Year of the Golden Ape (3 page)

'Show me how it works,' LeCat demanded when they stood in the basement laboratory with the suitcase open on a work-bench.

'This activates the trigger...'

'I shall need to attach a time mechanism...'

'I would suggest...'

LeCat listened only to the first part of the explanation. As an explosives and boobytrap specialist, the Frenchman knew before Antoine explained how he was going to deal with the problem - he simply wanted confirmation that he would be going about it the right way. After all, the nuclear physicist had produced a bomb large enough to destroy a medium-sized city.

Antoine had carefully not enquired to what purpose the device would be put; he believed he knew - that it would be handed over to either Israel or one of the Arab states for a large sum of money. The Frenchman had managed to persuade himself that he was going into business like any other armaments manufacturer; if he did not supply the device, someone else would. It was the way of the world, and fifty thousand dollars was a sum he would never have seen all his life had he remained in the service of his own government.

'You are leaving tonight,' LeCat said abruptly. 'You will be driven from here after dark.'

Antoine was surprised at the suddenness of his departure, and a worry he had been nursing for some time came to the surface. 'The fifty thousand dollars ...'

'I shall bring it here in a few hours. We do not want you travelling back the same way you came - across Canada. I have to drive you into the States by a devious route to Seattle. From there you will catch a train to Chicago and you will enter Canada again from America. Then we are finished with you.'

Antoine, clever enough at his own job, did not fully understand the reasons for this, but the complexity of the plan impressed him. Except for one question. 'I can enter America without a visa?'

'Of course! You forget - you are now a Canadian citizen with your new passport. Canadians can go across the border as often as they like - they only have to show their passport. I will see you this evening ...'

LeCat left the house with the suitcase and drove to the ferry point where he crossed to Victoria. He took a cab to the wharf where the trawler
Pêcheur
was anchored and spent some time aboard the vessel. Most of the time he spent chatting to the French captain while the hours passed, and during his stay he enjoyed a typically French meal of endless duration. It was after dark when he arrived back at the house on Dusquesne Street with another suitcase.

'You can count it if you like,' LeCat said, 'but we have a long journey ahead of us...'

Fifty thousand dollars. Antoine opened several of the hundred dollar bill packets inside the suitcase and checked the currency with a feeling of embarrassment - and relief - which amused Le-Cat. Then he closed the case, locked it, put the key inside his wallet. 'I suppose I'd better bank it a little at a time ?'

'That's right,' LeCat said amiably. 'Keep the rest inside a safety deposit. And now, if you're ready...'

LeCat suggested putting the suitcase in the boot of the car, but Antoine said he would prefer to ride in the back with the case beside him. LeCat shrugged, climbed behind the wheel, and they drove off, leaving Dupont and the engineer, Varrier, to remove the laboratory equipment Antoine had dismantled and packed up. They drove east out of the city in the darkness, up into the mountains.

LeCat shot Antoine three times through the chest when they had stopped by the side of a lake. He weighted the body with chains he had concealed under canvas in the boot, put it inside a small boat moored to the water's edge, and rowed the boat far out. Antoine was dropped in the lake, which at this point was over one hundred feet deep, and LeCat returned to the car and the suitcase containing fifty thousand dollars.

LeCat did not take the money for himself: it was part of the arrangement with Ahmed Riad - who had hired him in Algiers -that this amount would be used to pay the French crew of the trawler
Pêcheur;
one-third to be paid now, the balance of two-thirds to be handed over when the trawler had served its ultimate purpose.

When he returned to the
Pêcheur,
Andre Dupont was waiting for him, and a powerful launch was putting out to sea in the middle of the night with the crates of laboratory equipment aboard. Like the man who had used the equipment, the crates would be dropped overboard in deep water. A perfectionist for detail, LeCat checked to make sure Dupont had not overlooked anything.

His subordinate had not overlooked anything. While LeCat had driven off with the nuclear physicist, Dupont had thoroughly dusted the rooms in the house Antoine had used, wiping away all fingerprints. He had then Hoovered the basement and the other rooms to remove any particles or clothing threads a police scientist might find interesting - the police scientist, if he ever came, would himself use a special Hoover in search of the evidence Dupont had so carefully removed. The Hoover went overboard with the laboratory equipment.

Nor was it likely that the police would visit the building on Dusquesne Street for the next few months, because LeCat had taken a year's lease on the premises. After checking the place personally the following morning, LeCat locked it up and went back to the trawler with Dupont.

The cognac has been delivered.

LeCat cabled the message to an address in Paris from where it was sent by a devious route to Sheikh Gamal Tafak who was at that moment at Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. For 'cognac' Tafak read the phrase 'nuclear device'. Earlier he had received two other similarly cryptic messages from LeCat, one reporting the 'death' of Antoine in Nantes, the other confirming the seizure of the plutonium canister. The day after he had sent his latest message, LeCat flew back to Europe. It was November, time to bring the Englishman, Winter, into his stage of the operation.

4

Winter.

The background of the English adventurer with whom LeCat had previously worked for two years was totally unknown. He had appeared in the Mediterranean one day, materialising out of nowhere, a man looking for a job which paid well, where the rewards would be tax-free, a job with a hint of excitement to ward off the boredom which was always threatening to assail him. He had first met LeCat in Tangier.

No one ever knew his real name, and no one ever came close enough to call him by his first name, whatever that might have been. In the Mediterranean underworld where this Englishman
earned his living he was simply known as Winter.

Over six feet tall, in his early thirties, he was lightly built and walked with a brisk step. There was a coldness in his steady brown eyes his associates found disconcerting, an aloofness of manner which discouraged any attempt at intimacy, but within a few minutes of first meeting him, people formed the impression that this glacial Englishman was clever. His personality had a certain hypnotic effect; an adventurer, he always seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

At that time LeCat was looking for a partner he could trust, which automatically ruled out all his previous associates. And Winter had reduced the problem the Frenchman outlined to its bones in a few words. 'You want to smuggle cigarettes from Tangier to Naples? Forget powerboats and yachts - everyone uses them. Be different - use a trawler.'

'A trawler?' LeCat had been staggered as they drank wine in a bar overlooking Tangier harbour. 'This is crazy - a trawler has no speed. Anyone can catch you.'

'If they are looking for you ...'

Winter worked it out for LeCat inside ten minutes, the new twist to cigarette smuggling which proved so profitable. The Italian police and security services knew exactly what type of vessel to look for - as LeCat had said, you used a power-boat or ,a fast yacht. Winter proposed obtaining a 1,000-ton trawler, a vessel where a large consignment of cigarettes, say as much as one hundred tons, could easily be hidden under eight hundred tons of fish.

No attempt would be made to get the consignment ashore in the dark from small boats, the normal technique - instead they would sail into Naples in broad daylight as a bona-fide fishing vessel. Who would suspect a trawler? As everyone knew, for smuggling you needed a fast boat . . .

When Winter raised the question of finance, LeCat admitted he was an agent for the French Syndicate, a group of Marseilles businessmen who were not always over-concerned with legality. In a very short time LeCat purchased a 1,000-ton trawler,
Pêcheur,
with funds provided by the French Syndicate, and the crew of so-called fishermen were largely made up of LeCat's ex-OAS terrorist friends. The smuggling operation proved highly profitable - until the Italian Syndicate began making menacing noises.

'One night these people will meet us off the Naples coast,' LeCat warned. 'They think we are poaching on their preserve. And their method of discouraging opposition is likely to be swift and permanent ...'

Again Winter worked out a plan while they sat at a table in the bar overlooking Tangier harbour. The idea was submitted to the French Syndicate whose top men were impressed once more by Winter's plan, a little too impressed for LeCat's liking. By this time the Englishman had organised the smuggling out of Italy on the return trips to Tangier, valuable works of art stolen from Italy. These paintings fetched high prices from certain American and Japanese millionaires.

Winter had the foremast removed from the trawler and a platform built over one of the three fish-holds. On this platform an Alouette helicopter could land and take off with ease. LeCat grumbled about the expense, but the French Syndicate chiefs over-ruled him, which did not increase his affection for Winter.

The
Pêcheur
made further trips to Naples without incident. No one was worried about the presence of the helicopter on the main deck after Winter had casually mentioned to an Italian Customs man that this was the new fishing technique - the helicopter was used to seek out fish shoals from the air. Then the rival smuggling organisation, the Italian Syndicate, struck.

The
Pêcheur
was within twenty miles of the Italian coastline when Winter saw through field-glasses a powerful motor vessel approaching at speed. It was full of armed men and made no reply to
Pêcheur's
wireless signals. Winter, a skilled pilot - no one ever knew where he acquired the skill - took off in the machine with the most resourceful of LeCat's ex-OAS associates, Andre Dupont. Flying over the Italian Syndicate vessel the first time, Dupont dropped smoke bombs on its deck. On the second run, while Winter held the machine in a steady hover barely fifty feet above the smoke-obscured deck, Dupont dropped two thermite bombs. The vessel was ablaze within seconds; within minutes the armed smugglers had taken to their small boats. When Winter landed again on the
Pêcheur
he had to exert the whole force of his personality to stop LeCat ramming the helpless boatloads of men. The Frenchman was giving the order to the
Pêcheur's
captain as Winter came back on to the bridge.

'Change course! Head straight for them! Ram them!' 'Maintain previous course,' Winter told the captain quietly. 'The object of the exercise,' he informed LeCat, 'is to let them see it is unprofitable to tangle with us. Those people are Sicilians - kill them and you start a vendetta. They'll have enough trouble getting home as it is.' He started walking off the bridge, then turned at the doorway to speak to the captain. 'If you don't maintain course,' he said pleasantly, 'I'll break your arm . ,.'

The incident was significant on two counts. It set a precedent Winter was later to utilise on a far vaster scale, and it pointed up the vast chasm that opened between LeCat and Winter where human life was concerned. To the Englishman, killing was abhorrent, to be avoided at all costs unless absolutely unavoidable. To the Frenchman it was a way of life, something you did with as little compunction as cleaning your teeth.

A few months later, sensing that so much success could not continue for ever, Winter withdrew from the smuggling operation. Settling himself in Tangier, he proceeded to enjoy the profits he had made; staying at one of the two best hotels, he shared his luxury suite with first an English girl, later with a Canadian girl. To both of them he explained at the outset that marriage was an excellent arrangement for other people, and it was while he was relaxing that the first oil crisis burst on the world in 1973.

Winter observed with some cynicism the way the Arab sheikhs ordered Europe about, telling foreign ministers what they could and could not have, and he admired their gall. What he did not admire was world reaction, the scramble for oil at any price, and personally he would have dealt with the new overlords in a very different manner.

His judgement that the smuggling operation could not last for ever was vindicated when LeCat, having extended the operation to the south coast of France, was caught with a consignment in Marseilles. He was arrested, but only after a flying chase through the streets of the city when he managed to break the leg of one gendarme and fracture the skull of another. He was tried, given a long prison sentence and incarcerated in the Sant
é
in Paris. Later, Winter heard the Frenchman had been released in mysterious circumstances. He shrugged his shoulders, never expecting to see LeCat again.

Winter, who knew his Mediterranean, did hear that the
Pêcheur
^{which put out to sea before LeCat's arrest, later sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar for an unknown destination. What he did not know was that LeCat, using Arab funds this time, had bought the vessel off the French Syndicate. The trawler made the long Atlantic crossing to the Caribbean, passed through the Panama Canal, and then made its way up the Californian coast to the port of Victoria in Canada. It had been anchored in Canadian waters less than a month when the approach was made to Winter.}