Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

`That's enough for today,' Borisov announced as he poured French cognac from a bottle. 'You're improving,' he added grudgingly.

With typical bravado Vanek raised his glass to the photograph on the wall. 'To our meeting, my dear colonel…'

Card Vanek was thirty-one years old, a tall, lean and bony- faced man with very dark hair and a neat dark moustache. A natural athlete, his quick-moving dark eyes stared back insolently as the Russian studied him. Vanek knew that he was good at his job, that the Russian disliked him but also recognized his ability, which made everything so much the better; and the way to keep Borisov in his place was to push the training even harder than the Russian wished. 'We'll repeat the night exercise,' Vanek said abruptly. 'Running a man down in the dark is even trickier.'

In Russia they have a word for the Czechs which means 'the smart people, too clever by half…' And this summed up the Russian trainer's opinion of his protege. On the other hand, Borisov was thinking, Vanek was definitely the man to lead this Soviet Commando; he had all the qualifications. Five years earlier Vanek had been attached to the security unit at the Czech Embassy on Avenue Charles-Floquet near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Like so many Czechs, Vanek was an excellent linguist: he spoke French, German and English fluently. And when the three-man team was given the signal to leave for the west they would travel as Frenchmen, speaking that language and equipped with French papers.

Vanek had other useful skills, too-besides those of the trained assassin he had perfected at the training centre. A handsome man, bold and confident in manner, the Czech was attractive to women, which at times proved highly convenient. After all, the way to a man was so often through his woman. And finally, Borisov thought as he smoked his Gauloise, Vanek had a cold streak which enabled him to kill a man and sleep well after the act. This had been proved when he had travelled to Istanbul to kill a Soviet cipher clerk who had developed an appetite for American dollars. Vanek had choked the man to death and then thrown him from a balcony into the Bosphorus one dark night.

Much as it went against the grain, Borisov the Russian had to admit that the three Czechs, led by Vanek, made an ideal assassination Commando. And although Borisov could not have known it, the specification for the Commando leader was not at all unlike the specification David Nash had laid down for choosing a man to go into France. Fluency in French, knowledge of France, the ability to pass as a Frenchman-and whereas Nash had insisted on a non-American, so the three members of the Russian Politburo who had sanctioned the mission had added their own proviso: the men who made up the Commando must be non-Russian. If anything were to go wrong, the real power behind the operation must never be exposed.

`When the hell are we going to leave to visit this Col Lasalle?' Vanek demanded.

`Soon,' Borisov replied, 'the signal will come soon…'

On the same evening when Alan Lennox in London received the phone call from David Nash, two hundred miles away in Paris Marc Grelle sat up late in his bachelor apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis reading an old and dusty file. It was the file on the Leopard.

Andre Boisseau, who lived in the rue Monge, spent the earlier part of the evening with the prefect, and since he had read the file earlier they compared notes. In the Second World War every single member of the Resistance had worked under a false name-to protect his family and his friends. Normally another French surname was chosen at random; sometimes a man would be known by a false Christian name; and certain high-ranking army officers labelled themselves with geometrical symbols such as Hypotenuse. But the Leopard was different: he had taken the name of a savage animal as though to stress his uniqueness.

`I think the choice of the name indicates a supreme self- confidence,' Boisseau remarked. 'One of those people who kids himself up he's a man of destiny…

The Leopard had certainly had a remarkable-although brief-career. In his earliest twenties-one of the few facts known about this elusive figure-he had commanded one of the most powerful Resistance groups in the Massif Central, operating in the departments of Lozere and Haute-Loire. He distinguished himself from other Resistance leaders by his brilliance and ruthlessness; there had been something almost Napoleonic in the way he had descended out of nowhere on the enemy, destroyed him, and then vanished again.

The Leopard's extraordinary success was based on a widespread intelligence system. He had agents everywhere-in the Vichy police, in the telephone exchanges where operators plugged in to enemy calls, on the railways where the staff reported on the movement of munition and troop trains, and inside the Milice, a Vichy organization of vicious thugs and collaborators.

He had even planted someone inside the Abwehr, the enemy counter-intelligence organization.

`Perhaps we ought to be looking for someone who is an expert on intelligence and security apparatuses,' Boisseau suggested.

The prefect grunted and continued reading. The thick file went on endlessly describing the Leopard's achievements, but the weird thing was, there was hardly a hint of what he looked like. There were reasons for this. The Communist leader had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that no one-not even his close associates-had any idea of his personal appearance. There was one exception: a deputy, code-named Petit-Louis, had gone everywhere with him, issuing instructions while the Leopard stayed out of sight.

`He was over six feet tall and not much more than twenty at the time, which would put him in his early fifties now if he had survived,' Grelle pointed out. 'And that's all we do know about this ghost…

`Petit-Louis probably knew what he looked like,' Boisseau remarked.

In the autumn of 1944 events took a more sinister turn. At the time of the second Allied landing-in August in the south of France-the Midi was practically under the control of the Resistance for a short period. It was a period no one talked about much in later years: the prospect had been too frightening. This was when the Communists came within an inch of establishing a Soviet Republic in the south of France.

All the plans were laid. The signal for setting up the Soviet Republique du Sud was to be the capture by the Communists of the key cities of Limoges and Montpellier. It was calculated that, presented with a fait accompli while the Allies were still fighting the enemy, the Soviet Republic would have to be accepted. The mastermind behind this plan was the Leopard himself. Only de Gaulle's swift and sudden descent on the region smashed the plot. Soon afterwards the Leopard died.

His death was carefully documented in the file. He had been shot by an enemy sniper in the streets of Lyon on 14 September. Full of anguish at the death of their leader, worried that a gang of Vichy thugs might desecrate the grave, a small party of Communists had carried the body away and quietly buried it in the middle of a forest. Petit-Louis, the Leopard's deputy, had not been present at the burial. Near the end of the file an appendix noted small details which Grelle found interesting. The Leopard had always been guarded by a huge and ferocious wolfhound called Cesar which kept even trusted friends at a distance.

`To make sure they never knew what he looked like,' Grelle commented. 'I wonder what happened to the hound?'

The Abwehr, the enemy intelligence service, had also apparently compiled a detailed file on their mysterious enemy. The officer who had undertaken this task was a certain Dieter Wohl, who had been thirty at the time. 'So he would be in his sixties now,' Grelle observed. 'I wonder whether he survived?'