Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

`You look like a mandarin in that dragon-embossed robe,' Blanc remarked. 'I'm issuing certain instructions and may need your authority to confirm them. I'll explain later-we have a minor emergency and the president has issued orders he must not be disturbed. Very sensible-he has a long trip tomorrow. Now..'

This was the old Alain Blanc speaking, the man who had planned Guy Florian's rise to power, who had kept his nerve in every political crisis. With Lamartine at his side, he proceeded methodically, informing the underground communications bunker at Taverny outside Paris-the bunker designed to operate under conditions of nuclear warfare-that until further notice they could act on no orders from any quarter without his counter-signature. 'From any quarter,' he repeated.

`I have Gen Lamartine by my side who will confirm what I have just said…' Putting his hand over the receiver he saw that Lamartine was hesitating. 'Get on with it,' he said sharply, `I haven't got all night…

Inside ten minutes Blanc had frozen the movement of all the French armed forces-not a single tank, plane or ship could move without his express sanction. Blanc had also spoken to French headquarters at Baden-Baden and Sedan-and his orders were that once through the Ardennes the two armoured divisions were to turn round immediately and move at speed back through the Ardennes to Germany. To ensure the order was carried out he had removed Chassou, Florian's general, from command and replaced him by Gen Crozier. Chassou was placed under close arrest by the military governor of Metz.

Seated by his side, Lamartine confirmed each order, not sure of what was going on, but it was impossible even for Lamartine to suggest approaching the Elysee-which had been sealed off. Blanc, the master manipulator, was turning Florian's weapon of isolation against him. By three o'clock the job was done. The crisis would come in the morning if the president heard of what had happened while he slept.

Now quite alone in his apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis, Marc Grelle, haggard and unshaven, still wearing his polo-necked sweater and slacks, smoked and studied a series of reports and diagrams. They showed all the security precautions he had mounted to protect the president during his coming motorcade drive to the airport. As he had done so often before, Grelle was checking for a loophole, some open door he had omitted to close through which an assassin might walk. He wished he had Boisseau by his side, but this was one operation he could only work on alone. Occasionally he glanced at the framed photograph of a woman perched on a near-by grand piano, a photograph of his late wife, Pauline.

Some ambitious officials in France take good care to marry rich wives; money can advance a career. Grelle had married a girl whose family was of very modest means, and then out of the blue, shortly before she had been killed in the motor crash, Pauline had inherited a small fortune from a relative she had not even known existed. 'I'd love to buy an apartment on the Quai Bethune,' she had said one day. 'It's the only extravagance I've ever craved…' Shortly afterwards she had been killed.

As police prefect, Grelle had automatically been provided with an apartment inside the prefecture, but after Pauline's death he had purchased this place; not so much because he wanted it, but he thought she would have been happy to know he was living there. His eyes strayed more frequently to the photograph as he went on struggling with the problem; he was wondering what she would have thought of it all. At 4 am, suddenly aware that the room was choking, he got up and opened the window, then he stood there looking across the Seine, breathing in fresh air to alert his brain. He had still not found a loophole.

No airport in the world was ever more heavily guarded than Charles de Gaulle Airport on the morning of 23 December. The presidential Concorde-looking in the half-light of near-dawn like a huge, evil bird-waited on the tarmac, already fully fuelled for its long flight to Moscow. In a few hours, at 10.30 am precisely, the aircraft would lift off at a critical angle of forty-five degrees, its vulture-like head arched as it headed for fifty thousand feet.

And already the presidential pilot, Captain Pierre Jubal, who had got up from his bed in his expensive flat in Passy at 5.30, had arrived at the airport the French often call Roissy because it was built near the village of Roissy-en-France. Driving himself the twenty-five kilometres from Paris to the airport, Jubal had been stopped three times at checkpoints along Autoroute A 1, the highway over which the presidential motorcade would pass later.

`This bloody security,' he snapped to his co-pilot, Lefort, as he got out of his Alfa Romeo, 'this bloody security is insane. Do they really believe someone is going to take a pot-shot at him?'

Lefort shrugged. 'In a bar last night I heard someone say Florian will never reach Roissy alive.'

The airport had been closed to all civil aircraft from midnight, an unprecedented step even for the protection of a head of state. 'It's that police prefect, Grelle,' Jubal grumbled as he walked towards the waiting aircraft. 'He's power-mad. Look at all that…'

He waved his hand towards the huge circular building which is the centre-piece of the world's most advanced airport. Silhouetted against the growing light, uniformed men of the Air Transport Gendarmerie patrolled the roof of the building with their automatic weapons. The two men passed a scout-car mounted with a machine gun. Surrounding the circular building are the seven satellites, the separate modernistic departure centres where passengers board their aircraft after travelling on underground travelator belts. Jubal gestured towards the roof of a satellite where the same sinister silhouettes patrolled. `The man's a maniac,' he growled.

`There has already been one attempt on President Florian,' Lefort reminded his superior. 'And, as I've just told you, in a bar last night there was a strong rumour..

`You shouldn't have been in a bar last night,' Jubal rapped. `You should have been in bed like I was, getting my kip… `With Jacqueline"

As the pale early morning light spread over the plain in which Charles de Gaulle Airport stands, Concorde was emerging in stronger silhouette, looking more than ever like a rapacious bird crouched for take-off. In three hours she would be on her way, climbing towards the stratosphere, taking the president of the French Republic on his historic flight to Soviet Russia.

Just before 9.30 am on 23 December the city of Paris was like a frozen tableau where shortly the curtain would rise on great events. Every intersection leading on to the route the presidential motorcade would follow had been closed on Grelle's orders. At every intersection truckloads of CRS troops waited with the engines running. Behind every intersection 'dragon's teeth' of steel chain had been thrown across the incoming roads, blocking off any vehicle which might try to rush the presidential convoy.

Crowds lined the route, kept well back from the road by a maze of crash barriers erected by gendarmes in the middle of the night with the aid of arc-lights mounted on trucks. The crowds were strangely silent, as though expecting something dramatic and tragic to happen. Some of them had tuned in transistor radios to Europe Number One; Col Lasalle was expected to make yet another broadcast shortly. Occasionally, as they waited on that crisp, clear December morning-only two days away from Christmas-they looked behind to the rooftops where police patrolled the skyline like prison camp guards.

At other times the crowd stared above into the sky, which was also guarded. Over the route a fleet of helicopters flew backwards and forwards at a height of one hundred feet, their engines thumping, disappearing out of earshot and then returning again. And all these elements in the vast cordon-on the ground, on the rooftops, in the air itself-were linked by radio to central control at the prefecture on the Ile de la Cite. Boisseau was the man in direct control of the huge operation, waiting in the office Grelle had loaned him for the first radio report to come in.