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Simon eased the pressure sufficiently to allow the other to remove his hand but not to extract the gun he had been groping for. While Parton massaged his bruised fingers, the Saint retrieved the automatic, removed the magazine, ejected the cartridge in the firing chamber, and tossed the weapon into a wastepaper basket.

“Any more tricks like that, Sammy,” he warned, “and I shall get upset. Now, where’s the passport? Or do I have to tear this rat hole apart and you with it?”

The forger’s eyes burned with hate, but there was a lift of triumph in his voice.

“Go ahead,” he jeered. “Enjoy yourself. It won’t do you a bit of good. It ain’t under this roof.”

“I see,” Simon deduced. “So when a job’s finished, you put it in a safe place where the client can’t come and pick it up with a gun instead of cash.”

Parton puffed sullenly at his cigaret without replying.

“All right,” said the Saint. “The passport’s ready. You’ve said as much. Now I want the place and date of delivery.”

“Templar, some day you’ll get it through your head that I don’t grass on customers.”

Leila stepped forward, and Parton turned to give her his full attention for the first time.

“Suppose I buy this man’s passport from you for double what he would pay?” she asked.

Parton shook his head as if he was genuinely sorry to disappoint her.

“Lady, I do that and I’m a goner. This ain’t the usual run of client.”

The Saint’s voice came low and hard: “Yes, he’s a killer. But then you knew that, didn’t you?”

The little fat man was sweating, torn between fears of what the Saint might do if he refused to answer and what others would certainly do if he did.

“Templar, put yourself in my place. A bloke such as you describe orders a passport. I don’t talk about it. If anything goes wrong at the market tomorrow when I make the drop, I’ll be gettin’ measured for a coffin.”

“Which market, Sammy?” Simon pounced on the word remorselessly.

Parton wiped the sweat from his forehead and lit a new cigaret from the butt of the old one.

“Market? Did I say market? Just leave me alone, will you? Clear off and leave me alone!”

The Saint’s sensitive ears picked up sounds of movement in the hall below that could only have come from one source. Parton obviously heard them too, and his confidence began to return.

“You’d better get out of here, Templar, while yer still can,” he threatened.

The Saint smiled, and his hand reached across and patted the other’s cheek in a mockery of affection.

“Thanks for the help, Sammy,” he responded. “We’ll see you around.”

He turned towards the door, but Leila stood in the way without moving.

“Surely,” she protested. “You’re not...”

Simon shook his head.

“No, I’m not. Staying for Goliath, that is. Not until we can book Wembley Stadium and sell tickets. But here and now, there’s nothing more in it for us. Believe me.”

He took her by the arm and led her out of the room and down the stairs. The bodyguard was sitting with his back against a wall, gingerly feeling his jaw and shaking his head muzzily. He glared up at them vengefully, but was still in no condition to make any move to stop them as the Saint found the door to the shop, took Leila through it, unlocked the front door, and led them out into the street.

Leila sat in prickly silence as he headed the car back towards the West End. He could feel the anger building up inside her, and tried to dampen the fuse.

“Think it through a bit further before you blow your top, darling,” he said quietly. “The passport isn’t there, and short of tying up Goliath and sticking pins under Sammy’s fingernails we couldn’t have found out how it’s to be delivered. But if we could have made Sammy tell us, the delivery would have been off. As it is, we know he’ll be meeting Hakim tomorrow, and Hakim is the guy we really want. We’ll just have to make sure that we’re there when they get together.”

“You are the guide,” she retorted coldly. “I am forced to count on you to make certain that we are there.”

The suspicion remained in her voice, and confirmed him in a mildly malicious decision not to dispel it by going into details.

“Don’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “I shall.”

They completed the drive without speaking again. The Saint was thinking about other things. He was quite satisfied with what they had achieved that night, and was perfectly content to let the morrow wait for itself. Hakim, Masrouf, and even Leila were far from uppermost in his thoughts when he turned the Hirondel into the mews.

The cul-de-sac was lit only by a solitary lamp at the far end, and he was into it before he saw the station wagon outside his house, facing towards him. Even so, its identity took a second to register, and by then it was too late.

He stamped on the brake as something shattered the glass of his sitting room window. The station wagon leapt forward and came swerving past them just as a terrific explosion blew out the rest of the front ground-floor windows.

7

As the station wagon careered past them he had barely a glimpse of two swarthy faces in it — Khaldun, probably, in the driver’s seat, his head stretched forward over the wheel, while the man beside him, looking back over his shoulder at the destruction he had caused, could have been Masrouf.

Leila Zabin moved with startling speed, reacting to the situation with reflexes sharpened by intensive training. While the Hirondel was still rocking to a standstill, her hand dived into her purse and a small automatic was in her grasp by the time it righted itself. Before the Saint could stop her, she was out of the car and taking two-handed aim. She fired as soon as her outstretched arms reached the level of her shoulders, but could only crack off two hasty rounds as the station wagon turned the corner.

The Saint threw himself out of the car and grabbed her around the waist as she began to sprint for the opening.

“Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “You’ll never catch them now.”

She shook him off but made no move to continue her pursuit. Slowly she lowered the gun.

“For God’s sake put that thing away,” he said.

One or two windows overlooking the mews were opening, and Leila saw the sense of his advice. She pushed the automatic into the waistband of her skirt, where her coat would cover it. Nevertheless, whether from timidity or the apathy of the big city, there was as yet no rash of inquisitive neighbours to gawp at whatever the big bang might have produced to gawp at.

Simon realised that as loud as the detonation had seemed to him, because he had been so close and seen its immediate effect, anyone a little farther away might have dismissed it, perhaps wishfully, as merely an especially loud backfire or a major collision of vehicles. But in retrospect he was now fairly sure that he could tell what it had been: an ordinary hand grenade.

By that time he was opening the door of the house, with Leila close behind him.

The bomb had gone off near the middle of the room, fortunately in an area where surrounding armchairs and a couch had absorbed the brunt of its havoc. This had not entirely saved the walls and ceiling from being pockmarked by fragments of flying metal, the shattering of some ornaments and picture frames, and the gouging in the carpet of a shallow, smouldering crater which no shampooing and weaving service was ever going to restore. All the same, the blast had not been severe enough to cause any radical structural damage.

The Saint stood completely still as he surveyed the debris through the dust and smoke that lingered in the air. There was a strange, unnatural calm about him that was somehow more frightening than a torrent of threats against those responsible could ever have been. As far as he was concerned, there could be no more standing on the sidelines. The conflict of tribes and ideologies about which he had previously felt only a biased neutrality was suddenly of secondary importance. Now his own home had been violated. Furniture could be quickly replaced, and surfaces patched up, but the savage invasion of his most private territory had created a personal debt that could only be personally repaid.