Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5) by Jack Higgins Read Free Book Online

And he had said he was coming back after the concert. Why? There could really only be one reason.
    He had to get out while there was still time, but to whom could he turn? Certainly not to the police and not to any of his criminal associates. Quite suddenly, in spite of his half-drunken state, he thought of the obvious answer. The one person. Maitre Deville, his lawyer. The best criminal lawyer in the business, everyone knew that. He'd saved him from prison twice now. Deville would know what to do.
    He wouldn't be at his office now, of course, but at the apartment where he lived alone since his wife had died of cancer three years previously. Rue de Nanterre, off the Avenue Victor Hugo. Jarrot found the number and dialled it quickly.
    There was a slight delay then a voice said, 'Deville here.'
    'Maitre? It's me, Jarrot. I must see you.'
    'In trouble again, eh, Claude?' Deville laughed good-humouredly. 'I'll see you at the office first thing. Let's say nine o'clock.'
    'It can't wait, Maitre.'
    'My dear chap, it will have to. I'm going out to dinner.'
    'Maitre, have you heard the news tonight? About what happened in the Bois de Meudon.'
    'The assassinations?' Deville's voice had changed. 'Yes.'
    'That's what I've got to see you about.'
    'Are you at the garage?'
    'Yes.'
    'Then I'll expect you here in fifteen minutes.'
    Jean Paul Deville was fifty-five years of age and one of the most successful lawyers practising at the criminal bar in Paris. In spite of this, his relations with the police were excellent. Although he used every trick in the book on behalf of his clients, he was fair and just and scrupulously correct in his dealings. A gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word, he had cooperated to the advantage of the Surete on more than one occasion which made him a popular figure in that quarter.
    His family had all been killed when Stuka dive-bombers had pounded Calais in 1940. Deville himself had not served in the army because of bad eyesight. A clerk in a lawyer's office, he had been shifted to Eastern Germany and Poland along with thousands of his fellow countrymen as a slave worker.
    Like many Frenchmen, caught behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the war, he had not reached France again until 1947. His family in Calais having all died, he had decided to make a new life for himself in Paris, going to the Sorbonne on a special government grant for people like him, and taking a law degree.
    Over the years, he had acquired a considerable reputation. He had married his secretary in 1955, but there had been no children. Her health had always been poor and with cancer of the stomach she had taken two painful years to die.
    All of which had occasioned nothing but sympathy for him, not only with the police and his own profession, but amongst the criminal fraternity as well.
    It was really rather ironic when one considered that this benign and handsome Frenchman was, in reality, Colonel Nikolay Ashimov, a Ukrainian who had not seen his homeland for something like twenty-five years. Probably the single most important Russian Intelligence agent in Western Europe. An agent, not of the KGB, but of its bitter rival, the Intelligence section of the Red Army known as the GRU.
    The Russians, even before the end of the war, had spy schools at various places in the Soviet Union, each one with a distinctive national flavour like Glacyna where agents were trained to work in English-speaking countries in a replica of an English town, living exactly as they would in the West.
    Ashimov spent two long years preparing in a similar way at Grosnia where the emphasis was on everything French, environment, culture, cooking, and dress being faithfully replicated.
    He had a distinct advantage over the others from the first as his mother was French. His progress was rapid and he was finally posted to join a group of French slave workers in Poland in 1946, enduring the hardships of their existence, assuming the role of the Jean Paul Deville who had