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.'Roger Danchin, Alain Blanc.Grelle drank the rest of his Scotch in two gulps, placed the empty glass on the table and stood up.His voice was crisp and cold.`The lengths to which the American government has gone recently to smear our president have been absurd, but what you have just suggested is outrageous.'Nash stood up from the chair.'Marc, we don't have to blow our tops.`Your so-called story is a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end,' Grelle went on icily.'Clearly you are trying to spread a lying rumour in the hope that it will damage the president because you don't like his speeches.`Marc,' Nash interjected quietly, 'I'll tell you now that you are the only man inside this embassy who will hear what I have just told you.'`Why?' Grelle snapped.`Because you are the only Frenchman I really trust with this secret—the only contact I have come to warn.I want you to be on your guard—and you have ways of checking things out, ways that we couldn't even attempt.'`You'd get chopped if you did!' Grelle, his face flushed, moved towards the door, then seemed to calm down and for a few minutes he chatted with the American about other topics.It was, Nash told himself after the prefect had gone, a very polished performance: outrage at the suggestion and then a brief relaxation of tension to indicate to the American that they would remain friends in the future.Lighting a cigarette, Nash wandered back across the hall to the reception, satisfied with the result of his trip to Paris.Because despite what he had said, Grelle would check.Grelle was the policeman's policeman.Grelle always checked.To give himself time to think, Grelle drove round in a circle to get back to the prefecture.On his way he passed the Elysee and had to pull up while a black Zil limousine with one passenger in the back emerged from the palace courtyard.Leonid Vorin, Soviet ambassador to France, was just leaving after making one of his almost daily visits to see Guy Florian.Since the trip to Moscow on 23 December had been announced, the Soviet ambassador had consulted frequently with the president, driving from his embassy in the rue de Grenelle to the Elysee and back again.Inside the limousine Leonid Vorin, short and stocky with a pouched mouth and rimless glasses, sat staring ahead, looking neither to right nor left as the car swung out and drove off towards Madeleine.The uniformed policeman who had halted Grelle, saluted and waved him on.Driving automatically, the prefect had half his mind on what Nash had told him.Up to half an hour ago his suspicions had been based on Gaston Martin's strange story and what he had heard from the Cayenne police chief, all of which was disturbing but by no means conclusive.Now the same story was coming from Washington, and soon rumours might start sweeping through the European capitals.As Grelle told Boisseau later, 'I don't believe a word of that fairy-tale Nash told me about a Soviet defector—he was protecting his real informant—but this is something we are going to have to investigate in the greatest secrecy.As he crossed the crowded Pont Neuf on to the Ile de la Cite Grelle shivered, a nervous tremor which had nothing to do with the chill night air now settling over Paris.For the police prefect his world had suddenly become unstable, a place of shifting quicksands where anything might lie under the surface.'Roger Danchin.Alain Blanc.he muttered to himself.'It's impossible.Leaving the isolated farmhouse at about the same time when Grelle was returning to the prefecture, Lennox drove back to Saarbrucken through slashing rain with the distant rumble of thunder in the night.The storm suited his mood; he also was disturbed.At one point in the conversation he had asked the colonel who had typed out the list of names and addresses he now carried tucked away inside his wallet.'Captain Moreau, my assistant, of course,' Lasalle had replied.'He was the only officer who came with me when I left France and I trust him completely.'`You didn't trust him with my real name until shortly before I arrived,' Lennox had pointed out.'When I phoned from Saarbrucken he had no idea who I was.'`That was to protect you until you arrived safely, I called Nash in London at a certain time and he gave me your name, but I withheld it from Moreau.If my assistant had been kidnapped while you were on the way he couldn't have identified you under pressure.For the same reason Moreau does not know I am in touch with the Americans.'Under pressure.As he peered through the rain-swept windscreen Lennox grimaced.What a life the colonel was living since he had fled France.Locked away inside a German farmhouse, guarded at the gate by a man with a sub-machine gun, ready at any time for the intruders in the night who might arrive with chloroform—or something more lethal.And tomorrow Lennox himself would cross the border into France— after first meeting Peter Lanz of the BND.While Alan Lennox was driving through the night to a hotel in Saarbrucken, Marc Grelle had returned to the prefecture from the reception at the American Embassy where he dealt with the paperwork which had accumulated in his absence.'There are too many typewriters in Paris,' he muttered as he initialled minutes from Roger Danchin and ate the sandwich brought in from the local brasserie.He was just about to leave when the phone rang.'Shit!' he muttered, picking up the receiver.It was Cassin, one of the phone operators in the special room at Surete headquarters.`Another message has come in from Hugon, Mr Prefect.' `Routine ?''No
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