Wild Justice

“Story of my life,” Colin sighed. “Only the dogs love me.” They played gin-rummy and drank teeth-blackening airforce coffee, all the way across the Atlantic.

Colin Noble did most of the talking, around the stub of his cheroot. It was shop, Thor shop, training and personnel details, small anecdotes about men and things they both knew well and he made no effort to question Peter about his job and Narmco, other than to remark that he would have Peter back in London for the series of Narmco meetings he had arranged starting on the following Monday. It was a deliberate and not very subtle intimation of just how much Atlas knew about Peter and his new activities.

They landed at Kennedy a little after midnight, and there was an army driver to take them to a local Howard Johnson for six hours” sleep, that kind of deep black coma induced by jet-lag.

Peter still felt prickly-eyed and woollen-headed as he watched with a feeling of disbelief as Colin devoured one of those amazing American breakfasts of waffles and maple syrup, wieners and bacon and eggs, sugar cakes and sticky buns, washed down with countless draughts of fruit juice and coffee. Then Colin lit his first cheroot and announced, “Hell, now I know I’m home. Only now I realize I’ve been slowly fading away with malnutrition for two years.” The same army driver was waiting for them at the front entrance of the motel. The Cadillac was an indication of their status in the military hierarchy. Peter looked out with detachment from the air-conditioned and padded interior onto the brooding ghettoes of Harlem. From the elevated highway along the East River, it reminded Peter of a deserted battle ground where a few survivors lurked in dark doorways or scuttled along the littered and pitted sidewalks in the cold misty morning. Only the graffiti that adorned the bare brick walls had passion and vitality.

Their drive caught the junction of Fifth and One Hundred and Eleventh Street, and ran south down the park past the Metropolitan Art Museum in the thickening rush, hour traffic, then slipped off and into the cavernous mouth of a parking garage beneath one of the monolithic structures that seemed to reach to the grey cold heavens.

The garage entrance was posted “Residents Only’, but the doorman raised the electronically controlled grid and waved them through. Colin led Peter to the bank of elevators and they rode up with the stomach-dropping swoop while the lights above the elevator door recorded their ascent to the very top of the building.

There they stepped out into a reception area protected by ornamental, but none the less functional screens.

A guard in military police uniform and wearing a sidearm surveyed them through the grille and checked Colin’s Atlas pass against his register before allowing them through.

The apartment occupied the entire top level of the building, for there were hanging gardens beyond the sliding glass panels and a view across the sickening canyons of space to the other tall structures farther down Island the Pan Am building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

The decor was Oriental, stark interiors in which were displayed works of art that Peter knew from his previous visit were of incalculable value antique Japanese brush paintings on silk panels, carvings in jade and ivory, a display of tiny netsuke and in an atrium through which they passed was a miniature forest of Bonsai trees in their shallow ceramic bowls, the frozen contortions of their trunks and branches a sign of their great age.

Incongruously, the exquisite rooms were filled with the thunder of von Karajan leading the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra through the glories of the Eroica.

Beyond the atrium was a plain door of white oak, and Colin Noble pressed the buzzer beside the lintel and almost immediately the door slid open.

Colin led into a long carpeted room, the ceiling of which was covered with acoustic tiles. The room contained besides the crowded bookshelves and work table an enormous concert piano, and down the facing wall an array of hi-fi turntables and loudspeakers that would have been more in place in a commercial recording studio.

Kingston Parker stood beside the piano, a heroic figure, tall and heavy in the shoulder, his great shaggy head hanging forward onto his chest, his eyes closed and an expression of almost religious ecstasy glowing upon his face.

The music moved his powerful frame the way the storm wind sways a giant of the forest. Peter and Colin stopped in the doorway, for it seemed an intrusion on such a private, such an intimate moment, but it was only a few seconds before he became aware of them and lifted his head. He seemed to shake off the spell of the music with the shudder that a spaniel uses to shake itself free of water when it reaches dry land, and he lifted the arm of the turntable from the spinning black disc.

The silence seemed to tingle after the great crashing chords of sound.

“General Stride,” Kingston Parker greeted him. “Or may I still call you Peter?”

“Mr. Stride will do very nicely,” said Peter, and Parker made an eloquent little gesture of regret, and without offering to shake hands indicated the comfortable leather couch across the room.

“At least you came,” he said, and as Peter settled into the couch, he nodded.

“I have always had an insatiable curiosity.”

“I was relying on that,” Kingston Parker smiled. “Have you breakfasted?”

“We’ve had a snack,“Colin cut in but Peter nodded.

“Coffee then,” said Parker, and spoke quietly into the intercom set, before turning back to them.

“Where to begin?” Parker combed the thick greying hair back with both hands, leaving it even more tousled than it had been.

“Begin at the beginning,” Peter suggested. “As the King of Hearts said to Alice.”

“At the beginning-” Parker smiled softly. All right, at the beginning I opposed your involvement with Atlas.”

“I know.”

“I

did not expect that you would accept the Thor command, it was a step backwards in your career. You surprised me there, and not for the first time.” A Chinese manservant in a white jacket with brass buttons carried in a tray. They were silent as he offered coffee and cream and coloured crystal sugar and then, when he had gone, Parker went on.

“At that time, my estimate of you, General Stride, was that although you had a record of brilliance and solid achievement, you were an officer of rigidly oldfashioned thought. The Colonel Blimp mentality more suited to trench warfare than to the exigencies of war from the shadows the kind of wars that we are fighting now, and will be forced to fight in the future.” He shook the great shaggy head and unconsciously his fingers caressed the smooth cool ivory keyboard, and he settled down on the stool before the piano.

“You see, General Stride, I saw the role of Atlas to be too limited by the original terms of reference placed upon it. I did not believe that Atlas could do what it was designed for if it was only an arm of retaliation. If it had to wait for a hostile act before it could react, if it had to rely entirely on other organizations with all their internecine rivalries and bickerings for its vital intelligence. I needed officers who were not only brilliant, but who were capable of unconventional thought and independent action. I did not believe you had those qualities, although I studied you very carefully. I was unable to take you fully into my confidence.” Parker’s slim fingers evoked a fluent passage from the keyboard as though to punctuate his words, and for a moment he seemed completely enraptured by his own music, then he lifted his head again.

“If I had done so, then the conduct of your rescue operation of Flight 070 might have been completely different. I have been forced radically to revise my estimate of you, General Stride and it was a difficult thing to do. For by demonstrating those qualities which I thought you lacked, you upset my judgement. I admit that personal chagrin swayed my reasoned judgement and by the time I was thinking straight again you had been provoked into offering your resignation-” “I know that the resignation was referred to you personally, Doctor Parker and that you recommended that it be accepted.” Peter’s voice was very cold, the tone clipped with controlled anger and Parker nodded.

“Yes, you are correct. I endorsed your resignation.”

“Then it looks as though we are wasting our time here and now.” Peter’s lips were compressed into a thin, unforgiving line, and the skin across his cheeks and over the finely chiselled flare of his nostrils seemed tightly drawn and pa leas porcelain.

“Please, General Stride let me explain first.” Parker reached out one hand to him as though to physically restrain him from rising, and his expression was earnest, compelling. Peter sank back into the couch, his eyes wary and his lips still tight.

“I have to go back a little first, in order to make any sense at all.” Parker stood up from the piano and crossed to

?”

the rack of pipes on the work table between the hi-fi equipment.

He selected one carefully, a meerschaum mellowed to the colour of precious amber. He blew through the empty pipe and then tramped back across the thick carpet to stand in front of Peter.

“Some months before the hijacking of 070 six months to be precise, I had begun to receive hints that we were entering a new phase in the application of international terrorism. Only hints at first, but these were confirmed and followed by stronger evidence.” Parker was stuffing the meerschaum from a leather wallet as he spoke, now he zipped this closed and tossed it onto the piano top. “What we were looking at was a consolidation of the forces of violence under some sort of centralized control we were not sure what form this control was taking.” He broke off and studied Peter’s expression, seemed to misinterpret it for utter disbelief, for he shook his head. “Yes, I know it sounds farfetched, but I will show you the files. There was evidence of meetings between known militant leaders and some other shadowy figures, perhaps the representatives of an Eastern government. We were not sure then, nor are we now. And immediately after this a complete change in the conduct and apparent motivation of militant activity. I do not really have to detail this for you. Firstly the systematic accumulation of immense financial reserves by the highly organized and carefully planned abduction of prominent figures, starting with the ministers of OPEC, then leading industrialists and financial figures-” Parker struck a match and puffed on his pipe and perfumed smoke billowed around his head.

So that it appeared that the motivation had not really changed and was still entirely self gain or parochial political gain. Then there was the taking of 070. “I had not confided in you before and once you were on your way to Johannesburg it was too late. I could do nothing more than try to control your actions by rather heavy-handed commands. I could not explain to you that we suspected that this was the leading wave of the new militancy, and that we must allow it to reveal as much as possible. It was a terrible decision, but I had to gamble a few human lives for vital information and then you acted as I had believed you were incapable of acting.” Parker removed his pipe from his mouth and he smiled; when he smiled you could believe anything he said and forgive him for it, no matter how outrageous. “I admit, General Stride, that my first reaction was frustrated rage.

I wanted your head, and your guts also. Then suddenly I began using my own head instead. You had just proved you were the man I wanted, my soldier capable of unconventional thought and action. If you were discredited and cast adrift, there was just a chance that this new direction of militancy would recognize the same qualities in you that I had been forced to recognize. If I allowed you to ruin your career, and become an outcast an embittered man, but one with vital skills and invaluable knowledge, a man who had proved he could be ruthless when it was necessary-” Parker broke off and made that gesture of appeal. I am sorry, General Stride, but I had to recognize the fact that you would be very attractive to-” he made an impatient gesture I do not have a name for them, shall we just call them “the enemy”. I had to recognize the fact that you would be of very great interest to the enemy. I endorsed your resignation.” He nodded sombrely. “Yes, I endorsed your resignation, and without your own knowledge you became an Atlas agent at large. It seemed perfect to me.

You did not have to-act a role you believed it yourself.

You were the outcast, the wronged and discredited man ripe for subversion.”

“I don’t believe it,” Peter said flatly, and Parker went back to the work table, selected an envelope from a Japanese ceramic tray and brought it back to Peter.

It took Peter a few moments to realize that it was a Bank Statement Credit Suisse in Geneva the account was in his name, and there were a string of deposits. No withdrawals MAde or debits. Each deposit was for exactly the same amount, the net salary of a major-general in the British Army.

“You see,” Parker smiled “you are still drawing your Atlas salary. You are still one of us, Peter. And all I can say is that I am very sorry indeed that we had to subject you to the pretence but it seems it was all worth while.” Peter looked up at him again, not entirely convinced, but with the hostility less naked in his expression.

“What do You mean by that, Doctor Parker?”

“It seems that you are very much back in play again.”

“I am Sales Director for Northern Armaments Company,” he said flatly.

“Yes, of course, and Narmco is part of the Altmann Industrial Empire and Baron Altmann and his lovely wife are, or rather were, an extraordinarily interesting couple.

For instance, did you know that the Baron was one of the top agents of Mossad in Europe?” impossible,” Peter shook his head irritably. “He was a Roman Catholic. Israeli intelligence does not make a habit of recruiting Catholics.”

“Yes,” Parker agreed. “His grandfather converted to Catholicism and changed the name of the family home to La Pierre Brute. It was a business decision, that we are certain of, there was not much profit in being Jewish in nineteenth-century France. However, the young Altmann was much influenced by his grandmother and his own mother. He was a Zionist from a very early age, and he unswervingly used his enormous wealth and influence in that cause right up until the time of his murder. Yet he did it so cunningly, with such subtlety that very few people were aware of his connections with uda ism and Zionism.

He never made the mistake of converting back to his ancestral religion, realizing that he could be more effective as a practising Christian.” Peter was thinking swiftly. If this was true, then it all had changed shape again. It must affect the reasons for the Baron’s death and it would change the role of Magda Altmann in his life.

“The Baroness?” he asked. “Was she aware of this?”

“Ah, the Baroness!” Kingston Parker removed his pipe from between his teeth, and smiled with reluctant admiration. “What a remarkable lady. We are not certain of very much about her except her beauty and her exceptional talents. We know she was born in Warsaw. Her father was a professor of medicine at the university there, and he escaped to the West when the Baroness was still a child. He was killed a few years later, a traffic accident in Paris. Hit and run driver, while the professor was leaving his faculty in the Sorbonne. A small mystery still hangs around his death. The child seems to have drifted from family to family, friends of her father, distant relatives. She already was showing academic leanings, musical talent, at thirteen a chess player of promise then for a period there is no record of her. She seems to have disappeared entirely. The only hint is from one of her foster mothers, a very old lady now, with a fading memory. “I think she went home for a while she told me she was going home.”” Parker spread his hands. “We do not know what that means. Home?

Warsaw? Israel? Somewhere in the East?”

“You have researched her very carefully,” Peter said. What he had heard had left him uneasy.

“Of course, we have done so to every contact you have made since leaving Atlas Command. We would have been negligent not to do so but especially we have been interested in the Baroness. She has been the most fascinating, you understand that, I am sure.” Peter nodded, and waited. He did not want to ask for more. Somehow it seemed disloyal to Magda, distrustful and petty but still he waited and Parker went on quietly.

“Then she was back in Paris. Nineteen years of age now a highly competent private secretary, speaking five languages fluently, beautiful, always dressed in the height of fashion, soon with a string of wealthy, influential and powerful admirers the last of these was her employer, Baron Aaron Altmann.” Parker was silent then, waiting for the question, forcing Peter to come to meet him.

“Is she Mossad also?”

“We do not know. It is possible but she has covered herself very carefully. We are rather hoping you will be able to find that out for us.”

“I see.”

“She must have known that her husband was a Zionist.

She must have suspected that it had something to do with his abduction and murder. Then there are the missing six years of her life from thirteen to nineteen, where was she?”

“Is she Jewish?” Peter asked. “Was her father Jewish?”

“We believe so, although the professor showed no interest in religion and did not fill in the question on his employment application to the Sorbonne. His daughter showed the same lack of religious commitment we know only that her marriage to the Baron was a Catholic ceremony followed by a civil marriage in Rambouillet.”

“We have drifted a long way from international terrorism,” Peter pointed out.

“I do not think so.” Kingston Parker shook his big shaggy head. “The Baron was a victim of it, and almost as soon as you one of the world’s leading experts on militancy and urban warfare as soon as you are associated with her there is an assassination attempt, or an abduction attempt made on the Baroness.” Peter was not at all surprised that Parker knew of that night on the road to La Pierre Benite it was only a few days since Peter’s arm had been out of the sling.

“Tell me, Peter. What was your estimate of that affair? I have seen an excerpt of the statement that you made to the French police but what can you add to that?” Peter had a vivid cameo memory of the Citroen that had followed him out of Paris, and then almost simultaneously the tearing sound of automatic fire in the night.

“They were after the Baroness,” Peter said firmly.

“And you were driving her car?”

“That’s right.”

“You were at the place at the time that the Baroness usually passed?”

“Right “Who suggested that? You?”

“I told her that the car was too conspicuous.” “So you suggested taking it down to La Pierre enite that night.” “Yes.” Peter lied without knowing why he did so.

“Did anybody else know that the Baroness would not be driving?” “Nobody.” Except her bodyguards, the two chauffeurs who had met them on their return from Switzerland, Peter thought.

“You are certain?” Parker persisted.

“Yes,” Peter snapped. “Nobody else.” Except Magda, only Magda. He pushed the thought aside angrily.

“All right, so we must accept that the Baroness was the target but was it an assassination or an abduction attempt?

That could be significant. If it was assassination, it would indicate that it was the elimination of a rival agent, that the Baroness was probably also a Mossad agent, recruited by her husband. On the other hand, an abduction would suggest that the object was monetary gain. Which was it, Peter?”

“They had blocked the road-” he said, but not completely he remembered. “And the police impersonator signalled me to stop-” or at least to slow down, he thought, slow down sufficiently to make an easy target before they started shooting ” and they did not open fire until I made it clear that I was not going to stop.” But they had been ready to begin shooting at the instant Peter made the decision to send the Maserati through the roadblock. The intention of the two machine-gunners had seemed evident.

I would say the object was to seize the Baroness alive.”

“All right,” Parker nodded. “We will have to accept that for the time being.” He glanced at Colin. “Colonel Noble?

You had a question?”

“Thank you, Doctor. We haven’t heard from Peter in “what terms he was approached by Narmco or the Baroness.

Who made the first contact?”

“I was approached by a London firm who specializes in A making top executive placements. They came directly from the Narmco Board-” And I turned them down flat, he thought. It was only later at Abbots Yew’I see.” Colin frowned with disappointment. “There was no question of a meeting with the Baroness?”

“Not at that stage.”

“You were offered the sales appointment no mention of any other duties, security, industrial intelligence “No, not then.” later?”

“Yes. When I met the Baroness, I realized her personal security arrangements were inadequate. I made changes.”

“You never discussed her husband’s murder?”

“Yes, we did “And?”

“And nothing.” Peter was finding it difficult to improvise answers, but he used the old rule of telling as much of the truth as possible.

“There was no mention by the Baroness of a hunt for her husband’s murderers? You were not asked to use your special talents to lead a vendetta?” Peter had to make a swift decision. Parker would know of his leak to the British military attache in Paris the bait he had so carefully placed to attract Caliph. Of course Parker would know: he was head of Atlas with access to the Central Intelligence computer. Peter could not afford to deny it.

“Yes, she asked me to relay any information which might point to her husband’s murderers. I asked G.2 in Paris for any information he might have. He couldn’t help me.” Parker grunted. “Yes. I have a note that G.2 filed a routine report but I suppose her request was natural enough.” He wandered back to his work table to glance at a pad on which was scribbled some sort of personal shorthand.

“We know of eight sexual liaisons that the Baroness formed prior to her marriage, all with politically powerful or wealthy men. Six of them married men-” Peter found himself trembling with anger so intense that it surprised him. He hated Parker for talking like this of Magda.

With a huge effort he kept his expression neutral, the hand in his lap was relaxed and the fingers spread naturally, though he felt a driving desire to bunch it and drive it into Parker’s face. all these affairs were conducted with utmost discretion. Then during her marriage there is no evidence of any extra-marital activity.

Since the Baron’s murder there have been three others, a minister in the French Government, an American businessman head of the world’s second largest oil company-” He dropped the pad back on the desk and swung back to face Peter. “And recently there has been one other.” He stared at Peter with a bright penetrating gaze. “The lady certainly believes in mixing business with pleasure. All her partners have been men who are able to deliver very concrete proof of their affections. I think this rule probably applies to her latest choice of sexual partner.” Colin Noble coughed awkwardly, and shifted in his chair, but Peter did not even glance at him, he went on staring impassively at Kingston Parker. He and Magda had made very little secret of their relationship still it was bitterly distasteful to have to discuss it with anybody else.

“I think that you are in a position now to gather vital intelligence. I think that you are very near the centre of this nameless and formless influence I think that you will be able to make some sort of contact with the enemy, even if it is only another military brush with them. The only question is whether or not you find any reason, emotional or otherwise, that might prevent you fulfilling this duty?” Kingston Parker cocked his head on one side, making the statement into a question.

“I have never let my private life interfere with my duty, Doctor, Peter said quietly.

“No,” Kingston Parker agreed. “That is true. And I am sure that now you know a little more about Baroness Altmann you will appreciate just how vital is our interest in that lady.”

“Yes, I do.” Peter had his anger under control completely.

“You want me to use a privileged relationship to spy on her.

Is that correct?”

“Just as we can be sure she is using the same relationship to her own ends-” Parker broke off as an odd thought seemed to occur. “I do hope I have not been too blunt, Peter. I haven’t destroyed some cherished illusion.” Now Parker’s attitude was dismissive. The interview was over.

“At my age, Doctor a man has no more illusions.” Peter rose to his feet. “Do I report to you direct?”

“Colonel Noble will make the arrangements for all communications.” Kingston Parker held out his hand. “I would not have asked this of you if I had a choice.” Peter did not hesitate, but took the hand. Parker’s hand was cool and dry. Although he made no show of it, Peter could sense the physical power in those hard pianist’s fingers.

“I understand, sir,” said Peter and he thought grimly, and even if that is also a lie, I’m going to understand pretty damned soon.

Peter made the excuse of tiredness to avoid the gin rummy game, and pretended to sleep during most of the long trans-Atlantic flight. With his eyes closed he tried to marshal his thoughts into some sort of pattern, but always they seemed to come around full circle and leave him chasing his tail. He could not even achieve any about his feelings and loyalties to Magda Altmann.

cer taint They seemed to keep changing shape every time he examined them, and he found himself brooding on irrelevancies.

“Sexual liaisons” what a ridiculously stilted expression Parker had used, and why had it angered Peter so much?

Eight liaisons before marriage, six with married men, two others since marriage all wealthy or powerful. He found himself trying to flesh out these bare statistics, and with a shock of bitter resentment imagined those faceless, formless figures with the slim smooth body, the tiny, perfectly shaped breasts, and the long smoky fall of shimmering hair. He felt somehow betrayed, and immediately scorned himself for this adolescent reaction.

There were other more dire questions and chances that Kingston Parker had raised, the Mossad connection, the six missing years in Magda’s life and yet he came back again to what had happened between them. Was she capable of such skilful deception, or was it not deception? Was he merely suffering from hurt pride now, or somehow unbeknown to him had she been able to force him into a more vulnerable position? Had she succeeded in making him fall in love with her?

How did he feel about her? At last he had to face that question directly and try to answer it, but when they landed again he still had no answer, except that the prospect of seeing her again pleased him inordinately and the thought that she had deliberately used him to her own ends and was capable of discarding him as she had done those others left him with an aching sense of dismay. He dreaded the answer for which he had to search, and suddenly he remembered her suggestion of an island to which they could escape together. He realized then that she was a victim of the same dread, and with a clairvoyant shudder he wondered if they were somehow preordained to destroy each other.

There were three separate messages from her at the Dorchester. She had left the Rambouillet number, each time. He telephoned immediately he reached the suite.

“Oh, Peter. I was so worried. Where were you?” And it was hard to believe her concern was faked, and it was even harder to discount the pleasure when, the following noon, she met him at Charles de Gaulle Airport herself instead of sending a chauffeur.

“I needed to get out of the office for an hour,” she explained, and then she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and pressed herself against him. “That’s a lie, of course. I came because I couldn’t wait the extra hour to see you.” Then she chuckled huskily. “I am behaving shamelessly, I can’t imagine what you must think of me!” They were with a party of eight that evening, dinner at Le Doyen and then the theatre at the Palais de Chaillot.

Peter’s French was still not up to Moli&e, so he took his pleasure in surreptitiously watching Magda, and for a few hours he succeeded in suppressing all those ugly questions; only on the midnight drive back to La Pierre Brute did he begin the next move in the complicated game.

“I couldn’t tell you on the telephone-” he said in the intimate darkness and warmth of her limousine. “I had an approach from Atlas. The head of Atlas summoned me to New York. That’s where I was when you called. They are also onto Caliph.” She sighed then, and her hand stole into his. “I was waiting for you to tell me, Peter,” she said simply, and she sighed again. “I knew you’d gone to America, and I had a terrible premonition that you were going to lie to me. I don’t know what I would have done then.” And Peter felt a lance of conscience driven up under his ribs, and with it the throb of concern she had known of his journey to New York, but how? Then he remembered her sources’.

“Tell me,” she said, and he told her everything, except the nagging question marks which Kingston Parker had placed after her name.

The missing years, the Mossad connection with the Baron, and those ten nameless men.

“They don’t seem to know that Caliph uses that name,” Peter told her. “But they seem to be pretty certain that you are hunting him, and you’ve hired me for that purpose.” They discussed it quietly as the small cavalcade of cars rushed through the night, and later when she came to his suite, they went on talking, holding each other as they whispered in the night, and Peter was surprised that he could act so naturally, that the doubts seemed to evaporate so easily when he was with her.

“Kingston Parker still has me as a member of Atlas,” Peter explained. “And I did not deny it, nor protest. We want to find Caliph, and if I still have status with Atlas it will be useful, of that I am certain,”

“I agree. Atlas can help us especially now that they are also aware that Caliph exists.” They made love in the dawn, very deeply satisfying love that left bodies and minds replete, and then keeping her discretion she slipped away before it was light, but they met again an hour later for breakfast together -in the Garden Room.

She poured coffee for him, and indicated the small parcel beside his plate.

“We aren’t quite as discreet as we think we are, She chuckled. “Somebody seems to know where you are spending your evenings.” He weighed the parcel in his right palm; it was the size of a roll of 35 men. film, wrapped in brown paper, sealed with red wax.

“Apparently it came special delivery yesterday evening.” She broke one of the crisp croissants into her plate, and smiled at him with that special slant of her green eyes.

The address was typed on a stick-on label, and the stamps were British, franked in south London the previous morning.

Suddenly Peter was assailed with a terrifying sense of foreboding; the presence of some immense overpowering evil seemed to pervade the gaily furnished room.

“What is it, Peter?” Her voice cracked with alarm.

“Nothing,“he said. “It’s nothing.”

“You suddenly went deadly pale, Peter. Are you sure you are all right?”

“Yes. I’m all right.” He used his table knife to lift the wax seal and then unrolled the brown paper.

It was a small screw-topped bottle of clear glass, and the liquid it contained was clear also. Some sort of preservative, he realized immediately, spirits or formaldehyde.

Hanging suspended in the liquid was a soft white object.

“What is it?“Magda asked.

Peter felt cold tentacles of nausea closing around his stomach.

The object turned slowly, floating free in its bottle, and there was a flash of vivid scarlet.

“Does your mother allow you to wear nail varnish now, Melissa-Jane?” He heard the question echoed in his memory, and saw his daughter flirt her hands, and the scarlet flash of her nails. The same vivid scarlet.

“Oh yes though not to school, of course. You keep forgetting I’m almost fourteen, Daddy.” The floating white object was a human finger. It had been severed at the first joint, and the preservative had bleached the exposed flesh a sickly white. The skin had puckered and wrinkled like that of a drowned man. Only the painted fingernail was unaltered, pretty and festively gay.

The nausea caught Peter’s throat, choking him and he coughed and retched drily as he stared at the tiny bottle.

The telephone rang three times before it was answered.

“Cynthia Barrow.” Peter recognized his ex-wife’s voice, even though it was ragged with strain and grief.

“Cynthia, it’s Peter.”

“Oh, thank God, Peter. I have been trying to find you for two days.”

“What is it?”

“Is Melissa-Jane with you, Peter?”

“No.” He felt as though the earth had lurched under his feet.

“She’s gone, Peter. She’s been gone for two nights now.

I’m going out of my mind.”

“Have you informed the police?”

“Yes, of course. “The edge of hysteria was in her voice.

“Stay where you are,” Peter said. “I’m coming to England right now, but leave any message for me at the Dorchester.” He hung up quickly, sensing that her grief would overflow at any moment and knowing that he could not handle it now.

Across the ormolu Louis Quatorze desk Magda was pale, tense, and she did not have to ask the question, it was in the eyes that seemed too large for her face.

He did not have to reply to that question. He nodded once, an abrupt jerky motion, and then he dialled again and while he waited he could not take his eyes from the macabre trophy that stood in its bottle in the centre of the desk.

“Colonel Noble.” Peter snapped into the mouthpiece.

“Tell him it’s General Stride and it’s urgent.”

Colin came on within a minute. ““They’ve taken Melissa-Jane.”

“Who? I don’t understand.”

“The enemy. They’ve taken her.”

“Jesus God! Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. They sent me her finger in a bottle.” Colin was silent for a few seconds, and then his voice was subdued. “That’s sick. Christ, that’s really sick.”

“Get onto the police. Use all your clout. They must be keeping quiet on it. There has been no publicity.

I want to be in on the hunt for these animals. Get Thor involved, find out what you can. I’m on my way now. I’ll let you know what flight I am on.”

“I’ll keep a listening watch at this number round the clock, Colin promised. “And I’ll have a driver meet you.” Colin hesitated. “Peter, I’m sorry. You know that.”

“Yes. I know.”

“We will all be with you, all the way.” Peter dropped the receiver onto its arm, and across the desk Magda stood up resolutely.

“I’ll come with you to London, she said, and Peter reached out and took her hand.

“No,” he said gently. “Thank you, but no. There will be nothing for you to do.”

“Peter, I want to be with you through this terrible thing.

I feel as though it’s all my fault.”

“That’s not true.”

“She’s such a lovely child.”

“You will be more help to me here, said Peter firmly.

“Try through all your sources, any little scrap of information.” “Yes, very well.” She accepted the decision, without further argument. “Where can I find you if I have anything?” He gave her Colin Noble’s private number at Thor, scribbling it on the pad beside the telephone. “Either there or at the Dorchester,” he said.

“At least I will come with you as far as Paris,” she said.

Heathrow Airport. It was on the front page of the Evening Standard and Peter snatched a copy off the news Stand and read it avidly during the drive up to London.

The victim was abducted At the front gate of her home in Leaden Street, Cambridge at eleven o’clock on Thursday. A neighbour saw her speak to the occupants of a maroon Triumph saloon car, and then enter the back door of the vehicle, which drove off immediately.

“I thought there were two people in the car,” Mrs. Shirley Callon, 32, the neighbour, told our correspondent, and Melissa-Jane did not seem alarmed. She appeared to enter the Triumph quite willingly. I know that her father, who is a senior officer in the army, often sends different cars to fetch her or bring her home. So I thought nothing about it.” The alarm was not raised for nearly twenty-four hours, as the missing girl’s mother also believed that she might be with her ex-husband.

Only when she was unable to contact Major -General Stride, the girl’s father, did she inform the police. The Cambridge police found a maroon Triumph abandoned in the car park at Cambridge railway station. The vehicle had been stolen in London the previous day, and immediately a nation-wide alert was put in force for the missing girl.

Chief-Inspector-Alan Richards is the police officer in charge of the investigation and any person who may be able to provide information should telephone There followed a London number and a detailed description of Melissa-Jane and the clothes she was wearing at the time she disappeared.

Peter crumpled the newspaper and dropped it on the front seat. He sat staring ahead, cupping his anger to him like a flame, husbanding it carefully because the heat was infinitely more bearable than the icy despair which waited to engulf him.

Inspector Alan Richards was a wiry little man, more like a jockey than a policeman. He had a prematurely wizened face, and he had combed long wisps of hair across his balding pate to disguise it. Yet his eyes were quick and intelligent, and his manner direct and decisive.

He shook hands when Colin Noble introduced them. “I must make it very clear that this is a police matter, General.

However, in these very special circumstances I am prepared to work very closely with the military.” Swiftly Richards went over the ground he had already covered. He had mounted the investigation from the two offices set aside for him on the third floor of Scotland Yard, with a view over chimney pots of the spires of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

Richards had two young policewomen answering the telephone calls coming in through the number they had advertised in the Press and on television. So far they had accepted over four hundred of these. “They range from long shots to the completely crazy, but we have to investigate all of them.” For the first time his expression softened. “It’s going to be a long, slow process, General Stride, but we have a few more leads to follow come through.” The inner office was furnished in the same nondescript Public Works Department furniture, solid and characterless but there was a kettle boiling on the gas ring, and Richards poured the tea as he went on.

“Three of my men are taking the kidnap car to pieces.

We are sure it is the right car. Your ex-wife has identified a purse found on the floor of the vehicle. It is your daughter’s.

We have lifted over six hundred fingerprints, and these are now being processed. It will take some time until we can isolate each and hope for an identification of any alien prints.

However, two of these correspond to prints lifted from your daughter’s room Sugar? Milk?” Richards brought the cup to Peter as he went on.

The neighbour, Mrs. Callon, who saw the pick-up, is working on an identikit portrait of the driver, but she did not get a very good view of him. That is a very long shot.” Richards sipped his tea. “However, we will show the final picture on television and hope for another lead from it. I am afraid that in cases like this, this is all we can do. Wait for a tip, and wait for the contact from the kidnappers. We do not expect the contact will be made through your ex wife but of course we have a tap on her telephone and men watching over her.” Richards spread his hands. “That’s it, General Stride. Now it’s your turn. What can you tell us?

Why should anybody want to snatch your daughter?” Peter exchanged a glance with Colin Noble, and was silent as he collected his thoughts, but Inspector Richards insisted quietly: “I understand you are not a very wealthy man, General but your family? Your brother?” Peter dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. “My brother has children of his own. They would be the more logical targets.”

“Vengeance? You were very active against the Provos in Ireland. You commanded the recapture of Flight 070.”

“It’s possible.”

“You are no longer connected with the army, I understand.” Peter was not going to be drawn further in that direction.

“I do not think this type of guesswork will profit us much.

We will know the motive as soon as the kidnappers make their demands known.”

“That is true.” Richards rattled his teacup, a little nervous gesture. “They could not have sent you her” He broke off as he saw Peter’s expression change.

It is horrible and terribly distressing, but we have to accept the finger as proof that your daughter is still alive and that the contact, when it comes, will be made to you. It was an expression of their earnest intention, and a threat but-” The telephone on his desk rang shrilly and Richards snatched it up.

“Richards!” he snapped, and then listened at length, occasionally grunting encouragement to the caller. When he hung up the receiver he did not speak immediately, but offered Peter a rumpled pack of cigarettes. When Peter refused, the policeman lit one himself and his voice was diffident.

“That was the laboratory. You know your daughter was a white cell donor, don’t you?” Peter nodded. It was part of Melissa-Jane’s social commitment. If she had not been tactfully dissuaded, she would have donated her blood and marrow by the bucketful.

“We were able to get a tissue typing from the Cambridge hospital. The amputated finger matches your daughter’s tissue type. I’m afraid we must accept that it is hers I cannot imagine that the kidnappers would have gone to the lengths of finding a substitute of the same type.” Peter had been secretly cherishing the belief that it was a bluff. That he had been sent the fingertip from a corpse, from a medical sample, from the casualty ward of a city hospital and now as that hope died he was assailed by the cold spirit-sapping waves of despair. They sat in silence for fully a minute, and now it was Colin Noble who broke it.

“Inspector, you are aware of the nature of the Thor Command?” “Yes, of course. There was a great deal of publicity at the time of the Johannesburg hijacking. It is an antiterrorist unit.”

“We, are probably the most highly trained specialists in I’m sorry, General.

the world at removing hostages safely from the hands of militants—”

“I understand what you are trying to tell me, Colonel,” Richards murmured drily. “But let us track down our militants first, and then any rescue attempts will be entirely under the control of the Commissioner of Police.” It was after three o’clock in the morning when Peter Stride checked in with the night receptionist at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane.

“We have been holding your suite since midday, General.”

“I’m sorry.” Peter found himself slurring his words, exhaustion and nervous strain, he realized. He had only left Police Headquarters when he could convince himself that everything possible was being done, and that he could place complete trust in Chief-Inspector Richards and his team.

He had Richards’s solemn undertaking that he would be informed, no matter at-what time of day or night, as soon as there was any new development.

Now he signed the register, blinking at the gritty swollen feeling of his eyelids.

“There are these messages for you, General.”

“Thank you again, and goodnight.” In the elevator he glanced at the mail the clerk had given him.

The first was a telephone slip.

“Baroness Altmann asks you to return her call to either the Paris or Rambouillet number.” The second was another telephone slip.

“Mrs. Cynthia Barrow called. Please call her at Cambridge 699 313.” The third was a sealed envelope, good-quality white paper, undistinguished by crest or monogram.

His name had been printed in capitals, very regular Win lettering, an oldfashioned copper-plate script. No stamp, so it would have been delivered by hand.

Peter split the flap with his thumb, and withdrew a single sheet of lined writing paper, again good but undistinguished.

There would be a stack of these sheets in any stationery department throughout the United Kingdom.

The writing was the same regular, unnatural script, so that Peter realized that the writer had used a stencil to form each letter, one of those clear plastic cut-out stencils obtainable from any toy store or stationery department. A completely effective method of disguising handwriting.

A finger you have already, next you will have the hand, then another hand, then a foot, then another foot and at last the head.

The next package will arrive on April 20th, and there will be another delivery every seven days.

To prevent this you must deliver a life for a life. The day Dr. Kingston Parker dies, your daughter will return to you immediately, alive and suffering no further harm, Destroy this letter and tell nnobody, or the head will be delivered immediately.

The letter was signed with the name which had come to loom so largely in Peter’s life:

“CALIPH’

The shock of it seemed to reach to the extremities of his soul. To see the name written. To have complete confirmation of all the evil that they had suspected, to see the mark of the beast deeply printed and unmistakable.

The shock was made greater, almost unbearable, by the contents of the letter. Peter found that such cruelty, such utter ruthlessness, tested his credibility to its limits.

The letter was fluttering in his hands, and he realized with a start of surprise that he was shaking like a man in high fever. The porter carrying his black crocodile valise was staring at him curiously, and it required a huge physical effort to control his hands and fold the sheet of white paper.

He stood rigidly, as though on the parade ground, until the elevator door opened and then he marched stiffly down the passage to his suite. He gave the porter a banknote, without glancing at it, and the moment the latch clicked closed, he unfolded the sheet again, and standing in the centre of the living-room floor, scanned the stilted script again, and then again until the words seemed to melt together and lose coherence and meaning.

He realized that for the first time in his life he was in complete panic, that he had lost all resolution and direction.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, counting slowly to one hundred, emptying his mind completely, and then giving himself the command: “Think!” All right, Caliph knew his movements intimately. Even to when he was expected at the Dorchester. that? Cynthia, Colin Noble, Magda Altmann and the secretary at Rambouillet who had made the reservation, Colin’s secretary at Thor, the Dorchester staff, and anybody else who had made even an idle study of Peter’s movements would know he always stayed at the Dorchester. That was a cul-de-sac.

“Think!” Today was April fourth. There were sixteen days before Caliph sent him Melissa-Jane’s severed hand. He felt the panic mounting again, and he forced it back.

“Think!” Caliph had been watching him, studying him in detail, assessing his value. Peter’s value was that he could move unsuspected in high places. He could reach the head of Atlas by simply requesting an audience. More than that, he could probably get access to any head of state if he wanted it badly enough.

For the first time in his life Peter felt the need for liquor.

He crossed quickly to the cabinet and fumbled with the key. A

stranger’s face stared at him out of the gilt-framed mirror above it.

The face was pale, haggard, with deep parentheses framing the mouth.

There were plum-coloured bruises of fatigue below the eyes, and the gaunt, bony jaw was gunmetal blue with a new beard and the sapphire blue of the eyes had a wild deranged glitter. He looked away from his own image. It only increased his sense of unreality.

He poured half a tumbler of Scotch whisky, and drank half of it straight off. He coughed at the sting of the liquor and a drop of it broke from the corner of his mouth and trickled down his chin. He wiped it away with his thumb, and turned back to study the sheet of white paper again. It was crumpled already, where he had gripped it too hard. He smoothed it carefully.

“Think!” he told himself. This was how Caliph worked, then.

Never exposing himself. Picking his agents with incredible attention to detail. Fanatics, like the girl, Ingrid who had led the taking of

Flight 070. Trained assassins, like the man he had killed in the river at La Pierre Brute.

Experts in high places, like General Peter Stride. Studying them,

assessing them and their capabilities, and finally finding their price.

Peter had never believed the old law that every man had his price.

He had believed himself above that general rule.

Now he knew he was not and the knowledge sickened him.

Caliph had found his price, found it unerringly. Melissa-Jane.

Suddenly Peter had a vivid memory of his daughter on horseback,

swivelling in the saddle to laugh and call back to him.

“Super-Star!” And the sound of her laughter on the wind.

Peter shivered, and without realizing it he crumpled the sheet of paper to a ball in his fist.

Ahead of him he saw the road that he was destined to follow. With a new flash of insight, he realized that he had already taken his first steps along the road. He had done so when he had put the gun to Ingrid in the terminal. of Johannesburg Airport, when he had made himself judge and executioner.

Caliph had been responsible for that first step on the road to corruption, and now it was Caliph who was driving him farther along it.

With a sudden prophetic glimpse ahead, Peter knew it would not end with the life of Kingston Parker. Once he was committed to Caliph, it would be for ever or until one of them, Peter Stride, or Caliph, was completely destroyed.

Peter drank the rest of the whisky in the tumbler.

Yes, Melissa-Jane was his price. Caliph had made the correct bid.

Nothing else would have driven him to it.

Peter picked the booklet of matches off the liquor cabinet and like a sleepwalker moved through to the bathroom. He twisted the sheet of paper into a taper and lit the end of it, holding it over the toilet bowl. He held it until the flame scorched his fingers painfully, then dropped it into the bowl and flushed the ash away.

He went back into the lounge, and refilled the glass with whisky.

He picked the comfortable armchair below the window and sank into it.

Only then did he realize how very weary he was. The nerves in his thighs quivered and twitched uncontrollably.

He thought about Kingston Parker. A man like that had an incalculable amount to offer mankind. It will have to look like an assassination attempt aimed at me, Peter thought. One that finds the wrong victim.

“A bomb,” Peter thought. He hated the bomb. Somehow it seemed to be the symbol of the senseless violence which he hated. He had seen it used in Ireland and in London town, and he hated it. The undirected destruction, mindless, merciless.

“It will have to be a bomb,” he decided, and with surprise he found that his hatred had found a new target. Again for the first time ever, he hated himself for what he was going to do.

Caliph had won. He knew that against an adversary of that calibre there was no chance they would find where Melissa-Jane was hidden.

Caliph had won, and Peter Stride sat the rest of the night planning an act which he had dedicated his life, until then, to prevent.

cannot understand why we haven’t had the demand A contact yet.”

Inspector Richards ran his hand distractedly across his pate,

disturbing the feathery wisps that covered it and leaving them standing out at a startled angle.

“It’s five days now. Still no demands.”

“They know where to contact Peter,” Colin Noble agreed.

“The interview he gave covered that.” Peter Stride had appeared on

BBC TV to broadcast an appeal to the kidnappers not to maim his daughter further, and to the general public to offer any information that might lead to her rescue.

On the same programme they had displayed the police identikit portrait of the driver of the maroon Triumph prepared by the one witness.

The response had been overwhelming, jamming the switchboard at

Inspector Richards’s special headquarters, and a mixed bag had fallen into the net.

A fourteen-year-old runaway had the police barge into the

Bournemouth apartment where she was in bed with her thirty-two-year-old lover. She was returned weeping bitterly to the bosom of her family,

and had again disappeared within twenty-four hours.

In North Scotland the police sadly bungled a raid on a remote cottage hired by a man with the same lank dark hair and gunfighter’s mustache as the identikit portrait. He turned out to be a cottage-industry manufacturer of LSD tablets, and he and his four assistants, one of them a young girl who vaguely fitted the description of Melissa-Jane in that she was female and blonde, had scattered across the Highlands before being overtaken and borne to earth by sweating pounding members of the Scottish Constabulary.

Peter Stride was furious. “If it had been Melissa-Jane, they would have had fifteen minutes in which to put her down-” He raged at

Richards. “You’ve got to let Thor go in to the next raid.” Through the

Thor communications net he spoke directly to Kingston Parker on the video screens.

We’ll put all our influence into it,” Parker agreed, and then with deep compassion in his eyes, “Peter, I’m living every minute of this with you. I cannot escape the knowledge that I have placed you into this terrible situation. I did not expect the attack would come through your daughter. I think you know that you can call on me for any support you need.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Peter and for a moment felt his resolve weaken. In ten days he would have to execute this man. He steeled himself by thinking of a puckered dead white finger floating in its tiny bottle.

Kingston Parker’s influence worked immediately. Six hours later the order came down from Downing Street via the Commissioner of Police,

that the next raid on a suspect hideout would be conducted by Thor

Command.

The Royal Air Force placed two helicopters at Thor’s disposal for the duration of the operation, and Thor’s assault unit went into intensive training for penetration and removal under urban conditions.

Peter trained with them, he and Colin swiftly re-establishing the old rapport of concerted action.

When they were not practising and refining the exit and assembly from the hovering helicopters, Peter spent much of his time in the enclosed pistol range, trying to drown his awareness in the crash of gunfire, but the days passed swiftly in a series of false alarms and misleading clues.

Each night when Peter examined his face in the mirror above the liquor cabinet, it was more haggard, the blue eyes muddied by fatigue and terrible gut eroding terror of what the next day might bring forth.

There were six days left when Peter left the hotel room before breakfast, caught the tube at Green Park and left it again at Finsbury

Park. In a garden supplies shop near the station he purchased a twenty-pound plastic bag of ammonium nitrate garden fertilizer. He carried it back to the Dorchester in a locked Samsonite suitcase and stored it in the closet behind his hanging trenchcoat.

That night, when he spoke to Magda Altmann, she pleaded once again to be allowed to come to London.

“Peter I know I can be of help to you. Even if it’s just to stand beside you and hold your hand.”

“No. We’ve been over that.” He could hear the brutal tone in his own voice, but could not control it. He knew that he was getting very close to the edge. “Have you heard anything?”

“I’m sorry, Peter. Nothing, absolutely nothing. My sources are doing all that is possible.” Peter bought the dieseline from a pump at the Lex Garage in Brewer Street. He took five lit res in a plastic screw-topped container that had contained a household detergent. The pump attendant was a pimply teenager in dirty overalls. He was completely uninterested in the transaction.

In his bathroom Peter worked on the dieseline and the nitrate from the garden shop. He produced twenty-one pounds of savagely weight-efficient high explosive that was, none the less, docile until activated by a blasting cap such as he had devised with a flashlight bulb.

It would completely devastate the entire suite, utterly destroying everybody and everything in it. However, the damage should be confined to those three rooms.

It would be a simple matter to lure Kingston Parker to the suite under the pretence of having urgent information about Caliph to deliver, information so critical that it could only be delivered in person and in private.

That night the face in the mirror above the liquor cabinet was that of a man suffering from a devouring terminal disease, and the whisky bottle was empty. Peter broke the seal on a fresh bottle; it would make it easier to sleep, he told himself.

The wind came off the Irish Sea like the blade of a harvester’s scythe, and the low lead-coloured cloud fled up the slopes of the

Wicklow hills ahead of it.

There were weak patches in the cloud layer through which a cold and sickly sun beamed swiftly across the green forested slopes. As it passed so the rain followed icy grey rain slanting in on the wind.

A man came up the deserted street of the village. The tourists had not yet begun the annual invasion, but the “Bed and Breakfast”

signs were already out to welcome them on the fronts of the cottages.

The man passed the pub, in its coat of shocking salmon pink paint and lifted his head to read the billboard above the empty car park.

“Black is Beautiful drink Guinness” it proclaimed, and the man did not smile but lowered his head and trudged on over the bridge that divided the village in two.

On the stone balustrades of the bridge a midnight artist had used an aerosol paint can to spray political slogans in day-glo colours.

“BRITS OUT” on the left-hand balustrade and “STOP BLaCK TORTURE”

on the other. This time the man grimaced sourly.

Below him the steely grey water boiled about the stone piers before hissing down towards the sea.

The man wore a cyclist’s plastic cape and a narrow brimmed tweed cap pulled down over his eyes. The wind dashed at him, flogging the skirts of the cape against his Wellington boots.

He seemed to cringe to the wind, hunching down against its cold fury, as he trudged on past the few buildings of the village. The

Street was deserted, though the man knew that he was being watched from curtained windows.

This village on the lower slopes of the Wicklow hills, a mere thirty miles from Dublin, would not have been his choice. Here isolation worked against them, making them conspicuous. He would have preferred the anonymity of the city. However, his preferences had never been asked for.

This was only the third time he had left the house since they had arrived. Each time it had been for some emergency something that a little more forethought might provision have prevented, which should have been included when the old house was stocked for their stay. That came from having to rely on a drinking man, but here again he had not been consulted.

He was discontented and in a truculent, smouldering mood. it had rained most of the time, and the oil-fired central heating was not working, the only heating was the smoking peat fires in the small fireplaces in each of the two big rooms they were using. The high ceilings and sparse furnishings had made the rooms more difficult to warm and he had been cold ever since they had arrived. They were using only the two rooms, and had left the rest of the house locked and shuttered. It was a gloomy building, with the smell of damp pervading it. He had only the company of a whining alcoholic, day after cold rainy day. The man was ripe and overripe for trouble, for any diversion to break the grinding monotony but now he was reduced to errand boy and house servant, roles for which he was unsuited by temperament and training, and he scowled darkly as he trudged over the bridge towards the village store, with its row of petrol pumps standing before it like sentries.

The storekeeper saw him coming, and called through into the back of the shop.

“It’s himself from down at the Old Manse.” His wife came through,

wiping her hands on her apron, a short plump woman with bright eyes and ready tongue.

“City people have no more sense than they need, out in this weather.”

“Sure and it’s not baked beans nor Jameson whiskey he’s afteTbuying.” Speculation about the new occupant of the Old Manse had swiftly become one of the village’s main diversions, with regular bulletins broadcast by the girl on the local telephone exchange two overseas telephone calls, by the postman no mail deliveries, by the dustman the disposals into the dustbins were made up mainly of empty

Heinz baked beans cans and Jameson whiskey bottles.

“I still think he’s from the trouble up north,” said the shopkeeper’s wife. “He’s got the look and the sound of an Ulster man.”

“Hush, woman.” Her husband cautioned her. “You’ll bring bad luck upon us. Get yourself back into the kitchen now.” The man came in out of the rain and swept the tweed cap off his head, beating the water from it against the jamb of the door. He had black straight hair, cut into a ragged fringe above the dark Irish visage and fierce eyes, like those of a falcon when first the leather hood is slipped.

“The top of the morning to you, Mr. Barry,” the shopkeeper greeted him heartily. “Like as not it will stop raining, before it clears.”

The man they knew as Barry grunted, and as he slipped the waterproof cape from his shoulders, swept the cluttered interior of the little general dealer’s store with a quick, all, embracing glance.

He wore a rough tweed jacket over a cable-stitched jersey and brown corduroys tucked into the top of the Wellington boots.

“You finished writing on your book, have you?” Barry had told the milkman that he was writing a book about Ireland.

The Wicklow hills were a stronghold of the literary profession,

there were a dozen prominent or eccentric writers living within twenty miles, taking advantage of Ireland’s tax concessions to writers and artists.

“Not yet,” Barry grunted, and went across to the shelves nearest the till. He made a selection of half a dozen items and laid them on the worn counter top.

“When it’s good and wrote I’m going to ask the library to keep a copy for me,” the shopkeeper promised, as though that was exactly what a writer would want to hear, and began to ring up the purchases on his register.

Barry’s upper lip was still unnaturally smoother and paler than the rest of his face. He had shaved away the dark droopy mustache the day before arriving in the village, and at the same time had cut the fringe of his hair that hung almost to his eyes.

The shopkeeper picked up one of the purchases and looked inquiringly at Barry, but when the dark Irish face remained impassive and he volunteered no explanation, the shopkeeper dropped his eyes self-consciously and rang up the package with the other purchases and dropped it into a paper carrier.

“That will be three pounds twenty pence,” he said, and closed the cash drawer with a clang, waiting while Barry stung the cape over his shoulders and adjusted the tweed cap.

“God be with you then, Mr. Barry.” There was no reply and the shopkeeper watched him set off back across the bridge before he called his wife again.

“He’s a surly one, all right, he is.”

“He’s got him a girlfriend down there.” The shopkeeper was bursting with the importance of his discovery. “He’s up to a nice little bit of hanky-panky.”

“How do you know that?”

“He was after buying women’s things you know.” He hooded a knowing eye.

“No, I don’t know, “his wife insisted.

“For the curse you know. Women’s things,” and his wife glowed with the news, and began to untie her apron.

“You’re sure now? “she demanded.

“Would I ever be lying to you?”

“I think I’ll go across to Mollie for a cup pa tea,” said his wife eagerly; the news would make her the woman of the hour throughout the village.

The man they knew as Barry trudged into the narrow, high-walled lane that led up to the Old Manse. It was only the heavy boots and voluminous cape that gave him a clumsy gait, for he was a lithe, lean man in prime physical condition, and under the brim of his cap the eyes were never still, hunter’s eyes probing and darting from side to side.

The wall was twelve feet high, the stonework blotched with silver-grey lichen, and although it was cracked and sagging at places,

yet it was still substantial and afforded complete privacy and security to the property beyond.

At the end of the lane there was a pair of rotten and warping double doors, but the lock was a bright new brass Yale and the cracks in the wood and the gaping seams had been covered with fresh white strips of pine so that it was impossible to see into the interior of the garage.

Barry unlocked the brass Yale lock and slipped through, pulling the latch closed behind him.

There was a dark blue Austin saloon car parked facing the doors for immediate departure. It had been stolen in Ulster two weeks before, re sprayed and fitted with a roof rack to alter its appearance,

and with new licence plates.

The engine had been tuned and checked and Barry had paid nearly twice its market value.

Now he slipped behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition. The engine fired and caught immediately. He grunted with satisfaction; seconds could mean the difference between success and failure, and in his life failure and death were synonymous. He listened to the engine beat for half a minute, checking the oil pressure and fuel gauges before switching off the engine again and going out through the rear door of the garage into the overgrown kitchen yard.

The old house had the sad unloved air of approaching dereliction.

The fruit trees in the tiny orchard were sick with fungus diseases and surrounded by weed banks.

The thatch roof was rotten-green with moss, and the windows were blindman’s eyes, unseeing and uncaring.

Barry let himself in through the kitchen door and dropped his cape and cap on the scullery floor and set the carrier on the draining board of the sink. Then he reached into the cutlery drawer and brought out a pistol. It was a British officer’s service pistol, had in fact been taken during a raid on a British Army arsenal in Ulster three years previously.

Barry checked the handgun with the expertise of a long.

familiarity and then thrust it into his belt. He had felt naked and vulnerable for the short time that he was without the weapon but he had reluctantly decided not to risk carrying it in the village.

Now he tapped water into the kettle, and at the sound a voice called through from the dim interior.

“Is that you?”

“None other,” Barry answered drily, and the other man came through and stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

He was a thin, stooped man in his fifties with the swollen inflamed face of the very heavy drinker.

“Did you get it?” His voice was husky and rough with whiskey, and he had a seedy run-down air, a day’s stubble of grey hairs that grew at angles on the blotchy skin.

Barry indicated the package on the sink.

“It’s all there, doctor.”

“Don’t call me that, I’m not a doctor any more,” the man snapped irritably.

“Oh, but you are a damned fine one. Ask the girls who dropped their bundles-“

“Leave me alone, damn you.” Yes, he had been a damn fine doctor. Long ago, before the whiskey, now however it was the abortions and the gunshot wounds of fugitives, and jobs like this one.

He did not like to think about this one. He crossed to the sink and sorted through the packages.

“I asked you for adhesive tape, “he said.

“They had none. I brought the bandage.”

“I cannot-” the man began, but Barry whirled on him savagely, his face darkening with angry blood.

“I’ve had a gutsful of your whining. You should have brought what you needed, not sent me to get it for you.”

“I did not expect the wound-“

“You didn’t expect anything but another dram of Jamesons, man.

There is no adhesive tape. Now get on with it and tie the bitch’s hand up with the bandage.” The older man backed away swiftly, picked up the packages and shuffled through into the other room.

Barry made the tea and poured it into the thick china mug, spooned in four spoons of sugar and stirred noisily, staring out of the smeared panes. It was raining again. He thought that the rain and the waiting would drive him mad.

The doctor came back into the kitchen, carrying a bundle of linen soiled with blood and the yellow ooze of sepsis.

“She is sick he said. “She needs drugs, antibiotics. The finger-“

“Forget it, “said Barry.

From the other room there was a long-drawn-out whimper, followed by the incoherent gabble of a young girl deep in the delirium induced by fever and hypnotic drugs.

“If she is not taken to proper care, I won’t be responsible.”

“You’ll be responsible,” Barry told him heavily. “I’ll see to that.”

The doctor dropped the bundle of linen into the sink and let the water run over it.

“Can I have a drink now?” he asked.

Barry made a sadistic display of consulting his watch.

“No. Not yet, “he decided.

The doctor poured soap flakes into the sink.

“I don’t think I can do the hand,” he whispered, shaking his head.

“The finger was bad enough but I can’t do the hand.”

“You’ll do the hand” said Barry. “Do you hear me, you whiskey-guzzling old wreck?

You’ll do the hand, and anything else I tell you to do.” Sir Steven

Stride offered a reward of fifty thousand pounds to anyone giving information that led to the recovery of his niece, and the offer was widely reported on television and in the press with reprints of the identikit portrait. It led to a revival of the flagging public interest in the case.

Inspector Richards had been able to reduce his telephone answering staff to one the last few days, but with the renewed spate of informers and speculators, he had to ask for the other policewoman to return to the third floor, and he had two sergeants processing the material that flowed in.

“I feel like Littlewoods,” he growled to Peter. “Everybody taking a ticket on the pools, or getting his three-pence worth of advertising.” He picked up another message slip.

“Here is another claim for responsibility the Democratic

People’s Party for the Liberation of Hong Kong Have we ever heard of them before?”

“No, sir.” The senior sergeant looked up from his lists.

“But that makes one hundred and forty-eight confessions or claims for responsibility so far.”

“And “Enry the Eighth was on again half an hour ago.” One of the girls at the switchboard turned and smiled around her mouthpiece. “Hasn’t missed a day.”

“Enry the Eighth was a sixty-eight-year-old pensioner who lived in a council estate in South

London. His hobby was confessing to the latest spectacular crime from rape to bank robbery, and he had called regularly every morning.

“Come and get me,” he challenged each time. “But I warn you I

won’t come peaceful like. -” When the local constable had made a courtesy call, while on his regular beat, “Enry the Eighth had his suitcase packed and ready to go. His disappointment was heart-rending when the bobby tactfully explained that they weren’t going to arrest him, but when the bobby assured him that they would be keeping him under close surveillance as the Commissioner considered him a very dangerous man,

he brightened up considerably and offered the constable a cup of tea.

“The trouble is we dare not dismiss any of it, even the real loonies, it all has to be checked out,” Richards sighed, and motioned

Peter to go through to the inner office.

“Still nothing?” Richards asked. It was an unnecessary question.

They had a tap on his telephone, at the hotel and at Thor Headquarters,

to record any contact from the kidnappers.

“No, nothing,” Peter lied, but the lie had become easy now just as he had learned to accept whatever else was necessary for

Melissa-Jane’s release.

“I don’t like it, General. I really don’t like the fact that there has been no attempt to contact you. I don’t want to be despondent, but every day of silence makes it look more like an act of vengeance, ” Richards broke off and covered his embarrassment by lighting a cigarette. “Yesterday the Deputy-Commissioner telephoned me. He wanted my opinion as to how much longer I thought it necessary to maintain this special unit.”

“What did you tell him?” Peter asked.

“I told him that if we did not have some firm evidence within ten days, at least some sort of demand from the kidnappers then I would have to believe that your daughter was no longer alive.”

“I see.” Peter felt a fatalistic calm. He knew. He was the only one who knew. There were four days to Caliph’s deadline, he had worked out his timetable.

Tomorrow morning he would request his urgent meeting with Kingston

Parker. He expected it would take less than twelve hours to arrange it, he would make it too attractive for Parker to refuse.

Parker would have to come, but against the remote possibility that he did not, Peter had left himself three clear days before the deadline in which to put into action his alternative plan. This would mean going to Kingston Parker.

The first plan was the better, the more certain but if it failed, Peter would accept any risk.

Now he realized that he had been standing in the centre of

Richards’s office, staring vacantly at the wall above the little inspector’s head. He started as he realized that Richards was staring at him with a mingling of pity and concern.

“I am sorry, General. I understand how you feel but I cannot keep this unit functioning indefinitely. We just do not have enough people-“

“I understand.” Peter nodded jerkily, and wiped his face with an open hand. It was a weary, defeated gesture.

“General, I think you should see your doctor. I really do.”

Richards’s voice was surprisingly gentle.

“That won’t be necessary I’m just a little tired.”

“A man can take just so much.”

“I think that’s what these bastards are relying on,” Peter agreed. “But I’ll be all right.” From the next door office there was the almost constant tinkle of telephone bells, and the murmur of female voices as the two policewomen answered the incoming stream of calls. It had become a steady background effect, so that when the call for which they had prayed and pleaded and waited finally came, neither of the two men was aware of it, and there was no excitement on the switchboard. in front of The two girls sat side by side on swivel stools the temporary switchboard. The blonde girl was in her middle twenties, she was pretty and pert, with big round breasts buttoned primly under her blue uniform jacket. The blonde hair was twisted into a bun at the back of her neck to free her ears, but the headset made her appear older and businesslike.

The bell pinged and a panel lit in front of her; she plugged in the switch and spoke into the headset, “Good morning. This is the

Police Special Information Unit-” She had a pleasant middle-class accent, but was unable to keep the trace of boredom out of it. She had been on this job for twelve days now. There was the warning tone of a public telephone and then the click of small change fed into the slot.

“Can you hear me?” The accent was foreign.

“Yes, sir.”

“Listen carefully. Gilly O’Shaughnessy has hen” No,

it was an imitation, the foreign accept slipped a little with the pronunciation of the name.

“Gilly O’Shaughnessy,“the police girl repeated.

“That’s right. He’s holding her at Laragh.”

“Spell that, please.”

Again the accent slipped as the man spelled the name.

“And where is that, sir?”

“County Wicklow, Ireland.”

“Thank you,

sir. What is your name, please?” There was the clack of a broken connection and the hum of the dialling tone. The girl shrugged, and scribbled the message on the pad before her, glancing at her wristwatch simultaneously.

“Seven minutes to tea time,” she said. “Roll on death, battle with the angels.” She tore the sheet off the pad and passed it over her shoulder to the burly, curly-headed sergeant who sat behind her.

“I’ll buy you a sticky bun, “he promised.

“I’m on a diet, “she sighed.

“That’s daft, you look a treat-” The sergeant broke off.

Gil ly O’Shaughnessy. Why do I know that name?” The older sergeant looked up sharply.

“Gilly O’Shaughnessy?” he demanded. “Let me see that.” And he snatched the sheet, scanning it swiftly, his lips moving as he read the message. Then he looked up again.

“You know the name because you’ve seen it on the wanted posters,

and heard it on the telly. Gilly O’Shaughnessy, strew the man, he’s the one who bombed the Red Lion at Leicester, and shot the Chief Constable in Belfast.” The curly-headed policeman whistled softly. “This looks like a hot one. A real hot one-” But his colleague was already barging into the inner office without the formality of knocking.

Richards had the connection to the Dublin police within seven minutes.

“Impress upon them that there must be no attempt-” Peter fretted,

while they waited, and Richards cut him short.

“All right, General. Leave this to me. I understand what has to be done—2 At that moment the Dublin connection was made, and Richards was transferred quickly to a Deputy, Commissioner. He spoke quietly and earnestly for nearly ten minutes before he replaced the receiver.

“They will use the local constabulary, not to waste time in sending a man down from Dublin. I have their promise that no approach will be made if a suspect is located.” Peter nodded his thanks.

“Laragh,” he said. “I have never heard of it. It cannot have a population of more than a few hundred.”

“I’ve sent for a map,” Richards told him, and when it came they studied it together.

“It’s on the slopes of the Wicklow hills ten miles from the coast-” And that was about all there was to learn from the large-scale map.

“We’ll just have to wait for the Dublin police to call back-“

“No,” Peter shook his head. “I want you to call them again, and ask them to contact the surveyor-general. He must have trig maps of the village, aerial photographs, street layouts. Ask them to get them down with a driver to Enniskerry Airfield-“

“Should we do that now? What if this turns out to be another false alarm.”

“We’ll have wasted a gallon of petrol and the driver’s time-” Peter was no longer able to sit still, he jumped out of the chair and began to pace restlessly about the office; it was too small for him suddenly, he felt as though he were on the point of suffocation. “I don’t think it is, however. I

have the smell of it. The smell of the beast.”

Richards looked startled and Peter deprecated the exaggerated phrase with a dismissive gesture. “A manner of speech” he explained,

and then stopped as a thought struck him. “The helicopters will have to refuel, they haven’t got the range to make it in one hop, and they are so bloody slow!” He paused and reached a decision, then leaned across Richards’s desk to pick up the telephone and dialled Colin

Noble’s private number at Thor.

“(2bun.” He spoke curtly with the tension that gripped him like a mailed fist. “We’ve just had a contact. It’s still unconfirmed, but it looks the best yet.”

“Where?” Colin broke in eagerly.

“Ireland.”

“That’s to hell and gone.”

“Right, what’s the flight time for the whirlybirds to reach Enniskerry?”

“Stand by.” Peter heard him talking to somebody else probably one of the RAF. pilots. He came back within the minute.

“They will have to refuel en route—2 eyes?” Peter demanded impatiently “Four and a half hours,“Colin told him.

“It’s twenty past ten now almost three o’clock before they reach

Enniskerry. With this weather it will be dark before five.” Peter thought furiously; if they sent the Thor team all the way to Ireland on a false trail and while they were there the correct contact was made in Scotland, or Holland, or’It’s got the smell. It’s got to be right,”

he told himself, and took a deep breath. He could not order Colin

Noble to go to Bravo. Peter was no longer commander of Thor.

“Colin,” he said. “I think this is it. I have the deep-down gut feel for it. Will you trust me and go to Bravo now? If we wait even another half hour we’ll not get Melissa-Jane out before nightfall if she is there.”

its There was a long silence, broken only by Colin Noble’s light quick breath.

“Hell, it can only cost me my job,” he said easily at last.

okay, Pete baby, it’s Bravo, we’ll be airborne in five minutes.

We’ll pick you up from the helipad in fifteen minutes; be ready.” The cloud was breaking up, but the wind was still bitter and spiteful, and up on the exposed helipad it cut cruelly through Peter’s trench coat,

blazer and roll-neck jersey. They looked out across the churned surface of the River Thames, eyes watering in the wind, for the first glimpse of the helicopters.

“what if we have a confirmation before you reach Enniskerry?”

“You can reach us on the RAF. frequencies, through Biggin Hill,” Peter told him.

“I hope I don’t have bad news for you.” Richards was holding his bowler hat in place with one hand, the skirts of his jacket slapping around his skinny rump and his face blotchy with the cold.

The two ungainly craft came clattering in, low over the rooftops,

hanging on the whirling silver coins of their rotors.

At a hundred feet Peter could plainly recognize the broad shape of

Colin Noble in the open doorway of the fuselage, just forward of the brilliant RAF. rounders, and the down draught of the rotors boiled the air about them. “Good hunting.” Richards raised his voice to a shout. “I wish I

was coming with you.” Peter ran forward lightly, and jumped before the helicopter gear touched the concrete pad. Colin caught him by the upper arm and helped to swing him aboard without removing the cheroot from his wide mouth.

“Welcome aboard, buddy. Now let’s get this circus on the road. “And he hitched the big .45 pistol on his hip.

“She’s not eating.” The doctor came through from the inner room and scraped the plate into the rubbish bin below the sink. “I’m worried about her. Very worried.” Gilly O’Shaughnessy grunted but did not look up from his own plate. He broke a crust off the slice of bread and very carefully wiped up the last of the tomato ketchup. He popped the bread into his mouth and followed it with a gulp of steaming tea, and while he chewed it all together, he leaned back on the kitchen chair and watched the other man.

The doctor was on the verge of cracking up. He would probably not last out the week before his nerve went completely; Gilly O’Shaughnessy had seen better men go to pieces under less strain.

He realized then that his own nerves were wearing away.

It was more than just the rain and the waiting that was working on him. He had been the fox for all of his life, and he had developed the instincts of the hunted animal. He could sense danger, the presence of the pursuers, even when there was no real evidence. It made him restless to stay longer in one place than was necessary, especially when he was on a job. He had been here twelve days, and it was far too long. The more he thought about it the more uneasy he became. Why had they insisted he bring the brat to this isolated, and therefore conspicuous, little dead-end? There was only one road in and out of the village, a single avenue of escape. Why had they insisted that he sit and wait it out in this one place? He would have liked to keep moving. If he had had the running of it, he would have bought a second-hand caravan, and kept rolling from one park to another his attention wandered for a few moments as he thought how he would have done it if he had been given the planning of it.

He lit a cigarette and gazed out of the rain-blurred window panes,

hardly aware of the muttered complaints and misgivings of his companion. What they should have done was crop the brat’s fingers and bottle all of them to send to her father at intervals, and then they should have held a pillow over her face and buried her in the vegetable garden or weighted her and dumped her out beyond the hundred fathom line of the Irish Sea that way they would not have had to bother with a doctor, and the nursing Everything else had been done with professional skill, starting with the contact they had made with him in the favela of Rio de Janeiro, where he was hiding out in a sleazy one-room shack with the half-caste Indian woman, and down to his last fifty quid.

That had given him a real start, he thought he had covered his tracks completely, but they had him made.

They had the passport and travel papers in the name of Barry, and they did not look like forgeries. They were good papers, he was sure of it, and he knew a lot about papers.

Everything else had been as well planned, and swiftly delivered.

The money a thousand pounds in Rio, another five thousand the day after they grabbed the brat, and he was confident that the final ten would be there as it was promised. It was better than an English gaol,

the “Silver City” as the Brits called their concentration camp at the

Maze. That was what Caliph had promised, if he didn’t take the job.

Caliph, now that was a daft name, Gilly O’Shaughnessy decided for the fiftieth time as he dropped the stub of his cigarette into the dregs of his teacup and it was extinguished with a sharp hiss. A real daft name, but somehow it had the ability to put a chill on the blood,

and he shivered not only from the cold.

He stood up and crossed to the kitchen window. It had all been done with such speed and purpose and planning everything so clearly thought out, that when there was a lapse it was more troubling.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy had the feeling that Caliph did nothing without good reason then why had they been ordered to back themselves into this dangerously exposed bottleneck, without the security of multiple escape routes, and to sit here and wait?

He picked up the cyclist cape and tweed cap. “Where are you going?” the doctor demanded anxiously. “I’m going to take a shufti,“Gilly O’Shaughnessy grunted as he pulled the cap down over his eyes.

“You’re always prowling around,” the doctor protested.

“You make me nervous.” The dark Irishman pulled the pistol from under his jacket and checked the load before thrusting it back into his belt.

“You just go on playing nursemaid,” he said brusquely. “And leave the man’s work to me.” The small black Austin crawled slowly up the village street, and the rain hammered on the cab and bonnet in tiny white explosions that blurred the outline, giving the machine a softly focused appearance, and the streaming windscreen effectively hid the occupants.

It was only when the Austin parked directly in front of Laragh’s only grocery store and both front doors opened that the curiosity of watchers from behind the curtained windows all down the street was satisfied.

The two members of the Irish constabulary wore the service blue winter uniform with darker epaulettes. The soft rain speckled the patent leather peaks of their caps as they hurried into the shoP.

“Good morning, Maeve, me old love,” the sergeant greeted the plump red-faced lady behind the counter.

“Owen O’Neill, I do declare-” She chuckled as she recognized the sergeant there had been a time, thirty years before, when the two of them had given the priest some fine pickings at the confessional. “And what brings you all the way up from the big city?” That was a generous description of the quaint seaside resort town of Wicklow, fifteen miles down the road.

“The sight of your blooming smile-2 They chatted like old friends for ten minutes, and her husband came through from the little storeroom when he heard the rattle of teacups.

“So what is new in Laragh, then?” the sergeant asked at last.

“Any new faces in the village?”

“No, all the same faces. Nothing changes in Laragh, bless the Lord for that.” The shopkeeper wagged his head. “No, indeed only new face is the one down at the Old Manse, he and his lady friend-” he winked knowingly but seeing as how he’s a stranger, we aren’t after counting him.” The sergeant ponderously delved for his notebook, opened it and extracted a photograph from it;

it was the usual side view and full face of police records. He held the name covered with his thumb as he showed it to them.

“No.” The woman shook her head positively. “Himself down at the manse is ten years older than that, and he does not have a mustache.”

“This was taken ten years ago,” said the sergeant.

“Oh, well, why didn’t you say so.” She nodded. “Then that’s him.

That’s Mr. Barry for certain sure.”

“The Old Manse, you say.” The sergeant seemed to inflate visibly with importance, as he put the photograph back into his notebook. “I’m going to have to use your telephone now, dear.”

“Where will you be after telephoning?” The shopkeeper asked suspiciously.

“Dublin,” the sergeant told him. “It’s police business.”

“I’ll have to charge you for the call,” the shopkeeper warned him quickly.

“There,” said the wife as they watched the sergeant making his request to the girl on the village switchboard. “I told you he had the look of trouble, didn’t I? The first time I laid eyes on him I knew he was from up in the North, and carrying trouble like the black angel.”

Gilly O’Shaughnessy kept close in under the stone wall, keeping out of the slanting rain and out of the line of sight of a casual watcher on the slope beyond the river. He moved carefully and quietly as a tomcat on his midnight business, stopping to examine the earth below the weakened or tumbled places in the wall where a man could have come over, studying the wet drooping weeds for the brush marks where a man might have passed.

At the farthest corner of the garden, he stepped up onto the leaning main stem of an apple tree to see over the wall, wedging himself against the lichen-encrusted stone, so that the silhouette of his head did not show above the wall.

He waited and watched for twenty minutes, with the absolute animal patience of the predator, then he jumped down and went on around the perimeter of the wall, never for a moment relaxing his vigilance,

seemingly oblivious to the discomfort of the cold and the insistent rain.

There was nothing, not the least sign of danger, no reason for the nagging disquiet but still it was there. He reached another vantage point, the iron gate that led into the narrow walled alley, and he leaned against the stone jamb, cupping his hands to protect match and cigarette from the wind, and then shifting slightly so he could see through the crack between wall and gate and cover the walled lane, and the road beyond as far as the bridge.

Once again he assumed the patient watching role, closing his mind against the physical discomfort and letting his eyes and his brain work at their full capacity.

Not for the first time he pondered the unusual system of signals and exchanges of material that Caliph had insisted upon.

The payments had been made by bearer deposit certificates, in

Swiss francs, sent through the post to his Rio address and then to his collection address in London.

He had made one delivery to Caliph, the bottle and its contents and two telephone calls. The delivery had been made within two hours of grabbing the girl, while she was still under the effects of the initial shot of the drug. The doctor Dr. Jameson, as Gilly

O’Shaughnessy liked to think of him had done the job in the back of the second car. It had been waiting in the car park at Cambridge railway station, a little green Ford delivery van with a completely enclosed rear compartment. They had moved the girl from the maroon

Triumph to the Ford in the covering dusk of the autumn evening, and they had parked again in the lot of a roadside cafe on the A10 while Dr.

Jameson did the job.

All the instruments had been ready for him in the van, but he had botched it badly, his hands shaking with nerves and the need for liquor. The brat had bled copiously, and now the hand was infected.Gilly O’Shaughnessy felt his irritation rising sharply when he thought of the doctor. Everything he touched seemed to turn to disaster.

He had delivered the bottle to a pick-up car that had been exactly where he was told it would be, and it had dipped its headlights in the prearranged signal. Gilly had hardly stopped, but merely drawn up alongside and handed the bottle across, then driven straight into the

West, and caught “4

the early morning ferry long before any general alarm was out for the girl.

Then there were the telephone calls. They worried Gilly

O’Shaughnessy as much as anything else in this whole bloody business.

He had made the first call immediately they reached Laragh. It was an international call, and he had to say one sentence: “We arrived safely.” And then hang up. A week later a call to the same number, and again only one sentence: “We are enjoying ourselves.” And then immediately break the connection.

Gilly remembered how each time the girl on the local exchange had called him back to ask if the contact had been satisfactory and each time she had sounded puzzled and intrigued.

It was not the way Caliph had worked up until then, it was leaving a trail for the hunters to follow and he would have protested if there had been somebody to protest to, but there was only the international telephone number, no other way of contacting Caliph. He decided as he stood by the gate that he would not make the next telephone call to that number which was due in four days” time.

Then he remembered that was the day the hand was due and he would probably receive his orders for delivery of the hand when he made the call but he didn’t like it. Not even for the money and suddenly his mind went back to an incident long ago.

They had wanted to pass false information to the English, details of an intended operation which would in fact take place at a different place and a different time.

They had fed the detailed but duff information to a young unreliable Provo, one who they knew would not hold out under interrogation, and they had put him in a safe house in the Shankhill

Road and that was where the English took him.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy felt a little electric prickle run down his spine like ghost-fire, and that feeling had never let him down before never. He looked at his cheap Japanese wristwatch; it was almost four o’clock, and evening was lowering on the hills of grey and cold green.

When he looked up again, there was movement on the road.

From the top of the hill a vehicle was following the curve of the road, down towards the bridge. It was a small black saloon car, and it went out of sight behind the hedge.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy watched for it to reappear without particular interest, still worrying about those two telephone calls. Trying to find the need for them, why Caliph should want to take that chance.

The small black car turned onto the bridge, and came directly down towards the Manse, but the light was wrong and Gilly could make out only the shape of two heads beyond the rhythmically flogging windscreen wipers.

The car began to slow up, coming down almost to walking speed, and

Gilly straightened up instinctively, suddenly completely alert as he peered through the slit.

There was the pale blur of faces turned towards him, and the car slowed almost to a halt. The nearest side window was lowered slowly and for the first time he could see clearly into the interior. He saw the peak of the uniform cap, and the silver flash of a cap badge above the straining white face. The ghost-fire flared up Gilly

O’Shaughnessy’s spine and he felt his breath suddenly scalding his throat.

The small black car disappeared beyond the corner of the stone wall, and he heard it accelerate away swiftly.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy whirled with the cape ballooning around him and he ran back to the house. He felt very cold and sure and calm now that the moment of action had come.

The kitchen was empty and he crossed it in half a dozen strides,

and threw open the door to the second room.

The doctor was working over the bed and he looked up angrily.

“I’ve told you to knock.” They had argued this out before. The doctor still retained some bizarre vestige of professional ethics in his treatment of his patient. He might surgically mutilate the child for the money he so desperately needed, but he had protested fiercely when Gilly O’Shaughnessy had lingered at the doorway to ogle the maturing body whenever the doctor stripped it for cleansing, treatment or for the performance of its natural functions.

The dark Irishman had halfheartedly attempted to force him to back down, but when he had encountered surprisingly courageous opposition he had abandoned his voyeuristic pleasures and had returned to the inner room only when called to assist.

Now the child lay face down on the soiled sheets. Her blonde hair was matted and snarled into greasy tresses; the doctor’s attempts at cleanliness were as bumbling and gin ineffectual as his surgery.

The infection and the use of drugs had wasted the flesh off the tender young body, each knuckle of her spine stood out clearly and her naked buttocks seemed pathetically vulnerable, shrunken and pale.

Now the doctor pulled the grubby sheet up to her shoulders, and turned to stand protectively over her. It was an absurd gesture, when you looked at the untidy, stained dressing that bound up her left hand and Gilly O’Shaughnessy snarled at him fiercely.

“We are getting out.”

“You can’t move her now, protested the doctor. “She’s really sick.”

“Suit yourself,” Gilly agreed grimly.

“Then we’ll leave her.” He reached under the dripping cape, and brought out the pistol. He thumbed back the hammer and stepped up to the bed.

The doctor grabbed at his arm, but Gilly pushed him away easily,

sending him reeling back against the wall.

“You are right, she’ll be a nuisance,” he said, and placed the muzzle of the pistol against the base of the child’s skull.

“No,” shrieked the doctor. “No, don’t do that. We’ll take her.”

“We are leaving as soon as it’s dark.” Gilly stepped back and uncocked the pistol. “Be ready by then, “he warned.

The two helicopters flew almost side by side, with the number two only slightly behind and higher than the leader; below them the Irish

Sea was a sheet of beaten lead flecked with feathers of white water.

They had refuelled at Caemarvon and had made good time since leaving the Welsh coast, for the wind drove them on, but still the night was overtaking them and Peter Stride fretted, glancing at his wristwatch every few seconds.

It was only ninety miles of open water to cross, but to Peter it seemed like the entire Atlantic. Colin slumped beside him on the bench that ran the length of the hold, with the cold stump of a cheroot in the corner of his mouth in deference to the “No smoking” light that burned on the bulkhead behind the flight deck. The rest of the Thor team had adopted their usual attitudes of complete relaxation, some of them sprawled on the deck using their equipment as pillows, the others stretched out full length on the benches.

Peter Stride was the only one tensed up, as though his blood fizzed with nervous energy. He stood up once again to peer through the perspex window, checking the amount of daylight and trying to judge the height and position of the sun through the thick cloud cover.

“Take it easy, Colin counselled him as he dropped back into his seat. “You will give yourself an ulcer.”

“Colin, we’ve got to decide.

What are our priorities on this strike?” He had to shout above the racket of wind and motor.

“There are no priorities. We have only one object to get

Melissa-Jane out, and out safety.”

“We aren’t going to try for prisoners to interrogates”

“Peter baby, we are going to hit anything and everything that moves in the target area, and we are going to hit them hard.” Peter nodded with satisfaction. “They will only be goons anyway, you can be certain that their paymaster will not let them connect to him but what about Kingston Parker, he would want prisoners?”

“Kingston Parker?” Colin removed the stub of cheroot from his mouth. “Never heard of him around here it’s Uncle Colin makes the decisions.” And he grinned at Peter, that friendly lopsided grin,

and at that moment the flight engineer crossed the cabin and yelled at

Colin.

“Irish coast ahead we’ll be landing at Enniskerry in seven minutes, sir.” The traffic control at Enniskerry had been apprised of the emergency. They stacked the other traffic in holding pattern above circuit altitude and cleared the two RAF. helicopters for immediate landing.

They came clattering out of the low grey cloud and rain, and settled on the hangar apron. Immediately a police car with headlights burning in the gloom, sped out from between the hangars and parked beside the leading machine. Before the rotors had stopped turning, two members of the Irish Constabulary and a representative of the surveyor general’s office were scrambling up into the camouflaged fuselage.

“Stride.” Peter introduced himself quickly. He was dressed now in

Thor assault gear, the one piece fitted black suit and soft boots, the pistol on its webbing belt strapped down to his right thigh.

“General, we’ve had a confirmation,” the police inspector Aware told him while they were still shaking hands. “Local people have identified O’Shaughnessy from a police photograph.

He is staying in the area all right.”

“Have they found where?”

Peter demanded.

“They have, sir. It’s an old rambling building on the edge of the village-” He motioned the bespectacled surveyor to come forward with the file he was clutching to his chest.

There was no chart table in the stripped-out hull of the helicopter, and they spread the survey map and photographs on the deck.

Colin Noble ordered across the team from the second helicopter,

and twenty men crowded into a huddle about the maps. “There, that’s the building.” The surveyor placed a circle on the map with a blue pencil.

“Right,” grunted Colin. “We’ve got good fixes we pick up either the river or the road and follow it to the bridge and the church. The target is between them.”

“Haven’t we got a blow-up of the building, a plan of the interior?” one of the Thor team asked.

“Sorry, there wasn’t time to do a proper search,” the surveyor apologized.

“The local police reported again a few minutes ago, and we got a relay on the radio. They say the house is enclosed by a high stone wall and that there are no signs of activity.”

“They haven’t been near it?” Peter demanded. “They were strictly ordered not to approach the suspects.”

“They drove past once on the public road. “The inspector looked slightly abashed. “They wanted to make certain that-“

“If it’s

O’Shaughnessy, he needs only one sniff and he’ll be gone ” Peter’s expression was stony, but his eyes sparkled blue with anger. ” Why can’t these people do what they are told?” He turned quickly to the helicopter pilot in his yellow life jacket and helmet with its built-in microphone and earphones.

“Can you get us in?” The pilot did not answer immediately but glanced up at the nearest window; a fresh gout of rain splashed against the pane.

“It will be dark in ten minutes, or even earlier, and the ceiling is down to the deck now, we only got down here using the airport VOR.

beacons-He looked dubious.

“ There is nobody aboard who will recognize the target, hell I

don’t know I could get you in at first light tomorrow.”

“It has to be tonight, now. Right now.”

“If you could get the local police to mark the target-” the pilot suggested, with torches or a flare.”

“There is no chance of that we have to go in cold, and the longer we sit here talking the less our chances. Will you give it your best shot?”

Peter was almost pleading, the go decision is one that cannot be forced on a pilot, even air traffic control cannot force a pilot-in command to operate beyond his personal judgement.

“We will have to try and keep ground contact all the way; it’s classic conditions for trouble, rising terrain and deteriorating weather-“

“Try it.” Peter said, please The pilot hesitated five seconds longer.

“Let’s go!” he said abruptly, and there was a concerted rush for the hatchway as the second Thor team made for the other machine, and the police and surveyor made certain they were not included on the passenger list.

Turbulence slogged the helicopter like the punches of a heavyweight prize fighter, and she dipped and staggered to them with a nauseatingly giddy action.

The ground flickered past under them, very close, and yet darkly insubstantial in the wild night. The headlights of a solitary vehicle on a lonely country road, the cluttered lights of a village, each a distinct yellow rectangle they were so close, these were the only landmarks with any meaning the rest was dark patches of woods, the threads of hedges and stone walls drawn lightly across sombre fields, and every few minutes even that was gone as a fresh squall of grey clouds and rain washed away all vision, and the pilot concentrated all his attention on the dull glow of the flight instruments arranged in their distinctive T layout in front of him.

Each time they emerged from cloud, the light seemed to have diminished and the dark menace of earth loomed more threateningly as they were forced lower and lower to keep contact.

Peter was squeezed into the jump seat of the helicopter’s flight deck, between the two pilots, and Colin crowded in behind him, all of them peering ahead, all silent and tense as the ungainly machines lumbered low and heavy over the earth, groping for the shoreline.

They hit the coast, the ghostly white line of surf flared with phosphorescence only fifty feet below them, and the pilot swung them to run south with it and seconds later another brighter field of lights appeared below them.

“Wicklow,” said the pilot, and his co-pilot called the new heading; now they had made a fix they could head for Laragh directly.

They swung onto the new heading, following the road inland.

“Four minutes to -target,” the co-pilot shouted at Peter, stabbing ahead with his finger, and Peter did not try to answer in the clatter and roar of the rotors, but he reached down and checked the Walther in its quick-release holster; it came out cleanly in his fist.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy threw his few personal possessions into the blue canvas airways grip, a change of underclothing and his shaving gear. Then he pulled the iron bedstead away from the wall, ripped back the skirting board and cleared out the hiding-place he had made there by removing a single brick.

There were the new papers and passports. Caliph had even provided papers for the brat Helen Barry his daughter. Caliph had thought of everything. With the papers was six hundred pounds sterling in travellers” cheques, and a package of spare ammunition for the pistol.

He thrust these into the pocket of his jacket, and took one last look around the bare bleak room. He knew that he had left nothing to lead the hunters, because he never carried anything that could be used to identify him. Yet he was obsessed by the need to destroy all sign of his passing. He had long ago ceased to think of himself by the name of

Gilly O’Shaughnessy. He had no name, and only one purpose that purpose was destruction.

The magnificent passion to reduce all life to decay and mortification.

He could recite by heart most of Bakunin’s The Revolutionary

Catechism, especially the definition of the true revolutionary: The lost man, who has no belongings, no outside interest, no personal ties of any sort not even a name.

Possessed of but one thought, interest and passion the revolution. A man who has broken with society, broken with its laws and conventions. He must despise the opinions of others, and be prepared for death and torture at any time. Hard towards himself, The

MUSt. be hard to others, and in his heart there must be no place for love, friendship, gratitude or even honour.

As he stood now in the empty room, he saw himself in a rare moment of revelation, as the man he had set out to become the true revolutionary, and his head turned for a moment to indulge in the vanity of regarding his own image in the mirror screwed to the peeling wallpaper above the iron bedstead.

It was the dark cold face of the lost man, and he felt proud to belong to that elite class, the cutting edge of the sword, that was what he was.

He picked up the canvas grip, and strode through into the kitchen.

“Are you ready? “he called.

“Help me.” He dropped the grip and stepped to the window. The last of the light was fading swiftly, glowing pink and mother of-pearl within the drooping, pregnant belly of the sky. It seemed so close he could reach out and touch it. Already the trees of the unkempt orchard were melding into the darkness as the night encroached.

“I cannot carry her on my own,” the doctor whined, and he swung away from the window. It was time to go again.

In his life there was always the moving onwards, and always the hunters baying hard upon his scent. It was time to run again, run like the fox.

He went through into the second room. The doctor had the child wrapped in a grey woollen blanket, and he had tried to lift her from the bed, but had failed. She was sprawled awkwardly, half onto the floor.

“Help me,” repeated the doctor.

“Get out of the way.” Gilly O’Shaughnessy pushed him roughly aside, and stooped over the girl. For a second their faces were within inches of each other.

Her eyes were opened, half conscious, although the pupils were widely dilated by the drug. The lids were pink rimmed and there were little butter-yellow lumps of mucus in the corners. Her lips were dried to white scales, and cracked through to the raw flesh at three places.

“Please tell my daddy,” she whispered. “Please tell him I’m here.” His nostrils flared at the sick sour smell of her body, but he picked her up easily with an arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders, and carried her out across the kitchen, kicking open the door so the lock burst and it slammed back against its hinges.

Quickly he carried her across the yard to the garage, with the doctor staggering along after them carrying a carton of medical supplies and equipment against his chest, cursing miserably at the cold, and sliding and slipping in the treacherous footing.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy waited while the doctor opened the rear door of the car, and then he bundled her in so roughly that the child cried out weakly. He ignored her and went to the double garage doors and dragged them open. It was so dark now that he could not see as far as the bridge.

“Where are we going? “bleated the doctor.

“I haven’t decided yet,” Gilly told him brusquely. “There is a safe house up North, or we might go back across the sea to England-” He thought of the caravan again, that was a good one, But why are we leaving now, so suddenly?” He did not bother to reply but left the garage and ran back into the kitchen. Always he was obsessed by the need to cover his tracks, to leave no sign for the hunters.

Though he had brought little with him, and was taking that now,

yet he knew the old house contained signs, even if it was only his fingerprints. There was also the single remaining appetite for destruction to assuage.

He ripped the wooden doors off the kitchen cupboards and smashed them to splinters under his heel, piled them in the centre of the wood floor. He crumpled the newspapers piled on the table and added them to the pile, threw the table and chairs upon it.

He lit a match and held it to the crumpled newsprint. It flared readily, and he straightened and opened the windows and doors. The flames fed on the cold fresh air and climbed greedily, catching on the splintered doors.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy picked up the canvas grip and stepped out into the night, crouching to the wind and the rain but halfway to the garage he straightened again abruptly and paused to listen.

There was a sound on the wind, from the direction of the coast.

It might have been the engine note of a heavy truck coming up the hills, but there was a peculiar thin whistling sound mingled with the engine beat, and the volume of sound escalated too sharply to be that of a lumbering truck. It was coming on too swiftly, the sound seemed to fill the air, to emanate from the very clouds themselves.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy stood with his face lifted to the fine silver drizzle, searching the belly of the clouds, until a throbbing regular glow began to beat like a pulse in the sky, and it was a moment until he recognized it as the beacon light of a low-flying aircraft, and at the same moment he knew that the shrill whistle was the whirling of rotors bringing the hunters.

He cried aloud in the certainty of betrayal and onrushing death.

“Why? God, why?” He called to the god he had so long ago denied, and he began to run.

It’s no good.” The pilot twisted his neck to shout at Peter without taking his eyes from the flight instruments which kept the great ungainly machine level and on course. They had lost contact with the other machine.

“We are socked in, blind.” The cloud frothed over the canopy like boiling milk over the lip of the pot. “I’m going to have to climb out,

and head back for Enniskerry before we run into my number two.” The risk of collision with the other helicopter was now real and imminent.

The beacon light throbbed above them, reflected off the impenetrable press of soft cloud but the other pilot would not see it until too late.

“Hold on. Just another minute,” Peter shouted back at him, his expression tortured in the glow of the instrument panel. The entire operation was disintegrating about him, would soon end in tragedy or in fiasco, but he must go on.

“It’s no good-” the pilot began, and then shouted with fright and hurled the helicopter over onto its side, at the same instant altering pitch and altitude so the machine shuddered and lurched as though she had run into a solid obstruction, and then bounded upwards, gaining a hundred feet in a swoop.

The spire of a church had leapt at them out of the cloud, like a predator from ambush, and now it flickered by only feet from where they crouched in the flight deck, but it had disappeared again instantly as they roared past.

“The church!” Peter yelled. “That’s it! Turn back.” The pilot checked the machine, hovering blindly in the chaos of rain and cloud churned to a fury by the down draught of their own rotor.

“I can’t see a damned thing, “shouted the pilot.

“We’ve got one hundred and seventy feet on the radio altimeter,”

his co-pilot called; that was actual height from the ground and still they could see nothing below them.

“Get us down. For God’s sake, get us down,” Peter pleaded.

“I can’t take the chance. We don’t have any idea of what is under us.” The pilot’s face was sickly orange in the instrument glow, his eyes the dark pits of a skull. “I’m climbing out and heading back-“

Peter reached down and the butt of the Walther jumped into his hand,

like a living thing. He realized coldly that he was capable of killing the pilot, to force the co-pilot to land but at the moment there was a hole in the cloud, just enough to make out the dark loom of the earth below them.

“Visual,” Peter shouted. “We’ve visual, get us down!” And the helicopter sank swiftly, breaking out suddenly into the clear.

“The river.” Peter saw the glint of water. “And the bridge-“

“There’s the churchyard-” Colin roared eagerly, and that’s the target.”

The thatched roof was a black oblong, and light spilled from the windows of one side of the building, so they could see the high enclosing wall. The pilot spun the helicopter on its axis like a compass needle, and dived towards the building.

Colin Noble scrambled down into the cabin, shouting to his team.

“Delta! We are going to Delta-” And the flight engineer slid the hatch cover open. Immediately a fine swirling mist filled the cabin as the down-draught of the rotors churned the rain filled air.

The Thor team were on their feet, forming up on each side of the open hatch, while Colin towered over the flight engineer as he took lead position “point” as he always called it.

The dark earth rushed up to meet them, and Colin spat out the cheroot stub and braced himself in the doorway.

“Hit anything that moves,” he yelled. “But for Chrissake watch out for the kid. Let’s go, gang. Let’s go!” Peter was jammed into the jump seat by the swooping drop of the machine, unable to follow,

wasting precious seconds but he had a clear view ahead through the canopy.

The light in the windows of the building wavered unnaturally, and

Peter realized that it was burning. Those were flames, and his concern was heightened by the knowledge, but he did not have a chance to ponder this new development. In the shadows of the walled yard he saw movement, just the dark blur of it in the glow of the flames, and what was left of the daylight but it was the shape of a man, running,

crouched low, disappearing almost immediately into one of the outbuildings that flanked the narrow stone walled lane.

Peter dragged himself out of the seat against the G force,

scrambling awkwardly down into the cabin as the helicopter dropped the last few feet, and then hung, swaying slightly, suspended ten feet above the open yard at the rear of the house and black-clad figures spilled out of her, dropping lightly onto their feet and racing forward as they touched ground, seeming to disappear again miraculously through the doors and windows of the building. Even in the grinding tension of the moment Peter felt the flare of pride in the way it was done,

instant and seemingly effortless penetration, the lead man using the sandbags to break in glass and wooden shutters and the man behind him going in with a clean controlled dive.

Peter was the last man left aboard, and something made him check in the open hatchway before jumping. Perhaps it was that glimpse of movement outside the main building that he had been given; he looked back that way, and suddenly lights leapt in solid white lances down the walled lane the headlights of a motor vehicle, and at the same moment the vehicle launched itself from the dark derelict outbuilding and rocketed away down the lane.

Peter teetered in the open hatch, for he had been in the very act of jumping, but he caught his balance now, grabbing wildly at the nylon line above the door. The vehicle slowed for the turn into the main road at the bridge and Peter caught the flight engineer and shook his shoulder violently, pointing after the escaping vehicle. His lips were inches from the man’s face.

“Don’t let it get away!” he screamed, and the flight engineer was quick and alert; he spoke urgently into his microphone, directly to the pilot in the flight deck above them, and obediently the helicopter swung around and the beat of the engines changed as the rotors altered pitch and roared in forward thrust the machine lunged forward,

skimming the garage roof by mere feet and then hammered out into the night in pursuit of the dwindling glow of headlights.

Peter had to hang out of the hatchway to see ahead, and the wind clamoured around his head and tore at his body, but they were swiftly overhauling the vehicle as it raced down the twisting narrow road towards the coast.

It was two hundred yards ahead, and the dark tree tops seemed to rush by at the same level as the hatch in which Peter stood. A hundred yards ahead now, the headlights blazing through the drivel of rain,

etching fleeting cameos of hedges and starkly lit stone walls from the night.

They were close enough now for Peter to make out that it was a smallish vehicle with an estate car body, not quite large enough to be -a station wagon the driver was throwing it through the curves and twists of the road with reckless skill, but the helicopter crept up behind him.

“Tell him to switch off the beacon light.” Peter swung inboard to shout in the flight engineer’s ear. He did not want to warn the driver that he was being followed, but as the engineer lifted the microphone to his mouth the headlights snapped -out into darkness. The driver had become aware, and after the brilliance of the headlights the night seemed totally dark, and the car disappeared into it.

Peter felt the helicopter lurch, as the pilot was taken by surprise, and his own dismay was a lance.

We have lost them, he thought, and he knew that it was suicide to fly on in darkness only a few feet above the treetops, but the pilot of the helicopter steadied the craft and then suddenly the earth below them was lit by a blaze of stark white light that startled Peter until he realized that the pilot had switched on his landing lights. There were two of them, one on each side of the fuselage; they were aimed down and slightly forward.

The escaping car was caught fairly in their brilliance.

The helicopter dropped lower, edging in between the telegraph poles and trees that lined the narrow road.

Now Peter could see that the car was a dark blue Austin, with a carrying rack bolted to the long roof. It was that carrying rack which decided him. Without it no human being could have hoped for purchase on the smooth rounded roof of the lurching, swaying car.

the doctor in the back seat of the Austin had been the one who spotted the helicopter. The engine noise and the drumming of the wind had covered the whistling whine of the rotors, and Gilly O’Shaughnessy had chuckled with grim triumph and self-congratulation.

He had deliberately waited for the helicopter to discharge its load of fighting men before he had switched on his headlights and roared out of the garage into the lane.

He knew it would be many minutes before the assault team realized that the burning house was empty and that it would take as long again to regroup and board the helicopter to continue the hunt and by that time he would be clear; there was a safe house in Dublin or there had been, four year previously. Perhaps it was blown now; in that case he would have to get rid of the brat and Dr. Jameson, a bullet each in the back of the head, and drive the Austin into the Irish Sea.

The wild exhilaration of danger and death was upon him again, the waiting was over at last and he was living again the way he had chosen the fox running ahead of the hounds, he was alive again, with his right foot thrust flat to the floor boards and the Austin rocketing through the night.

The girl was screaming weakly from the back seat, in pain and panic; the doctor was trying to quieten her, and Gilly laughed aloud.

The tyres screeched wildly as he skidded out in the turn, brushing the hedge with the side before he was through.

“They are following,” screamed the doctor, as he straightened the car into the next stretch, then Gilly glanced back over his shoulder.

He could see nothing through the rear windows.

“What?”

“The helicopter-” Gilly lowered his window and, driving with one hand, thrust his head out. The flashing aircraft beacon was close behind and above, and he ducked back in and looked ahead to make sure that the road ran straight, then he switched off the headlights.

In total darkness he did not diminish speed, and now when he laughed it was a wild and reckless sound.

“You’re mad , the doctor shrieked. “You’ll kill us all!”

“Right you are, doctor!” But his night vision was clearing and he caught the

Austin before she wandered into the stone wall on the left-hand side,

and at the same moment he jerked the pistol from under his cape and laid it on the seat beside him.

“There is not going to be, -” he began and then broke off as the blinding light burst over them. The helicopter had switched on its landing lights the road ahead was brightly lit, and he skidded into the next turn with rubber squealing.

“Stop!” the doctor pleaded, trying to hold the semiconscious child from being hurled about in the swaying cab.

“Let’s give up now, before they kill us.”

“They’ve got no fighting men on board,” Gilly yelled back at him. “There’s nothing they can do.”

“Give up,” the doctor whined. “Let’s get out of this alive.” And

Gilly O’Shaughnessy threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“I’m keeping three bullets, doctor, one for each of us-“

“They’re right on top of us.” Gilly snatched up the pistol and once again thrust his head and right shoulder out, twisting to look upwards.

The eye-searing lights beamed down upon him, very close above. It was all he could see and he fired at them, the crash of the shots lost in the clattering whistling roar of the rotors and the tearing rush of the wind.

oised in the hatchway, Peter counted the bright orange spurts of gunfire. There were five of them, but there was no sound of passing shot, no thump of the strike.

“Get lower!” he shouted at the engineer, reinforcing the order with urgent hand signals, and obediently the big machine sank down upon the racing Austin.

Peter gathered himself, judging his moment carefully, and when it came he launched himself clear of the hatchway, and his guts seemed to cram into his throat as he dropped.

He dropped with all four limbs spread and braced to land together,

but for a moment he thought he had misjudged it and would fall behind the Austin, into the metal led roadway, to be crushed and shredded by the forward impetus of the low-flying helicopter.

Then the Austin swerved and checked slightly and Peter crashed into its roof with stunning force; he felt the metal buckle and sag under him, and then he was rolling and slipping sideways. His whole left side was numbed by the force of impact, and he clutched wildly with his right hand, his fingernails tearing at the paintwork, but still he slid towards the edge, his legs kicking wildly in dark rushing space.

At the last instant before he was hurled into the roadway, his clawed fingers hooked in the framework of the roof rack, and he hung bat-like from his one arm. It had taken only a small part of a second,

and immediately the driver of the Austin realized that there was a man on the roof. He slewed the little car from one side of the road to the other, short wrenching turns that brought her over on two outside wheels before slamming back and twisting the other way.

“The tyres squealed harsh protest, and Peter was flung brutally back and forth, the muscle and tendons of his right arm popping and creaking with the strain of holding on but feeling was flooding swiftly back into his numbed left side.

He had to move quickly, he could not survive another of those wrenching swerves, and he gathered himself, judged the Austin’s momentum, and used it to roll and grab with his free hand; at the same moment the toes of his soft boots found purchase on one of the struts of the roof carrier, and he pressed himself belly down, clinging with both arms and legs to the wildly swinging machine.

The Austin checked and steadied as a steep turn appeared ahead in the arc lights of the helicopter which still hung over them. The driver shot the car into the corner, and ahead of them was a long extended drop as the road twisted down the-hills towards the coast.

Peter half lifted himself and was about to slide forward when the metal six inches in front of his nose exploded outwards, leaving a neatly punched hole through the roof, and tiny fragments of flying metal stung his cheek; at the same moment the concussion of the pistol shot beat in upon his eardrums. The driver of the Austin was firing blindly up through the coach work and he had misjudged Peter’s position above him by inches. Peter threw himself desperately to one side, for an instant almost losing his grip on the struts of the carrier and another pistol bullet clanged out through the metal roof, that one would have taken him through the belly, and Peter had a fleeting image of the kind of wound that it would have inflicted, the bullet would have been mushroomed and deformed by the roof and would have broken up inside his body.

Desperately Peter threw himself back the opposite way, trying to outguess the gunman below him, and once again the crash of the shot and the metal roof erupted in a little jagged pockmark, flecking the paintwork away so the rim of the bullet hole shone like polished silver shilling. Again it would have hit him, if he had not moved.

Peter rolled again, tensing his belly muscles in the anticipation of the tearing, paralysing impact, expecting the gun shot which did not come. Only then he remembered the wasted pistol fire the driver had thrown up at the hovering helicopter. He had emptied his pistol and as the realization dawned on Peter there was another completely compelling sound, very faint in the drumming rush of the wind and the engine roar but unmistakable. It was the sound of a young girl screaming and it galvanized Peter as nothing else, even the threat of death, could have done.

He came up on toes and fingers, like a cat, and he went forward and to the right, until he was directly above the driver’s seat.

The girl screamed again, and he recognized Melissa-Jane’s voice.

There was no question of it, and he slipped the Walther from its quick-release holster and cocked the hammer with the same movement, one glance ahead and they were rushing down on another turn in the narrow road. The driver would be using both hands to control the swaying and bucking little machine.

“Now!” he told himself, and dropped forward, so that he was peering backwards and upside-down through the windScreen directly into the driver’s pale face and at a distance of only eighteen inches.

In the thousandth part of a second Peter recognized the dark,

wolfish features and the cold, merciless eyes of the killer. He had hunted this man for many years and studied his photograph endlessly when the hunting of the Provo terrorists had been his life’s work.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy was driving with both hands, the pistol still gripped in one of them and the chamber open for reloading. He snarled at Peter like an animal through the bars of its cage, and Peter fired with the muzzle of the Walther touching the glass of the windscreen.

The glass starred into a glittering sheet, white and opaque, and then it collapsed inwards with the force of the wind, filling the interior of the Austin with flying diamond chips of sparkling glass.

Gilly O’Shaughnessy had thrown up both hands to his face, but bright blood burst from between them, spattering his chest and soaking swiftly into the lank black hair.

Still hanging upside down across the Austin’s cab, Peter thrust the Walther in “through the shattered windscreen until it almost touched the man’s body and he fired twice more into his chest, where the explosive Velex bullets would break up against bone, and would not over penetrate to harm anybody else in the interior. Melissa-Jane’s screams still rang clearly in his ears, as he killed Gilly

O’Shaughnessy. He did it as coldly as a veterinary surgeon would put down a rabid dog, and with as little pleasure, and the bullets punched

Gilly O’Shaughnessy back on the bucket seat, head lolling from side to side, and Peter expected the howl of the engine to cut out now as the dead man’s foot slipped from the accelerator.

It did not happen. There was no change in the engine beat, the body had slid forward and jammed, the knee under the dashboard bearing down fully on the pedal, and the little car flew down the slope of the hill, the stone walls on each side blurring past as though down a tunnel in the depths of the earth.

Peter wriggled forward and thrust both arms through the shattered windscreen and caught the untended wheel as it began to spin aimlessly.

He checked the Austin and swung her back into the road but she had been driven to her limits, rocking and swaying crazily before she righted herself and flew down the hill.

It was almost impossible to judge the control needed to keep her on the road.

Peter was hanging head down, gripping only with knees and toes,

and he had to manipulate the wheel from this inverted position with his upper arms sawing across the teeth of jagged glass still remaining in the frame of the windscreen.

The wind whipped and clawed him, and Gilly O’Shaughnessy’s body flopped forward bonelessly onto the wheel, jamming it at a critical moment, so that while Peter used one hand to shove him backwards, the side of the Austin touched the stone wall with a screech of rending metal and a shower of orange sparks. Peter wrenched her back into the road, and she began a series of uncontrolled broadsides, swinging wildly from side to side, touching the wall with another jarring shock,

then swinging back sideways to bounce over the verge, then back again.

She was going over, Peter knew it, and he would be crushed under the metal roof and smeared along the abrasive surface of the macadam road. He should jump now, and take his chances but grimly he stayed with the crazed machine, for Melissa-Jane was in her and he could not leave.

She survived one more skid, and ahead Peter had the glimpse of a barred wooden gate in the wall. Deliberately he turned the front wheels into the direction of the next skid, no longer trying to counteract it, but aggravating it IL

steering directly for the gate, and the Austin smashed into it.

A wooden beam cartwheeled over Peter’s head, and a scalding cloud of steam from the shattered radiator stung his face and hands, and then the Austin was into the open field, bouncing and thudding over the rocks that studded it, the drag of soft muddy earth slowing her, and the steep slope of the hillside against her within fifty feet the front end dropped heavily into a drainage ditch, and the little car shuddered to a halt, canted at an abandoned angle.

Peter slipped over the side and landed on his feet. He jerked open the rear door and a man half fell from the cab.

He dropped onto his knees in the mud, blubbering incoherently and Peter drove his right knee into his face. Bone and cartilage crunched sharply and there was the crackle of breaking teeth.

His voice was cut off abruptly and, as he dropped, Peter chopped him with the stiffened blade of his right hand, a controlled blow judged finely to immobilize but not to kill, and before the unconscious body dropped, Peter had gone in over it, He lifted his daughter out of the

Austin, and the frail wasted body felt unsubstantial in his arms, and the heat of fever and infection burned against his chest.

He was possessed by an almost uncontrollable desire to crush her body to him with all the strength of his arms, but instead he carried her as though she was made of some precious and fragile substance,

stepping carefully over the uneven rocky surface of the field to where the helicopter was settling cumbersomely out of the darkness.

The Thor doctor was still aboard her; he jumped clear before the helicopter touched and ran towards Peter in the brilliant glare of the landing lights.

Peter found he was crooning so. “It’s all right now, darling.

It’s all over now. It’s all finished, my baby I’m here, little one

Then Peter made another discovery. It was not sweat running down his cheeks and dripping from his chin, and he wondered unashamedly when last it was he had wept.

He could not remember, and it did not seem important, not now, not with his daughter in his arms.

Synthia came down to London, and Peter relived some of those horrors from their marriage.

“Everybody around yOU always has to SUffer, Peter.

Now it’s Melissa-Jane’s turn.” He could not avoid her, nor her martyred expression, for she was always at Melissa-Jane’s bedside.

While he bore her recriminations and barbed accusations, he wondered that she had ever been gay and young and attractive. She was two years younger than he was but she already had the shapeless body and greying mind that made her seem twenty years older.

Melissa-Jane responded almost miraculously to the antibiotics, and although she was still weak and skinny and pale, the doctor discharged her on the third day, and Peter and Cynthia had their final degrading haggling and bargaining session which Melissa-Jane settled for them.

mummy, I’m still so afraid. Can’t I go with Daddy just for a few days?” Finally Cynthia agreed with sighs and pained airs that left them both feeling a little guilty. On the drive down to Abbots Yew,

where Steven had invited them for as long as was necessary for

Melissa-Jane’s convalescence, she sat very quietly beside Peter, her left hand still in the sling and the finger wearing a small neat white turban. She spoke only after they had passed the Heathrow turn off on the M4.

“All the time I knew you were going to come. I can’t remember much else. It was always dark and giddy making things kept changing.

I’d look at a face and it would fade away, and then we’d be somewhere else-“

“It was the drug they were giving you,” Peter explained.

“Yes, I know that. I remember the prick of the needle-“

Reflexively she rubbed her upper arm, and shivered briefly.

“But even with the drug I always knew you were going to come. I remember lying in the darkness listening for your voice. -” There was the temptation to try to pretend it had never happened, and Melissa-Jane had not spoken about it until now but

Peter knew she must be allowed to talk it out.

“Would you like to tell me about it?” he invited gently, knowing that it was essential to the healing process. He listened quietly as she spilled out drug-haunted memories, disjointed scraps of conversation and impressions. The terror was back in her voice when she spoke of the dark one.

“He looked at me sometimes. I remember him looking at me-” And

Peter remembered the cold killer’s eyes.

“He is dead now, darling.”

“Yes, I know. They told me.” She was silent for a moment, and then went on. “He was so different from the one with grey hair. I liked him, the old one. His name was Doctor

Jameson.”

“How did you know that?” Peter asked.

“That’s what the dark one called him.” She smiled.

“Doctor Jameson, I remember he always smelled like cough mixture and I liked him-” The one who had done the amputation, and would have taken her hand as well, Peter thought grimly.

“I never saw the other one. I knew he was there, but I never saw him.”

“The other one?” Peter turned to her sharply. “Which other one,

darling?”

“There was another one and even the dark one was afraid of him. I knew that, they were all afraid of him.”

“You never saw him?”

“No, but they were always talking about him, and arguing about what he would do—”

“Do you remember his name?” Peter asked, and Melissa-Jane frowned in concentration.

“Did he have a name?” Peter prompted.

“Usually they just talked about him, but, yes, I remember now.

The dark one called him “Casper”.”

“Casper?”

“No, not that, not Casper.

Oh, I can’t remember.” Her voice had risen, a shrill note in terror that ripped at Peter’s nerves.

“Don’t worry about it.” He tried to soothe her, but she shook her head with frustration.

“Not Casper, a name like that. I knew he was the one who really wanted to hurt me they were just doing what he told them. He was the one I was truly afraid of.” Her voice ended with a sob, and she was sitting bolt upright in the seat.

“It’s over now, darling.” Peter swung into the verge of the road and braked to a halt. He reached for her but she was rigid in his arms and at his touch she began to shake uncontrollably. Peter’s alarm flared, and he held her to his chest.

“Caliph!” she whispered. “That’s his name. Caliph.” And she relaxed against him softly, and sighed. The shaking stopped slowly.

Peter went on holding her, trying to control the terrible consuming waves of anger that engulfed him, and it was some little time before he realized suddenly that Melissa-Jane had fallen asleep.

It was as though uttering the name had been a catharsis for her terror, and now she was ready to begin the healing inside.

Peter laid her gently back in the seat and covered her with the angora rug before he drove on, but every few seconds he glanced across to make sure she was at peace.

Twice Peter called Magda Altmann from Abbots Yew, both times to her private number, but she was unobtainable and there was no message for him.

That was five days he had not been able to reach her, not since the Delta Strike which had freed Melissa-jane. She seemed to have disappeared completely, and Peter pondered the implications during the quiet days when he was almost always alone with his daughter.

Then Dr. Kingston Parker arrived at Abbots Yew, and Sir Steven

Stride was delighted to have as his guest such a distinguished statesman.

Kingston Parker’s giant personality seemed to fill the beautiful old home. When he put himself out, his graciousness was irresistible. Steven was delighted with him, particularly when he discovered that despite Parker’s image as a liberal and his well-known concern with human rights, he was also a champion of the capitalist system, and determined that his country should take more seriously its responsibilities as leader of the Western world. They both deplored the loss of the BI bomber and the delaying of the neutron bomb programme, and the restructuring of America’s intelligence agencies.

They spent much of the first afternoon in Steven’s redwood-panelled study exploring each other’s views, and came out of it fast friends.

When they emerged, Parker completed his conquest of the Stride household by showing he shared with Patricia Stride a scholarly knowledge and love of antique porcelain.

His concern and warmth for Melissa-Jane and his relief at her safety were too spontaneous not to be entirely genuine.

His conquest of that young lady’s affections was complete when he went down with her to the stables to meet Florence Nightingale and prove that he was also a fair judge of horseflesh.

“He’s a lovely man. I think he is truly an honourable man,”

Melissa-Jane told Peter, when he went up to her bedroom to bid her goodnight “And he’s so kind and funny-” Then, lest there be any question of disloyalty, “But you are still my most favourite man in all the world.” Her cure and convalescence seemed almost complete, and as

Peter went down to rejoin the company he marvelled again at the resilience of young flesh and young minds.

As usual at Abbots Yew there was glittering and stimulating company at dinner, with Kingston Parker at its centre, but afterwards he and Peter exchanged a single glance down the length of Pat Stride’s silver-and candle decorated table and they left them to the port and cognac and cigars and slipped out unobtrusively into the walled rose garden.

While they paced side by side on the crunching gravel pathway,

Kingston Parker stoked his meerschaum and then began to talk quietly.

Once his bodyguard coughed in the shadows where he waited just out of range of their subdued voices, but that was the only intrusion and the spring night was still and balmy. Their conversation seemed utterly incongruous in these surroundings, talk of death and violence, the use and abuse of power, and the manipulations of vast fortunes by a single mysterious figure.

“It’s been five days since I arrived in England-” Kingston Parker shrugged. “One does not rush through the echoing passages of

Whitehall. There was much to discuss-” Peter knew that he had met with the Prime Minister on two separate occasions ” and it wasn’t just

Atlas business, I’m afraid-” Parker was one of the President’s confidants. They would have taken full advantage of his visit to exchange views with the British Government. “However, we did discuss

Atlas in depth and detail. You know very well that Atlas has opponents and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. They tried very hard to squash it, and when they could not they saw to it that its power and duties were severely curtailed-” Parker paused and his pipe gurgled.

He flicked out the juices from the mouthpiece onto the gravel path.

“The opponents of Atlas are all highly intelligent concerned and informed men. Their motives and their reasoning in opposing Atlas are laudable. I find myself a little in sympathy despite myself. If you create a strike force such as Atlas, where enormous powers are placed in the hands of a single man or a small elite leadership, you could very well be creating a Frankenstein a monster more frightening than you are setting out to destroy.”

“That depends on the man who controls it, Dr. Parker. I believe that they have the right man.”

“Thank you, Peter.” Parker turned his big shaggy head and smiled. “Won’t you please call me Kingston.” Peter nodded agreement, while Parker went on. “Atlas has had some spectacular successes at Johannesburg and now in Ireland but that makes it more danger—us. There will be a readier acceptance of the whole concept by the public; if Atlas asks for wider powers, it is more likely they would be granted. And, believe me, if it is to do the job it needs wider powers, Peter. I find myself torn down the centre-“

“And yet,”

Peter pointed out, “we cannot take on the most dangerous animal in the world, man the killer, we cannot do it without arming ourselves in every possible way.” Kingston Parker sighed. “And if Atlas achieves those powers, who can say when they will be abused, when will the rule of force supersede the rule of law?”

“The rules have changed. The rule of law is so often powerless in the face -of those who have no respect for the law.”

“There is another aspect, Peter. One that I have thought about half my life. What about the rule of unjust law? The laws of oppression and greed. A law that enslaves or deprives a man because of the colour of his face or the god he worships? If a duly constituted parliament makes racial laws or if the General Assembly of the United

Nations declares that Zionism is a form of Imperialism and must be outlawed. What if a handful of men gain control of the world’s resources and legally manipulate them in a manner dictated by personal greed to the detriment of all mankind, such as the Committee of the

OPEC, the Shah and the King of Saudi Arabia-” Kingston Parker made a helpless gesture, spreading those long sensitive fingers. “Must we respect those laws? The rule of law, even unjust law, is it sacrosanct?”

“Balance,” said Peter. “There has to be a balance between law and force.”

“Yes, but what is the balance, Peter?” He abruptly closed his hands into fists. “I have asked for greater powers for

Atlas, wider scope for its use, and I think these will be granted.

When they are, we will have need of good men, Peter.” Kingston Parker reached out and took Peter’s shoulder in a surprisingly powerful grip.

“Just men, who can recognize when the rule of law has either failed or is unjust, and who have the courage and the vision to act to restore the balance that you spoke of a moment ago.” His hand was still on

Peter’s shoulder and he left it there.

It was a natural gesture, without affectation.

“I believe you are one of those men.” He let the hand drop, and his manner changed. “Tomorrow I have arranged that we meet with

Colonel Noble. He has been busy breaking down and examining the entire

Irish operation, and I hope he will have come up with something for us to get our teeth into. Then there is much else to discuss. Two o’clock at Thor Command, will it suit you, Peter?”

“Of course.”

“Now let’s go in and join the company.”

“Wait.” Peter stopped him. “I have something I must tell, Kingston. It’s been tearing at my guts, and after you you have heard it you may alter your opinion of me my suitability for my role at Atlas.”

“Yes?” Parker turned back and waited quietly.

“You know that the people who kidnapped my daughter made no demands for her return, made no attempt to contact me or the police to negotiate.”

“Yes,” Parker answered. “Of course. It was one of the puzzling things about the whole business.”

“It was untrue. There was a contact and a demand.”

“I don’t understand.” Parker frowned and thrust his face closer to Peter’s, as though trying to study his expression in the poor light from the windows.

“The kidnappers contacted me. A letter which I destroyed-“

“Why?”

Parker shot at him.

“Wait. I’ll explain,” Peter replied. “There was a single condition for my daughter’s release, and a deadline of two weeks. If I

did not meet the condition by that time, they would have sent me parts of my daughter’s body her hands, her feet, and finally her head.”

“Diabolical,” Parker whispered. “Inhuman. What was the condition?”

“A

life for a life,” said Peter. “I was to kill you in exchange for

Melissa-Jane.” Parker started, throwing back his head with shock.

“They wanted me?” Peter did not reply, and they stood staring at each other, until Parker raised his hand and combed at his hair, a distracted gesture.

“That changes it all. I will have to think it out carefully but it makes a whole new scenario.” He shook his head.

They were going for the head of Atlas. Why? Because I was the champion of Atlas, and they opposed its formation? No! That’s not it. There seems only one logical explanation. I told you last time I

saw you that I suspected the existence of a central figure the puppetmaster who was taking control of all known militant organizations and welding them into a single cohesive and formidable entity.

Well, Peter, I have been hunting this figure. I have learned much to confirm my suspicions since last we met. I believe this person, or assembly of persons, does in fact exist part of the new powers I have asked for Atlas were to be used to hunt and destroy this organization before it does grave damage before it succeeds in so terrifying the nations of the world that it becomes itself a world power.-” Parker stopped as though to gather his thoughts, and then went on in quiet,

more measured tones. “I think now that this is absolute proof that it does exist, and that it is aware of my suspicions and intentions to destroy it. When I set you up as Atlas agent at large, I believed you would make contact with the enemy but, God knows, I did not expect it to come like this.” He paused again, considering it. “Incredible!“he marvelled.

“The one person whom I would never have suspected, you Peter. You could have reached me at any time, one of the few people who could.

And the leverage! Your daughter the protracted mutilations I may have just misjudged the cunning and ruthlessness of the enemy.”

“Have you ever heard the name Caliph?” Peter asked.

“Where did you hear that?” Parker demanded harshly.

“The demand letter was signed Caliph, and Melissa-Jane heard her captors discussing it.”

“Caliph.” Parker nodded. “Yes, I have heard the name, Peter. Since I last spoke to you. I have heard the name.

Indeed I have.” He was silent again, sucking distractedly on his pipe, then he looked up. “I will tell you how and when tomorrow when we meet at Thor, but now you have given me much to keep me awake tonight.” He took Peter’s arm and led him back towards the house.

Warm yellow light and laughter spilled out from the downstairs windows, welcoming and gay, but both of them were withdrawn and silent as they trudged up the smoothly raked path.

At the garden door Kingston Parker paused, holding Peter back from entering.

“Peter, would you have done it?” he asked gruffly.

Peter answered him levelly without attempting to avoid his eyes.

“Yes, Kingston, I would have done it.”

“How?”

“Explosives.”

“Better than poison,” Parker grunted. “Not as good as a gun.” And then angrily, “We have to stop him, Peter. It is a duty that supersedes every other consideration.”

“What I have just told you does not alter our relationship?” Peter asked. “The fact that I would have been your assassin does not change it?”

“Strangely enough, it merely confirms what I have come to believe of you, Peter. You are a man with the hard ruthless streak we need, if we are to survive.” He smiled bleakly. “I might wake up sweating in the night but it doesn’t alter what we have to do. Colin Noble with his cheroot, and opposite him Kingston Parker with the amber meerschaum, seemed to be in competition as to who could soonest render the air in the room incapable of supporting human life. It was already thick and blue, and the temporary headquarters of Thor Command lacked air-conditioning, but within minutes Peter had become so immersed in what he was hearing that the discomfort was forgotten.

Colin Noble was going over the details of the Irish operation, and all that had been gleaned from it.

“The house, the Old Manse, was burned to the ground, of course.

The Irish constabulary had twenty men sifting through the ashes-” He spread his hands. “A big nix.

Nothing at all.”

“Next the contents of the Austin and its provenance how do you like that word, Peter baby? Provenance, that’s a classy word.” Parker smiled indulgently. “Please go on, Colin.”

“The Austin was stolen in Dublin, and refitted with the roof carrier. It contained nothing, no papers, nothing in the glove compartment or boot, it had been stripped and cleaned out by an expert-“

“The men,” Parker prompted him.

ly of Gerald es, sir. The men. The dead one first. Name known as “Gilly”, born Belfast 1946-” O’Shaughnessy, also As he spoke Colin picked up the file that lay on the table in front of him. It was five inches thick. ” Do we want to read all of it? It’s a hell of a story. The guy had a track record-” “Only as far as it concerns

Atlas,” Parker told him.

There is no evidence as to when or how he became involved with this business-” Colin sketched the facts swiftly and succinctly. ” So we end with the contents of his pockets. Six hundred pounds sterling, thirty-eight rounds of .38 ammunition, and papers in the name of Edward and Helen Barry forged, but beautifully forged.” Colin closed the file with a slap. “Nothing,“he repeated. “Nothing we can use. Now the other man. Morrison Claude Bertram Morrison celebrated abortionist and dedicated alcoholic.

Struck off the medical rolls in 1969-” Again he recounted the sordid history swiftly and accurately. ” His price for the digital surgery was three thousand pounds half in advance. Hell, that’s cheaper than the Blue Cross.” Colin grinned but his eyes were black and bright with anger. “I am pleased to report that he can expect a sentence of approximately fifteen years. They are going to throw the book at him. There is only one item of any possible interest which he could give us. Gilly O’Shaughnessy was the leader from whom he took his orders, O’Shaughnessy in turn took his orders from somebody called-” He paused dramatically.

“Yes, that’s right. The name we have all heard before.

Caliph.” just one point here,” Kingston Parker interrupted.

“Caliph likes to use his name. He signs it on his correspondence.

Even his lowliest thugs are given the name to use. Why?”

“I think I

can answer that.” Peter stirred and raised his head. “He wants us to know that he exists. We must have a focal point for our fear and hatred. When he was merely a nameless, faceless entity he was not nearly as menacing as he is now.”

“I think you are right.” Parker nodded his head gravely.

“By using the name he is building up a store of credibility which he will draw upon later. In future when Caliph says he will kill or mutilate we know he is in deadly earnest, there . will be no compromise. He will do exactly as he promises. The man, or men, are clever psychologists.”

“There is just one aspect of the Irish operation we have not yet considered,” Peter broke in, frowning with concentration. “That is who was it that tipped us off, and what was the reason for that telephone call?” They were all silent, until Parker turned to Colin.

“What do you think of that one?”

“I have discussed it with the police, of course. It was one of the first things that puzzled us.

The police believe that Gilly O’Shaughnessy picked his hideout in

Ireland because he was familiar with the terrain, and had friends there. It was his old stamping ground when he was with the Provos.

He could move and disappear, get things fixed.” Colin paused and saw the sceptical expression on Peter’s face.

“Well, look at it this way, Peter baby. He had a woman negotiate the lease on the Old Manse Kate Barry, she called herself and signed it on the lease so that was one ally. There must have been others,

because he was able to buy a stolen and reworked automobile he would have had difficulty doing that in Edinburgh or London without the word getting about.” Peter nodded reluctantly. “All right, having the Irish connection helped him, Ad But there was the other side of the coin. O’Shaughnessy had enemies, even in the Provos. He was a ruthless bastard with a bloody record. We can only believe that one of those enemies saw the chance to make a score the one who sold him the stolen auto, perhaps. We have had the recording of the tip-off call examined by language experts and had a run against the voice prints on the computer. Nothing definite. The voice was disguised, probably through a handkerchief and nose plugs, but the general feeling is that it was an Irishman who made the call. The boffins from the telephone department were able to test the loading of the line and guess it was a call from a foreign country very likely Ireland, although they cannot be certain of that.” Peter

Stride raised one eyebrow slightly, and Colin chuckled weakly and waved the cheroot at him in a wide gesture of invitation.

“Okay. That’s my best shot,” he said. “Let’s hear you do better.

If you don’t like my theories, you must have one of your own.”

“You are asking me to believe it was all a coincidence; that O’Shaughnessy just happened to run into an old enemy who just happened to tip us off twenty-four hours before the deadline for Melissa-Jane’s hand to be amputated. Then it just so happened that we reached Laragh at exactly the same moment as O’Shaughnessy was pulling out and making a run for it. Is that what you want me to believe?”

“Something like that,“Colin admitted.

“Sorry, Colin. I just don’t like coincidence.”

“Shoot!” Colin invited. “Let’s hear how it really happened.”

“I don’t know,” Peter grinned phicatingly. “It is just that I have this feeling that Caliph doesn’t deal in coincidence either. I have this other feeling that somehow Gilly O’Shaughnessy had the death mark on his forehead from the beginning. I have this feeling it was all part of the plan.”

“it must be great fun to have these feelings.” Colin was prickling a little.

“But they sure as hell aren’t much help to me.) “Take it easy.” Peter held up one hand in surrender. “Let’s accept tentatively that it happened your way, then-“

“But?“Colin asked.

“No buts not until we get some more hard evidence-“

“Okay,

buster.” There was no smile on Colin’s face now, the wide mouth clamped in a grim line. “You want hard evidence, try this one for size-“

“Hold it, Colin,” Parker shot in quickly, authoritatively.

“Wait for a moment before we come to that.” And Colin Noble deflated with a visible effort, the cords in his throat smoothing out and the line of mouth relaxed into the old familiar grin as he deferred to Kingston Parker.

“Let’s backtrack here a moment,” Parker suggested. “Peter came up with the name Caliph. In the meantime we had picked up the same name but from an entirely different source. I promised Peter I would tell him about our source because I think it gives us a new insight into this entire business.” He paused and tinkered with his pipe, using one of those small tools with folding blades and hooks and spikes with which pipe smokers arm themselves. He scraped the bowl and knocked a nub of half-burned tobacco into the ashtray, before peering into the pipe-the way a rifleman checks the bore of his weapon. Peter realized that Parker used his pipe as a prop for his performances, the way a magician distracts his audience with flourishes and mumbo jumbo He was not a man to underestimate, Peter thought again for the hundredth time.

Kingston Parker looked up at him and smiled, a conspiratorial smile as if to acknowledge that Peter had seen through his little act.

“Our news of Caliph comes from an unlikely direction or rather,

considering the name, a more likely direction.

East. Riyadh to be precise. Capital city of Saudi Arabia, seat of King Khalid’s oil empire. Our battered and beleaguered Central

Intelligence Agency has received an appeal from the King following the murder of one of his grandsons. You recall the case, I’m sure–2

Peter had a strange feeling of deji-vu as he, listened to Kingston

Parker confirming exactly the circumstances that he and Magda Altmann had discussed and postulated together, was it only three weeks before?

You see the King and his family are in a very vulnerable position really. Did you know that there are at least seven hundred Saudi princes who are multimillionaires, and who are close to the King’s affections and power structure? It would be impossible to guard that many potential victims adequately. It’s really damned good thinking you don’t have to seize a hostage with all the attendant risks. There is virtually an unlimited supply of them walking around, ripe for plucking, and an inexhaustible supply of assassins to be either pressured or paid to do the job, just as long as you have the information and leverage, or just enough money. Caliph seems to have all that.”

“What demand has been made upon Khalid?“Peter asked.

“We know for certain that he has received a demand, and that he has appealed to the CIA for assistance to protect and guard his family.

The demand came from an agency or person calling himself Caliph. We do not know what the demand is but it may be significant that Khalid and the Shah of Persia have both agreed that they will not support a crude oil price increase at the next pricing session of OPEC, but on the contrary they will push for a five per cent decrease in the price of crude.”

“Caliph’s thinking has paid off again,” Peter murmured.

“It looks like it, doesn’t it.” Parker nodded, and then chuckled bitterly. “And once again you get the feeling, as with his demands to the South African Government, that his final objective is desirable even if the way he goes about procuring it is slightly unconventional,

to say the least.”

“To say the very least,” Peter agreed quietly,

remembering the feel of Melissa-Jane’s fever-racked body against his chest.

“So there is no doubt now that what we feared, is fact.

Caliph exists-” said Parker.

“Not only exists, but flourishes,” Peter agreed.

“Alive and well with a nice house in the suburbs.” Colin lit the stub of his cheroot before going on. “Hell! He succeeded at

Johannesburg. He is succeeding at Riyadh where does he go from there why not the Federation of Employers in West Germany? The Trade Union leaders in Great Britain? Any group powerful enough to affect the fate of nations, and small enough to be terrorized as individuals.”

“It’s a way to sway and direct the destiny of the entire world you just cannot guard all the world’s decision makers from personal attack,

Peter agreed. “And it’s no argument to point out that because his first two targets have been South Africa and the oil monopoly, then the long term results will be to the benefit of mankind. His ultimate target will almost certainly be the democratic process itself.

I don’t think there can be any doubt that Caliph sees himself as a god. He sees himself as the paternal tyrant. His aim is to cure the ills of the world by radical surgery, and to maintain its health by unrestrained force and fear.” Peter could remain seated no longer. He pushed back his chair and crossed to the windows, standing there in the soldier’s stance, balanced on the balls of his feet with both hands clasped lightl behind his back. There was an uninspiring view of the high barbed-wire fence, part of the airfield and the corrugated sheet wall of the nearest hangar.

A Thor sentry paced before the gates with a white MP.

helmet on his head and side arm strapped to his waist. Peter watched him without really seeing him, and behind him the two men at the table exchanged a significant glance.

Colin Nobleasked a silent question and Parker answered with a curt nod of affirmative.

“All right, Peter,” Colin said. “A little while back you asked for hard facts. I promised to give you a few.” Peter turned back from the window and waited.

“Item One. During the time that Gilly O’Shaughnessy held

Melissa-Jane in Laragh, two telephone calls were made from the Old

Manse. They were both international calls.

They both went through the local telephone exchange. The first call was made at seven p.m. local time on the first of this month.

That would have been the first day that they could have reached the hideout. We have to guess it was an “All Well” report to the top management. The second call was exactly seven days later again at seven o’clock local time precisely. To the same number. We have to guess that it was another report, “All is still well”. Both calls were less than one minute in duration. Just time enough to pass a prearranged code message-” Colin broke off and looked again at Kingston

Parker.

“Go on,” Parker instructed.

“The calls were to a French number. Rambouillet 47-87-47.” Peter felt it hit him in the stomach, a physical blow, and he flinched his head, for a moment closing both his eyes tightly. He had called that number so often, the numerals were graven on his memory.

“No.” He shook his head, and opened his eyes. “I’m not going to believe it.”

“It’s true, Peter,” Parker said gently.

Peter walked back to his seat. His legs felt rubbery and shaky under him. He sat down heavily.

The room was completely silent. Neither of the other two looked directly at Peter Stride.

Kingston Parker made a gesture to Colin and obediently he slid the red box file, tied with red tapes, across the cheap vinyl topped table.

Parker untied the tapes and opened the file. He shuffled the papers, scanning them swiftly. Clearly he was adept at speed reading and was able to assimilate each typed double spaced page at a glance but now he was merely waiting for Peter to recover from the shock. He knew the contents of the red file almost by heart.

Peter Stride slumped in the steel-framed chair with its uncushioned wooden seat, staring sightlessly at the bulletin board on the opposite wall on which were posted the Thor rosters.

He found it hard to ride the waves of dismay that flooded over him. He felt chilled and numbed, the depth of this betrayal devastated him, and when he closed his eyes again he had a vivid image of the slim, tender body with the childlike breasts peeping through a silken curtain of dark hair.

He straightened in his seat, and Kingston Parker recognized the moment and looked up at him, half closing the file and turning it towards him.

The cover bore the highest security gradings available to Atlas

Command and below them was typed:

ALT MANN MAG DA IRENE. Born KUTCHINSKY

Peter realized that he had never known her second name was Irene.

Magda Irene. Hell, they were really ugly names made special only by the woman who bore them.

Parker turned the file back to himself and began to speak quietly.

“When last you and I met, I told you of the special interest we had in this lady. That interest has continued, unabated, since then,

or rather it has gathered strength with every fresh item of information that has come to us.” He opened the file again and glanced at it as if to refresh his memory. “Colin has been very successful in enlisting the full cooperation of the intelligence agencies of both our countries, who in turn have been able to secure that of the French and believe it or not the Russians. Between the four countries we have been able to at last piece together the woman’s history-” He broke off.

“Remarkable woman,” and shook his head in admiration. “Quite incredible really.

I can understand how she is able to weave spells around any man she chooses. I can understand, Peter, your evident distress. I am going to be utterly blunt now we have no time nor space in which to manoeuvre tactfully around your personal feelings. We know that she has taken you as a lover. You notice that I phrase that carefully.

Baroness Altmann takes lovers, not the other way around. She takes lovers deliberately -and with careful forethought. I have no doubt that once she has made the decision, she accomplishes the rest of it with superb finesse.” Peter remembered her coming to him and the exact words she had used. “I am not very good at this, Peter, and I want so badly to be good for you.” The words had been chosen with the finesse that Kingston Parker had just spoken of. They were exactly timed to make herself irresistible to Peter and afterwards she had given the gentle lie to them with the skill and devilish cunning of her hands and mouth and body.

“You see, Peter. She had special and expert training in all the arts of love. There are probably few women in the Western world who know as much about reading a man, and then pleasing him. What she knows she did not learn in Paris or London or New York-” Kingston Parker paused and frowned at Peter. “This is all theory and hearsay, Peter.

You are in a better position to say just how much of it is false?”

The ultimate skill in pleasing a man is to fuel his own belief in himself, Peter thought, as he returned Parker’s inquiring gaze with expressionless eyes. He remembered how with Magda Altmann he had felt like a giant, capable of anything. She had made him feel like that with a word, a smile, a gift, a touch that was the ultimate skill.

He did not answer Parker’s question. “Go on please, Kingston,” he invited. Externally, he had himself completely under control now. His right hand lay on the table top, with the fingers half open, relaxed.

“I told you that even as a child she showed special talents. In languages, mathematics her father was an amateur mathematician of some importance chess and other games of skill. She attracted attention. Especially she attracted attention because her father was a member of the Communist Party-” Parker broke off as Peter lifted his head in sharp inquiry. i - I’m sorry, Peter. We did not know that when last we met. We have learned it since from the French, they have access to the party records in Paris it seems, and it was confirmed by the Russians themselves.

Apparently the child used to accompany her father to meetings of the Party, and soon showed a precocious political awareness and understanding. Her father’s friends were mostly party members, and after his death there still remains a mystery around his death.

Neither the French nor the Russians are forthcoming on the subject. Anyway, after his death, Magda Kutchinsky was cared for by these friends. It seemed she was passed on from family to family” Kingston

Parker slid a postcard-sized photograph from a marbline envelope and passed it across the table to Peter, from this period.” It showed a rather skinny girl in short skirts and dark stockings, wearing the yoked collar and straw bonnet of the French schoolgirl. Her hair was in two short braids, tied with ribbons, and she-held a small fluffy white dog in her arms. The background was a Parisian summer park scene, with a group of men playing boule and chestnut trees in full leaf.

The child’s face was delicately featured with huge beautiful eyes,

somehow wise and compassionate beyond her age, and yet still imbued with the fresh innocence of childhood.

“You can see she already had all the markings of spectacular beauty.” Kingston Parker grunted, and reached across to take back the photograph. For a moment Peter’s fingers tightened instinctively; he would have like to have kept it, but he relaxed and let it go. Parker glanced at it again and then slipped it back into the envelope.

“Yes. She attracted much interest, and very soon an uncle from the old country wrote to her. There were photographs of her father and the mother she had never known, anecdotes of her infancy and her father’s youth. The child was enchanted. She had never known she had an uncle.

Her father had never spoken of his relatives, but now at last the little orphan found she had family. It took only a few more letters,

exchanges of delight and affection, and then it was all arranged. The uncle came to fetch her in person and Magda Kutchinsky went back to

Poland.” Parker spread his hands. “It was easy as that.”

“The missing years,” Peter said, and his Voice SOLinded strange in his own ears. He cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably under Parker’s piercing but understanding gaze.

“No longer missing, Peter. We have been fed a little glimmering of what happened during those years and we have been able to fill in the rest of it from what we knew already.”

“The Russians?” Peter asked,

and when Parker nodded, Peter went on with a bitter tang to his voice.

“They seem to be very forthcoming, don’t they? I have never heard of them passing information at least not valuable information so readily.”

“They have their reasons in this case,” Parker demurred.

“Very good reasons as it turns out but one will come to those in due course.” “Very well.” The child returned with her uncle to Poland,

Warsaw.

And there was an extravagant family reunion. We are not certain if this was her real family, or whether the child was provided with a foster family for the occasion. In any event, the uncle soon announced that if Magda would submit to examination there was an excellent chance that she would be provided with a scholarship to one of the elite colleges of the USSR. We can imagine that she passed her examination with great distinction and her new masters must have congratulated themselves on their discovery.

“The college is on the shores of the Black Sea near Odessa. It does not have a name, nor an old school tie. The students are very specially selected, the screening is rigorous and only the brightest and most talented are enrolled. They are soon taught that they are an elite group, and are streamed in the special direction that their various talents dictate. In Magda’s case it was languages and politics, finance and mathematics. She excelled and at the age of seventeen graduated to a higher, more specialized branch of the Odessa college. There she was trained in special memory techniques, the already bright mind was honed down to a razor edge. I understand that one of the less difficult exercises was to be given access to a list of a hundred diverse items for sixty seconds. The list had to be repeated from memory, in the correct order, twenty-four hours later.” Parker shook his head again, expressing his admiration.

“At the same time she was also trained to fit naturally into upper-class international Western society. Dress, food, drink,

cosmetics, manners, popular music and literature, cinema theatre,

democratic politics, business procedures, the operation of stocks and commodities markets, the more mundane secretarial skills, modern dancing, the art of lovemaking and pleasuring men that and much else,

all of it taught by experts flying, skiing, weapons, the rudiments of electronics and mechanical engineering and every other skill that a top-class agent might have to call upon.

“She was the star of her course and emerged from it much as the woman you know. Poised, skilled, beautiful, motivated and deadly.

“At the age of nineteen she knew more, was capable of more, than most other human beings, male or female, twice her age. The perfect agent, except for a small flaw in her make-up that only showed up later. She was too intelligent and too personally ambitious.” Kingston

Parker smiled for the first time in twenty minutes. Which of course is a pseudonym for greed. Her masters did not recognize it in her, and perhaps at that age it was only latent greed. She had not yet been fully exposed to the attractions of wealth nor of unlimited power.”

Kingston Parker broke off, leaned across the table towards Peter. then seemed to cLinge direction then, smiling an inward knowledgeable stude,

as though pondering a hidden truth.

“Greed for wealth alone belongs essentially to the lower levels of human intelligence. It is only the developed and advanced mind that can truly appreciate the need for power-” He saw the protest in Peter’s expression. No, no, I don’t mean merely the power to control one’s own limited environment, merely the power of life and death over a few thousand lives not that, but true power. Power to change the destiny of nations, power such as Caesar or Napoleon wielded, such as the

President of the United States wields that is the ultimate greed,

Peter. A magnificent and noble greed.” He was silent a moment, as though glimpsing some vision of splendour. Then he went on: ”

digress. Forgive me,” and turned to Colin Noble. “Do we have some coffee, Colin? I think we could all do with a cup now. Colin went to the machine that blooped and gurgled and winked its red eye in the corner, and while he filled the cups, the charged atmosphere in the room eased a little, and Peter tried to arrange his thoughts in some logical sequence. He looked for the flaws and weak places in the story but could find none instead he remembered only the feel of her mouth, the touch of her hands on his body. Oh God, it was a stab of physical pain, a deep ache in the chest and groin, as he remembered how she had coursed him like a running stag, driving and goading him on to unvisited depths of his being. Could such skills be taught, he wondered, and if so, by whom? He had a horrifying thought of a special room set on the heights above the Black Sea, with that slim, vulnerable tender body practising its skills, learning love as though it were cookery or small arms practice and then he shut his mind firmly against it, and Kingston Parker was speaking again, balancing his coffee cup primly with his pinky finger raised, like an old maid at a tea party.

“So she arrived back in Paris and it fell at her feet. It was a triumphant progress.” Kingston Parker prodded in the file with his free hand, spilling out photographs of Magda Magda dancing in the ballroom of the Elysee Palace, Magda leaving a Rolls-Royce limousine outside

Maxim’s in the rue Royale, Magda skiing, riding, beautiful, smiling,

poised and always there were men. Rich, well-fed, sleek men.

(I told you once there were eight sexual liaisons.” Kingston

Parker used that irritating expression again. “We have had reason to revise that figure. The French take a very close interest in that sort of thing, they have added to the list.” He flicked over the photographs. “Pierre Hammond, Deputy Minister of Defence-” And another. “Mark Vincent, head of mission at the American Consulate-“

“Yes,” Peter cut in short, but still there was a sickly fascination in seeing the faces of these men. He had imagined them accurately, he realized, without particular relish.

“Her masters were delighted as you can imagine. With a male agent it is sometimes necessary to wait a decade or more for results while he moles his way into the system.

With a young and beautiful woman she has her greatest value when those assets are freshest. Magda Kutchinsky gave them magnificent value. We do not know the exact extent of her contributions our

Russian friends have not bared everything to us, I’m afraid, but I

estimate that it was about this time they began to realize her true potential. She had the magical touch, but her beauty and youth could not last for even” Kingston Parker made a deprecating gesture with the slim pianist’s hands. “We do not know if Aaron Altmann was a deliberate choice by her masters. But it seems likely. Think of it one of the richest and most powerful men in Western Europe, one who controlled most of the steel and heavy engineering producers, the single biggest armaments complex, electronics all associated and sensitive secondary industries. He was a widower, childless, so under

French law his wife could inherit his entire estate.

He was known to be fighting a slowly losing battle with cancer, so his life term was limited and he was also a Zionist and one of the most trusted and influential members of Mossad. It was beautiful.

Truly beautiful” said Kingston Parker. “Imagine being able to undermine a man of that stature, perhaps being able to double him!

Though that seemed an extravagant dream not even the most beautiful siren of history could expect to turn a man like Aaron Altmann. He is a separate study on his own, another incredible human being with the strength and courage of a lion until the cancer wore him out. Again

I digress, forgive me. Somebody, either the Director of the NKVD in

Moscow, or Magda Kutchinsky’s control at the Russian Embassy in Paris,

who was, incidentally, the Chief NKVD Commissar for Western Europe,

such was her value, or Magda Kutchinsky herself, picked Aaron Altmann.

Within two years she was indispensable to him. She was cunning enough not to use her sexual talents upon him immediately.

Altmann could have any woman who took his fancy, and he usually did. His sexual appetites were legendary, and they probably were the cause of his remaining childless. A youthful indiscretion resulted in a venereal disease with complications. It was later completely cured,

but the damage was irreversible, he never produced an heir.” He was a man who would have toyed with her and cast her aside as soon as he tired of her, if she had been callow enough to make herself immediately available to him.

First, she won his respect and admiration. Perhaps she was the first woman he had ever met whose brain and strength and determination matched his own Kingston Parker selected another photograph and passed it across the table. Fascinated, Peter stared at the black and white image of a heavily built man with a bull neck, and a solid thrusting jaw. Like so many men of vast sexual appetite, he was bald except for a Friar Tuck frill around the cannon ball dome of his skull. But there were humorous lines chiselled about his mouth, and his eyes, though fierce, looked as though they too could readily crinkle with laughter lines. Portrait of Power, Peter thought.

“When at last she gave him access to her body, it must have been like some great electrical storm.” Kingston Parker seemed to be deliberately dwelling on her past love affairs, and Peter would have protested had not the information he was receiving been so vital.

“This man and woman must have been able to match each other once again.

Two very superior persons, two in a hundred million probably it is interesting to speculate what might have happened if they had been able to produce a child.” Kingston Parker chuckled. “It would probably have been a mongolian idiot life is like that.” Peter moved irritably,

hating this turn in the conversation, and Parker went -on smoothly.

“So they married, and NKVD had a mole in the centre of Western industry. Narmco, Altmann’s armaments complex, was manufacturing top secret American, British and French missile hardware for NATO. The new

Baroness was on the Board, was in fact Deputy Chairman of Narmco. We can be sure that armaments blueprints were passed, not by the sheet but by the truckload. Every night, the leaders and decision-makers of the

Western world sat at the new Baroness’s board and swilled her champagne. Every conversation, every nuance and indiscretion was recorded by that specially trained memory, and slowly, inevitably, the

Baron’s strength was whittled away. He began to rely more and more upon her. We do not know exactly when she began to assist him with his

Mossad activities but when it happened the Russians had succeeded in their design. In effect they had succeeded in turning Baron Aaron

Altmann, they had his right hand and his heart for by this time the dying Baron was completely besotted by the enchantress.

They could expect to inherit the greater part of Western European heavy industry. It was all very easy until the latent defect in the

Baroness’s character began to SUrface.

We can only imagine the alarm of her Russian imislers when they detected the first signs that the Baroness was working for herself alone. She was brighter by far than any of the men who had up until that time controlled her, and she had been given a taste of real power.

The taste seemed very much to her liking. We can only imagine the gargantuan battle of wills between the puppet masters and the beautiful puppet that had suddenly developed a mind and ambitions of her very own quite simply her ambition now was to be the most wealthy and powerful woman since Catherine of Russia, and the makings were almost within her pretty hands except-” Kingston Parker stopped; like a born storyteller, he knew instinctively how to build up the tension in his audience.

He rattled his coffee cup.

“This talking is thirsty business.” Colin and Peter had to rouse themselves with a physical effort. They had been mesmerized by the story and the personality of the storyteller. When Parker had his cup refilled, he sipped at it, then went on speaking.

“There was one last lever her Russian masters had over her. They threatened to expose her. It was quite a neat stroke, really. A man like Aaron Altmann would have acted like an enraged bull if he had known how he had been deceived. His reaction was predictable. He would have divorced Magda immediately. Divorce is difficult in France but not for a man like the Baron. Without his protection Magda was nothing, less than nothing, for her value to the Russians would have come to an end. Without the Altmann Empire her dreams of power would disappear like a puff of smoke. It was a good try it would have worked against an ordinary person, but of course they were not dealing with an ordinary person-” Parker paused again; it was clear he was as wrapped up by the story as they were, and he was drawing out the pleasure of the telling of it.