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.