"I hope you won't mind my calling you over the weekend," he said.

"Not at all, my dear fellow," said Manson quite untruthfully. "Any time."

"I would have called at the office last night, but I got held up at a meeting. Recalling our conversation some time ago about the results of your mining survey down in that African place. You remember?"

Manson supposed Goole felt obliged to go through the security rigmarole on an open line.

"Yes indeed," he said. "I took up your suggestion made at that dinner. The figures concerned were slightly changed, so that the quant.i.ties revealed were quite unviable from a business standpoint. The report went off, was received, and I've heard no more about it."

Goole's next words jerked Sir James Manson out of his weekend relaxation.

"Actually, we have," said the voice on the phone. "Nothing really disturbing, but odd all the same. Our Amba.s.sador in the area, although accredited to that country and three other small republics, doesn't five there, as you know. But he sends in regular reports, gleaned from a variety of sources, including normal liaison with other friendly diplomats. A copy of a section of his latest report, concerned with the economic side of things out there, landed on my desk yesterday at the office. It seems there's a rumor out there that the Soviet government has secured permission to send in a mining survey team of their own. Of course, they may not be concerned with the same area as your chaps...."

Sir James Manson stared at the telephone as Goole's voice twittered on. In his head a pulse began to hammer, close to his left temple.

"I was only thinking, Sir James, that if these Russian chaps go over the same area your man went over, their findings might be somewhat different. Fortunately, it's only a question of minor quant.i.ties of tin. Still, I thought you ought to know. h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo? Are you there?"

Manson jerked himself out of his reverie. With a ma.s.sive effort he made his voice appear normal.

"Yes indeed. Sorry, I was just thinking. Very good of you to call me, Goole. I don't suppose they'll be in the same area as my man. But d.a.m.n useful to know, all the same."

He went through the usual pleasantries before hanging up, and walked slowly back to the sun terrace, his mind racing. Coincidence? Could be, it just could be. If the Soviet survey team was going to cover an area miles away from the Crystal Mountain range, it would be purely a coincidence. On the other hand, if it went straight toward the Crystal Mountain without having done any aerial survey work to notice the differences in vegetation in that area, then that would be no coincidence. That would be b.l.o.o.d.y sabotage. And there was no way he could find out, no way of being absolutely certain, without betraying his own continuing interest. And that would be fatal.

He thought of Chalmers, the man he was convinced he had silenced with money. His teeth ground. Had he talked? Wittingly? Unwittingly? He had half a mind to let Endean take care of Dr. Chalmers, or one of En-dean's friends. But that would change nothing. And there was no proof of a security leak.

He could shelve his plans at once and think no more of them. He considered this, then considered again the pot of pure gold at the end of this particular rainbow. James Manson was not where he was because he had the habit of backing down on account of risk.

He sat down in his deck chair next to the now cold coffeepot and thought hard. He intended to go forward as planned, but he had to a.s.sume the Russian mining team would touch on the area Mulrooney had visited, and he had to a.s.sume that it too would notice the vegetation changes. Therefore there was now a new element, a time limit. He did some mental calculation and came up with the figure of three months. If the Russians learned the content of the Crystal Mountain, there would be a "technical aid" team in there like a dose of salts. A big one at that, and half the members would be hard men from KGB.

Shannon's shortest schedule had been a hundred days, but he had originally told Endean that another fortnight added to the timetable would make the whole project that much more feasible. Now they did not have that fortnight. In fact, if the Russians moved faster than usual, they might not even have a hundred days.

He returned to the telephone and called Simon En-dean. His own weekend had been disturbed; there was no reason why Endean should not start doing a bit of work.

Endean called Shannon at the hotel on Monday morning and set up a rendezvous for two that afternoon at a small apartment house in St. John's Wood. He had hired the flat on the instructions of Sir James Manson, after having had a long briefing at the country mansion on Sunday afternoon. He had taken the flat for a month in the name of Harris, paying cash and giving a fict.i.tious reference which no one checked. The reason for the hiring was simple: the flat had a telephone that did not go through a switchboard.

Shannon was there on time and found the man he still called Harris already installed. The telephone was hung in a desk microphone set that would enable a telephone conference to be held between one or more people in the room and the person on the other end of the line.

"The chief of the consortium has read your report," he told Shannon, "and wants to have a word with you."

At two-thirty the phone rang. Endean threw the "speak" switch on the machine, and Sir James Man-son's voice came on the line. Shannon already knew who it would be but gave no sign.

"Are you there, Mr. Shannon?" asked the voice.

"Yes, sir."

"Now, I have read your report, and I approve your judgment and conclusions. If offered this contract, would you be prepared to go through with it?"

"Yes, sir, I would," said Shannon.

"There are a couple of points I want to discuss. I notice in the budget you award yourself the sum of ten thousand pounds."

"Yes, sir. Frankly, I don't think anyone would do the job for less, and most would ask more. Even if a budget were prepared by another person which quoted a lower sum, I think that person would still pa.s.s a minimum of ten per cent to himself, simply by hiding the sum in the prices of purchases that could not be checked out."

There was a pause; then the voice said, "All right. I accept that. What does this salary buy me?"

"It buys you my knowledge, my contacts, my acquaintanceship with the world of arms dealers, smugglers, gun-runners, and mercenaries. It also buys my silence in the event of anything's going wrong. It pays me for three months' d.a.m.ned hard work, and the constant risk of arrest and imprisonment. Lastly, it buys the risk of my getting killed in the attack."

There was a grunt. "Fair enough. Now as regards financing. The sum of one hundred thousand pounds will be transferred into a Swiss account which Mr. Harris will open this week. He will pay you the necessary money in slices, as and when you need it over the forthcoming two months. For that purpose you will have to set up your own communications system with him. When the money is spent, he will either have to be present or to receive receipts."

"That will not always be possible, sir. There are no receipts in the arms business, least of all in black-market deals, and most of the men I shall be dealing with would not have Mr. Harris present. He is not in their world. I would suggest the extensive use of travelers' checks and credit transfers by banks. At the same tune, if Mr. Harris has to be present to countersign every banker's draft or check for a thousand pounds, he must either follow me around everywhere, which I would not accept on grounds of my own security, or we could never do it all inside a hundred days."

There was another long pause. "What do you mean by your own security?" asked the voice.

"I mean, sir, that I don't know Mr. Harris. I could not accept that he be in a position to know enough to get me arrested in a European city. You have taken your security precautions. I have to take mine. These are that I travel and work alone and unsupervised."

"You're a cautious man, Mr. Shannon."

"I have to be. I'm still alive."

There was a grim chuckle. "And how do I know you can be trusted with large sums of money to handle on your own?"

"You don't, sir. Up to a point Mr. Harris can keep the sums low at each stage. But the payments for the arms have to be made in cash and by the buyer alone. The only alternatives are to ask Mr. Harris to mount the operation personally, or to hire another professional. And you would not know if you could trust him either."

"Fair enough, Mr. Shannon. Mr. Harris."

"Sir?" answered Endean immediately.

"Please return to see me at once after leaving where you are now. Mr. Shannon, you have the job. You have one hundred days, Mr. Shannon, to steal a republic. One hundred days."

PART TWO - The Hundred Days

9.

For several minutes after Sir James Manson had hung up, Simon Endean and Cat Shannon sat and stared at each other. It was Shannon who recovered first.

"Since we're going to have to work together," he told Endean, "let's get this clear. If anyone, anyone at all, gets to hear about this project, it will eventually get back to one or another of the secret services of one of the main powers. Probably the CIA, or at least the British SIS or maybe the French SDECE. And they will screw, but good. There'll be nothing you or I could do to prevent them ending the affair stone dead. So we keep security absolute."

"Speak for yourself," snapped Endean. "I've got a lot more tied up in this than you."

"Okay. First thing has to be money. I'll fly to Brussels tomorrow and open a new bank account somewhere in Belgium. I'll be back by tomorrow night. Contact me then, and I'll tell you where, in which bank and in what name. Then I shall need a transfer of credit to the tune of at least ten thousand pounds. By tomorrow night I'll have a complete list of where it has to be spent. Mainly, it will be in salary checks for my a.s.sistants, deposits, and so on."

"Where do I contact you?" asked Endean.

"That's point number two," said Shannon. "I'm go- ing to need a permanent base, secure for telephone calls and letters. What about this flat? Is it traceable to you?"

Endean had not thought of that. He considered the problem. "It's hired in my name. Cash in advance for one month," he said.

"Does it matter if the name Harris is on the tenancy agreement?" asked Shannon.

"No."

"Then I'll take it over. That gives me a month's tenancy-seems a pity to waste it-and I'll take up the payments at the end of that time. Do you have a key?"

"Yes, of course. I let myself in by it."

"How many keys are there?"

For answer Endean reached into his pocket and brought out a ring with four keys on it. Two were evidently for the front door of the house and two for the flat door. Shannon took them from his hand.

"Now for communications," he said. "You can contact me by phoning here any time. I may be in, I may not. I may be away abroad. Since I a.s.sume you will not want to give me your phone number, set up a poste restante mailing address in London somewhere convenient to either your home or office, and check twice daily for telegrams. If I need you urgently, I'll telegraph the phone number of where I am, and a time to phone. Understood?"

"Yes. I'll have it by tomorrow night. Anything else?"

"Only that I'll be using the name of Keith Brown throughout the operation. Anything signed as coming from Keith is from me. When calling a hotel, ask for me as Keith Brown. If ever I reply by saying 'This is Mr. Brown,' get off the line fast. It means trouble. Explain that you have the wrong number, or the wrong Brown. That's all for the moment. You'd better get back to the office. Call me here at eight tonight, and I'll give you the progress to date."

A few minutes later Endean found himself on the pavements of St. John's Wood, looking for a taxi.

Luckily Shannon had not banked the 500 he had received from Endean before the weekend for his attack project, and he still had 450 of it left.

He rang BEA and booked an economy-cla.s.s round trip on the morning flight to Brussels, returning at 1600 hours, which would get him back in his flat by six. Following that, he telephoned four telegrams abroad, one to Paarl, Cape Province, South Africa; one to Ostend; one to Ma.r.s.eilles; and one to Munich. Each said simply, "Urgent you phone me London 507-0041 any midnight over next three days. Shannon." Finally he summoned a taxi and had it take him back to the Lowndes Hotel. He checked out, paid his bill, and left as he had come, anonymously.

At eight Endean rang him as agreed, and Shannon told Manson's aide what he had done so far. They agreed Endean would ring again at ten the following evening.

Shannon spent a couple of hours exploring the block he was now living in, and the surrounding area. He spotted several small restaurants, including a couple not far away in St. John's Wood High Street, and ate a leisurely supper at one of them. He was back home by eleven.

He counted his money-there was more than 400 left-put 300 on one side for the air fare and expenses the following day, and checked over his effects. The clothes were unremarkable, all of them less than three months old, most bought in the last ten days in London. He had no gun to bother about, and for safety destroyed the typewriter ribbon he had used to type his reports, replacing it with one of his spares.

Though it was dark early in London that evening, it was still light on a warm, sunny summer evening in Cape Province as Janni Dupree gunned his car past Seapoint and on toward Cape Town. He too had a Chevrolet, older than Endean's, but bigger and flashier, bought second-hand with some of the dollars with which he had returned from Paris four weeks earlier.

After spending the day swimming and fishing from a friend's boat at Simonstown, he was driving back to his home in Paarl. He always liked to come home to Paarl after a contract, but inevitably it bored him quickly, just as it had when he left it ten years before.

As a boy he had been raised in the Paarl Valley and had spent his preschool years scampering through the thin and poor vineyards owned by people like his parents. He had learned to stalk birds and shoot in the valley with Pieter, his klonkie, the black playmate a white boy is allowed to play with until he grows too old and learns what skin color is all about.

Pieter, with his enormous brown eyes, tangled ma.s.s of black curls, and mahogany skin, was two years older than Janni and had been supposed to look after him. In fact they had been the same size, for Janni was physically precocious and had quickly taken the leadership of the pair. On summer days like this one, twenty years ago, the two barefoot boys used to take the bus along the coast to Cape Agulhas, where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans finally meet, and fish for yellow-tail, galjoen, and red steenbras off the point.

After Paarl Boys' High, Janni had been a problem - too big, aggressive, restless, getting into fights with those big scything fists and ending up twice in front of the magistrates. He could have taken over his parents' farm and tended with his father the stubby little vines that produced such thin wine. The prospect appalled him -of becoming old and bent trying to make a living from the smallholding, with only four black boys working with him. At eighteen he volunteered for the army, did his basic training at Potchefstroom, and transferred to the paratroops at Bloemfontein. It was here he had found the thing he wanted to do most in life, here and in the counterinsurgency training in the harsh bushvdd around Pietersburg. The army had agreed with him about his suitability, except on one point: his propensity for going to war while pointing in the wrong direction. In one fistfight too many, Cor- poral Dupree had beaten a sergeant senseless, and the commanding officer had busted him to private.

Bitter, he went AWOL, was taken in a bar in East London, battered two MPs before they held him down, and did six months in the stockade. On release he saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt in an evening newspaper, reported to a small office in Durban, and two days later was flown out of South Africa to Kamina base in Katanga. He had become a mercenary at twenty-two, and that was six years ago.

As he drove along the winding road through Fran-shoek toward the Paarl Valley, he wondered if there would be a letter from Shannon or one of the boys, with news of a contract. But when he got there, nothing was waiting at the post office. Clouds were blowing up from the sea, and there was a hint of thunder in the air.

It would rain that evening, a nice cooling shower, and he glanced up toward the Paarl Rock, the phenomenon that had given the valley and the town its name long ago when his ancestors first came into the valley. As a boy he had stared in wonderment at the rock, which was a dull gray when dry but after rain glistened like an enormous pearl in the moonlight. Then it became a great glistening, gleaming thing, dominating the tiny town beneath it. Although the town of his boyhood could never offer him the kind of life he wanted, it was still home; and when he saw the Paarl Rock glistening in the light, he always knew he was back home again. That evening he wished he were somewhere else, heading toward another war.

Tiny Marc Vlaminck leaned on the bar counter and downed another foaming schooner of Flemish ale. Outside the front windows of the place his girlfriend managed, the streets of Ostend's red-light district were almost empty. A chill wind was blowing off the sea, and the summer tourists had not started to arrive yet. He was bored already.

For the first month since his return from the tropics, it had been good to be back, good to take hot baths again, to chat with his friends who had dropped in to see him. Even the local press had taken an interest, but he had told them to get lost. The last thing he needed was trouble from the authorities, and he knew they would leave him alone if he did or said nothing to embarra.s.s them with the African emba.s.sies in Brussels.

But after weeks the inactivity had palled. A few nights back it had been enlivened when he thumped a seaman who had tried to fondle Anna's bottom, an area he regarded as entirely his own preserve. The memory started a thought running through his mind. He could hear a low thump-thump from upstairs, where Anna was doing the housework in the small flat that they shared above the bar. He heaved himself off his barstool, drained the tankard, and called, "If anyone comes in, serve 'em yourself."

Then he lumbered up the back stairs. As he did so, the door opened and a telegram came in.

It was a clear spring evening with just a touch of chill in the air, and the water of the Old Port of Ma.r.s.eilles was like gla.s.s. Across its center, a few months ago a mirror for the surrounding bars and cafes, a single homecoming trawler cut a swathe of ripples that wandered across the harbor and died chuckling under the hulls of the fishing boats already moored. The cars were locked solid along the Canebiere, smells of cooking fish emanated from a thousand windows, the old men sipped their anisette, and the heroin-sellers scuttled through the alleys on their lucrative missions. It was an ordinary evening.

In the multinational, multilingual caldron of seething humanity that called itself Le Panier, where only a policeman is illegal, Jean-Baptiste Langarotti sat at a corner table in a small bar and sipped a long, cool Ricard.

He was not as bored as Janni Dupree or Marc Vla- minck. Years in prison had taught him the ability to keep himself interested in even the smallest things, and he could survive long periods of inactivity better than most.

Moreover, he had been able to get himself a job and earn a living, so that his savings were still intact. He saved steadily, the results of his economies mounting up in a bank in Switzerland that no one knew about. One day they would buy him the little bar in Calvi that he wanted.

A month earlier a good friend of his from the Algerian days had been picked up for a small matter of a suitcase containing twelve former French army Colt .45s and from Les Baumettes had sent Jean-Baptiste a message asking him to "mind" the girl on whose earnings the imprisoned friend normally lived. He knew he could trust the Corsican not to cheat him. She was a good girl, a broad-beamed hoyden called Marie-Claire, who went under the name of Lola and did her nightly stint in a bar in the Tubano district. She had taken quite a fancy to Langarotti, perhaps because of his size, and her only complaint was that he did not knock her about the way her boyfriend in prison had done. Being small was no hindrance to being a "minder," because the rest of the underworld, who might have made a claim for Lola, needed no education about Langarotti.

So Lola was happy to be the best-minded girl in town, and Jean-Baptiste was content to while away the days until another contract to fight came up. He was in contact with a few people in the mercenary business but, being new to it, was relying more on Shannon to hear of something first. Shannon was more the sort clients would come to.

Shortly after returning to France, Langarotti had been contacted by Charles Roux in Paris, who had proposed that the Corsican sign on with him exclusively in exchange for first choice if and when a contract turned up. Roux had talked largely of the half-dozen projects he had brewing at the time, and the Corsican had re- mained noncommittal. Later he had checked up and found Roux was mostly talk, for he had set up no projects of his own since his return from Bukavu in the autumn of '67 with a hole through his arm.

With a sigh Langarotti glanced at his watch, finished his drink, and rose to go. It was time to fetch Lola from their apartment and escort her to the bar for work, and then drop in at the all-night post office to see if there was a telegram from Shannon offering a prospect of a new war.

In Munich it was even colder than in Marc Vlaminck's Ostend, and Kurt Semmler, his blood thinned by years in the Far East, Algeria, and Africa, shivered in his knee-length black leather coat as he headed toward the all-night post office. He made a regular check-call at the counter every morning and evening, and each time hoped for some letter or telegram bearing news or an invitation to meet someone for an interview for possible selection for a mercenary a.s.signment.

The period since his return from Africa had been one of idleness and boredom. Like most army veterans, he disliked civilian life, wore the clothes badly, despised the politics, and longed again for some form of routine combined with action. The return to his birth city had not been encouraging. Everywhere he saw long-haired youths, sloppy and ill-disciplined, waving their banners and screaming their slogans. There seemed to be none of the sense of purpose, of commitment to the ideal of the greatness of the Fatherland and its leader, that had so completely absorbed his own childhood and youth, nor the sense of order that characterized army life.

Even the smuggling life in the Mediterranean, although it had been free and easy, at least could offer the sense of activity, the scent of danger, the feeling of a mission planned, executed, and accomplished. Easing a fast launch in toward the Italian coast with two tons of American cigarettes on board, he had at least been able to imagine himself back on the Mekong, going into action with the Legion against the Xoa Binh river pirates.

Munich offered him nothing. He had drunk too much, smoked too much, wh.o.r.ed a bit, and become thoroughly disgruntled.

At the post office there was nothing for him that evening.

At midnight Marc Vlaminck phoned in from Ostend. The Belgian telegram delivery service is excellent and delivers until ten at night. Shannon told Vlaminck simply to meet him in front of Brussels National Airport the following morning with a car, and gave him his flight number.

Belgium has, from the point of view of those wishing to operate a discreet but legal bank account, many advantages that outweigh those offered by the much better-publicized Swiss banking system. Not nearly as rich or powerful as Germany, not neutral like Switzerland, Belgium nevertheless offers the facility of permitting unlimited quant.i.ties of money to pa.s.s in and out without government control or interference. The banks are also just as discreet as those of Switzerland, which is why they and the banks of Luxembourg and Lich tenstein have been steadily increasing their volume of business at the expense of the Swiss.

It was to the Kredietbank in Brugge, seventy minutes' driving time from the Brussels airport, that Shannon had himself driven by Marc Vlaminck the following morning. The big Belgian was evidently full of curiosity, but he kept it to himself. When they were on the road to Brugge, Shannon mentioned briefly that he had been given a contract and there was room for four helpers. Was Vlaminck interested?

Tiny Marc indicated that of course he was. Shannon told him he could not say what the operation was, other than that it was a job that had to be not merely fought but set up from scratch. He was prepared to offer normal rates of $1250 a month, plus expenses, for the next three months, and the job, although not requiring absence from home until the third month, would require a few hours' risk in Europe. That, of course, was not strictly mercenary work, but it had to be done.

Marc grunted. "I'm not knocking off banks," he said. "Not for that kind of money."

"It's nothing like that. I need some guns taken on board a boat. We have to do it ourselves. After we sail, it's all set for Africa and a nice little firefight."

Marc grinned. "A long campaign, or a quick in-and-out job?"

"An attack," said Shannon. "Mind you, if it works there could be a long contract in the offing. Can't promise, but it looks like that. And a fat success bonus."