The Stone Leopard (31 page)

Walking a short distance along the road away from the highway, he found a convenient hiding-place behind a clump of trees where he stood and waited. During the space of fifteen minutes he let two tradesmen's vans pass and then he saw a BMW saloon approaching from the direction of the highway. There was only one man inside and the vehicle stank of money. Stepping into the middle of the road, he flagged down the car, calling out, 'Police, police. . .'

Again he showed his Surete card to the suspicious driver who protested he had been stopped on the highway. 'I don't believe you,' Vanek said, taking back his card. 'How far away was that ?' One kilometre away, the driver informed him. A man in his late fifties, expensively suited, he had an arrogant manner which amused Vanek. Producing the Luger, he made the man move across to the passenger seat and got in behind the wheel. He put on the cap which he had taken from the dead bargee. `I am your chauffeur,' he announced. 'If we are stopped by a police patrol you will confirm that. If you make one mistake I will shoot you three times in the stomach and you will die slowly.'

It was not so much the nature of the threat as the off-hand manner in which Vanek made it that thoroughly frightened the BMW owner. The Czech drove off in the same direction— away from the highway. Five minutes later in the middle of a wood, convinced that he had driven beyond the range of police patrols, Vanek stopped the car to check the road map purchased at Strasbourg airport which had guided himself and Lansky to Saverne. He found he could now reach Saverne again by a different route, keeping north of the canal and the highway until he almost reached the town. 'You'd better give me the car's papers,' he said. 'The chauffeur looks after things like that.' The man, who had told Vanek he was driving back to Metz, omitting to mention he was a banker, handed over the papers.

`I'm going to leave you here tied up with a rope.' Vanek patted his pocket to indicate the rope. 'In an hour I shall phone the Saverne police and tell them where to find you. I am a burglar and have no wish that you should die of cold.' Getting out of the car with his prisoner, he shot him by the roadside and concealed the body behind some bushes.

Returning to the BMW, he drove on by the roundabout route towards Saverne.

Boisseau had exerted all his considerable charm and powers of persuasion but he made no impression on Annette Devaud's decision. Yes, she would travel to Paris and see the police prefect if it was all that important—and here Boisseau detected a certain excitement at the prospect. Possibly her nearness to death had made her think she would like to see the capital city once more. But no, she would not fly there in a plane if they paid her a million francs. And no, she would not travel there by road; car travel made her sick. She would only go to Paris if she went there by train.

From police headquarters at Saverne, where they had rushed her by car—and that was enough driving she had informed them fiercely—Boisseau made repeated calls to Marc Grelle, reporting the latest progress, or lack of it. And it was Grelle who took the decision to bring her to the capital by train. 'But you must take the most stringent precautions,' he warned Boisseau. 'Remember that three of the witnesses have been killed already, and they very nearly got Annette Devaud as well. Very special arrangements must be made—since at least one assassin is still at large.' After talking to Boisseau the prefect personally called Strasbourg to put his whole authority behind the operation. If everyone co-operated, Annette Devaud should be safely in Paris by nine in the evening, little more than twelve hours before Guy Florian was due to fly to Russia.

Police headquarters at Saverne was marked on the map Vanek was carrying, so when he reached the town he had no problem finding his way there. Still wearing his chauffeur's cap, he sat erect behind the wheel of the BMW as he drove slowly along the street as though looking for somewhere to park. Four patrol-cars were parked nose to tail outside the station while uniformed policemen strolled up and down, guarding the building. One of them glanced at the BMW and then looked away; as Vanek had once said to Brunner, in the capitalist west the police respect affluence and nothing is more affluent than a chauffeur-driven BMW.

Vanek had another reason for feeling confident: during his conversation with the banker he had later killed he had elicited the information that the Frenchman was driving to Metz, which meant that at least two hours should pass before anyone started worrying about his non-arrival. As he drove on, Vanek was now convinced they were holding Madame Devaud under guard inside police headquarters, that soon they would have to take her somewhere else—perhaps back to her home at Woodcutter's Farm. Pulling into a side street, he reversed the car so he could get away quickly, put a coin in the parking meter and walked back to a near-by bar from where he could observe the police station.

The security operation to protect Annette Devaud's life was organized by Boisseau from inside the Saverne police station. Using the phone, and with the full weight of Grelle's authority behind him—`This concerns the safety of the president of the French Republic'—Boisseau issued a stream of precise instructions. Before the 17.14
Stanislas
Trans-European express for Paris left Strasbourg a special coach was linked to the train immediately behind the engine. Stickers were plastered over the windows indicating that this coach was reserve. One minute after the express was due to leave, the ticket barriers were closed and gendarmes, who had previously hidden in the luggage office, filed aboard the sealed coach with automatic weapons.

The express was five minutes away from Saverne, a place it normally flew past at speed, when the gendarmes filed out of the sealed coach and moved along the full length of the train, closing all the window blinds. 'Emergency', the inspector in charge of the detachment explained in a loud voice to a dining-car passenger who had the temerity to ask what the devil was happening. 'We've had a warning of terrorist activity. . . .'

Stanislas was losing speed as it approached Saverne station which had been sealed off by the local police and extra men rushed in from Strasbourg. As the express pulled in to the station the atmosphere was eerie. To stop anyone who might raise a blind—power-operated on the TEE express, it only requires the touch of a button—batteries of lights mounted on trucks were shone on the side of the train as it stopped. Anyone looking out would have been blinded by the glare. In the waiting-room, Boisseau sat with Madame Devaud, muffled in her old-fashioned fur coat, who was still calm and controlled despite all the fuss. 'Is it true I shall be having a whole coach to myself?' she inquired. Boisseau assured her it was true. He personally escorted her to the coach after making her put on a pair of dark glasses—partly as a disguise, partly as protection against the glare of the lights. As she moved along the corridor to her compartment the train also began to move again.

A short distance from the station, out of sight of the convoy of parked patrol-cars, the chauffeur of a BMW was having a little trouble with his engine. With the hood up he stooped over the motor, checking the wiring. The express had just begun to move when he sorted out the problem, closing the hood and getting back behind the wheel. He drove off at speed, accelerating through the darkness as soon as he had left Saverne behind, heading for Strasbourg airport where there is a frequent Air Inter plane service to Paris.

CHAPTER FOUR

IN PARIS, Marc Grelle believed he had found out how the list of Lasalle's three witnesses had been passed back to Moscow. As events had unfolded, as information came in showing that a Soviet Commando was eliminating the very people whose names had been on Lasalle's list, the prefect realized that the coincidence was too great. Someone in Paris in addition to himself had seen the list and had then caused it to be transmitted to Russia. The Soviet Commando had then been despatched to the west.

He started his discreet inquiries at the Ministry of the Interior, tracing the route his memo containing the list had followed. Grelle had, of course, sent his memo to Roger Danchin by despatch rider late on the morning of Tuesday, 14 December. Francois Merlin, the Minister's assistant, who liked the prefect, proved helpful. 'We haven't heard from Hugon, our pipeline into Col Lasalle, recently,' Grelle explained, 'so I'm double-checking the security of our arrangements. . . .' It didn't surprise Merlin that the prefect himself was making the inquiry: all Paris knew Grelle's quaint habit of attending to details personally.

Copies of the communications from Hugon were restricted to a very narrow circle: Grelle himself, Boisseau, the Minister and his assistant, Merlin. Pressed to go through the files, Merlin told Grelle that the confidential memo containing the names and addresses of the three witnesses had arrived at the Place Beauvau just before noon on Tuesday, 14 December. 'I was in the office when he read it,' Merlin remarked. 'A few minutes later Ambassador Vorin arrived for a private word with the Minister before going on to the Elysee. By then my chief had dealt with the memo. . .'

`Dealt with it ?'

`He had a copy of your memo sent to the President's office at once. I took it down myself and handed it to a despatch rider who was just leaving for the Elysee. On my way down I met Ambassador Vorin who had just arrived and was waiting to see Danchin. The Elysee, of course, sees everything that concerns Col Lasalle,' Merlin explained.

The prefect grunted and drank the rest of the cup of coffee Merlin had provided. 'Do you think I could have a word with the monitoring section ?' he suggested.

Among the cluster of radio masts which rise up from the roof of the Ministry of the Interior in the Place Beauvau is the antenna used for monitoring radio signals transmitted by foreign embassies. At 4 pm on 14 December the technician on duty inside the monitoring unit recorded a long signal emanating from the Soviet Embassy at 79, rue de Grenelle. The tape-recording of the signal was handed to the Russian section who went through the routine motions of studying the coded signal—routine because no one expected to be able to unravel the stream of ciphers.

The Russians use the one-time code, which is unbreakable. Codes are broken by discovering a pattern; only a fragment can unlock the key. But when each element of a code is linked to a particular book—often a novel (in the past the Russian encoders have favoured Dickens)—there is no way to break the code without knowing which of the thousands of books published over the past hundred years has been used. And as the same book is never used twice it is literally a one-time code which is employed.

It was cryptographer Pierre Jadot who had studied the signal transmitted, and he immediately recalled the incident when Grelle asked him about any Soviet signals transmitted on that day. 'I made my usual routine report in a memo to the Minister,' he said, 'and I remember suggesting that one section of the signal could have been a list of names and addresses. . .'

`You are sure about that ?' Grelle asked casually.

`By no means—it is no more than an educated guess. And there is no way of cracking the Soviet codes.'

`Can you give me any idea of how long it might take the Soviet encoder at this end to prepare that signal for transmission? Even a guess would be helpful.'

Jadot took down a file, extracted his copy of the signal and studied it for a few minutes. 'At a guess—it can be no more than that—I would say between one and two hours. Probably nearer two hours. . .

Thanking Jadot, the prefect left the Ministry and called at the Elysee on his way back to the prefecture. Again he asked to see the visitors' register, and again he concealed what he was really looking for by glancing at several pages. Then he drove straight back to his office and called in Boisseau. It took him only a few minutes to explain. 'The point is, Leonid Vorin, the Soviet ambassador, left the Elysee to return to his embassy at 1.45 pm. Allowing for the traffic, he must have got back say half an hour later—at 2.15 pm. That gave the Soviet encoder just under two hours to prepare the signal for the transmission which began at four o'clock—which fits in with the time Jadot estimated it would take. A signal which may well have contained Col Lasalle's list of names and addresses.. .

`Which brings us back to the men who knew about the list and who saw Ambassador Vorin,' Boisseau replied gravely. `Danchin and . .'

`The president,' Grelle added. 'I have the feeling that daylight is beginning to break through this business.'

`Or the blackest night,' Boisseau commented.

It was six o'clock in the evening when Alain Blanc came up to Grelle's office at the prefecture looking grim and despondent. The Stanislas express with Annette Devaud on board was now racing through the night on its way to Paris. At Charles de Gaulle Airport mechanics were busily servicing the Concorde which would fly President Florian to Moscow within a few hours. Blanc came into the office with a savage expression as he closed the door and flopped into a chair.

`You've heard about the Soviet convoy, of course ?' the Minister of National Defence inquired. 'It is now inside the Sicilian Narrows and its destination could be either Barcelona or even Lisbon.'

`What is worrying you, sir?' the prefect asked quietly.