Program for a Puppet (37 page)

“What if a fake tape exists and Philpott intends to use it?”

“If we could prove that, we'd have something to go on. I think Rickard would ask Carruthers to look at Philpott's script.”

“How is Rickard?”

“Improved slightly. He's going on TV tomorrow night in a speech to the nation which he'll tape earlier. His campaign team want to prop him up in front of a camera and let him speak to the people—to reassure them he is fit to run the country.”

“Let's hope he stands up to it.” There was a slight pause before Graham added, “I'll be on trial tomorrow night too. I'm meeting Huntsman and Cheznoir.”

“Isn't that dangerous?”

“Don't worry, I'm not taking any chances.”

“Let me know how it goes.”

“I'll phone you after it's finished.”

“You must take care, Ed. Think of poor Gordon … you know how vulnerable you are …”

 

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1

Graham had a night of fitful sleep. He awoke several times and wandered around the room, often looking from the balcony of his room on the fifth floor down to the silent streets below.

A full breakfast in his room hardly lifted the Australian from his drowsy and depressed condition. He dressed casually and at ten o'clock walked slowly down to a newsstand on the Grand Armée and bought French and English newspapers. The weather was cool but sunny, so Graham stopped to have a cup of coffee at a nearby open-air café. He had been there five minutes when a quiet voice from close behind him said, “Mr. Graham, the Colonel says not to stay away from the hotel too long.”

The Australian was slightly startled. He looked around at a smartly dressed young Frenchman sitting facing the opposite direction.
Without acknowledging him, Graham folded the papers and walked briskly back to his hotel.

There he continued to read but found it difficult to concentrate as his mind wandered to the coming meeting. He began to think of all the things that could go wrong. What if “they” stormed the hotel and gunned him down? What if the colonel, with the best intentions and planning in the world, made a mistake? And what if French Intelligence had made a secret decision to catch Rodriguez at any price?

He took the elevator up to his room and, in an effort to take his mind off his fears, wrote a strenuous exercise routine which he went through rigorously for an hour.

At noon he rang Huntsman at the Intercontinental. He was not in, but had left a message to confirm the night's dinner engagement.

“At one, instead of taking lunch, Graham felt fatigued enough to try to sleep again. He managed three solid hours, which made up for the restless periods during the night. He had a couple of cups of black coffee with the manager, a balding, bespectacled old man, in the dining room downstairs, and talked to him for an hour about French politics and the American election. The manager told him that he was welcome to watch the French news on television at five. It touched briefly on the American election build-up and announced that President Rickard had made a last-minute decision to go on television.

Graham had hope that Colonel Guichard would ring and call off the plan. But the clock ticked relentlessly toward his appointment.

Everett Rickard was a little shaky as he made his way into the Oval Office for the first time since his heart attack. Technicians were waiting to test his voice and the lighting in preparation for his taped speech to the nation, which would be shown later.

Rickard sat down gingerly and nervously stacked the loose pages of his speech. He had lost weight since the heart attack, and his face was ghostly pale.

A camera crew asked him to try out the microphone.

“Right. You want a voice lead,” Rickard said in a confident tone. He picked up the first page of the speech and began: “Good
evening, America. I am speaking to you tonight … The voice was as imperious as ever.

“Fine, Mr. President,” a technician said. “Good luck, sir!”

Rickard beamed a thank-you and said to a cameraman, “Hey, Joe, sure you can see me? I've lost a lot of weight, you know.”

“No trouble, Mr. President, just as long as you don't turn side-on…

There were smiles all round and it seemed to ease the tension. Rickard looked over at the people peeping around the Oval Office door.

“I need you in here,” he said, waving at them. In filed his wife, two teenage sons and twenty-year-old daughter. They joined four Secret Service agents and two doctors at the back of the room. Seconds later a technician called out, “One minute to go, Mr. President.”

Rickard cleared his throat. Silently he urged himself to make a strong and confident performance.

At 9:00
P.M
. Graham, nervous, but alert and ready, stepped out of Étoile Maillot. Paris was cold but alive with people strolling the streets, or on their way by car to a Saturday night's entertainment.

Graham drove slowly in the heavy traffic along the Avenue de la Grande Armée toward the Arc de Triomphe. When he had rounded the arch and was heading down the Champs Élysées, he picked up the radio-telephone. Colonel Guichard came on the line.

“I'm on my way. I'll be in rue Marbeuf in about three minutes.”

“
Bon
. We are ready. Stay calm, Mr. Graham. You will be safe.”

Once in rue Marbeuf, the Australian found a place to park the Peugeot very close to Les Innocents restaurant. The pressure of the moment took hold as he turned off the ignition. Suddenly, Colonel Guichard's repeated assurances of safety meant nothing. He sat rigidly in the car and stared into the rearview mirror. Then he watched the faces of people going past. Some were walking into shops. Others were looking in windows. He focused on faces
sitting in restaurants. Which of them, he wondered, could be waiting to put a bullet in his head?

Before terror could take a grip, he gritted his teeth and got out of the car. He locked it, and then marched off along the sidewalk, turning left into rue Robert Estienne. He felt a prickly sensation in his back and head. It gave him a tremendous urge to run as he briskly covered the forty yards to the end of the cul-de-sac, and the restaurant.

The petite brunette manageress, Brigette, ushered him in with a welcome smile. A feeling of relief surged over him as the door was closed and the restaurant's safety and warmth enveloped him.

“Have my friends arrived?” he asked, looking at his watch.

“No, monsieur. Would you like a drink?” Brigette asked, taking his coat, scarf and gloves.

Graham shook his head. Settling at the bar, he looked around at his favorite French restaurant. It was an intimate and romantic setting under low lights and cross-beamed ceiling. Soft velvet couches and fine wooden tables were tucked away from each other to ensure privacy. A mastiff hound lay quietly in one corner.

It was not the setting Graham would normally have liked with his company this night. But it was territory he knew. He felt it would give him a psychological advantage over the two Lasercomp executives.

As soon as Huntsman and Cheznoir arrived at 9:35, Graham asked Brigette for a table.

For most of the dinner, conversation was strained and trite. Cheznoir, with Huntsman's occasional support, explained Lasercomp's official policy in dealing with the Soviet Union. It was the same old corporate stuff, and it firmed the Australian's conviction that it was a set-up. Just as coffee and cognac were served, he lost patience.

“Look, gentlemen, I really don't understand the point of this meeting. All you've said so far, I could have lifted from the old Lasercomp songbook.”

Cheznoir forced a laugh. Huntsman, who until now had slobbered happily over the cuisine, was angry. “We tried to set you straight. Your information could get you into trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Well, uh,” Huntsman began squeamishly, “you're touching nerves in the Soviet Union …”

The Australian's expression tightened. “You'd better explain what you mean.”

“I think you should realize that there are, well …” Cheznoir said, pausing to gesture, “many in the Soviet Union who would not like their trade with the U.S. upset…

Graham turned sharply to the chubby PR man. “You said nerves. Whose nerves?”

Huntsman swallowed and just managed to keep down a belch. “I meant…”

“The KGB, perhaps? They're worried you might be stopped smuggling them computers. Is that it?”

“That's ridiculous!” Cheznoir hissed.

Graham decided to put the knife right in. “Like the murders of Jane Ryder, Donald Gordon and Ronald MacGregor!”

Huntsman and Cheznoir looked edgily at people at other tables.

The Australian twisted the knife. “I've got information that will screw you and your beloved Lasercomp.”

“Such as?” Huntsman asked as he wiped his mouth. He was perspiring freely.

Graham leaned back in his couch and lit a cigarette. “Such as your whole smuggling chain right into the Soviet Union's network. Such as the KGB master plan. Such as a direct link from Lasercomp to the assassination of Ronald MacGregor.”

“I've never heard so much rubbish!” Huntsman sneered. “You seem to have an obsession with attacking Lasercomp. Maybe you need psychiatric help.…”

Graham laughed. “You've tried that tactic before with other people who have questioned your clinically clean and faultless corporation. Probing Lasercomp equals mental instability—right? You bastards have more in common with the KGB than just computers, haven't you?”

Huntsman was boiling over. “We could easily screw you in court!”

“Go ahead and try. But remember, I spoke to Donald Gordon last week. He spilled everything. The PPP and every single detail of your power-crazy games!”

A waiter approached the table. There was a long silence as he cleared it and left the bill.

“How do you propose to use these lies?” Cheznoir asked, as he picked up the bill.

“It'll be published very shortly.”

“Fiction!” Cheznoir said fiercely, as he pulled his wallet from an inside coat pocket.

“Oh, no, Mr. Cheznoir, it'll be fact, checked and checked again. What you might call an exposé.”

The Australian stubbed his cigarette and stood up to leave as Cheznoir placed a credit card on the bill.

“Thank you for the dinner,” Graham said coldly. “That, at least, was pleasant.” He moved away from the table and asked for his coat. He didn't bother to look back as the manageress opened the door and wished him good night.

Graham moved quickly to his car, got in and drove straight up rue Marbeuf, watched by twenty of Colonel Guichard's disguised and armed men in cars, and strolling the street. The Peugeot was followed by two unmarked cars which had been sitting behind “road repair” signs in rue Françoise. The colonel, in a command vehicle, and a squad of six more cars followed soon afterward.

Rodriguez took a call in a small restaurant-bar off the Champs Élysées thirty seconds after Graham had left. It was Huntsman at Les Innocents.

“Now!” he said firmly and hung up.

Rodriguez moved quickly to where Martinez was waiting in a black late model Maserati with the engine running. They watched Graham's car swing into the Champs Élysées. As the Peugeot cruised past them, Rodriguez felt he could have done the job there and then with the submachine gun wrapped in brown paper resting on his knees. But he restrained himself. There were too many cars about. They waited until a few other cars passed, and then began to tail Graham.

They followed him to the lights at Pont de la Concorde over the Seine. The Peugeot crossed the bridge and then headed south along floodlit Quai Branly with the Eiffel Tower on the left.

The midnight traffic was heavy.

“Get closer,” Rodriguez ordered as the Peugeot moved faster. It began to zigzag through the traffic at increased speed. Several
motorists honked their horns in anger at the seemingly careless driving.

Rodriguez's first thought was that Huntsman had succeeded in getting Graham drunk. “Don't lose him,” he said to Martinez. He began to thread his way through the traffic once more, to the chagrin of other drivers—all except for nine cars scattered in the four lines of traffic heading one way. In them were eighteen heavily armed members of Guichard's Intelligence squad.

Graham's erratic driving was under orders that squeaked over the radio-telephone resting on the Peugeot's front seat.

The idea was to cause any tail to show itself. And it did.

I think we may have something,” Guichard said calmly as he noticed the Maserati. “Keep up speed.”

Graham checked his rear vision. He could see nothing but a blaze of headlights through the thin frost on his back windows. Guichard, now on a direct line of traffic fifty yards behind Graham, gave a flurry of orders. “Two and three move in. Four and six ease ahead. Straight ahead. Five and seven stay wide in position. Eight and nine steady. Everyone steady.”

Graham reached the lights at Port d'Issay where the traffic had thinned.

At exactly that moment, thirty-year-old Sergeant Hubert de Roqueforte turned his police car into Quai André, the very place at which Graham, the assassins, and their pursuers had just arrived. He was returning across to home base in the sixteenth
arrondissement
, to repair his radio which was out. The young sergeant spotted the sleek black Maserati slipping through the traffic making a nuisance of itself. Like every policeman in the city that night, he had been alerted to a plan to apprehend some important terrorists. He was also aware the plan was under way somewhere near where he was now. But at that precise second, he had no idea what was going on around him. De Roqueforte made hot pursuit after the Maserati, light flashing and siren on.

Guichard saw the maverick police car and tried desperately to make radio contact.

“Get out of there …! Leave the Maserati… repeat… leave that Maserati! Get out of there!
Merde!
Who is that idiot!”