The Dogs of War

“Would you want anything bad to happen to me because of something you did or said?”

She pulled herself back from him, staring deep into his face. This was much more like the scenes in her schoolgirl dreams. “Never,” she said soulfully. “I’d never talk. Whatever they did to me.”

Shannon blinked several times in amazement. “Nobody’s going to do anything to you,” he said. “Just don’t tell your father that you know me or went through his papers. You see, he employs me to gather information for him about the prospects of mining in Africa. If he learned we knew each other, he’d fire me. Then I’d have to find another job. There is one that’s been offered to me, miles away in Africa. So you see, I’d have to go and leave you if he ever found out about us.”

That struck home, hard. She did not want him to go. Privately he knew one day soon he would have to go, but there was no need to tell her yet.

“I won’t say anything,” she promised.

“A couple of points,” said Shannon. “You said you saw the title on the sheets with mineral prices on them. What was the title?”

She furrowed her brow, trying to recall the words. “That stuff they put in fountain pens. They mention it in the ads for the expensive ones.”

“Ink?” asked Shannon.

“Platium,” she said.

“Platinum,” he corrected, his eyes pensive. “Lastly, what was the title on the folder?”

“Oh, I remember that,” she said happily. “Like something out of a fairy tale. The Crystal Mountain.”

Shannon sighed deeply. “Go and make me some coffee. There’s a love.”

When he heard her clattering cups in the kitchen he leaned back against the bedhead and stared out over London. “You cunning bastard,” he breathed. “But it won’t be that cheap, Sir James, not that cheap at all.”

Then he laughed into the darkness.

That same Saturday night Benny Lambert was ambling home toward his lodgings after an evening drinking with friends in one of his favorite cafés. He had been buying a lot of rounds for his cronies, using the money, now changed into francs, that Shannon had paid him. It made him feel good to be able to talk of the “big deal” he had just pulled off and buy the admiring bar girls champagne. He had had enough, more than enough, himself, and took no notice of the car that cruised slowly behind him, two hundred yards back. Nor did he think much of it when the car swept up to him as he came abreast of a vacant lot half a mile short of his home.

By the time he took notice and started to protest, the giant figure that had emerged from the car was hustling him across the lot and behind a hoarding that stood ten yards from the road.

His protests were silenced when the figure spun him around and, still holding him by the scruff, slammed a fist into his solar plexus. Benny Lambert sagged and, when the grip on his collar was removed, slumped to the ground. Standing above him, face shadowed into the obscurity behind the hoarding, the figure drew a two-foot iron bar from his belt. Stooping down, the big man grabbed the writhing Lambert by the left thigh and jerked it upward. The iron bar made a dull whumph as it crashed down with all the assailant’s force onto the exposed kneecap, shattering it instantly. Lambert screamed once, shrilly, like a skewered rat, and fainted. He never felt the second kneecap being broken at all.

Twenty minutes later, Thomard was phoning his employer from the booth in a late-night café a mile away.

At the other end, Roux listened and nodded. “Good,” he said. “Now I have some news for you. The hotel where Shannon usually stays. Henri Alain has just informed me they have received a letter from Mr. Keith Brown. It reserves a room for him on the night of the fifteenth. Got it?”

“The fifteenth,” Thomard said. “Yes. He will be there then.”

“And so will you,” said the voice on the phone. “Henri will keep in touch with his contact inside the hotel, and you will remain on standby, not far from the hotel, from noon of that day onward.”

“Until when?” asked Thomard.

“Until he comes out, alone,” said Roux. “And then you will take him. For five thousand dollars.”

Thomard was smiling slightly when he came out of the booth. As he stood at the bar sipping his beer, he could feel the pressure of the gun under his left armpit. It made him smile even more. In a few days it would earn him a tidy sum. He was quite sure of it. It would, he told himself, be simple and straightforward to take a man, even Cat Shannon, who had never even seen him and did not know he was there.

It was in the middle of a Sunday morning that Kurt Semmler phoned. Shannon was lying naked on his back on the bed while Julie puttered around the kitchen, making breakfast.

“Mr. Keith Brown?” asked the operator.

“Yes. Speaking.”

“I have a personal call for you from a Mr. Semolina in Genoa.”

Shannon swung himself off the bed and crouched on the edge, the telephone up to his ear. “Put him on the line,” he ordered.

The German’s voice was faint, but reception was reasonably clear. “Carlo?”