The Stone Leopard Read Free Page A

was rumoured he was about to be arrested for conspiring against the president. Driving his own car, Lasalle crashed through a frontier control post east of Metz at four in the morning and took refuge in West Germany. From the moment of his arrival in the Federal Republic he set about organizing a campaign of rumours to discredit the man who had ruined him. As his instrument he chose Europe Number One, the independent radio station with its transmitters in the Saarland.
    At the time when David Nash flew from New York to meet him secretly, Col Lasalle was fifty-five years old. Small, compact and lean-faced, he now made his way through life with only one arm: his left arm had been blown clean off his shoulder by a landmine in Algeria in 1962. At that time a captain in army counter-intelligence, Lasalle had proved himself the most brilliant officer in the French Army when it came to rooting out Arab underground leaders. Within twenty-four hours of his arm being taken away from him, his family was also taken away: a terrorist threw a bomb into the living-room of his villa, killing his wife and seven-year-old son. Lying in hospital, his reaction was typical when he heard the news.
    `Since my private life is finished I shall devote the rest of my time to France—to help preserve her way of life. It is the only thing left to me. . .
    Immediately his convalescence was over, he returned from Marseilles to North Africa. The convalescence in itself was remarkable. Finding his sense of balance faulty, Lasalle took to walking in the Estoril mountains with a stick, leaping over deep ravines to find a new balance. 'When survival is at stake,' he said later, 'the body adjusts itself wonderfully. . . .' He went back to Algeria just in time to detect and foil the most determined effort up to date to assassinate General de Gaulle. Then, years later, came the clash with Florian.
    Now, exiled to the Saarland, living in a farmhouse close to Saarbrucken—close also to the French border—Lasalle broadcast regularly over Europe Number One, the radio station on German soil listened to by millions inside France. And the loss of one arm seemed to have increased the electric energy of this small man who boasted he had never been idle for a day in his life. The target of his virulent broadcasting campaign was Guy Florian.
    `Why is he going to visit Soviet Russia on 23 December? What is the real motive behind this visit ? Why is he going there of all places at a time when Europe is threatened by the looming shadow of the Red Army as never before. Who is the cabinet minister about whom whispers are spreading in Paris ? . .
    Never once did Lasalle refer to Florian by name. Always he referred to 'he', to 'this man', until gradually it dawned on Paris that Lasalle was not only an expert counter-intelligence officer; he had now become a master of poisonous political propaganda who was threatening to undermine the foundations of Florian's regime. This was the man who had quietly indicated to the Americans that he wanted to speak to a trustworthy intelligence official.

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    On the night of Thursday, 9 December, the same day when in New York David Nash informed MacLeish that he would be flying to Europe to interview Col Rene Lasalle, a short, grizzle- haired man in shabby clothes arrived in the Faubourg St Honore and took up a position opposite the Elysee Palace. He was standing at the exact spot on the kerb where, twenty-four hours earlier, Lucie Devaud had fallen into the gutter when Marc Grelle's bullets hit her in the chest. No one took any notice of him, and if the uniformed garde republicaine on duty outside the Elysee gave him even a moment's thought he must have assumed that this was just another voyeur, one of those macabre people who delight in goggling at the scene of an attempted crime.
    The shabbily-clothed man arrived at 7.3o pm, when it was dark.
    In his middle sixties, his face lined and worn and with a straggle of grey