Along the ceiling were a series of grid-covered air-conditioning ducts, and it was through the grating of one of those two-foot-square holes that the Saint had seen—just before he jumped to his feet, and began to throw things—the head and shoulders of a man, and a rifle barrel. Merely shouting a warning at the Prime Minister would probably have resulted in nothing more, at least for the first precious few seconds, than startled stares—even if the shout were heard at all. So the Saint threw the pots, and even before the third had smashed against the floor beside the Prime Minister’s sofa, rifle shots thudded harmlessly into the sofa and shattered the plate glass window just behind it.
Before the police and the secret service men could so much as turn toward the Saint, their attention was caught by the crack of the rifle above their heads. The pistols which might have been directed at Simon were quickly aimed at the grating, and bullets clanged against the metal and plunked holes in the plaster around the hole.
There was no answering fire from the rifleman. Men dashed out of the doors of the waiting room to surround the building. Others crouched with drawn pistols behind chairs, gazing up at the row of gratings in the ceiling, waiting for more shots.
“Everybody stay down,” somebody was shouting.
“Is Tom all right?” one of Liskard’s aides called from the shelter of an alcove.
“I’m fine,” Liskard boomed back.
His rumbling resonant voice was suited to the size of his body. He was crouched behind the sofa. His wife had disappeared entirely behind it.
“Look there!”
Since the walls of the whole waiting room were almost entirely glass, the last phase of the attempted assassination was visible to everyone inside the building. A white man in a soiled tan suit appeared on the edge of the low roof which covered the unloading area of the driveway. He fired his rifle wildly without taking real aim at any of the security men around the terminal building, then jumped to the ground. He fell forward on his hands and knees when he hit the grass, and then snatched up his rifle and ran. The guards had no choice but to shoot him down. Their weapons crackled in a sudden fusillade. The would-be assassin leaped twisting into the air, throwing his rifle above his head. Then he crashed down on the earth and moved no more.
A civilian-dressed security man and a uniformed policeman were already standing over Simon, their guns drawn. It was by no means obvious to them whether he was an accomplice of the gunman or not. The Saint got to his feet with the utmost casualness and dusted his coat sleeves and the knees of his trousers. The secret service man looked around, not quite sure what to do with him.
“I believe this gentleman saved my life,” a deep voice said.
Thomas Liskard was walking across the room toward the Saint, much to the discomfort of his bodyguard, who thought he should stay under cover until the area was declared entirely safe. The other non-official persons in the waiting room were being gently herded into one small section of the place so that they could be easily watched over and questioned. The Saint, as a man long inured to life’s more spectacular possible crises, had only one really pressing thought: Now we’ll be hours late on the takeoff.
Prime Minister Liskard strode easily up to him and offered his huge hand. He was the kind of bulky bearish man whose very clumsiness had a politically valuable magnetism to it, and whose craggily handsome face had an obvious substratum of keen intelligence.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to the Saint. “That was quick thinking.”
They shook hands.
“I’m sorry about the method,” Simon said. “I didn’t have time to observe protocol.”
“I don’t think there is a really proper way of telling a Prime Minister to fall on his face,” Liskard replied with a grin. “I’m damned grateful.”
The secret service men were standing by ready to pounce. Liskard waved them back.
“If you boys kept up on your work, you’d know who this is,” Liskard said to them. “Mr Simon Templar, isn’t it, unless I’m very mistaken?”
A slight raising of the Saint’s eyebrows was all that betrayed his mild surprise.
“I have to admit I didn’t realize my notoriety had spread quite so far,” he said. “Or to such high circles.”
“This is a small country, Mr Templar,” Liskard said. “There’s not much that happens that I don’t hear about. What with constant threats against me and this country in general, we can’t afford to have guests dropping in without a strict screening process—and when the guest has your fame, especially among professional policemen, his name goes straight to the top of the bureaucratic pyramid as soon as he crosses our border.” Liskard smiled. “As a matter of fact, you were within our ken pretty well all the time. I have some excellent snapshots of you taking snapshots of leopards out at the park.”
Then it was Simon’s turn to smile.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have some excellent snapshots of your men taking snapshots of me. Especially a little bald chap who almost got gored by a wart hog while he was watching me watch baboons.”
Prime Minister Liskard laughed out loud.
“You deserve your reputation,” he said. “I hope our attention didn’t offend you.”
“Not at all,” Simon said. “It made me feel right at home. I’d have felt a little lost without knowing that somebody was there watching.”
“Well,” Liskard said, “it’s a good thing you were watching, Mr Templar, or I might be dead at this moment. Please do me the honor of sitting with my group on the plane.”
“I’d be delighted.”
An important-looking man in a dark suit came up and spoke to Liskard.
“His name was Benjamin Scott. You remember? The one who escaped from Awi Bluff a week ago.”
“A madman then?” Liskard asked. “Is that all there is to it?”
“Possibly. We’re putting in a call to the director at Awi Bluff. Maybe he can tell us just what sort of lunatic the fellow was.”
“Is he dead?” one of Liskard’s younger aides asked.
“Died instantly. Nothing on him. I think we can assume this was one insane man’s big blow-up. It shouldn’t have political overtones or affect your trip.”
“Thank you, Stewart. Please let me know if there’s anything more before we take off. I’d not like to be delayed any longer than necessary.”
Stewart spoke to some other men, and within ten minutes the plane was beginning to take on passengers. Liskard was swept away, after a word of apology to Simon, in a tide of last-minute business, but a moment after the loading of the plane began, a very officious-looking young man with a bulging briefcase in one hand came scurrying up to the Saint.
“I’m Lockhart, the Prime Minister’s secretary,” he said. “I’m to ask you to please come past the barrier with me and join our party on the plane.”
Simon turned to follow him, and almost bumped into someone else.
“And I’m the Prime Minister’s wife,” she said, not making the slightest move to increase the minute space between herself and Simon. “The Prime Minister didn’t bother to introduce us,” she went on. “I think sometimes he forgets he has a wife.”
“He’d have to be terribly forgetful, in that case,” replied the Saint. “But in the circumstances, I’m sure he has a lot on his mind.”
She was about thirty-five, very attractive, very blonde, and there was a neurotic tension in the carefully made-up contours of her face. Simon had a hunch that her apparent calm in the midst of the storm of the assassination attempt was the result of a good deal of alcoholic insulation.
“We’d better hurry, please,” Lockhart said in clipped, high cultured tones.
“Don’t worry, Jimmy,” Mrs Liskard said. “We won’t get you in trouble with the big man.”
“Shall we go on, then?” Simon suggested.
He was made considerably more uncomfortable by the boozily affectionate wives of other men than he was by wild-eyed assassins with high-powered rifles. Mrs Liskard
smiled at him, took his arm before he could get it out of her reach, and walked with him around the crowd of people waiting to board the plane.
“Jimmy is a very ambitious boy,” she said loudly enough for Lockhart to hear. “He’s terribly afraid of upsetting the big man.”
Lockhart ignored the crack and Simon tried to. They boarded the big jet and entered a curtained-off section between the pilot’s area and the rest of the seating accommodations. From his window Simon could see Liskard giving solemnly confident waves to the photographers before he came up the ramp. Mrs Liskard asked Lockhart to see about getting her a gin and tonic. A steward and stewardess appeared to make certain all was in order in the private section. Mrs Liskard asked them to see about getting her a gin and tonic since Lockhart was taking so long.
Simon did not like Mrs Liskard in spite of her attractiveness. He had nothing against amiable alcoholics in general, but Mrs Liskard was too amiable to him and too unamiable to other people, toward whom she tended to take a coldly condescending attitude. And her amiability toward Simon took a curious and very irritating form of expression. When other people, such as Lockhart, were watching, she fell all over him, but when there was no one else paying any attention she dropped the whole passionate display almost entirely. Her eyes were always darting around her immediate vicinity, searching for an audience, sizing up the impression she was making.
“Here he comes,” whispered the steward to the stewardess.
There was a bustle as Liskard entered the plane. Mrs Liskard went for Simon’s nearest arm and hand, both her arms and hands wrapping around his like vines. She shot him a dazzling and absolutely artificial smile, which he returned as he removed his arm and hand firmly from her grasp. Her smile faded, then came back more false than ever as her husband came into the curtained compartment along with half a dozen other men. One of them was the man called Stewart, Nagawiland’s Foreign Minister, who had spoken to Liskard in the terminal building about the identity of the dead gunman. Another was immediately recognizable to any reader of newspapers as Nagawiland’s Deputy Prime Minister, James Todd. He was neither as dynamic as Liskard nor as vaguely aristocratic and important-looking as the fortyish Stewart. Todd was a head shorter than either Liskard or Stewart, and ten or more years older. His graying hair was thin, and he wore rimless bifocals whose thick lower crescents distorted the lower part of his eyes. He was reputed to be a professional government man of great ability, but he looked more like a village parson or almost-retired schoolteacher than second in command to Thomas Liskard.
Simon did not recognize the other four men who entered with Liskard. He judged from their deferential behavior that they held nothing like the status of Liskard and his two top associates. They stood holding briefcases and bundles of papers, while Todd and Stewart took seats. Anne Liskard caught her husband’s hand as he passed her.
“Oh, Tom, we’ve been having the most wonderful time while you were posing out there! Except we can’t get a thing to drink. Mr Templar is so fascinating. I think you should make him your second deputy or something. I’m sure he could handle those socialists.”
Todd looked at her over his shoulder with open disgust. Liskard wore the expression of a man who had been through it all before and expected to keep on going through it. He leaned down and whispered in his wife’s ear. Simon just caught his words.
“You gave me your word, if I brought you along…”
Mrs Liskard giggled loudly and pushed him playfully away.
“Oh, Tom, don’t be so secretive!” she said with every effort to make her voice carry as far as possible. “Everybody knows you made me promise to behave myself before you’d let me come along.”
“Then try behaving yourself now,” Liskard said patiently.
He took a seat across the aisle.
“I have been,” his wife protested. She turned to the Saint. “Simon, haven’t I been behaving myself? Behaving means not drinking, of course.” She giggled again. “I’ve been trying to behave, but Lockhart’s gone off and won’t bring me that gin and tonic.”
She was speaking to her husband again, but he ignored her. She turned back to Simon.
“I’m really not so bad. I’m always perfectly dignified when any reporters are around, and they’re the only ones who count, after all, aren’t they?”
One of the jet’s engines coughed and whined to full life. Simon wished heartily that he had somehow been able to warn Thomas Liskard of the assassin in the ceiling and at the same time to see that Mrs Liskard was left as a tempting target on the sofa.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to let your husband judge those things,” he said.
Anne Liskard’s face contorted into a frowning sulkiness.
“I certainly should think a gentleman could defend me a little better than that!” she said.
Simon got to his feet as a second engine went into action.
“You’re not leaving us?” Thomas Liskard said.
“With all respect,” Simon answered, “I’m afraid I’m not quite enough of a diplomat to handle the problems you have here.”
A lesser man than Liskard might have been gravely offended by the Saint’s bluntness, gently put though it was. But the Prime Minister accepted the Saint’s comment without a trace of embarrassment or irritation.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Please sit down. I’m looking forward to a chat with you on the flight. My wife is just…overexcited. She’ll calm down when she gets a drink into her.”
Simon sat down again with a shrug of thanks for Liskard’s understanding.
“Well, where is that drink?” his wife demanded of Lockhart, who came through the curtains at just that moment.
Lockhart gave the Prime Minister a questioning but otherwise absolutely neutral look.
“Would you please ask the stewardess to bring my wife a gin and tonic?” Liskard said, with quiet dignity.
“Yes, sir,” said Lockhart, and turned back through the curtain.
All four of the engines had been switched on now, and their noise hindered casual conversation. Simon took a deep breath of relief as he saw that Anne Liskard had decided to sink into sullen silence. A stewardess hurried in with a double gin and tonic and profuse apologies to Mrs Liskard. The voice of another stewardess sounded from a loudspeaker in the cool blue upholstery of the ceiling in the standardized litany to which today’s airline passengers have become so wearily immune that they scarcely hear it.
“Please fasten your seat belts and refrain from smoking until after take-off.”
A moment later the tone of the jets changed, and the blinding white of the terminal building began to move slowly across the plane’s windows. Todd turned to speak to the Prime Minister.
“It’ll be good to get off the ground—and better still to get down again.”
“Let’s just hope it’s not a question of leaving the frying pan for the fire,” Liskard said good-humoredly. “From what our advance group tells me about the greeting we can expect in London, that little business in the waiting room may seem like a tea party in comparison.”
3
Prime Minister Liskard’s advance information about his English reception proved to be unpleasantly accurate. Even as the jet came down through the clouds to land at London Airport, one of Liskard’s aides pressed his cheek to the window beside his seat and exclaimed, “Do you see that? Must be five hundred of them!”
Simon leaned across Mrs Liskard, who had been sleeping off the effects of the first half of the flight during the second half with her head resting against the outer wall of the plane, and caught a glimpse of the dark herd of human figures congregated in an open space among the terminal’s complex of huge buildings. Then the momentary view was lost as the plane with strange slowness moved down an invisible incline of air toward contact with the runway.
“The welcoming committee?” Liskard asked with amused irony.
He was sitting across the aisle from the Saint, and had not been able to see.
&nb
sp; “Your admirers seem to be out in force,” Simon confirmed.
“More likely a lynch mob,” Liskard responded dourly. “At least somebody cares.”
The wheels of the jet screeched suddenly against the pavement of the runway, and Mrs Liskard woke up.
“Who cares about what?” she asked blearily.
Half a dozen gin and tonics had not improved her perceptions nor her appearance. Her face was puffy and her lipstick smeared at one corner of her mouth. Even so, any man with reasonable tolerance for human frailty could have spotted her as potentially one of the most attractive women he was ever likely to meet. All the more pity, Simon thought, that she should be torn apart by whatever tensions drove her into a continual desire for semi-consciousness.
“We’re in London,” he told her. “We were just noticing the crowd that’s out to meet you.”
She tried to see. The plane was taxiing in toward the passenger terminal, but was still some distance away.
“Where?” she asked.
“On the other side of that building,” the Saint answered.
“Carrying roses, I suppose,” she said sarcastically.
Stewart turned from his place in front.
“Possibly,” he said, “but what they were carrying looked more like pitchforks.”
Anne Liskard’s eyes widened in a gullible expression which may or may not have been entirely put on.
“You couldn’t really see that well, could you?” she asked.
Stewart shook his head, sighed, and faced front again.
“Were there really so many?” Lockhart asked. “Five hundred? The opposition must be much worse than we thought.”
He was the only one of the party who seemed openly worried, but his statement sent a silent but somehow clearly perceptible wave of uneasiness through the rest of the group. The Prime Minister, who had spent the last two hours of the trip concentrating on paper work, snapped down the clasps of his briefcase.
The Saint Abroad Page 10