Colin Forbes - Year of the Golden Ape

The time-bomb, two hundred pounds of gelignite, had totally demolished the house and little that was identifiable was left of the three corpses which had lain inside it. Six people in Nantes knew that Jean-Philippe Antoine had a dental appointment at ten in the morning – he had been careful to tell them this – and it was obvious he had died in the explosion. The force of the bomb was so great it shattered the patient's body, making it impossible to check identity by the most foolproof method known to science -by Antoine's dental records. No teeth were found to check, and in any case his dental records were inside LeCat's jacket pocket.

There were good reasons for the precautions LeCat had taken. In France the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (counter-intelligence) does not like it when key security risks go abroad on unexplained visits. And France had just lost one of her more promising nuclear physicists.

Travelling under different names and carrying false papers, LeCat and Antoine arrived at Dorval airport, Montreal, during a blizzard. There is nothing conspicuous about two Frenchmen arriving in Montreal, a city where French is widely spoken. A car was waiting to take them away the moment they had passed through Immigration and Customs.

LeCat handed Antoine over to Andrd Dupont, who escorted the nuclear physicist to a motel for the night. Dupont and Antoine did not linger in eastern Canada; the following morning they caught a CPR train and stayed aboard until it reached Vancouver on the Pacific coast. On arrival they went straight to a house in Dusquesne Street.

Nor did LeCat linger. Inside the car which met them at Dorval airport was an American, Joseph Walgren, a fifty-year-old ex-accountant LeCat had got to know rather well when he was living in Denver in 1968. Walgren, a round-faced man with wary eyes, had given up accountancy years earlier when he muddled up a client's money with his own bank account. Since then his method of earning a living had not been completely legal. Twenty-four hours after LeCat's arrival in Montreal, Walgren drove him over the border into the States. They were heading for Illinois, a part of America Walgren knew well. They had the man to make the nuclear device. Now they needed the material.

Extract from transcript of Columbia Broadcasting System's television '60 Minutes' report, August 101973 ·

Dr John Gofman: 'Any reasonably capable physicist, say, getting out of a university with a Ph. D., I would estimate would be able to come up with a design to use plutonium in a bomb in a very short time…'

Carole Bannermann was driving too fast for the road, for the weather, for her own safety. In Illinois, ten miles from the city of Morris, the highway was awash from an earlier flash-flood as rain swept across it, great driving sweeps of rain which passed her headlight beams in the night like moving curtains. Recklessly, because she was late for the party, she kept her speedometer needle at sixty, five above the regulation fifty-five.

At nine in the evening in March the highway was deserted; few people took the car out at night during the present energy crisis – not since gas had been rationed. Carole, fair-haired – her mother had named her after Lombard – had no patience with the gas situation. You were twenty only once in a lifetime and she was going to make the most of her natural resources. To hell with the energy crisis. She pressed her foot down, the speedometer climbed, the rain curtains whipped past her headlights probing the darkness.

She was reckless, but she had split-second reflexes, and she believed in watching the road ahead. Beyond her headlights another light was flashing, like a torch waving up and down as it signalled frantically. Hell, some hitch-hiker nut – standing in the middle of the highway. She lost speed, getting ready to pick it up again, to drive round the man in the night when she could locate him precisely. Pick up a guy at this hour, after dark – in the middle of nowhere? He must be out of his crazy mind…

Carole's eyes narrowed and she lost more speed, travelling at less than thirty as the headlight beams hit the silhouette of an armoured truck parked broadside on across the highway. It must have skidded, turned through ninety degrees, and then stopped like a barricade across the highway. The beams shone on a driver or guard standing on the highway, wearing helmet, leather tunic and boots, which gave him a para-military look. She felt reassured as she stopped and the man walked towards her in the rain, staying inside the headlight beams.

A security truck is reassuring – like a security guard or a highway patrolman. He was still carrying the heavy torch he had flashed as he came closer, rain streaking his visor which hid the upper half of his face. Carole was reassured, but still conscious enough of the loneliness of the place to keep her motor running. She lowered the window as he came up on her side and leaned an elbow on the cartop while he looked down at her. He had, she noticed, glanced into the back of her Dodge.

Rain from his visor dripped on the short, wide-shouldered man's chest as he looked down without speaking. She kept her hand on the brake. 'We hit a flash-flood,' he explained. 'Jo braked too hard and there we were – turned on a dime like you see us. With the motor stopped…'

He spoke with an accent she couldn't place and she frowned. What did he expect her to do? She seemed to have heard that these security trucks carried a radio link, so why did he need help? She was still uncertain, not sure why she was uncertain, when the security man moved. He brought down the heavy torch he had been holding as he leaned against the cartop with a crushing blow. It struck her on the temple with such force she died instantly.

Studying her for a moment as she lay slumped in the seat, LeCat opened the door, and hauled her half way out of the car, propping her head against the wheel. Then he stood up and flashed the torch three times rapidly in the direction of the parked truck.

The second armoured truck was moving down the highway at fifty-five miles an hour, keeping inside the regulation limit as its headlights shone on the driving rain. The driver, Ed Taglia, was not wearing his helmet, which lay on the seat beside him, which was against regulations. Beyond the helmet sat Bill Gibson, who always wore his helmet.

This speed limit chews me up,' Taglia said as he stared at the highway ahead. 'Why build freeways and then make us crawl? Screw those A-rabs…'

'There's an energy crisis…'

'Screw that. I want to get home…'

With what we have aboard, fifty-five is fast enough,' the older man observed. 'If you turn her over and the truck busts open…'

Taglia was tired and didn't reply. When you got old, you got old. You slowed down with women and you slowed down with cars. Gibson was all of fifty years old. Screw Gibson for coming on the trip. On his own Taglia would have pressed his foot down and to hell with it. He squinted through the windscreen where the wipers were just coping with the cloudburst.

'Trouble,' Gibson said quietly. 'Don't stop – just drive slow until we see what it's made of…'

'Stop leaning on me – I know the routine…'

Like Carole Bannermann had done, he was reducing speed as he came up closer to the flashing torch waving about in the middle of the highway. With one hand he jammed the helmet on his head and snapped the catch under his jaw. Gibson reached for the mike, switched it on. 'Angel One calling Roosevelt… Angel One calling Roosevelt…' He repeated the call back to base in Morris several times and then gave a grunt of disgust. 'Must be the storm – Goddam thing is full of static…'

Taglia was moving slowly now, approaching what lay ahead with extreme caution. Then he whistled. 'One of us…' In front his lights picked out a grisly scene. Another armoured truck sat broadside across the highway, its hood tucked inside the rear door of a green Dodge. The front door of the car was open and a blonde-haired girl lay sprawled half in and half out of the car, sprawled on her back with her head propped up against the wheel.