He handed Sir James a buff folder, and the head of Manson Consolidated read it within a few minutes. He grunted several times and muttered, “Bloody hell,” once. When he had finished, he looked up. “I still want those three hundred thousand shares in Bormac,” he said. “You say the others went about it the wrong way. Why?”
“She would appear to have one obsession in life, and it’s not money. She’s rich in her own right. When she married, she was the daughter of a Scottish laird with more land than ready cash. The marriage was no doubt arranged between the families. After her old man died she inherited the lot, mile after mile of desolate moorland. But over the past twenty years the fishing and hunting rights have brought in a small fortune from city-dwelling sportsmen, and parcels of land sold off for industry have made even more. It’s been shrewdly invested by her broker, or whatever they call them up there. She has a nice income to live on. I suspect the other bidders offered a lot of money but nothing else. That would not interest her.”
“Then what the hell would?” asked Sir James.
“Look at paragraph two on the second page, Sir James. See what I mean? The notices in The Times every anniversary, the attempt to have a statue erected, which was refused by the London County Council. The memorial she had put up in his hometown. I think that’s her obsession—the memory of the old slave driver she married.”
“Yes, yes, you may be right. So what do you propose?”
Thorpe outlined his idea, and Manson listened thoughtfully.
“It might work,” he said eventually. “Stranger things have happened. The trouble is, if you try it and she still refuses, you can hardly go back again with another offer couched in a different vein. But then, I suppose a pure cash offer would in any case get the same reaction the previous two proposals met. All right, play it your way. Just get her to sell those shares.”
With that, Thorpe was on his way.
Shannon was back in his London flat shortly after twelve. Lying on the mat was a cable from Langarotti in Marseilles. It was signed simply “Jean” and addressed to Keith Brown. Its message was an address, a hotel in a street a little way out of the center of the town where the Corsican had checked in under the name of Lavallon. Shannon approved the precaution. Checking into a French hotel requires the filling out of a form which is later collected by the police. They might have wondered why their old friend Langarotti was staying so far out of town from his usual haunts.
Shannon spent ten minutes extracting the number of the hotel from Continental Directory Enquiries, and placed a call. When he asked the hotel for M. Lavallon, he was told the monsieur was out. He left a message asking M. Lavallon to call M. Brown in London on his return. He had already given each of the four his own telephone number and made them commit it to memory.
Still using the telephone, he sent a telegram to the poste restante address of Endean under the name of Walter Harris, advising the project manager that he was back in London and would like to discuss something. Another telegram went to Janni Dupree at his flat, instructing him to report to Shannon as soon as he received the cable.
He rang his own Swiss bank and learned that of the salary for himself of £10,000, half that amount had been transferred to him, the credit having come from an unnamed account holder at the Handelsbank. This he knew to be Endean. He shrugged. It was normal for half the salary only to be paid at this early date. He was confident, from the sheer size of ManCon and its evident eagerness to see Kimba fall from power, that the other £5000 would be his as the operation progressed.
Through the afternoon he typed out a full report of his Luxembourg and Hamburg trip, excluding the names of the firm of accountants in Luxembourg and the two arms dealers. To these sheets he attached a full statement of expenditure.
It was past four when he finished, and he had not eaten since the midmorning snack provided by Lufthansa on the flight from Hamburg. He found half a dozen eggs in the refrigerator, made a complete mess of an omelet, threw it away, and had a nap.
The arrival of Janni Dupree at the door just after six woke him, and five minutes later the phone rang. It was Endean, who had picked up the telegram in the post office.
Endean soon noticed that Shannon was not in a position to talk freely. “Is there someone with you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it connected with business?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to meet?”
“I think we ought,” said Shannon. “What about tomorrow morning?”
“Okay. About eleven suit you?”
“Sure,” said Shannon.
“Your place?”
“Suits me fine.”
“I’ll be there at eleven,” said Endean and hung up.
Shannon turned to the South African. “How are you getting on, Janni?” he asked.
Dupree had made a little progress in the three days he had been working. The hundred pairs of socks, T-shirts, and underpants were on order and would be ready for collection by Friday. He had found a supplier for the fifty combat tunics and had placed the order. The same firm could have provided trousers to match, but, according to his orders, Dupree was seeking another firm to supply the trousers so that no one supplier would realize he was providing complete sets of uniforms. Dupree mentioned that no one seemed suspicious in any case, but Shannon decided nevertheless to stick to the original idea.
Janni said he had tried several footwear stores but had not found the canvas boots he was looking for. He would go on trying for the rest of the week and start searching for berets, haversacks, knapsacks, a variety of webbing, and sleeping bags next week. Shannon advised him to contact his first export agent and get the first consignment of underwear and tunics off to Marseilles as soon as possible. He promised Dupree to get from Langarotti the name and address of a consignee agent in Marseilles within the next forty-eight hours.
Before the South African left, Shannon typed out a letter to Langarotti and addressed it to him under his real name at the main post office of Marseilles. In the letter he reminded the Corsican of a conversation they had had six months earlier beneath the palm trees, when the talk had turned to the buying of arms. The Corsican had mentioned that he knew a man in Paris who could get End User Certificates from a diplomat in one of the Paris embassies of an African republic. Shannon needed to know the name of the man and where he could be contacted.
When he had finished he gave Dupree the letter and ordered him to post it, express rate, that same evening from Trafalgar Square. He explained he would have done it himself, but he had to wait in the flat for Langarotti to call from Marseilles.
He was getting very hungry by eight, when Langarotti finally called, his voice crackling over a telephone line that must have been created personally by the inventor of that antique masterpiece the French telephone network.
Shannon asked him, in guarded terms, how he had been getting on. Before any of the mercenaries had left him, he had warned them all that under no circumstances was a telephone line to be used to talk openly about what they were doing.
“I checked into a hotel and sent you a telegram with my address on it,” said Langarotti.
“I know. I got it,” shouted Shannon.
“I hired a scooter and toured all the shops that deal in the kind of merchandise we are looking for,” came the voice. “There are three manufacturers in each category. I got the addresses and names of the three boat makers and wrote off to each for their brochures. I should get them in a week or so. Then I can order the best-suited from the local dealers, quoting the maker’s name and brand name of the article,” said Langarotti.
“Good idea,” said Shannon. “What about the second articles?”
“They depend on the kind we pick from the brochures I shall get. One depends on the other. But don’t worry. On the second thing we need, there are thousands of every kind and description in the shops along this coast. With spring coming, every shop in every port is stocking up with the latest models.”
“Ok
ay. Fine,” Shannon shouted. “Now listen. I need the name of a good export agent for shipping. I need it earlier than I thought. There will be a few crates to be sent from here in the near future, and another from Hamburg.”
“I can get that easy enough,” said Langarotti from the other end. “But I think it will be better in Toulon. You can guess why.”
Shannon could guess. Langarotti could use another name at his hotel, but for exporting goods from the port on a small freighter he would have to show his identity card. Moreover, in the past year or so Marseilles police had tightened up considerably in their watch on the port and a new customs chief had been drafted in, who was believed to be a holy terror. The aim of both operations was to clamp down on the heroin traffic that made Marseilles the start of the French connection with New York, but a search of a boat for drugs could just as easily turn up arms instead. It would be the worst irony to be caught because of something one was not even involved in.
“Fair enough. You know that area best,” said Shannon. “Cable me the name and address as soon as you have them. There is one other thing. I have sent a letter by express rate tonight, to you personally at the main post office in Marseilles. You’ll see what I want when you read it. Cable me the man’s name at once when you get the letter, which should be Friday morning.”
“Okay,” said Langarotti. “Is that all?”
“Yes, for the moment. Send me those brochures as soon as you get them, with your own comments and the prices. We must stay in budget.”
“Right. By-by,” called Langarotti, and Shannon hung up. He had dinner alone at the Bois de St. Jean and slept early.
Endean arrived at eleven the next morning and spent an hour reading the report and accounts and discussing both with Shannon.
“Fair enough,” he said at length. “How are things going?”
“Well,” said Shannon, “it’s early days yet, of course. I’ve only been on the job for ten days, but a lot of ground has been covered. I want to get all the orders placed by Day Twenty, which will leave forty days for them to be fulfilled. After that there must be an allowance of twenty days to collect all the component parts and get them safely and discreetly aboard the ship. Sailing date should be Day Eighty, if we are to strike on schedule. By the way, I shall need more money soon.”
“You have three and a half thousand in London, and seven thousand in Belgium,” objected Endean.
“Yes, I know. But there is going to be a spate of payments soon.”
He explained he would have to pay Johann, the Hamburg arms dealer, the outstanding $26,000 within twelve days to allow him forty days to get the consignment through the formalities in Madrid and ready for shipment; then there would be $4800, also to Johann, for the ancillary gear he needed for the attack. When he had the End User Certificate in Paris, he would have to send it to Alan, along with a credit transfer for $7200, 50 percent of the Yugoslav arms price.
“It all mounts up,” he said. “The big payments, of course, are the arms and the boat. They form over half the total budget.”
“All right,” said Endean. “I’ll consult and prepare a draft to your Belgian account for another twenty thousand pounds. Then the transfer can be made on a telephone call from me to Switzerland. In that way it will only take a matter of hours, when you need it.” He rose to go. “Anything else?”
“No,” said Shannon. “I’ll have to go away again at the weekend for another trip. I should be away most of next week. I want to check on the search for the boat, the choice of dinghies and outboards in Marseilles, and the submachine guns in Belgium.”
“Cable me at the usual address when you leave and when you get back,” said Endean.
The drawing room in the sprawling apartment above Cottesmore Gardens, not far from Kensington High Street, was gloomy in the extreme, with heavy drapes across the windows to shut out the spring sunshine. A gap a few inches wide between them allowed a little daylight to filter in through thick net curtains. Between the four formally placed and overstuffed chairs, each of them late-Victorian pieces, myriad small tables bore assorted bric-à-brac. There were buttons from long-punctured uniforms, medals won in long-past skirmishes with long-liquidated heathen tribes. Glass paperweights nudged Dresden china dolls, cameos of once demure Highland beauties, and fans that had cooled faces at balls whose music was no longer played.
Around the walls of discolored brocade hung portraits of ancestors, Montroses and Monteagles, Farquhars and Frazers, Murrays and Mintoes. Surely such a gathering could not be the ancestors of one old woman? Still, you never knew, with the Scots.
Bigger than them all, in a vast frame above the fire that clearly was never lit, stood a man in a kilt, a painting evidently much more recent than the other blackened antiques, but still discolored by age. The face, framed by two bristling ginger muttonchop whiskers, glared down into the room as if its owner had just spotted a coolie impudently collapsing from overwork at the other end of the plantation. “Sir Ian Macallister, K.B.E.,” read the plate beneath the portrait.
Martin Thorpe dragged his eyes back to Lady Macallister, who was slumped in a chair, fiddling as she constantly did with the hearing aid that hung on her chest. He tried to make out from the mumblings and ramblings, sudden digressions, and difficult accent what she was saying.
“People have come before, Mr. Martin,” she was saying; she insisted on calling him Mr. Martin, although he had introduced himself twice. “But I don’t see why I should sell. It was my husband’s company—don’t you see? He founded all these estates that they make their money from. It was all his work. Now people come and say they want to take the company away and do other things with it—build houses and play around with other things. I don’t understand it all, not at all, and I will not sell—”
“But, Lady Macallister—”
She went on as if she had not heard him, which indeed she had not, for her hearing aid was up to its usual tricks because of her constant fiddling with it. Thorpe began to understand why other suitors had eventually gone elsewhere for their shell companies.
“You see, my dear husband, God rest his poor soul, was not able to leave me very much, Mr. Martin. When those dreadful Chinese killed him, I was in Scotland on furlough, and I never went back. I was advised not to go. But they told me the estates belonged to the company, and he had left me a large part of the company. So that was his legacy to me—don’t you see? I could not sell his own legacy to me…”
Thorpe was about to point out that the company was worthless, but realized that would not be the right thing to say. “Lady Macallister—” he began again.
“You’ll have to speak directly into the hearing aid. She’s deaf as a post,” said Lady Macallister’s companion.
Thorpe nodded his thanks at her and really noticed her for the first time. In her late sixties, she had the careworn look of those who once had their own independence but who, through the strange turns of fortune, have fallen on harder times and to survive have to put themselves in bond to others, often to cantankerous, troublesome, exhausting employers whose money enables them to hire others to serve them.
Thorpe rose and approached the senile old woman in the armchair. He spoke closer to the hearing aid. “Lady Macallister, the people I represent do not want to change the company. On the contrary, they want to put a lot of money into it and make it rich and famous again. We want to start up the Macallister estates, just like when your husband ran them….”
For the first time since the interview had started an hour before, something like a glimmer of light awoke in the old woman’s eyes. “Like when my husband ran them?” she queried.
“Yes, Lady Macallister,” bawled Thorpe. He pointed up at the figure of the tyrant on the wall. “We want to create all his life’s work again, just the way he would have wanted it, and make the Macallister estates a memorial to him and his work.”
But she was gone again. “They never put up a memorial to him,” she quavered. “I tried, you know. I wrote to the author
ities. I said I would pay for the statue, but they said there was no room. No room. They put up lots of statues, but not to my Ian.”
“They will put up a memorial to him if the estates and the company will become rich again,” Thorpe shouted into the hearing aid. “They’ll have to. If the company was rich, it could insist on a memorial. It could found a scholarship, or a foundation, called the Sir Ian Macallister Trust so that people would remember him.”
He had already tried that ploy once, but no doubt she had not heard him or had not grasped what he was saying. But she heard him this time.
“It would cost a lot of money,” she quavered. “I am not a rich woman.” She was in fact extremely rich, but probably unaware of it.
“You don’t have to pay for it, Lady Macallister,” he said. “The company would pay for it. But the company would have to expand again. And that means money. The money would be put into the company by my friends.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she wailed and began to sniff, reaching for a cambric handkerchief in her sleeve. “I don’t understand these things. If only my dear Ian were here. Or Mr. Dalgleish. I always ask him what would be for the best. He always signs the papers for me. Mrs. Barton, I’d like to go back to my room.”
“It’s time enough,” said the housekeeper-companion brusquely. “Now come along. It’s time for your nap. And your medicine.”
She helped the old woman to her feet and assisted her out of the sitting room and down the corridor. Through the open door Thorpe could hear her businesslike voice commanding her charge to get onto the bed, and the old woman’s protests as she took the medicine.
After a while Mrs. Barton came back to the sitting room. “She’s on the bed—she’ll rest for a while,” she said.
Thorpe smiled his most rueful smile. “It looks as if I’ve failed,” he said sadly. “And yet, you know, the stock she holds is quite valueless unless the company is rejuvenated with fresh management and some hard cash, quite a lot of it, which my partners would be prepared to put in.” He turned to the door. “I’m sorry if I put you to inconvenience,” he said.
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