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country’s future.
    Conway saw a good deal of Leanda during the five days’ wait, and his admiration for her steadily increased. She was intense where Spyros was concerned, and very single-minded, but she wasn’t in the least strident. Having made her position plain, she showed no tendency to dwell on her country’s wrongs, and any fear Conway might have had that he’d have to listen to a lot of tedious harangues proved quite unfounded. Her main interest now, like his own, appeared to be a practical one. He managed to find out a little more about her—that her father had been a well-to-do businessman with a cosmopolitan background and no politics; that she had been educated at an English school in Switzerland , which accounted for her lack of a Spyros accent; that both her parents were now dead. But she talked about her personal life only when he questioned her, and then briefly. Their relationship was that of a working partnership, and Leanda clearly meant to keep it that way.
    By the sixth day, all was ready, and they flew off to Paris with a stack of brand-new luggage appropriate to a young couple who had recently married, and a credit in Conway ’s bank totaling nearly fifteen hundred pounds. In Paris they made the notional change-over to the married state and picked up two United Kingdom passports from an address that Metaxas had given them. One, a rather battered one, was in the name of Michael Cornford, gentleman, born in Belfast, with a photograph—skillfully made to look old —that Conway had had taken in St.-Jean-de-Luz for the purposes of the forgery. The other was new and shiny, the property of Leanda Cornford, nee Owen, born in Bangor , Wales . The Welsh touch had been Conway ’s idea—it might help to explain, he thought, Leanda’s distinctly exotic type of loveliness. Both passports were stamped with a false entry into France via Calais a fortnight before. Both were works of art. Conway hoped they would also prove serviceable, since he was now committed for the first time in his life to a considerable illegality. It was all very well for Leanda, he said teasingly, as they took off from Paris on the Kenya flight—she was already an old lag! But he felt no real anxiety—their front was a good one. Who would be suspicious of a young, wealthy, and highly presentable couple who were flying to Mombasa to look at a yacht they’d seen advertised, with the idea of spending the bleak English winter cruising under romantic tropic skies? “ All the world loves a lover,” Conway said. Leanda had learned to smile at cracks like that. She didn’t really approve of his tendency to mock, any more than she approved of his blatant mercenariness, but as long as he got on with the job she didn’t mind.
    They changed planes at Nairobi and reached Mombasa in the evening of the second day. There they drove to the Ambassadors, a five-star hotel on Prince Charles Street where an elegant suite had been reserved for them. Only one of the rooms was equipped as a bedroom, but the suite was spacious—much more spacious, Conway said with a grin, than Thalia would be! He found the unusual situation amusing and intriguing. Leanda, as she had said she would, took it completely in her stride. Her public attitude had been affectionate; now that they were alone together she was coolly businesslike and detached. Conway was much more aware of her physically than she was of him. As he climbed into one of the twin beds, he was reminded of those matter-of-fact young women whom agencies provide to spend innocent nights with prospective divorcees. Any kind of pass would have seemed a breach of taste, as well as of contract. In fact, they both slept well in the deep privacy of mosquito nets.
    First thing in the morning Conway telephoned their contact, Ionides, who ran the Transport and General Mercantile Company in Mombasa . The agent said he’d come straight over, and he turned up in a Cadillac just after ten, smoking a huge cigar. He