The Stone Leopard (2 page)

The world was emerging from the disastrous slump which had begun in 1974. Everywhere there was hope and optimism again. The airlines were carrying an ever-growing number of tourists to distant and exotic places; the world stock markets were climbing rapidly—Dow Jones had passed the 1500-line —and the terrors of inflation were now only a memory. And, as the American Hudson Institute had predicted, France was leading the world with a great economic surge. For various reasons France had become the most powerful nation in western Europe, overtaking even West Germany; so, the President of the French Republic, Guy Florian, was the most powerful statesman between Moscow and Washington. On the political front the scene was less reassuring.

During the economic blizzard Soviet Russia had made vast strides. Portugal was now a Communist state, the Communist party there having seized power by rigging the elections. In Greece a Communist coup d'etat had taken over the government. And Spain, after a long period of chaos, was now in the grip of a Communist-dominated coalition government. Soviet warships were in the Piraeus harbour of Athens, were anchored off Barcelona, and were using the facilities of Lisbon as a naval base. The Mediterranean had become almost a Russian lake. Added to this, the last American troops had left Europe as the American Congress retreated further and further into isolation.

It was all this—plus her growing economic power—which made France the key state in western Europe. Allied with Western Germany, she provided the key element which barred any further Soviet advance. This was the situation when the news reverberated round the world of Lucie Devaud's attempt to kill President Guy Florian. The Frenchwoman failed to pull the trigger on her 9-mm automatic, but inadvertently she pulled a different kind of trigger.

Very shortly her death was to affect the lives of Alan Lennox, an Englishman based in London; of David Nash, an American living in New York; of Peter Lanz, a German based in Bavaria; of Colonel Rene Lasalle, ex-assistant chief of army counter-intelligence, now living in exile in Germany; and of certain other people at the moment residing in Czechoslovakia. The first reaction came from Col Rene Lasalle who made yet another inflammatory broadcast over the radio station Europe Number One, which transmits from the Saarland in Germany.

`Who was this mysterious woman, Lucie Devaud?' he asked in his late-evening broadcast on 8 December. 'What was her secret ? And what is the secret in the past of a leading Paris politician which must not be discovered at any cost ? And why is Marc Grelle clamping down a security dragnet which overnight is turning my country into a police state? Is there a conspiracy. . .?'

Extracts from the broadcast were repeated in television news bulletins all over the world. Lasalle's broadcast—his most venomous yet—had all the elements to stir up a ferment of speculation. 'The secret in the past of a leading Paris politician . . .' The phrase was seized on by the foreign correspondents. Was there, they speculated, somewhere in Paris a key personality—even a cabinet minister—who was secretly working against President Florian ? if so, who was this shadowy figure ? The wildest rumours were spread—even one to the effect that a right-wing group of conspirators headed by the unknown cabinet minister was behind the assassination attempt, that they had tried to kill Florian before he made his historic visit to Soviet Russia on 23 December.

In an apartment on the eighth floor at an address on East 84th Street in New York, David Nash dismissed the conspiracy rumour as rubbish. Nash, forty-five years old, a small and well-built man with shrewd grey eyes and thinning hair, worked for a special section of the State Department which no congressional committee had yet penetrated and so rendered useless. Officially, he was concerned with policy—`the vaguest word in the dictionary', as he once commented; in fact he was involved with counter-espionage at the highest level. And since he made a point of rarely appearing in the capital, the press corps was hardly aware of his existence. In the afternoon of the day following Lasalle's outburst over Europe Number One he sat in his apartment studying a transcript of the broadcast.

Round the table with him were seated two men who had just flown in from Washington.

`The way things are,' Nash commented, 'it sends shivers up my spine how close Florian came to death. If France were plunged into chaos at this particular moment, God knows how Russia might try to take advantage of the situation. We've got to find out who was behind that attempt. . .

Andrew MacLeish, Nash's nominal superior, a thin, austere fifty-year-old, broke in irritably. He hated New York and counted every minute spent there as time out of his life. 'You think this nut, Lasalle, has any idea of what he's talking about? For my money he's got his knife into Florian and just enjoys twisting it at random. By my count this is his tenth anti-Florian broadcast in six months. . .

`The tenth,' Nash agreed. 'Incidentally, I've accepted his invitation to meet with him.'

`What invitation?' MacLeish demanded. 'This is the first I've heard you've had any contact with that psychopath. . .

`Even psychopaths sometimes know a thing or two,' Nash remarked. 'Col Lasalle approached me through the Brussels embassy late this morning, our time. He says he has some vital information about what's really happening inside Paris but he'll only talk to a representative from Washington—face to face. And we have to keep very quiet about this. . .

`I don't think we ought to get mixed up with psychopathic exiles,' MacLeish repeated. He looked out of the window where he could just see a section of the Triborough Bridge through the skeletal framework of a new high-rise. They argued about it for over an hour, but in the end Nash wore them down. It was Washington which was becoming psychopathic in Nash's view; with the military and most of the administration against the troop withdrawal from Europe which Congress had forced on them, it was becoming even more important to know what was really happening in Europe, to warn their ex-allies of any dangerous development they could uncover.

On the following day Nash flew to Europe to meet the man Guy Florian had ruined.

Col Rene Baptiste Lasalle, ex-assistant chief of French military counter-intelligence, had recently been called 'an extinct volcano' by Guy Florian, but for a man whose career was abruptly ended when it seemed almost certain he would soon be promoted to the exalted rank of general, the volcano remained remarkably active. Certainly the rumbling of Col Lasalle was heard clearly enough in Paris.

Six months before Lucie Devaud tried to shoot Guy Florian in the Faubourg St Honore, Lasalle had quarrelled violently with the president and had to flee France overnight; it was rumoured he was about to be arrested for conspiring against the president. Driving his own car, Lasalle crashed through a frontier control post east of Metz at four in the morning and took refuge in West Germany. From the moment of his arrival in the Federal Republic he set about organizing a campaign of rumours to discredit the man who had ruined him. As his instrument he chose Europe Number One, the independent radio station with its transmitters in the Saarland.

At the time when David Nash flew from New York to meet him secretly, Col Lasalle was fifty-five years old. Small, compact and lean-faced, he now made his way through life with only one arm: his left arm had been blown clean off his shoulder by a landmine in Algeria in 1962. At that time a captain in army counter-intelligence, Lasalle had proved himself the most brilliant officer in the French Army when it came to rooting out Arab underground leaders. Within twenty-four hours of his arm being taken away from him, his family was also taken away: a terrorist threw a bomb into the living-room of his villa, killing his wife and seven-year-old son. Lying in hospital, his reaction was typical when he heard the news.

`Since my private life is finished I shall devote the rest of my time to France—to help preserve her way of life. It is the only thing left to me. . .

Immediately his convalescence was over, he returned from Marseilles to North Africa. The convalescence in itself was remarkable. Finding his sense of balance faulty, Lasalle took to walking in the Estoril mountains with a stick, leaping over deep ravines to find a new balance. 'When survival is at stake,' he said later, 'the body adjusts itself wonderfully. . . .' He went back to Algeria just in time to detect and foil the most determined effort up to date to assassinate General de Gaulle. Then, years later, came the clash with Florian.

Now, exiled to the Saarland, living in a farmhouse close to Saarbrucken—close also to the French border—Lasalle broadcast regularly over Europe Number One, the radio station on German soil listened to by millions inside France. And the loss of one arm seemed to have increased the electric energy of this small man who boasted he had never been idle for a day in his life. The target of his virulent broadcasting campaign was Guy Florian.

`Why is he going to visit Soviet Russia on 23 December? What is the real motive behind this visit ? Why is he going there of all places at a time when Europe is threatened by the looming shadow of the Red Army as never before. Who is the cabinet minister about whom whispers are spreading in Paris ? . .

Never once did Lasalle refer to Florian by name. Always he referred to 'he', to 'this man', until gradually it dawned on Paris that Lasalle was not only an expert counter-intelligence officer; he had now become a master of poisonous political propaganda who was threatening to undermine the foundations of Florian's regime. This was the man who had quietly indicated to the Americans that he wanted to speak to a trustworthy intelligence official.

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On the night of Thursday, 9 December, the same day when in New York David Nash informed MacLeish that he would be flying to Europe to interview Col Rene Lasalle, a short, grizzle- haired man in shabby clothes arrived in the Faubourg St Honore and took up a position opposite the Elysee Palace. He was standing at the exact spot on the kerb where, twenty-four hours earlier, Lucie Devaud had fallen into the gutter when Marc Grelle's bullets hit her in the chest. No one took any notice of him, and if the uniformed
garde republicaine
on duty outside the Elysee gave him even a moment's thought he must have assumed that this was just another voyeur, one of those macabre people who delight in goggling at the scene of an attempted crime.

The shabbily-clothed man arrived at 7.3o pm, when it was dark.

In his middle sixties, his face lined and worn and with a straggle of grey moustache, he was still standing there at 8.30 pm, when, as if in a daze, he suddenly stepped into the street without looking. The car coming at speed only a few metres away had no time to pull up; the man must have loomed in front of the driver's windscreen without warning. The vehicle hit the pedestrian a terrible blow, drove on over him and accelerated down the street, disappearing in the direction of Madeleine. Fifteen minutes later an ambulance with siren screaming rushed him to the Hotel-Dieu on the Ile de la Cite. On arrival a doctor examined the patient and said he would be lucky to last the night.

On Thursday, g December, having got rid of his visitors from Washington, David Nash consulted a road map of western Europe, checked distances and promptly decided to fly across the Atlantic the same night. If he caught Pan Am flight 92 leaving New York at 5.45 pm, he could be in Brussels early next day, which should give him time to drive to Luxembourg —where he had arranged to meet Lasalle—and back again to catch another night flight from Brussels to New York. He boarded flight 92 by the skin of his teeth and then relaxed in his first-class seat as the Boeing 707 climbed steadily towards thirty thousand feet above the Long Island coast.

Nash had a tight schedule ahead of him, He was not only going to meet Lasalle on the neutral ground of Luxembourg; he had also arranged to meet his German counterpart, Peter Lanz, with whom he maintained a close and cordial relationship. After all, the French fugitive colonel was residing in Germany and it had been one of Lanz's more delicate duties to keep an eye on his electric visitor who had fled from the territory of Germany's closest ally.

The German authorities had very mixed feelings about the arrival of Col Lasalle in their midst. They gave him refuge— no specific charges had ever been levelled against him by Paris —and the local police chief in Saarbrucken was instructed to maintain a distant surveillance on the fugitive. Lasalle himself, fearing an attempt to kidnap him, had asked for police protection, and this was granted on the understanding that it was never referred to publicly. With the passage of time— Lasalle had now been in Germany for six months—the surveillance was relaxed.

Peter Lanz had visited Lasalle several times, requesting him to tone down his broadcasts, and always Lasalle received the German courteously and said he would consider the request. Then he would get into his car, drive to the radio station and blast Florian all over again with a fresh series of innuendoes. Since he was breaking no law, Lanz would shrug his shoulders and then sit down to read carefully a transcript of the latest outburst.

Lanz, at thirty-two, was exceptionally young to occupy the post of vice-president of the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, the West German Federal Intelligence Service. He owed his rapid promotion to his ability, and to the fact that a large number of older men were suddenly swept out of the organization when the new Chancellor, Franz Hauser, was elected three months after Guy Florian's own rise to power. 'I don't want intriguers,' Hauser had snapped, 'I want young and energetic men who can do the damned job. . .