“Frankly, we would not be sorry to see this Kimba go, and neither would his people. A new government would be good for the economy of the place and good for the country. We need a man to go down there and make a complete assessment of the military and security situation in and around the palace and the important institutions. We want a complete report on Kimba’s military strength.”

“So you can pass it on to your officers?” asked Shannon.

“They are not our officers. They are Zangaran officers. The fact is, if they are going to strike at all, they had better know what they are doing.”

Shannon believed half of the briefing, but not the second half. If the officers, who were on the spot, could not assess the situation, they would be incompetent to carry out a coup. But he did not say so.

“I’d have to go in as a tourist,” he said. “There’s no other cover that would work.”

“That’s right.”

“There must be precious few tourists that go there. Why cannot I go in as a company visitor to one of your friends’ business houses?”

“That will not be possible,” said Harris. “If anything went wrong, there would be all hell to pay.”

If I get caught, you mean, thought Shannon, but kept silent. He was being paid, so he would take risks. That, and his knowledge, was what he was being paid for.

“There’s the question of pay,” he said shortly.

“Then you’ll do it?”

“If the money’s right, yes.”

Harris nodded approvingly. “Tomorrow morning a round-trip ticket from London to the capital of the neighboring republic will be at your hotel,” he said. “You have to fly back to Paris and get a visa for this republic. Zangaro is so poor there is only one embassy in Europe, and that’s in Paris also. But getting a Zangaran visa there takes a month. In the next-door republic’s capital there is a Zangaran consulate. There you can get a visa for cash, and within an hour if you tip the consul. You understand the procedure.”

Shannon nodded. He understood it very well.

“So get visaed up in Paris, then fly down by Air Afrique. Get your Zangaran visa on the spot and take the connecting plane service from there to Clarence, paying cash. With the tickets at your hotel tomorrow will be three hundred pounds in French francs as expenses.”

“I’ll need five,” said Shannon. “It’ll be ten days at least, possibly more, depending on connections and how long the visas take to get. Three hundred leaves no margin for the occasional bribe or any delay.”

“All right, five hundred in French francs. Plus five hundred for yourself,” said Harris.

“A thousand,” said Shannon.

“Dollars? I understand you people deal in U.S. dollars.”

“Pounds,” said Shannon. “That’s twenty-five hundred dollars, or two months at flat salary if I were on a normal contract.”

“But you’ll only be away ten days,” protested Harris.

“Ten days of high risk,” countered Shannon. “If this place is half what you say it is, anyone getting caught on this kind of job is going to be very dead, and very painfully. You want me to take the risks rather than go yourself, you pay.”

“Okay, a thousand pounds. Five hundred down and five hundred when you return.”

“How do I know you’ll contact me when I return?” said Shannon.

“How do I know you’ll even go there at all?” countered Harris.

Shannon considered the point. Then he nodded. “All right, half now, half later.”

Ten minutes later Harris was gone, after instructing Shannon to wait five minutes before leaving himself.

At three that afternoon the head of the detective agency was back from his lunch. Shannon called at three-fifteen.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Brown,” said the voice on the phone. “I have spoken to my man. He waited as you instructed, and when the subject left the building he recognized him and followed. The subject hailed a taxi from the curb, and my man followed him to the City. There he dismissed the taxi and entered a building.”

“What building?”

“ManCon House. That’s the headquarters of Manson Consolidated Mining.”

“Do you know if he works there?” asked Shannon.

“It would seem he does,” said the agency chief. “My man could not follow him into the building, but he noticed the commissionaire touched his cap to the subject and held the door open for him. He did not do that for a stream of secretaries and evidently junior executives who were emerging for lunch.”

“He’s brighter than he looks,” conceded Shannon. The youth had done a good job. Shannon gave several further instructions and that afternoon mailed £50 by registered mail to the detective agency. He also opened a bank account and put down £10 deposit in it. The following morning he banked a further £500 and that evening flew to Paris.

Dr. Gordon Chalmers was not a drinking man. He seldom touched anything stronger than beer, and when he did he became talkative, as his employer, Sir James Manson, had found out for himself over their luncheon at Wilton’s. The evening that Cat Shannon was changing planes at Le Bourget to catch the Air Afrique DC-8 to West Africa, Dr. Chalmers was having dinner with an old college friend, now also a scientist and working in industrial research.

There was nothing special about their meal. He had run into his former classmate in one of those coincidental meetings on the street a few days earlier, and they had agreed to have dinner together.

Fifteen years earlier they had been young undergraduates, single and working hard on their respective degrees, earnest and concerned as so many young scientists feel obliged to be. In the mid-1950s the concern had been the bomb and colonialism, and they had joined thousands of others marching for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the various movements that sought an instant end to empire, and world freedom now. Both had been indignant, serious, committed, and both had changed nothing. But in their indignation over the state of the world they had dabbled with the Young Communist movement. Chalmers had grown out of it, married, started his family, secured a mortgage for his house, and slowly merged into the salaried middle class.

The combination of worries that had come his way over the previous two weeks caused him to take more than his usual single glass of wine with dinner, considerably more. His friend, a kindly man with soft brown eyes, noticed his worry and asked if he could help.

It was over the brandy that Dr. Chalmers felt he had to confide his worries to someone, someone who, unlike his wife, was a fellow scientist and would understand the problem. Of course it was highly confidential, and his friend was solicitous and sympathetic.

When he heard about the crippled daughter and the need for the money to pay for her expensive equipment, the man’s eyes clouded over with sympathy, and he reached across the table to grip Dr. Chalmers’ forearm.

“Don’t worry about it, Gordon. It’s completely understandable. Anyone else would have done the same thing,” he told him. Chalmers felt better when they left the restaurant and made their separate ways home. He was easier in his mind, his problem somehow shared.

Though he had asked his old friend how he had fared in the intervening years since their undergraduate days together, the man had been slightly evasive. Chalmers, bowed under his own worries and his observation blunted by wine, had not pressed for detail. Even had he done so, it was unlikely the friend would have told him that, far from merging into the bourgeoisie, he had remained a fully committed member of the Communist party.