The Stockholm Syndicate Read Online Free Page A

huge wrought-iron gates were thrown open. The scrolled lettering on a metal plaque attached to the left hand pillar read Château Wardin .
    The Château Wardin this was where it had all started, Beaurain reflected, as he drove up the winding drive. The formation of Telescope. For three days after the burial of his wife he had remained inside his Brussels apartment, refusing to answer the doorbell or the phone, eating nothing, drinking only mineral water. At the end of the three days he had emerged, handed in his resignation as chief of the anti-terrorist squad and asked the owner of the Château Wardin for financial backing.
    The Baron de Graer, president of the Banque du Nord and one of the richest men in Europe, had provided Beaurain with the equivalent of one million pounds. His late wife's father, a London merchant banker, supplied the second million. But it was de Graer's gift of the Château Wardin as well, which had provided the training ground for the gunners whom Henderson trained as Europe's deadliest fighters.
    Recruitment had been carried out with far greater care than by most so-called professional secret services seeking personnel. The motive had to be there: men and women who had suffered loss in the same way as Beaurain. Wives who had lost husbands in the twentieth-century carnage laughingly known as peacetime. Henderson had brought with him several Special Air Service men taking care the motive was never money. The Scot despised mercenaries.
    Telescope had been involved in three major operations. At Rome airport it had shot four terrorists who had hijacked an Air France plane. No one had spotted Henderson's snipers who escaped dressed as hospital orderlies in an ambulance. And Dusseldorf: a bank siege involving hostages. No one ever worked out how unidentified men wearing Balaclava-type helmets reached the first floor and then descended one flight to destroy the heavily-armed robbers with shin-grenades and machine-pistols. Vienna: a hijack with Armenian terrorists unidentified snipers operating at night had killed every Armenian and then disappeared like ghosts. But in each episode and many others the local police had found the same object left as a trademark. A telescope.
    Most West European governments were hostile to this private organisation which achieved what they were unable to. But rather than risk the general public knowing of Telescope's existence, they compromised allowing their own security forces to take responsibility for the events in Rome, Dusseldorf and Vienna.
    "It would make the politicians look so stupid, Jules," René Latour, head of French counterespionage, had explained when he was dining with his old friend Beaurain during a visit to Brussels.
    "Do you remember that remark I once made to you about three years ago," he continued.
    "That the President regards me as his telescope because I take the long view?"
    "No, I don't remember," Beaurain had lied.
    "It came back to me when all our security services were holding a meeting about Telescope and wondering who could be the boss of such an outfit," "Really," Beaurain had replied, ignoring Latour's searching glance and changing the subject.
    Information. The Belgian had foreseen from the very beginning that the transmission of swift and secret information to his organisation was essential if it was to be able to act with the necessary speed and ruthlessness And in this direction only, money was used; large fees were paid to an elaborate network of spies in all branches of the media, in many branches of government, in many countries. And always they operated through two watertight cut-outs, phoning a telephone number where someone else called another number.
    But it was the Château Wardin with its seclusion, its variety of terrain, its hidden airstrip and helipad, which was the key to Telescope. This was Beaurain's main base.
     
    As soon as the van drove in, the gates of Château Wardin were closed behind it. Litov was still awake. He was