time he had killed a woman. When the Forensic Institute people examined the corpse later, they found one of Grelle's bullets in her heart, the second, one centimetre to the right. A moment earlier the prefect had hustled the president back inside the courtyard, gripping him tightly by the arm, taking no notice of what he said, ushering him back inside the Elysee like a felon. Now guards with automatic weapons were flooding into the street. Far too late.
Grelle himself removed the automatic from the hand of the dead woman, lifting it carefully by the barrel to retain fingerprints. It was a Bayard 9-mm short, made by the Belgian small-arms factory at Hertal. Small enough to go inside a handbag, it was by no means a lady's gun. Fired-as it would have been-at point-blank range, Grelle had no doubt the result would have been fatal. A few minutes later his deputy, Director-General Andre Boisseau of the Police Judiciaire, arrived in the cordoned-off street in a police car with siren screaming.
`My God, is it true?'
`Yes, it is true,' Grelle snapped. 'His would-be assassin, a woman, is just being carried into that ambulance. Florian is unhurt-back in the Elysee. From now on everything will be different. We will have tight security on him twenty-four hours a day. He is to be guarded wherever he goes-I'll see him in the morning to get his approval..'
`If he doesn't agree?'
`He'll receive my immediate resignation…
The press had arrived now, the reporters were trying to force their way through the churning crowd of gendarmes, and one of them called out to the prefect. 'The hyenas are here,' Grelle muttered under his breath, but it was important to set them right immediately. They still had time to file their stories for tomorrow's banner headlines. He ordered that they be let through and they swarmed round the slim, athletic man who was the calmest person present. It was, of course, the reporter from L'Humanite-`that Communist rag,' as the prefect called the paper-who asked the question. 'You say the assassin was a woman? Did the president know her?'
The implication was crude and clear, bearing in mind the rumours about Florian's strained relations with his wife, about his relationships with other women. L'Humanite scented a juicy scandal of international proportions. Grelle, who detested politicians, understood politics. He paused to get everyone's close attention, to build up a suspense he could deflate.
`The president did not know this woman. He had never seen her in his life. He told me this when I was hustling him back into the Elysee…
`He saw her clearly then?' the reporter insisted.
`He happened to be looking straight at her when she aimed the weapon at him…
Soon after this exchange he shut them up, had them sent back further down the street behind the cordon, knowing they would soon have to rush off to phone their offices. The ambulance had gone now. Police photographers were taking pictures of the sidewalk section where it had happened. Leaving a superintendent in charge to complete the formalities, Grelle got inside Boisseau's car and his deputy drove them back to the prefecture on the Ile de la Cite.
On the way the prefect examined the dead woman's handbag he had slipped inside his raincoat pocket. The usual equipment: lipstick, powder compact, a ring of keys, comb and one hundred and fifty-seven francs in notes and coins, and an identity card. The woman who had tried to kill the President of France was a Lucie Devaud. At this time Grelle saw no significance in the name. Nor did he see any significance in the fact that she had been born in the department of Lozere.
At certain moments in history it is a single incident which triggers off a whole series of events, which causes wheels to begin turning in several continents, wheels which move faster and faster. Lucie Devaud's attempt to kill Guy Florian was just such an incident. It came at a critical moment in the history of Europe.
The world was emerging from the disastrous slump which had begun in 1974. Everywhere there was hope and optimism again. The airlines were carrying an ever-growing number of tourists to distant and exotic places; the world stock markets were climbing rapidly-Dow Jones had passed the 1500-line -and the terrors of inflation were now only a memory. And, as the American Hudson Institute had predicted, France was leading the world with a great economic surge. For various reasons France had become the most powerful nation in western Europe, overtaking even West Germany; so, the President of the French Republic, Guy Florian, was the most powerful statesman between Moscow and Washington. On the political front the scene was less reassuring.
During the economic blizzard Soviet Russia had made vast strides. Portugal was now a Communist state, the Communist party there having seized power by rigging the elections. In Greece a Communist coup d'etat had taken over the government. And Spain, after a long period of chaos, was now in the grip of a Communist-dominated coalition government. Soviet warships were in the Piraeus harbour of Athens, were anchored off Barcelona, and were using the facilities of Lisbon as a naval base. The Mediterranean had become almost a Russian lake. Added to this, the last American troops had left Europe as the American Congress retreated further and further into isolation.
It was all this-plus her growing economic power-which made France the key state in western Europe. Allied with Western Germany, she provided the key element which barred any further Soviet advance. This was the situation when the news reverberated round the world of Lucie Devaud's attempt to kill President Guy Florian. The Frenchwoman failed to pull the trigger on her 9-mm automatic, but inadvertently she pulled a different kind of trigger.
Very shortly her death was to affect the lives of Alan Lennox, an Englishman based in London; of David Nash, an American living in New York; of Peter Lanz, a German based in Bavaria; of Colonel Rene Lasalle, ex-assistant chief of army counter-intelligence, now living in exile in Germany; and of certain other people at the moment residing in Czechoslovakia. The first reaction came from Col Rene Lasalle who made yet another inflammatory broadcast over the radio station Europe Number One, which transmits from the Saarland in Germany.
`Who was this mysterious woman, Lucie Devaud?' he asked in his late-evening broadcast on 8 December. 'What was her secret? And what is the secret in the past of a leading Paris politician which must not be discovered at any cost? And why is Marc Grelle clamping down a security dragnet which overnight is turning my country into a police state? Is there a conspiracy…?'
Extracts from the broadcast were repeated in television news bulletins all over the world. Lasalle's broadcast-his most venomous yet-had all the elements to stir up a ferment of speculation. 'The secret in the past of a leading Paris politician…' The phrase was seized on by the foreign correspondents. Was there, they speculated, somewhere in Paris a key personality-even a cabinet minister-who was secretly working against President Florian? if so, who was this shadowy figure? The wildest rumours were spread-even one to the effect that a right-wing group of conspirators headed by the unknown cabinet minister was behind the assassination attempt, that they had tried to kill Florian before he made his historic visit to Soviet Russia on 23 December.
In an apartment on the eighth floor at an address on East 84th Street in New York, David Nash dismissed the conspiracy rumour as rubbish. Nash, forty-five years old, a small and well-built man with shrewd grey eyes and thinning hair, worked for a special section of the State Department which no congressional committee had yet penetrated and so rendered useless. Officially, he was concerned with policy-`the vaguest word in the dictionary', as he once commented; in fact he was involved with counter-espionage at the highest level. And since he made a point of rarely appearing in the capital, the press corps was hardly aware of his existence. In the afternoon of the day following Lasalle's outburst over Europe Number One he sat in his apartment studying a transcript of the broadcast.
Round the table with him were seated two men who had just flown in from Washington.
`The way things are,' Nash commented, 'it sends shivers up my spine how close Florian came to death. If France were plunged into chaos at this particular moment, God knows how Russia might try to take advantage of the situation. We've got to find out who was behind that attempt…
Andrew MacLeish, Nash's nominal superior, a thin, austere fifty-year-old, broke in irritably. He hated New York and counted every minute spent there as time out of his life. 'You think this nut, Lasalle, has any idea of what he's talking about? For my money he's got his knife into Florian and just enjoys twisting it at random. By my count this is his tenth anti-Florian broadcast in six months…
`The tenth,' Nash agreed. 'Incidentally, I've accepted his invitation to meet with him.'
`What invitation?' MacLeish demanded. 'This is the first I've heard you've had any contact with that psychopath…
`Even psychopaths sometimes know a thing or two,' Nash remarked. 'Col Lasalle approached me through the
