Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

Wohl was hesitant at first, trying to decide whether seeing Bouvier would help him with his memoirs, then it struck him that a little advance publicity could do no harm, so he agreed. Lennox took a cab to the ex-Abwehr officer's remote house and Wohl was waiting for him at the door. A cautious man, Wohl sat his visitor down in the living-room and then asked for some identification. Lennox produced his papers. 'Anyone can get a press card printed,' he said easily.

It took half an hour to coax Wohl into a trusting frame of mind, but when Lennox mentioned the Leopard he saw a flicker in the German's eyes. 'This is something I am concentrating on,' Lennox explained. 'I find it excellent copy-the mystery surrounding the Leopard's real identity. It was never cleared up, was it?'

Wohl went over to his desk where part of a hand-written manuscript lay alongside a worn, leather-bound diary. For fifteen minutes he told Lennox in precise detail all the steps he had taken to track down the Resistance leader during 1944. Lennox had filled a dozen pages of his notebook with shorthand, had decided that the German really had no information of value, when Wohl mentioned the incident when he had almost ambushed the Leopard. At the end of the story he gave the name of the girl who had died in the submerged car. Lucie Devaud.

`It was a shocking business,' Wohl remarked, 'leaving the girl to drown like that. The car was in eighteen feet of water, my men were some distance from where it went over the bridge. I'm convinced he could have saved her had he tried. He didn't try…'

`Lucie Devaud,' Lennox repeated. 'That was the name of the woman who tried to kill Guy Florian. I suppose there's no possible connection?'

`I wondered about that myself,' Wohl admitted. 'Annette Devaud was very close to the Leopard-she was in charge of his brilliant team of couriers. I understand she went blind soon after the war…

Lennox sat very still, saying nothing. Col Rene Lasalle had made a passing reference to Annette Devaud, dismissing her as of no importance because of her blindness. Could the French colonel have slipped up here-if Annette had indeed been so close to the Leopard?

`I wrote to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last week,' Wohl continued, 'and I mentioned the incident of the drowned girl. I also mentioned that another Devaud-Annette-who was involved with the Leopard, might still be alive in France. I even gave her last-known address, which perhaps I should not have done. Here it is. Annette Devaud, Woodcutter's Farm, Saverne, Alsace. It was a long time ago but some French people stay in one place for ever…'

Wohl showed Lennox the address at the back of the war diary where he had underlined it several times. 'Living alone as I do,' he said apologetically, 'I get funny ideas. Only last night I thought some people were watching my house. And then there was that peculiar phone call from the market research people…' As he went on talking, Lennox listened.

`… in fact, Wohl only mentioned it in passing, but considering what happened in Strasbourg and Colmar, it just made me wonder…' At four in the afternoon Lennox had met Peter Lanz in a bedroom of the Hotel Colombi in Freiburg soon after the BND chief had flown there from Bonn, and now he was telling the German about his meeting with Dieter Wohl. Earlier, Lanz had told the Englishman about the opening up of the Leopard's grave in a forest near Lyon, about how the French police had found only the skeleton of a hound inside the Resistance leader's coffin.

`This is what has turned a vague disquiet into alarm and crisis,' the BND official explained. 'It now seems probable that Lasalle had been right all along-that somewhere in Paris a top Communist is working close to Florian, maybe only waiting for the president to leave the capital for his visit to Moscow..

`I suppose it's confidential-how you heard about the exhumation of the Leopard's grave?' Lennox hazarded.

`It's confidential,' the German assured him.

He saw no advantage in revealing to Lennox that it was Col Lasalle who had passed the information to him. And Lanz himself had no inkling of the colonel's source which had passed on the news to Lasalle. Georges Hardy, police prefect of Lyon and Marc Grelle's great friend, had for some time disagreed violently with Guy Florian's policies, and to express this disagreement he had been secretly furnishing Lasalle with information about developments inside France.

Lennox had then reported to Lanz on his interview with Dieter Wohl, ending by describing the curious incidents of the previous day the ex-Abwehr officer had described. 'I gather he was looking out of a bedroom window last night in the dark when he saw this car stop outside,' he went on. 'It just reminded me of the man I saw following Leon Jouvel that night in Strasbourg. I suppose it isn't possible that someone has Dieter Wohl under observation? Then there was the peculiar telephone call. After all, two of the three men on Lasalle's list have already died suddenly. And it's damned lonely where he lives…

`If by a long chance you are right,' Lanz suggested, 'this could be a breakthrough. If we grab hold of someone trying to put Wohl out of the way, too, we can find out who is behind this whole business.'

`It's a very slim hope,' Lennox warned.

`What else have we got?' Lanz demanded. He was well aware he was grasping at straws, but Chancellor Hauser had said he wanted positive information immediately. From the hotel bedroom he phoned the police chief of Freiburg.

The Mercedes SL 230 hired in Kehl pulled in at the kerb close to Freiburg station and Vanek lit a cigarette as he watched people coming off a train. Nearing the end of the Commando's mission, the Czech had become mistrustful of hotels and the previous night the three men had slept in the car at the edge of the Black Forest, muffled up in travelling rugs they had purchased in Freiburg. Puffy-eyed and irritable, both Brunner and Lansky showed the minor ravages of their improvised night's rest. Vanek, on the other hand, who could get by with only catnapping, looked as fresh as on the morning when they had crossed the Czech border at Gmund.

`We have no time or need for any more research,' Vanek said. `Wohl lives alone. We know he is there every evening. We have checked the immediate surroundings where he lives. We will visit him tonight.'

Inspector Gruber of the Freiburg police took every possible precaution: without knowing what might happen, half- convinced that nothing at all would happen, he mounted a formidable operation. At Lanz's suggestion twenty men, all armed with automatic weapons, had thrown a loose cordon round the vicinity of Dieter Wohl's house-loose because they wanted anyone who approached the house to slip inside the net before they tightened it. So observation had to be from a distance and the nearest policeman was over a hundred metres from the building.

Six men were held back in a special reserve force, hidden inside a truck which had been backed into a field and parked behind trees. Communications were excellent; every man was equipped with a walkie-talkie which linked him with a control truck half a kilometre up the road to Freiburg and inside a field. Inside the truck the BND chief sat with Lennox, Inspector Gruber and the communications technician; a transceiver perched on a flap table linked them with the walkie-talkie sets.

To try and counter the distance problem-the fact that they had to stay well back from Wohl's house-Gruber had issued several men with night-glasses for scanning the house. His orders were specific: they must let anyone who approached reach the house, then close in on command from Gruber personally. Everything really depended on how well the men with the night-glasses were able to operate. And all traffic was to be allowed to pass along the road. Any attempt to set up checkpoints would have been useless: they had no idea who they were waiting for, whether in fact there was anyone to wait for.