Endean shook his head. “I’ll make it twenty thousand,” he said. “You can always contact me if you need more. By the way, I would like to see some of this stuff. That will be fifty thousand you’ll have gone through inside a month.”

“You can’t,” said Shannon. “The ammunition is not yet bought, nor the boats, engines, and so forth. Nor are the mortars and bazookas, nor the submachine pistols. All these deals have to be put through cash on the barrelhead or in advance. I explained that in my first report to your associates.”

Endean eyed him coldly. “There had better be some purchases being made with all this money,” he grated.

Shannon stared him out. “Don’t threaten me, Harris. A lot of people have tried it; it costs a fortune in flowers. By the way, what about the boat?”

Endean rose. “Let me know which boat and from whom it is being bought. I’ll make the credit transfer direct from my Swiss account.”

“Please yourself,” said Shannon.

He dined alone and well that evening and had an early night. Sunday would be a free day, and he had found Julie Manson was already at home with her parents in Gloucestershire. Over his brandy and coffee he was lost in thought, planning the weeks ahead and trying to visualize the attack on the palace of Zangaro.

It was in the middle of Sunday morning that Julie

Manson decided to call her new lover’s flat in London and see if he was there. Outside, the spring rain fell in a steady curtain on the Gloucestershire countryside. She had hoped to be able to saddle up the handsome new gelding her father had given her a month earlier and gallop through the parkland surrounding the family mansion. She had hoped the ride would be a tonic to the feelings that flooded through her when she thought of the man she had fallen for. But the rain had washed out the idea of riding. Instead she was confined to wandering around the old house, listening to her mother’s chitchat about charity bazaars and orphan-relief committees, or staring at the rain falling on the garden.

Her father had been working in his study, but she had seen him go out to the stables to talk to the chauffeur a few minutes earlier. As her mother was within earshot of the telephone in the hallway, she decided to use the extension in the study.

She had lifted the telephone beside the desk in the empty room when her eye caught the sprawl of papers lying across the blotter. On top of them was a single folder. She noted the title and idly lifted the cover to glance at the first page. A name on it caused her to freeze, the telephone still buzzing furiously in her ear. The name was Shannon.

Like most young girls, she had had her fantasies, seeing herself as she lay in the darkness of the dormitory at boarding school in the role of heroine of a hundred hazardous exploits, usually saving the man she loved from a terrible fate, to be rewarded by his undying devotion. Unlike most girls, she had never completely grown up. From Shannon’s persistent questioning about her father she had already half managed to translate herself into the role of a girl agent on her lover’s behalf. The trouble was, most of what she knew about her father was either personal, in his role of indulgent daddy, or very boring. Of his business affairs she knew nothing. And then here, on a rainy Sunday morning, lay her chance.

She flicked her eyes down the first page of the folder and understood nothing. There were figures, costings, a second reference to the name Shannon, a mention of several banks by name, and two references to a man called Clarence. She got no further. The turning of the door handle interrupted her.

With a start she dropped the cover of the folder, stood back a yard, and began to babble into the un-hearing telephone. Her father stood in the doorway.

“All right, Christine, that will be marvelous, darling. I’ll see you on Monday, then. ’By now,” she chattered into the telephone and hung up.

Her father’s set expression had softened as he saw the person in the room was his daughter, and he walked across the carpet to sit behind his desk. “Now what are you up to?” he said with mock gruffness.

For answer she twined her soft arms around his neck from behind and kissed him on the cheek. “Just phoning a friend in London, Daddy,” she said in her small, little-girl voice. “Mummy was fussing about in the hall, so I came in here.”

“Humph. Well, you’ve got a phone in your own room, so please use that for private calls.”

“All right, Daddikins.” She cast her glance over the papers lying under the folder on the desk, but the print was too small to read and was mostly columns of figures. She could make out the headings only. They concerned mining prices. Then her father turned to look up.

“Why don’t you stop all this boring old work and come and help me saddle up Tamerlane?” she asked him. “The rain will stop soon, and I can go riding.”

He smiled up at the girl who was the apple of his eye. “Because this boring old work happens to be what keeps us all clothed and fed,” he said. “But I will, anyway. Give me a few more minutes, and I’ll join you in the stable.”

Outside the door, Julie Manson stopped and breathed deeply. Mata Hari, she was sure, could not have done better.

The Spanish authorities are far more tolerant to tourists than is generally thought. Bearing in mind the millions of Scandinavians, Germans, French, and British who pour into Spain each spring and summer, and since the law of averages must provide that a certain percentage of them are up to no good, the authorities have quite a lot to put up with. Irrelevant breaches of regulations such as importing two cartons of cigarettes rather than the permitted one carton, which would be pounced on at London airport, are shrugged off in Spain.

The attitude of the Spanish authorities has always tended to be that a tourist really has to work at it to get into trouble in Spain, but once he has made the effort, the Spaniards will oblige and make it extremely unpleasant for him. The four items they object to finding in passenger luggage are arms and or explosives, drugs, pornography, and Communist propaganda. Other countries may object to two bottles of duty-free brandy but permit Penthouse magazine. Not Spain. Other countries have different priorities, but, as any Spaniard will cheerfully admit, Spain is different.

The customs officer at Malaga Airport that brilliant

Monday afternoon cast a casual eye over the bundle of £1000 in used £20 notes he found in Shannon’s travel bag and shrugged. If he was aware that, to get it to Malaga, Shannon must have carried it with him through London airport customs, which is forbidden, he gave no sign. In any case, that was London’s problem. He found no copies of Sexy Girls or Soviet News and waved the traveler on.

Kurt Semmler looked fit and tanned from his three weeks orbiting the Mediterranean looking for ships for sale. He was still rake-thin and chain-smoked nervously, a habit that belied his cold nerve when in action. But the suntan gave him an air of health and set off with startling clarity his close-cropped pale hair and icy blue eyes.

As they rode from the airport into Malaga, Semmler told Shannon he had been in Naples, Genoa, Valletta, Marseilles, Barcelona, and Gibraltar, looking up old contacts in the world of small ships, checking the lists of perfectly respectable shipping brokers and agents for ships for sale, and looking some of them over as they lay at anchor. He had seen a score, but none of them suitable. He had heard of another dozen in ports he had not visited, and had rejected them because he knew from the names of their skippers they must have suspect backgrounds. From all his inquiries he had drawn up a list of seven, and the Albatross was the third. Of her qualities, all he would say was that she looked right