A small-time
confidence trickster on the run stumbles across a sinister organisation, based at a
manor house in the
Cotswolds, who are using a high-class
clinic as a front for their more dishonest activities. About to be killed by them, he manages to turn the tables, steal their
formula and make an escape. Pursued by his ruthless adversaries, he manages to reach
Oxford and stash the stolen formula in the
Bodleian Library before he is recaptured. Coincidentally Appleby is also in the city, called in by his younger sister Jane to find her
fiancée, an undergraduate who is gone missing. It turns out that he has vanished in the vicinity of the manor house, as has a refugee Austrian
doctor and her young son. Only when Jane penetrates the clinic does she discover the full extent of the scheme. What the confidence trickster had thought was an
alchemist's operation to produce
gold or at the very least forged
five pound notes is in fact the development of a
brainwashing technique that destroys any sense of human independence or resistance. The scheme is codenamed Operation Pax. ==References==