There was another long pause. “What do you mean by your own security?” asked the voice.

“I mean, sir, that I don’t know Mr. Harris. I could not accept that he be in a position to know enough to get me arrested in a European city. You have taken your security precautions. I have to take mine. These are that I travel and work alone and unsupervised.”

“You’re a cautious man, Mr. Shannon.”

“I have to be. I’m still alive.”

There was a grim chuckle. “And how do I know you can be trusted with large sums of money to handle on your own?”

“You don’t, sir. Up to a point Mr. Harris can keep the sums low at each stage. But the payments for the arms have to be made in cash and by the buyer alone. The only alternatives are to ask Mr. Harris to mount the operation personally, or to hire another professional. And you would not know if you could trust him either.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Shannon. Mr. Harris.”

“Sir?” answered Endean immediately.

“Please return to see me at once after leaving where you are now. Mr. Shannon, you have the job. You have one hundred days, Mr. Shannon, to steal a republic. One hundred days.”

For several minutes after Sir James Manson had hung up, Simon Endean and Cat Shannon sat and stared at each other. It was Shannon who recovered first.

“Since we’re going to have to work together,” he told Endean, “let’s get this clear. If anyone, anyone at all, gets to hear about this project, it will eventually get back to one or another of the secret services of one of the main powers. Probably the CIA, or at least the British SIS or maybe the French SDECE. And they will screw, but good. There’ll be nothing you or I could do to prevent them ending the affair stone dead. So we keep security absolute.”

“Speak for yourself,” snapped Endean. “I’ve got a lot more tied up in this than you.”

“Okay. First thing has to be money. I’ll fly to Brussels tomorrow and open a new bank account somewhere in Belgium. I’ll be back by tomorrow night. Contact me then, and I’ll tell you where, in which bank and in what name. Then I shall need a transfer of credit to the tune of at least ten thousand pounds. By tomorrow night I’ll have a complete list of where it has to be spent. Mainly, it will be in salary checks for my assistants, deposits, and so on.”

“Where do I contact you?” asked Endean.

“That’s point number two,” said Shannon. “I’m going to need a permanent base, secure for telephone calls and letters. What about this flat? Is it traceable to you?”

Endean had not thought of that. He considered the problem. “It’s hired in my name. Cash in advance for one month,” he said.

“Does it matter if the name Harris is on the tenancy agreement?” asked Shannon.

“No.”

“Then I’ll take it over. That gives me a month’s tenancy—seems a pity to waste it—and I’ll take up the payments at the end of that time. Do you have a key?”

“Yes, of course. I let myself in by it.”

“How many keys are there?”

For answer Endean reached into his pocket and brought out a ring with four keys on it. Two were evidently for the front door of the house and two for the flat door. Shannon took them from his hand.

“Now for communications,” he said. “You can contact me by phoning here any time. I may be in, I may not. I may be away abroad. Since I assume you will not want to give me your phone number, set up a poste restante mailing address in London somewhere convenient to either your home or office, and check twice daily for telegrams. If I need you urgently, I’ll telegraph the phone number of where I am, and a time to phone. Understood?”

“Yes. I’ll have it by tomorrow night. Anything else?”

“Only that I’ll be using the name of Keith Brown throughout the operation. Anything signed as coming from Keith is from me. When calling a hotel, ask for me as Keith Brown. If ever I reply by saying ‘This is Mr. Brown,’ get off the line fast. It means trouble. Explain that you have the wrong number, or the wrong Brown. That’s all for the moment. You’d better get back to the office. Call me here at eight tonight, and I’ll give you the progress to date.”

A few minutes later Endean found himself on the pavements of St. John’s Wood, looking for a taxi.

Luckily Shannon had not banked the £500 he had received from Endean before the weekend for his attack project, and he still had £450 of it left.

He rang BEA and booked an economy-class round trip on the morning flight to Brussels, returning at 1600 hours, which would get him back in his flat by six. Following that, he telephoned four telegrams abroad, one to Paarl, Cape Province, South Africa; one to Ostend; one to Marseilles; and one to Munich. Each said simply, “Urgent you phone me London 507-0041 any midnight over next three days. Shannon.” Finally he summoned a taxi and had it take him back to the Lowndes Hotel. He checked out, paid his bill, and left as he had come, anonymously.

At eight Endean rang him as agreed, and Shannon told Manson’s aide what he had done so far. They agreed Endean would ring again at ten the following evening.

Shannon spent a couple of hours exploring the block he was now living in, and the surrounding area. He spotted several small restaurants, including a couple not far away in St. John’s Wood High Street, and ate a leisurely supper at one of them. He was back home by eleven.

He counted his money—there was more than £400 left—put £300 on one side for the air fare and expenses the following day, and checked over his effects. The clothes were unremarkable, all of them less than three months old, most bought in the last ten days in London. He had no gun to bother about, and for safety destroyed the typewriter ribbon he had used to type his reports, replacing it with one of his spares.

Though it was dark early in London that evening, it was still light on a warm, sunny summer evening in Cape Province as Janni Dupree gunned his car past Seapoint and on toward Cape Town. He too had a Chevrolet, older than Endean’s, but bigger and flashier, bought second-hand with some of the dollars with which he had returned from Paris four weeks earlier.

After spending the day swimming and fishing from a friend’s boat at Simonstown, he was driving back to his home in Paarl. He always liked to come home to Paarl after a contract, but inevitably it bored him quickly, just as it had when he left it ten years before.

As a boy he had been raised in the Paarl Valley and had spent his preschool years scampering through the thin and poor vineyards owned by people like his parents. He had learned to stalk birds and shoot in the valley with Pieter, his klonkie, the black playmate a white boy is allowed to play with until he grows too old and learns what skin color is all about.

Pieter, with his enormous brown eyes, tangled mass of black curls, and mahogany skin, was two years older than Janni and had been supposed to look after him. In fact they had been the same size, for Janni was physically precocious and had quickly taken the leadership of the pair. On summer days like this one, twenty years ago, the two barefoot boys used to take the bus along the coast to Cape Agulhas, where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans finally meet, and fish for yellow-tail, galjoen, and red steenbras off the point.

After Paarl Boys’ High, Janni had been a problem — too big, aggressive, restless, getting into fights with those big scything fists and ending up twice in front of the magistrates. He could have taken over his parents’ farm and tended with his father the stubby little vines that produced such thin wine. The prospect appalled him —of becoming old and bent trying to make a living from the smallholding, with only four black boys working with him. At eighteen he volunteered for the army, did his basic training at Potchefstroom, and transferred to the paratroops at Bloemfontein. It was here he had found the thing he wanted to do most in life, here and in the counterinsurgency training in the harsh bushveld around Pietersburg. The army had agreed with him about his suitability, except on one point: his propensity for going to war while pointing in the wrong direction. In one fistfight too many, Corporal Dupree had beaten a sergeant senseless, and the commanding officer had busted him to private.