"We don't want you to," said Harris.

"All right, what's the mission? And what's the fee?" asked Shannon. He saw no sense in wasting words. The man in front of him was unlikely to be shocked by a spade being called a spade.

Harris smiled briefly. "First, you would have to come to London for briefing. We would pay for your trip and expenses, even if you decided not to accept."

"Why London? Why not here?" asked Shannon.

Harris exhaled a long stream of smoke. "There are some maps and other papers involved," he said. "I didn't want to bring them with me. Also, I have to consult my partners, report to them that you have accepted or not, as the case may be."

There was silence as Harris drew a wad of French 100-franc notes from his pocket.

"Fifteen hundred francs," he said. "About a hundred and twenty pounds. That's for your air ticket to London, single or return, whichever you wish to buy. And your overnight stay. If you decline the proposition after hearing it, you get another hundred for your trouble in coming. If you accept, we discuss the further salary."

Shannon nodded. "All right. I'll listen-in London. When?"

"Tomorrow," said Harris and rose to leave. "Arrive any time during the course of the day, and stay at the Post House Hotel on Haverstock Hill. I'll book your room when I get back tonight. At nine the day after tomorrow I'll phone you in your room and make a rendezvous for later that morning. Clear?"

Shannon nodded and picked up the francs. "Book the room in the name of Brown, Keith Brown," he said.

The man who called himself Harris left the hotel and headed downhill, looking for a taxi. He had not seen any reason to mention to Shannon that he had spent three hours earlier that afternoon talking with another mercenary, a man by the name of Charles Roux. Nor did he mention that he had decided, despite the Frenchman's evident eagerness, that Roux was not the man for the job; he had left the man's flat with a vague promise to get in touch again, with his decision.

Twenty-four hours later Shannon stood at his bedroom window in the Post House Hotel and stared out at the rain and the commuter traffic swishing up Haver-stock Hill from Camden Town toward Hampstead and the commuter suburbs.

He had arrived that morning on the first plane, using his pa.s.sport in the name of Keith Brown. Long since, he had had to acquire a false pa.s.sport by the normal method used in mercenary circles. At the end of 1967 he had been with Black Jacques Schramme at Bukavu, surrounded and besieged for months by the Congolese army. Finally, undefeated but running out of ammunition, the mercenaries had vacated the Congolese lakeside city, walked across the bridge into neighboring Rwanda, and allowed themselves, with Red Cross guarantees which the Red Cross could not possibly fulfill, to be disarmed.

From then on, for nearly six months, they had sat idle in an internment camp at Kigali while the Red Cross and the Rwanda government ha.s.sled over their repatriation to Europe. President Mobutu of the Congo wanted them sent back to him for execution, but the mercenaries had threatened if that was the decision they would take the Rwandan army barehanded, recover their guns and find their own way home. The Rwandan government had believed, rightly, that they might do it.

When finally the decision was made to fly them back to Europe, the British consul had visited the camp and soberly told the six British mercenaries present that he would have to impound their pa.s.sports. They had soberly told him they had lost everything across the lake in Bukavu. On being flown home to London, Shannon and the others had been told by the Foreign Office that each man owed 350 for the air fare and would receive no new pa.s.sport ever again.

Before leaving the camp, the men had been photographed and fingerprinted and had had their names taken. They also had to sign doc.u.ments pledging never to set foot on the continent of Africa. These doc.u.ments would be sent in copy to every African government.

The reaction of the mercenaries was predictable. Every one had a lush beard and mustache and hair left uncut after months in the camp, where no scissors were allowed in case they went on the warpath with them. The photographs were therefore unrecognizable. Each man then submitted his own fingerprints for another man's prints, and they all exchanged names. The result was that every ident.i.ty doc.u.ment contained one man's name, another man's fingerprints, and a third man's photograph. Finally, they signed the pledge to leave Africa forever with names like Sebastian Weetabix and Neddy Seagoon.

Shannon's reaction to the Foreign Office demand was no less unhelpful. As he still had his "lost" pa.s.sport, he kept it and traveled where he wished until it expired. Then he took the necessary steps to secure another one, issued by the Pa.s.sport Office but based on a birth certificate, secured from the Registry of Births in Somerset House for the standard fee of five shillings, which referred to a baby who had died of meningitis in Yarmouth about the time Shannon was born.* (*For a more detailed explanation of this procedure, which was used by a would-be a.s.sa.s.sin of General de Gaulle, see The Day of the Jackal (New York: The Viking Press, 1971; Bantam Books, Inc., 1972).) On arrival in London that morning, he had contacted the writer he had first met in Africa and learned how Walter Harris had found him. He thanked the man for recommending him and asked if he knew the name of a good agency of private inquirers. Later that afternoon he visited the agency and paid a deposit of 20, promising to phone the next morning with further instructions.

Harris called, as he had promised, on the dot of nine the following morning and was put through to Mr. Brown's room.

"There's a block of flats in Sloane Avenue called Chelsea Cloisters," he said without preamble. "I have booked flat three-seventeen for us to talk. Please be there at eleven sharp. Wait in the lobby until I arrive, as I have the key." Then he hung up.

Shannon checked the address in the telephone book under the bedside table and called the detective agency. "I want your man in the lobby of Chelsea Cloisters in Sloane Avenue at ten-fifteen," he said. "He had better have his own transport."

"He'll have a scooter," said the head of the agency.

An hour later Shannon met the man from the agency in the lobby of the apartment house. Rather to his surprise, the man was a youth in his late teens, with long hair.

Shannon surveyed him suspiciously. "Do you know your job?" he asked.

The boy nodded. He seemed full of enthusiasm, and Shannon only hoped it was matched by a bit of skill.

"Well, park that crash helmet outside on the scooter," he said. "People who come in here don't carry crash helmets. Sit over there and read a newspaper."

The youth did not have one, so Shannon gave him his own. "I'll sit on the other side of the lobby. At about eleven a man will come in, nod to me, and we'll go into the lift together. Note that man, so you will recognize him again. He should come out about an hour later. By then you must be across the road, astride the scooter, with the helmet on and pretending to be busy with a breakdown. Got it?"

"Yes. I've got it."

"The man will either take his own car from nearby, in which case grab the number of it. Or he'll take a taxi. In either case, follow him and note where he goes. Keep on his tail until he arrives at what looks like his final destination."

The youth drank in the instructions and took his place in the far corner of the lobby behind his newspaper.

The lobby porter frowned but left him alone. He had seen quite a few meetings take place in front of his reception desk.

Forty minutes later Simon Endean walked in. Shannon noticed that he dismissed a taxi at the door, and hoped the youth had noticed it as well. He stood up and nodded to the newcomer, but Endean strolled past him and pressed the summons b.u.t.ton for the lift. Shannon joined him and remarked the youth peering over his newspaper.

For G.o.d's sake, thought Shannon and mentioned something about the foul weather lest the man who called himself Harris should glance round the lobby.

Settled into an easy chair in flat 317, Harris opened his briefcase and took out a map. Spreading it out on the bed, he told Shannon to look at it. Shannon gave it three minutes and had taken in all the details the map had to give. Then Harris began his briefing.

It was a judicious mixture of fact and fiction. He still claimed he represented a consortium of British businessmen, all of whom did some form of business with Zangaro and all of whose businesses, including some which were virtually out of business, had suffered as a result of President Kimba.

Then he went into the background of the republic from independence onward, and what he said was truthful, most of it out of his own report to Sir James Manson. The punch line came at the end.

"A group of officers in the army has got in touch with a group of local businessmen-who are, incidentally, a dying breed. They have mentioned that they are considering toppling Kimba in a coup. One of the local businessmen mentioned it to one of my group, and put their problem to us. It is basically that they are virtually untrained in military terms, despite their officer status, and do not know how to topple the man, because he spends too much time hidden inside the walls of his palace, surrounded by his guards.

"Frankly, we would not be sorry to see this Kimba go, and neither would his people. A new government would be good for the economy of the place and good for the country. We need a man to go down there and make a complete a.s.sessment of the military and security situation in and around the palace and the important inst.i.tutions. We want a complete report on Kimba's military strength."

"So you can pa.s.s it on to your officers?" asked Shannon.

"They are not our officers. They are Zangaran officers. The fact is, if they are going to strike at all, they had better know what they are doing."

Shannon believed half of the briefing, but not the second half. If the officers, who were on the spot, could not a.s.sess the situation, they would be incompetent to carry out a coup. But he did not say so.

"I'd have to go in as a tourist," he said. "There's no other cover that would work."

"That's right."

"There must be precious few tourists that go there. Why cannot I go in as a company visitor to one of your friends' business houses?"

"That will not be possible," said Harris. "If anything went wrong, there would be all h.e.l.l to pay."

If I get caught, you mean, thought Shannon, but kept silent. He was being paid, so he would take risks. That, and his knowledge, was what he was being paid for.

"There's the question of pay," he said shortly.

"Then you'll do it?"

"If the money's right, yes."

Harris nodded approvingly. "Tomorrow morning a round-trip ticket from London to the capital of the neighboring republic will be at your hotel," he said. "You have to fly back to Paris and get a visa for this republic. Zangaro is so poor there is only one emba.s.sy in Europe, and that's in Paris also. But getting a Zan-garan visa there takes a month. In the next-door republic's capital there is a Zangaran consulate. There you can get a visa for cash, and within an hour if you tip the consul. You understand the procedure."

Shannon nodded. He understood it very well.

"So get visa-ed up in Paris, then fly down by Air Afrique. Get your Zangaran visa on the spot and take the connecting plane service from there to Clarence, paying cash. With the tickets at your hotel tomorrow will be three hundred pounds in French francs as expenses."

"I'll need five," said Shannon. "It'll be ten days at least, possibly more, depending on connections and how long the visas take to get. Three hundred leaves no margin for the occasional bribe or any delay."

"All right, five hundred in French francs. Plus five hundred for yourself," said Harris.

"A thousand," said Shannon.

"Dollars? I understand you people deal in U.S. dollars."

"Pounds," said Shannon. "That's twenty-five hundred dollars, or two months at flat salary if I were on a normal contract."

"But you'll only be away ten days," protested Harris.

"Ten days of high risk," countered Shannon. "If this place is half what you say it is, anyone getting caught on this kind of job is going to be very dead, and very painfully. You want me to take the risks rather than go yourself, you pay."

"Okay, a thousand pounds. Five hundred down and five hundred when you return."

"How do I know you'll contact me when I return?" said Shannon.

"How do I know you'll even go there at all?" countered Harris.

Shannon considered the point. Then he nodded. "All right, half now, half later."

Ten minutes later Harris was gone, after instructing Shannon to wait five minutes before leaving himself.

At three that afternoon the head of the detective agency was back from his lunch. Shannon called at three-fifteen.

"Ah, yes, Mr. Brown," said the voice on the phone. "I have spoken to my man. He waited as you instructed, and when the subject left the building he recognized him and followed. The subject hailed a taxi from the curb, and my man followed him to the City. There he dismissed the taxi and entered a building."

"What building?"

"ManCon House. That's the headquarters of Manson Consolidated Mining."

"Do you know if he works there?" asked Shannon.

"It would seem he does," said the agency chief. "My man could not follow him into the building, but he noticed the commissionaire touched his cap to the subject and held the door open for him. He did not do that for a stream of secretaries and evidently junior executives who were emerging for lunch."

"He's brighter than he looks," conceded Shannon. The youth had done a good job. Shannon gave several further instructions and that afternoon mailed 50 by registered mail to the detective agency. He also opened a bank account and put down 10 deposit in it. The following morning he banked a further 500 and that evening flew to Paris.

Dr. Gordon Chalmers was not a drinking man. He seldom touched anything stronger than beer, and when he did he became talkative, as his employer, Sir James Manson, had found out for himself over their luncheon at Wilton's. The evening that Cat Shannon was changing planes at Le Bourget to catch the Air Afrique DC-8 to West Africa, Dr. Chalmers was having dinner with an old college friend, now also a scientist and working in industrial research.

There was nothing special about their meal. He had run into his former cla.s.smate in one of those coincidental meetings on the street a few days earlier, and they had agreed to have dinner together.

Fifteen years earlier they had been young undergraduates, single and working hard on their respective degrees, earnest and concerned as so many young scientists feel obliged to be. In the mid-1950s the concern had been the bomb and colonialism, and they had joined thousands of others marching for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the various movements that sought an instant end to empire, and world freedom now. Both had been indignant, serious, committed, and both had changed nothing. But in their indignation over the state of the world they had dabbled with the Young Communist movement. Chalmers had grown out of it, married, started his family, secured a mortgage for his house, and slowly merged into the salaried middle cla.s.s.

The combination of worries that had come his way over the previous two weeks caused him to take more than his usual single gla.s.s of wine with dinner, considerably more. His friend, a kindly man with soft brown eyes, noticed his worry and asked if he could help.

It was over the brandy that Dr. Chalmers felt he had to confide his worries to someone, someone who, unlike his wife, was a fellow scientist and would under- stand the problem. Of course it was highly confidential, and his friend was solicitous and sympathetic.

When he heard about the crippled daughter and the need for the money to pay for her expensive equipment, the man's eyes clouded over with sympathy, and he reached across the table to grip Dr. Chalmers' forearm.

"Don't worry about it, Gordon. It's completely understandable. Anyone else would have done the same thing," he told him. Chalmers felt better when they left the restaurant and made their separate ways home. He was easier in his mind, his problem somehow shared.

Though he had asked his old friend how he had fared in the intervening years since their undergraduate days together, the man had been slightly evasive. Chalmers, bowed under his own worries and his observation blunted by wine, had not pressed for detail. Even had he done so, it was unlikely the friend would have told him that, far from merging into the bourgeoisie, he had remained a fully committed member of the Communist party.

7.

The Convair 440 that ran the connecting air service into Clarence banked steeply over the bay and began its descent toward the airfield. Being intentionally on the left side of the plane, Shannon could look down toward the town as the aircraft overflew it. From a thousand feet he could see the capital of Zangaro occupying the end of the peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the palm-fringed waters of the gulf, and on the fourth side by the land, where the stubby peninsula, just eight miles long, ran back to join the main coastline.

The spit of land was three miles wide at its base, set in the mangrove swamps on the coastline, and a mile wide at the tip, where the town was situated. The flanks along each side were also composed of mangrove, and only at the end did the mangroves give way to some shingly beaches.

The town spanned the end of the peninsula from side to side and stretched about a mile back down the length of it. Beyond the fringes of the town at this end, a single road ran between cultivated patches the remaining seven miles to the main coast.

Evidently all the best buildings were set toward the seaward tip of the land, where the breezes would blow, for the aerial view showed the buildings to be set ia their own plots of land, one to an acre. The landward side of the town was evidently the poorer section, where thousands of tin-roofed shanties intersected with narrow muddy alleys. He concentrated on the richer section of Clarence, where the colonial masters had once lived, for here would be the important buildings, and he would only have a few seconds to see them from this angle.

At the very end was a small port, formed where, for no geological reason, two long curving spits of shingle ran out into the sea like the antlers of a stag beetle or the pincers of an earwig. The port was set along the landward side of this bay. Outside the arms of the bay, Shannon could see the water ruffled by the breeze, while inside the three-quarter-circle enclosed within the arms, the water was a flat calm. No doubt it was this anchorage, tacked onto the end of the peninsula in one of nature's afterthoughts, which had attracted the first mariners.

The center of the port, directly opposite the opening to the high seas, was dominated by a single concrete quay without any ship tied up to it, and a warehouse of sorts. To the left of the concrete quay was evidently the natives' fishing area, a shingly beach littered with long canoes and nets laid out to dry, and to the right of the quay was the old port, a series of decrepit wooden jetties pointing toward the water.

Behind the warehouse there were perhaps two hundred yards of rough gra.s.s, ending with a road along the sh.o.r.e, and behind the road the buildings started. Shannon caught a glimpse of a white colonial-style church and what could have been the governor's palace in bygone days, surrounded by a wall. Inside the wall, apart from the main buildings, was a large courtyard surrounded by lean-to hutments of evidently recent addition.

At this point the Convair straightened up, the town disappeared from view, and they were on final approach.

Shannon had already had his first experience of Zan- garo the previous day when he had applied for his visa for a tourist visit. The consul in the neighboring capital had received him with some surprise, being unused to such applications. He had to fill out a five-page form giving his parents' first names (as he had no idea of Keith Brown's parents' names, he invented them) and every other conceivable piece of information.

His pa.s.sport, when he handed it over, had a handsome banknote idly lying between the first and second pages. This went into the consul's pocket. The man then examined the pa.s.sport from every angle, read every page, held it up to the light, turned it over, checked the currency allowances at the back. After five minutes of this, Shannon began to wonder if there was something wrong. Had the British Foreign Office made an error in this particular pa.s.sport?

Then the consul looked at him and said, "You are an American."

With a sense of relief Shannon realized the man was illiterate. He had his visa in five minutes more. But at Clarence airport the fun stopped.

He had no luggage in the aircraft hold, just a hand grip. Inside the main (and only) pa.s.senger building the heat was overpowering, and the place buzzed with flies. About a dozen soldiers lounged about, and ten policemen. They were evidently of different tribes. The policemen were self-effacing, hardly speaking even to each other, leaning against the walls. It was the soldiers who attracted Shannon's attention. He kept half an eye on them as he filled in another immensely long form (the same one he had filled the previous day at the consulate) and penetrated Health and Pa.s.sport Control, both manned by officials whom he took to be Caja, like the policemen.

It was when he got to customs that the trouble started. A civilian was waiting for him and instructed him with a curt gesture to go into a side room. As he did so, taking his bag with him, four soldiers swaggered in after him. Then he realized what it was about them that rang a bell in his memory.

Long ago in the Congo he had seen the same att.i.tude, the blank-eyed sense of menace conveyed by an African of almost primeval cultural level, armed with a weapon, in a state of power-wholly unpredictable, with reactions to a situation that were utterly illogical, ticking away like a moving time bomb. Just before the worst of the ma.s.sacres he had seen launched by Congolese on Katangese, Simbas on missionaries, and Congolese army on Simbas, he had noticed this same menacing mindlessness, the sense of power without reason, that can suddenly and for no recollected explanation turn to frenetic violence. The Vindu soldiers of President Kimba had it.

The civilian customs officer ordered Shannon to put his bag on the rickety table and then began to go through it. The search looked thorough, as if for concealed weapons, until he spotted the electric shaver, took it from its case, examined it, tried the "on" switch. Being a Remington Lektronic and fully charged, it buzzed furiously. Without a trace of expression, the customs man put it in his pocket.

Finishing with the bag, he gestured to Shannon to empty his pockets onto the table. Out came the keys, handkerchief, coins, wallet, and pa.s.sport. The customs man went for the wallet, extracted the travelers' checks, looked at them, grunted, and handed them back. The coins he swept into his hand and pocketed them. Of the banknotes, there were two 5000-French-African-franc notes and several 100s. The soldiers had crowded nearer, still making no sound but for their breathing in the roasting atmosphere, gripping guns like clubs, but overcome with curiosity. The civilian behind the table pocketed the two 5000-franc notes, and one of the soldiers picked up the smaller denominations.

Shannon looked at the customs man. The man looked back. Then he lifted his singlet and showed the b.u.t.t of a Browning 9-mm. short, or perhaps an 875, jammed into his trouser band. He tapped it.