When he finally gave Roux the tip-off, it was too late. Roux telephoned the hotel at once under another name and asked if a Mr. Shannon was staying there. The chief desk clerk replied quite truthfully that there was no one of that name at the hotel.

Cross-examined, a thoroughly frightened Lambert claimed he had not actually visited the hotel but had simply received a call from Shannon, who had given that hotel as the place where he was staying.

Shortly after nine Roux’s man Henri Alain was at the reception desk of the Plaza-Surene and established that the only Englishman or Irishman who had stayed in the hotel the previous night exactly corresponded in description to Cat Shannon, that his name and passport had been those of Keith Brown, and that he had reserved through the reception desk a ticket on the 9:00 a.m. express train to Luxembourg. Henri Alain learned two more things: of a meeting that M. Brown had had in the residents’ lounge the previous afternoon, and a description of the Frenchman with whom he had been seen speaking. All this he reported back to Roux at midday.

In the French mercenary leader’s flat, Roux, Henri Alain, and Raymond Thomard held a conference of war Roux made the final decision.

“Henri, we’ve missed him this time, but the chances are that he still knows nothing about it. So he may well return to that hotel next time he has to overnight in Paris. I want you to get friendly, real friendly, with someone on the staff there. The next time that man checks in there, I want to know, but at once. Understand?”

Alain nodded. “Sure, patron. I’ll have it staked out from the inside, and if he even calls to make a reservation, we’ll know.”

Roux turned to Thomard. “When he comes again, Raymond, you take the bastard. In the meantime, there’s one other little job. That shit Lambert lied his head off. He could have tipped me off last night, and we’d have been finished with this affair. So he probably took money off Shannon, then tried to take some more off me for out-of-date information. Just make sure Benny Lambert doesn’t do any walking for the next six months.”

The floating of the company to be known as Tyrone Holdings was shorter than Shannon could have thought possible. It was so quick it was over almost before it had begun. He was invited into Mr. Stein’s private office, where Mr. Lang and a junior partner were already seated. Along one wall were three secretaries—as it turned out, the secretaries of the three accountants present. With the required seven stockholders on hand, Mr. Stein set up the company within five minutes. Shannon handed over the balance of £500, and the thousand shares were issued. Each person present received one and signed for it, then passed it to Mr. Stein, who agreed to keep it in the company safe. Shannon received 994 shares in a block constituted by one sheet of paper, and signed for them. His own shares he pocketed. The articles and memorandum of association were signed by the chairman and company secretary, and copies of each would later be filed with the Registrar of Companies for the Archduchy of Luxembourg. The three secretaries were then sent back to their duties, the board of three directors met and approved the aims of the company, the minutes were noted on one sheet of paper, read out by the secretary, and signed by the chairman. That was it. Tyrone Holdings SA existed in law.

The other two directors shook hands with Shannon, calling him Mr. Brown as they did so, and left. Mr. Stein escorted him to the door.

“When you and your associates wish to buy a company in the chosen field of operations, to be owned by Tyrone Holdings,” he told Shannon, “you will then need to come here, present us with a check for the appropriate amount, and buy the new issue at one pound per share. The formalities you can leave to us.”

Shannon understood. Any inquiries would stop at

Mr. Stein as company chairman. Two hours later he caught the evening plane for Brussels, and he checked into the Holiday Inn just before eight.

The man who accompanied Tiny Marc Vlaminck when they knocked at Shannon’s door the following morning just after ten was introduced as M. Boucher. The pair of them, standing on the threshold when he opened the door, looked like a comic turn. Marc was bulky, towering over his companion, and he was beefy in every place. The other man was fat, extremely fat —the sort of fatness associated with fairground sideshows. He seemed almost circular, balanced like one of those children’s spherical plastic toys that cannot be overturned. Only on closer examination was it apparent there were two tiny feet in brilliantly polished shoes beneath the mass, and that the bulk constituting the lower half was divided into two legs. In repose, the man looked like one single unit.

M. Boucher’s head appeared to be the only object to mar the contours of the otherwise uniformly globular mass. It was small at the top and flowed downward to engulf his collar and hide it from view, the flesh of the jowls resting thankfully on the shoulders. After several seconds Shannon conceded that he also had arms, one on each side, and that one held a sleek document case some five inches thick.

“Please come in,” said Shannon and stepped back.

Boucher entered first, turning slightly sideways to slip through the door, like a large ball of gray worsted fabric on castors. Marc followed, giving Shannon a wink as he caught his eye. They all shook hands. Shannon gestured to an armchair, but Boucher chose the edge of the bed. He was wise and experienced. He might never have got out of the armchair.

Shannon poured them all coffee and went straight to business. Tiny Marc sat and stayed silent.

“Monsieur Boucher, my associate and friend may have told you that my name is Brown, I am English by nationality, and I am here representing a group of friends who would be interested in acquiring a quantity of submachine carbines or machine pistols. Monsieur Vlaminck kindly mentioned to me that he was in a position to introduce me to someone who might have a quantity of machine pistols for sale. I understand from him that these are Schmeisser nine-mm. machine pistols, of wartime manufacture but never used. I also understand and accept that there can be no question of obtaining an export license for them, but this is accepted by my people, and they are prepared to take all responsibility in this regard. Is that a fair assessment?”

Boucher nodded slowly. He could not nod fast. “I am in a position to make available a quantity of these pieces,” he said carefully. “You are right about the impossibility of an export license. For that reason the identity of my own people has to be protected. Any business arrangement we might come to would have to be on a cash basis, and with security arrangements for my own people.”

He’s lying, thought Shannon. There are no people behind Boucher. He is the owner of this stuff and works alone.

In fact M. Boucher in his younger and slimmer days had been a Belgian SS man and had worked as a cook in the SS barracks at Namur. His obsession with food had taken him into cooking, and before the war he had lost several jobs because he tasted more than he served through the hatch. In the starving conditions of wartime Belgium he had opted for the cookhouse of the Belgian SS unit, one of the several local SS groups the Nazis recruited in the occupied countries. In the SS, surmised the young Boucher, one could eat. In 1944, when the Germans pulled back from Namur toward the frontier, a truckload of unused Schmeissers from the armory had been on its way east when the truck broke down. There was no time to repair it, so the cargo was shifted into a nearby bunker and the entrance dynamited. Boucher watched it happen. Years later he had returned, shoveled away the rubble, and removed the thousand weapons.

Since then they had reposed beneath a trapdoor built into the floor of the garage of his country cottage, a building left him by his parents, who died in the mid-1950s. He had sold job lots of Schmeissers at various times and had “unloaded” half of his reserve.