Free The Stone Leopard by Colin Forbes Page B

two-storey building which came into view round a bend, was in the same state. Unpainted, with tiles missing from the roof, it hardly looked habitable.
    Shortage of money, Lennox assumed: fugitive colonels are hardly likely to be sitting on fat bank accounts.
    Col Rene Lasalle met him at the entrance, then closed, locked and bolted the heavy door before leading the way into a large, rambling living-room crammed with old-fashioned furniture. In the hall Lennox noted there were new and modern locks on the door; in the living-room locks had been attached to all the windows. Theoretically safe inside Germany, the colonel had sealed himself off inside a minor fortress.
    `They will come for me one day,' Lasalle remarked crisply. `Shabby little Corsican thugs with knives in their pockets. They may try to kidnap me—they may come to kill me. But they will come.'
    The one-armed colonel, his left sleeve flapping loose like the broken wing of a bird, was small and spare, and as he fetched drinks from a sideboard he moved with a springy step. Lennox immediately had an impression of enormous energy, of a strong- willed personality likely to dominate any group of people he might be a part of. Fifty-five years old, Lasalle's features were sharp and gaunt, his eyes large and restless, his thin moustache little more than a dark slash. He still had a full head of dark hair and his most prominent feature was a hooked nose. In some ways he reminded Lennox of a miniature version of Charles de Gaulle himself. The colonel handed him a large brandy, raised his own glass. 'To the destruction of the enemies of France!'
    `I'll drink to that. . . .' Lennox was watching the colonel carefully. 'Whoever they might be.'
    `The Soviet faction inside Paris—led by the Leopard. But first I need to know something about you, about your background. . .
    For fifteen minutes he grilled the Englishman. It was the most shrewd and penetrating interrogation Lennox had ever experienced, with a lot of cross-questioning, a lot of jumping backwards and forwards as the Frenchman swiftly absorbed the details of Lennox's life and probed deeper and deeper. 'You have met Marc Grelle ?' he said at one point. 'You are a personal friend of the police prefect then ?' Lennox assured him that this was not so, that they had met only once for an hour in Marseilles during the planning of a counter-terrorist operation. At the end of fifteen minutes Lasalle pronounced himself satisfied.
    `You can go into France for me,' he said as though conferring a high honour.
    `I'm glad I pass inspection,' Lennox replied ironically, 'but what you may not realize is I haven't made up my mind about you. . .'
    `That is necessary ?'
    `That is essential. You see—it's going to be my head laid on the block. ..'

    Leon Jouvel. Robert Philip. Dieter Wohl.
    These were the names of the three witnesses, as Lasalle persisted in calling them, which he wished Lennox to visit and quietly interrogate. 'I'm convinced that one of these three people—all of whom were involved with the Leopard during the war—can tell you something which will lead us to the Communist agent inside Paris today,' the Frenchman said emphatically. 'In any case, as far as I know, they are the only survivors, apart from Annette Devaud—and she is blind. . .'
    `Devaud ?' Lennox queried. 'That was the name of the woman who tried to shoot Florian. .
    `A common enough name.' Lasalle shrugged and made an impatient gesture with his right hand. 'I see no reason for a connection. And in any case, Annette Devaud, who must be over seventy now, has been blind since the end of the war. A blind person can identify no one positively. Now. . .'
    It had started eighteen months earlier—a year before the climactic row with President Florian which ended in the colonel's flight from France. Lasalle had been interrogating a known Communist agent who had infiltrated inside a French army barracks near Marseilles. 'That area is infested with the vermin,' the