lips with a silk handkerchief before he replied. 'The leopard? An animal with a spotted coat which can be dangerous…'
`This one is dangerous,' the American agreed. 'He's sitting behind a government desk not a mile from where we are at the moment. Let me tell you a story…' Nash told the story well -about a Russian defector who had arrived in New York only a week earlier, who had been rushed from Kennedy airport to a secret camp in the Adirondack mountains where Nash himself had questioned the man. The following morning-before the interrogation had been resumed-the Russian had been shot by a long-distance sniper with a telescopic rifle. 'It happened while I was walking beside him,' the American went on. 'One moment he was walking beside me, the next he was sprawled on the track with a bullet through his skull…'
Grelle went on sipping his Scotch, listening with the same expressionless face as the American related how the high-grade Russian had told him about a French Communist agent- adopting the name of the wartime Resistance leader Leopard -who for over thirty years had worked himself up to become one of the top three men in France. 'The Leopard could be any one of your top cabinet ministers,' Nash concluded. 'Roger Danchin, Alain Blanc…
Grelle drank the rest of his Scotch in two gulps, placed the empty glass on the table and stood up. His voice was crisp and cold.
`The lengths to which the American government has gone recently to smear our president have been absurd, but what you have just suggested is outrageous…'
Nash stood up from the chair. 'Marc, we don't have to blow our tops…
`Your so-called story is a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end,' Grelle went on icily. 'Clearly you are trying to spread a lying rumour in the hope that it will damage the president because you don't like his speeches…
`Marc,' Nash interjected quietly, 'I'll tell you now that you are the only man inside this embassy who will hear what I have just told you…'
`Why?' Grelle snapped.
`Because you are the only Frenchman I really trust with this secret-the only contact I have come to warn. I want you to be on your guard-and you have ways of checking things out, ways that we couldn't even attempt…'
`You'd get chopped if you did!' Grelle, his face flushed, moved towards the door, then seemed to calm down and for a few minutes he chatted with the American about other topics. It was, Nash told himself after the prefect had gone, a very polished performance: outrage at the suggestion and then a brief relaxation of tension to indicate to the American that they would remain friends in the future. Lighting a cigarette, Nash wandered back across the hall to the reception, satisfied with the result of his trip to Paris. Because despite what he had said, Grelle would check. Grelle was the policeman's policeman. Grelle always checked.
To give himself time to think, Grelle drove round in a circle to get back to the prefecture. On his way he passed the Elysee and had to pull up while a black Zil limousine with one passenger in the back emerged from the palace courtyard. Leonid Vorin, Soviet ambassador to France, was just leaving after making one of his almost daily visits to see Guy Florian. Since the trip to Moscow on 23 December had been announced, the Soviet ambassador had consulted frequently with the president, driving from his embassy in the rue de Grenelle to the Elysee and back again. Inside the limousine Leonid Vorin, short and stocky with a pouched mouth and rimless glasses, sat staring ahead, looking neither to right nor left as the car swung out and drove off towards Madeleine.
The uniformed policeman who had halted Grelle, saluted and waved him on. Driving automatically, the prefect had half his mind on what Nash had told him. Up to half an hour ago his suspicions had been based on Gaston Martin's strange story and what he had heard from the Cayenne police chief, all of which was disturbing but by no means conclusive. Now the same story was coming from Washington, and soon rumours might start sweeping through the European capitals. As Grelle told Boisseau later, 'I don't believe a word of that fairy-tale Nash told me about a Soviet defector-he was protecting his real informant-but this is something we are going to have to investigate in the greatest secrecy…
As he crossed the crowded Pont Neuf on to the Ile de la Cite Grelle shivered, a nervous tremor which had nothing to do with the chill night air now settling over Paris. For the police prefect his world had suddenly become unstable, a place of shifting quicksands where anything might lie under the surface. 'Roger Danchin… Alain Blanc.. he muttered to himself. 'It's impossible.
Leaving the isolated farmhouse at about the same time when Grelle was returning to the prefecture, Lennox drove back to Saarbrucken through slashing rain with the distant rumble of thunder in the night. The storm suited his mood; he also was disturbed. At one point in the conversation he had asked the colonel who had typed out the list of names and addresses he now carried tucked away inside his wallet. 'Captain Moreau, my assistant, of course,' Lasalle had replied. 'He was the only officer who came with me when I left France and I trust him completely.'
`You didn't trust him with my real name until shortly before I arrived,' Lennox had pointed out. 'When I phoned from Saarbrucken he had no idea who I was…'
`That was to protect you until you arrived safely, I called Nash in London at a certain time and he gave me your name, but I withheld it from Moreau. If my assistant had been kidnapped while you were on the way he couldn't have identified you under pressure. For the same reason Moreau does not know I am in touch with the Americans…'
Under pressure… As he peered through the rain-swept windscreen Lennox grimaced. What a life the colonel was living since he had fled France. Locked away inside a German farmhouse, guarded at the gate by a man with a sub-machine gun, ready at any time for the intruders in the night who might arrive with chloroform-or something more lethal. And tomorrow Lennox himself would cross the border into France- after first meeting Peter Lanz of the BND.
While Alan Lennox was driving through the night to a hotel in Saarbrucken, Marc Grelle had returned to the prefecture from the reception at the American Embassy where he dealt with the paperwork which had accumulated in his absence. 'There are too many typewriters in Paris,' he muttered as he initialled minutes from Roger Danchin and ate the sandwich brought in from the local brasserie. He was just about to leave when the phone rang. 'Shit!' he muttered, picking up the receiver. It was Cassin, one of the phone operators in the special room at Surete headquarters.
`Another message has come in from Hugon, Mr Prefect.' `Routine?'
'No. There has been a development…
Grelle swore again under his breath. He would have liked to ask the operator to relay the message over the line, but that was impossible-he had personally issued strict orders that this must never be done. Phones can be tapped: all you need is a post office communications expert who knows how to leak off a private phone. Never mind about exotic electronic bugs; splicing the right wires will do the trick. 'I'll come over,' Grelle said and put down the receiver.
Rush hour was over as he drove along streets gleaming wetly under the lamps and turned into the rue des Saussales where Surete headquarters forms part of the huge block of buildings centred round the Ministry of the Interior. In the narrow street he waited while a uniformed policeman dropped the white-painted chain, and then drove under the archway into the courtyard beyond. The room was on the fourth floor and at that hour he met no one as he climbed the gloomy staircase, walked down an ill-lit corridor and used his key to open the locked door. Closing the door on the inside, Grelle stared down at Cassin, the night man. The room smelt of garlic, which meant the operator had eaten a snack recently. A half-filled glass of red wine was on the table beside the tape-recorder which was linked to the phone.
`Well?' the prefect asked.
`Hugon phoned at 6.45 pm… Cassin, a lean, pasty-faced man of thirty, was reading from a notebook in a bored tone. 'I recorded the message as usual and it's on tape.'
`How did he sound?' Grelle perched his buttocks on the edge of the table. He would hear what Hugon had said in a minute, but the recording was inclined to iron out a man's voice, to drain it of emotion, and Cassin had listened while the tape recorded.
`A bit excited, nervous, agitated-as though he hadn't much time and was afraid of being interrupted.'
`That's a precise analysis.'
`He's sending something through the post-a list of names and addresses. He didn't want to transmit them
