Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

Marc Grelle had made himself an expert on death by assassination-on the methods used, on the people who used them. He had made a particular study of the thirty-one attempts which had been made to assassinate General de Gaulle, on the reasons why they might have succeeded, on the reasons why they failed. The list of techniques employed was formidable.

Killing by remote detonation of explosive charges under a moving vehicle; killing by sniper armed with rifle and telescopic sight; killing at close quarters-by stabbing, by shooting; killing by imposture-by use of a stolen military or police uniform; killing by motor-bike outrider approaching presi- dential car; killing by suicidal air collision-one plane crashing into another carrying the president; killing by absurdly exotic methods-using a camera-gun, using explosive-carrying dogs trained to run to a certain spot where the president was due to speak; and killing by motorized ambush.

The last method was the favourite, and Grelle could see why. The motorized ambush was most deadly because it used highly-trained thugs at short range, men who could react at the last split second according to circumstances. De Gaulle had, in fact, come closest to death when his motorcade was ambushed by other cars. With this catalogue of assassination attempts in his head, Grelle, aided by the tireless Boisseau, set out to counter every one of them. He was still working on the problem when his deputy returned from Strasbourg.

It was nine in the evening, and Boisseau, who had had nothing to eat since lunch, sent out to the corner brasserie for food. He ate his meal at the prefect's desk while he went on reporting about the Strasbourg trip. 'You see,' he continued, Jouvel's suicide is technically sound, no doubt about that, and few people can fake that kind of death. As you know, they would overlook certain details…

`Unless we are confronted with a professional assassin? Which would give rise to all sorts of unpleasant implications…

`What I don't like,' Boisseau remarked, sopping up gravy with a piece of bread, 'is those two men who called on the tart and asked her-quite independently-almost the self-same questions about Jouvel. And that when Jouvel normally had no one calling on him or even interested in him. So, who were those two strangers-to say nothing of the man with the umbrella whom none of the tenants recognized?'

`Face it,' Grelle advised, Jouvel may well have committed suicide and these other people are probably irrelevant. At this end we are getting nowhere yet-neither Roger Danchin nor Alain Blanc have made contact with any known Soviet link. We are at that stage we have encountered on so many cases when everything is a blind alley. We have to wait for a development, a pointer…' He took out from a locked drawer the list of witnesses compiled by Col Lasalle, glancing at it again. Tor all we know the key to the whole thing may be a man we can't even put under surveillance-Dieter Wohl of Freiburg.'

`You could phone Peter Lanz of the BND,' Boisseau suggested. 'He is always very helpful…

`When even here on our home patch we are having to proceed with the secrecy which characterizes conspirators? I dare not start spreading this abroad.' Grelle stretched and yawned. `God, I'm tired. No, we must wait-and hope-for a pointer.'

In a two-storey house beyond the outskirts of Freiburg, the university town on the edge of the Black Forest, the ex Abwehr officer Dieter Wohl, stood by the window of his darkened bedroom as he peered across the fields towards the west, towards France only a few miles away across the Rhine. He was remembering.

A large, well-built man with a strong-jawed face, Wohl was sixty-one years old. As his shrewd blue eyes stared towards Alsace, a faint smile puckered his mouth. It had all been so long ago, so futile. Now there was peace on both sides of the Rhine, thank God; at least he had lived to see that. A retired policeman and widower, Dieter Wohl had plenty of time to think about the past.

It was the banner headline in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung eleven days ago which had first stirred memories, the story about the attempt to assassinate the French president. A shocking business. What had intrigued Wohl had been the name of the woman who had made the attempt, a Lucie Devaud. Curious. That was the name of the woman who had died in the sunken car when the Leopard went into the river. Could there be any connection he wondered?

After reading the newspaper story Wohl had dug out one of his old war diaries from the back of his desk. It had been strictly forbidden by military regulations-to keep a diary- but many soldiers had broken the regulation; even generals and field-marshals who later made a pot of money writing up their memoirs. With all the time in the world on his hands, Wohl read through the whole of the diary for 1944. As he read, it all came back to him.

As a keen young Abwehr officer stationed in the Lozere district of France, Wohl had made up his mind to trap the Leopard. Diligently he picked up every scrap of gossip about the mysterious Resistance leader and recorded it; his passion for secrecy, his remarkable network of agents, his ferocious dog, Cesar-the Leopard's only friend so far as Wohl could gather.

Once-and only once-Wohl had come close to capturing the Leopard when he received a tip-off that his adversary would be driving down a certain country road at a certain time. The ambush was laid on the far side of a bridge over a river the Leopard would have to cross. At this point a thick forest came down steeply to the water's edge and Wohl stationed himself high up among the trees with a pair of field-glasses. It was close to noon on a windy day when he saw the car coming behind a screen of trees, coming at high speed. Through his glasses Wohl saw an image blurred by foliage- and the speed of the approaching vehicle.

`God in Heaven!'

A man was behind the wheel and beside him sat a girl, her hair streaming behind her in the wind. This was something Wohl had not anticipated-a woman in the car-and it worried him as the car came closer to the bridge. She must be a Resistance courier, he imagined. He strained to see detail in his glasses and he was excited. This was the first time anyone had actually seen the Leopard. The trouble was he couldn't see the man's face-everything was blurred by the screen of trees and the vehicle's movement. But he would have to slow down as he came up to the river: there was a sharp bend just before the road went over the bridge. Beyond the far end of the bridge was a road-block.

The Leopard made no effort to slow at all. He was reputed always to move at speed to avoid being shot at. With a scream of tyres and a cloud of dust the vehicle careered round the bend and came up on to the bridge. It was a remarkable piece of driving, Wohl admitted, his eyes glued to the glasses. As the car came out of the dust-cloud half-way across the bridge the Leopard must have seen the road-block. He reacted instantly; still moving at speed he drove into the parapet, smashed through it and went down into the river which at this point was eighteen feet deep. Wohl could hardly believe his eyes as he saw the vehicle disappear and a belated burst of machine-gun fire rattled.

As it plunged the car turned turtle and went down roof first. When it settled on the bottom both the man and the girl must have been upside down as the river surged inside. Wohl was quite sure that the Leopard must now be dead but he took no chances. Using a megaphone he barked out orders and the soldiers began to force their way through the thick under-growth lining the banks. It was three hours later before a breakdown truck equipped with a crane hauled the sunken car slowly to the surface.

Wohl was on the bridge when the car, dripping with water, was swung over and down. He received another shock. There was no trace of the Leopard. But the girl was still there, imprisoned in the front seat, her dark hair plastered to her skull, an attractive girl of about twenty. After a few days, using the Vichy police's fingerprint records, Wohl was able to identify her as Lucie Devaud. The medical examiner told the Abwehr officer that at some recent time she had been delivered of a child.