Jack Higgins
Solo
PUBLISHERS NOTE
Solo was first published in the UK by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd in 1980 and later by Pan Books in 1981. This amazing novel has been out of print for some years, and in 2009, it seemed to the author and his publishers that it was a pity to leave such a good story languishing on his shelves. So we are delighted to be able to bring back Solo for the pleasure of the vast majority of us who never had a chance to read the earlier editions.
Dedication
For my daughter
Ruth Patterson,
Who thinks its about time.
Epigraph
Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
Francis Bacon
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Publishers Note
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
The Cretan turned in through the gate in the high,
1
Some forty sea miles south from Athens and less than
2
The British Secret Intelligence Service, known more correctly as DI5,
3
But in Belfast that day, extraordinary things had been happening
4
By evening Morgan had reached Leeds. He left the city
5
Baker stood in front of the fire, warming himself as
6
Katherine Riley was having lunch in her study at the
7
The Europa Hotel in Belfast stands in Great Victoria Street,
8
Harvey Jago inspected himself carefully in the bathroom mirror. In
9
Not that any of it mattered for at the very
10
It was raining heavily in the first grey light of
11
At Heathrow, it was just three-thirty as Katherine Riley hurried
12
For most of his seventy-two years George Ghika had been
13
Morgan was tramping over the mountain on his way home
14
It was almost six oclock when Kim answered the ring
15
In the Green Room behind the stage at the Albert
16
Harry Baker was talking to a uniformed inspector in the
About the Author
Other Books by Jack Higgins
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Cretan turned in through the gate in the high, brick wall surrounding the house near Regents Park, stepped into the shrubbery, merging with the shadows. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. Ten minutes to seven, which meant he had a little time in hand.
He was wearing a dark anorak from one pocket of which he produced a Mauser with a bulbous silencer on the end of the barrel. He checked the action and slipped it back into his pocket.
The house was imposing enough, which was only to be expected for it was owned by Maxwell Jacob Cohen Max Cohen to his friends. Amongst other things, chairman of the largest clothing manufacturers in the world, one of the most influential Jews in British society. A man loved and respected by everyone who knew him.
Unfortunately, he was also an ardent Zionist, a considerable disadvantage in the eyes of certain people. Not that it bothered the Cretan. Politics were a nonsense. Games for children. He never queried the target, only the details and in this case hed checked them thoroughly. There was Cohen, his wife and the maid no one else. The rest of the servants lived out.
He took a black balaclava helmet from his pocket, which he pulled over his head, leaving only his eyes, nose and mouth exposed, then he pulled up the hood of the anorak, stepped out of the shrubbery and moved towards the house.
Maria, the Cohens Spanish maid, was in the living-room when the doorbell rang. When she opened it, she received the shock of her life. The phantom before her held a pistol in his right hand. When the lips moved in the obscene slash in the woollen helmet, he spoke somewhat hoarsely in English with a heavy foreign accent.
Take me to Mr Cohen. Maria opened her mouth to protest. The pistol was extended menacingly as the Cretan stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Quickly now, if you want to live.
The girl turned to go up the stairs and the Cretan followed. As they moved along the landing, the bedroom door opened and Mrs Cohen appeared. She had lived with the fear of this kind of thing for some years now, saw Maria, the hooded man, the gun, and in a reflex action, jumped back instantly into the bedroom. She slammed and locked the door then ran to the telephone and dialled nine-nine-nine.
The Cretan pushed Maria on. The maid stumbled, losing a shoe, then paused at the door of her masters study. She hesitated, then knocked.
Max Cohen answered with some surprise, for it was a strict house rule that he must never be disturbed in his study before eight in the evening. He was aware of Maria standing there, one shoe off, terror on her face and then she was pulled to one side and the Cretan appeared, the silenced gun in his hand. It coughed once.
Max Cohen had been a boxer in his youth and for a moment, it was like being back in the ring. A good solid punch in the face that knocked him clean off his feet. And then he was on his back in the study.
His lips tried to form the words of that most common of Hebrew prayers recited by any Jew, the last prayer he utters in death. Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. But the words refused to come and the light was fading very fast now and then there was only darkness.
As the Cretan ran out of the front door the first police car to answer the call turned in at the end of the street and he could hear others approaching fast. He darted across the garden into the shadows and clambered over a wall into another garden. Finally he opened a gate to let himself out into a narrow lane a few moments later. He pulled down his hood, removed the balaclava helmet and hurried away.
Already, his description, obtained from the maid by the crew of the first police car on the scene, was being transmitted over the radio. Not that it mattered. A couple of hundred yards and he would be lost in the greenness of Regents Park. Straight across to the underground station on the other side, change at Oxford Circus.
He started to cross the road, there was a squeal of brakes. A voice called, Hey, you!
It was a police car, one quick glance told him that, and then he dodged into the nearest side street and started to run. His luck, as always, was good for as he ran along the line of parked cars, he saw a man up ahead getting into one. The door slammed, the engine started.
The Cretan wrenched the door open, dragged the driver out head first and jumped behind the wheel. He gunned the motor, swinging the wheel, crumpling the nearside wing on the car parked in front, and drove away quickly as the police car roared up the street after him.
He cut across Vale Road into Paddington. He didnt have long if he was to lose them, he knew that, because in seconds every police car in that part of London would be converging on the area, sealing it up tight.
There was a road works sign, an arrow pointing to the right which didnt give him much choice. A one-way street between warehouses, narrow and dark, leading down to Paddington Goods Station.
The police car was close now too close. He increased speed and saw that he was entering a long narrow tunnel under the railway line, then he noticed a figure up ahead.
It was a girl on a bicycle. A young girl, in a brown duffel coat, a striped scarf around her neck. He was conscious of her white frightened face as she glanced over her shoulder. The machine wobbled.
He swung the wheel, scraping the nearside wing against the tunnel wall so that sparks flew. It was no good. There just wasnt the room. There was a dull thud, no more than that and then she bounced to one side off the bonnet of the car.
The police car braked to a halt sharply. The Cretan kept on going, straight out of the end of the tunnel into Bishops Bridge Road.
Five minutes later he dumped the car in a side street in Bayswater, crossed the Bayswater Road and walked briskly through the trees across Kensington Gardens, emerging at Queens Gate.
There was quite a crowd when he crossed to the Albert Hall and a queue up the steps to the box office, for there was an important concert that night. The Vienna Philharmonic doing the St Anthony Chorale by Brahms with John Mikali playing Rachmaninovs Concerto No. 2 in C minor.
21 July 1972. The Cretan lit a cigarette and examined the picture of Mikali on the poster, the famous one with the dark, curly hair, the pale face, the eyes like clear black glass.
He walked round to the rear of the building. One of the doors had an illuminated sign over it which said Artists. He entered. A doorkeeper, in his booth, glanced up from his sports paper and smiled.
Evening, sir, cold tonight.
Ive known worse, the Cretan said.
He descended to the corridor leading to the back of the stage. There was a door marked Green Room. He opened it and switched on the light. It was surprisingly spacious as dressing rooms went and reasonably furnished. The only thing which had visibly seen better days was the practice piano against the wall, an old upright Chappell which looked in imminent danger of collapse.
He took the Mauser from his pocket, opened a dressing case, removed the base panel and stuffed the Mauser inside out of sight. Then he took off his anorak, tossed it into the corner and sat down in front of the dressing mirror.
There was a knock on the door and the stage manager looked in. Youve got forty-five minutes, Mr Mikali. Can I get them to bring you some coffee?
No, thank you, John Mikali said. Coffee and I dont agree. Some chemical thing, my doctor tells me. But if you could manage a pot of tea, Id be most grateful.
Certainly, sir. The stage manager, on his way out again, paused. By the way, if youre interested, theres just been a newsflash on the radio. Someones shot Maxwell Cohen at his house near Regents Park. Hooded man. Got clean away.
Good God, Mikali said.
The police think its political, Mr Cohen being such a well-known Zionist. He only escaped death by a miracle last year, from that letter bomb someone sent him. He shook his head. Its a funny kind of world we live in, Mr Mikali. What kind of man would do a thing like that?
He went out and Mikali turned and looked in the mirror. He smiled slightly and his reflection smiled back.
Well? he said.
1
Some forty sea miles south from Athens and less than five from the coast of the Peloponnese, lies the island of Hydra, once one of the most formidable maritime powers in the Mediterranean.
From the middle of the eighteenth century many ships captains amassed huge fortunes trading as far as America, and Venetian architects were brought in to build large mansions which may still be seen to this day in that most beautiful of all ports.
Later, as Greece suffered under the harsh regime of the Ottoman Empire and the island became a haven for mainland refugees, it was the sailors of Hydra who challenged the might of the Turkish Navy in the War of Independence that finally brought national freedom.
To a Greek, the names of those great Hydriot sea captains, Votzis, Tombazis, Boudouris, have the same magic as John Paul Jones for an American, Raleigh and Drake to the English.
Amongst those names, none had a more honourable place than Mikali. The family had prospered as blockade runners when Nelson commanded in the Eastern Mediterranean, had provided four ships for the allied fleet which had crushed the might of the Turkish Empire once and for all at the Battle of Navarino in 1827.
The fortune that was the result of the piracy and the blockade running of the Turkish wars, shrewdly invested in a number of newly developed shipping lines, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century the Mikalis were one of the wealthiest families in Greece.
And the men were all seafarers by nature, except for Dimitri, born in 1892, who showed an unhealthy interest in books, attended Oxford and the Sorbonne and came home only to take up a post as Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Athens.
His son, George, soon restored the family honour. He opted to attend the School of Merchant Marine at Hydra, the oldest of its kind in Greece. A brilliant and gifted seaman, he held his first command at the age of twenty-two. In 1938, restless for fresh horizons, he moved to California to take command of a new passenger cargo ship for the Pacific Star line, working the San FranciscoTokyo run.
Money meant nothing to him. His father had deposited one hundred thousand dollars to his account in a San Francisco bank, a considerable sum in those days. What he did, he did because he wanted to do it. He had his ship, the sea. Only one thing was lacking and he found that in Mary Fuller, the daughter of a high school music teacher, a widow named Agnes Fuller, whom he met at a dance in Oakland in July 1939.
His father came over for the wedding, bought the young couple a house by the sea in Pescadero and returned to a Europe where gunfire already rumbled like thunder on the horizon.
George Mikali was half-way to Japan when the Italians invaded Greece. By the time his ship had made the round trip and docked in San Francisco again, the German Army had taken a hand. By 1 May 1941, Hitler, by intervening to save Mussolinis face, had overrun Yugoslavia and Greece and driven out the British Army, all in twenty-five days and for the loss of fewer than five thousand casualties.
For George Mikali there was no way home and from his father there was only silence, and then came that Sunday in December when Nagumos strike force left Pearl Harbor a smoking ruin.
By February, Mikali was in San Diego taking command of a transport and supply ship not much different from his own. Two weeks later his wife, after three years of ill-health and miscarriages, gave birth to a son.
Mikali could be spared for only three days. In that time he persuaded his mother-in-law, now a high school principal, to move into his home on a permanent basis, and tracked down the widow of a Greek seaman who had served under him and had lost his life in a typhoon off the Japanese coast.
She was aged forty, a solid, heavily built woman named Katina Pavlo, a Cretan by birth, who had been working as a maid in a waterfront hotel.
He took her home to meet his wife and his mother-in-law. In her black dress and headscarf she had seemed to them an alien figure, this short, stocky, peasant woman, yet Agnes Fuller had found herself strangely drawn to her.