Neil had only a rigid set of terms on which to negotiate, dictated to him before each visit by Le Hir. The Secret Army would agree to no verbal truce; they insisted on meeting the leaders of the Arab Front in person and discussing the precise terms of the truce face to face. This would mean a deputation of Dr. Marouf, Boussid and Ali La Joconde.
Boussid deferred and bickered and drank more tea, insisting that the Arab Front would only negotiate with General Guérin. No deputy leader of the Secret Army, even Broussard or Le Hir, would satisfy them.
Le Hir refused. On no account would General Guérin agree to meet any member of the Arab Front in person. The discussions broke down.
At the fourth meeting, at noon on the third day, Boussid appeared to be losing his aplomb: he was tetchy and fidgeted, drinking more tea than usual and shouting angrily at his subordinates in Arabic. If Guérin did not participate, he told Neil, then the Arab Front would be represented only by a minor official.
That afternoon Le Hir also relented. General Paul Guérin was prepared to discuss a formal truce, providing he met only the three leaders of the Casbah and in a place which he would name.
The last meeting, which was also the most arduous, settled the place where the talks would be held. After several hours of arguing, Neil persuaded Boussid to accept the spot chosen by General Guérin. It was a farmhouse eighteen miles outside the city, set back on a plain between the mountains and the sea. It had been deserted since the owner, a colon farmer, had left for France three months earlier. The place could only be approached by two roads across open fields which removed any serious risk of an ambush; and it had the vital advantage of lying beyond the urban areas controlled by the Secret Army, and also outside the mountainous territory infested by Arab Front guerrillas. Each delegation would produce an escort of six men, armed only with machine-pistols; and Neil had to convey in turn to Le Hir and Boussid that if there was any breach of the agreement by one side, the other would retaliate with massive reprisals.
Except when he was beyond the CRS roadblock, Neil was under constant watch by Le Hir’s commandos; and all his telephone calls to Pol were tapped by Le Hir himself. During these calls Pol did not discuss the talks with Boussid. Their conversations were short and to the point, concerning only the various appointments with the men who were to drive Neil into the Casbah. Once, on Le Hir’s instructions, Neil asked Pol whether the French Army had any part in these plans. Pol replied, ‘I can promise you that neither the Army nor the security forces have anything to do with this matter. You have my solemn word for that!’
This startled Le Hir. He had assumed, as an ex-member of Military Security, that the Sûreté and the Deuxième would work in close collaboration. His military training did not admit to independent agents. To him Charles Pol was just another fat, overpaid Government employee. But Neil remembered that Pol had been a double-agent in the war and was a former Anarchist. He was not — as he had been at pains to explain in Athens — an ordinary policeman carrying out the instructions of his superiors. Pol was an idealist, a man with dynamic views on how the world should be run. The idea that he might be acting entirely free of the French authorities did not strike Neil as far-fetched. Le Hir considered it, but shrugged it off. The only idealists he knew were in the Secret Army.
During all this time the possibility of treachery by either side occurred constantly to Neil. He would lie on his bed in the spare room put at his disposal in Le Hir’s flat and weigh up the probabilities. Always he was reassured by the same process of argument: that it was in the logical interests of all sides — the Secret Army, the Arab Front and the French Government — to put an end to indiscriminate murder. Furthermore, it seemed to him that men like Colonel Broussard, Le Hir, Boussid and Ali La Joconde were far too canny in the ways of terrorism and counterterrorism to allow themselves to be caught out by an elementary ruse.
At first the thing that worried him most was his being unable to contact his office in London. It was one of Broussard’s conditions that not a hint of the proposed peace talks should reach the Press. Neil had been allowed merely to cable Winston St. Leger at the Miramar to say that he was leaving the city for a trip into the Bled for a few days. He had missed the Saturday night deadline and could send Foster no final report on how the crisis had looked at the weekend.
The situation in the city remained ominously stagnant. On the Friday evening a cruiser had sailed into the harbour and anchored. By next morning it had been joined by two destroyers, and there were now rumours of a naval blockade. The frontiers and the airport stayed closed during the whole weekend; and reinforcements, rushed from the French zone of Germany, had continued to pour in until Saturday night. On Sunday afternoon helicopters had droned over the barricades, dropping leaflets which appealed to the rebels to surrender honourably and not to obey ‘dissident, treacherous officers whose names are a disgrace to the French nation’.
For these four days Neil was kept virtually under house-arrest. He was brought excellent meals prepared by Nadia, but was allowed to leave the flat only to make his visits to
