A Hero for Leanda

along together for a bit.”
    Her eyes opened wide. “You mean we are to go along together?”
    “We’ll go to Mombasa , anyway,” Conway said, “and see what happens.”
    “That was a remarkably quick decision.”
    “Well, you’re rather a remarkable woman,” Conway said. It took five days for the initial arrangements to be made. In that time, Conway and Leanda paid several secret visits to the anchored steam yacht after dark. Metaxas, exuberantly pleased at Conway ’s decision, threw himself eagerly into the preliminary planning. The details, he agreed, would have to be settled by Conway in Mombasa , but he hoped to get a steady flow of coded information from there through his agent, a man named Ionides, with whom Conway would be working. He still tended to talk of the prospective expedition as though it were a rather glamorous adventure, but there was no denying his shrewd grasp of all the practical questions involved. He was, Conway could see, a brilliant organizer of immense energy, and his pleasure at being able to use his talents in an active way on behalf of Spyros was unmistakable. Until now, Conway suspected, he had been little more in the politics of his country than a keen and well-meaning amateur, naively pretending to himself that he was at the heart of the struggle when in fact he was out of touch and operating in a wordy vacuum of his own on the periphery. Now, beyond any doubt, he was doing something that could have a tremendous effect on his 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