The Stockholm Syndicate (32 page)

"We – you - have to destroy the Syndicate, Jules," he remarked as he trimmed off the tip of his cigar and then lit it slowly, puffing with evident pleasure. "You might say I have recovered my nerve."

"Did you ever lose it?"

"The last time I saw you in Brussels I was a trembling wreck I have had time to think since. The information you need is this. I am, as a minor member of the Syndicate, invited to what they are pleased to call their summit conference.
The scum!
"

"We'll deal with them,"

"Meeting place is supposed to be the liner Silvia, now lying a few miles off the coast of southern Sweden near the port of Trelleborg. That's a blind. The real conference takes place aboard the Soviet hydrofoil,
Kometa
. All the leading European financiers, industrialists and politicians who have become members will be taken out aboard power-boats and cruisers from Trelleborg - to meet their American counterparts. They are moving out of Stockholm at this very moment."

"By what route?"

"Mostly by air. Some aboard scheduled flights from Arlanda to Malmö and then on by car. Others will use smaller and private planes to get them to an airstrip close to their destination." He began pacing restlessly round the room. "This Hugo has to be identified and hunted down, Jules. He is the real leader and yet no-one has ever seen his face."

"But we have heard of him," Beaurain said soothingly. "When is this summit due to take place?"

"Hugo - whoever he is - has chosen a curious time. Once on board
Kometa
the visitors will be taken on a short voyage it will take place between 20.50 hours and 2.43 the following morning, which coincides tomorrow precisely with the few hours of darkness at this time of the year."

"And you have no idea at all even remotely who Hugo might be?" Beaurain pressed.

De Graer threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration. "Do you think I have not asked myself that question a thousand times and more?"

"How long have you known these details of the summit conference?" asked Beaurain.

"A message came through on the telephone less than an hour ago. The short notice is obviously deliberate - to give no time to react."

"Who phoned - a man or a woman?"

"I'm pretty sure it was that girl who phoned me when I was in Brussels. The one I called Madame."

"Always it is a woman, a girl, who makes these phone calls," Beaurain said reflectively. He looked at the Baron. "I cannot thank you enough for the information you have provided. Can I take it that under no circumstances will you attend this meeting on board
Kometa
?"

De Graer stopped pacing and grasped Beaurain's arm. "I only came here to see if I could help. I am now catching the first flight back from Arlanda to Brussels - but I am taking the precaution of booking my ticket only when I get to Arlanda. No-one except yourself will then know of my departure."

"Very wise. Take care." Beaurain shook the old warrior by the hand. "Louise and I will be leaving for Trelleborg shortly. That is all I am going to tell you."

Descending in the hotel's splendid lift with its red leather padding and gilt-framed mirrors which seemed to go so well with the world of the Baron de Graer - Beaurain pondered on what the banker had said. Who, he wondered, really was Hugo?

Chapter Nineteen

The short time before Beaurain's departure for Trelleborg was packed with activity. Beaurain was preparing very carefully for the final clash between Telescope and the Stockholm Syndicate.

His temporary headquarters was the interior of a laundry van, a mobile headquarters Palme kept in reserve in a garage in Stockholm. Similar mobile headquarters inside a variety of vehicles were available in every country in Western Europe. The interior of the laundry van was fully equipped with a high-powered transceiver, a telescopic aerial, maps of every major province in Sweden, charts of the seas offshore, and long-life rations. The van was parked in a side street close to the Grand Hotel.

As Beaurain, sitting on a flap seat at the rear of the van, read signals which had come in from
Firestorm
at sea, Louise stood by his shoulder. Some time earlier, Palme had driven off in his Saab to Rådmansgatan 490. Beaurain's instructions had been simple and direct.

"If the place is empty, rip it apart. I don't know what we're looking for - something unusual, something you feel doesn't fit in with a normal middle class Swedish girl's way of life, something Norling keeps in that apartment."

"
Firestorm
is lying off Trelleborg," Louise remarked.

"Bucky Buckminster is doing exactly what I told him to keeping below the horizon and using his chopper to mount a series of recces."

"Well, they've found both the liner Silvia and the Soviet hydrofoil
Kometa
."

"Yes, and the significant thing is that
Kometa
is situated a few miles further out to sea and due south of
Silvia
. So any power-cruiser ferrying VIPs from Trelleborg to
Kometa
can make it appear from shore that it is
Silvia
they are heading for."

"Will it be a savage encounter?" Louise asked quietly.

"I expect a most brutal and bloody clash with no quarter given on either side. This is an organisation with billions behind it, with men of enormous influence involved. They live in a world all their own where the only thing that counts is the maximum profit. Look at the horror of the Elsinore Massacre -and that was just to make sure one man - one man! - didn't reach us with information. I'm not too happy about any of it."

"Why?" asked Louise. She watched him while he lit a cigarette and took only a few puffs before stubbing it out. One of the disadvantages of holding a meeting inside a stationary laundry van.

"I think Hugo may have gone over the edge," Beaurain told her.

"You mean..."

"Hugo still, I'm convinced, has his first-class brain functioning perfectly. It's just that he no longer takes human life into account at all."

"What's going to happen?"

As if on cue, there was a rapping on one of the rear doors, Palme's signal that he had returned from the apartment on Rådmansgatan. Checking through the one-way glass window in the door, Louise released the latch and the Swede scrambled inside. He was holding a blue cloth bag.

"Something very peculiar," were his first words.

"Which is?" Beaurain prompted him.

"This bag - hidden where women always think no-one will ever look," Palme said laconically. "In a recess on top of a wardrobe well above eye level. Contents are interesting."

Beaurain took the bag and burrowed inside. Two items were neatly stored inside plastic envelopes. They were American passports and when Beaurain showed them to Louise they saw that the photographs and details of the holders were still to be added. "Final proof and the mystery deepens," was his tantalising observation.

"Very illuminating ..." Louise began.

"We have to make one more visit to Harry Fondberg, another to Ed Cottel, then we all make our way to Trelleborg by different routes and modes of transport. Scheduled air flights, cars - this laundry van must go as our mobile headquarters - and some can go direct to
Firestorm
by boat. Inform Jock to organise the move south
fast
," he told Palme.

From Harry Fondberg's office at police headquarters, Beaurain used the phone to call both Willy Flamen and Bodel Marker. Fondberg and Louise sat listening to his conversations and Fondberg smoked another of his cigars as he listened and nodded his approval. Eventually Beaurain put down the phone after making his last call.

"You'll all have to collaborate very closely and get the timing synchronised right across Western Europe," he warned Harry Fondberg. "You heard me arrange with Willy to co-ordinate with Wieshaden for Germany and with Paris - and Bodel Marker links up with Amsterdam. God knows they have enough water in Holland."

"It will be the biggest mass-arrest Europe has ever seen," Fondberg promised Beaurain. "And it will happen everywhere at the same time, as soon as the next set of signals start transmitting - you predict tomorrow about midnight."

Beaurain stood up. "And now Louise and I must get moving." He hesitated before he continued.

"We have an appointment which concerns the American connection."

"The American connection?" Fondberg was puzzled.

"Yes. It's the key to the whole evil system."

*

The rendezvous with Ed Cottel took place late in the evening at a remote spot off Highway E3 which leads towards Strängnäs. Beaurain had chosen a location on a side road on the way to an old iron mine which had ceased working. The mine was called Skottvångs Gruva, and the meeting point was deep inside a fir forest which closed in on either side of the road like a wall.

The location had been suggested by Palme and marked on a map delivered to Cottel in his room at the Grand so that on receipt he barely had enough time to drive to the rendezvous. The dramatic atmosphere, heightened by the time of the meeting - 10 p.m. - was all part of Beaurain's plan, as he explained to Louise while they were driving along the E3. In the back of the Mercedes Palme sat in silence, his machine-pistol concealed in an oil-cloth sheath.

'I'm playing on Ed's nerves," Beaurain told her, 'screwing them up to the maximum pressure point, hoping he'll blow."

"I thought he was your friend," Louise observed.

"And who is in the best position to fool you? Read history - it always turns out to be the one closest to you. Julius Caesar could have told you - Brutus."

"But you've known him for decades."

"Don't forget that house that damned near blew up in our faces - and Ed Cottel kept well clear of it. Another thing, he keeps pointing me at Rashkin and away from Washington. It could even be that Harvey Sholto is in Stockholm to find out who Ed really is. I'm just not Sure - I hope to be after this meeting."

On this cryptic note Beaurain fell silent, turning off the main highway onto a forest-lined road which had no traffic at all, a road which Louise found creepy in the gathering dusk. "Sorry about that mistake I made in the lobby of the Grand Hotel," Palme called out from the rear seat.

Beaurain shook his head dismissively. In a rush when delivering the rendezvous message to Cottel, Palme had used a hotel pad to scribble brief written instructions on the route to reinforce the marked map. On his way back from Cottel's room he had hurried down to the lobby to rescue the pad in case the impression of his writing was imprinted on it.
The pad had disappeared
.

The Mercedes was moving at no more than thirty miles an hour, its headlight beams lancing across the enclosing palisade of tree trunks. Palme leaned over frequently to check the odometer, checking the distance from where they had turned onto the road leading to Skottvångs Gruva. Beaurain was still cruising, watching the dashboard clock which registered 9.50 p.m. "We're ten minutes early deliberately," he remarked. Louise didn't like the atmosphere: Beaurain had not told her what was going to happen. And now there were only three of them left in Stockholm.

The main movement south towards the port of Trelleborg had started and was well under way. Commanded by Jock Henderson, all the gunners were being withdrawn from the Swedish capital and sent by various routes and differing forms of transport to reinforce the heavy contingent of troops already aboard the fast and heavily-armed steam yacht,
Firestorm
.

"Drop me off here, Jules."

It was Palme who had spoken after leaning forward again and checking the odometer for the last time. Beaurain dipped his lights, cruised a few more yards, hardly moving, then switched off all the lights and stopped the car.

"Don't worry, Jules, I'll be close enough," Palme whispered as he opened the door.

"Happy to rely on you. But watch it, Stig. We can't be sure."

Can't be sure of what? Louise bit her knuckles to stop herself asking questions. Sitting rigidly in the dark with only the illumination from the dashboard she noticed something else. As Palme left the car he did not close the heavy door with his normal
clunk!
He went to considerable trouble to close it as silently as he could.

Then they were moving again, Beaurain switched on all the lights and they were turning a bend and the headlight beams illuminated another stretch of highway hemmed in by dense forest. Here and there tracks led away through the wall of trees, tracks for timber wagons by the look of the deep ruts bored into the ground. They had moved only a

very short distance beyond the bend when two headlights came on and glared at them, stayed on for three seconds - Beaurain was checking by his wrist-watch - and went out.

Beaurain stopped the car and Louise sensed the tension although there was no physical contact between them. The twin headlights repeated the process twice switching on for three seconds and then going out again. So far as Louise could gauge, the car beaming its lights at them was parked at an angle just off the road on one of the tracks. It was ridiculous and yet eerie. In her nervousness she giggled.

"It's like Checkpoint Charlie you know, an exchange between East and West,"

"Except that this time it's an exchange between West and West."

"What does that mean, for Christ's sake?"

"An exchange of views. That should be Ed Cottel in his new car."

"Then it's all right - if it's Ed?"

"If you say so."

Louise felt a tremble of fury. "Why the hell do we have to meet him in this godforsaken spot?"

"I told you earlier."

To put pressure on Ed? That's crazy."

"His idea," Beaurain told her. "We're here at his request a meeting between me and him well outside

Stockholm."

"I don't like being out here. I feel something is desperately wrong."

"Something is desperately wrong. We have to try and find out what it is, who Hugo is, who really is running the Stockholm Syndicate before we move down to Trelleborg."

"These signals - car lights flashing on and off," "Were agreed when we arranged this rendezvous. They're supposed to identify us to each other,"

"Supposed to?"

"And now the exchange of signals has taken place we head straight for Cottel's car, then stop. So, we will do just that," Beaurain, who had kept the engine idling during the exchange of signals, released the brake and drove forward at very slow speed. The Mercedes was hardly moving as he swung off from the road onto the springy grass at the edge of the forest. And as he approached the stationary Renault the vehicle remained dark and without any sign of life.

Beaurain turned the wheel slightly, swinging Louise's side of the Mercedes away from the Renault. He stopped and whispered in her ear before switching off the engine. "Open your door, slip out and back onto the road. Don't close the door just push it to. If you hear shots take cover and wait for me to call out to you,"

She hated obeying the order, leaving Beaurain on his own, but her training at the Château Wardin asserted itself. Without a word she did as she had been told, using the Mercedes to hide her from the Renault as she slipped back through the forest to the road.

Left alone, Beaurain took his Smith & Wesson from its shoulder holster, held it by his side and quietly slid out of the car.

"I have a machine-pistol trained on you! Drop the gun, Hugo!"