Shannon believed half of the briefing, but not the second half. If the officers, who were on the spot, could not assess the situation, they would be incompetent to carry out a coup. But he did not say so.
“I’d have to go in as a tourist,” he said. “There’s no other cover that would work.”
“That’s right.”
“There must be precious few tourists that go there. Why cannot I go in as a company visitor to one of your friends’ business houses?”
“That will not be possible,” said Harris. “If anything went wrong, there would be all hell to pay.”
If I get caught, you mean, thought Shannon, but kept silent. He was being paid, so he would take risks. That, and his knowledge, was what he was being paid for.
“There’s the question of pay,” he said shortly.
“Then you’ll do it?”
“If the money’s right, yes.”
Harris nodded approvingly. “Tomorrow morning a round-trip ticket from London to the capital of the neighboring republic will be at your hotel,” he said. “You have to fly back to Paris and get a visa for this republic. Zangaro is so poor there is only one embassy in Europe, and that’s in Paris also. But getting a Zangaran visa there takes a month. In the next-door republic’s capital there is a Zangaran consulate. There you can get a visa for cash, and within an hour if you tip the consul. You understand the procedure.”
Shannon nodded. He understood it very well.
“So get visa-ed up in Paris, then fly down by Air Afrique. Get your Zangaran visa on the spot and take the connecting plane service from there to Clarence, paying cash. With the tickets at your hotel tomorrow will be three hundred pounds in French francs as expenses.”
“I’ll need five,” said Shannon. “It’ll be ten days at least, possibly more, depending on connections and how long the visas take to get. Three hundred leaves no margin for the occasional bribe or any delay.”
“All right, five hundred in French francs. Plus five hundred for yourself,” said Harris.
“A thousand,” said Shannon.
“Dollars? I understand you people deal in U.S. dollars.”
“Pounds,” said Shannon. “That’s twenty-five hundred dollars, or two months at flat salary if I were on a normal contract.”
“But you’ll only be away ten days,” protested Harris.
“Ten days of high risk,” countered Shannon. “If this place is half what you say it is, anyone getting caught on this kind of job is going to be very dead, and very painfully. You want me to take the risks rather than go yourself, you pay.”
“Okay, a thousand pounds. Five hundred down and five hundred when you return.”
“How do I know you’ll contact me when I return?” said Shannon.
“How do I know you’ll even go there at all?” countered Harris.
Shannon considered the point. Then he nodded. “All right, half now, half later.”
Ten minutes later Harris was gone, after instructing Shannon to wait five minutes before leaving himself.
At three that afternoon the head of the detective agency was back from his lunch. Shannon called at three-fifteen.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Brown,” said the voice on the phone. “I have spoken to my man. He waited as you instructed, and when the subject left the building he recognized him and followed. The subject hailed a taxi from the curb, and my man followed him to the City. There he dismissed the taxi and entered a building.”
“What building?”
“ManCon House. That’s the headquarters of Manson Consolidated Mining.”
“Do you know if he works there?” asked Shannon.
“It wou