Colin Forbes - Year of the Golden Ape

'You are leaving tonight,' LeCat said abruptly. 'You will be driven from here after dark.'

Antoine was surprised at the suddenness of his departure, and a worry he had been nursing for some time came to the surface. 'The fifty thousand dollars…'

'I shall bring it here in a few hours. We do not want you travelling back the same way you came – across Canada. I have to drive you into the States by a devious route to Seattle. From there you will catch a train to Chicago and you will enter Canada again from America. Then we are finished with you.'

Antoine, clever enough at his own job, did not fully understand the reasons for this, but the complexity of the plan impressed him. Except for one question. 'I can enter America without a visa?'

'Of course! You forget – you are now a Canadian citizen with your new passport. Canadians can go across the border as often as they like – they only have to show their passport. I will see you this evening …'

LeCat left the house with the suitcase and drove to the ferry point where he crossed to Victoria. He took a cab to the wharf where the trawler Pecheur was anchored and spent some time aboard the vessel. Most of the time he spent chatting to the French captain while the hours passed, and during his stay he enjoyed a typically French meal of endless duration. It was after dark when he arrived back at the house on Dusquesne Street with another suitcase.

'You can count it if you like,' LeCat said, 'but we have a long journey ahead of us…'

Fifty thousand dollars. Antoine opened several of the hundred dollar bill packets inside the suitcase and checked the currency with a feeling of embarrassment – and relief – which amused Le-Cat. Then he closed the case, locked it, put the key inside his wallet. 'I suppose I'd better bank it a little at a time?'

'That's right,' LeCat said amiably. 'Keep the rest inside a safety deposit. And now, if you're ready…'

LeCat suggested putting the suitcase in the boot of the car, but Antoine said he would prefer to ride in the back with the case beside him. LeCat shrugged, climbed behind the wheel, and they drove off, leaving Dupont and the engineer, Varrier, to remove the laboratory equipment Antoine had dismantled and packed up. They drove east out of the city in the darkness, up into the mountains.

LeCat shot Antoine three times through the chest when they had stopped by the side of a lake. He weighted the body with chains he had concealed under canvas in the boot, put it inside a small boat moored to the water's edge, and rowed the boat far out. Antoine was dropped in the lake, which at this point was over one hundred feet deep, and LeCat returned to the car and the suitcase containing fifty thousand dollars.

LeCat did not take the money for himself: it was part of the arrangement with Ahmed Riad – who had hired him in Algiers -that this amount would be used to pay the French crew of the trawler Pecheur; one-third to be paid now, the balance of two-thirds to be handed over when the trawler had served its ultimate purpose.

When he returned to the Pecheur, Andre Dupont was waiting for him, and a powerful launch was putting out to sea in the middle of the night with the crates of laboratory equipment aboard. Like the man who had used the equipment, the crates would be dropped overboard in deep water. A perfectionist for detail, LeCat checked to make sure Dupont had not overlooked anything.

His subordinate had not overlooked anything. While LeCat had driven off with the nuclear physicist, Dupont had thoroughly dusted the rooms in the house Antoine had used, wiping away all fingerprints. He had then Hoovered the basement and the other rooms to remove any particles or clothing threads a police scientist might find interesting – the police scientist, if he ever came, would himself use a special Hoover in search of the evidence Dupont had so carefully removed. The Hoover went overboard with the laboratory equipment.

Nor was it likely that the police would visit the building on Dusquesne Street for the next few months, because LeCat had taken a year's lease on the premises. After checking the place personally the following morning, LeCat locked it up and went back to the trawler with Dupont.

The cognac has been delivered.

LeCat cabled the message to an address in Paris from where it was sent by a devious route to Sheikh Gamal Tafak who was at that moment at Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. For 'cognac' Tafak read the phrase 'nuclear device'. Earlier he had received two other similarly cryptic messages from LeCat, one reporting the 'death' of Antoine in Nantes, the other confirming the seizure of the plutonium canister. The day after he had sent his latest message, LeCat flew back to Europe. It was November, time to bring the Englishman, Winter, into his stage of the operation.

Winter.

The background of the English adventurer with whom LeCat had previously worked for two years was totally unknown. He had appeared in the Mediterranean one day, materialising out of nowhere, a man looking for a job which paid well, where the rewards would be tax-free, a job with a hint of excitement to ward off the boredom which was always threatening to assail him. He had first met LeCat in Tangier.

No one ever knew his real name, and no one ever came close enough to call him by his first name, whatever that might have been. In the Mediterranean underworld where this Englishmanearned his living he was simply known as Winter.

Over six feet tall, in his early thirties, he was lightly built and walked with a brisk step. There was a coldness in his steady brown eyes his associates found disconcerting, an aloofness of manner which discouraged any attempt at intimacy, but within a few minutes of first meeting him, people formed the impression that this glacial Englishman was clever. His personality had a certain hypnotic effect; an adventurer, he always seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

At that time LeCat was looking for a partner he could trust, which automatically ruled out all his previous associates. And Winter had reduced the problem the Frenchman outlined to its bones in a few words. 'You want to smuggle cigarettes from Tangier to Naples? Forget powerboats and yachts – everyone uses them. Be different – use a trawler.'

'A trawler?' LeCat had been staggered as they drank wine in a bar overlooking Tangier harbour. 'This is crazy – a trawler has no speed. Anyone can catch you.'

'If they are looking for you…'

Winter worked it out for LeCat inside ten minutes, the new twist to cigarette smuggling which proved so profitable. The Italian police and security services knew exactly what type of vessel to look for – as LeCat had said, you used a power-boat or, a fast yacht. Winter proposed obtaining a 1,000-ton trawler, a vessel where a large consignment of cigarettes, say as much as one hundred tons, could easily be hidden under eight hundred tons of fish.

No attempt would be made to get the consignment ashore in the dark from small boats, the normal technique – instead they would sail into Naples in broad daylight as a bona-fide fishing vessel. Who would suspect a trawler? As everyone knew, for smuggling you needed a fast boat…

When Winter raised the question of finance, LeCat admitted he was an agent for the French Syndicate, a group of Marseilles businessmen who were not always over-concerned with legality. In a very short time LeCat purchased a 1,000-ton trawler, Pecheur, with funds provided by the French Syndicate, and the crew of so-called fishermen were largely made up of LeCat's ex-OAS terrorist friends. The smuggling operation proved highly profitable – until the Italian Syndicate began making menacing noises.

'One night these people will meet us off the Naples coast,' LeCat warned. 'They think we are poaching on their preserve. And their method of discouraging opposition is likely to be swift and permanent …'