The sky was clear, with only a faint smudge of haze near the horizon. I held the Cessna 210 steadily on course at slow cruise. I kept looking, from side to side, scanning the skies around me.
I saw the other plane on an intercept course when it was still so far away that it looked like a small dot that could have been anything, even an optical illusion. I reduced the speed of my own aircraft even more, pulling back the throttle and resetting the trim tab. In a few minutes, the other plane took on shape. Presently, it swung in a wide arc, circling to come in beside me, flying wingtip to wingtip. The plane was a Bonanza. There was only one man in it. The pilot of the Bonanza picked up his mike. I heard a rough baritone voice crackle in my earphones.
“Five… niner… Alpha. Is that you, Carter?”
I picked up my own mike.
“Affirmative.”
“Follow me,” he said, and the Bonanza swung smoothly away on a northerly course, sliding in ahead of my aircraft, slightly to my left and just above me where I could easily keep it in sight I turned the Cessna 210 to follow it, pushing the throttle ahead, picking up speed to keep it in sight.
Almost an hour later, the Bonanza slowed, let down its flaps and gear, and turned in a tight bank to let down for a landing on a strip bulldozed in the floor of a valley.
As I followed the Bonanza in, I saw that there was a Learjet parked at the far end of the runway, and I knew that Gregorius was waiting for me.
Inside the plush interior of the Learjet, I sat across from Gregorius, almost enfolded by the rich leather of the armchair.
“I know you are angry,” Gregorius said calmly, his voice smooth and polished. “However, please don’t let your emotions get in the way of your thinking. It wouldn’t be like you at all.”
“I told you that I’d never do another job for you again, Gregorius. I told that to Hawk, too.”
I watched the big man intently.
“So you did,” admitted Gregorius. He took a sip of his drink. “But then, nothing in this world is ever final — except death.”
He smiled at me out of a large, rubbery face of oversized features. Large mouth, large eyes that bulged codlike under thick gray eyebrows, a huge, protuberant nose with heavy nostrils, coarse pores in a sallow skin— Gregorius’ face was like a sculptor’s rough, clay head molded in heroic size to match the rest of his gross body.
“Besides,” he said smoothly, “Hawk has lent you to me, so you’re really working for him, you see.”
“Prove it.”
Gregorius pulled a folded sheet of onion skin paper out of his pocket. He reached over and handed it to me.
The message was in code. Not too difficult to decipher, either. Decoded, it read simply, “N3 on lend-lease to Gregorius. No AXE until job completed. Hawk.”
I lifted my head and stared coldly at Gregorius.
“It could be a fake,” I said.
“Here’s the proof that it’s genuine,” he answered, and handed me a package.
I looked down into my hands. The package was wrapped in paper, and when I tore that off, I found another wrapping underneath of chamois. And swaddled in the chamois was my 9mm Luger, the pencil-slim knife that I had carried in its sheath strapped to my right forearm, and Pierre, the tiny gas bomb.
I’d put them away — safely, I thought — six months ago. How Hawk had found my safe deposit box or had gotten its contents I’ll never know. But then, Hawk was able to do many things no one knew about. I nodded my head.
“You’ve proved your point,” I told Gregorius. “The message is genuine.”
“So you will listen to me now?”
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll listen.”
CHAPTER TWO
I refused Gregorius’ offer of lunch, but I did have coffee while he put away a huge meal. He didn’t talk while he ate, concentrating on his food with almost total dedication. It gave me a chance to examine him while I smoked and sipped at my coffee.
Alexander Gregorius was one of the world’s richest and most secretive men. I think I knew more about him than anyone else because I had set up his incredible information network when Hawk had put me out on loan to him before.
As Hawk had said, “We can use him. A man with his power and his money can be a valuable help to us. There’s just one thing for you to remember, Nick. Whatever he knows, I want to know, too.”
I’d set up the fantastic information system that was to work, for Gregorius and then tested it by ordering information gathered on Gregorius himself. I passed that information on to AXE’s files.
There was damned little hard information about his early years. Most of it was unconfirmed. Rumor had it that he’d been born somewhere in the Balkans or Asia Minor. Rumor had it that he was part Cypriot and part Lebanese. Or Syrian and Turk. Nothing was completely definitive.
But I’d discovered his real name was not Alexander Gregorius, something which a very few people knew. But even I couldn’t learn where he’d really come from or what he’d done during the first twenty-five years of his life.
He emerged from nowhere right after World War II. He appeared on an immigration record in Athens as having come from Ankara, but his passport was Lebanese.
By the end of the 50s, he was deep in Greek shipping, Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil, Lebanese banking, French import-export, South American copper, manganese, tungsten — you name it. It was almost impossible to pin down all his activities even from an insider’s seat.
It would be an accountant’s nightmare to uncover his exact holdings. He’d hidden them by incorporating in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Panama — countries where corporate secrecy is virtually unbreachable. That’s because the S.A. after the names of European and South American companies stands for Societe Anonyme. No one knows who the stockholders are.
I don’t think that even Gregorius himself could pin down the exact extent of his wealth. He no longer measured it in terms of dollars, but in terms of power and influence — and he had plenty of both.
What I’d done for him, on that first assignment from Hawk, was to set up an information gathering service that consisted of an insurance company, a credit checking organization, and a news magazine with foreign bureaus in more than thirty countries and well over a hundred correspondents and stringers. Add to that an electronic data processing firm and a market research business. Their combined investigative resources were staggering.
I showed Gregorius how we could put all this data together, compiling completely detailed dossiers about several hundred thousand people. Especially those who worked for companies he had an interest in or that he owned outright. Or who worked for his competition.
The information flowed in from correspondents, from credit investigators, from insurance records, from his market research people, from the files of his news-magazine. It was all fed into a bank of IBM 360 computers at the EDP company located in Denver.
In less than sixty seconds I could have a printout on any one of these people packed with such thorough information that it would scare the hell out of them.
It would be complete from the time they were born, the schools they went to, the grades they got, the exact salaries earned on every job they ever held, the loans they ever took out and the payments they have to make. It can even compute their estimated annual income taxes for every year they worked.
It knows the affairs they’re having or have had. Right down to the names and addresses of their lovers. And it included information on their sexual proclivities and perversions.
There’s also one special reel of tape, containing some two thousand or more dossiers with both input and output, handled only by a few carefully selected ex-FBI men. That’s because the information is too secret and too dangerous to be seen by anyone else.