The political earthquakes which followed in due course were met with determination on the part of the white population of Nagawiland to maintain their own human rights.
In the move of the area from colonial status toward independence, only one man seemed able to keep the conflicting forces in fair balance and prevent his country’s becoming the slaughteryard into which so much of the rest of Africa had been turned. His name was Thomas Liskard, and he was the white Prime Minister of Nagawiland.
On a certain morning in January, Prime Minister Liskard prepared to fly to London for crucial talks with Her Majesty’s government which, it was hoped, would lead to some settlement of Nagawiland’s immediate problems. Nagawiland, being a small country, did not furnish its government officials with private transport planes, so the Prime Minister and his party were driven to the airport of Nagawiland’s capital city to meet a commercial jetliner coming up on a Capetown to London run.
It happened that on the same January morning Simon Templar was driven by taxi to the same airport in order to catch the same plane for London. The unlikely presence of that adventurer — who under his nickname of the Saint was perhaps better known throughout the world than Thomas Liskard himself — in Nagawiland is easily explained. The Saint was there as a tourist. Nagawiland is of course far from ordinary tourist routes, but then Simon Templar was far from an ordinary tourist. He was a man who lived on excitement and constant change. It was his penchant for the former which, diligently indulged from his earliest years, had enabled him to afford the latter. His buccaneering expeditions into the Never-Never Land of lawless men had earned him the fear and hatred of criminals, the grudging respect of police officials, and enough money to travel in the most elegant style anywhere in the world anytime he felt like it.
He had felt like going to Nagawiland for two primary reasons. In the first place, it was one of the few places left where one could see certain African animals in an almost completely natural state. Thanks to Liskard’s predecessors, a hugh preserve had been cordoned off and kept free from poachers. Simon had stayed in the guest house of the game park and thoroughly enjoyed himself for several days, luxuriating in the total absence of pressure. It was fascinating to be able to watch the animals in the park, whose lives were as direct, as cleanly instinctive and sometimes as deadly, as his own had always been.
The second reason for the Saint’s choice of Nagawiland as a place to spend those few days involved a more practical kind of interest. He wanted to see for himself one of those newly emergent countries whose teething troubles provided so much grist for the world’s press mills. Nagawiland had in recent months occupied considerably more space in newsprint than it did in geographical area, and much of the journalistic expanses dedicated to it were thronged with inky armies of reporters and editors marching forth in a sort of new Children’s Crusade against colonialism, restricted suffrage, and Thomas Liskard. Simon Templar, on the other hand, had developed a great admiration for Thomas Liskard, without of course having had any personal contact with him. It seemed to him that Liskard was one of the few politicians in the world who was more interested in the job he was doing for his country than in his own career. His whole life reflected his ability and integrity — and it was in fact his completely unblemished reputation among the British public as well as his own people which gave him his great personal power as a statesman, and which kept his land from catastrophe.
So Simon Templar had a chance, in going to Liskard’s country, not only to relax in the tropics while the world to the north shivered in wintry slush, but also to verify his positive opinions about Nagawiland’s good government. It seemed to him more than ever obvious that — contrary to the strictly liberal, rigidly democratic doctrines expressed in most of the newspapers — it was slightly better that a country be governed well by a few people than that it be governed poorly by a great many.
It was not one of the Saint’s intentions to take a look at Thomas Liskard himself, but the fact that he did see the Prime Minister was no great coincidence. There was only one direct flight to London each week from Nagawiland’s just created jet-sized airfield, so everybody going to London in any given seven-day period would naturally collect at the terminal on the same morning.
The Saint, tall and lean and tanned, in a middleweight blue suit that tried to take into account the fact what while it was 98 degrees Fahrenheit here it would be 42 degrees in London when he got off the plane, gratefully left the sweltering glare of the asphalt drive where his taxi had dropped him, and entered the air-conditioned coolness of the terminal building. The place was not large by European standards, but it was white and clean and new, and it possessed a small restaurant which supplied him a late breakfast
When he came out into the waiting room he immediately noticed an atmosphere of expectancy among the airport personnel and the two dozen or so waiting passengers and their friends. Simon, having read in the papers that the Prime Minister would be traveling on the same flight that he was taking, realized what the anticipation was all about. He stationed himself in a comfortable chair alongside a row of tropical flowers in colorful ceramic pots. There he could have a farewell view of the Nagawiland countryside, get a look at the Prime Minister when he arrived, and read the morning paper in detail.
The front page carried reports of threats against the Prime Minister’s life by “nationalist groups,” and the reassuring news that the jetliner and its passengers would be thoroughly searched for bombs and weapons before Liskard got aboard. The small but vociferous Popular Front party (which amounted to the disloyal opposition to Liskard’s United Reform party, and which took a much more “liberal” line) deplored such extremist excesses as assassination attempts, but sympathized with their motives and called for Liskard’s resignation and “return” of the government to the hands of “the people.”
There are certain species of birds which are said to detect the approach of a hurricane several days before its arrival, and to abandon the threatened area while the air is still mild and sunny. Simon Templar had the same facility for sensing with great precision when some explosive event was about to take place in his presence. Without that sixth sense he would never have survived and prospered as long as he had. In this case he had a distinct feeling that an attempt to kill the Prime Minister would actually be made, and that if it were not made in the capital, or on the road the Prime Minister would be traveling, it would very possibly be here at Nagawiland’s National Airport.
The Saint did not shrug such intuitions off lightly, but at the same time he did not regard himself as an infallible prophet. His premonition — which he was quite ready to laugh off when it proved to be wrong — took a practical form only in that it made him more alert and gave his nerves and muscles a pleasant ready tension.