Pol said softly, ‘Was it this man?’
Neil nodded and handed the folder back.
CHAPTER 2
The man was Colonel Pierre Broussard, commander of a crack paratroop regiment which had been involved in an abortive coup the year before in one of France’s less happy North African Protectorates.
It had been the climax of several years’ guerrilla warfare between the French and the Moslem Nationalists, who called themselves the Arab Front. An exhausted French nation had finally agreed to open tentative peace talks as a prelude to granting the Protectorate independence. The European population, a strong minority of nearly a million, had reacted at first with hopeless anger — rioting, burning official buildings, calling strikes.
Then, eight months ago, a clique of Army officers, headed by General Paul Guérin, a former Commander-in-Chief in the Protectorate, had defied the Government and for four days had threatened to drop paratroopers over Paris and seize the city. The revolt had collapsed when the rest of the Army, undecided to the last, had finally failed to give the rebels their support.
Paul Guérin and a number of high-ranking officers, including his second-in-command, Colonel Broussard, had gone underground and been sentenced to death in absentia. Out of the rump of eighteen-hundred disbanded paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires, and the leaders of extremist civilian groups, Guérin had founded a clandestine organization calling itself the Secret Army.
France now found herself trapped in a three-cornered fight. Burdened with mutinous officers, she was trying to extricate herself with the remnants of dignity, from between two fanatical terrorist organizations. While her struggle against the Arab Front still continued, the power of the Secret Army had been growing to frightening proportions, steadily eroding the foundations of law and order within the Protectorate until now even the stability of Metropolitan France was threatened.
Monsieur Pol now explained that during the last two weeks, while Neil had been on Athos, innocent of world affairs, the Secret Army had begun an indiscriminate terrorist campaign against Moslems in the capital of the Protectorate. Their aim was to disrupt any future peace talks between Paris and the Arab Nationalists. French security forces — the CRS (the Campagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) and the shock troops of the Gardes Mobiles — had tried, with the dubious backing of the Army, to break the organization, but with no great success. Many arrests had been made, but the main conspirators, including Colonel Broussard, had slipped out of the Protectorate to Spain, Sicily and Greece, where they were now believed to be planning a new coup to overthrow the French Government.
Pol confessed to Neil that the Deuxième Bureau had known for a while that Broussard was operating from somewhere in Greece; then, the night before, an agent in Salonika had reported that he might be hiding on Mount Athos. Instructions had been given for the Greek police to detain all travellers leaving the peninsula.
Pol spread his fat fingers across his knees: ‘So you see, gentlemen, it was necessary to bring you here this morning in the interests, let us say, of security… Many of Broussard’s men were in the Foreign Legion — Germans and Spaniards, Dutchmen, even Englishmen. We couldn’t take any chances — these people are very well organized.’ He clapped his hands against his enormous thighs: ‘However, now you are here, perhaps you could tell us something about this Monsieur Martel. Was he alone?’
‘Yes,’ said Neil.
‘What did he talk about?’
Neil paused: ‘The only things he talked to me about were Arabic semantics and old coins.’
Pol chuckled, wagging his head: ‘Ah, our friend Broussard is an intellectual! An intellectual killer. One must not underestimate him. He was one of the great heroes of the French Army — a survivor of Dien Bien Phu, decorated with the Legion of Honour, the Médaille Militaire — an expert on psychological warfare and a leading French authority on classical Arabic. He wrote an excellent book on the history of Persian poetry. Formidable man. Unfortunately, in Saigon he began relying too much on opium. After Dien Bien Phu he had a nervous collapse and spent a lot of time in a psychiatric clinic near Grenoble. He’s a little insane.’
Neil told Pol about the night at St. Panteleimon and the black box that the colonel had lugged about the mountain.
‘That would have been radio transmitting equipment,’ said Pol, ‘he was keeping in touch with the Secret Army agents here in Greece.’
Neil remembered now the whining sound and the voice behind the wall that he had heard at Zographou on that first night he had met M. Martel. Finally he told Pol of the conversation he had had with the gendarme at Karyes, and about the boat that had arrived during the night.
Pol listened solemnly to this. When Neil finished, he nodded and said glumly, ‘So it looks as though our friend Broussard has flown. You say two nights ago?’ He turned to Captain Spyros, who had been staring at his manicured nails. ‘Captain, we must still check all the boats and roads from Athos. Keep the Salonika police alerted — warn the coastguards, the ports, the airfields. It is just possible that the man is still in Greece.’
Captain Spyros bowed, smiled obsequiously round him, and hurried from the room, followed by the plainclothes man. The door closed. Neil and Van Loon rose to leave, but Pol jumped up with amazing agility and clutched them both by the elbow with his pink fleshy fingers.
‘One moment!’ he cried. ‘I have a debt to pay! I have had you both seized in error as common criminals in a land
