The Stone Leopard

by Colin Forbes

  Lennox grasped what was happening instantly. Someone had got into his car. They were going to knock him over the edge. He timed it to a split second, standing up and exposing his silhouette at the moment when it was masked from the Renault by the speeding Mercedes heading straight for him. He had a camera-shutter image of the Mercedes's rear window framing the twisted-round head-and-shoulders of the driver. He fired twice through the centre of the frame, angling his gun downwards, then dived sideways, sprawling on the ground. Both bullets hit Lansky in the back and neither was instantaneously fatal. The spasm of reaction drove his right foot hard down on the accelerator. The Mercedes tore over the shrubberies and went on beyond, arcing into nothingness and then plunging down and down until it hit the highway one hundred feet below.

  The police patrol-car, with Boisseau inside and a local driver behind the wheel, was turning into the entrance to Woodcutter's Farm when the Mercedes landed. As the patrol-car changed direction the Mercedes burst into flames.

  Vanek had heard the police siren and he reacted as he saw the Mercedes with Lansky inside disappear over the edge; he drove the Renault round in a tight circle so it faced back down the track. A few metres away he saw Lennox sprawl on the ground, then start to get back to his feet. Braking, Vanek grabbed the Luger out of his lap, took instinctive aim and fired. The Englishman was aiming his own pistol when the bullet hit him and he went down again.

  Vanek drove down the twisting track at reckless speed but he managed to keep the vehicle under control. When he emerged at the bottom the blazing Mercedes blocked the road to his right, blocking off the patrol-car. He turned left and started driving west along the deserted highway, his mind racing as he worked out what he had to do next. The answer could be summed up in one word: vanish. It was the death of his partner he had just witnessed which gave him the idea. Climbing a steep stretch of highway he came to a point where the road curved sharply with a fence to his right and a warning notice. Dangerous corner. Stopping the Renault just beyond the bend he got out and walked back to the recently-erected fence.

  Beyond it the ground dropped away a good two hundred feet to a rock-pile with a canal crossing the field beyond. Vanek ran back to the Renault, switched on the ignition again from outside the car, released the hand-brake, slammed the door shut as the car started moving backwards slowly, and then guided it with his hand on the steering-wheel through the open window.

  He had stopped the car on a reasonably level patch of tarmac before the highway went into a further steep ascent so it moved back quite gently for a few seconds as he walked alongside; then the road began to slope down and the car picked up momentum. Vanek had withdrawn his hand from the wheel and the Renault was moving faster when it hit the white- painted fence—erected only to define the edge—broke through and dropped out of sight. He heard it hit the rock-pile with a crunch of disintegrating metal but unlike the Mercedes it did not burst into flames. Satisfied that he had given himself a temporary breathing-space, the Czech left the highway, climbing up into the forest above and began moving back at a trot towards the craggy bluff where Lansky had died.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAKING HIS WAY through the woods, following the road below to guide him, Vanek arrived back at a knoll which overlooked the bluff in time to see Madame Devaud being escorted by a squad of men to a patrol-car. There had been a delay while she was guarded in the barn until more patrol-cars, summoned by radio, arrived with men who made a quick search of the wooded area surrounding the bluff. It was Lennox, still conscious and now inside an ambulance, who had warned Boisseau that these men were professional killers that no chance must be taken with the life of Madame Devaud.

  By the time Vanek reached the wooded knoll looking down on the bluff the convoy of patrol-cars was ready to leave. Using the small but powerful monocular glass he always carried, hidden behind a clump of pines, the Czech watched while Annette Devaud was escorted to one of the cars. The glass brought her up so close that he saw her head and shoulders clearly in his lens and he reflected that had he been equipped with a telescopic rifle she would be dead by now. Then as though his thought had travelled down to them, the police escort huddled round her and she disappeared behind a wall of uniforms. The range was far too great for him to even contemplate using his Luger.

  Crouching on his haunches, Vanek waited as the patrol-cars disappeared down the track, led by the ambulance, and later reappeared on the highway where the mist had now dissolved. Even so, in the late afternoon light the cars were no more than a blur but it was the direction they took which interested him. Towards Saverne.

  `The second killer went off the road and down to the edge of a canal,' Boisseau reported to Marc Grelle over the phone from Saverne police headquarters. 'Men should be arriving at the point of the crash just about now. And the Englishman, Lennox, has appeared. It was he, in fact, who shot the first assassin, and was then shot himself. . .'

  `He is dead?' the prefect inquired from Paris.

  `No, he will be all right, but he will be in hospital for a few days. He has a message for you. A very cautious man, Mr Lennox—I had to show him my card before he would pass on the message through me. He says he believes Madame Devaud can identify the Leopard. . .

  `You have Madame Devaud with you ?'

  `I can see her from where I am sitting. . . '

  Boisseau broke off as the Saverne inspector who had just taken a call on another line signalled to him. Listening for a moment, Boisseau resumed his call to Paris. 'This may be bad news. The Renault—the assassins' car—which went off the highway has now been examined. There was no trace of anyone inside and it appears it may have been tipped off the road deliberately to throw us off the scent. One of the assassins is still at liberty. . .'

  * * *

  The motor-barge chugged slowly forward out of the mist towards Vanek where he stood waiting for it by the edge of the lonely canal. His breathing was still a trifle laboured from his exertions when he had come down the mountainside from the knoll, making his way through the woods until he cautiously crossed the highway and negotiated the lower slope which brought him to the edge of the canal. He had been walking along the deserted tow-path—keeping well clear of the highway —when he heard the chugging motor coming up behind him.

  Gesturing to the man in yellow oilskins and peaked cap behind the wheel at the rear of the barge, Vanek called out `Police' several times, then waited until the barge was steered close enough to the bank for him to jump on board. He showed the leathery-faced bargee his Surete card. 'Are you alone ?' The man assured him he was and pointed out he had already been stopped higher up by policemen who were examining a crashed car. 'How far to the next lock ?' Vanek demanded, ignoring the question. It was six kilometres. ' I'll travel with you,' Vanek told the man. 'I'm looking for the murderer who escaped from that car. . .'

  For several minutes Vanek stood behind the man, pretending to watch the fields they were passing through while he observed the way the bargee handled the controls. Idly, as though to pass the time, he asked one or two technical questions as the barge chugged on through a remote section of the canal fogged with drifting mist. Clearing off the mountains, the mist was now settling in the narrow gulch through which the canal passes on its way to the Strasbourg plain. 'Your cap looks like a chauffeur's,' Vanek remarked. 'But then, fair enough, instead of a car you drive a barge. . .' He was still talking when he took out his Luger and shot the man in the back.

  Before he threw him overboard Vanek took off his oilskin coat and put it on himself, then he donned the bargee's cap. He used a heavy chain lying on the deck of the barge to weight the body, bringing it up between the legs and over the shoulders. The barge, which he had stopped, was drifting gently as he heaved the weighted corpse over the side; pausing only to watch it sink out of sight under the grey, murky water. He re-started the engine and took up station behind the wheel. A few minutes later a bridge appeared out of the mist with a patrol-car parked in the middle and a policeman leaning over
the parapet. The policeman waited until the barge was close.

  `Have you seen a man by himself as you came along the canal ?' he shouted down.

  `Only a lot of your friends checking a car which drove off the highway,' Vanek shouted back.

  The policeman waited, staring down from the parapet as Vanek, looking straight ahead, guided the barge through the archway and continued down the canal. A few minutes later the bridge behind him had vanished in the mist as he saw the faint outline of another bridge ahead. Vanek reckoned he had now moved out of the immediate area where they would be searching for him and in any case he had to leave the barge before he reached the lock. Passing under the bridge, he stopped the barge, hid the oilskin under a coil of rope and climbed the muddy path which took him up to a country road. The cap he had tucked away inside his coat.

  Walking a short distance along the road away from the highway, he found a convenient hiding-place behind a clump of trees where he stood and waited. During the space of fifteen minutes he let two tradesmen's vans pass and then he saw a BMW saloon approaching from the direction of the highway. There was only one man inside and the vehicle stank of money. Stepping into the middle of the road, he flagged down the car, calling out, 'Police, police. . .'

  Again he showed his Surete card to the suspicious driver who protested he had been stopped on the highway. 'I don't believe you,' Vanek said, taking back his card. 'How far away was that ?' One kilometre away, the driver informed him. A man in his late fifties, expensively suited, he had an arrogant manner which amused Vanek. Producing the Luger, he made the man move across to the passenger seat and got in behind the wheel. He put on the cap which he had taken from the dead bargee. `I am your chauffeur,' he announced. 'If we are stopped by a police patrol you will confirm that. If you make one mistake I will shoot you three times in the stomach and you will die slowly.'

  It was not so much the nature of the threat as the off-hand manner in which Vanek made it that thoroughly frightened the BMW owner. The Czech drove off in the same direction— away from the highway. Five minutes later in the middle of a wood, convinced that he had driven beyond the range of police patrols, Vanek stopped the car to check the road map purchased at Strasbourg airport which had guided himself and Lansky to Saverne. He found he could now reach Saverne again by a different route, keeping north of the canal and the highway until he almost reached the town. 'You'd better give me the car's papers,' he said. 'The chauffeur looks after things like that.' The man, who had told Vanek he was driving back to Metz, omitting to mention he was a banker, handed over the papers.

  `I'm going to leave you here tied up with a rope.' Vanek patted his pocket to indicate the rope. 'In an hour I shall phone the Saverne police and tell them where to find you. I am a burglar and have no wish that you should die of cold.' Getting out of the car with his prisoner, he shot him by the roadside and concealed the body behind some bushes.

  Returning to the BMW, he drove on by the roundabout route towards Saverne.

  Boisseau had exerted all his considerable charm and powers of persuasion but he made no impression on Annette Devaud's decision. Yes, she would travel to Paris and see the police prefect if it was all that important—and here Boisseau detected a certain excitement at the prospect. Possibly her nearness to death had made her think she would like to see the capital city once more. But no, she would not fly there in a plane if they paid her a million francs. And no, she would not travel there by road; car travel made her sick. She would only go to Paris if she went there by train.

  From police headquarters at Saverne, where they had rushed her by car—and that was enough driving she had informed them fiercely—Boisseau made repeated calls to Marc Grelle, reporting the latest progress, or lack of it. And it was Grelle who took the decision to bring her to the capital by train. 'But you must take the most stringent precautions,' he warned Boisseau. 'Remember that three of the witnesses have been killed already, and they very nearly got Annette Devaud as well. Very special arrangements must be made—since at least one assassin is still at large.' After talking to Boisseau the prefect personally called Strasbourg to put his whole authority behind the operation. If everyone co-operated, Annette Devaud should be safely in Paris by nine in the evening, little more than twelve hours before Guy Florian was due to fly to Russia.

  Police headquarters at Saverne was marked on the map Vanek was carrying, so when he reached the town he had no problem finding his way there. Still wearing his chauffeur's cap, he sat erect behind the wheel of the BMW as he drove slowly along the street as though looking for somewhere to park. Four patrol-cars were parked nose to tail outside the station while uniformed policemen strolled up and down, guarding the building. One of them glanced at the BMW and then looked away; as Vanek had once said to Brunner, in the capitalist west the police respect affluence and nothing is more affluent than a chauffeur-driven BMW.

  Vanek had another reason for feeling confident: during his conversation with the banker he had later killed he had elicited the information that the Frenchman was driving to Metz, which meant that at least two hours should pass before anyone started worrying about his non-arrival. As he drove on, Vanek was now convinced they were holding Madame Devaud under guard inside police headquarters, that soon they would have to take her somewhere else—perhaps back to her home at Woodcutter's Farm. Pulling into a side street, he reversed the car so he could get away quickly, put a coin in the parking meter and walked back to a near-by bar from where he could observe the police station.

  The security operation to protect Annette Devaud's life was organized by Boisseau from inside the Saverne police station. Using the phone, and with the full weight of Grelle's authority behind him—`This concerns the safety of the president of the French Republic'—Boisseau issued a stream of precise instructions. Before the 17.14 Stanislas Trans-European express for Paris left Strasbourg a special coach was linked to the train immediately behind the engine. Stickers were plastered over the windows indicating that this coach was reserve. One minute after the express was due to leave, the ticket barriers were closed and gendarmes, who had previously hidden in the luggage office, filed aboard the sealed coach with automatic weapons.

  The express was five minutes away from Saverne, a place it normally flew past at speed, when the gendarmes filed out of the sealed coach and moved along the full length of the train, closing all the window blinds. 'Emergency', the inspector in charge of the detachment explained in a loud voice to a dining-car passenger who had the temerity to ask what the devil was happening. 'We've had a warning of terrorist activity. . . .'

  Stanislas was losing speed as it approached Saverne station which had been sealed off by the local police and extra men rushed in from Strasbourg. As the express pulled in to the station the atmosphere was eerie. To stop anyone who might raise a blind—power-operated on the TEE express, it only requires the touch of a button—batteries of lights mounted on trucks were shone on the side of the train as it stopped. Anyone looking out would have been blinded by the glare. In the waiting-room, Boisseau sat with Madame Devaud, muffled in her old-fashioned fur coat, who was still calm and controlled despite all the fuss. 'Is it true I shall be having a whole coach to myself?' she inquired. Boisseau assured her it was true. He personally escorted her to the coach after making her put on a pair of dark glasses—partly as a disguise, partly as protection against the glare of the lights. As she moved along the corridor to her compartment the train also began to move again.

  A short distance from the station, out of sight of the convoy of parked patrol-cars, the chauffeur of a BMW was having a little trouble with his engine. With the hood up he stooped over the motor, checking the wiring. The express had just begun to move when he sorted out the problem, closing the hood and getting back behind the wheel. He drove off at speed, accelerating through the darkness as soon as he had left Saverne behind, heading for Strasbourg airport where there is a frequent Air Inter plane service to Paris.

  CHAPTER FOUR

 
IN PARIS, Marc Grelle believed he had found out how the list of Lasalle's three witnesses had been passed back to Moscow. As events had unfolded, as information came in showing that a Soviet Commando was eliminating the very people whose names had been on Lasalle's list, the prefect realized that the coincidence was too great. Someone in Paris in addition to himself had seen the list and had then caused it to be transmitted to Russia. The Soviet Commando had then been despatched to the west.

  He started his discreet inquiries at the Ministry of the Interior, tracing the route his memo containing the list had followed. Grelle had, of course, sent his memo to Roger Danchin by despatch rider late on the morning of Tuesday, 14 December. Francois Merlin, the Minister's assistant, who liked the prefect, proved helpful. 'We haven't heard from Hugon, our pipeline into Col Lasalle, recently,' Grelle explained, 'so I'm double-checking the security of our arrangements. . . .' It didn't surprise Merlin that the prefect himself was making the inquiry: all Paris knew Grelle's quaint habit of attending to details personally.

  Copies of the communications from Hugon were restricted to a very narrow circle: Grelle himself, Boisseau, the Minister and his assistant, Merlin. Pressed to go through the files, Merlin told Grelle that the confidential memo containing the names and addresses of the three witnesses had arrived at the Place Beauvau just before noon on Tuesday, 14 December. 'I was in the office when he read it,' Merlin remarked. 'A few minutes later Ambassador Vorin arrived for a private word with the Minister before going on to the Elysee. By then my chief had dealt with the memo. . .'