hostages.'
^ 'Riad has already told me that,' the Frenchman replied with his eyes half-closed.
^ Winter left Paris the following day and flew to London. First he checked the transfer of twenty-five thousand dollars from a Paris bank to a City bank which he had arranged before leaving Paris. The money had arrived, he collected a cheque book, and armed with this he took a taxi to Mount Street where the Mayfair estate agents live. He found the property he was looking for in an agent's window, a glossy photograph advertised as 'Fine Old Manor House, East Anglia. Six Months' Lease'. After a brief discussion with the agent, he hired a car and drove to East Anglia where he put up for the night at King's Lynn.
^ ^ he had hoped, it was exactly what he wanted. The house itself, Cosgrove Manor, was surrounded with parkland, and the twenty acres of isolated grounds concealed it completely from the road. He concluded the deal at once, explaining that his family would be coming over from Australia in the next few weeks. The six months' rent he paid in advance with a cheque drawn on the London bank in the name of George Bingham.
^ The following morning he drove back to London, reserved a room at Brown's Hotel in Albemarle Street, again in the name of George Bingham, and then took a cab to the world-famous shipping organisation, Lloyd's of London. Wearing a tweed suit and rimless glasses, he posed as a writer researching a book on the oil crisis.
^ After making certain enquiries about shipping movements, he consulted the ^ Shipping Register, ^ a remarkable publication produced daily which records the present positions of all vessels at sea. It took him several hours to check on ships moving up and down the West Coast of America, but when he left the building he was fairly sure he had found his target ship. The following day he flew by Polar Route direct to Los Angeles, and there he caught another plane on to San Francisco.
^ Joseph Walgren, the fifty-year old ex-accountant who had helped LeCat with the hi-jack of the armoured truck in Illinois eight months before, an incident Winter knew nothing about, was waiting for him. In response to a cable from LeCat, the American met Winter off the plane at the International airport. There was an immediate disagreement over the modest-priced hotel Walgren suggested for the Englishman.
^ 'It's too cheap,' Winter said firmly as the American drove him into San Francisco. 'If you stay at a very expensive place the police in any country assume you are respectable. I'll take a room at the Huntingdon on California Street…'
^ For three days he ran Walgren, an energetic character, into the ground. Constantly on the move, Winter drove round the city familiarising himself with its layout, driving as far out as Oleum, the oil terminal, scouring Marin County north of the city and then, when Walgren thought he had finished, the Englishman hired a launch and explored the coastline of the Bay. Before he left the city – and a somewhat limp Walgren – Winter gave him certain instructions which included involving the American in a brief trip to Mexico. He also provided him with a large sum of money. On the fourth day Winter left for Canada.
^ He paid a brief visit to the trawler ^ Pecheur, ^ still moored at a dock in the port of Victoria. Brief as it was, he took the time to make sure the Canadian Port Authority were happy about the vessel's continued presence, and he found that LeCat had handled the problem satisfactorily. Using the Frenchman as an agent, Arab money had not only purchased the ^ Pecheur ^ from the French Syndicate of Marseilles businessmen – it had also formed the World Council of Marine Biological Research with headquarters on the rue St Honore in Paris, a body nominally headed by a Frenchman, Bernard Oswald.
^ Marine research was the latest scientific fad, the progressive thing to engage in, so the Canadian authorities gave little thought to the arrival of the trawler and its continued stay in their port. And, as he had once assured an Italian Customs official in Naples about the Alouette helicopter on the ^ Pecheur's ^ deck – '… a new technique. We use it to spot fish shoals from the air…' – so he now set about reassuring a Canadian official.
^ 'We shall have a Sikorsky helicopter arriving here before we leave for the Galapagos… Certain places we want to explore we can only reach by chopper…'
^ The Canadian port official found George Bingham, the British marine biologist, an amiable fellow, and now he understood fully why the ^ Pecheur ^ was still in harbour – she was waiting for the arrival of the helicopter.
^ While in San Francisco Winter had found time to arrange with Walgren for the purchase and delivery of the Sikorsky, which would be flown to Canada by a pilot friend of Walgren – the man who can fly a Beechcraft cannot necessarily pilot a helicopter. Twenty-four hours after his arrival in Canada Winter was on his way to Alaska.
^ He spent three weeks in Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, which lies at the head of the Cook Inlet, the site of the state's first oil discovery. Today, people think of the great North Slope field when they think of Alaskan oil, but when Winter was in Anchorage the only oil which flowed from Alaska to California, two thousand miles south, came from Cook Inlet. A shuttle service of tankers – one of them British – was moving backwards and forwards, carrying the desperately needed oil to San Francisco.
^ During his long journey Winter had seen many signs of the way in which the fifty per cent oil cut controlled by Sheikh Gamal Tafak was crippling the West. Planes nearly always arrived late, due to fuel shortages; the street lights in California were turned off at ten o'clock at night; power blackouts were frequent, plunging whole cities into darkness without warning. And still, so far as Winter could see, there was no effective resistance to the sheikhs' blackmail. It was early December when he returned to Europe.
^ 'None so far,' LeCat replied, 'but I have set up listening posts in different countries…'
^ They talked in French, one of the four languages Winter was fluent in, and Winter's question was a key question. When you organise an operation on a large scale, sooner or later there are liable to be rumours of something going on. It was, in a way, a race against time – to get the operation moving before a hint of it reached the outside world. From Winter's point of view, the listening posts would provide a warning if rumours began to spread, but LeCat regarded them in a very different light. If someone began making enquiries and he heard about it, then drastic action might have to be taken. After all, it would probably only mean killing whoever looked like getting in the way.
5
^ Larry Sullivan, thirty-two years old, was in the same age range as Winter, and the similarity between the two men did not end there. Sullivan also was a lone wolf, which was one reason why his career in naval intelligence was brought to a rather abrupt conclusion; Sullivan, with the rank of lieutenant, did not suffer fools gladly – even when they held the rank of admiral. When it was indicated to him indirectly – he hated people who indicated things indirectly – that his route up the promotion ladder was blocked permanently unless he became more-flexible, he indicated his own reaction quite directly. 'You can stuff the job,' he told his superior.
^ With his background and experience he had no trouble finding a job as an investigator with Lloyd's of London. Unlike the peacetime Navy, this unique organisation is anything but hide-bound in its methods; it has, in fact, a reputation for free-wheeling, for observing tradition in the face it presents to the public, while behind the scenes it breaks every rule in the book if that is the only way to get results. Only the British could have invented such an institution which, deservedly, has a world-wide reputation for integrity among all who deal with it. And Sullivan fitted in well.
^ A lean-faced, smiling man, lightly built and five feet nine tall, he had a thatch of dark hair which women found attractive; so much so he had postponed any idea of marriage yearly. His job was as unique as the organisation he worked for. Investigating suspect insurance claims which might amount to twenty million pounds for a single vessel, he carried no authority in the outside world. He lived by his wits.
^ He could lean on no one, give orders to no one, but this inhibition had its advantages. He was not too restricted in the methods he used – or persuaded others to use. He lived by his contacts and friendships, by getting to know people far outside the range of the shipping world. It was important to him to know police officials all over the globe, that he could phone certain Interpol officers and call them by their first names, that he attended Interpol conferences where he never stopped talking and listening. He was also one of the most persistent people who walked the face of the earth. 'Do it, get him off our backs', was a phrase often used behind his own back. Loaned by Lloyd's to their client, Harper Tankships, he started his enquiries about the whisper in January.
^ One January evening – his diary shows it was Sunday January 5 – Sullivan was in Bordeaux, checking the most efficient grapevine in the shipping world, the waterfront bars where seamen gather and gossip. His style of dress was hardly elegant: he wore a none-too-clean sweater and stained trousers under a shabby overcoat. ^ ^
