The Stone leopard

CHAPTER FIVE

On the morning of Monday, 13 December, when Marc Grelle received his telex from Guiana about Gaston Martin, Alan Lennox was flying to Brussels. Travelling aboard Sabena flight 602 he landed in the Belgian city at 10.30 am. Earlier, from Heathrow Airport, he had phoned his personal assistant at home to say an urgent inquiry had come in from Europe and he was flying there to get the contract specification. During the brief conversation he made a vague reference to Denmark. `You'll be back when, if ever?' Miss Thompson asked him gaily.

`When you see me, I'm back…

It was time to sell out Lennox thought as he boarded the Sabena flight. He had organized the company so well that now he could go away for long periods and the machine ran itself. So I've worked myself out of a job again he told himself as the Boeing 707 climbed up through the murk and broke through into a world of brilliant sunshine which was always there, even over England, if only the inhabitants could see it. The reference to Denmark was a precaution; if anyone inquired for him at the office Judith Thompson would be close-mouthed, but if someone clever did make her slip up, then they were welcome to search for him in Copenhagen

At Brussels airport he hired a Mercedes SL 230. Offered a cream model, he chose a black car instead; black is less conspicuous, less easy to follow. Driving first to Liege, Lennox kept a careful eye on his rear-view mirror, watching for any sign of a car or truck keeping persistently behind him. It was unlikely but not impossible; since David Nash had walked from the Ritz to his flat in St James's Place and back again he could have been followed, and the follower might then have turned his attention to the man Nash had crossed the Atlantic to meet.

At Liege, where only three days earlier Nash had twice met Peter Lanz of the BND in one day, Lennox took a further precaution. Visiting the local Hertz car-hire branch, he invented a complaint about the performance of the Mercedes and exchanged it for a blue Citroen DS 2I, his favourite car. Then lie turned south-east, heading for the Ardennes, which is not the direct route into Germany. Sometimes it is possible to follow a man by remote control-observing the route he is taking and then phoning ahead. It takes a team of men to carry out the operation, but at the last count Lennox had heard the French Secret Service were employing over one hundred full- and part-time operatives in Belgium. If the main routes out of Liege were now being checked for a black Mercedes the watchers were hardly likely to take much notice of a blue Citroen.

Eating a sandwich lunch on the way while he drove, Lennox arrived in Saarbrucken as a cloudburst broke over the German city. The windscreen wipers almost gave up the job as hopeless while he was threading his way through the traffic. Rain cascaded down the glass, beat a tattoo on the car roof while he went on searching for the main post office. On the continent, post offices provide the most useful means of making a call you don't wish to be overheard.

From the post office he called Col Lasalle's number which had been given to him by Nash. When Lennox asked for the colonel the man who answered the phone in French said he would take a message.

`You won't,' Lennox snapped. 'Put me through to the colonel. Edmond calling…'

`Edmond who?'

`Just Edmond. And hurry it up. He's expecting the call.'

The man at the other end-probably Captain Paul Moreau whom Nash had mentioned as Lasalle's assistant-obviously did not know about all the colonel's activities, which was reassuring. It suggested the ex-chief of military counter-intelligence had not lost his touch. The code-name Edmond, provided by Nash, put him through to Lasalle and the Frenchman said he could come at once.

`I will be waiting for you,' he replied crisply and put down the receiver. No waste of words, no questions, and the voice had been sharp and decisive.

It took him an hour, driving through rain squalls, to find the remote farmhouse, and it was dark as his headlights picked out an old lodge beside a closed gate. There had been lights inside the lodge when he first saw it, but now the place was in darkness. He kept the engine running and waited, then got out cautiously when no one appeared. He was walking past his own headlights when a shutter in the lodge banged open.

The muzzle of a Le Mat sub-machine gun poked out of the aperture.

`Stay where you are-in the lights,' a voice shouted in German

`You're expecting me,' Lennox shouted back in French. 'I rang you from Saarbrucken. For God's sake open the bloody gate before I get soaked…

`Come in on foot…' The voice had switched to French. `Come through the gate…

Opening the gate, Lennox went up to the lodge, tried the door, opened it, stepped inside and stopped. A man in civilian clothes faced him, still holding the sub-machine gun which he aimed point-blank at the Englishman's stomach. A smooth- faced individual with a smear of moustache, a man in his late forties, Lennox assumed this must be Capt. Paul Moreau. 'I'm Edmond,' Lennox said after a moment. 'Do you have to keep pointing that thing at me?'

`Some identification-on the table…'

`The colonel is going to be happy about this?'

`On the table…'

Lennox extracted his passport carefully from inside his dripping raincoat and then threw it casually on the table. To reach for the document with his right hand the man with the gun had to cradle the wire stock under his left arm; as he did so Lennox suddenly knocked the muzzle aside, grasped the barrel and wrenched the weapon out of the man's grip. 'I don't know who you are,' he remarked as the Frenchman recovered his balance and glared, 'but you could be someone who just knocked out the real lodge-keeper…'

`Lodge-keeper? I am Capt. Moreau, the colonel's assistant.' Bristling with anger, the man examined the passport at much greater length than was really necessary. 'You could end up dead-taking a crazy risk like that,' he grumbled.

`Less of a risk than facing an unknown man with a gun in this God-forsaken place.'

Lennox insisted on seeing Moreau's own identity card before he returned the weapon, first folding the projecting magazine parallel to the barrel so the weapon became inoperative. When identity documents had been exchanged the Frenchman told him curtly to leave his car and walk up to the house. 'Why don't you get stuffed?' Lennox suggested. Going outside, he climbed into his car, drove through the gateway and on towards the house. Moreau was using a wall phone when he left the lodge, presumably to call up the colonel.

As he drove slowly up a long curving drive Lennox saw how neglected the place was. Wet shrubbery which gleamed in the headlights had grown out over the drive, in places almost closing it so the car brushed past shrubs as he approached Lasalle's refuge. The farmhouse, a long, two-storey building which came into view round a bend, was in the same state. Unpainted, with tiles missing from the roof, it hardly looked habitable.

Shortage of money, Lennox assumed: fugitive colonels are hardly likely to be sitting on fat bank accounts.

Col Rene Lasalle met him at the entrance, then closed, locked and bolted the heavy door before leading the way into a large, rambling living-room crammed with old-fashioned furniture. In the hall Lennox noted there were new and modern locks on the door; in the living-room locks had been attached to all the windows. Theoretically safe inside Germany, the colonel had sealed himself off inside a minor fortress.

`They will come for me one day,' Lasalle remarked crisply. `Shabby little Corsican thugs with knives in their pockets. They may try to kidnap me-they may come to kill me. But they will come.'

The one-armed colonel, his left sleeve flapping loose like the broken wing of a bird, was small and spare, and as he fetched drinks from a sideboard he moved with a springy step. Lennox immediately had an impression of enormous energy, of a strong- willed personality likely to dominate any group of people he might be a part of. Fifty-five years old, Lasalle's features were sharp and gaunt, his eyes large and restless, his thin moustache little more than a dark slash. He still had a full head of dark hair and his most prominent feature was a hooked nose. In some ways he reminded Lennox of a miniature version of Charles de Gaulle himself. The colonel handed him a large brandy, raised his own glass. 'To the destruction of the enemies of France!'

`I'll drink to that…' Lennox was watching the colonel carefully. 'Whoever they might be.'

`The Soviet faction inside Paris-led by the Leopard. But first I need to know something about you, about your background…

For fifteen minutes he grilled the Englishman. It was the most shrewd and penetrating interrogation Lennox had ever experienced, with a lot of cross-questioning, a lot of jumping backwards and forwards as the Frenchman swiftly absorbed the details of Lennox's life and probed deeper and deeper. 'You have met Marc Grelle?' he said at one point. 'You are a personal friend of the police prefect then?' Lennox assured him that this was not so, that they had met only once for an hour in Marseilles during the planning of a counter-terrorist operation. At the end of fifteen minutes Lasalle pronounced himself satisfied.

`You can go into France for me,' he said as though conferring a high honour.

`I'm glad I pass inspection,' Lennox replied ironically, 'but what you may not realize is I haven't made up my mind about you…'

`That is necessary?'

`That is essential. You see-it's going to be my head laid on the block…'

Leon Jouvel. Robert Philip. Dieter Wohl.

These were the names of the three witnesses, as Lasalle persisted in calling them, which he wished Lennox to visit and quietly interrogate. 'I'm convinced that one of these three people-all of whom were involved with the Leopard during the war-can tell you something which will lead us to the Communist agent inside Paris today,' the Frenchman said emphatically. 'In any case, as far as I know, they are the only survivors, apart from Annette Devaud-and she is blind…'

`Devaud?' Lennox queried. 'That was the name of the woman who tried to shoot Florian..

`A common enough name.' Lasalle shrugged and made an impatient gesture with his right hand. 'I see no reason for a connection. And in any case, Annette Devaud, who must be over seventy now, has been blind since the end of the war. A blind person can identify no one positively. Now…'

It had started eighteen months earlier-a year before the climactic row with President Florian which ended in the colonel's flight from France. Lasalle had been interrogating a known Communist agent who had infiltrated inside a French army barracks near Marseilles. 'That area is infested with the vermin,' the colonel remarked. Lennox gathered the interrogation had been preceded by a physical session which had reduced the agent, a man called Favel, to a moaning wreck. `While trying to escape from the barracks,' Lasalle explained, `he accidentally shot a sergeant. The men who questioned him before me were the sergeant's friends. So..'

An hour after Lasalle had begun his own interrogation just before midnight Favel had started rambling on about the wartime Resistance. At first Lasalle had thought this was a trick to veer the interrogation into other channels; later he had become interested as the prisoner made repeated references to the Leopard. At intervals-the interrogation had continued for over twelve hours-the broken man had told a strange story about a man who would one day rise from the dead to liberate France from the capitalist yoke. This man, had, in fact, already risen from the dead and was walking the streets of Paris.

`It seemed absolute nonsense for a long time,' Lasalle explained. 'I thought I was dealing with a religious maniac- which seemed odd for a dedicated Communist-and then he told me he had been hiding in the barracks…'

`Hiding?' Lennox queried.

`Hiding from his own people,' Lasalle said impatiently. 'I had got it the wrong way round-instead of trying to spy for the Communist cell in Marseilles he was fleeing from them. What better place to hole up than in a military barracks-or so he thought. They were trying to kill him-I think because he knew too much.'

Tut he did know something?'

`He said it was no common spy he was talking about-a civil servant who photographs documents at dead of night and passes over microfilm inside a cigar or some such absurdity. No, Favel was referring to a highly placed mandarin close to the centre of power. To a man who for years had waited and worked his way up steadily-without having a single contact with any Communist organization. That is the genius of the idea-with no Communist contacts it is impossible to detect him.'

'Favel named the man?'

Lasalle made a gesture of resignation. 'He did not know who he was-only that he existed. What finally convinced me was a tragedy. The day after I completed my interrogation, Favel escaped from the barracks-twenty-four hours later he was found at the bottom of a cliff with his neck broken.'

`His so-called friends caught up with him?'

`I'm convinced of it,' Lasalle replied. 'I started my own investigation and eventually I came up with those three names on the list. I visited one of them-Leon Jouvel in Strasbourg- but I think my position frightened him. I came away feeling sure that he knew something. Shortly after that, I had my great confrontation with Florian and had to flee my own country…

Lennox asked other questions. Both Jouvel and Philip, the two Frenchmen on the list of witnesses, lived in Alsace. Was it a coincidence? 'Not at all,' Lasalle explained. 'The Leopard favoured men from Alsace in his Resistance group-he believed they were more reliable than the more excitable men from the Midi.' The colonel smiled sarcastically. 'He was, I am sure, a realist in everything.'

`But the Leopard is dead,' Lennox pointed out. 'He died in Lyon in 1944… '

`Which is the clever part of the whole thing. Don't you see?'

`Frankly, I don't,' Lennox replied.

`The man has to have a code-name for the few occasions when he is referred to in Soviet circles. So they chose the name of a man known to be dead. What is the immediate reaction if the name ever slips out? It must be nonsense. He is dead! My God, what was your own reaction?'

`I see what you mean,' Lennox said slowly. 'You're saying there is …'

`A second Leopard-who was in some way connected with the Leopard's original Resistance group. This unknown man would easily think of using this name-if he once worked with the man whose name he has stolen. One of those three witnesses on that list should be able to clear up the mystery…

`Who is this Dieter Wohl?' Lennox inquired. 'I see he lives in Freiburg now. He's a German, of course?'

`Dieter Wohl was the Abwehr officer who tried to track down the Leopard during the war. He knew a great deal about the Resistance in the Lozere…

Lasalle had thought more than once of approaching Dieter Wohl himself; unable to get back into France to interview the two Alsace witnesses he could easily have travelled to Freiburg. He had decided against the idea in case the BND heard of the visit.

`They might have said that I was interfering in German affairs,' he remarked. 'I cannot afford to be thrown out of the Federal Republic at this stage. Now, answer me one question quite simply. With those names and addresses, will you go into France?'

`Yes.'

While Lennox was talking to Col Lasalle near Saarbrucken, two hundred miles away to the west in Paris Marc Grelle was arriving at the American Embassy on the Avenue Gabriel. As he walked through the gateway at 6 pm he was well aware he was being photographed by agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire-political counter-intelligence. He even knew where the camera with the telescopic lens was situated, hidden inside the large blue Berliet truck parked by the sidewalk opposite the Embassy. Uniformed gendarmes lounged round the truck, giving the impression they were a reserve force, standing by in case of trouble. By the following morning the photo would lie on the desk of the Minister of the Interior. Attached to the print would be a form filled in to show the details. 1800 hours. Visitor: Marc Grelle, police prefect of Paris. Later, the time of his departure would be duly recorded.

Going inside the embassy, Grelle signed the visitors' book and went upstairs where he was relieved of his raincoat by a girl with a Texan accent. 'I was once in Dallas,' he told her, `on the day President Kennedy was assassinated.' He went into the large room overlooking the Place de la Concorde where the reception was being held. The room was a blaze of lights, a babble of voices, and the curtains were drawn, presumably to mask the room against the probing telephoto lens inside the Berliet truck. Grelle hovered at the edge of the crowd, getting his bearings and noting who was present.

`That computer-like mind of yours must have listed all the guests by now,' a voice behind him suggested, 'so why don't we slip away into the library where the real stuff is kept?' David Nash grinned and shook hands when the prefect turned round. `I had to come to Paris, so …'

`You thought we could chat? Or, you came to Paris so we could chat ?' Grelle inquired in English.

`That policeman's mind of yours!' Nash led the way out of the reception room and across the corridor into another room lined with books. Shutting the door, he turned the key which was already on the inside. 'Now we won't be disturbed… Pouring a large Scotch, Nash handed it to the prefect, ushered him into an armchair and perched himself on the arm of another chair as he raised his glass. 'Here's to France. May she survive for ever, including the next two months…

`Why shouldn't she?' Grelle peered at the American over the top of his glass. 'Or is it a state secret? You still hold the same post as when we last met, I presume?'

`The same post.' Nash leaned forward, keeping his voice low. `I come here as a friend, not as an agent of my government. As a friend of France, too. Marc, have you ever heard of the Leopard?'

Aware that Nash was studying him, Grelle sipped his Scotch and kept his face expressionless. He mopped his lips with a silk handkerchief before he replied. 'The leopard? An animal with a spotted coat which can be dangerous…'

`This one is dangerous,' the American agreed. 'He's sitting behind a government desk not a mile from where we are at the moment. Let me tell you a story…' Nash told the story well -about a Russian defector who had arrived in New York only a week earlier, who had been rushed from Kennedy airport to a secret camp in the Adirondack mountains where Nash himself had questioned the man. The following morning-before the interrogation had been resumed-the Russian had been shot by a long-distance sniper with a telescopic rifle. 'It happened while I was walking beside him,' the American went on. 'One moment he was walking beside me, the next he was sprawled on the track with a bullet through his skull…'

Grelle went on sipping his Scotch, listening with the same expressionless face as the American related how the high-grade Russian had told him about a French Communist agent- adopting the name of the wartime Resistance leader Leopard -who for over thirty years had worked himself up to become one of the top three men in France. 'The Leopard could be any one of your top cabinet ministers,' Nash concluded. 'Roger Danchin, Alain Blanc…

Grelle drank the rest of his Scotch in two gulps, placed the empty glass on the table and stood up. His voice was crisp and cold.

`The lengths to which the American government has gone recently to smear our president have been absurd, but what you have just suggested is outrageous…'

Nash stood up from the chair. 'Marc, we don't have to blow our tops…

`Your so-called story is a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end,' Grelle went on icily. 'Clearly you are trying to spread a lying rumour in the hope that it will damage the president because you don't like his speeches…

`Marc,' Nash interjected quietly, 'I'll tell you now that you are the only man inside this embassy who will hear what I have just told you…'

`Why?' Grelle snapped.

`Because you are the only Frenchman I really trust with this secret-the only contact I have come to warn. I want you to be on your guard-and you have ways of checking things out, ways that we couldn't even attempt…'

`You'd get chopped if you did!' Grelle, his face flushed, moved towards the door, then seemed to calm down and for a few minutes he chatted with the American about other topics. It was, Nash told himself after the prefect had gone, a very polished performance: outrage at the suggestion and then a brief relaxation of tension to indicate to the American that they would remain friends in the future. Lighting a cigarette, Nash wandered back across the hall to the reception, satisfied with the result of his trip to Paris. Because despite what he had said, Grelle would check. Grelle was the policeman's policeman. Grelle always checked.

To give himself time to think, Grelle drove round in a circle to get back to the prefecture. On his way he passed the Elysee and had to pull up while a black Zil limousine with one passenger in the back emerged from the palace courtyard. Leonid Vorin, Soviet ambassador to France, was just leaving after making one of his almost daily visits to see Guy Florian. Since the trip to Moscow on 23 December had been announced, the Soviet ambassador had consulted frequently with the president, driving from his embassy in the rue de Grenelle to the Elysee and back again. Inside the limousine Leonid Vorin, short and stocky with a pouched mouth and rimless glasses, sat staring ahead, looking neither to right nor left as the car swung out and drove off towards Madeleine.

The uniformed policeman who had halted Grelle, saluted and waved him on. Driving automatically, the prefect had half his mind on what Nash had told him. Up to half an hour ago his suspicions had been based on Gaston Martin's strange story and what he had heard from the Cayenne police chief, all of which was disturbing but by no means conclusive. Now the same story was coming from Washington, and soon rumours might start sweeping through the European capitals. As Grelle told Boisseau later, 'I don't believe a word of that fairy-tale Nash told me about a Soviet defector-he was protecting his real informant-but this is something we are going to have to investigate in the greatest secrecy…

As he crossed the crowded Pont Neuf on to the Ile de la Cite Grelle shivered, a nervous tremor which had nothing to do with the chill night air now settling over Paris. For the police prefect his world had suddenly become unstable, a place of shifting quicksands where anything might lie under the surface. 'Roger Danchin… Alain Blanc.. he muttered to himself. 'It's impossible.

Leaving the isolated farmhouse at about the same time when Grelle was returning to the prefecture, Lennox drove back to Saarbrucken through slashing rain with the distant rumble of thunder in the night. The storm suited his mood; he also was disturbed. At one point in the conversation he had asked the colonel who had typed out the list of names and addresses he now carried tucked away inside his wallet. 'Captain Moreau, my assistant, of course,' Lasalle had replied. 'He was the only officer who came with me when I left France and I trust him completely.'

`You didn't trust him with my real name until shortly before I arrived,' Lennox had pointed out. 'When I phoned from Saarbrucken he had no idea who I was…'

`That was to protect you until you arrived safely, I called Nash in London at a certain time and he gave me your name, but I withheld it from Moreau. If my assistant had been kidnapped while you were on the way he couldn't have identified you under pressure. For the same reason Moreau does not know I am in touch with the Americans…'

Under pressure… As he peered through the rain-swept windscreen Lennox grimaced. What a life the colonel was living since he had fled France. Locked away inside a German farmhouse, guarded at the gate by a man with a sub-machine gun, ready at any time for the intruders in the night who might arrive with chloroform-or something more lethal. And tomorrow Lennox himself would cross the border into France- after first meeting Peter Lanz of the BND.

While Alan Lennox was driving through the night to a hotel in Saarbrucken, Marc Grelle had returned to the prefecture from the reception at the American Embassy where he dealt with the paperwork which had accumulated in his absence. 'There are too many typewriters in Paris,' he muttered as he initialled minutes from Roger Danchin and ate the sandwich brought in from the local brasserie. He was just about to leave when the phone rang. 'Shit!' he muttered, picking up the receiver. It was Cassin, one of the phone operators in the special room at Surete headquarters.

`Another message has come in from Hugon, Mr Prefect.' `Routine?'

'No. There has been a development…

Grelle swore again under his breath. He would have liked to ask the operator to relay the message over the line, but that was impossible-he had personally issued strict orders that this must never be done. Phones can be tapped: all you need is a post office communications expert who knows how to leak off a private phone. Never mind about exotic electronic bugs; splicing the right wires will do the trick. 'I'll come over,' Grelle said and put down the receiver.

Rush hour was over as he drove along streets gleaming wetly under the lamps and turned into the rue des Saussales where Surete headquarters forms part of the huge block of buildings centred round the Ministry of the Interior. In the narrow street he waited while a uniformed policeman dropped the white-painted chain, and then drove under the archway into the courtyard beyond. The room was on the fourth floor and at that hour he met no one as he climbed the gloomy staircase, walked down an ill-lit corridor and used his key to open the locked door. Closing the door on the inside, Grelle stared down at Cassin, the night man. The room smelt of garlic, which meant the operator had eaten a snack recently. A half-filled glass of red wine was on the table beside the tape-recorder which was linked to the phone.

`Well?' the prefect asked.

`Hugon phoned at 6.45 pm… Cassin, a lean, pasty-faced man of thirty, was reading from a notebook in a bored tone. 'I recorded the message as usual and it's on tape.'

`How did he sound?' Grelle perched his buttocks on the edge of the table. He would hear what Hugon had said in a minute, but the recording was inclined to iron out a man's voice, to drain it of emotion, and Cassin had listened while the tape recorded.

`A bit excited, nervous, agitated-as though he hadn't much time and was afraid of being interrupted.'

`That's a precise analysis.'

`He's sending something through the post-a list of names and addresses. He didn't want to transmit them over the phone. Said it would take too long…

`Or he was being careful,' Grelle suggested. 'Did he say when he would post this list?'

`He's already done it. He was in the post office.'

`You look as though you could do with a bit of fresh air, Cassin. Come back in fifteen minutes-I'll stay and listen to the tape…

Alone, Grelle listened to the operator locking the door from the outside, then sat down in the chair and lit a cigarette. The room was sound-proofed and was checked daily for bugging devices, so every possible precaution had been taken to protect Hugon. Grelle pressed the replay button.

The tape which had recorded Cassin's conversation with Hugon was waiting on the machine. The man whose voice he was going to listen to had phoned one of the special numbers reserved for the Surete Nationale's private use, numbers unlisted in any directory. If anyone called the number by mistake, without giving the correct name, the operator informed him that he was the exchange, that the number had been disconnected. The machine crackled.

`What number are you calling?' Cassin inquired.

`Hugon speaking. Is that the Polyphone Institute? Good, I haven't much time…

`Where are you calling from?'

`The Saarbrucken post office. Look, I told you..

`Take it easy. I'm listening. Don't babble,' Cassin snapped.

Grelle was standing up now, perched against the table edge, watching the spools turn slowly, recording each word in his brain as the machine replayed them. And Cassin had been right: Hugon's agitation came through even the recording.

`The colonel had a meeting this evening with an Englishman. Name Alan Lennox…' Hugon spelt out the name. 'Thirty- five, dark-haired, clean-shaven, wearing…' A description of the clothes followed. 'They talked alone in the farmhouse…'

`How did this Lennox arrive? By taxi? By car?'

`In his own car. I can't stay here long. It's dangerous, you know. The car was a blue Citroen DS 2 I. Registration number BL 49120. Lennox came by appointment. I was able to get back to the farmhouse and overhear just a few words, but it was dangerous…'

`So you keep saying. Who is this man Lennox?'

`I've no idea. Stop interrupting me. For God's sake listen! When I heard them talking Lennox was asking about a man called the Leopard. .

Grelle stiffened, stopped the machine. Gabbling on, Hugon had blurred the words. He played it back again, listening carefully. Yes, for Christ's sake, Hugon had said 'the Leopard'. The recording continued.

`… and there was something about a list of witnesses. Yes, witnesses. If you don't let me get on I'm hanging up. Yesterday morning the colonel dictated to me a list of three people's names and addresses. I think this is the list they were talking about. I think the colonel gave Lennox this list..'

`We need those names and addresses,' Cassin interjected.

`Shit!' Hugon spoke the word with venom. 'I was just going to tell you-I made a carbon copy when I typed out the list. I put this in an envelope and sent it off yesterday to the address you gave me. And yes, Lennox has left. No! I have no idea where he has gone. I got the idea he's going to see the people on the list…'

`Which country are these people in?'

`Two in Alsace, one in Germany. Goodbye!'

The prefect stopped the machine, still perched on the table with a forgotten Gauloise smoking at the corner of his mouth. It was Guy Florian himself who authorized Marc Grelle to conduct the operation which penetrated Col Lasalle's farmhouse refuge in the Saarland. Normally such an assignment would have been handled by the Surete but the president had told Danchin he wanted Grelle to deal with it. 'I trust Grelle,' he remarked casually, watching the minister wince.

The penetration operation had not been too difficult. Capt. Moreau, who had been given the code-name Hugon, had fled France with Col Lasalle on an impulse; later, as the months went by, as he found himself acting as housekeeper to the colonel, which even included preparing the meals and keeping the house clean, his enthusiasm for exile had waned. Seeing nothing ahead but an empty future, Moreau had snapped up Grelle's secret offer of four thousand francs a month paid into a Paris bank account. 'With indecent haste,' as the prefect had remarked at the time.

When Cassin returned from his breath of fresh air, Grelle left the Surete to drive back to his apartment on the Ile Saint- Louis. The next step would be to circulate Alan Lennox's description to all French frontier checkpoints.