“Of course not,” murmured Dr. Steinhofer. “Your financial assistant is who, please?”
“Mr. Martin Thorpe.” Sir James Manson drew a slim envelope from his pocket and handed it to the banker. “This is my power of attorney, duly notarized and witnessed, and signed by me. You have my signature for comparison, of course. In here you will find Mr. Thorpe’s full name and the number of his passport, by which he will identify himself. He will be visiting Zurich in the next week or ten days to finalize arrangements. From then on he will act in all matters on my behalf, and his signature will be as good as mine. Is that acceptable?”
Dr. Steinhofer scanned the single sheet in the envelope and nodded. “Certainly, Sir James. I see no problems.”
Manson rose and stubbed out his cigar. “Then I’ll bid you good-by, Dr. Steinhofer, and leave further dealings in the hands of Mr. Thorpe, who of course will consult with me on all steps to be taken.”
They shook hands, and Sir James Manson was ushered down to the street. As the solid oak door clicked quietly shut behind him, he pulled up his coat collar against the still chilly air of the north Swiss town, stepped into the waiting hired limousine, and gave instructions for the Baur au Lac for lunch. One ate well there, he reflected, but otherwise Zurich was a dreary place. It did not even have a good brothel.
Assistant Undersecretary Sergei Golon was not in a good humor that morning. The mail had brought a letter to his breakfast table to notify him that his son had failed the entrance examination for the Civil Service Academy, and there had been a general family quarrel. In consequence, his perennial problem of acid indigestion had elected to ensure him a day of unrelenting misery, and his secretary was out sick.
Beyond the windows of his small office in the West Africa section of the Foreign Ministry, the canyons of Moscow’s windswept boulevards were still covered with snow slush, a grimy gray in the dim morning light, waiting tiredly for the thaw of spring.
“Neither one thing nor the other,” the attendant had remarked as he had berthed his Moskvitch in the parking lot beneath the ministry building.
Golon had grunted agreement and taken the elevator to his eighth-floor office to begin the morning’s work. Without a secretary, he had taken the pile of files brought for his attention from various parts of the building and started to go through them, an antacid tablet revolving slowly in his mouth.
The third file had been marked for his attention by the office of the Undersecretary, and the same clerkish hand had written on the cover sheet: “Assess and Instigate Necessary Action.” Golon perused it gloomily. He noted that the file had been started on the basis of an interdepartmental memorandum from Foreign Intelligence, that his ministry had, on reflection, given Ambassador Dobrovolsky certain instructions, and that, according to the latest cable from Dobrovolsky, they had been carried out. The request had been granted, the Ambassador reported, and he urged prompt action.
Golon snorted. Passed over for an ambassadorship, he held firmly to the view that men in diplomatic posts abroad were far too prone to believe their own parishes were of consummate importance.
“As if we have nothing else to bother about,” he grunted. Already his eye had caught the folder beneath the one he was reading. He knew it concerned the Republic of Guinea, where the constant stream of telegrams from the Soviet Ambassador reported the growth of Chinese influence in Conakry. Now that, he mused, was something of concern. Compared to this, he could not see the importance of whether there was, or was not, tin in commercial quantities in the hinterland of Zangaro. Besides, the Soviet Union had enough tin.
Nevertheless, action had been authorized from above, and, as a good civil servant, he took it. To a secretary borrowed from the typing pool, he dictated a letter to the director of the Sverdlovsk Institute of Mining, requiring him to select a small team of survey geologists and engineers to carry out an examination of a suspected tin deposit in West Africa, and to inform the Assistant Undersecretary in due course that the team and its equipment were ready to depart.
Privately he thought he would have to tackle the question of transportation to West Africa through the appropriate directorate, but pushed the thought to the back of his mind. The painful burning in his throat subsided, and he observed that the scribbling stenographer had rather pretty knees.
Cat Shannon had a quiet day. He rose late and went into the West End to his bank, where he withdrew most of the £1000 his account contained. He was confident the money would be replaced, and more, when the transfer came through from Belgium.
After lunch he rang his friend the writer, who seemed surprised to hear from him. “I thought you’d left town.”
“Why should I?” asked Shannon.
“Well, little Julie has been looking for you. You must have made an impression. Carrie says she has not stopped talking. But she rang the Lowndes, and they said you had left, address unknown.”
Shannon promised he’d call. He gave his own phone number, but not his address. With the small talk over, he requested the information he wanted.
“I suppose I could,” said the friend dubiously. “But honestly, I ought to ring him first and see if it’s okay.”
“Well, do that,” said Shannon. “Tell him it’s me, that I need to see him and am prepared to go down there for a few hours with him. Tell him I wouldn’t trouble him if it wasn’t important, in my opinion.”
The writer agreed to put through the call and ring him back with the telephone number and address of the man Shannon wished to talk to, if the man agreed to speak to Shannon.
In the afternoon Shannon wrote a letter to Mr. Goossens at the Kredietbank to tell him that he would in the future give two or three business partners the Kredietbank as his mailing address and would keep in contact by phone with the bank to check whether any mail was waiting for collection. He would also be sending some letters to business associates via the Kredietbank, in which case he would mail an envelope to Mr. Goossens from wherever he happened to be. He requested Mr. Goossens to take the envelope which would be enclosed, addressed but not stamped, and forward it from Brugge to its destination. Last, he bade Mr. Goossens deduct all postal and bank charges from his account.
At five that afternoon Endean called him at the flat, and Shannon gave him a progress report, omitting to mention his contact with his writer friend, whom he had never mentioned to Endean. He told him, however, that he expected three of his four chosen associates to be in London for their separate briefings that evening, and the fourth to arrive on Thursday evening at the latest.
Martin Thorpe had his fifth tiring day, but at least his search was over. He had perused the documents of another seventeen companies in the City Road, and had drawn up a second short list, this time of five companies. At the top of the list was the company that had caught his eye the previous day. He finished his reading by midafternoon and, as Sir James Manson had not returned from Zurich, decided to take the rest of the day off. He could brief his chief in the morning and later begin his private inquiries into the setup of his chosen company, a series of inquiries to determine why such a prize was still available. By the late afternoon he was back in Hampstead Garden Suburb, mowing the lawn.
ten
The first of the mercenaries to arrive at London’s Heathrow Airport was Kurt Semmler, on the Lufthansa flight from Munich. He tried to reach Shannon by phone soon after clearing customs, but there was no reply. He was early for his check-in call, so he decided to wait at the airport and took a seat by the restaurant window overlooking the apron of Number Two building. He chain-smoked nervously as he sat over coffee and watched the jets leaving for Europe.
Marc Vlaminck phoned to check in with Shannon just after five. The Cat glanced down the list of three hotels in the neighborhood of his apartment and read out the name of one. The Belgian took it down in his Victoria Station phone booth, letter by letter. A few minutes later he hailed a taxi outside the station and showed the paper to the driver.
Semmler was ten minutes aft
er Vlaminck. He too received from Shannon the name of a hotel, wrote it down, and took a minicab from the front of the airport building.
Langarotti was the last, checking in just before six from the air terminal in Cromwell Road. He too hired a taxi to take him to his hotel.
At seven Shannon rang them all, one after the other, and bade them assemble at his flat within thirty minutes.
When they greeted one another, it was the first indication any of them had had that the others had been invited. Their broad grins came partly from the pleasure of meeting friends, partly from the knowledge that Shannon’s investment in bringing them all to London with a guarantee of a reimbursed airfare could only mean he had money. If they wondered who the patron might be, they knew better than to ask.
Their first impression was strengthened when Shannon told them that he had instructed Dupree to fly in from South Africa on the same terms. A £500 air ticket meant Shannon was not playing games. They settled down to listen.
“The job I’ve been given,” he told them, “is a project that has to be organized from scratch. It has not been planned, and the only way to set it up is to do it ourselves. The object is to mount an attack, a short, sharp attack, commando-style, on a town on the coast of Africa. We have to shoot the shit out of one building, storm it, capture it, knock off everyone in it, and pull back out again.”
The reaction was what he had confidently expected. The men exchanged glances of approval. Vlaminck gave a wide grin and scratched his chest; Semmler muttered, “Klasse,” and lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one. Langarotti remained deadpan, his eyes on Shannon, the knife blade slipping smoothly across the black leather around his left fist.
Shannon spread a map out on the floor in the center of the circle, and the men eyed it keenly. It was a hand-drawn map depicting a section of seashore and a series of buildings on the landward side. It was not accurate, for it excluded the two curving spits of shingle that were the identifying marks of the harbor of Clarence, but it sufficed to indicate the kind of operation required.
The mercenary leader talked for twenty minutes, outlining the kind of attack he had already proposed to his patron as the only feasible way of taking the objective, and the three men concurred. None of them asked the name of the destination. They knew he would not tell them and that they did not need to know. It was not a question of lack of trust, simply of security. If a leak were sprung in the secret, they did not want to be among the possible suspects.
Shannon spoke in strongly accented French, which he had picked up in the Sixth Commando in the Congo. He knew Vlaminck had a reasonable grasp of English, as a barman in Ostend must have, and that Semmler commanded a vocabulary of about two hundred words. But Langarotti knew very little indeed, so French was the common language, except when Dupree was present, when everything had to be translated.
“So that’s it,” said Shannon as he finished. “The terms are that you all go on a salary of twelve hundred and fifty dollars a month from tomorrow morning, plus expenses for living and traveling while in Europe. The budget is ample for the job. Only two of the tasks that have to be done in the preparation stages are illegal, because I’ve planned to keep the maximum strictly legal. Of these tasks, one is a border crossing from Belgium to France, the other a problem of loading some cases onto a ship somewhere in southern Europe. We’ll all be involved in both jobs.
“You get three months’ guaranteed salary, plus five thousand dollars’ bonus each for success. So what do you say?”
The three men looked at each other. Vlaminck nodded. “I’m on,” he said. “Like I said yesterday, it looks good.”
Langarotti stropped his knife. “Is it against French interests?” he asked. “I don’t want to be an exile.”
“You have my word it is not against the French in Africa.”
“D’accord,” said the Corsican simply.
“Kurt?” asked Shannon.
“What about insurance?” asked the German. “It doesn’t matter for me, I have no relatives, but what about Marc?”
The Belgian nodded. “Yes, I don’t want to leave Anna with nothing,” he said.
Mercenaries on contract are usually insured by the contractor for $20,000 for loss of life and $6000 for loss of a major limb.
“You have to take out your own, but it can be as high as you want to go. If anything happens to anyone, the rest swear blind he was lost overboard at sea by accident. If anyone gets badly hurt and survives, we all swear the injury was caused by shifting machinery on board. You all take out insurance for a sea trip from Europe to South Africa as passengers on a small freighter. Okay?”
The three men nodded.
“I’m on,” said Semmler.
They shook on it, and that was enough. Then Shannon went into the jobs he wanted each man to do.
“Kurt, you’ll get your first salary check and one thousand dollars for expenses on Friday. I want you to go down to the Mediterranean and start looking for a boat. I need a small freighter with a clean record. Get that: it must be clean. Papers in order, ship for sale. One hundred to two hundred tons, coaster or converted trawler, possibly converted navy vessel if need be, but not looking like an MTB. I don’t want speed, but reliability. The sort that can pick up a cargo in a Mediterranean port without exciting attention, even an arms cargo. Registered as a general freighter owned by a small company or its own skipper. Price not over twenty-five thousand pounds, including the cost of any work that needs doing on it. Absolute latest sailing date, fully fueled and supplied for a trip to Cape Town, not later than sixty days from now. Got it?”
Semmler nodded and began to think at once of his contacts in the shipping world.
“Jean-Baptiste, which city do you know best in the Mediterranean?”
“Marseilles,” said Langarotti without hesitation.
“Okay. You get salary and five hundred pounds on Friday. Get to Marseilles, set up in a small hotel, and start looking. Find me three large inflatable semirigid craft of the same kind as Zodiac makes. The sort developed for water sports from the basic design of the Marine Commando assault craft. Buy them from separate suppliers, then book them into the bonded warehouse of a respectable shipping agent for export to Morocco. Purpose, waterskiing and subaqua diving at a holiday resort. Color, black. Also three powerful outboard engines, battery-started. The boats should take up to a ton of payload. The engines should move such a craft and that weight at not less than ten knots, with a big reserve. You’ll need about sixty horsepower. Very important: make sure they are fitted with underwater exhausts for silent running. If they can’t be had in that condition, get a mechanic to make you three exhaust-pipe extensions with the necessary outlet valves, to fit the engines. Store them at the same export agent’s bonded warehouse, for the same purpose as the dinghies: water sports in Morocco. You won’t have enough money in the five hundred. Open a bank account and send me the name and number, by mail, to this address. I’ll send the money by credit transfer. Buy everything separately, and submit me the price lists by mail here. Okay?”
Langarotti nodded and resumed his knife stropping.
“Marc. You remember you mentioned once that you knew a man in Belgium who had knocked off a German store of a thousand brand-new Schmeisser submachine pistols in nineteen forty-five and still had half of them in store? I want you to go back to Ostend on Friday with your salary and five hundred pounds and locate that man. See if he’ll sell. I want a hundred, and in first-class working order. I’ll pay a hundred dollars each, which is way over the rate. Write me by letter only, here at this flat, when you have found the man and can set up a meeting between him and me. Got it?”
By nine-thirty they were through, the instructions memorized, noted, and understood.
“Right. What about a spot of dinner?” Shannon asked his colleagues.
He took them around the corner to the Paprika for a meal. They still spoke in French, but no one else took much notice, except to glance over when a loud burst of lau
ghter came from the group of four. Evidently they were excited at something, though none of the diners could have surmised that what elated the group in the corner was the prospect of going once again to war under the leadership of Cat Shannon.
Across the Channel another man was thinking hard about Carlo Alfred Thomas Shannon, and his thoughts were not charitable. He paced the living room of his apartment on one of the residential boulevards near the Place de la Bastille and considered the information he had been gathering for the previous week, and the snippet from Marseilles that had reached him several hours earlier.
If the writer who had originally recommended Charles Roux to Simon Endean as a second possible mercenary for Endean’s project had known more about the Frenchman, his description would not have been so complimentary. But he knew only the basic facts of the man’s background and little about his character. Nor did he know, and thus was unable to tell Endean, of the vitriolic hatred that Roux bore for the other man he had recommended, Cat Shannon.
After Endean had left Roux, the Frenchman had waited a full fortnight for a second contact to be made. When it never came, he was forced to the conclusion either that the project in the mind of the visitor who had called himself Walter Harris had been abandoned, or that someone else had got the job.
Pursuing the latter line of inquiry, he had looked for anyone among the other possible selections that the English businessman could have made. It was while he was making these inquiries, or having them made for him, that he had learned Cat Shannon had been in Paris, staying under his own name at a small hotel in Montmartre. This had shaken Roux, for he had lost track of Shannon after their parting at Le Bourget Airport and had thought the man had left Paris.