JOHN DENIS

Alistair MacLean’s UNACO Hostage Tower

Contents

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

EPILOGUE

By Alistair MacLean

ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S HOSTAGE TOWER

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Lorenz van Beck had three hours to kill. For a man to whom killing came easily, it was time enough. But on that fine, pastel-golden Paris day, van Beck had nothing to kill but time.

Van Beck wandered through the leafy shades of the Ile Saint-Louis and basked in the dappled darts of sunlight that sought out his square, unsmiling face beneath its cap of spiked grey hair. He was hatless, and dressed in a dark suit of heavy broadcloth, his waistcoat buttoning high to bunch up the small-knotted, unimpressive tie. He looked, unsurprisingly, like a businessman.

With a muttered sigh, van Beck turned to business, choosing the Musée Rodin and the Musée de Cluny for modern art, porcelain and glass. He noted recent additions, their placings and lighting, their security surveillance. He made jottings in a notebook: enter by this or that window; copy key to door 2, 9, 15; how big, how small, how friendly, the curator’s guards; proximity to sewers, access roads; MO – bombs? Gas?

Occasionally he wrote down a name, one of a thousand – ten thousand – thieves, killers, weapons men, explosives men, biologists, hit-men, stunt-men, drivers, pimps … the freelance employees of Lorenz van Beck, international fence extraordinary. Against a particularly splendid loan collection of Venetian glass he set another name – a well-known name, titled, respected – a lady, you could say, of some quality. Not an employee, but a client.

Van Beck flipped back through the pages of the notebook to the diary section, and checked the client appointment he had fixed that day. He cast an eye at the gold watch chained to his waistcoat, sniffed the expensively musty air of the museum once again – what delicious odours wealth created! – and strolled to the car he had rented under a false name and driving licence at the Gare d’Austerlitz. He retrieved a shabby leather case with an obstinate clasp from the front seat, locked the car, and abandoned it. It would later, he knew, be reported missing, but the matter did not greatly concern van Beck.

He made his way by taxi to another car rental office in the Boulevard Haussmann, where the pretty secretary recognized him as Marcel Louvain, and drove to Rambouillet by way of Versailles, stopping at the palace to sit in the lengthening garden shadows and eat warm bread and rough Ardennes pâté. The Rambouillet bell-tower boomed the first chime of six o’clock as Lorenz van Beck pushed open a creaking internal door and clumped into the darker silence of the church …

The bell notes reverberated through the empty nave. Van Beck peered into the gloom, grunted, and plodded to the second in a group of confessional boxes set in the furthest shadowy corner. He pushed through the dingy red curtain, lowered his bulk on to the chair, cleared his throat, and sniffed in the direction of the confessional grille. A polite cough came from the scarcely discernible figure on the other side.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ van Beck mumbled.

‘In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sanc –’ the priest began, and was rudely interrupted by van Beck’s derisive chuckle.

‘This was your idea, Smith,’ he said, ‘but I’m a sensitive man, and play-acting becomes neither of us. Say what you have to say, and let me go.’

‘I rely, as always, van Beck,’ Smith returned in his dry, precise voice, ‘on your absolute discretion.’

‘And I on your consuming lust for making money illegally.’

The vaguely outlined head nodded agreement. ‘Though you do me a small injustice,’ Smith said. ‘I am fascinated more by crime than by money, as you well know. For me, stealing ten dollars from the coffee fund in the desk of the secretary to the Director of Fort Knox is worth all the jackpots in Las Vegas … in the world.

‘I have made crime my life’s study, my life’s work. It is the ultimate excitement, van Beck. No other physical experience can match it.’

‘Ja, ja,’ the Bavarian sighed, ‘so you have said, so you have said, Mister Smith. So you’re different from me … huh? I can fence anything from the Mona Lisa to a uranium mine. I could find customers for the Taj Mahal or Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. I’ve even sold his own gold back to the Director of Fort Knox. But I’m a peasant. You’re an artist. What do you want?’

‘A team.’

‘To do what?’

‘You know better than that, van Beck,’ Smith rapped.

‘OK, OK.’ Van Beck was silent. ‘How many?’

‘Three,’ Smith replied.

Van Beck wrote the figure in his dog-eared notebook. ‘Any preferences?’ he enquired.

‘None.’

‘So tell me.’

Smith’s urbane voice dropped to a sibilant hiss. ‘One – a weapons expert. The best. Tough … resourceful … professional.’ Van Beck’s blunting pencil stump dug into the cheap paper.

‘Two – a thief. Again, the best. I have to steal two and a half million rivets and somebody’s mother.’ Smith giggled. ‘The best thief you know, van Beck. Daring, totally unafraid.’

‘What’s the going rate for scrap iron and old ladies?’ van Beck enquired.

‘For this collection?’ Smith said. ‘Could be thirty million.’

‘Rivets?’

‘Dollars.’

Van Beck whistled low, unmelodiously. ‘I can get a good team for a slice of that.’

‘Then do it,’ Smith whispered. ‘Do it.’

‘The third one?’

Smith hesitated. ‘Someone … inventive. Incredibly ingenious. Strong, and – again – afraid of nothing. Especially heights.’

Van Beck was thoughtful, rubbing his fleshy, prickly chin.

‘That apply to the other two as well?’ he queried, blandly.

‘What?’

‘The heights,’ the German replied, trying to fit rivets in the sky into a recognizable pattern.

Smith was quiet, dangerously quiet. At length he said. ‘Don’t push me, van Beck. Do what you have to do, but don’t try your luck too hard. It may not last.’

Van Beck swallowed, and shuffled uncomfortably. ‘It will be as you say.’ He made to get up, but Smith’s rasping command froze him.

‘One more thing. There is a new gun, a laser-gun, the Lap-Laser. The Americans have it for their army. I want some. The weapons man must get them. Agreed?’

‘It’ll cost.’

‘I’ll pay.’

‘Sure,’ van Beck grunted. ‘You pay, I’ll supply. That’s business.’

‘Thank you.’ Smith relaxed back in his seat. ‘You may go. Contact me in the usual way. You have a month.’

Van Beck nodded, making no reply. None was needed. He threw aside the curtain on its jangling brass rings, and strode out into the mellow light of evening. He drank white wine, marginally chilled, and cognac at the pavement table of a café, then rejoined his car and took the road to Chartres.

From the church porch, piercing eyes in a hooded face watched him.

Then the heavy door swung open once again, and a bent, shabby little priest joined the home-goers and the evening walkers. He smiled benignly at an old woman dressed, like himself, in rusty black. He reached to pat the head of a passing boy, but missed.

ONE

It was a sheltered place, twenty-eight miles west of Stuttgart: a plateau in wooded country screened from the road by trees, and hardly ever overflown. It made an ideal secret firing range. The US Army used the unfenced fields to test their newest toy, the General Electric Lap-Laser-gun.

The US Army had four Lap-Lasers at Stuttgart. Not very many, they conceded, but still one-third of those known to exist. For the manufacturers had made only twelve so far, and they were as yet in the experimental stage. Since the Army chiefs were confident that neither General Electric’s security nor their own had been breached, they took their time about putting the Lap-Laser through its paces. No one, after all, they reasoned, was going to steal it …

On the day appointed by Smith for the theft of all four guns, a fine but drenching rain speckled the goggles of the Army’s chief weapons instructor as he strained his eyes skywards to pick up the incoming helicopter. The fretful buzz of its motor sounded intermittently out of the heavy clouds. He chewed his gum viciously and spat, a not un-accomplished combined operation.

The helicopter was part of the daily Lap-Laser routine, bringing the precious guns from the big, closely guarded Stuttgart base to the range each morning, and taking them back again in the evening for safe keeping. The guns could not be tested at the base: they were too powerful, too unpredictable.

Apart from that, they needed an enormous power source, and rather than transport huge and unwieldy banks of generators from place to place, the Army preferred the option of an isolated testing ground where they could install a small nuclear power plant.

The colonel glanced back over his shoulder at his sleekly sinister ‘babies’, all four stripped and stacked away, ready to leave on the return trip to the base. He grinned and winked at his second-in-command at his side.

‘They’re really somethin’ aren’t they.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Yeah,’ acknowledged the major, through a stubby cigar that rarely left his stained lips.

There were US Army Generals, plenty of them, who would greet with genuinely blank astonishment any leading question about a laser-gun, and the chief weapons instructor and his 2–IC basked in the realization that they were part of an impressively small band of experts. For example, if put to the trouble, which they rarely were, they would be able to explain that the Lap-Laser was made possible by advances not in ballistics or aero-dynamics, but in the field of optics. That statement in itself was enough to confound most questioners.

The colonel grinned appreciatively at the final touch the laser-gunners had insisted on adding to the already successful day’s tests: at a range of a thousand metres they had drilled ‘USAAF’ through a four-inch plate of sheet steel as cleanly as if it had been stencilled on cartridge-paper.

The Lap-Laser’s guidance system was similar to that of a conventional radar device, except that instead of using radio beams, it reflected beams of light when seeking its target. It could be sensitized to any target within its range, or any kind of target, because the mouse-ear detectors of the Lap-Laser, on either side of its firing mechanism, were tuned to distinguish the properties of a variety of different materials. They could run from a dozen different sorts of metal, to wood, brick, or the human body.

Once the target was located, the Lap-Laser sent out a concentrated ray of appallingly destructive force, which annihilated anything in its direct path.

Its other great advantage was speed. It is the practice in orthodox electronics to work down to a nano-second – one thousandth of a millionth of a second. If even greater speed is required, the only alternative carrier is light, which can be con trolled to a pico-second, or micromicro-second – a millionth of a millionth fraction of time, of such minute duration as to be incomprehensible in human terms.

The Lap-Laser worked to pico-second tolerances, using a processor which General Electric built into the controlling computer specially for the job. To give the optical system the necessary speed to match the sophisticated laser-gun, the processor employed mini-lasers no larger than a grain of salt.

Allied to a power source of massive concentration and force, the lasers combined to produce a weapon that was like a glimpse into a fearful future. Everything ultimately depended on the uses to which the Lap-Laser was put, and on the inviolable guarantee that it could never fall into the wrong hands.

Yet the hands of Mister Smith were among the dirtiest in creation.

And the instrument of his criminal ambition was at that moment speeding down an autobahn in a hired car to keep an appointment with the four deadliest ‘babies’ of all time.

‘AUSGANG-STUTTGART’ the road sign read, and Michael Graham obediently urged the BMW into the stream that peeled off the motorway.

When the price was right, Graham was invariably obedient. Van Beck’s price had been not only right, but generous. The unknown client, the German explained, was prepared to pay for excellence. And Mike Graham, van Beck had known, was awesome in his field of weapons and weapon systems. He had received the kind of training that only the US Army could supply, and had used a privileged position to enlarge his knowledge and raise his performance to a peak of unparalleled capability.

Smith had provided the means, through van Beck, to steal the Lap-Lasers, but the plan was Mike Graham’s, and he turned it over in his mind for the thousandth time.

Using a laser-guided, tripod-mounted electronic surveillance device over a range of more than half a mile, Graham had bugged the US Army base guardroom to obtain the weekly series of passwords that would gain him admittance to the off-limits compound at the right time … when the helicopter touched down on its run back from the firing range.

Graham had also sounded out the other parts of the base’s territory which interested him: the officers’ club, and the living quarters for visiting top brass, whose faces would not be known to the guards. He had selected and marked his target officer, and now had a complete set of forged papers in his new identity. He drove carefully along the public road through the base, away from the off-limits section, and pulled into a cul-de-sac not far from the officers’ quarters, located in a mini-apartment block.

Ten minutes later, a figure in the uniform of a General of the United States Army strode the short distance from the living quarters to the officers’ club. He had a bundle under his arm. He checked his wrist-watch, peered up at the sky, and made his way to a jeep parked at the rear of the club.

The guard corporal dropped his girlie magazine and jumped to his feet as the jeep screeched to a halt outside the guardroom. He joined another soldier at the door, and they peered out into the near-darkness. The harsh whirr of the descending helicopter’s engine sounded loudly in their ears.

A man leapt lithely from the jeep, and the guardroom lights winked on his General’s stars. The corporal tightened his grip on his M–1 carbine.

‘Halt,’ he commanded. Graham did. ‘It’s an emergency, for Christ’s sake, Corporal,’ he shouted. ‘I’m in one hell of a hurry.’

‘Advance and be recognized.’ Snorting with impatience. Graham advanced. The GIs saw a man they did not know, tall and bronzed, with brown hair and moustache, broad-shouldered and thin-faced, looking at them from soft, quick, intelligent eyes. He had a commanding, arrogant manner. But then, the soldiers reasoned, Generals usually did.

‘Hurry it up,’ Graham ordered. The banshee wail of the chopper told him it would soon be settling on the launch-pad in the compound beyond the guard block.

‘Password,’ the corporal rapped.

‘Don’t play games with me,’ Graham snapped. ‘You first – that’s the drill.’

‘Sleepy dog,’ the guard rejoined.

‘Angle-iron,’ said Graham, handing over his papers.

The corporal recollected the name. ‘General Otis T. Brick.’ Visiting brass. Weapons expert. He snapped up a salute. ‘Yessir General,’ he bellowed, while his subordinate pressed the button to raise the barrier to the compound.

Graham vaulted back into the jeep, gunned the motor to speed into the compound and slew to a halt in a spray of gravel near the launch-pad. Three startled soldiers, waiting for the helicopter to come back from the range with the four crated laser-guns on board, jumped like scalded tomcats when Graham screamed, ‘Get away from there – now!’

‘Ten-shun!’ barked the corporal in charge, and all three snapped into rigidity.

Graham saluted, and said, ‘Get your men away from this area. There’s a leak in the nuclear generator shielding out at the range. The radioactivity could have spread to the guns, or even the helicopter. My orders are to take the chopper away.’

‘Who – who are you, s-sir,’ the corporal stammered. Graham had already raced back to the jeep and extricated the anti-radiation suit he had brought with him. Climbing into it, he shouted above the roar of the settling helicopter, ‘General Brick, Third Army Special Weapons Division. Now move it, soldier – move it!’

Graham reached back into the jeep and pulled out a geiger counter, and what looked like a steel brief-case. The helicopter’s rotors were beating the air, and the pilot looked anxiously out at the charade on the tarmac. Graham ducked under the sweeping blades, and wrenched open the door.

‘Out!’ he ordered the pilot. ‘Radiation scare. You could have got a dose. The Emergency Med. Unit’ll be here soon to check you over. I’ll take the chopper away. Don’t switch the motor off.’

The pilot needed no second bidding. He scrambled out of the seat and dropped to the ground, almost colliding with Graham.

‘Will you be all right, sir?’ he screamed.

‘The suit will protect me,’ Graham shouted. ‘I’ll fly the chopper to the far end of the range and quarantine it. Look after yourself, man.’

The blare of a motor-horn from the direction of the guardroom drew the eyes of all four men on the ground away from the helicopter, where Graham was already revving the engine.

Two jeeps packed with men hurtled towards the launch-pad. A burst of machine-gun fire came from the leading vehicle. The three soldiers and the pilot scattered to hit the deck, and the jeeps pulled up short of a stack of gasolene cans a hundred yards from the chopper. Graham throttled viciously, and another spurt of tracer fire arced towards him.

Bullets pinged off the shell of the helicopter, and one tore a track across the shoulder of his anti-radiation suit, but he felt no pain. A third salvo stuttered out, and Graham, who had been about to take off, swore brutally. He snapped open the clasp of his brief-case and drew out a heavy, ugly Schmeisser machine pistol.

He could barely see the two vehicles in the pool of blinding light, so he hit the easier target.

A vast swell of sound erupted as the gasolene cans exploded. The GIs were safe behind their jeeps, but there was now no possibility of stopping Graham.

Behind a concealing wall of smoke and flame, the helicopter rose into the air, taking the false General, and four crated but fully operative Lap-Laser-guns, away to do the bidding of Mister Smith.

The troops on the ground fired madly at the departing plane to ease their frustration, until the officer in charge resignedly flapped his hand in a gesture of dismissal.

‘Who the hell was he, sir?’ asked his sergeant.

‘Christ knows,’ the captain returned wearily, ‘but he sure wasn’t General Brick, because I’ve just been talking to General Brick in the officers’ club. Somebody walked off with his dress uniform, and it wasn’t his batman, so it must’ve been that sonofabitch up there.’

He tipped his peaked cap back on his head, put his hands on his hips, and whistled out a tight-lipped sigh. ‘Can you imagine the crap that’s going to be flying around when the brass find out we’ve lost not just one of their favourite toys, but all four? Jeeze.’ He shook his head, almost admiringly. ‘You gotta hand it to that guy. He sure pulled a neat trick, whoever he is.’

But the Army never did learn Graham’s identity. The BMW was untraceable, and Graham had made no fingerprints. His abandoned clothing was unmarked, and in any case had been bought from a chain store. He might as well have been a ghost for all the clues he left. Or a spook.

He flew the helicopter eastwards for perhaps fifteen minutes on a pre-arranged flight path. Then he brought her in low and skimmed the tree-tops, his eyes combing the ground.

There it was. A winking light in a pool of blackness. He flashed his own landing lights, and three pairs of vehicle headlamps came on in answer.

Mike set the plane down quickly and expertly, forming a square in the deserted field with the big, dark Citröen, the Volkswagen, and the tough little pick-up truck that waited to greet him.

He ran to the larger car, and the driver’s window slid noiselessly down. ‘You have them?’ asked a man in the uniform as a chauffeur.

Mike said, ‘Yep.’

‘Excellent,’ the chauffeur returned briefly. He spoke guttural German. He reached over to the front passenger seat and handed Graham a loosely wrapped parcel and a brief-case of soft matt leather.

‘Clothing, your size,’ he grunted. ‘In the valise – money, and the keys to the Volkswagen. Don’t worry about the lasers. We’ll load them into the truck. You’ll be contacted for Phase Two. For now, disappear.’

Graham opened the brief-case, and raised his eyebrows as he saw the fat bundles of small denomination US dollars. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’ The chauffeur nodded.

Mike tried to peer beyond him to the man whom he could dimly see in the rear offside passenger seat, but a panel of tinted glass blocked his view. The windows were tinted, too. The man had not spoken a word, and sat hunched inside an enveloping overcoat, with a black Homburg pulled down over his brow.

‘Thank you, too,’ Graham said, cheerily. The mystery man stayed silent and unmoving. Mike gave up the struggle and walked away, whistling.

The chauffeur turned and slid back the glass panel. ‘I’ll transfer the guns and take the pick-up to the warehouse, sir,’ he said, respectfully.

‘Do that,’ Smith grunted. ‘I’ll drive the Citröen and see you at the hotel. Don’t make any mistakes. Graham didn’t. He’s good.’

The chauffeur nodded. ‘And the helicopter?’

‘Kill it,’ Smith ordered. ‘With Graham’s uniform and anti-radiation suit in it.’

Mike was a mile away when he heard the ‘crump’ of the explosion, and saw in his rear-view mirror the funeral pyre of the helicopter.

‘You gotta hand it to that guy,’ he murmured, patting the brief-case on the seat beside him. ‘He sure pulls neat tricks, whoever he is.’

TWO

Weesperplein is not one of the great public squares of Amsterdam, like Sophiaplein, Rembrandtplein or Dam Square itself, but its commercial importance is undeniable. That Friday evening, Weesperplein hummed with important traffic and prosperous, stolid people, as the armoured secur ity van nosed its way patiently along to come to a halt outside Number Four.

The uniformed, armed and helmeted driver of the vehicle got out, and slammed the self-locking door. He walked around to the rear of the van, and tapped with his truncheon on the panel. Two men, also in uniform and wearing guns, alighted to stand by him.

The driver glanced at the clock above the heavy double-fronted entrance to Number Four, Weesperplein. The finely wrought gilt hands stood at four minutes to six. ‘Just in time,’ he remarked.

While the driver rang the bell, his colleagues manhandled a wooden crate on to the sidewalk by its carrying handles. The summons was answered by a man of medium height, balding, with mild grey eyes and a nervous manner. He nodded to the driver, who turned to his companions and sang out, ‘OK.’

They heaved the create up between them, and carried it inside. Then they returned and fetched from the van a precisely similar crate, and took that in, too. Both crates were heavy, and sealed.

When all three security men came out, the nervous man stood in the doorway, watching them depart. He shut the front door behind them, and checked that it was fully locked.

The driver glanced up again at the big clock. It gave the time as three minutes after six. ‘Home then,’ he said.

Number Four, Weesperplein, was an impressive, even beautiful, building, and the Gothic-script ornamental letters forming the frieze around the clock described in two succinct words what went on behind the imposing facade. The legend was ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMANTBEUR’.

A brass plate on the wall carried a translation for the benefit of foreigners: ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMOND EXCHANGE’.

Sabrina Carver made her first steal when she was seven.

She lived then – and for the next ten years – in her native town of Fort Dodge, Iowa, county seat of Webster County, as Sabrina learned at an early age, and immediately forgot.

It was also patiently explained to her that Fort Dodge had started life in 1850 as Fort Clarke, but the following year a pressing need arose to honour a certain Colonel Henry Dodge, and the name was changed. The fort was abandoned in 1853, so the tiny settlement, struggling to make ends meet in its uncompromising bed of river clay and gypsum, assumed the name.

‘Good for Colonel Dodge,’ thought Sabrina, and immediately forgot him, too.

The Des Moines River, on which Fort Dodge stands, is still picturesque at that point, though it no longer rings to the cries of marauding Indians and defending settlers. It figured prominently in Sabrina Carver’s young life, though, since it was the scene of that very first theft.

She was on a river trip with family and friends, and she calmly picked a tiny, silvery brooch off the coat of the lady who was sitting next to her, talking animatedly to Sabrina’s own mother. The larceny passed unnoticed for half an hour, until Sabrina’s mother spotted the brooch on her daughter’s dress.

Though she was straightway forgiven by the gushing owner – ‘The poor, innocent little darling doesn’t know, does she’ – Sabrina made no fuss about giving the brooch back.

For this act of mature contrition, she received a quarter from the gushing lady, who petted her like a doll, for Sabrina had appealing dark eyes, long red-blonde hair and a serious, saintly little face. As they were parting from her new-found friend, Sabrina stole the brooch again, and this time made sure her mother didn’t see it.

She sold the bauble to the roughest boy in school for two bucks. It was a gross under-payment, for the brooch had three diamonds set into a silver clasp. But at that time, Sabrina failed to recognize them as diamonds. She thought they were glass.

She never made that mistake again.

From then on, Sabrina stole regularly to brighten her comfortable but tedious middle-class life. She had unearthed a professional fence by the time she was nine, and impressed him with her ability to deliver her dentist father’s instruments, one at a time, over a space of three months. In that ongoing heist, she used a different modus operandi each time. The police were baffled.

All her education, her astonishing physical fitness, her command of sports and special skills, even her flowering beauty, were ruthlessly channelled into serving her over-weening ambition to become one of the great thieves of all time. She chose new clothes, picture shows, books, lectures, holidays, only if they would widen her experience, or add to her prowess, or make the art of stealing easier for her.

Sabrina was, then, supremely dedicated. On her seventeenth birthday she left high school laden with prizes, and clutching a letter from the Principal urging that she go on to Vassar, or at least Bryn Mawr, since she was the brightest student the school had ever known.

Her fence held sixty-seven thousand dollars for Sabrina in his own deposit account. By the end of the following week she had almost doubled her nest-egg with the proceeds of a raid on a Des Moines hotel, which the police said could only have been committed by a small squad of acrobatic commandos.

Sabrina warmly thanked her friend the fence, withdrew every cent of the capital, and disclaimed the current interest. She used the money to set up in business for herself in New York, later establishing branch offices in Paris, Monte Carlo, Rome and Gstaad.

She never once went back to Fort Dodge, Iowa, and had not made the slightest attempt to contact her parents.

Sabrina was a healthy girl and, at the age of twenty-five, almost indecently beautiful. Sex was easy to find, and she frequently found it.

At no time, however, did she allow any ulterior consideration to interfere with what, for Sabrina, was the ruling passion, the most intense pleasure, of her life. Not merely stealing, but stealing diamonds.

At stealing diamonds, Sabrina was indeed internationally acknowledged to be the very best.

There are probably more diamonds in Amsterdam than in any other single place in the world. Diamonds were first discovered in India, but the Dutch – who are inclined to treat anything of value with exaggerated respect – have been cutting and polishing them since the sixteenth century. At factories like Asscher’s, eagle-eyed cutters peer at cleavage panes parallel to the octahedral faces, and divide the fabulous crystals with immense care, skill and courage.

Asscher’s it was who cleft the 2024-carat Cullinan Diamond. Joseph Asscher himself struck the master blow. Had he messed it up, his firm would doubtless have gone bankrupt, and the British Crown Jewels would have a lot of empty spaces in them.

Asscher’s, and other manufacturing plants, are the places where the glamorous work of the diamond trade is done, but for dealing, the centre is the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange. The Exchange, in fact, handles bullion of all kinds, which was why its security manager did not for a moment hesitate to grant a request from an important client, concerning not gems, but a consignment of gold ingots.

‘I would not trouble you,’ the client, Kees van der Goes, had said, ‘except that I owe a favour to this friend of mine. He’s got a big shipment of gold passing through Amsterdam at the weekend … at least, it was supposed to, but the outward journey to London has been delayed. He’s asked me if you’d look after the crates for him until Monday morning. They’ll reach you on Friday night.’

Van der Goes, a well-known diamond and bullion dealer, was a valued customer of the Exchange. The security manager, whose nervousness was endemic, and practically boundless, agreed immediately.

‘We’ll keep the vaults open for the consignment,’ he promised, ‘though if you could possibly arrange for the crates to be delivered by six o’clock, then the time-lock can run its routine, you know.’

Van der Goes said he would try, and the security men backed him to the hilt. They had all, however, reckoned without the dealer’s pedantically fussy agent, who arrived at the Exchange shortly before the shipment, and insisted on examining at least part of the contents of both crates.

They had been carried through to the rear lobby, and there, the massive steel door to the vaults stood open, even though the electric wall clock showed seven minutes after six. The crates stood side by side on the metal floor. The fussy agent had just finished sealing one crate, and was about to open the other.

The nervous security manager’s anxiety increased with each second that passed.

‘Must you check the second crate?’ he pleaded. ‘It’s probably just the same as the first.’

‘I sincerely trust that it is,’ remarked the agent, ‘because it’s supposed to be, after all, isn’t it?’

‘So?’

‘But one must be positive, my dear fellow,’ protested the agent. ‘You would not wish me to do half my job, would you?’ ‘My job is to close the vault.’ ‘And so you shall. All in good time.’ The security manager shot the agent a glance of pure detestation, which was completely ignored. The agent unlocked the seals, and prised off the lid of the second crate. Like the first, it was filled to the brim with shiny gold ingots. As he had done before, however, the agent insisted in lifting up ingots from various places, to check the tier beneath. Finally satisfied, he lowered the lid, and laboriously replaced the clasps and seals.

Mopping his brow, the nervous one pushed home the vault door, spun the locking wheels, dialled the combination, and set the clock for the time-lock. The Amsterdam Exchange vaults would now remain shut, sound-proof and air-tight, until nine o’clock on the following Monday morning.

No human agency except a massive bomb could open the door from the outside.

And no way had yet been devised for performing the operation from the inside.

The stillness within the vault was almost palpable, the air heavy and hot. No sound came, and no living thing stirred.

So the shattering noise as the end panel of one of the crates was violently kicked out, seemed all the more horrendous because of the oppressive silence.

Feet first, a dark figure wriggled into the total blackness of the vault. Despite the increasing warmth (which would eventually come under thermostatic control at 70 degrees Fahrenheit), the intruder shivered, for the place had about it the feel of the tomb.

The beam of a slim torch cut through the Stygian darkness, and illuminated the other crate. With tools from the air-conditioned ‘living space’ in the first box, the burglar levered off the end panel of the second, and drew out more tools, plus battery lights, portable breathing apparatus, a radio, and a plentiful and varied supply of food and drink.

A battery light came on, and the dark form of the thief was revealed, clad from head to foot in the sinister all-black garb and hood of a Ninja Assassin.

Periodically, the hood was lifted to enable the intruder to breathe through a mask attached to an oxygen tank.

Finally, Sabrina Carver pulled the hood off altogether, and released her flowing hair. She switched on the radio, and settled down to a packet of smoked salmon sandwiches and a bottle of excellent Pouilly Fuissé.

It was going to be a long wait until Monday morning, she thought, with only the theft of a small fortune in diamonds to while away the time.

The electric clock controlling the time-lock jumped from two minutes of nine to one minute. The security manager started in sympathy, despite the fact that his Monday morning routine of opening the vaults had not varied since he joined the staff of the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange twelve years before.

The machinery had merely got more sophisticated, and though the clock made no noise as it ticked off the minutes, the security manager, being nervous, acted as if the passage of the long hand was the crack of doom.

He was accompanied by the Deputy Director of the Exchange – again, as normal – and lurking discreetly behind them were two armed and uniformed guards. One kept a wary eye on van der Goes’s fussy little agent.

Nine o’clock.

A white bulb over a switch box next to the vault door blinked on. A plaque in the wall identified the box as the ‘Time Vault Release’. A security guard reached out a long arm and, on the nod of the Deputy Director, pressed down a lever.

The security manager breathed a sigh of heartfelt relief, and stepped forward to turn the large combination dial, and spin the wheels in reverse direction.

The guards lifted their weapons and flanked the two executives.

With a solid metallic ‘clunk’, the bolts inside the vault slid along their tracks, and the mighty door swung soundlessly out.

The security manager looked over his shoulder at his boss, smiling for the first time during the entire weekend.

The five men outside the vault barely had time to register the unbelievable scene … steel deposit boxes lying open, some scattered on the floor, clearly empty, alongside a trio of equally empty wine bottles.

Then the bizarre black hooded figure was on them.

The guards did little more than gape, because the intruder was clear past before they realized there had been anyone in the vault at all.

They were left with one scarcely possible, lunatic impression: of the sound of whirring wheels.

It was only when the hooded figure had gone that one guard turned on his heel, loosed off a departing shot, and shouted, ‘Roller skates! It had roller skates!’

In the outer lobby, secretaries and early arriving businessmen dived for safety as the apparition sped across the marble floor in long, crouching strides. Sabrina saw the far wall looming up, and made a dramatic power leg-over-leg turn.

The racing wheels of the skates fixed to her boots screeched jarringly on the marble as she clipped a corner and shot into a corridor.

The few girl clerks, more soigné secretaries, and portly office managers in her way, scattered in horror and flattened themselves against walls or ducked into open doors to give her a clear passage.

Accelerating all the time, she pumped powerfully and unstoppably down the corridor, and from there to another, hunched forward in racing style, her arms swinging in surging rhythm, her eyes pools of brightness in the dark hood, a black knapsack clipped to her back.

Through a third corridor she rushed and a fourth, navigating a half-open glass door, and with more hair-raising right-angled turns, until she knew she was once more at the rear of the building.

It was an exhibition of breathtaking skill, streaking through knots of terrified people, skimming obstacles, trolleys, file-toting clerks, all the while gaining power and acceleration.

And finally, she was in a cul-de-sac.

She looked steadily ahead, gritting her teeth, bunching her muscles.

The passage ended not in a wall but in a floor-to-ceiling picture window. Sabrina careered towards it, went into an even lower crouch, let loose a yell of exultation, and sprang into the air.

She launched herself at the glass, booted feet and gloved fists leading, and pulped it to smithereens, bursting through into the cool air in a shower of splintered fragments.

Arms wheeling like a ski-jumper, she cleared the sidewalk and a disbelieving pedestrian. She landed fully-balanced in the roadway and, without stopping, leaned into a turn and roared away down the slight gradient.

An areaway, no more than an alley, came up on her right, just where it should have been, just the way she had planned it.

She sped into it, dodging garbage bins, and reached a sheltered open space at the back of an off-centre theatre.

Behind her she heard the wailing of klaxons, and the shouts of guards and police who were belatedly on her track. Sabrina spun to a stop, and slipped off her skates, stowing them in the unclipped haversack. With a key from her belt she let herself into the almost deserted theatre.

The people goggling at the unaccustomed activity in the quiet street, took the dazzlingly lovely girl in the pant suit for an actress, even if only because she had exited from a theatre. She had a large tote-bag slung over her shoulder, and she smiled winningly at the guards tearing past her.

Once in the Weesperplein, Sabrina caught a tram to the Rijksmuseum, spent half an hour there soaking up the Rembrandts, and walked through the pedestrian precinct to the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square.

At the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, the Deputy Director and the security manager were comparing notes with the police.

‘I make it probably four hundred thousand dollars’ worth in the unlocked boxes,’ the Deputy Director said, ruefully. ‘Thank God it was a slack weekend, and there wasn’t more there.’

‘It was enough,’ the security manager intoned. ‘My, oh my, it was enough.’ He breathed out noisily, and shook his head in tragi-comic weariness. ‘Roller skates. I ask you – roller skates.’

‘What about my client’s gold?’ demanded the agent of Kees van der Goes.

‘Nothing leaves here,’ interjected a stern-faced and harassed policeman. ‘Those are the orders.’

‘But the seals,’ the agent bleated, ‘they are untouched. The crates are as they were on Friday evening.’

And they were. With the sole exception of the wine bottles – which she left on the floor out of sheer devilment – Sabrina had stowed everything carefully away in the crates, and repaired the end panels. With luck, they would pass scrutiny.

‘So where, then,’ the policeman inquired icily, ‘did the guy in black spring from? Hey? And where did these bloody bottles come from? Huh?’

For once, the agent had no ready answer.

THREE

Enter the Black Spider-man.

There are times, even at night, when New York City – and particularly the canyons of the great avenues – seems to be made of glass.

Curtain walls of opaque smoothness, rising hundreds of feet into the air, suddenly, from different angles, come on like Christmas Trees, and reflect the whole exotic panorama of skyscraper and strip-bar, cathedral and cat-house.

Generally speaking, the bigger buildings are where the bigger people live, or work, or occasionally love, when they are not too preoccupied with living and working.

The big people like to have the trophies, the spoils, of their rich and rewarding lives around them, if only to remind them how richly rewarded they are. Then they pay other, more talented, people to arrange the trophies in the most aesthetically pleasing ways, and invite yet more people, who are less richly rewarded than they are, to come to their palaces and admire both them and their gewgaws.

The process serves two useful purposes: it teaches the visitors that the deadly sin of envy is a magnificent driving force; and it provides the means for the Pollocks, the Ming jars and the Mayan masks to get the occasional dusting.

There is, though, one drawback: certain small-minded persons are importunate enough to wish to steal the spoils of the moguls. Thus, the trophies have to be guarded with such fanatical zeal that the pretty penthouse palaces become fortresses, or, worse, virtually prisons.

Happily, most of the lairs of the truly rich are well-nigh impregnable, and it must be a source of comfort to the criminal classes that these good citizens can sleep easily in their beds at night. So euphoric do the big people sometimes feel, that they will gladly lend out their treasures for public exhibition so that a great many people may see them, and slaver at the unostentatious plaque that makes it perfectly plain who is doing the lending.

If anything, these public displays are protected with even greater care and devotion than the private gloatings, for while the truly rich may not sincerely appreciate their treasures, they are the very devil when it comes to collecting insurance pay-offs.

When the Black Spider-man gets bored with stealing from the millionaires’ palaces, he will penetrate the public exhibition places with equally contemptuous ease.

In Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue there are many glass mansions, as a latter-day prophet might put it. One stands in the block between 5th and 58th and 59th. A poster tastefully mounted on an easel outside the building says: ‘LOAN EXHIBITION. THE T’ANG TREASURES. 38th FLOOR EXHIBITION HALL’.

Much of the building is in darkness, but the lobby is well-lit, especially the elevators. Two men, both armed and in the livery of security guards, sit and talk and smoke …

Up the steel-beamed glass wall C.W. crept. He was black-clad and black of skin, his bare toes as prehensile as his gloved hands. He did not have far to go. Twenty feet above him sat a window washer’s gondola, attached to the vertical inset steel I-beam by a wheeled device.

C.W. reached it without breaking sweat, and climbed in. Slowly the gondola rose, almost to the peak of the building. C.W. scorned to count the floors: he would know the 38th when he reached it.

He looked down, and from side to side. The avenue, stretching out as far as he could see in one direction, was a ribbon of moving light-specks. The other way lay the dark menace of Central Park.

The 38th floor exhibition suite was not completely darkened. Though the exhibition had closed for the night, the choicest masterpieces of Chinese sculpture and metalwork were perman ently illumined; some gaudily, where they needed it, others hardly touched by fingers of light that picked out salient features of wonderful artistry and delicacy.

C.W. peered through the window, and located the centrepiece – a magnificent T’ang Dynasty Flying Horse. The Black Spider-man drew in his breath. The sculpture was almost too exquisite to handle. But it was his target. He had a commission to steal it, and in any case he would own it for a few brief, precious hours.

C.W. also noted the other form of illumination in the exhibition suite’s main hall. Light-beams, laser-powered, criss-crossed each other like searchlights, seeking out and protecting the exhibits with a sureness that no human guard could match.

An intruder had merely to touch one of the glowing rays, and alarm bells rang out – not just in the exhibition suite and the lobby, and in the apartment of the building’s security chief, but also at Manhattan Central and two other police precincts. The Flying Horse sat there, graceful and elegant, but dramatically charged with the suggestion of enormous, coiled power.

C.W. conceived the loony notion that all he had to do was whistle, and the horse would leap out of its prison into his arms. He tried it, and his warm breath blew back into his face from the window. He thought the horse winked, but he wasn’t sure.

He sighed, and picked up from the floor of the gondola a large rubber suction cup. He clamped the cup to the window, and fixed the cord running from it to the stanchion of the I-beam. Then he took from his belt a diamond-tipped scalpel, and patiently traced a perfect circle around the perimeter of the cup.

He completed the manoeuvre several times, and replaced the scalpel. With the knuckles of both hands, he rapped the area of glass surrounding the suction cup, which was sitting on the skin of the window like a black carbuncle.

The ring of glass broke free, and C.W. carefully caught the suction cup and allowed it and its new glass cap to hang by the cord against the side of the building. He crawled through the circular hole, carefully avoiding a low, slanting light-beam, and stood in the exhibition hall getting his bearings and adjusting his eyes and body to the changed lighting and temperature. He breathed in deeply and evenly, and tensed his muscles for what, at best, could be only a ten-second sprint to the horse, and back out to freedom.

For the Black Spider-man knew that he had not even the remotest chance of stealing the horse and escaping undetected. That might be achieved by an army of electronic experts and technicians, but C.W., as always, was one man, alone. For him, it had to be the hard way.

His sole aids were his pantherish strength, his astonishing nerve, his natural ferocity, and his boundless contempt for danger.

He had one other (for his chosen trade) admirable quality: he was always self-contained, and rarely dealt in violence. Violence against things, or obstacles – yes. Against locks, doors, safes, secur ity devices; but hardly ever against people. C.W. valued people – even the truly rich – almost as much as he valued the beautiful creations they owned.

Drawing breath again, he let it out explosively, and launched himself towards the centre of the room.

When you are baptized Clarence Wilkins Whitlock and your schoolfriends ask you which name you want them to call you by and you say ‘Neither’, then you might have to fight to protect your nominal integrity. Clarence Wilkins Whitlock reached this small crisis early on in life, and established his right to be known simply as ‘C.W.’ over a bloody, but gratifyingly brief, period in one of the less favoured districts of Tallahassee, Florida.

C.W. came from the wrong side of the tracks before the tracks were even laid. He had an innate appreciation of the natural beauty of that part of Northern Florida where Tallahassee sits on its perch high above the sea, in a nest of rolling hills, lakes and streams. When C. W. could get away, this was where he liked to be, sitting by – or more likely in – the little tumbling brooks, sunning himself on the quiet uplands, and climbing the giant magnolia trees and majestic oaks, hung in season with Spanish moss.

For C.W., home was always the haven, not of peace, but of resentment; an island of poverty and bitterness in a sea of plenty. Above all, it was the place where his racism (and C.W. would accept that he qualified as a black racist) was nurtured. His youth had been the time of the awakening of black race consciousness, and that false dawn had a magnetic attraction for him. He did not actively loathe whites, but he was deeply afraid of them; and fear, he decided, was a more powerful emotion altogether than hate.

Only later, when he was beginning to establish himself to an unarguable degree, did C.W. discover that his fear of whites had turned to cautious regard, and then to grudging awareness, and finally to acceptance of them as a necessary aspect of his society. For without them, who would be the negro’s negro? The Jew, perhaps? Polacks? Spics? Dagos? Wops?

Juvenile crime was a way of life for C.W. Whitlock before any alternative path had even been considered. And when, as he grew older, the question arose in his mind of a career, the choice – as it had been for Sabrina Carver – was easy.

For apart from a cool head crowning his lithe body, C.W. possessed one priceless accomplishment: he could climb anything, by day or night, any structure that he had ever been asked to climb, or been forced to. Some in his vicious circle of cronies dubbed him ‘Monkey’, and quickly learned that C.W. did not take kindly to nick-names. Later he secretly revelled in being known to the American Underworld as ‘The Black Spider-man’: that, he felt, was a fitting tribute to an impressive talent.

But in the early days, he concentrated on going from strength to strength – or, more properly, from height to height. He devised ever more complex and daring pathways to robbery, and his gangster acquaintances were not surprised when he quickly outgrew his need for the basic talents of thuggery which were the limits of their collective repertoire.

He kept one friend, and occasional accomplice, Pawnee Michaels, a full-blooded black Red Indian, for God’s sake. He went through Vietnam with Pawnee, and they travelled the road of crime together. But Pawnee was a liability, and knew it. Unadept and clumsy, he tried one day his own caper. C.W watched him fall from the City Bank in Trenton, New Jersey, and turned away because there could be no percentage in claiming what was left of the poor, smashed body.

Since then, he had worked alone. Like Sabrina Carver, he migrated to New York, where the buildings were taller and more challenging. Again like her, he fenced through Lorenz van Beck …

C.W. leapt the light-beams and glided between the statues, betraying no sign of his presence.

He landed on his toes by the central plinth, and froze, controlling his body, steeling his reactions. Then he plunged both hands into the cat’s-cradle of light, and seized the T’ang horse.

The infernal clangour of the alarms cut through the quiet of the building like a bolt of lightning. The security chief jerked awake and smashed the clock from his bedside table. He swore and reached for the telephone.

The lobby guards raced efficiently through their drill, the one haring for the elevator, and the other double-locking the front doors, then returning to bring down the three unused elevators. When they reached the ground floor, they would be immobilized.

He gazed hypnotically as the floor indicator of the occupied lift raced up to thirty-eight. The phone rang. He palmed the receiver and said ‘Check. Check. Right.’ Then he slammed it back on its rest, and crossed to where the three remaining elevators were settling, their doors opening in sequence.

The guard snapped off the operating switches to all three, and grinned. The bastard was trapped. Wherever he was hiding, he could not leave the building.

His security chief paused long enough to drag on his underpants, for he normally slept only in his gun. His apartment was immediately below the exhibition suite, and he made the stairwell in seven seconds.

There was no one on the stairs, either way. Nobody could have been quick enough to get clear, so the guy had still to be up there.

Security chief and guard entered the suite simultaneously from different doors, and came within an ace of killing each other. But they were professionals, with quicksilver reactions.

The chief muttered ‘Shit!’ when he saw the empty podium of the T’ang Flying Horse, and his guard shouted ‘There!’ as he spotted the big hole in the window.

They sprinted over to it, stuck their heads out, and looked down. Down was where the thief must be, should have been … but wasn’t. The security floodlights had been activated by the alarms, and the whole front of the building was clearly visible. They doubted whether even a fly could pass unnoticed on the glass palace.

So it must be up. And both men fired at the trundling gondola, which even now was within a few yards of the top.

‘Get the roof!’ the chief yelled. ‘I’ll send Tommy up, and make sure the police chopper’s airborne.’ He leaned and fired again, and saw the bullets hit the metal frame, but could not be sure that they had penetrated.

C.W. flattened himself against the side of the gondola, and felt it judder to a halt as it reached the end of its track. He had been counting the bullets, and there was still the last of an estimated six to come. But he could delay his flight no longer.

He threw his body frantically upwards, and his questing fingers closed on the rough granite parapet which topped the building. Through the thin fabric of his gloves, he felt tiny chips of stone digging into his finger-tips. His toes clamped on to the smooth surface of the facade like limpets. The last shot came, and ploughed into the granite an inch away from his left hand. Two fingernails split as he tensed his whole frame in mental and physical anguish.

The little cradle bucked under his feet. He gulped another lungful of air and made a last supreme effort to haul himself over the parapet. With a throat-wrenching grunt, he landed on the roof, and raced for the wooden shed housing the head of the ventilation shaft and air-conditioning central station. He knew it could be only a matter of seconds before the security guards got someone up there to seek him out, and he had much to do.

He tore open the parcel he had stowed there a week before, and quickly assembled the contraption that would take him to freedom. As he strapped on the harness, he permitted himself the briefest of sardonic grins. There was no earthly doubt that he would make it, given a lucky break, a few more seconds, now … given that, he was safe.

For C. W. Whitlock was one of the world’s great experts at hang-gliding.

He climbed on to the perch that was to be his launch-pad into thin air: the cover of the ventilation shaft. At that moment, the roof door burst open, and the security guard loosed off a volley of bullets. But he was a fraction of a second too late … C.W. had gone.

The Black Spider-man had never attempted hang-gliding in a city before, and he would have preferred a less spectacular launch than throwing himself into a vertical dive down the wall of a skyscraper. But he had no choice.

It occurred to him with the storeys flashing by and the wind tearing at his flailing body, that nobody else had ever tried hang-gliding in Manhattan, either. Well, aficionados would soon know whether or not it worked.

He had planned the unorthodox technique of gathering tremendous speed for an all-out power glide rather than use the currents of warm air which rose from the city streets. It was to this specific end that he had chosen hang-gliding for his exit: he dared not land in the carriageways, where he would be at the mercy of the traffic and the police. But if he could make the sanctuary of Central Park in one continuous leap …

The slipstream was a dull roar in his ears, and the concrete and glass and marble veneer of the tower merged into a dark-grey blur as he plummeted towards the street. He tried pulling out of the dive, but he was going too fast, and the great, broad bulk of the neighbouring skycraper grew larger by the second.

He yanked the harness into the tightest turn that he dared, and almost wrenched his arms from their sockets. The soaring parallel streaks of light that traced the outline of another building suddenly swivelled through a right angle, and C.W.’s panic-stricken eyes gave his brain the mad message that New York had tilted on its side.

The skyscraper he was trying to avoid seemed for one appalling moment to be directly beneath his feet, so that he could land on it and walk down it like a fly down a post. Then he fought the wind, and straightened out, almost crying aloud his relief as the road slid away from his wingtip, to resume its rightful place in the scheme of gravity.

He looked wildly about him, and saw that he was not yet too low to catch a thermal current, if only he could reach one. Then, mercifully, a thermal found him. Almost immediately, but so imperceptibly that he failed to realise it, he started to rise.

He was now two floors higher than he had been, and still going up. At the moment, he was well out of range of the roof-top security men’s guns in the exhibition building. But if he continued his ascent?

Yet the thermal zephyr was playful and, after lifting him fifty feet or so further, it shot him across the face of the neighbouring skyscraper. He needed no prompting to steer round the corner and reach the end of the block. There, on the opposite side of 59th Street, were the welcoming trees of Central Park.

C.W. waved gleefully at a pair of lovers enjoying a session of palpitating sex in a fourteenth floor apartment. They were so surprised at being spied on by a passing birdman that they pulled apart and fell off the bed. The girl, C.W. spotted, was a lulu. He made a mental note of the position of the flat.

He rode the life-saving thermal across 59th, dropped lower in a controlled dive, and tree-hopped until he found an unobtrusive landing-place. From there he linked with a pick-up driver who had been waiting for him, concealed the hang-glider and the Flying Horse under its false floor, and headed for home, scarcely noticing the minor irritation of the police road-block at the corner of 5th and 59th.

Lorenz van Beck stepped off the Rambouillet bus and walked across the square to a different café from the one he had patronized on his last visit. Today he wore a sports shirt in a violent check, a loosely belted open jacket, sunglasses and jeans. He downed a Dubonnet and made for the church. The church clock welcomed him inside, and as he settled down in the confessional booth, he heard Smith rustling paper on the other side of the grille.

‘Well?’ Smith enquired.

‘Bless me, Father, for I –’

‘Cut it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ van Beck apologized, ‘last time I thought –’

‘Never mind about last time. Now I’m in a hurry. Report.’

Van Beck considered the situation, and how he might make best advantage of it. ‘Well …’ he began, slowly. ‘I – uh – I take it you were satisfied with Mike Graham’s performance? And, of course, you do have the Lap-Lasers – do you not?’

‘We do,’ Smith agreed, ‘and I was. Very satisfied. I want him again, for the big one. Tell him. No details – not that you know the details, anyway – but make it clear he’ll be very well paid.’

‘He already has been,’ van Beck returned.

‘I know,’ said Smith, shortly. ‘When I buy, I buy only the best. My price for extreme skill is high.’

‘It shall be done,’ the German said. Then he fell silent again.

‘Hurry it up,’ Smith snapped. ‘What of the others?’

‘There are two whom I can recommend,’ van Beck continued, ‘because of their, as you so adroitly put it, extreme skills. The trouble is that they’re loners. I just don’t know how they’ll react to working for you. They’ll never have heard of you, of course, since you seem to adopt a different name and disguise for each little – ah – outing. Even I have no idea who you are, or which are the jobs that have been pulled by you, or at your orders.’

‘Good.’

‘For all I know, you could be my best friend.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Oh.’

‘However,’ Smith said, ‘if you are pursuing a devious route towards an increase in your fee, you need not strive so officiously. Ask, and you shall have it.’

‘Aaah,’ van Beck sighed. ‘In that case – there is a jewel-thief, Sabrina Carver, and a cat-man, C.W. Whitlock, both in New York. I think they would suit you admirably.’

‘Sound them out,’ Smith ordered. ‘If they agree, tell both of them, and Graham, that they’ll be getting further instructions very shortly. Plus money and plane tickets.’

‘Airline tickets to – ?’

‘Paris,’ Smith said. ‘From there, of course, it could be anywhere.’

‘As you say,’ the German agreed.

Smith rose to his feet. ‘This time,’ he smiled thinly, ‘you stay and I go.’

‘Unusual,’ van Beck replied, ‘but acceptable.’

Smith walked quietly from the church. He was a taller, immaculately dressed, more confident priest than in his previous incarnation, and he held his manicured hands clasped in front of him, so that even eminently pattable children escaped his attentions.

And, still seated in the confessional box, Lorenz van Beck mused on rivets, heights and Paris. This time, though, he got a definite picture forming, as if he had suddenly joined up a series of dots. It was a very well-known shape indeed that sprang into his mind.

FOUR

There are probably fewer than a dozen nightclubs or discos throughout the civilized world where top-drawer international jet setters will admit to being seen. Il Gattopardo, in Rome, is one of them.

Dawn is a good time to be noticed at Il Gattopardo, though for the highest of swingers, an appearance at that hour will have been a reflex action, rather than a matter of calculation.

For Sabrina Carver, standing outside ‘The Leopard’ waiting for her car, it was merely the end of a less than scintillating night. She distanced herself by about three yards from two quite beautiful young men, scions of top Roman families, close friends both of each other and of Sabrina, who were trying to settle a tactful argument as to which of them should go home with her.

The discussion did not interest Sabrina. She would have been tolerably happy with either, or neither.

Guilio and Roberto had reached a temporary accomodation, based on an apportionment of past rewards for Sabrina’s favours, and future opportunities, when the parking attendant pulled up in Sabrina’s Alfa Romeo. A portly, excitable little man with a waxed moustache and a too-large, braided cap, the attendant jumped out, held the door open for Sabrina, and bowed low over her generous tip. That way, he could also peer into her generous cleavage without seeming forward.

She settled herself into the driving seat, and the attendant leaned in again, adopting the sort of confidential air at which Italian operatic tenors excel. He handed her a small, plain box, tied with pretty white ribbons.

‘Someone left this for you, Signorina Carver,’ he whispered through an effluvium of garlic.

‘Who?’

He shrugged extravagantly, using most of his upper body and the ends of his moustache.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and made with the lire again. The attendant decided not to push his luck with the décolletage, and backed away obsequiously. As Sabrina pulled apart the ribbons, the entente of Guilio and Roberto fractured, and they decided to settle the matter like gentlemen with the toss of a coin.

Signorina Carver’s educated fingers coped busily with the wrapping. The attendant sighed, dramatically. ‘Bella, bellissima,’ he murmured; and with good reason. She was classically, breath-catchingly lovely, with a cascade of hair shaded now to russet-brown, falling on her bare shoulders, framing a face that had more than once peered wistfully out from the front covers of Vogue and Woman’s World. Gone was the saintliness of childhood, but not to give way to artfulness or knowingness. Her brow was deep, her eyes wide-spaced and round, her nose and mouth in exquisite proportion, her chin cheekily dimpled.

How such a flower of Grecian beauty could ever have been the product of that dour, grain-encrusted Middle Western state of Iowa had baffled Fort Dodge. Sabrina had agreed, and settled the matter by leaving. Now her voice, like her face and body, was international, and she kept nothing of her childhood but her name, and her high regard for the stones which, as she could abundantly testify, were indeed a girl’s best friend.

Inside the box, in a bed of cotton wool and wrapped in tissue paper, were five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

She stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as she noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.

A coin was duly borrowed from the parking attendant, and flipped by Roberto, as Sabrina throttled warningly and released the hand-brake. Giulio shouted ‘Ciao’ while the coin was still in the air, hurdled over the back of the growling little car, and landed in the seat next to Sabrina. The Alfa screamed away and Giulio fastened his safety belt. He had never before ridden with Sabrina, but he was aware she had a reputation for a certain nonchalance at the wheel.

Upper Madison Avenue, New York City, like Fifth Avenue, is stacked with discreet, bijou little shops and boutiques catering for expensive and often esoteric tastes. There is also a sprinkling of way-out art galleries on Madison, to take advantage of the carriage trade’s lust for artifacts that no-one else possessed, nor indeed would wish to. ‘PRIMITIVES INC.’, which the elegant and faultlessly dressed black man with the pencil-thin moustache was about to enter, was one such gallery.

‘PRIMITIVES INC.’ dealt, as its name implied, in primitive art. This meant that it engaged agents, who suborned other agents who, in turn, bribed African village headmen, to lean on their tribes to produce badly carved, multi-hued bric-a-brac for half a bowl of gruel, which then sold on Upper Madison Avenue for six hundred bucks apiece.

The receptionist sat at a gleaming steel and glass desk (Stockholm, c. 1978) amid a weird but well-arranged clutter of masks, assegais and fertility symbols.

‘Good morning, Mr Whitlock,’ she smirked.

‘And to you, Mary-Lou,’ C.W. answered. Then he flashed her a brilliant smile and said, ‘Hey, that rhymes.’ Mary-Lou grinned back. He was a dish, she decided; pity he was … well, you know, black. She tried to think of a suitable rhyme for ‘C.W.’, but her intellectual equipment wasn’t up to it.

‘Anything doing, gorgeous?’ C.W. enquired.

‘It so happens,’ Mary-Lou replied coyly, ‘that yes, there is.’

C.W. was rapidly losing patience, but tried not to show it. The dumb white chicks, he mused, were even more of a pain in the ass than the smart ones, of whom there were not all that many.

‘A message, perhaps?’ he suggested.

‘In back,’ she inclined her peroxided head. ‘You know.’

‘Indeedy I do,’ C.W. simpered. He rolled his eyes as he passed her desk and crossed to the door leading to the lavish, semi-private display area behind the main gallery. Here the sculptures staring down at him from lucite shelves were, if even more wildly expensive, at least genuine and finely wrought. The semi-private nature of the rear gallery was required of the owners, because many of the costlier fertility symbols were all too explicitly fertile.

The gallery served (for a fee) as one of C.W.’s collection of New York dead-letter boxes, a facility that chimed in well with his tendency to divide his life into separate, equally secret, compartments. He had this in common with Sabrina Carver, too.

On a splendid oak refectory table sat a large, flat parcel. C.W. twisted the fastening string around his finger, and snapped the twine as if it were cotton. He shuffled aside the decorative paper wrapping, and looked with undisguised pleasure on a fresh wheel of his favourite French cheese, Brie.

C.W. selected a Pathan ornamental dagger from the wall, and cut himself a generous slice. He bit into it. The rind was deliciously crisp, the cheese at a perfect creamy consistency. C.W. munched the remainder of the slice, then set the knife into the far edge of the wheel, and cut the entire cheese precisely in half.

He dipped the blade of the dagger into one segment, and traced a path along it. Puzzled, he repeated the process on the other crescent. The point of the knife encountered an obstruction. C.W. smiled, and hooked it out.

It was a small package, enclosed in rice-paper. He scraped the rice-paper off, and unfolded five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

He stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as he noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.

‘Classy,’ C.W. said, admiringly. ‘Very classy.’ He walked out humming ‘The last time I saw Paris’.

Bureaucracy thrives on paper. Paper demands circulation. In order to facilitate distribution bureaucrats love drawing up lists that squeeze as many people as possible on to them while, in order to save paper, confining them to a single sheet. Thus was born the acronym, an indispensable arm of bureaucracy.

The United Nations is bureaucracy run riot, and acronyms proliferate there like hamsters. Few of them are important. One, in a little-frequented part of the UN Building in New York, scarcely rates a second glance. The sign on the office door says: ‘UNACO’. And below that: ‘Malcolm G. Philpott, Director’. And underneath, ‘Sonya Kolchinsky, Assistant Director’.

This acronym is misleadingly innocent, since ‘UNACO’ stands for ‘United Nations Anti-Crime Organization’, and it is very important indeed.

Sonya Kolchinsky picked up the ornate silver tray and carried it carefully across the room to Philpott’s desk. Philpott’s desk, like Philpott, was invariably tidy; there was plenty of space to set down the tray, which she did, again carefully. It bore a small espresso coffee machine, and cups and saucers in delicate china from a full service. Next to the silver sugar bowl and cream jug stood a cut-glass crystal decanter of brandy.

Sonya poured out a cup of coffee, and added a half spoonful of demerara sugar. She stirred the brew and, without asking Philpott, slipped in a touch, measured almost in droplets, of Remy Martin. She stirred the contents again, then topped it up with cream. Philpott, his eyes still glued to a file on his desk, raised the cup to his lips and sipped.

‘Delicious,’ he remarked, absently.

‘I know,’ she said.

He looked up at her, and grinned, a shade selfconsciously. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Miles away.’

‘You’re forgiven.’ She inclined her head mockingly. She was of above average height, and statuesquely built. She had a round, slightly pug-nosed face, and lightish-brown hair, cut fairly short with a sweeping fringe, then layered back over her shapely head.

Sonya was in her early forties, Czech-born, but now a naturalized American. She was an expert linguist; she had a degree in molecular physics; and her IQ was a few points higher than the man whom now she faced. She had clear, grey eyes that twinkled at Malcolm Gregory Philpott, enjoying his temporary discomfiture.

She sat in a chair at an angle from the desk, and raised her eyebrows quizzically. ‘The list?’ she enquired.

‘By all means,’ Philpott replied. He placed a finger on his intercom buzzer, and a voice rasped, ‘Director?’

‘The list.’

‘Sir.’

In the large and roomy outer office, a young man in a sober suit with a shaving rash and earnest glasses, picked up a message-pad and started across the deep-piled carpet. He passed a wall-to-wall neon map of the world. In front of the map was a practically wall-to-wall inclined counter, a cross between a library reading room desk and a Dickensian office lectern.

Three technicians of differing nationalities sat at the counter in padded swivel chairs. Each wore a pilot-style headset with a tiny cantilevered microphone hovering a measured inch and a half from his mouth. The three were listening-posts to the world. Occasionally they murmured greetings or commands in any one of more than thirty languages, and made notes on sheets of cartridge-paper pinned to the counter. Every time a new call came in, a red light blinked on the map, indicating its origin.

An exact see-through miniature of the map, measuring no more than six inches by nine, rested on Philpott’s uncluttered desk in a handsome frame. A mellow chime from an alarm system warned him when a new call came up, and the lighting pattern of the map was precisely duplicated, down to merest pinpoints from the most unlikely places.

The young man handed the pad to Sonya, who said, ‘Thank you, Basil,’ and began to study the neatly typed summary of the mid-morning traffic …

Traffic in crime, which was the business of UNACO and its staff. Like Mister Smith, Philpott was fascinated by crime. He was, indeed, fascinated by Mister Smith; and there he had a decided advantage over Smith. For whereas Malcolm Philpott knew a great deal about Smith, and his many aliases and driving obsessions, Smith never even suspected the existence of Philpott or his Department.

Philpott had himself suggested the formation of the top-secret group when he was a research professor in a New England University, heading a section sponsored partly by industry – it was highly technical and advanced research – and partly by the CIA, through the US Government. The Government had fallen for the idea, and had even accepted Philpott’s primary and absolute condition that the organization should come under the aegis of the United Nations, where its services would be placed at the disposal of all member states, and where its sources would not feel inhibited by the taint of American self-interest and militarism.

Philpott had not imagined for a second that the Nixon administration would not merely enthusiastically endorse the project, but also fund the donkey work of setting up the Department. He was allowed to select all his staff, and recruit agents, and had never for an instant regretted his first (and only) choice of Assistant Director.

Sonya Kolchinsky and Philpott shared the conviction that international crime, if properly organized, could threaten subversion and chaos on a scale to rival that of even the most belligerent Eastern Bloc state. They devoted (and sometimes risked) their lives and admittedly well-paid careers to fighting serious crime, and they had earned the respect and admiration of the vast majority of UN member nations, including some in the Eastern Bloc.

For UNACO would tackle crime anywhere, and for any reason, provided the threat to stability was critical, and that Philpott was sure the Depart ment was not being used as a pawn in a power-game. He had known from the start that the Nixon administration would try to subvert UNACO, by planting key personnel in the group. He had annulled that threat years ago and now, under a more malleable and far-sighted President, the Department enjoyed the trust and support of the United States Government and the un-stinting co-operation of the CIA, INTERPOL and the FBI.

In fact, Philpott’s personal relationship with the new President of the United States had opened doors to UNACO in America, and throughout the world, which had previously been closed to Philpott, whatever his credentials or reputation. It was a good time for UNACO. Malcolm G. Philpott was determined to keep it that way.

Easily the most persuasive explanation for his current high standing was his astonishing success. And the most important influence on the UNACO hit rate was, without doubt, Philpott’s ability to recruit international criminals to unmask international crime.

He logically put criminals into two principal categories: those who operated on their own account for their own benefit; and those others – such as terrorists of all kinds – whose activities were directed at Governments, nations and social systems.

There was a third kind – a rare breed of criminal dedicated to anarchy, wedded to the abstract concept of crime as a cleansing force; totally amoral and wanting in any respect for human life.

The second and third categories were Philpott’s targets. He occasionally brought in Governments to help his constant war against international terrorism. But the Napoleons of crime, the monsters, he reserved for himself, asking for help only when he needed it.

And he was winning his battles. For the criminals Philpott chose as his weapons were often the match for those he sought to destroy.

Which was why long since, he had recruited the master-criminals Sabrina Carver and C. W. Whitlock to help him rid the world of Mister Smith.

Sonya scanned the message-pad again, and said, ‘Right – here goes.

‘The diamond trail’s moving again, it seems.

Reports indicate that an estimated two million in smuggled uncuts leaked out to Capetown yesterday. Courier unknown. Action?’

‘Is someone tracking the haul?’ Philpott asked.

‘We are.’

‘OK. Code Blue. Give it to INTERPOL, Amsterdam.’

Sonya wrote in a neat hand in the margin opposite the coded entry. Then she resumed, ‘Czechoslovakia forensic has identified the poison in the Branski assassination.’

Philpott grinned. ‘With a little help from you, I imagine. Yes, good. Make it a Yellow, and send the thing to our own lab, for a fast report.’

Sonya made the notation. ‘Gold?’ she said. Philpott nodded. ‘Heavy unloading by the Bombay Irregulars.’

Philpott winced and sighed. ‘That’s a Green.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘And now,’ Sonya announced portentously, having kept the best news for last, ‘we have a Smith affirmative out of Rome.’

Philpott sat back in his chair and slapped the gleaming desk with the palm of his hand. ‘Great!’ he enthused. ‘Sabrina hooked him. Great!’

‘With a little help from us and van Beck,’ Sonya protested.

‘We didn’t help with that Diamond Exchange robbery,’ Philpott said. ‘We can’t do that sort of thing, after all. The Dutch would never forgive us. Neither would INTERPOL.’

‘We can keep our fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong, though, can’t we?’ Sonya asked.

‘And we do,’ Philpott agreed. ‘Mind you, it’s not really necessary with Sabrina. I reckon she could have done it on her head, let alone on roller skates.’

Sonya half rose from her chair. ‘Would you like to speak to her?’

‘Yes,’ Philpott replied, ‘I’d love to – but not just yet.’ Sonya seated herself again and looked at him enquiringly.

‘Well,’ Philpott explained, ‘if Smith’s bitten with Sabrina, then he ought to be doing the same for C.W. Has he called?’

Sonya was about to say ‘No,’ when the chime pealed, and the map on Smith’s desk glowed with a fresh pinpoint of light. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘New York. Now, I wonder who this could be.’ He directed that the call should be put straight through to him.

C.W. reported briefly and succinctly. ‘Excellent,’ beamed Philpott. ‘Three days, eh? Not much time. We’ll be there with you, though, and then we’ll find out what it is. At the moment, it’s enough to know that Smith’s behind it, so it’ll be pretty damned serious and spectacular.’

Philpott cut the line and regarded Sonya steadily. ‘Now,’ he mused, slowly. ‘I wonder what, and precisely where …’

‘Paris, I suppose,’ Sonya put in. ‘Why send them tickets to Paris if the action’s somewhere else.’

‘Ye-e-s,’ Philpott conceded. ‘And it’s true that van Beck’s come up with some absolutely crazy idea that just doesn’t seem to make sense. All the same …’

‘What idea?’ she demanded sharply. Philpott did not normally keep secrets from her, and she had right of access to most UNACO information – unless Philpott considered it might be dangerous for her to know.

He grinned, sheepishly. ‘D’you mind if I don’t tell you at the moment?’ he said. ‘I want to consider it a little further. It’s – way out. And it may mean nothing. Or everything.’

Sonya relaxed. ‘Sure,’ she agreed. She furrowed her brow in thought, bit her lower lip, and ventured. ‘So it’s just the laser-guns we’re not fully up to date with yet?’

Philpott nodded. He stroked the left-hand edge of the bridge of his nose – a favourite trick when he was thinking too hard. His face was lined, but still handsome. He was perhaps ten years older than Sonya, and his hair, though plentiful, was grey and slightly tousled. He had a strong, pointed jaw and skin stretched tautly over high cheek bones. He was lean and fit and, for an ex-academic, scrupulously well dressed. Sonya Kolchinsky was in love with him, and he knew it.

‘The lasers,’ he said. ‘The lasers – yes. Who took them? And why? And for whom?’ He was silent for a while, and Sonya did not disturb his train of thought. Philpott tapped his fingers unevenly on the desk. ‘For Smith, I imagine,’ he argued with himself, ‘and more than likely for this job. As to who took them – it could be anyone.’ He shrugged, and nodded at the file in front of him. ‘We both believe it’s a weapons man, and they’re all in here – all the top suspects. Ex-army, ex-CIA, grudge-holders, suspected agents … It’s just a question of picking the right one. It’s a pity,’ he reflected, ‘that van Beck couldn’t help Smith find a weapons man. Then we’d have all three in our pocket.’

Mike Graham sauntered out of the Munich bierkeller and crossed to the busy square fronting the magnificent cathedral. Anywhere in central Munich was not too far from The Four Seasons Hotel, which was one of the great hotels of Europe, and which at present numbered Graham among its guests.

He walked through the square, and took a short cut to the fruit and vegetable market. Between a pair of enticing vegetable stalls sat an old woman next to a small, trestle-mounted cart. The cart held packeted wienerschitzel, and chestnuts popped on a free-standing brazier.

Graham was wearing jeans, and a leather flying-jacket which had seen better days. A white ’kerchief fluttered at his throat, and he sported an American Legion badge over the top left-hand pocket of the jacket.

‘Guten morgen,’ he said to the woman. Her sharp eyes took in the ’kerchief, the badge, and the face above it.

‘Good morning,’ she replied, in heavily accented English. ‘Would you like some chestnuts for a not too warm day?’

Mike nodded, and said, ‘Ja, bitte.’ The elderly woman took a paper bag from the cart, and picked freshly roasted nuts from the coals with a pair of tongs. ‘They are hot,’ she warned, ‘very hot. Mind your fingers.’

Graham assured her he would. He gingerly extracted one, cracked and peeled it, and popped it into his mouth. It was delicious. ‘Auf wiedersehen,’ he said. ‘Goodbye,’ she replied.

He strolled back down the street, and took a seat at a pavement café for coffee and schnapps. He emptied the chestnuts out on the table to cool. The packet was at the bottom of the bag.

He opened it and, shielding the contents with his other hand, unrolled five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

Graham opened the folded airline ticket. In the top left-hand corner was a poorly executed sketch of a Lap-Laser, accompanied by a terse message: ‘Now I want you to use them’. The message was unsigned. Mike drained his schnapps and ordered a refill.

Giulio was sitting as though bolted into the seat of the Alfa Romeo. They were well south of Rome now, and he had not even bothered to ask Sabrina where they were going. He just fervently wished he was somewhere else.

He had brought it on himself, Giulio freely acknowledged, when he unbuckled his seat belt. Sabrina had been driving with great restraint – for her – when Giulio had sensed that the time was right for one arm to slip around her shoulders, while the other hand skated over, then settled on, her knee. He could not have been more wrong.

She stepped fiercely on the gas pedal, and Giulio’s head shot forward and rapped smartly on the fascia. The Alfa’s engine shrieked, and Giulio dimly saw a road sign saying ‘Roma 170’ – pointing in the opposite direction. He resigned himself to an early grave, and hoped his mother and numerous sisters would cry at his funeral.

Sabrina reached a corner, made a racing change, and screamed round the bend kicking dirt, on what seemed to Giulio to be only one wheel. It was a short road, and another bend was coming up, for they had long since abandoned the autostrada for more taxing sport. Sabrina double-clutched down through the gears, and drifted into a toe-to-heel braking power turn before gearing back up for the straight. The motor protested, but obeyed her feet and her tensed arms.

Giulio’s handsome face shaded to chalk-white, his eyes glazed over, and his bowels turned suddenly to water. He could see a narrow, humpbacked bridge looming up, and he quickly recited what he was certain would be his terminal prayer.

Sabrina turned to bestow a ravishing smile on him, taking her eyes completely off the road while, at the same time, pressing the accelerator pedal down into the floor. Giulio gripped the Alfa’s crash-bar so hard that his knuckles matched the white of his face. He closed his eyes and let out a scream of undiluted horror.

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