Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

`The way things are,' Nash commented, 'it sends shivers up my spine how close Florian came to death. If France were plunged into chaos at this particular moment, God knows how Russia might try to take advantage of the situation. We've got to find out who was behind that attempt…

Andrew MacLeish, Nash's nominal superior, a thin, austere fifty-year-old, broke in irritably. He hated New York and counted every minute spent there as time out of his life. 'You think this nut, Lasalle, has any idea of what he's talking about? For my money he's got his knife into Florian and just enjoys twisting it at random. By my count this is his tenth anti-Florian broadcast in six months…

`The tenth,' Nash agreed. 'Incidentally, I've accepted his invitation to meet with him.'

`What invitation?' MacLeish demanded. 'This is the first I've heard you've had any contact with that psychopath…

`Even psychopaths sometimes know a thing or two,' Nash remarked. 'Col Lasalle approached me through the Brussels embassy late this morning, our time. He says he has some vital information about what's really happening inside Paris but he'll only talk to a representative from Washington-face to face. And we have to keep very quiet about this…

`I don't think we ought to get mixed up with psychopathic exiles,' MacLeish repeated. He looked out of the window where he could just see a section of the Triborough Bridge through the skeletal framework of a new high-rise. They argued about it for over an hour, but in the end Nash wore them down. It was Washington which was becoming psychopathic in Nash's view; with the military and most of the administration against the troop withdrawal from Europe which Congress had forced on them, it was becoming even more important to know what was really happening in Europe, to warn their ex-allies of any dangerous development they could uncover.

On the following day Nash flew to Europe to meet the man Guy Florian had ruined.

Col Rene Baptiste Lasalle, ex-assistant chief of French military counter-intelligence, had recently been called 'an extinct volcano' by Guy Florian, but for a man whose career was abruptly ended when it seemed almost certain he would soon be promoted to the exalted rank of general, the volcano remained remarkably active. Certainly the rumbling of Col Lasalle was heard clearly enough in Paris.

Six months before Lucie Devaud tried to shoot Guy Florian in the Faubourg St Honore, Lasalle had quarrelled violently with the president and had to flee France overnight; it was rumoured he was about to be arrested for conspiring against the president. Driving his own car, Lasalle crashed through a frontier control post east of Metz at four in the morning and took refuge in West Germany. From the moment of his arrival in the Federal Republic he set about organizing a campaign of rumours to discredit the man who had ruined him. As his instrument he chose Europe Number One, the independent radio station with its transmitters in the Saarland.

At the time when David Nash flew from New York to meet him secretly, Col Lasalle was fifty-five years old. Small, compact and lean-faced, he now made his way through life with only one arm: his left arm had been blown clean off his shoulder by a landmine in Algeria in 1962. At that time a captain in army counter-intelligence, Lasalle had proved himself the most brilliant officer in the French Army when it came to rooting out Arab underground leaders. Within twenty-four hours of his arm being taken away from him, his family was also taken away: a terrorist threw a bomb into the living-room of his villa, killing his wife and seven-year-old son. Lying in hospital, his reaction was typical when he heard the news.

`Since my private life is finished I shall devote the rest of my time to France-to help preserve her way of life. It is the only thing left to me…

Immediately his convalescence was over, he returned from Marseilles to North Africa. The convalescence in itself was remarkable. Finding his sense of balance faulty, Lasalle took to walking in the Estoril mountains with a stick, leaping over deep ravines to find a new balance. 'When survival is at stake,' he said later, 'the body adjusts itself wonderfully…' He went back to Algeria just in time to detect and foil the most determined effort up to date to assassinate General de Gaulle. Then, years later, came the clash with Florian.

Now, exiled to the Saarland, living in a farmhouse close to Saarbrucken-close also to the French border-Lasalle broadcast regularly over Europe Number One, the radio station on German soil listened to by millions inside France. And the loss of one arm seemed to have increased the electric energy of this small man who boasted he had never been idle for a day in his life. The target of his virulent broadcasting campaign was Guy Florian.

`Why is he going to visit Soviet Russia on 23 December? What is the real motive behind this visit? Why is he going there of all places at a time when Europe is threatened by the looming shadow of the Red Army as never before. Who is the cabinet minister about whom whispers are spreading in Paris?..

Never once did Lasalle refer to Florian by name. Always he referred to 'he', to 'this man', until gradually it dawned on Paris that Lasalle was not only an expert counter-intelligence officer; he had now become a master of poisonous political propaganda who was threatening to undermine the foundations of Florian's regime. This was the man who had quietly indicated to the Americans that he wanted to speak to a trustworthy intelligence official.

On the night of Thursday, 9 December, the same day when in New York David Nash informed MacLeish that he would be flying to Europe to interview Col Rene Lasalle, a short, grizzle- haired man in shabby clothes arrived in the Faubourg St Honore and took up a position opposite the Elysee Palace. He was standing at the exact spot on the kerb where, twenty-four hours earlier, Lucie Devaud had fallen into the gutter when Marc Grelle's bullets hit her in the chest. No one took any notice of him, and if the uniformed garde republicaine on duty outside the Elysee gave him even a moment's thought he must have assumed that this was just another voyeur, one of those macabre people who delight in goggling at the scene of an attempted crime.

The shabbily-clothed man arrived at 7.3o pm, when it was dark.

In his middle sixties, his face lined and worn and with a straggle of grey moustache, he was still standing there at 8.30 pm, when, as if in a daze, he suddenly stepped into the street without looking. The car coming at speed only a few metres away had no time to pull up; the man must have loomed in front of the driver's windscreen without warning. The vehicle hit the pedestrian a terrible blow, drove on over him and accelerated down the street, disappearing in the direction of Madeleine. Fifteen minutes later an ambulance with siren screaming rushed him to the Hotel-Dieu on the Ile de la Cite. On arrival a doctor examined the patient and said he would be lucky to last the night.

On Thursday, g December, having got rid of his visitors from Washington, David Nash consulted a road map of western Europe, checked distances and promptly decided to fly across the Atlantic the same night. If he caught Pan Am flight 92 leaving New York at 5.45 pm, he could be in Brussels early next day, which should give him time to drive to Luxembourg -where he had arranged to meet Lasalle-and back again to catch another night flight from Brussels to New York. He boarded flight 92 by the skin of his teeth and then relaxed in his first-class seat as the Boeing 707 climbed steadily towards thirty thousand feet above the Long Island coast.

Nash had a tight schedule ahead of him, He was not only going to meet Lasalle on the neutral ground of Luxembourg; he had also arranged to meet his German counterpart, Peter Lanz, with whom he maintained a close and cordial relationship. After all, the French fugitive colonel was residing in Germany and it had been one of Lanz's more delicate duties to keep an eye on his electric visitor who had fled from the territory of Germany's closest ally.