Solo. Jack Higgins

He swung her round, a hand lightly around her throat. ‘I won’t harm you if you’re a good girl. But if you’re not, if you try to warn him in any way, I’ll kill you.’

      ‘Yes,’ she moaned.

      ‘Good. What time does he get in?’

      ‘Eight o’clock.’

      He glanced at his wrist. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes to wait. We’ll just have to make ourselves comfortable, won’t we?’

      He leaned against the wall, holding her against him. She was no longer afraid, at least not as she had been at first, but excited in a strange way, aware of him hard against her, one hand around her waist. She started to move against him, only a little at first and then more as he laughed and kissed her on the neck.

      She was more excited than she had ever been, there in the darkness, turned to meet him as he pushed her against the wall, easing the dark dress up above her thighs.

      Afterwards, he tied her wrists very gently behind her and breathed in her ear, ‘There, you’ve had what you wanted, so be a good girl and keep quiet.’

      He tied a handkerchief around her mouth to gag her, again with surprising gentleness, and waited. There was the sound of the key in the lock, the door opened and General Stephanakis was ushered in by two of his aides.

      They were all in uniform. He turned and said, ‘I’m going to have a shower and change. Come back in forty-five minutes. We’ll eat here.’

      They saluted and left and he closed the door. Stephanakis dropped his cap on the bed and started to unbutton his tunic. Behind him, the door of the wardrobe rolled back and Mikali stepped out. He held a pistol with a silencer in his right hand. Stephanakis gazed at him in stupefaction and Mikali pulled up the balaclava.

      ‘Oh, my God,’ the General said. ‘You – you are the Cretan.’

      ‘Welcome to Berlin,’ Mikali said and shot him.

      He turned off all the lights, pulled on his balaclava again, then opened the window and uncoiled the rope about his waist. A few moments later, he was abseiling down to the flat roof of the garage in the darkness four floors below. It was no great trick. In training at Gasfa on the Moroccan coast in the old days, a Legion paratrooper had been expected to abseil down a three-hundred-foot cliff or fail his course.

      Safely on the roof, he pulled down the rope, coiled it quickly about his waist, then dropped over the edge of the garage to the ground.

      He paused by some dustbins in the alley and took off his balaclava helmet which he folded neatly and slipped into one pocket. Then he pulled an ordinary paper carrier bag from behind the dustbins and took out a cheap, dark raincoat which he pulled on.

      A few moments later, he was walking away briskly through the crowded evening streets, back to his hotel. At nine-thirty, he was at the University of Berlin, giving a recital of the works of Bach and Beethoven, to a packed hall.

      The following morning, Jean Paul Deville received a cable from Berlin. It simply said, Your mitzvah much appreciated. Perhaps I can do the same for you some time.

      There was no signature.

      2

      The British Secret Intelligence Service, known more correctly as DI5, does not officially exist, is not even established by law although it does in fact occupy a large white and red brick building in the West End of London not far from the Hilton hotel.

      Those whom it employs are faceless, anonymous men who spend their time in a ceaseless battle of wits aimed at controlling the activities of the agents of foreign powers in Great Britain and increasingly, what has become an even more serious problem, the forces of European terrorism.

      But DI5 can only carry out an investigation. It has no powers of arrest. Any effectiveness it has depends in the final analysis on the cooperation of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard. It is they who make the arrests so that those anonymous men of DI5 never have to appear in court.

      Which explained why, on the night of the shooting of Maxwell Cohen, it had been Chief Detective-Superintendent Harry Baker who got out of the police Jaguar outside the mortuary in Cromwell Road just after nine o’clock and hurried up the steps.

      Baker was a Yorkshireman by birth from Halifax in the West Riding. He’d been a policeman for twenty-five years. A long time to be disliked by the general public and work a three-shift system that only gave you one weekend in seven at home with the family. A fact his wife no longer commented on for the simple reason that she’d packed her bags and moved out five years previously.

      Baker had grey hair and a badly broken nose, a relic of his rugby-playing days, giving him the air of an amiable prize fighter. Which was deceptive for it concealed one of the sharpest minds in Special Branch.

      His assistant, Detective-Inspector George Stewart, waited in the foyer, smoking a cigarette. He dropped it to the floor, put a foot on it and came forward.

      Baker said, ‘All right – tell me.’

      ‘Girl of fourteen – Megan Helen Morgan.’ He had his notebook open now. ‘Mother, Mrs Helen Wood. Married to the Reverend Francis Wood, rector of Steeple Durham in Essex. I spoke to him on the phone half an hour ago. They’re on their way now.’

      ‘Now wait a minute,’ Baker said. ‘I’m beginning to get a bit confused.’

      ‘The girl’s landlady is in here, sir. A Mrs Carter.’

      He opened a door marked Waiting Room and Baker moved in. The woman who sat by the window was stout and middle-aged and wore a brown raincoat. Her face was blotched, swollen by weeping.