SHAH-MAK
Charles Pol Espionage Thrillers
Book Four
Alan Williams
For Claire Rawcliffe
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
ALSO BY ALAN WILLIAMS
CHAPTER 1
The lower slopes of the Gotschnagrat were empty in the late January sun. Most of the sightseers were foreign tourists, still in their goggles and knitted caps, lips smeared white against snow burn, who had been cleared off the ski slopes half an hour earlier. There were a few locals from the village of Wolfgang, midway between Klosters and Davos, together with a discreet showing of Swiss police in their pale grey capes. In front of the crowd, at the foot of the ski run, stood a row of dark men in square-shouldered overcoats and astrakhan hats, hands deep in their side pockets.
The man swept over the last crest of snow. His skis smacked down as he executed a neat Christie before cutting round, half squatting on his haunches, swooshed back in a spray of powdered snow, and came to a halt a few feet from the row of men in overcoats, who took their hands from their pockets and clapped.
A blue Cadillac with smoked windows slid up to the edge of the road with a soft thump of chains. It stopped long enough for the man to snap off his skis and jump inside, before being driven away in the direction of Klosters. A perceptive observer might have noticed that its wheels left unusually deep ruts in the snow. Three more cars appeared, gathered in the men in overcoats, and sped off in the wake of the Cadillac. All four cars carried diplomatic plates and Swiss Zollamt registration numbers.
From what the spectators had been able to glimpse of the man, he was slim, rather small, with a good head of dark silver hair and a beaky profile under wraparound mirror glasses. He had been wearing a red, white and blue plastic anorak over a white polo-necked sweater and black skiing trousers.
The road was closed for five minutes until the convoy of cars had reached the steep track leading up to the large chalet, ‘Le Soupir du Soleil’, which stood concealed by trees 200 metres above Klosters. Here the ritual of arrival and departure was more pronounced. Men drifted out from behind conifers and banks of snow and surrounded the cars in a silent assembly, each facing in a different direction. More men whisked the doors open, bowing low as the silver-haired man stepped out of the Cadillac and walked across the snow-swept forecourt and up a flight of shallow granite steps.
The entrance hall, of plain, dark-stained pine, was dominated by a bronze effigy above the stairs of a huge hybrid bird with the spread tail of a peacock, the talons of an eagle, and the head of a serpent spitting fire. Privileged guests to the chalet rarely noticed that the peacock fan was a spray of blue sapphires, the serpent’s eye an emerald the size of a gull’s egg, and the flames from its mouth rows of rubies.
A servant, in a white uniform buttoned to the throat, removed the man’s skiing boots, while a second servant brought him a pair of embroidered slippers and a glass of apricot brandy. He swallowed the drink in a gulp; then walked, still in his wet plastic jacket, up the carpeted staircase and along a corridor to a sauna, which was equipped with two telephones — internal and external lines — and a UHF radio.
Half an hour later, dressed in a loose-sleeved silk housecoat, he sat behind a wide desk reading through a stack of that day’s international newspapers — the American, British and French in the originals, the Italian and German ones from translated résumés. He had replaced his wraparound glasses with horn-rimmed spectacles, which magnified his cold, oily-black eyes; and he read intently, systematically, pausing to make notes in pencil. When he had finished the last page he touched a button under the table and a chunky man in a black suit appeared, bowed, and gathered up the heap of papers. The man behind the desk said, ‘I am ready to see him.’
The retainer bowed again. ‘Your Imperial Highness, I regret that the gentleman has not yet arrived.’
‘He should have been here an hour ago. What explanation do you have?’
‘A telegram, Your Imperial Highness —’ the man bowed even lower this time — ‘has informed us that there is fog at Zürich. The gentleman’s plane has been obliged to land at Geneva.’
For a fraction of a second an expression of petulant anger crossed the face behind the desk. And in that instant it became an ugly, frightening face: the black unblinking eyes under their thick brows, as glossy as horses’ hair; the fleshy nose deeply etched into the sides of his high cheekbones; the thin, determined mouth — a hard face, a noble face, a face known throughout the world, admired, feared and reviled; now, in that moment, changed to the face of a spoilt, spiteful playboy with too much money and too much power — grown bored with both.
He recovered quickly. ‘Bring me some coffee and tell Lutz to join me for chess.’
The retainer bowed three times and backed out of the room, opening the door behind him without turning. Two minutes later a blond man appeared carrying a chess set. His face was pale and impassive, without a smudge of eyebrow, giving him a naked albino appearance.
The man behind the desk nodded to a chair opposite. The retainer had returned with a silver coffee service. The Supreme and All-Powerful Ruler of the fourth richest nation in the world watched without speaking as the servant poured two cups of black coffee and the blond man called Lutz laid out the chessmen.
The Ruler won the first three games; halfway through the fourth the black-suited retainer bowed himself in. ‘Your Imperial Majesty. The French gentleman has arrived.’
‘I will see him tomorrow.’ The Ruler’s hand hovered over the chessboard. He looked up at his opponent. ‘Lutz, you are not doing well. You are doing very badly.’ He spoke in English, with a very slight accent. The retainer had withdrawn. ‘Shah-Mak!’ the Ruler added, and allowed himself a small smile; ‘Or, as the English say — “check”!’
Lutz put his head on one side and smiled. ‘How could I win against you?’
‘How could you, indeed?’ said the Ruler. ‘How could anyone?’
Two days later the Frenchman was finally summoned, by telephone, from his room in the Silvretta Hotel in Klosters, to the Serene Presence above the town. No one had been sent to fetch him and he had been obliged to take a taxi for the quarter of a mile from the hotel to the Imperial chalet.
Monsieur Charles Pol was very short and very fat: rolls of flesh squeezed into a shapeless oyster-white suit that had seen better days; a large egg-shaped head decorated with a goatee beard and a lick of hair pasted down across the brow in a kiss-curl. His general demeanour was that of a comic character who had wandered out of an eighteenth-century French farce. It would have required someone with special insight — or equipped with a file containing full details of the Frenchman’s diverse career —
to perceive that, behind his grotesque exterior, Charles Pol was a man to be taken seriously.
The Ruler had just such insight and just such a file. The latter lay open on the desk in front of him when Pol was shown in some time after noon, having waited for over two hours downstairs in a restroom used by the bodyguards. The Ruler did not look up. He turned a page of the file, which was bound in plain grey covers and was as thick as a film script, and went on reading. Pol waddled down the length of the room and squeezed himself into the chair opposite his host.
‘You seem to be a man with a great variety of interests, Monsieur Pol,’ the Ruler said at last, in French, still without lifting his head. ‘You have been an anarchist, a Marxist, a Resistance hero, a spy, a bandit, an organizer of terrorism, a financial adventurer with an unsavoury reputation.’ He paused, then slowly raised his eyes. ‘Do I do you justice?’
Pol beamed back at him, his cherry lips showing two pearly-white teeth. The Ruler observed with distaste that there were patches of sweat under the man’s armpits and that the rim of his silk collar was also damp, and not quite clean.
‘It is all surely a matter of interpretation, Your Highness. I have read descriptions of your own career which were certainly accurate, yet far from flattering.’
The Ruler’s face remained quiet and closed. ‘Monsieur, a man in my position quickly wearies of the repetitive lies and propaganda put about by enemies abroad. It is one of the ironies of the modern world that if I were the upstart head of a starving nation who went squealing to the United Nations begging for aid and arms, I should not only be helped — I should be universally respected and admired.
‘But —’ his eyelids drooped with an expression of contemptuous boredom — ‘it is my evident misfortune not only to be the unchallenged ruler of a nation of some thirty million people, whose standard of living is rising faster than any other in the world, but also Supreme Commander of the largest and best equipped army, navy, and air force between the Mediterranean and India. My personal income last year was over 6000 million American dollars. I do not exaggerate when I claim to be the most powerful individual in the world. If I increase my oil revenues by one per cent — five per cent — fifty per cent — I can overnight, affect, distort, even destroy, the whole economic structure of Western civilization. I do not need the flattery of friends. As for the envy and hatred of my enemies —’ he swept his hand dismissively — ‘they do not disturb my sleep, I assure you.’
Monsieur Pol sighed. ‘Are you telling me all this to impress me, Your Majesty? Or because you fear I might be ill informed?’
A faint shadow passed across the Ruler’s face; he tapped the file in front of him. ‘From your record you are a man who has indulged himself in many left-wing causes. I do not expect you to have any love for me, or even appreciate what I have done for my country. Although we have an ancient history, we are also — in the modern world — a very young country. We are no more than a child who is just beginning to walk and speak. And I am that child’s father. In my country we have no parliamentary democracy… That is a luxury we cannot afford. It would be as foolish and as dangerous as allowing a child to play unguarded in a busy street. We also have no inflation, no strikes, no unemployment, one of the greatest social and industrial expansion programmes in the world, and a crime rate that is the lowest in the world.’ He paused, his eyes hooded and unblinking. ‘You are amused, Monsieur Pol?’
Pol gave a massive shrug which split a seam in his jacket. ‘When Your Majesty talks of social and industrial progress, I presume you include the factory that was recently constructed outside your capital, Mamounia, and which I understand is devoted exclusively to the manufacture of artificial hands and feet?’
The Ruler gave a quick smile, showing small sharp teeth. ‘You seem very well informed. And no doubt you will understand that in a rapidly advancing nation, old traditions die slowly. In France you still employ the guillotine. And yet, in the West, you are such masters of hypocrisy! When in my country a thief is caught and his hand is cut off, or when he tries to run away and his foot is cut off, you call it barbarism. Yet innocent citizens do not fear to walk the streets of our cities, Monsieur Pol, as they do in most Western countries. So why are you so anxious to criticize and condemn?’
‘I do neither,’ said Pol. ‘On the contrary, I admire your progress. I am tepid that the amputations are no longer carried out in public, but under local anaesthetics in a special air-conditioned clinic.’
There was a pause. ‘I trust you are not being impertinent, Monsieur Pol?’
‘Your Majesty, I understood that you had summoned me here with the possible purpose of hiring my services. I certainly did not come to discuss the ethics of Your Majesty’s rule. Since you have my file, you are probably aware that recently my circumstances have become somewhat straitened. You will also know that until a few months ago I myself, in a not too modest way, also enjoyed wealth and power. While I have never actually brought down a government, I have caused several to have bad indigestion. As for money, I too have enjoyed far more than was necessary to gratify those few appetites that are still left to me. But with respect to your own wealth and power, Your Majesty, let me say at once that I am more impressed by the genius of Yehudi Menuhin, or of the English novelist Graham Greene, or even by the culinary skills of the late Monsieur Point, proprietor of the “Pyramide”.’
As the Frenchman finished speaking, the door opened on its well-oiled hinges and the black-suited retainer appeared. The Ruler said something in his own tongue and the man came across the room and stood behind Pol’s chair.
The Ruler sat back and said to Pol, ‘In my own country most of my subjects believe that I am endowed with powers of divine guidance. To a sophisticated person like yourself, this will seem like childish idealism — the simple totem worship of a primitive people in search of a tangible god. I admit that many of my people are still simple. But you must also remember that my throne has not been occupied for a few generations by one of your inbred European dynasties — a mongrel breed of Germans and Greeks, seedy Mediterranean princelings and Balkan impostors. The Emerald Throne of the Hama’anah — a legendary bird that draws its strength from the talons of the eagle, the beauty of the peacock, and the venom of the snake — has been occupied for more than 3000 years. It has withstood the assault and intrigue of almost every race and alliance, from the Greeks, the Huns, the Turks, the Tsars, the Arabs, and, in recent times, the infectious plague of international socialism. I carry on the ancient tradition of my throne without fear or favour. If I do not always expect love, at least I command respect.’
Pol turned his head enough to observe the rigid figure of the servant standing less than a foot from his shoulder. The man’s hands hung straight at his sides, the fingers thick and square-tipped. His eyes did not move from his master’s face.
Pol’s lips parted in an impish grin. ‘I think we already know enough of each other, Your Majesty, not to have to play the comedy between ourselves. I am a failed financier — a buccaneer — a bum — whatever it pleases you to call me. As for you, I know that your throne was seized in a coup d’état by a common army sergeant who mutinied against his superiors, promoted himself Colonel, overthrew the old Imperial dynasty, and proclaimed himself King of Kings, Ruler of All Princes. You were merely his illegitimately begotten son.’
The Ruler said calmly, ‘I think it was St Paul, in your Bible, who spoke of those who can suffer fools gladly, seeing they themselves are wise? Monsieur, you are a fool.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Pol. ‘But it was Napoleon who said that the fool has one great advantage over the man of sense — he is always satisfied with himself.’
The Ruler murmured something and the retainer moved up against Pol’s chair. A hand closed round the side of Pol’s neck and the fingers hardened, squeezing and probing into the rolls of fat until they found the right spot. Pol’s face turned blue; he tried to blink through the tears, and tasted bile choking his throat. It was several secon
ds before he could make out the Ruler’s voice, slow and measured, with that tone of bored disdain.
‘We are fortunately under Swiss territorial jurisdiction, Monsieur Pol. Otherwise I might be tempted to dispense with legal properties. It is not wise to call me a bastard and a fool.’
Pol dabbed a silk handkerchief to his eyes and cheeks, and smoothed its cool surface over the side of his neck. The carefully arranged kiss-curl was splayed out like a crushed spider on the shining dome of his forehead, and the sweat trickled down his cheeks, collecting in the folds of his chin. He wiped his eyes again and said, ‘Your Majesty, I am surprised that a man in your position, should want to descend to such clumsy and embarrassing dramatics. In my experience, one is always at a disadvantage talking business with somebody one has just reduced to tears.’
He sat back and blew his nose. The man at his elbow had not moved, his eyes again fixed on the Ruler’s face. He is a poor bodyguard, thought Pol: he should be looking at me, not at this ageing emperor of his — this second-hand usurper of a desert kingdom grown suddenly rich on black gold — this prancing oriental peacock who’s no better than some cheap tout who has just won a lottery and is now lecturing his friends and neighbours on how to manage their affairs. Not that Pol totally disapproved of the Ruler. For while he remained unimpressed by the man’s vast wealth, Pol’s Gallic sense of irony was aroused by the thought of this despotic arriviste now being free to bail out several insolvent Western nations, as well as controlling major industries in a number of others.
He peered across the desk and grinned. ‘You are surely not fool enough to think me worth a little childish bullying before throwing me out into the snow? What do you want?’
The Ruler raised his eyes and nodded, and the bodyguard retreated soundlessly from the room. He turned to the dossier in front of him. ‘During the Vietnam War you stole two billion dollars from the Americans and gave them to Hanoi. Did the Communists pay a commission on the deal?’
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