Star of Ill-Omen Read online

  Dennis Wheatley

  Star of Ill-Omen

  For

  FREDDY AND BETTY

  Who first intrigued me

  with the mystery of

  the

  Flying Saucers

  With love

  from

  DENNIS

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 General Peron’s Secret

  2 The Fight in the Thorn Wood

  3 The Flying Saucer

  4 A Thief in the Night

  5 A Bedroom Scene

  6 Awkward Explanations

  7 A Desperate Situation

  8 Real Cause for Terror

  9 Kidnapped

  10 Space and Speed

  11 The Old Adam

  12 World Far from Ours

  13 Chamber of Horror

  14 Trial and Tribulation

  15 The Great Revelation

  16 The Masters of a World

  17 The Drones

  18 The Menace to Earth

  19 The Coming of Anna

  20 The Man with the Gun

  21 The Explosive Pill

  22 Zadovitch’s Mistress

  23 All Set for a Killing

  24 Murder

  25 The Last Bean

  26 A Gamble with Death

  27 Tempting Providence

  28 Walking like Agag—Delicately

  A Note on the Author

  Also by the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  1

  General Peron’s Secret

  Kem Lincoln slid back the chamber of his automatic to make certain that it was working freely, snapped home a clip of bullets and repouched the weapon in his shoulder holster. He hoped that he would not have to use it. If Estévan Escobar was alone the pistol should prove redundant, but if he appeared driven by a chauffeur, strong measures might be necessary to get the better of the two of them.

  It was mid-December, but nearly as hot as it would have been in June in central Morocco, for it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the latitude 33 degrees south. The spot on which Kem stood was about one hundred and sixty miles north of Buenos Aires. He had chosen it with care, as the highway there crossed the last low rise before merging into the great plain in which lay the basin of the River Plate. From it he could see a mile or more along the road to the little town of Basavilbaso, down which Escobar must come on his way to the capital; but there was no human habitation in sight and the landscape was entirely deserted. To the north the endless plain disappeared in a blue haze; to the west, coming right up to the road, stretched a belt of thorn-tree scrub; to the east the ground fell away to the distant mile-wide river in what a generation ago had been pampas but was now a part of the vast wheat-fields which were bringing the Argentine nearly as much wealth as her cattle.

  Kem was dressed in a white linen jacket, an open shirt, twill riding-breeches and a broad-brimmed sombrero. In spite of the protection the hat had given him on his recent ride from Basavilbaso, and the fact that he had now taken refuge in the shade of the nearest tree, he was in a bath of perspiration; little rivulets of it trickled down his chubby brown face.

  He was of medium height and twenty-eight years of age, inclined to plumpness but naturally so, and the strength of his back and shoulders made him a formidable opponent as a wrestler. Quite apart from the tan he had acquired during his three weeks in the Argentine, his skin was exceptionally dark for an Englishman. At first sight many people took him for a native of the south of France and in both physique and temperament he owed much to the fact that his maternal grandmother had been a Provençal. His hair was straight and black, his face round with full cheeks, his eyes dark brown and his lips thick. Men thought him an ugly fellow and could never understand what women saw in him; but women are rarely attracted by good looks alone. Kem’s immense vitality, t
he laughter that was always twitching his full mouth and the quick humorous intelligence that danced in his dark eyes had proved better assets with the girls than a handsome profile.

  As his keen eyes watched the empty, sun-scorched highway for the first little cloud of dust which would tell of the approach of his unsuspecting victim’s car, he cursed the heat and thought idly of the strange chain of events that had brought him there, like a modern Claude Duval, lurking on the edge of the forest about to stage a hold-up.

  At the opening of the Second World War he had been only fifteen, but by 1943 he had managed to get into the Commandos. A few months later he had had the bad luck to be knocked out and captured during a minor raid against the coast of France. The Germans had succeeded in holding him for less than a week and, once he had escaped, the ease with which he spoke fluent French had enabled him to make his way through France to the Pyrenees without difficulty; but soon after crossing the border into Spain misfortune had again overtaken him. Walking by night towards Burgos on his way south to Gibralter he had been run down by a fast car and picked up many hours later still unconscious with head injuries and a fractured thigh. By that time his lucky stars had once more been in the ascendant, as it was a local doctor returning from a confinement at a lonely farm who had found his twisted body soon after dawn.

  Like most Spanish professional men Doctor Manuel Duero accepted the Franco regime as infinitely preferable to Communism, but, all the same, cherished Liberal views which made him strongly anti-Nazi. As he lifted Kem into the back of his old Ford the young fugitive had become delirious and disclosed the fact that he was a British soldier; so instead of taking him to the local hospital, which would have resulted in his being interned for the duration, the good doctor had taken him to his own home. There, his two pretty daughters had nursed Kem back to health, but nine months had elapsed before his smashed thigh had mended sufficiently for him to regain full use of it.

  Meanwhile the armies of the Allies had landed on the Continent, but the Germans were still putting up a desperate resistance and no one could yet say when the war would end, so Kem had felt compelled to take a reluctant leave of the Dueros and make his way to Gib. By mid-September ’44 he was back in England and had rejoined his unit, but his disability was judged still too serious to permit of his resuming the more desperate forms of Commando operations; so when he was sent abroad again it was for attachment to the Special Intelligence branch of SHAEF.

  There he had soon graduated from an office desk to outside employment and had been let loose in Belgium in civilian clothes. His fluent French, coupled with his round, innocent, cheerful countenance, had made him an excellent agent; so when the war ended, having been trained to no other profession, he had gladly accepted an offer to remain on as a permanent operative in the British Secret Service.

  Although Kem had not realised it at the time, the shrewd chief who had made him that offer had then had innumerable resourceful young men to choose from, but comparatively few of them spoke good Spanish. It was that additional qualification, gained during his nine months’ convalescence with the Dueros, which, as a long-term policy, had really been responsible for his selection. And now the shrewd chief’s pigeon had come home to roost. At twenty-eight Kempton Lincoln was a fully experienced and very capable agent; he had carried out successful missions in various European countries, and when a really first-class man was needed to tackle a big job in the Argentine his chief had had no doubt in his mind whom to send.

  Kem pushed his sombrero to the back of his head, mopped his forehead and grinned as he thought how far-reaching the effect of one unexpected moment in a man’s life could be. Had he not been knocked down one night on the road to Burgos he would certainly not be where he was now, sweltering in the sun and waiting to hold up the man who was believed to hold the secret of a new, quick and in-expensive method of producing Atom bombs.

  On first being told of his new mission he had not liked the idea of it at all, as his scientific knowledge was about as sketchy as that of the average fifth-form schoolboy. At the risk of getting a raspberry for telling his grandmother how to suck eggs, he had pointed out to the Director-General M.I.-X. that nine-tenths of success in spying lay in knowing what to look for, and that if he managed to get into a nuclear energy plant it would be as meaningless to him as the inside of a television set to an Australian aborigine; but the D.G. had brushed the objection aside, and said:

  ‘My dear boy, in that only a handful of scientists are better situated than yourself, and obviously none of them can be employed on such unorthodox work as ours. Besides, no acquaintance with back-room wizardry is required to carry out the main object of this assignment. Early in 1951, the Dictator, Peron, announced that by approaching the problem from a new angle one of his scientists had discovered a cheap and easy method of producing atomic energy. If that is true its repercussions could be boundless. At present United Nations’ production of these new weapons is strictly limited by the vast labour and expense their manufacture entails, and, thank God, we have no reason to suppose that their cost in effort to the Huskies is any less. But if a way has been found to turn out these hideous things as easily as Ford cars, even a comparatively small country like the Argentine might well succeed in enforcing its will upon both hemispheres before she could be successfully destroyed or invaded. Fortunately General Peron is a declared enemy of Communism, but on the other hand he has never manifested any particular love for the democracies. Privately we may hope that he is a really great man, and that if he has such power he will use it to enforce a new era of universal peace; but officially it is our job to visualise ambition leading him to have a crack at becoming the Emperor of the World, and do what we can to tie his hands before he has the chance to get going.’

  ‘I see that,’ Kem had agreed, ‘but didn’t he admit a few months later that his scientist was a fake, and the whole thing a mare’s nest?’

  The D.G. took a pull at his after-lunch cigar and stared thoughtfully at the plane trees outside his bow window before replying: ‘Yes. He confessed that he had been fooled and took away a decoration that he had given the fellow for his supposed discovery. But what would you do, say you were a South African and had found alluvial diamonds on your farm? After the first excitement wouldn’t you give out that you had been mistaken, or that they were so small as to be valueless, in order to discourage raiders until you could get the place properly protected? If Peron is out for world domination he would be crazy to start anything at half-cock, and even given mass production it would take him a year or more to form a stock-pile large enough to menace the east as well as the west. In the meantime he would naturally take any steps he could to divert attention from his preparations.’

  ‘If that’s the case, sir, why should he have ever announced the discovery in the first place?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The D.G. grinned broadly. ‘Perhaps through lack of forethought. Or perhaps the whole thing was a bluff from the beginning, and simply staged to increase the importance of the Argentine in the eyes of the world. But, if so, why should Peron lose face by retracting afterwards? Perhaps it is a double bluff and he never had it, but pretended he had, then denied it, hoping that people like myself would think on just the lines I am thinking—that he has got it but is playing for time and denied it only to discourage spying. As you know, the old Falkland question has reared its ugly head again recently. As long ago as 1770 the Spaniards claimed the islands, and as their heirs the Argentinos are still trying to kick us out. Should that boil up to a head, Britain might have to think twice about going to war with the Argentine if we had grounds to suppose that Peron can turn out Atom bombs as easily as hand-grenades. Peron would certainly like us to believe that.’

  Again the D.G. pulled at his cigar, then went on: ‘Our own back-room boys seem positive that no short cut to production is feasible, so that lends a certain weight to the double-bluff theory; but there is always a tendency for scientists to stick in their own groove when they have
found a good one, and pooh-pooh all others. Anyhow, it will be up to them to decipher the gibberish in any papers you may be able to get hold of, and pronounce upon them. If you can manage to purloin or photograph anything that looks like a formula it would naturally be all to the good, but at this stage I’m not aiming as high as that. Your job is simply to find out if Peron is bluffing or not.’

  Kem had spent the rest of the afternoon memorising the contents of a rather slender file. It contained General Peron’s original announcement and his later disclaimer, a brief biography of the scientist who had claimed to have discovered the new process and a semi-technical appreciation of its implausibility by a committee of British atomic experts who had deliberated on the matter.

  There was also a series of brief reports from two resident agents in the Argentine. These revealed little but the apparently sinister fact that, far from having closed down his atomic experimental station, Peron had in recent months increased it to a great plant that now employed several thousand people. It was situated in a fold in the great plain some ten miles north of Basavilbaso and the whole area had been cordoned off. None of the workers was allowed to go on leave or quit the hutment town that had swiftly grown up round the plant for any other reason. The highest degree of secrecy was maintained about what went on there and permanent camps had been built outside its perimeter to accommodate ample troops to guard the place with strong patrols by day and night. The whole undertaking was under the control of Colonel Estévan Escobar.

  Escobar had started life as an engineer officer and was an old friend of General Peron. Rumour had it that he had made a fortune from the illegal sale of military supplies. In any case he had left the Army at the age of forty to devote himself entirely to his hobby, which was astronomy. He had then spent some years at observatories in both the United States and Germany. The outbreak of war had found him in Berlin, and he had entered the service of the Nazis as one of the scientific advisers to the Luftwaffe. For a time he had been at Peenemünde working on the long-range rocket projects. In February 1945, evidently having decided that the Nazi goose was cooked, he had abandoned his paymasters and returned to the Argentine. He was now fifty-seven.