Pearl watched the two men get into Sadu’s sports car and drive away. It was too early to close the shop, but she did light a joss stick and she did kneel for a long moment in prayer while the scented smoke swirled around her.
About the time Malik was meeting Smernoff at Le Bourget airport, Dorey received the green light from Washington to go ahead with his plan.
His suggestion had been considered by the Heads of Joint Chiefs of Staff and the F.B.I. They had been cautious. In its present stage, they felt it wasn’t at Presidential level This woman could be a fake. But they did accept the possibility that this was something to be treated as a top operation. Dorey’s Washington boss had said over the satellite telephone connection: “I’m going to leave this to you, John. Anyway, for the primary moves. You can spend what you like... if it lays an egg, we can always cover the expense somehow. But right at this moment, I would rather not know what you are doing. You go ahead, keep it unofficial, and if the egg produces a chicken, let me know.”
Dorey smiled mirthlessly. “You can safely leave it to me, sir,” he said and hung up.
But this was the kind of operation Dorey liked. He now had a free hand, money to spend and no one but himself responsible for success or failure. For the past hour he had been thinking and he was now ready to swing into action. The time was 8 p.m. Malik at this time was in the aircraft bringing him from London to Paris. Sadu and Jo-Jo were sitting in Sadu’s car outside the American hospital. The woman believed to be Erica Olsen, mistress of China’s leading missile and atomic scientist, was still drowsy from the Pentathol shot. The guard, Pfc Willy Jackson, an alert, disciplined soldier without much intelligence, but very quick on the trigger, was walking up and down the hospital corridor, glancing now and then at the closed door behind which Erica Olsen was dozing.
Dorey lifted the telephone receiver and called O’Halloran.
“Tim... do you remember Mark Girland?”
“Girland? Why, sure, he used to work for Rossland, didn’t he?”
“That’s the fellow. He’s in Paris right now and I want him. He has a studio apartment on Rue des Suisses. I don’t give a damn how you get him but get him. I want him here in an hour.”
“Just a second, sir, if I remember right, this Girland is a toughie. Suppose he won’t come?”
“Girland? Tough? He’s not working for me now. I hear he’s a street photographer or something. Anyway, pick him up, Tim. Send a couple of good men after him. I want him here within an hour.”
He replaced the receiver and leant back in his executive chair. He felt pretty pleased with himself. He felt he was handling this situation with some brilliance.
Mark Girland!
Not many people would have thought of Girland.
He was the man to handle Dorey’s problem. Girland was tailor-made for the job.
Dorey frowned. Tailor-made... if of course he could persuade Girland to do the job.
Marcia Davis had left a plate of chicken sandwiches and a glass of milk on the desk before she had gone home. Now, Dorey, his mind busy as to how he should handle Girland, reached for a sandwich and thoughtfully bit into it.
Chapter Two
Mark Girland felt depressed. If there was one thing he disliked more than another it was to spend an evening alone in his cheerless one-room apartment which was on the seventh floor of an old, shabby building on Rue des Suisses.
It was raining, his shoes leaked and he was temporarily out of money. He had eight francs and seventy-two centimes in his pocket. It didn’t seem possible, he thought ruefully, that three months ago he had had $5000 safely stashed away in a bank.
The trouble with me, he said to himself, trying to make himself comfortable in the canvas deck abortion that served him as an armchair, is that I am a layabout and a wastrel. I had all kinds of ideas how I was going to spend that nest egg. Who would have believed three miserable horses could have put up such a performance? He remembered with regret the afternoon at Long-champs racecourse, when all his money went into the satchel of a grinning bookmaker.
In spite of losing what he had hoped to have been the means to a new career, Girland firmly decided, after the Robert Henry Carey affair, that espionage was strictly for suckers. He had had the satisfaction of telling that old goat, John Dorey, to drop dead.
Regarding him over the tops of his rimless glasses, Dorey had said, “I don’t think you are the type of man I can use, Girland. You are not to be trusted. You always put yourself first and your work a poor second. I can’t use a man who thinks of himself first. So you will no longer work for me.”
Girland had grinned cheerfully.
“Who in his right mind wants to work for you? When I think of the dirty, smelly little jobs I did for your stooge Rossland — may he rest in peace — and the centimes I got out of it, I should have had my head examined. So I no longer work for you. Goodbye, and drop dead.”
But that speech of independence had been made when he was the owner of $5000, not entirely honestly gained, but gained.
But in spite of the depressing fact that he was now continually short of money, he still had no regrets that he had parted with the C.I.A.
For the past two months, he had made a somewhat precarious living as a street photographer. Armed with a Polaroid camera he had spent his days haunting the tourist byways on the lookout for a pretty American tourist on her first visit to Paris, and there were many of them. The photograph once taken, the print produced, he then spent a few minutes persuading the girl to part with a ten-franc note. Girland could charm a bird off a tree, and his technique with women had to be seen to be believed. Often, the transaction successfully concluded, the girl, flushed and aroused, would go with him back to his seventh floor apartment.
There were worse ways of making a living, he thought, scowling at the Polaroid camera that lay on the worm-eaten refectory table, but not much worse.
This day had been a complete write-off. It had rained steadily, and although Girland had wandered the streets, he had found no suitable subject. The two fat women he did finally photograph in desperation had threatened to call a gendarme when they learned they were expected to part with 20 francs for a rather indifferent photograph.
Girland regarded the big room with its two uncurtained windows that overlooked the roofs, the chimneys and the television aerials of Paris. At the far end of the room was a kitchen sink and an ancient gas cooker. There was a big radio and gramophone against another wall. A wardrobe and a bookcase with American and French paperbacks completed the furnishing.
Girland, lean, tall and dark, wrinkled his nose. What a hole! he thought. What it needs is a coat of paint, a vase of long-stemmed roses and an erotic blonde with a Bardot body, but right now I would settle for the blonde.
He got up and walked to the open window and stared out at the black, glistening roofs. Rain was still coming steadily. In the far distance he saw a flash of lightning. Shrugging, he was moving to the radio in the hope that there was something on he could listen to when the front door bell rang.
He looked at the door, cocking his left eyebrow, then he crossed the room and peered through the tiny peephole at the two men standing in the passage. He recognised the military raincoats and the snap-brimmed hats and he hesitated, his brain Suddenly very alert.
Then he relaxed and grinned. Probably an identity card check, he thought. These guys have very little to do with themselves except to be a nuisance. It seemed a long time now since he had had callers from the Central Intelligence Agency. Who knows? Dorey might have had a heart attack. He might even have left him something in his will. He opened the door.