his holding zone for forty
minutes. He’d walked his safety route before arriving at the coffee
shop, however last night’s insomnia and the seven coffees he’d
drunk were not calming. For now, he focused on not fidgeting
or looking impatient, both ‘tells’ that watchers would look for.
At forty-four minutes, Degarde wrapped a plain scarf around
his neck, covertly dismantled his phone and poured the pieces
into his jacket pocket. Standing, he picked up a tourist camera
from the table in front of him, dropped it in his other pocket,
and emerged into the afternoon. The cold air tightened his jaw
as he moved through Jungmann Square, his gait relaxed but his
mind a laundry list of actions and contingencies. Paul Degarde
may have been a fully commissioned case officer—an officier
traitant, or OT—of the DGSE, France’s foreign secret service,
but he was not from Operations. His academic background in
Russian foreign policy, and his fluency in the Russian language,

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 2 JACK BEAUMONT

had seen him recruited as an analyst by the Company twenty years

earlier. For analysts who worked with the DR—the Direction du
Renseignement, the Intelligence Division of the Company—some
basic training in clandestine liaison was required, which he’d used
at his two embassy external posts in Greece and Turkey. There
were rules for how he conducted himself in the field, even if his
job was the relatively low risk processing of human sources.
He had six minutes between Starbucks and his contact point.
He had to be nonchalant while detecting and memorising every-
thing on the route. He knew from his field work that once he was
back in Paris someone from the DO—Direction des Operations—
could gatecrash a debrief and start asking detailed questions about
who and what was around him during a meeting or a route.
He walked across Františkánská Zahrada Park, through
the Světozor passage with the tourist crowds and came out in
Vodičkova Street, where he turned right to create a visual ‘loss’
for potential followers. He walked fifty metres up the street before
crossing it, giving him an excuse to look for traffic and determine
followers.
He moved into a medieval walkway, past a line of eight adver-
tising panels and walked at a slight angle to them so as to remove
a convenient line of sight for any followers. He advanced to a
set of steps at the end of the lane where a luminous sign indi-
cated Kino Lucerna. Inside the building’s gallery, a horse was
suspended upside down from the vaulted ceiling. He took a few
photos, playing out his tourist legend and allowing a final check
for followers. By the time he lowered his camera he knew he
was clean. If things went wrong, the camera shots would let the
Company know his location before he disappeared. He pushed
the thought of capture from his head. Unlike the DO operatives,
he had his secret weapon, right against his heart in his jacket
pocket: his diplomatic passport.

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He climbed the stairs to the cafe, choosing a table located

slightly back from the bay windows, with a view of the gallery and
the stairs. Lotus was due to arrive at 3 p.m., which left Degarde
fifteen minutes to sit and watch.
He ordered a coffee and prepared for the wolf to show the
tip of his nose. The main operational security method he had to
adhere to when managing clandestine ‘drops’ was the itinéraire
de sécurité—IS—which involved walking routes, finding angles,
checking in reflections and creating points de passage obligés—
zones that a follower had to commit to in order to maintain their
‘tail’, and which made it obvious they were following. Besides the
IS there was also a hygiene protocol called the ‘tourniquet’, which
involved a team of least two OTs, who would overwatch a security
route and ‘clear’ an operative out of their mission zone, ensuring
no followers. He didn’t have a team overwatching this oper-
ation so he focused on his tradecraft and waited, controlling his
breathing and refraining from fidgeting. If Lotus was a no-show
after twenty-five minutes, he’d play it by the book: there was
never a compelling need to wait more than ten minutes past the
agreed meet time.
He’d arrived from Paris the previous morning and at his hotel,
the Old Royal Post, he’d asked to be moved to another room
immediately after check-in. Then he’d walked to the French
embassy, located west of the Vltava River. Degarde considered
the Vltava to be the natural demarcation between his life and
mission zones: in his mission zone, he was a spy whose every
movement and interaction was controlled by the Company; in
his life zone he was a mid-level diplomat with declared duties,
none of them controversial.
At the baroque palace that housed the French embassy, Degarde
had met the chief of station, who worked under the cover of
cultural attaché of the embassy. He’d briefed the local DGSE man
on the real purpose of his visit and the backup he would need if

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 4 JACK BEAUMONT

the contact with his source did not go as planned. Contact with
an already-recruited source did not usually necessitate a DO
protection scheme, so Degarde was responsible for his own safety.
Now, as he sipped his coffee in the Café Lucerna, his Paris
apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement, where his wife Katie
and daughter, Louise, were waiting for him, seemed very far
away. He tried not to think about Paris. Some operatives in the
Company could spend weeks in the field under these conditions,
somehow remaining calm and focused and keeping their families
in a separate mental compartment. He didn’t know how they did
it. Instead, he turned his mind to the meeting with Lotus—the
codename for Lado Devashvili, a former member of the Georgian
government who’d branched into the business world in the early
1990s when the Soviet bloc fell. Devashvili spent very little time
in Tbilisi with his family, given his job kept him so busy meeting
prostitutes at luxury hotels. Lotus provided everything that might
be required by a foreign government or its contractors: drugs,
escorts, boats, planes, IDs and weapons. What the DGSE required
was hard-to-come-by intelligence. There was no collusion between
the Company and Lotus, only an exchange of documents for cash.
Degarde had spoken to him once, through the operational agent
of the DO who had recruited Lotus and transitioned Degarde
to become the handler. That three-way meeting in Vienna had
been a memorable one for Degarde—not just because he’d met
Lotus for the first time, but because he’d met the well-known
Aguilar, from the DGSE’s Y Division, the section responsible
for clandestine operations. Lotus’s face resembled a metal plate
chiselled for many years by expensive vodka bottles, in the centre
of which sat two small, sunken eyes. Even Lotus had been wary
around Aguilar, Degarde noted. After the meeting, Aguilar had
warned Degarde to be particularly cautious around Lotus. ‘Avoid
talking to him, and always be very careful to carry out your

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 DARK ARENA 5

personal security measures. Imagine you’re dealing with a cobra

in a round room.’
Since that initial encounter, Degarde had met Lotus clandes-
tinely in the major cities of various European countries, always
under the guise of business trips. Degarde contacted Lotus via
the standard liaison plan, making an appointment and stating
his needs, and the Georgian appeared miraculously to pass on
information that was generally considered high quality. While
impressed by the level of information, Degarde would have
preferred not to come within five hundred kilometres of the man.
At 3.01 p.m., a tall, fat man wearing a long coat entered the
Lucerna’s gallery. Lotus was well within the Company’s accepted
–1/+2 minutes window for a contact. His tweed trilby hat was in
his hand rather than on his head, indicating that he didn’t think
he’d been followed, however Degarde’s position gave him a view
of everyone who came into the building behind the Georgian.
Degarde took the green Geo magazine from his bag and put it on
the table in front of him, indicating to Lotus that he’d detected
no followers and the exchange could proceed.
Lotus crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and climbed the
marble stairs to the cafe, where he sat at a free table between
Degarde and the exit. He put his hat on the table, took a packet of
cigarettes from his pocket and put it next to the hat, then signalled
to a waitress and ordered a whisky. Degarde paid his bill—keeping
the receipt so he could charge his coffee to his mission expenses—
and stood up. Tucking his magazine under his arm, he walked
to the exit. As he passed Lotus’s table, he let his hand drag and
retrieved the packet of cigarettes. Lotus did not react. Everything
happened so naturally that only a trained observer would have
seen the drop.
Degarde walked down the marble stairs to the foyer, and left
through an exit that neither man had used when they arrived. He
turned right and headed towards the National Museum, pausing

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 6 JACK BEAUMONT

along the way to take tourist snaps. At the statue of Saint Wenceslas
he entered the adjacent Metro station, turned left at the bottom of
the stairs, and walked with the crowd towards the disabled toilet.
After locking himself in, Degarde pulled the packet of cigarettes
from his pocket and opened it to reveal four tightly folded A4
sheets. Three of them were printouts of emails, containing the
names and addresses of the senders. Degarde skimmed them: in
Russian, the writers of the emails asked Lotus to set up various
services for their benefit in the Cypriot city of Larnaca, and
also on the Lebanese and Syrian coasts in the Mediterranean.
Degarde felt his blood run cold as he unfolded the fourth sheet
and saw the letterhead. It was a classified document from the
Russian defence ministry indicating the appointment of specialist
agents from the SVR, the civil foreign intelligence agency, at the
Russian military base at Tartus in Syria, and the deployment of
intelligence drones at the Khmeimim Air Base, another Russian
facility in Syria. He wondered how such a significant document
had fallen into Lotus’s hands, and decided it warranted staying an
extra night in Prague to play out his tourist legend. His training
emphasised that if an OT had any doubts while in the field, or
had a sense of heightened risk, they should put any followers ‘to
sleep’ by spending hours wandering a city in tourist mode, with
no hint of training.
He took his small camera out of his pocket and, after setting
the sheets flat on the floor, photographed them twice each, making
sure to erase each photo as soon as it was taken. His glasses
slipped over his nose and his hand was shaking. The Company’s
Technical Division would retrieve data from the camera’s memory
card upon its return, and the numbers of the remaining photos
would follow each other in the event of an inspection.
Having roughly verified the content of the drop, it was time to
move to the second phase of his contact: remuneration. Degarde

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 DARK ARENA 7

tore the sheets into tiny pieces and let them fall into the toilet.
He would have liked to proudly exhibit the Russian classified
document to colleagues at his intelligence desk, or ‘BER’—it
was quite a coup—but he wasn’t going to travel across Europe
with such a dangerous prize in his possession. He flushed the
toilet several times, removed an envelope from his bag which he
placed in his jacket pocket, then he left the bathroom and took
the westbound Metro line. No longer carrying compromising
material, he began to feel calmer as the train picked up speed.
But he would only breathe easily on the plane back to Paris, he
knew, when this was all over.
He emerged from Mustek station and walked through the
pretty streets of old Prague until he arrived at Svateho Jilji church,
entering the building through the side door on Zlatá Street. Lotus
sat alone in the first row of the left aisle, seemingly deep in prayer.
Degarde wondered which saint would listen to him. Apart from
a few tourists and a priest checking his candles, the church was
otherwise empty. Degarde sat at the other end of Lotus’s pew and,
without turning his head from the transept, took the envelope
from his pocket and placed it gently between them. Inside was ten
thousand euros, which Lotus would probably spend on vodka and
a girl. With this Christian thought, Degarde stood and crossed
himself, as Lotus put his hat on the envelope.
Degarde walked down the central aisle and stepped out onto
Husova Street. He plunged into the small passage in front of the
church, to the left of the beer museum, and set about exiting his
mission zone.
He walked past the medieval torture museum and over the
seven-hundred-year-old Charles Bridge, which was the point de
passage obligé leading to his life zone. For followers to stay on
his heels, they would have to reveal themselves on the bridge.
He breathed out slowly when he reached the far bank and took

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 8 JACK BEAUMONT

some tourist snaps, turning to face the way he’d come. He was
on the alert for someone he might have noticed earlier in the day,
without announcing that he was looking. But he saw no faces
he’d seen before, and no ‘parasite gestures’ that were supposed
to look natural but were forced.
He took another photo, committing to the role of tourist now.
He would spend the next twenty-four hours meandering the
streets and visiting museums, taking a hundred shots of Prague.
He wished he could show his wife and daughter this city, so beau-
tiful under the late winter sun, and so relaxing when you didn’t
have to retrieve secret documents from one of the Company’s
most dangerous sources.
Considering himself clean, he hurried up the stairs into the
lobby of the Old Royal Post and asked to extend his stay for an
extra night; there was just so much to see in this beautiful city,
he told the woman on reception. Then he went up to his room
and changed his flight.

After buying souvenirs in the airport’s departures concourse,

Degarde sat at the bar and ordered a whisky. He was exhausted.
The extra day in Prague had been spent walking in his office
shoes, and his feet ached. Easing back in his seat, he rummaged
in his jacket pocket, took out the various pieces of his phone,
put it together, and turned it on. He was pleased to see that there
was no missed call from Katie. Even though he’d been away a
night longer than planned, she would have understood that he
couldn’t break from his legend to call her. He sent a text to the
embassy’s ‘cultural attaché’, thanking him for his time and his
welcome, then pulled the battery from the phone again. The chief
of station would understand that Degarde was at the airport and
all was well.

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Degarde took a sip of his drink, thinking of those documents

he had briefly seen in the bathroom. Tartus and Khmeimim.
Why would Moscow send more SVR men there? What were the
Russians preparing in the Mediterranean?
The flight to Paris was announced. Degarde drained his whisky
and joined the queue to board, thinking that James Bond could
not have done better.

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 PARIS

It was 9.32 p.m. when Paul disembarked at Charles de Gaulle and

headed for the RER to get lost in the crowds and complete his last
safety route alone before returning home. At the boarding area for
the Paris-bound RER, the information panel indicated that the
next train had been delayed by forty-five minutes due to a signal
failure. Degarde was tired and wanted to go home. Though he
knew he should follow procedures, he considered that no opposing
service was following him, so he returned to the terminal and went
to the taxi stand. Putting a slight feeling of professional guilt to
the back of his mind, he got into his assigned taxi and gave the
driver his address, then he turned on his phone and texted his
wife: Just leaving the airport. I’ll be home in 35 minutes.

The following morning, Degarde ate breakfast with Katie and

Louise and then took the Metro to Porte des Lilas, emerging
in the twentieth arrondissement just before 9 a.m. It was still
cold enough to warrant gloves and his black woollen beanie as
he walked towards the Company’s headquarters. He wasn’t too

10

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concerned with his ‘hygiene’—he’d walked his security routes

the previous day in Prague before going to the airport, and he
didn’t feel the need to do another before entering the Centre
Administratif des Tourelles, known colloquially as the Cat, even
though he knew many OTs did. Instead, he was anticipating
his debriefing with sector manager, Marie Lafont, at 3 p.m.
He’d have time to drop the camera’s SD card with the Technical
Division—the DT—before writing his report. He was eager
to get the photos of the documents before lunch so he could
analyse them before the debriefing. Lafont could be forensic
about source materials.
He entered the DGSE building on Boulevard Mortier, known
as La Piscine by many employees because it was beside an indoor
swimming pool where so many of them exercised. He passed
through the many security points. A hotchpotch of Napoleonic
and late 1960s architecture, with a modern American overlay,
the headquarters of France’s foreign intelligence service looked
like it had been constructed to completely confuse an outsider.
He walked downstairs to the DT’s basement level, which was
vast and ran under Boulevard Mortier into the building over the
road. In the administrative area he dropped the SD card with a
techie who sported a Flock of Seagulls haircut and a t-shirt with
a picture of an audio cassette, and asked for the ‘prod’ to be sent
to his office.
Degarde went back upstairs to the cafeteria to grab a coffee and
pain au chocolat, and seeing four of his colleagues on the velvet
benches at one of the round tables he wandered over to join them.
‘Haven’t seen you for a couple of days, Paul,’ said Stefan, a DR
analyst on Degarde’s floor who worked at the Africa section.
‘You been on a trip?’
‘Yes,’ said Degarde, unable to repress a proud smile. ‘But I
can’t tell you more than that. You don’t have the need to know.’

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His colleagues laughed.

‘James Bond for a day,’ said Romain Precheur, the Counter-
Proliferation analyst.
‘Well, he’d better learn to drink a martini,’ said Stefan. ‘Last
time I saw Paul drinking gin, he threw up on himself.’
‘Bond drinks vodka martinis,’ said Romain.
‘Even worse,’ said Stefan. ‘Paul passes out with vodka.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Degarde, smiling as he stirred sugar into
his coffee. ‘The only thing I can tell you is that the quality of the
prod is as good as the girls in the country I visited.’
‘Let’s hope you weren’t in Pakistan then, mon pote,’ said Stefan,
which triggered more laughter.
He walked the stairs up into the main building, and entered
his office by inputting the week’s digital code. In front of him
were various files containing information grabbed by sources
over the previous months. He was expected to take in strands
of information and synthesise pieces of a puzzle. He had barely
closed the door behind him when there was a knock. He opened
it to find an internal courier, who handed him a sealed envelope
containing the printed documents retrieved from his SD card.
Closing the door again, he perused the contents closely. One of
the documents Lotus had supplied was an email in Russian about
an event scheduled for two weeks’ time in Monaco, aboard a
yacht called Azzam. Degarde couldn’t remember this email from
his quick verification in Prague. The Russian term for ‘making
a deal’ was used in the email and the language suggested a very
high level of discussion. There was also a phone number listed
for an unidentified person who seemed to be a person of interest,
a POI, for the Russians.
Degarde knew immediately that Lafont would want more
detail, so he left his office and walked down to the department
that generated intelligence from Open Sources. He asked them

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to research Azzam and have the information for him by 2 p.m.

Back in his office he called the DT, thanked them for the SD
images and asked for a ‘phone environment’ on the phone number
in the email; if they succeeded, it would tell him where the
phone was being used. Then he opened the reports section of
the DGSE computer system and wrote two reports. One was
for the analysts, an ‘O’ report written objectively that did not
allow the reader to see the identity of the writer or the sources of
the intelligence, and the other one was called ‘R’ and explained
how the contact with Lotus was done and the security measures
he took around it.
As Degarde filed the reports, the internal courier knocked
at his door and dropped off a file that contained pictures,
specifications and ownership details of Azzam. It was an eighty-
two-metre, ten-stateroom motor yacht, Degarde learned, built in
the Netherlands in 2017 at a cost of seventy-eight million euros.
It was owned by a UAE shell company and its home port was
Port Vell, Barcelona. It didn’t feature in any social pages and it
didn’t appear to be owned by a movie star or a Silicon Valley
billionaire. There wasn’t much on Azzam, but that wouldn’t stop
Lafont asking for more.

At 2.58 p.m. Degarde dropped his iPhone in the box outside

the E sector briefing room on the third floor and took a seat
at the large oval meeting table, across from the current head of
BER–Europe, Lars Magnus. Magnus was tall and youngish and
seemed a little spooked by the presence of his immediate prede-
cessor in the role, Marie Lafont, who sat beside him. Marie Lafont
was a well-dressed brunette in her early forties. She was smart
and driven and had field experience, which set her apart from
many of the careerists at the Company. Now a sector manager,

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 14 JACK BEAUMONT

she was running this operation. She didn’t acknowledge Degarde’s

arrival; she was on the phone, asking someone to join them. After
a quick conversation she hung up and turned to Degarde. ‘Based
on the prod I received this morning, I asked Briffaut to sit in.
He should be here soon.’
Degarde nodded and smiled but his stomach clenched. Dominic
Briffaut was the head of Y Division; he didn’t often leave the
Bunker, as the headquarters of clandestine operations was known,
to come for idle chats at the Cat.
‘We need to know what they’re planning on that boat,’ said
Lafont. ‘And we need a phone environment to locate this number
in the email.’
‘It’s done, boss,’ Degarde said, relieved he’d taken the initiative.
The bearish form of Dominic Briffaut entered the room, mug
of coffee in his hand. He threw his coat on one of the spare chairs
before taking a seat. ‘I have twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Tell me
what you’ve got.’
Lafont took Briffaut through the document drop in Prague and
the information gained from it, including the intelligence drones
being staged in Khmeimim Air Base, the new SVR intelligence
postings at Tartus, and the meeting in Monaco aboard Azzam;
so far, there was nothing to connect the phone number of the
POI to the meeting on the yacht, she added.
Briffaut nodded through the briefing, asking only a few clar-
ifying questions. The two senior people were economical with
their words, Degarde noticed. And Magnus—despite being the
head of BER–E—stayed out of it.
When Lafont had finished, Briffaut turned to Degarde, focusing
on him. ‘You’ve dealt with Lotus more than anyone. Was there
anything different about our Georgian friend in Prague?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Degarde. ‘I never talk to him. I collect
the prod and I give him the money.’

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 DARK ARENA 15

‘Sometimes a man doesn’t speak with words,’ said Lafont,

with a very faint smile.
‘Was there more eye contact than you’re used to?’ Briffaut
pushed. ‘Did he try to start a conversation?’
Degarde shook his head. ‘It was business as usual.’
The Y Division chief stared at Degarde in silence for a few
seconds, then he stood, grabbed his coat and, talking to Lafont,
said, ‘I’ll leave you to find out more about that phone number
and I’ll investigate a way on to the boat. Let’s talk tomorrow.’
And then he was gone.

Back in his office, Degarde found a message from the DT: the
phone number on the Lotus prod had been used in Genoa several
times in the past twenty-four hours. He sent an internal email
to Lafont to let her know, then put all the material he’d amassed
in his office safe, shut down his computer and headed to the
Metro. He mulled over the debriefing as he travelled home. It
had not gone terribly—after all, he’d retrieved the documents
without screwing up the mission—but the prod had delivered
more questions than answers. The Russians were increasing their
presence on the Syrian coast, and the Palais de l’Élysée would
expect the French security services to tell them why. And it was
important that the Company get the information to the President
before the Americans or the British could do it.
It was a little before 7 p.m. when he turned the key in the door
to the mid-nineteenth-century apartment in the thirteenth—the
rent was subsidised, thanks to Katie’s connections—and let himself
in. No murmur of a TV or squawk from an Xbox. That meant
Louise might be reading, which made Degarde happy; he was
tired of nagging her about screen time.
He hung up his coat, walked past the kitchen and froze at the
tableau before him.

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 16 JACK BEAUMONT

Three men in black balaclavas. His child on the sofa, crying. His
wife on her knees, hands tied behind her back, a hand holding
her blonde hair in a gloved fist.
‘Who are you?’ Degarde demanded, but instead of answering
the man closest to him took one step towards him and swung
a black handgun that caught Degarde in front of the right ear.
Degarde staggered sideways into the sideboard, and a vase toppled
from it and smashed on the floor.
‘Dad!’ screamed Louise, and the third masked man slapped
the child hard with the back of his hand. Her mother screamed
before a big hand was clamped over her mouth.
As Degarde pushed himself off the sideboard, he could see his
wife’s blue panties on the Persian rug beside the television screen,
ripped at the sides. As he tried to stand, his vision swimming, his
assailant kicked him in the balls. Degarde sagged to his knees,
retching from the pain.
‘So,’ said the man holding his struggling wife. ‘Our friend
lives like a king in beautiful Paris, eh boys?’
His French was good but heavily accented. Russian.
‘What do you want?’ gasped Degarde, switching to Russian.
‘My family have no part in this.’
‘So why bring them into it?’ asked the Russian, his grip on
Katie’s face tightening. ‘You make another country your business
and then claim you are immune? The French have such a sense
of humour.’
Louise stirred on the floor. Degarde could see she was crying,
tears running down her bruised face onto her Paris Saint-Germain
shirt. She didn’t have Katie’s blonde hair, but the dark curls of
Degarde’s mother. They framed a face full of fear and despair,
and this hurt Degarde more than his aching testicles.
‘Let them go,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
The lead man chuckled. ‘You hear that, boys? He’s offering
to talk.’

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The man who’d assaulted Degarde also laughed. He grabbed

the collar of Degarde’s woollen jumper and leaned in. ‘You’ll talk,
all right, Comrade. You’ll beg to do it.’
Degarde tried to reply but the handgun slammed into his face
again, and the scene before him went black.

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 CHAPTER
ONE

Alec de Payns walked in the morning sunlight across the Pont

des Bergues, spanning the Rhone, aiming for Geneva’s rive droit.
He’d been walking for sixteen minutes, which had given him time
to relax into his legend of a design student named Guillaume
Roger, while also checking for followers. Geneva gave the surface
impression of a wealthy, civilised city, however it was also a
historic crossroads of national interest and money, and de Payns
was always careful in this city of spies.
He stepped onto the Quai des Bergues, turned right and
walked along the river to where it opened into Lac de Geneve,
a haven for cruise boats and waterside bars and restaurants. He
crossed onto the Quai du Mont-Blanc, where the buildings became
grand. One of them was the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he was
due to meet his new friend Nikolai, a fellow student at the HEAD
design academy, and his father.
De Payns walked past two black Mercedes-Benz SUVs parked
on the Ritz-Carlton apron, and entered the impressive white
marble foyer with its black-and-white marble-tiled floor. There
were two military-looking men in the lobby, dressed in black suits

18

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 DARK ARENA 19

and tactical boots. De Payns had been expecting to see them, just
as he was expecting to see the tall blond student standing by the
marble staircase, his red woollen scarf a raffish contrast to his
expensive sand-coloured suit.
‘Guillaume!’ Nikolai waved flamboyantly, his Russian accent
echoing around the huge room. ‘Over here.’
Nikolai moved in for a hug and de Payns could sense the
security people watching them.
‘I hope you’re not freaked out by these apes,’ said Nikolai,
cocky and rude and eminently likeable. ‘My father only visits
once a year, and he travels with this zoo. Is it okay?’
‘I hardly noticed,’ said de Payns, with a smile. ‘Thought maybe
Putin was in town.’
Nikolai laughed then, suddenly serious, said, ‘Dad has to have
these people around him when he travels because of his work.
Please don’t be scared.’
‘Thanks for the warning—I’ll try to look brave,’ said de Payns.
He started to walk away, but Nikolai grasped his bicep to
stop him.
‘Dad and I love each other,’ he explained earnestly, ‘but he thinks
that the Russian climate is not good for me right now.’ Nikolai bit
his lip and looked away. ‘It just doesn’t . . . agree with me.’
De Payns felt for him. Their friendship hadn’t touched on the
subject of Nikolai’s sexuality. Now Nikolai was trying to find
a way to warn his French friend that the Russian military and
intelligence worlds did not accept gays. Even the sons and daugh-
ters of senior officers could find themselves sent to rehabilitation
camps, to be physically and psychologically broken down, and
turned into real Russians.
‘I understand, my friend,’ said de Payns. ‘I guess you are much
better off in Geneva, especially for the arts.’

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 20 JACK BEAUMONT

They moved into Fred by Fiskebar, a pricey bar favoured by

Nikolai. De Payns usually avoided drinking there; Geneva had
much better taverns. But his social manipulation had succeeded and
Nikolai now wanted his father to meet his new friend. Nikolai was
not aware that also dotted around the hotel was de Payns’ mission
team, consisting of Templar, positioned in the hotel for threats, and
Danny, who was in the van controlling the comms. They’d both
cover de Payns when he left the hotel, doing counter-tailing,
and if necessary they’d run a tourniquet. Aline, a petite blonde
who worked for the Company, was sitting alone in the Fiskebar,
drinking a Coke. She’d been recording audio and HD video of
the bar with a hidden device for ten minutes before de Payns
arrived, and she’d clandestinely record the meeting from her table.
Nikolai’s father was already seated at his table when the two
students arrived. De Payns flashed his big smile, in keeping
with the youthful student persona he’d cultivated. ‘So pleased
to meet you, Mr Beshivsky,’ he said, using the surname assumed
by Nikolai. ‘Welcome to Geneva.’
As they made small talk, de Payns assessed the man in front
of him: he was around fifty, with pale, cold eyes, a full head of
salt-and-pepper hair, and a strong body. De Payns could feel the
other man’s eyes scrutinising him in return, the father trying
to work out if Nikolai and de Payns were lovers. After all, that
was why Nikolai had been exiled to Geneva under a false name.
When Nikolai rose to go to the bathroom, de Payns was left
alone with his new acquaintance, whose real name was Lazar
Suburov, a full colonel in the Russian FSB, the country’s federal
security service. Suburov was the number two ranking officer
in the Intelligence Directorate for Chechnya. The Company had
codenamed him Keratine, and he was of value to France, which
was why de Payns was going to try to turn a senior FSB officer
while armed Russian henchmen stood guard outside.

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 DARK ARENA 21

‘So,’ said Keratine, ‘Nikolai tells me you share a passion for

art and for partying? I’m glad to hear he has found a like-minded
friend, given he doesn’t see his family much anymore.’
‘Well, actually,’ said de Payns, letting his expression harden,
‘I’m not your son’s friend. I work for the French services—and
from now on you’ll work for us too.’
The blood drained from Keratine’s face. De Payns recognised
real fear in his eyes.
‘You could refuse,’ continued de Payns, ‘but I guess you know
what happens if your colleagues discover that your son is not
dead, like you told them, but hiding out in Switzerland because
he’s gay?’
Keratine cleared his throat, his pupils dilating. ‘Exiling a gay
son isn’t so unusual . . .’
‘Even if he’s in contact with a foreign intelligence service?’
‘Fuck,’ mumbled Keratine. He slumped in his seat, rubbing
his face as if trying to make the conversation go away.
‘I understand the Russians like to re-educate homosexuals,’
said de Payns, keeping his voice flat but strong. ‘The Chechens
in particular. It’s not pretty, but highly effective, I hear.’
Keratine winced. ‘Look, I love my son. He’s not here because
I’m ashamed.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said de Payns, seeing that Nikolai had moved
to the bar and was ordering drinks. ‘Nikolai is an impressive
young man.’
Keratine sat up, seeming unsure whether to be sad or angry.
‘I knew this moment would come one day. Please don’t do this.
There is no need.’
De Payns kept talking, knowing the entire interaction was
being recorded by Aline from the bag on her table. ‘You will be
contacted in Russia by a man named Guy. He’ll introduce himself
as a friend from Geneva. I suggest you respond positively to his

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 22 JACK BEAUMONT

requests, for the survival of your son—and perhaps to also stop

your career from submerging?’
Nikolai returned with the drinks and resumed his seat. ‘So,
have you got acquainted?’ he asked, a boyish quality evident now
he was less nervous. ‘How do you like my friend, Dad? I told
you he was fun.’
‘Your friend is very nice,’ said Keratine, eyeballing the
Frenchman.
De Payns stood. ‘Well, I know how much you have missed
each other, so I’ll leave you to have some quality family time.’
He turned to Keratine. ‘Sir, it was very nice meeting you. Maybe
we’ll meet again?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Keratine, with a brief hate-filled glance,
‘but you never know.’

De Payns passed the Russian thugs in the lobby and stepped

out into the street. He crossed the road and walked north along
the Quai de Mont-Blanc, finding some shade from the trees that
separated the famous street from the lake. He now had to conduct
a tourniquet overseen by the three-person mission team, ending
at a plan de support—an advertising poster at a bus stop on the
Rue des Pâquis, which would feature a sticker, or gommette. If
the sticker was red, he was being followed and he’d move to an
exfiltration plan.
The route took sixteen minutes, his team detecting if he had
followers and communicating with one another over the radio
net. He walked to a Coca-Cola ad on a bus stop and saw the
red gommette. Yet just because there was a tail, it didn’t mean he
could break from his legend and start acting like a spy.
He kept walking and entered Geneva’s central railway station,
walking to a magazine stand where he pretended to be interested
in a publication. He waited for a train to arrive and, when there

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 DARK ARENA 23

was a crowd pouring down the main concourse, he joined them.

After ten seconds, he took a sudden turn to the right and walked
out a side passage into the sunshine and onto the grounds of
the art and design school. He walked out the other side of the
campus, leaped onto a tram and rode it four blocks west before
jumping off and treating himself to a browse through a three-
storey department store. When de Payns was sure he no longer
had a follower, he moved to the dead mailbox that had been set
up along with the tourniquet and had now been ‘armed’ with a
white gommette at the end of a street called Rue Jean-Gutenberg.
He followed the street for twenty seconds before seeing a red
bicycle with a wicker basket parked outside a bakery. From the
basket he grabbed a white envelope—left there by Aline—and
quickly dropped his French ID card in the name of Guillaume
Roger in another envelope in the basket. De Payns kept walking
and at the end of the street put the sticker he was carrying on a
concrete lamppost, which told Aline he’d made the exchange and
she could return for the envelope.
De Payns walked to the Crowne Plaza, where a room had
been booked under the name on the new ID card he’d just picked
up, Benoît Droulez. The booking had been made by Renan, an
infrastructure Honourable Correspondent—HC—working in
the hotel. An HC arranged important matériel and services for
visiting OTs. Renan worked in the Crowne Plaza and would
ensure no bank details were needed and there was no trace for
the Russians.
In his room, de Payns lay on the hotel bed, cycling his
breathing. He felt safe in this hotel because Renan was a clan
member, one of a secret group that included Shrek, Templar,
Rocket and himself, who were sworn to support one another.
That’s how de Payns worked and it was what he relied on for his
sanity. He visualised every step of the morning and the tourniquet.
He thought about faces he’d seen in the hotel and on the tram,

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 24 JACK BEAUMONT

and what he might have missed. He thought about Nikolai, and

about Nikolai’s father’s face when de Payns had given him the
facts, the dévoilement. He thought about how the scenario could
be turned on his own family, and quickly pushed that thought
down as far as it would go.

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