Prelude for War Read Online Free PDF

you
wouldn’t,” he admitted. “Oh no, they’re
not brilliant. But very respectable. In fact, just about what you’d expect to find at a place like that at the week end. Lady Sangore, the typical army officer’s wife, with her husband the typical army officer. Lady Valerie Wood- chester, the bright young society floozie, of the fearfully county huntin’-shootin’-an’-fishin’ Woodchesters. Captain Whoosis of the Buffoon Guards, her dashing young male equivalent, probably a nephew or something like that of old Sangore’s, invited down to make an eligible partner for Lady Valerie. Comrade Fairweather, the nebulous sort of modern country squire, probably Something in the City in his spare time, and one of the bedrocks of the Conservative party. A perfectly representative collection of English ladies and gentlemen of what we humorously call the Upper Classes. We can find out a bit more about them tomorrow —Peter’s been living here long enough now to be able to dig up some extra dirt from the village if he doesn’t know it already. But I don’t think we’ll get anything sensational. People like
that live in an even deeper rut than the fellow who goes to an office every
morning, although they’d have a stroke if you told them.
If only they hadn’t invited Com rade Luker …”
    “Who is he?”
    Simon drew another
cigarette to a bright glow from the stump of the last.
    “If he’s a financier,
as the policeman said, and he’s the bloke I’m thinking
of, I’ve heard of him. Which is more than most people
have done. He moves in a mysterious way.”
    “Where does he
move?”
    “In the most
distinguished international circles. He hobnobs with foreign secretaries and
ambassadors and prime ministers, and calls dictators by their first
names. But you never read about him in the
newspapers, and there are never any
photographers around when he pays his calls. They must like him just because he’s such a charming
guy. Of course he’s one of the
biggest shareholders in the Stelling Steel Works in Germany, and the
Siebel Arms Factory in France, and the
Wolverhampton Ordnance Company in England; but you couldn’t be so nasty as to
think that that had anything to do with it. After all, he plays no
favourites. In the last Spanish revolution,
the rebels were mowing down
Loyalists with Stelling machine guns just as busily as the government
was bopping the rebels with Siebels. It was just
about the same in the war between Bolivia and Para guay, except that the Wolverhampton Ordnance
Company was in on that as well—on both sides.”
    The knot around Patricia’s
heart seemed to tighten.
    “Just one of Nature’s
altruists,” she said mechanically.
    “Oh yes,” said
the Saint, with a kind of deadly and dis tant cheerfulness.
“You couldn’t say he was anything but impartial.
For instance, he’s one of the directors of the V oix Populaire, a French newspaper that spends most of its time howling about the menace of the Italo-German Fascist entente and at the same time he’s part owner of the Deutscher Unterricht, which lets off periodical blasts about the French threat to German recovery. … At
home, of course, he’s a staunch
patriot. He’s one of the most gener ous
subscribers to the Imperial Defence Society, which spends its time proclaiming that Britain must have
bigger and better armaments to
protect herself against all the European
enemies of peace. In fact, the I.D.S. takes a lot of credit for the latest fifteen-hundred-million-pound
rearma ment programme which our taxes
are now paying for. And naturally
it’s just an unavoidable coincidence that the Wolverhampton Ordnance Company is now working night and day to carry out its government
contracts.”
    “I see,” said
Patricia; but it was only as if a fog had eddied
and parted capriciously, giving her a glimpse of something
huge and terrifyingly inhuman looming through shifting
veils of mist.
    Simon Templar’s face was
as dark and cold as graven