The Stone leopard

CHAPTER FOUR

For the second time in less than seventy-two hours David Nash had crossed the Atlantic. Disembarking from Pan Am flight 100 at Heathrow Airport at 9.40 pm on Sunday night, 12 December, only ten days before Guy Florian was due to fly to Moscow, Nash took a cab to the Ritz, left his bag in his room and walked to Lennox's flat in St James's Place. On arrival he presented the Englishman with a bottle of Moet amp; Chandon.

`When the Greeks come bearing gifts…' Lennox greeted him cynically as he slipped the bottle inside the fridge. 'We'll open that later on-I presume we're going to be up half the night?'

`At the very least,' the American assured him. 'We're up against a deadline which is ten days from now…

`You are up against a deadline,' Lennox corrected him. 'I warned you on the phone-your kind of business is something I can do without. ..

They talked until 3 am, while Nash used up two packs of cigarettes, telling the Englishman about his recent visit to Peter Lanz and Col Lasalle, about the enormous anxiety in Washington that some great Communist coup was imminent, that Rene Lasalle might possibly-just possibly-be able to provide the key which would unlock the identity of the unknown Soviet agent in Paris. 'He's convinced the crunch is coming when Florian flies off to Moscow,' Nash said at midnight as he sipped his champagne. 'So we have no time at all to check out these three people inside France who, Lasalle believes, may come up with the answer…'

`I had the quaint idea that Washington hates the guts of President Guy Florian,' Lennox observed.

Nash's mouth tightened. 'That's as maybe. The hell of it is we're stuck with him-just as we were stuck with de Gaulle. In politics you may not like your bedmate, but you have to sleep with her all the same. President Florian of France and Chancellor Hauser of Germany are all that stand between Soviet Russia and the Channel coast now that Congress has opted out of Europe-your Channel coast, too,' he added.

`So where does the Leopard come into it? None of what you say makes much sense,' Lennox remarked bluntly. 'The Leopard is dead-he was shot in Lyon in 1944. I think Lasalle is just trying to stir up some muck, hoping it will stick to his old enemy, Guy Florian. Your French colonel is a fanatic.'

`Even fanatics get to know things,' Nash persisted. 'We don't entirely go along with his Leopard story but we do think he stumbled on something six months ago just before Florian threw him out of France. He got a sniff of some highly placed underground link with the Soviets-and don't forget that Lasalle was the best army counter-intelligence chief the French ever had…'

'But he won't give you this list of so-called witnesses, if it exists…'

`I'm certain it exists,' Nash flared. 'He's very security- minded so he only gives that to the man who goes into France to interview them…

`So why come to me?'

Nash swallowed the rest of his champagne, taking his time over replying. 'Because of who you are,' he said quietly. 'These witnesses may well only speak to a Frenchman. Lanz has agreed to supply cover papers. To avoid the security apparatus the man who goes in must merge with the landscape. You qualify, Alan. You were born and grew up in Paris. We gave you top security clearance while you were in the States. You're experienced in underground work, God knows. The Red Night in Syria proved that. You're made for the job,' the American went on. 'We need you. You need us…'

`And just why do I need you?' Lennox asked quietly.

`Because you need American government approval of that bid you put in for a major security contract with an American company, a company which, incidentally, handles certain Defence Department projects. Confidentially, I understand your bid was the lowest and is acceptable-providing you get Washington's rubber stamp…'

It was at this point that the explosion came, that Lennox started talking non-stop, refusing to allow Nash to interrupt while he told him what he thought about politics and politicians. 'Your own people do the same thing…' Nash interjected and then subsided under the torrent of Lennox's words. 'It's pressure,' Lennox told him savagely, 'bloody pressure tactics, and you know how I react to that…' The verbal battle went on until close to three in the morning as the atmosphere thickened with smoke, as they drank Scotch, as Nash, tie-less and in his shirt-sleeves now, fought back against Lennox's onslaught. Then, without warning, the Englishman switched his viewpoint.

`All right,' he said as he refilled the glasses, 'I'll go and see Lasalle and talk to him-but on the clear understanding that I make up my mind when I get there whether it's worth going into France…'

`That's great…

`Wait a minute, there are conditions. If I go in, you'll personally guarantee my American contract is approved. You'll also guarantee that only MacLeish will know I've agreed-the security on this thing has to be ironclad tight. Finally, you'll pay me a service fee of twenty thousand dollars…

`For God's sake,' Nash protested, 'you'll be getting the contract. ..'

`Which is the least I deserve since my bid is lowest. The twenty thousand dollars is danger money. You think it's going to be a picnic going undercover into France now?' Lennox demanded. 'For Christ's sake, before you arrived I was listening to the news bulletin-since the attempt on Florian's life French security is buzzing like a beehive. I'll risk tripping up over Grelle's mob, the counter-espionage gang, maybe even the CRS thugs. MacLeish is getting himself a non-American messenger boy on the cheap at twenty thousand.'

`Who said anything about a non-American?' Nash inquired mildly.

`You did when you phoned from Washington and then flew over here by the seat of your pants…

Shortly after three in the morning they came to their agreement, Nash swallowed a final gulp of neat Scotch, checked over certain details with Lennox and then walked back through the rain to the Ritz, quite satisfied and grimly amused at Lennox's insistence on the service fee. MacLeish could damn well shell out the twenty thousand and trim his budget elsewhere. Back in his flat Lennox washed dirty glasses and then started packing. Like Nash he was a night bird, and like Nash he was satisfied. From the moment the proposition had been put to him he had been interested because it suited him. It gave him something new and interesting to poke his nose into; it made the American contract secure; and he had just concluded a hard-fought deal. Extracting the twenty thousand from MacLeish was a bonus which lived up to his main principle: never do anything for nothing.

In Paris on Monday morning, 13 December, Grelle and Boisseau were no nearer clearing up the mystery surrounding Gaston Martin's strangely coincidental arrival only hours after the attempt on Florian's life. Detectives had visited the Hotel Cecile where Martin had dumped his bag after getting off the boat train from Le Havre, and his few miserable possessions had been brought to the prefecture. They consisted of one small suitcase of clothes. 'And this is all he had to show for sixty years of living,' the prefect commented. 'It's pathetic, the way some people live-and die…

`This newspaper we found in his room is interesting,' Boisseau replied. 'It clears up the riddle of why he was standing at the spot where Lucie Devaud died…

The copy of Le Monde, dated 9 December, the day after the assassination attempt, had carried one of those 'scene of the crime' diagrams newspaper editors are so fond of inserting; this one was a street plan of a section of the eighth arrondissement with a cross marking the spot where Lucie Devaud had been shot. Martin's copy of the paper, purchased at Le Havre when he came off the freighter, had been folded to the diagram, as though he had used it as a reference. 'They even showed the fur shop in the diagram,' Boisseau explained, 'so it was easy for him to find the spot…

`Which tells us nothing about any connection he may have had with the Devaud woman,' Grelle snapped. 'We've traced her to an expensive apartment in the Place des Vosges but no one there seems to know anything about her…

At nine in the morning the telex came in from Cayenne, Guiana-in response to Grelle's earlier request for information. It was a very long message and Grelle later supplemented it by a phone call to the Cayenne police chief. The story it told was quite damnable. During the war Gaston Martin had fought with the Resistance group commanded by the Leopard in the Lozere. He had, according to his own account-told to the Cayenne police chief only a few weeks earlier-worked closely with the Leopard, acting as his deputy. He even mentioned the savage wolfhound, Cesar, who guarded the Communist leader wherever he went.

At the war's end, still a dedicated Communist, Martin had reported to party headquarters in Paris where he was placed under the control of a special political section. Then, in July 1945, only two months after the war's end, Martin was entrusted with a mission: he was to go to Guiana in South America to organize a secret cell inside the union of waterfront workers. 'Control the ports of the west,' he was told, 'and we shall rule the west…'

Martin had set off with great enthusiasm, taking a ship from Le Havre bound for Cayenne, proud to be chosen for this important work. Landing in the tropical slum which is Cayenne had somewhat tempered his enthusiasm, but soon he plunged into a world of intrigue and underground activity. He took his orders from a man called Lumel; of mixed French and Indian blood, Lumel had been born in Guiana. Then the blow fell. Overnight his world was shattered. Drinking in a waterfront bar one evening before going home, he witnessed a drunken brawl and an American seaman was knifed to death. The police, tipped off by an anonymous call, came for him the next day. They found the murder weapon hidden at the back of a cupboard in the shack where he lived.

Lumel supplied Martin with a lawyer, who muffed his defence at the trial. He was sentenced to twenty years' hard labour on Devil's Island. For the first few months in this dreaded penal institution Martin was sustained by the belief that Lumel would find some way to free him; hope died with the passing of the years, with the non-arrival of any message from Lumel who seemed to have abandoned him. When Devil's Island was closed in 1949 he was transferred to another equally sordid penal settlement. -

With good behaviour-and he was a model prisoner-Martin should have been released in 1963. But late in 1962 there was an incident in the prison to which Martin had been transferred. A warder was knifed in the back and died. The murder weapon was found in the holdall Martin used to store his wooden eating implements. It was a repetition of the Cayenne murder sixteen years earlier. And should have immediately been suspect, Grelle thought grimly as he went on reading.

Reading between the lines, the governor of the prison had been an unsavoury character who wanted the matter cleared up quickly. Martin was accused, tried and sentenced to another twenty years. It was about this time that Martin became finally convinced that someone was trying to keep him in prison for ever. He served the greater part of his new sentence and then something odd happened. Lumel, knocked down in a street accident by a hit-and-run driver, called the Cayenne police chief as he lay dying. 'That car knocked me down deliberately,' he alleged. 'They tried to kill me…' Before he expired he dictated and signed a confession.

The order to put Gaston Martin out of circulation reached Lumel in 1945 even before Martin disembarked at Cayenne. `It came from Communist party headquarters in Paris,' Lumel explained in his statement. 'I could have had him killed, of course, but they didn't want it done that way…

`I know why,' Grelle said to Boisseau, who was smoking his pipe while the prefect read the report. 'Too many people who could identify the Leopard had already been killed…

`You're guessing, chief.'

`I'd bet my pension on it…

Lumel admitted organizing the frame-up of Gaston Martin for the bar-room killing, admitted that years later he had paid a large sum of money to arrange for the killing of the warder inside the prison Martin had been transferred to. After Lumel died Martin was personally interrogated by the Cayenne chief of police, a decent man Grelle gathered from the tone of the report. Bitterly disillusioned by his long years in prison, by Lumel's confession, Martin had told the police chief everything. 'I think he realized that his entire life had been thrown away for an illusion-the illusion of the Communist ideal,' the Cayenne police chief commented in his report. 'I arranged for his immediate release. It will probably always be a mystery why Gaston Martin had to be condemned to the life of an animal for nearly all his days…

Grelle dropped the report on his desk. 'The bastard,' he said quietly. 'To go on concealing his identity he had people killed, a man imprisoned in that black jungle hell for life. God knows how many other poor devils died for the sake of the cause-in the report I read of the Leopard I noticed a number of his closer associates came to a sticky end before the war was over. It's a trail of blood this man has left behind him…

The prefect was walking round his office with his hands shoved down inside his slacks pockets. Boisseau had rarely seen his chief so angry. 'Remember this, Boisseau,' Grelle went on. `Do a job but never devote your life to a so-called cause. You will find yourself in pawn to scum…

`All this to protect the Leopard? A man who is dead?'

`We'll see about that.' Grelle was putting on his leather raincoat. 'I'm going to the Elysee. If anyone asks for me, you don't know where I am.'

`I still don't understand it,' Boisseau persisted. 'The record shows the Leopard died in 1944. Gaston Martin, who we now know was Petit-Louis, the Leopard's right-hand man, says he saw him walk into the Elysee…'

`When you get a conflict of evidence, you test it. I'm starting to test it,' Grelle said brusquely.

The direct route to the Elysee would have led along the rue St Honore and the Faubourg St Honore beyond, but because of the one-way system Grelle drove via the Place de la Concorde, along the Avenue Gabriel, which took him past the American Embassy, and then up the Avenue Marigny, passing on his right the large walled garden which lies behind the Elysee itself. Arriving at the palace, he waited while a guard lowered the white-painted chain and then drove into the courtyard beyond. Getting out of his car, he went straight to the guardhouse.

`Can I see the register of visitors?' the prefect asked casually.

The officer showed him the book which records the date, time of arrival and identity of everyone visiting the Elysee. It was the page for Thursday, 9 December, the day when Gaston Martin had stood outside the Elysee which interested Grelle. He checked the entries for visitors who had arrived between 7.30 and 8.30 in the evening; then, to throw the duty officer off the scent, he looked at one or two other pages.

`Thank you,' he said and went out into the courtyard and up the seven steps which led to the plate glass doors of the main entrance.

Not even a cabinet minister could have called as casually as this, but Marc Grelle was held in especially high regard by Guy Florian. 'He has no political ambition,' the president once informed a cabinet minister he knew to be excessively ambitious. 'I had to drag him away from Marseilles to Paris. Sometimes I think he is the only honest man in France. I would trust him with my life…

In fact, Guy Florian had entrusted Grelle with his life. While the president is inside the department of Paris the responsibility for his security-and that of cabinet ministers-is in the hands of the police prefect. On the morning after the assassination attempt Florian had ordered that from now on his personal safety was to be in the hands of Marc Grelle throughout the whole of France. With one stroke of his pen Florian had made the prefect the most powerful figure in the French Republic after himself-if he chose to exercise that power.

`The president will receive you,' a uniformed usher informed Grelle as he waited in the marble-floored lobby which is carpeted only down the centre. The interview took place in the president's study on the first floor at the rear of the Elysee, a room with tall windows which overlooks the walled garden laid out with lawns and gravel paths. Facing the president as he sits at his Louis XV desk is a Gobelin wall tapestry of 'Don Quixote Cured of his Madness by Wisdom', and there are two telephones on the desk, one black and one white. A third instrument stands on a side table close to his right hand. As the door was closing behind Grelle he heard the chiming of one of the hundred and thirty-seven clocks which furnish the Elysee. 11 am. A large Alsatian dog bounded across the room, reared up and dropped its forepaws on the prefect's shoulders.

`Kassim, get down, you brute,' Grelle growled affectionately. The prefect himself, who was fond of dogs, had personally found the animal when requested to do so by Florian soon after his election. It was said in the Elysee that only two people dared touch the animal: Grelle and the president himself. Removing the forepaws, the prefect bowed and then sat down opposite the most powerful statesman in western Europe. Typically, Florian waited for him to speak.

`I was very disturbed to see that you again walked back from the Place Beauvau on the evening of 9 December,' Grelle began. 'And only twenty-four hours after the appalling incident…'

Florian lowered his lean, intelligent head like a small boy caught in the farmer's apple orchard. It was the kind of gesture, coming from a president, which would have disarmed most men, but Grelle's expression remained grave. 'It will not happen again,' Florian assured him. 'You saw the pictures in Friday's papers, of course?'

`I was thunderstruck.'

`But you are no politician, my friend. The street was swarming with detectives-at a discreet distance so the photographers would not include them in the pictures! But it is good politics, you see-the president walks the streets again only one day after the incident!' Florian grinned impishly. 'It is all nonsense, of course. Tell me, am I forgiven?'

Grelle returned to the prefecture reassured that from now on the president would stay behind the security fence erected to guard him. Only one question remained: was the security fence foolproof?

`Come in, close the door and lock it,' Grelle told Boisseau as he settled himself on the edge of his desk. It was a habit of the prefect's when disturbed to perch his buttocks on the edge of a desk or table so he could start pacing about more easily if the inclination took him. Boisseau sat in a chair, took out his pipe and relaxed, waiting. With less nervous energy than his chief, he had the look of a patient squirrel, and behind his back that, in fact, was what his staff called him. Andre the Squirrel.

`I checked the visitors' register at the Elysee for the evening of 9 December for the hour 7.30 to 8.30,' Grelle said abruptly. `Before I go on, remember that the only physical description we have of the Leopard concerns his height-over six feet tall…

`You have found something?' Boisseau suggested.

`Someone-more than one, as it happens. Florian himself arrived back on foot at eight o'clock from the Place Beauvau-that won't happen again, incidentally. The interesting thing is three other ministers also arrived on foot-they had come from the meeting at the Ministry of the Interior…'

The two men exchanged cynical smiles. Normally everyone would have returned from the Place Beauvau in his own ministerial car, but because the president had walked back they had felt obliged to adopt the same form of locomotion. `And, of course, they hoped to get their own pictures in the papers,' Grelle observed, 'knowing there were photographers in the Place Beauvau.'

`Who else came back?' Boisseau asked quietly.

`Pierre Rouget for one-we can dismiss him, of course.' They smiled again. Rouget was the nominal prime minister, the man the reporters called 'Florian's poodle'. An amiable man-`with a backbone of rubber' as Grelle sometimes remarked-no one took much notice of him and it was rumoured he would soon be replaced. In any case, he was no taller than five feet eight. `Between 8.15 and 8.30,' Grelle continued, 'two other men arrived and walked into the Elysee-and they came back separately, a few minutes apart. One of them was my own boss, the Minister of the Interior, Roger Danchin. The other was the Minister of National Defence, Alain Blanc. Both of them as you know are the tallest men in the cabinet, both of them are over six feet tall…

Boisseau took the dead pipe out of his mouth and stared at the prefect. 'You don't really believe this? Danchin, Blanc- the two strong men in the government? Martin must have been having hallucinations.'

`I don't really believe anything,' Grelle replied coolly. 'All I do is to check the facts and see where they lead-as we do in any investigation. But as we have agreed, I'm telling you everything however absurd it may seem.'

`Absurd? It's unbelievable…

`Of course.' Grelle picked up a report off his desk, talking as he scanned the first page. 'Something else has happened. David Nash, the American, has just been spotted arriving at Roissy airport this morning by a Surete man. And I have received a pressing invitation to a reception at the American Embassy this evening. You believe in coincidence, Boisseau?'

Andre the Squirrel did not reply. He was gazing into the distance, as though trying to grasp a fact so great it was beyond his comprehension.

`Danchin or Blanc?' he murmured.

It had been Roger Danchin's aim to become Minister of the Interior since he had been a youth, spending endless hours over his studies at the Ecole Normale d'Administration, the special school founded by de Gaulle himself to train future leaders of the French Republic. And while Guy Florian and Alain Blanc-at the Ecole Polytechnique-were the hares who forged ahead because of their brilliance, Danchin was the tortoise who got there in the end because he never stopped trying. Sometimes it is the tortoise which outlasts the hares.

By the time he was offered the post of Minister of the Interior, Roger Danchin, an intelligence expert, probably knew more about the French security system than any other man alive. Like Alain Blanc, over six feet tall, he had developed the stoop which tall men sometimes affect. Fifty-two years old, he was thin and bony-faced, a man with a passion for secrecy and a man who loved power. Blanc, who disliked him, summed up Danchin in a typical, biting anecdote. `Danchin would interrogate his own grandmother if he suspected she had changed her will-and after three hours under the arc lights she would leave him all the money… Danchin was at the height of his power when he summoned Grelle to see him just after the prefect returned from checking the Elysee register.

When the prefect entered the Minister's office on the first floor Danchin was standing by the window which overlooks a beautiful walled garden at the rear of the building, a garden the public never sees. 'Sit down, Grelle,' Danchin said, still staring down at the garden. 'I hear from Roissy that David Nash, the American, has just arrived in Paris. What do you think that implies?'

`Should it imply something?' Grelle inquired. By now he had grasped how this devious man's mind worked; rarely asking a direct question, Danchin tried to catch people out by encouraging them to talk while he listened.

`Something is happening, Grelle, I sense it. Strange also that he should arrive here so soon after the attempt on the president's life. ..'

`I don't see the connection,' Grelle stonewalled. 'But I have an invitation to the American Embassy this evening…'

`You are going?' Danchin interjected sharply.

`Why not, Minister? I may pick up something interesting. At least I should be able to answer your question as to why he has come to Paris…'

`And this woman, Lucie Devaud-has Boisseau found out something more about her? She couldn't be connected in any way with the arrival of Nash, I presume?'

`Surely you can't suspect the Americans were behind the attempt?' Grelle protested. `They do some strange things but..'

`Probing, Grelle, just probing.. Danchin suddenly returned behind his desk, moving so quietly Grelle was not aware he had left the window. It was another disturbing habit of Danchin's which his assistant, Merlin, had once complained about to Grelle. 'He turns up without warning like a ghost, standing behind you. Did you know that when people go out to lunch Danchin creeps into their offices to check the papers on their desks-to make sure they are not doing something he has no knowledge of? The atmosphere inside this place is terrible, I can tell you. Terrible!'

Grelle got out of Danchin's office as soon as he could, mopping his brow as he went downstairs and out into the fresh air. I wouldn't work in this place for a million francs a year he told himself as he got behind the wheel of his car. He drove out with a burst of exhaust as though to express his relief. Not for ten million francs!

Alain Blanc was born to a world of chateaux and money, of vintage wines and good food, possessed of a brain which in later years could absorb the details of a nuclear test ban treaty in a third of the time it would have taken Roger Danchin. With the family land and vineyards behind him Blanc, who came from the Auvergne, need never have worked for a day in his life. He chose to ignore the chance of a life of idleness, plunging instead into a life of furious activity.

A man of enormous vitality and appetite for work, he became one of the key political figures in Florian's regime, the man whom ambassadors quietly consulted when they could not get Florian's ear. An 'X', which stands for the crossed cannons symbol of the Ecole Polytechnique, a school where money is no substitute for brains, he was one of the five top students the year he graduated. His close friend, Guy Florian, passed out first among a galaxy of brilliant men. Years later, well entrenched in the political bedrock of France, it was Alain Blanc, the manipulator, who master-minded Florian's rise to the presidency.

Over six feet tall, fifty-four-year-old ex-paratrooper Blanc was heavily built; plump-faced, his hair thinning, his head was like a monk's dome. A man of powerful personality, he was reputed to be able to talk anyone into agreeing to anything with his warmth and jovial aggressiveness. Women, especially, found him attractive-he was so lively. 'He doesn't take himself seriously,' his mistress, Gisele Manton once explained, 'but he takes women seriously-or pretends to.. .'

His relations with Marc Grelle were excellent: the prefect understood the Minister of National Defence and never let Blanc overwhelm him. When they argued, which was frequently, it was with a fierce jocularity, and Blanc knew when he was beaten. 'The trouble with you, Grelle,' he once told the prefect, 'is you don't believe in politicians…'

`Does anyone?' Grelle replied.

Blanc came to see the prefect in the afternoon shortly after Grelle had returned from his brief interview with Danchin. It was typical of Blanc to drive over to the prefecture in his Lamborghini rather than to summon Grelle to his ministry, and even more typical that he flirted with Grelle's secretary on his way up. 'I shall have to abduct you, Vivianne,' he told the girl. 'You are far too appetizing for policemen!' He came into the prefect's office like a summer wind, grinning as he shook hands. 'What are the political implications behind this assassination attempt?' he demanded as he settled into a chair, drooping his legs over the arm.

`We nearly lost a president,' Grelle replied.

`I'm talking about this Devaud woman,' Blanc snapped. 'If it can be proved she ever knew the president-even if only briefly-the press will rape us. Can they?'

`You'd better ask the president…

`I have. He says he has never seen her before. But he could be wrong. Over the years God knows how many people he has met-or known slightly. What I'm saying is-if your investigation turns up a connection, could you inform me?'

`Of course…

Blanc left soon afterwards and the prefect smiled grimly as he watched the car from the window moving off too fast towards the right bank. Strictly speaking, anything which came to light should be reported only to his chief, Roger Danchin, but everyone knew that Blanc was Florian's eyes and ears, the man who fixed a problem when anything awkward cropped up. Boisseau, who had come into the office as Blanc left, watched the car disappearing. 'It's quite impossible to suspect a man like that,' he remarked.

`If the Leopard exists,' Grelle replied, 'it's because he has reached a position where people would say, "it's quite impossible to suspect a man like that…" '

One 9-mm Luger pistol, one monocular glass, three forged driving licences, and three different sets of forged French papers -one set for each member of the Soviet Commando. Walther Brunner, the second member of the team, sat alone inside the concrete cabin at the edge of the race-track wearing a pair of French glasses as he checked the cards. The equipment they would carry was meagre enough but the time was long since past when Soviet Commandos travelled to the west armed with exotic weapons like cyanide-bullet-firing pistols disguised as cigarette cases. The craft of secret assassination had progressed way beyond that.

Brunner, horn at Karlsbad, now known as Karlovy Vary, was forty years old; the oldest member of the Commando he had hoped to lead until Borisov had selected Carel Vanek instead. Shorter than Vanek, he was more heavily-built and his temperament was less volatile; round-headed, he would soon be bald and he felt it was his appearance which had persuaded Borisov to give the leadership to the younger man. At least he ranked as the second member of the three-man team, as Vanek's deputy, the man who would take over operations if something happened to Vanek while they were in the west. Rank, oddly enough, is an important factor in Communist circles.

Brunner was the Commando's planner, the man who worked out routes and schedules-and escape routes-before the mission was undertaken, the man who arranged for the provision of false papers, who later, when they arrived at their destination, suggested the type of 'accident' to be applied. 'You must make three different plans,' Brunner was fond of saying, `then when you arrive at the killing ground you choose the one best suited…' Beer was his favourite drink and, unlike Vanek, he regarded women as dangerous distractions. His most distinctive feature was his large hands, 'strangler's hands', as Vanek rudely called them. There was some justification in the description; if Col Lasalle had to die in the bath Brunner was likely to attend to it.

This was the nub of the training at the abandoned racetrack outside the medieval town of Tabor; here the three Czechs who made up the Commando perfected the skill of arranging 'accidental' deaths. Death by running someone down with a car was trainer Borisov's favourite method. The research section, housed in a separate cabin and which worked closely with the Commando, had studied the statistics: more people in western Europe died on the roads than from any other cause. Accidents in the home came next. Hence Brunner's special attention to drowning in the bath, which had been practised in a third concrete cabin with an iron bath-tub and live 'models'.

A fact largely unknown to the outside world is that an assassination Commando never leaves Russian-controlled territory without the express sanction of three members (who make up a quorum) of the Politburo in Moscow. Even in 1952 -when the power of the Committee for State Security was at its height-the Commando sent to West Berlin to kidnap (or kill, if necessary) Dr Lime, had to be approved by Stalin himself and two other Politburo members (one of whom was Molotov).

The reasoning behind this policy is sound. If a Commando's actions are ever detected the international image of Soviet Russia becomes smeared-because one thing the western public does know is that nothing happens inside Russia without government approval. The Politburo is aware of this, so a Commando is only despatched when there is no other alternative. Vanek's Commando had been fully approved by the First Secretary and two other Politburo members; now it only awaited the signal to proceed, travelling on French papers which would easily pass inspection inside Germany. Brunner had just completed his inspection of the identity cards when Borisov came into the cabin with the news.

`The execution of Lasalle has been postponed…

`Damn it!' Brunner was furious. 'And just when we were all geared up…

`Have patience, my impetuous Czech,' Borisov told him. `You have to stand by for a fresh signal. You may be departing at any time now.'