Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

`We need those names and addresses,' Cassin interjected.

`Shit!' Hugon spoke the word with venom. 'I was just going to tell you-I made a carbon copy when I typed out the list. I put this in an envelope and sent it off yesterday to the address you gave me. And yes, Lennox has left. No! I have no idea where he has gone. I got the idea he's going to see the people on the list…'

`Which country are these people in?'

`Two in Alsace, one in Germany. Goodbye!'

The prefect stopped the machine, still perched on the table with a forgotten Gauloise smoking at the corner of his mouth. It was Guy Florian himself who authorized Marc Grelle to conduct the operation which penetrated Col Lasalle's farmhouse refuge in the Saarland. Normally such an assignment would have been handled by the Surete but the president had told Danchin he wanted Grelle to deal with it. 'I trust Grelle,' he remarked casually, watching the minister wince.

The penetration operation had not been too difficult. Capt. Moreau, who had been given the code-name Hugon, had fled France with Col Lasalle on an impulse; later, as the months went by, as he found himself acting as housekeeper to the colonel, which even included preparing the meals and keeping the house clean, his enthusiasm for exile had waned. Seeing nothing ahead but an empty future, Moreau had snapped up Grelle's secret offer of four thousand francs a month paid into a Paris bank account. 'With indecent haste,' as the prefect had remarked at the time.

When Cassin returned from his breath of fresh air, Grelle left the Surete to drive back to his apartment on the Ile Saint- Louis. The next step would be to circulate Alan Lennox's description to all French frontier checkpoints.

Leon Jouvel. Robert Philip. Dieter Wohl.

The list of names and addresses meant nothing to either Grelle or Boisseau when the envelope containing the typed sheet reached the prefecture on Tuesday morning, 14 December. The envelope arrived in the prefect's hands by a somewhat devious route. As instructed earlier if he had anything to send by post, Hugon-Moreau had sent the envelope to an address in the rue St Antoine near the Place de la Bastille. The rue St Antoine is one of the many 'village' districts which make Paris one of the most complex and varied cities in the world. The envelope was addressed to the owner of a small bar who lived over his business; an ex-police sergeant, he supplemented his income by acting as a post-box for the Surete. Under the circumstances, it would hardly have been discreet for Moreau to send a communication direct to the rue des Saussaies. Warned of its imminent arrival, the bar-owner phoned the Surete when it arrived, who in turn phoned the prefecture. A despatch rider delivered the envelope to Grelle's desk by ten in the morning.

`These people mean nothing to me,' Boisseau told Grelle as they checked the list together. 'Do you think Hugon is inventing information to justify his four thousand francs a month?'

`No, I don't. Look at the German name-Dieter Wohl. I read about him in the file on the Leopard. He was the Abwehr officer in the Lozere during the war. I seem to remember he compiled a diary on the Leopard's activities…'

`In any case,' Boisseau said, sucking on his extinct pipe, 'the Leopard, as I keep reminding you, is dead…'

`So, Boisseau, we have two facts which contradict each other. First, the Leopard's deputy, Petit-Louis, whom we now know to have been Gaston Martin, stated quite categorically that he saw the Leopard walk in through the gates of the Elysee five days ago. That is a fact-he made the statement. Fact two, the Leopard is dead-the record says so. How do we reconcile these two contradictory facts?'

`We check them..'

`Precisely. I want to know everything there is on file about the burial of the Leopard in 1944. I want to know where the grave is, whether a priest attended the funeral, whether he is still alive, who the undertaker was, whether he is still alive- every little detail that you can dig up. Phone my friend Georges Hardy, the police prefect of Lyon. But tell him to keep the inquiry just between me and him… .' His deputy was leaving the office when Grelle called him back. 'And Boisseau, I want the information yesterday…'

The prefect next called in his secretary and dictated a confidential memo to Roger Danchin telling him the contents of the latest message from Hugon-Moreau. When the memo was typed he initialled it and a despatch rider immediately took it to the Place Beauvau. And as has been known to happen before when a subordinate reports to his superior, Grelle censored the report, omitting any reference to the Leopard. Danchin was reading the memo before noon.

Earlier, as soon as he arrived at his office, the prefect started the machinery moving which, in a few hours, would have circulated to all French frontier checkpoints the name and description of Alan Lennox. 'It's odd,' he said to Boisseau, 'I once met a man with this name when I was in Marseilles. Get someone to phone the right man at our embassy in London and try to check him out-with particular reference to his present whereabouts. Alan Lennox-he was an international security expert…'

The headquarters of the BND, the German Federal Intelligence Service is located at Pullach in Bavaria, a small town on the banks of the river Isar six miles south of Munich. On the morning when Grelle received the list of witnesses from Hugon, Peter Lanz called in at his office in the two-storey building which houses senior staff at the unearthly hour of 5 am. Rising so early did not bother Lanz who could easily get by on four hours' sleep a night. As he collected papers from his desk and put them inside a briefcase, his secretary, Frau Schenker, a pretty girl of twenty-seven and the wife of an army officer, came into the room.

`The car has arrived, Herr Lanz. They say the airfield is fogged in…

`They have a flare path, for God's sake!' Lanz grinned to take the edge off his outburst. 'I haven't had coffee yet, so you must excuse me. You can phone me in Bonn up to nine o'clock -if you must!'

`I shall forget you have gone to Bonn,' Frau Schenker replied. She was half in love with her boss, but sensible enough to know that this was really because she spent all day with him and he was so considerate. At least it helped to dispel the feeling of isolation working at Pullach engendered; none of the people who worked at the BND were able to let their friends know their real job.

As Lanz went down to the car, she checked her watch. He would be airborne within thirty minutes.

As Lanz had foreseen, they had to light the flare path before his executive aircraft could take off, then it was climbing steeply through grey murk which was always disturbing: you couldn't rid yourself of the feeling that a large airliner might be heading direct for you. To suppress the fear, Lanz pulled out the table-flap and read the transcript of Col Lasalle's latest broadcast over Europe Number One. The Frenchman had excelled himself.

`The Hawk in Paris is getting ready to take flight… Soon he will alight in the city of the new Tsar whose shadow falls over the ancient and famous cities of Athens, Rome and Lisbon… Is Paris to be the next city to fall under the darkness of this barbaric shadow?'

Which was as good as saying that Paris might soon fall to a Communist coup d'etat. Ridiculous. Lanz scribbled the word in the margin. Chancellor Franz Hauser, whom he was flying to see at the Palais Schaumburg, would be furious at this latest outburst. Every Tuesday morning Lanz flew to Bonn to brief Hauser on the latest international developments as seen by the BND. It was really the job of the BND president to attend this meeting, but the president was now no more than a figurehead. 'That empty old beer barrel,' as Hauser rudely called him, only to correct the description even more rudely. 'I'm wrong, of course. He's always full of beer-that's the trouble.. .