The Stone Leopard Read Free

secret in the past of a leading Paris politician . . .' The phrase was seized on by the foreign correspondents. Was there, they speculated, somewhere in Paris a key personality—even a cabinet minister—who was secretly working against President Florian ? if so, who was this shadowy figure ? The wildest rumours were spread—even one to the effect that a right-wing group of conspirators headed by the unknown cabinet minister was behind the assassination attempt, that they had tried to kill Florian before he made his historic visit to Soviet Russia on 23 December.

    In an apartment on the eighth floor at an address on East 84th Street in New York, David Nash dismissed the conspiracy rumour as rubbish. Nash, forty-five years old, a small and well-built man with shrewd grey eyes and thinning hair, worked for a special section of the State Department which no congressional committee had yet penetrated and so rendered useless. Officially, he was concerned with policy—`the vaguest word in the dictionary', as he once commented; in fact he was involved with counter-espionage at the highest level. And since he made a point of rarely appearing in the capital, the press corps was hardly aware of his existence. In the afternoon of the day following Lasalle's outburst over Europe Number One he sat in his apartment studying a transcript of the broadcast.
    Round the table with him were seated two men who had just flown in from Washington.
    `The way things are,' Nash commented, 'it sends shivers up my spine how close Florian came to death. If France were plunged into chaos at this particular moment, God knows how Russia might try to take advantage of the situation. We've got to find out who was behind that attempt. . .
    Andrew MacLeish, Nash's nominal superior, a thin, austere fifty-year-old, broke in irritably. He hated New York and counted every minute spent there as time out of his life. 'You think this nut, Lasalle, has any idea of what he's talking about? For my money he's got his knife into Florian and just enjoys twisting it at random. By my count this is his tenth anti-Florian broadcast in six months. . .
    `The tenth,' Nash agreed. 'Incidentally, I've accepted his invitation to meet with him.'
    `What invitation?' MacLeish demanded. 'This is the first I've heard you've had any contact with that psychopath. . .
    `Even psychopaths sometimes know a thing or two,' Nash remarked. 'Col Lasalle approached me through the Brussels embassy late this morning, our time. He says he has some vital information about what's really happening inside Paris but he'll only talk to a representative from Washington—face to face. And we have to keep very quiet about this. . .
    `I don't think we ought to get mixed up with psychopathic exiles,' MacLeish repeated. He looked out of the window where he could just see a section of the Triborough Bridge through the skeletal framework of a new high-rise. They argued about it for over an hour, but in the end Nash wore them down. It was Washington which was becoming psychopathic in Nash's view; with the military and most of the administration against the troop withdrawal from Europe which Congress had forced on them, it was becoming even more important to know what was really happening in Europe, to warn their ex-allies of any dangerous development they could uncover.
    On the following day Nash flew to Europe to meet the man Guy Florian had ruined.

    Col Rene Baptiste Lasalle, ex-assistant chief of French military counter-intelligence, had recently been called 'an extinct volcano' by Guy Florian, but for a man whose career was abruptly ended when it seemed almost certain he would soon be promoted to the exalted rank of general, the volcano remained remarkably active. Certainly the rumbling of Col Lasalle was heard clearly enough in Paris.
    Six months before Lucie Devaud tried to shoot Guy Florian in the Faubourg St Honore, Lasalle had quarrelled violently with the president and had to flee France overnight; it