Name: Sébastien Durand
Nationality: French
Age: 40
Height: 1.81 m
Weight: 80 kg
Hair: Black with flecks of grey
Eyes: Blue
                           Complexion: Tanned

Languages
French (Native), English (Fluent), Arabic (Fluent)

Skill Profile
Good: Small Arms (Rifle)
Above Average: Biology, Computer, Ground Vehicle (Wheeled), Intrusion, Observation, Persuasion, Small Arms (Pistol), Stealth, Unarmed Martial Arts
Average: Armed Martial Arts, Autogun, Grenade Launcher, Instruction, Interrogation, Leadership, Parachute, Small Watercraft, Swimming, Tac Missile, Thrown Weapons

Background
Salut,

My name’s Sébastien Durand. I was born in Paris, France in 1975. I’ve got one brother, Jerome, who’s two years older than me, and one sister, Susanne, who’s five years younger. My father is Marc Durand. He’s a member of the French Senate, has been since 1995, initially for Sarkozy’s Party, the RPR, the Rassemblement pour la République before they merged with a couple of others to form the UMP, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire. So yeah, my father knows a few people. My mother died in ’05. Cancer. My sister and I get on great but I'm not what you would call close to my father or my brother. Jerome's a senior executive with Total and Susanne works for one of the United Nations agencies in Geneva now.

I went to a good lycée, or High School, graduated in 1993. My grades were good enough that I could have gone right on to University, but I decided to join the military instead. Maybe I wanted to prove a point to my father, I don’t know. Either way, I enlisted in the Fusiliers Marins, the French Navy’s marines. My father was not happy about my decision – he had no issue with me joining the military per se, but he thought it should be as an officer.  Like I said, me and my dad aren't real close.

My first year was split between shore duties at the Brest Naval base then six months as part of the marine contingent aboard the Clemenceau. I wanted a bit more action though, a bit of excitement - you do when you're twenty years old, don't you - so after I came off le Clem I applied for the Commandos Marine, the Special Forces arm of the French Navy. The training was twenty weeks of pure hell at the Commando Training Centre at Lorient, but I made it through, traded my dark blue beret for the béret vert, the Green Beret, and was assigned to Commando Jaubert, which specialized in maritime assault, exfil operations, and hostage rescue.

I can’t really talk about a lot of the stuff that we did. There were a lot of black ops, doing things that we weren't supposed to be doing in places that we weren't supposed to be. A lot of our time was spent in Africa, although we lifted a few people in the Balkans in ‘98 and ‘99, guys that had blood on their hands from the fighting there. We'd spend days, sometimes weeks  watching, waiting for the moment to make the snatch. Sometimes we worked with French Intelligence, the DGSE. I enrolled on a distance learning course with the University of Strasbourg at the start of 2000, studying psychology. Understanding the human mind, why people behave the way that they do, was always something that had interested me. After September 11th I spent a lot of time in North Africa, giving the Algerians covert support in the Maghreb. I did one deployment to Afghanistan in 2004. We were based around Kandahar, saw a good bit of action. The bastards even managed to wound me, nothing serious, a flesh wound to the upper left arm. I've still got the scar. In my downtime I’d usually end up with my nose buried in a psych textbook.

I completed my degree in 2006. By then I had decided it was time to quit the military, although I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I'd picked up a good bit of Arabic when I'd been in Algeria, so I thought I might be able to get some work as a security consultant in the Gulf, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, somewhere like that, somewhere the salaries are tax free. Two months before I was due to get out my CO ‘invited’ me to meet with some people for a chat. It turned out they were from the DGSE. I guess one thing must have led to another and they offered me the chance to join the DGSE’s Operations Division. I left the Commandos in the late summer of '06, at which point I held the rank of Maître, which is roughly the equivalent to a Staff Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps.

I was in Libya when Khadafy fell, have spent time in Iraq, Syria, Mali, working with groups that were supposed to be  friendly to France, rebels, opposition groups, the so called moderates. Moderate my arse. The World isn’t black and white, it’s a hell of a lot of shades of grey. The people that want to be your friends today will quite happily fuck you over tomorrow.  Our operations were always deniable. We all knew that if we finished up in the hands of the Islamists we were fucked.

In 2009  I decided to do my Masters in Psychology, this time at the UPMC, the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, part of the Sorbonne in Paris.  My career was doing OK.

Until Somalia.

August 2013. A French family had decided to sail their yacht around the World. Mother, father, and two kids, a fifteen year old boy and an eighteen year old girl. Silly bastards sailed too close to fucking Somalia didn't they, the pirates got them. I got sent to Mogadishu with another officer, a woman called Barthez. Our job was to get the family out. It took us four months to find out where they were being held, four months of coercing our sources, bribing them, squeezing them, Four months to get the name of the camp where they were being held. The Intel was solid. Times had changed, and the powers that be decided there wasn't going to be a ransom. They wanted direct action. Storm the camp, kill the terrorist fuckers and rescue the family, a heroic homecoming at Le Bourget in front of the world’s cameras.

The guys going in on the ground, were some of my old mates from Commando Jaubert. They came in by helicopter from the Indian Ocean, twenty five of them. I watched the whole thing on a satellite feed at our compound in the Mog. It all went fucking wrong. When the firefight was over we'd lost one man killed and another seriously wounded. All the terrorists were dead – or soon would be - but there was no sign of the family anywhere. It turned out the Intel was bad. They'd been moved thirty six hours before we stormed the camp. So, the mission was a total fucking failure. They executed the parents two days later. The usual routine, the orange jumpsuits, the video uploaded to YouTube. No one knows what happened to the kids.

Of course it was all over the fucking news, but not in the way that had been intended.

Someone had to take the blame.

I'd been responsible for the Intel. Two civilians were dead, two more disappeared Christ knows where, one of our operators also dead, another will never walk again. A fucking disaster.

And so I got transferred to Guyane,  on secondment to the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, the National Centre for Space Studies. My job is to carry out threat assessments, run red team exercises, that sort of thing.  Out of sight, out of mind, just until the fuss has died down they said. Not a punishment. Yeah, sure. That was nearly a year ago. I finished my Masters degree three months ago via distance learning - handy thing the internet.  Coincidentally enough, my Thesis was on how technology affects cognitive thought.

So...c'est moi...Sébastien Durand...what else is there?

I was raised Catholic, but I don’t practice any more. I’ve seen too much shit done in the name of religion over the years for it to mean much to me. I've never been married, no kids either. Sure, I've had girlfriends, one or two of them got serious. I think the longest relationship I had was with a woman called Sophie that I met when I was stationed at Lorient as an instructor in 2002. We were together for three years, but I was probably only around for ten months of that - it's the old cliché when you're in the military - the Commandos fucked up a lot of marriages. After the fuck up in Somalia Barthez and I got together a few times after we got back to France, but it wasn't anything serious and I haven't seen her since I got seconded to Guyane. The good thing about seeing someone that's in the job is that at least they understand what it's like, don't expect you home for dinner every night.

I try to keep myself in good shape, but I'm forty years old now, so I guess I'm not as strong or as nimble as I once was. Joys of getting old...I can handle a weapon, I've killed people, sometimes I've looked them in the eyes when I did it. Most of them probably deserved to die. Maybe some of them didn't, but it's not something that I lose sleep over. I don't know where my career is headed right now. You don't exactly see people lining up to volunteer for duty in Guyane. I know I could pick up work in the private sector no problem, so had been thinking that maybe it's time to revisit that option.

Then I got a call to come back to Paris...