The Stone Leopard Read Online Free PDF Page B

companies were enjoying a minor boom. God knew why, but recently they had become a City cult. Probably because they were 'export-orientated' as the little wise men who sent out brokers' recommendations phrased it. All over the world large industrial concerns were employing Britons to organize their security because, it was alleged, they were incorruptible. Another cult. Lennox thought maybe it was a good time to sell out—once he had obtained the big American oil combine contract he was bidding for. With that under his belt the shares should go through the roof.
    The only man in the building—managing directors worked alone on Saturdays—he went down in the lift to Leadenhall Street and out into the storm which had broken over London. Collecting his Citroén DS 23 from the underground garage, he drove home through sheets of blinding rain to his flat in St James's Place, reflecting that it wasn't a Saturday night to encourage a man on his own to dine out. Arriving inside the flat, which he had furnished with antiques, Lennox took off his two-hundred-guinea coat and poured himself a large Scotch. The next problem was to decide whether to eat out or grill himself a steak from the fridge.
    Thirty-five years old, managing director of the most successful international security company based in London, Lennox was a well-built man of medium height who moved with a deceptive slowness; in an emergency he could react with the speed of a fox. Dark-haired, the hair cut shorter than the normal fashion, his thick eyebrows were also dark. The eyes were his most arresting feature; brown and slow-moving, they looked out on the world warily, taking nothing for granted. `It's in the nature of my job to be suspicious,' he once said. 'A man called Marc Grelle told me in Marseilles that I had the mind of a policeman; I suppose he was right. . .
    Born in Paris, Lennox's mother had been French, his father a minor official at the British Embassy in the Faubourg St Honore. The first ten years of his life had been spent in France and Lennox was fluent in French long before he mastered English at school. Disliking his father's idea that he enter the diplomatic service—`after eighteen I found we had nothing to say to each other'—he joined a large international oil company. Because of his fluency in English, French, German and Spanish he was attached to the security department. Five years later he was directing it.
    `I was lucky,' Lennox recalled. 'The timing was right. Security had become the key to survival. You can buy tankers, drill new oilfields—but where's the profit if people keep dynamiting them ?'
    Lennox's career soared at the time when Arab terrorists were turning their attention to blowing up non-Arab oilfields—to increase the economic power of the Middle East fields. In an emergency, boards of directors turn to the man who can save them; they turned to Lennox. Travelling widely, he organized new systems to protect oilfields, tankers and refineries in four continents. He soon decided that defensive measures were not enough; if you are to win you must carry the war into enemy territory.
    Disappearing into the twilight world of counter-espionage, often for months at a time, Lennox penetrated the terrorist groups, locating their camps in the Lebanon and farther back in Syria. At this time he was employing all sorts of dubious people, paying them large sums in tax-free cash—which drove prim accountants at headquarters crazy. One of his most successful anti-terrorist teams was recruited from the Union Corse—the French Mafia— who were annoyed because Arab money had bought up certain Parisian protection rackets they had previously controlled. 'The Red Night of July 14' was splashed across the world's headlines.
    Lennox waited until he was ready, waited patiently for months while he built up an intimate knowledge of the terrorist gangs. On 4. July he struck. The Union Corse team—speaking French, the second language in Lebanon—landed