Free The Stone Leopard by Colin Forbes Page A

office. On the continent, post offices provide the most useful means of making a call you don't wish to be overheard.
    From the post office he called Col Lasalle's number which had been given to him by Nash. When Lennox asked for the colonel the man who answered the phone in French said he would take a message.
    `You won't,' Lennox snapped. 'Put me through to the colonel. Edmond calling ....'
    `Edmond who ?'
    `Just Edmond. And hurry it up. He's expecting the call.'
    The man at the other end—probably Captain Paul Moreau whom Nash had mentioned as Lasalle's assistant—obviously did not know about all the colonel's activities, which was reassuring. It suggested the ex-chief of military counter-intelligence had not lost his touch. The code-name Edmond, provided by Nash, put him through to Lasalle and the Frenchman said he could come at once.
    `I will be waiting for you,' he replied crisply and put down the receiver. No waste of words, no questions, and the voice had been sharp and decisive.
    It took him an hour, driving through rain squalls, to find the remote farmhouse, and it was dark as his headlights picked out an old lodge beside a closed gate. There had been lights inside the lodge when he first saw it, but now the place was in darkness. He kept the engine running and waited, then got out cautiously when no one appeared. He was walking past his own headlights when a shutter in the lodge banged open.
    The muzzle of a Le Mat sub-machine gun poked out of the aperture.
    `Stay where you are—in the lights,' a voice shouted in German
    `You're expecting me,' Lennox shouted back in French. 'I rang you from Saarbrucken. For God's sake open the bloody gate before I get soaked. . .
    `Come in on foot . . .' The voice had switched to French. `Come through the gate. . .
    Opening the gate, Lennox went up to the lodge, tried the door, opened it, stepped inside and stopped. A man in civilian clothes faced him, still holding the sub-machine gun which he aimed point-blank at the Englishman's stomach. A smooth- faced individual with a smear of moustache, a man in his late forties, Lennox assumed this must be Capt. Paul Moreau. 'I'm Edmond,' Lennox said after a moment. 'Do you have to keep pointing that thing at me ?'
    `Some identification—on the table. . .'
    `The colonel is going to be happy about this ?'
    `On the table. . .'
    Lennox extracted his passport carefully from inside his dripping raincoat and then threw it casually on the table. To reach for the document with his right hand the man with the gun had to cradle the wire stock under his left arm; as he did so Lennox suddenly knocked the muzzle aside, grasped the barrel and wrenched the weapon out of the man's grip. 'I don't know who you are,' he remarked as the Frenchman recovered his balance and glared, 'but you could be someone who just knocked out the real lodge-keeper. . .'
    `Lodge-keeper ? I am Capt. Moreau, the colonel's assistant.' Bristling with anger, the man examined the passport at much greater length than was really necessary. 'You could end up dead--taking a crazy risk like that,' he grumbled.
    `Less of a risk than facing an unknown man with a gun in this God-forsaken place.'
    Lennox insisted on seeing Moreau's own identity card before he returned the weapon, first folding the projecting magazine parallel to the barrel so the weapon became inoperative. When identity documents had been exchanged the Frenchman told him curtly to leave his car and walk up to the house. 'Why don't you get stuffed ?' Lennox suggested. Going outside, he climbed into his car, drove through the gateway and on towards the house. Moreau was using a wall phone when he left the lodge, presumably to call up the colonel.
    As he drove slowly up a long curving drive Lennox saw how neglected the place was. Wet shrubbery which gleamed in the headlights had grown out over the drive, in places almost closing it so the car brushed past shrubs as he approached Lasalle's refuge. The farmhouse, a long,