Anatomy of a manhunt 2 страница

Half an hour later Colonel Raoul Saint-Clair de Villauban lay asleep, face half-buried in the pillow, snoring gently from his exertions. Beside him his mistress lay staring up through the darkness at the ceiling, dimly lit where the lights from the street outside filtered through a tiny crack where the curtains joined.

What she had learned had left her aghast. Although she had had no previous knowledge of any such plot she could work out for herself the importance of Kowalski’s confession.

She waited in silence until the bedside clock with the luminous dial registered two in the morning. Easing herself out of the bed, she slid the plug of the bedroom telephone extension out of its socket.

Before walking to the door she bent over the Colonel, and was grateful he was not the sort of man who liked to sleep in embrace with his bedmate. He was still snoring.

Outside the bedroom she quietly closed the door, crossed the sitting-room towards the hall and closed that door after her. From the phone on the hall table she dialled a Molitor number. There was a wait of several minutes until a sleepy voice answered. She spoke rapidly for two minutes, received an acknowledgment and hung up. A minute later she was back in bed, trying to get to sleep.

Throughout the night crime chiefs of the police forces of five European countries, America and South Africa were being woken with long-distance calls from Paris. Most of them were irritated and sleepy. In Western Europe the time was the same as Paris, the small hours of the morning. In Washington the time was nine in the evening when the call from Paris came through, and the chief of FBI Homicide was at a dinner party. It was only at the third attempt that Caron could get him, and then their conversation was marred by the chatter of guests and the clink of glasses from the next room where the party was in progress. But he got the message and agreed to be in the communications room of the FBI headquarters at two in the morning, Washington time, to take a call from Commissaire Lebel who would be ringing him from Interpol at 8 a.m. Paris time.

The crime chiefs of the Belgian, Italian, German and Dutch police were all apparently good family men; each was awoken in turn and after listening to Caron for a few minutes agreed to be in their communications rooms at the times Caron suggested to take a person-to-person call from Lebel on a matter of great urgency.

Van Ruys of South Africa was out of town and would not be able to get back to headquarters by sunrise, so Caron spoke to Anderson, his deputy. Lebel, when he heard, was not displeased for he knew Anderson fairly well, but Van Ruys not at all. Besides, he suspected Van Ruys was more of a political appointment while Anderson had once been a constable on the beat like himself.

The call reached Mr Anthony Mallinson, Assistant Commissioner Crime for Scotland Yard, in his home at Bexley shortly before four. He growled in protest at the insistent clanging of the bell beside his bed, reached out for the mouth-piece and muttered ‘Mallinson’.

‘Mr Anthony Mallinson?’ asked a voice.

‘Speaking.’ He shrugged to clear the bedclothes from his shoulders, and glanced at his watch.

‘My name is Inspector Lucien Caron, of the French Sûreté Nationale. I am ringing on behalf of Commissaire Claude Lebel.’

The voice, speaking good but strongly accented English, was coming over clearly. Obviously line traffic at that hour was light. Mallinson frowned. Why couldn’t the blighters call at a civilized hour?

‘Yes.’

‘I believe you know Commissaire Lebel, perhaps, Mr Mallinson.’

Mallinson thought for a moment. Lebel? Oh, yes, little fellow, had been head of Homicide in the PJ. Didn’t look much but he got results. Been damn helpful over that murdered English tourist two years back. Could have been nasty in the Press if they hadn’t caught the killer in double-quick time.

‘Yes, I know Commissaire Lebel,’ he said down the phone. ‘What’s it about?’

Beside him his wife Lily, disturbed by the talking, grumbled in her sleep.

‘There is a matter of very considerable urgency, which also requires a great degree of discretion, that has cropped up. I am assisting Commissaire Lebel on the case. It is a most unusual case. The Commissaire would like to place a person-to-person call to you in your communications room at the Yard this morning at nine o’clock. Could you please be present to take the call?’

Mallinson thought for a moment.

‘Is this a routine inquiry between co-operating police forces?’ he asked. If it were they could use the routine Interpol network. Nine o’clock was a busy time at the Yard.

‘No, Mr Mallinson, it is not. It is a question of a personal request by the Commissaire to you for a little discreet assistance. It may be there is nothing that affects Scotland Yard in the matter that has come up. Most probably so. If that is the case, it would be better if there were no formal request placed.’

Mallinson thought it over. He was by nature a cautious man and had no wish to be involved in clandestine inquiries from a foreign police force. If a crime had been committed, or a criminal had fled to Britain, that was another matter. In that case why the secrecy? Then he remembered a case years ago where he had been sent out to find and bring back the daughter of a Cabinet Minister who had gone astray with a handsome young devil. The girl had been a minor, so charges of removing the child from parental authority could have been brought. A bit marginal. But the Minister had wanted the whole thing done without a murmur reaching the Press. The Italian police had been very helpful when the couple was found at Verona playing Romeo and Juliet. All right, so Lebel wanted a bit of help on the Old Boy network. That was what Old Boy networks were for.

‘All right, I’ll take the call. Nine o’clock.’

‘Thank you so much, Mr Mallinson.’

‘Good night.’ Mallinson replaced the receiver, re-set the alarm clock for six-thirty instead of seven, and went back to sleep.

In a small and fusty bachelor flat, while Paris slept towards the dawn, a middle-aged schoolmaster paced up and down the floor of a cramped bedsitter. The scene around him was chaotic: books, newspapers, magazines and manuscripts lay scattered over the table, chairs and sofa, and even on the coverlet of the narrow bed set into its alcove on the far side of the room. In another alcove a sink overflowed with unwashed crockery.

What obsessed his thoughts in his nocturnal pacings was not the untidy state of his room, for since his removal from his post as headmaster of a Lycée at Sidi-bel-Abbes and the loss of the fine house with two manservants that went with it, he had learned to live as he now did. His problem lay elsewhere.

As dawn was breaking over the eastern suburbs, he sat down finally and picked up one of the papers. His eye ran yet again down the second lead story on the foreign news page. It was headlined: ‘OAS Chiefs Holed Up in Rome Hotel.’ After reading it for the last time he made up his mind, threw on a light mackintosh against the chill of the morning, and left the flat.

He caught a cruising taxi on the nearest boulevard and ordered the driver to take him to the Gare du Nord. Although the taxi dropped him in the forecourt, he walked away from the station as soon as the taxi had left, crossed the road and entered one of the all-night cafés of the area.

He ordered a coffee and a metal disc for the telephone, left the coffee on the counter and went into the back of the café to dial. Directory Enquiries put him on to the International Exchange and he asked them the number of a hotel in Rome. He got it within sixty seconds, replaced the receiver and left.

At a café a hundred metres down the street he again used the phone, this time to ask Enquiries for the location of the nearest all-night post office from which international calls could be placed. He was told, as he had expected, that there was one round the corner from the mainline station.

At the post office he placed a call to the Rome number he had been given, without naming the hotel represented by the number, and spent an anxious twenty minutes waiting until it came through.

‘I wish to speak to Signor Poitiers,’ he told the Italian voice that answered.

‘ Signor Che? ’ asked the voice.

‘Il Signor francesi. Poitiers. Poitiers...’

‘ Che? ’ repeated the voice.

‘ Francesi, francesi...’ said the man in Paris.

‘ Ah, si, il signor francesi. Momento, per favore...’

There was a series of clicks, then a tired voice answered in French.

‘Ouay...’

‘Listen,’ said the man in Paris urgently. ‘I don’t have much time. Take a pencil and note what I say. Begins. “Valmy to Poitiers. The Jackal is blown. Repeat. The Jackal is blown. Kowalski was taken. Sang before dying. Ends.” Got that?’

‘ Ouay,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll pass it on.’

Valmy replaced the receiver, hurriedly paid his bill and scurried out of the building. In a minute he was lost in the crowds of commuters streaming out of the main hall of the station. The sun was over the horizon, warming the pavements and the chill night air. Within half an hour the smell of morning and croissants and grinding coffee would vanish beneath the pall of exhaust fumes, body odour and stale tobacco. Two minutes after Valmy had disappeared a car drew up outside the post office and two men from the DST hurried inside. They took a description from the switchboard operator, but it could have described anybody.

In Rome Marc Rodin was awakened at 7.55 when the man who had spent the night on the duty desk on the floor below shook him by the shoulder. He was awake in an instant, half out of bed, hand groping for the gun under his pillow. He relaxed and grunted when he saw the face of the exlegionnaire above him. A glance at the bedside table told him he had overslept anyway. After years in the tropics his habitual waking hour was much earlier, and the August sun of Rome was already high above the roofs. But weeks of inactivity, passing the evening hours playing piquet with Montclair and Casson, drinking too much rough red wine, taking no exercise worth the name, all had combined to make him slack and sleepy.

‘A message, mon colonel. Someone phoned just now, seemed in a hurry.’

The legionnaire proffered a sheet from a note pad on which were scribbled the disjointed phrases of Valmy. Rodin read through the message once, then leapt out of the thinly sheeted bed. He wrapped the cotton sarong he habitually wore, a habit from the East, round his waist, and read the message again.

‘All right. Dismiss.’ The legionnaire left the room and went back downstairs.

Rodin swore silently and intensely for several seconds, crumpling the piece of paper in his hands. Damn, damn, damn, damn Kowalski.

For the first two days after Kowalski’s disappearance he had thought the man had simply deserted. There had been several defections of late from the cause, as the conviction set in among the rank and file that the OAS had failed and would fail in its aim of killing Charles de Gaulle and bringing down the present Government of France. But Kowalski he had always thought would remain loyal to the last.

And here was evidence that he had for some inexplicable reason returned to France, or perhaps been picked up inside Italy and abducted. Now it seemed he had talked, under pressure of course.

Rodin genuinely grieved his dead servitor. Part of the considerable reputation he had built up as a fighting soldier and commanding officer had been based on the enormous concern he showed for his men. These things are appreciated by fighting soldiers more than any military theorist can ever imagine. Now Kowalski was dead, and Rodin had few illusions of the manner of his passing.

Still, the important thing was to try to recollect just what Kowalski had had to tell. The meeting in Vienna, the name of the hotel. Of course, all of that. The three men who had been at the meeting. This would be no news to the SDECE. But what did he know about the Jackal? He had not been listening at the door, that was certain. He could tell them of a tall blond foreigner who had visited the three of them. That in itself meant nothing. Such a foreigner could have been an arms dealer, or a financial backer. There had been no names mentioned.

But Valmy’s message mentioned the Jackal by his code-name. How? How could Kowalski have told them that?

With a start of horror Rodin recalled the scene as they had parted. He had stood in the doorway with the Englishman; Viktor had been a few feet down the corridor, annoyed at the way the Englishman had spotted him in the alcove, a professional outmanoeuvred by another professional, waiting for trouble, almost hoping for it. What had he, Rodin said? ‘ Bonsoir, Mr Jackal.’ Of course, damn and blast it.

Thinking things over again, Rodin realized that Kowalski could never have got the killer’s real name. Only he, Montclair and Casson knew that. All the same, Valmy was right. With Kowalski’s confession in the hands of the SDECE, it was too far blown to be retrievable. They had the meeting, the hotel, probably they had already talked to the desk clerk; they had the face and figure of a man, a code-name. There could be no doubt they would guess what Kowalski had guessed – that the blond was a killer. From then on the net around De Gaulle would tighten; he would abandon all public engagements, all exits from his palace, all chances for an assassin to get him. It was over; the operation was blown. He would have to call off the Jackal, insist on the money back, minus all expenses and a retainer for the time and trouble involved.

There was one thing to be settled, and quickly. The Jackal himself must be warned urgently to halt operations. Rodin was still enough of a commanding officer not to send a man out on his orders on a mission for which success had become impossible.

He summoned the bodyguard to whom, since the departure of Kowalski, he had given the duties of going every day to the main post office to collect the mail and, if necessary, make telephone calls, and briefed him at length.

By nine o’clock the bodyguard was in the post office and asked for a telephone number in London. It took twenty minutes before the telephone at the other end began to ring. The switchboard operator gestured the Frenchman to a cabin to take the call. He picked up the receiver as the operator put hers down, and listened to the bzzz-bzzz... pause... bzzz-bzzz of an English telephone ringing.

The Jackal rose early that morning, for he had much to do. The three main suitcases he had checked and re-packed the previous evening. Only the hand-grip remained to be topped up with his sponge bag and shaving tackle. He drank his habitual two cups of coffee, washed, showered and shaved. After packing the remainder of the overnight toiletries he closed up the hand luggage and stored all four pieces by the door.

He made himself a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, orange juice and more black coffee in the flat’s small but compact kitchen, and ate it off the kitchen table. Being a tidy and methodical man he emptied the last of the milk down the sink, broke the two remaining eggs and poured them also down the sink. The remainder of the orange juice he drank off, junked the can in the trash basket and the remainder of the bread, egg shells and coffee grounds went down the disposal unit. Nothing left would be likely to go rotten during his absence.

Finally he dressed, choosing a thin silk polo-necked sweater, the dove-grey suit containing the private papers in the name of Duggan, and the hundred pounds in cash, dark grey socks and slim black moccasin shoes. The ensemble was completed by the inevitable dark glasses.

At nine-fifteen he took his luggage, two pieces in each hand, closed the self-locking flat door behind him and went downstairs. It was a short walk to South Audley Street and he caught a taxi on the corner.

‘London Airport, Number Two Building,’ he told the driver.

As the taxi moved away, the phone in his flat began to ring.

It was ten o’clock when the legionnaire returned to the hotel off the Via Condotti and told Rodin he had tried for thirty minutes to get a reply from the London number he had been given, but had not succeeded.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Casson, who had heard the explanation given to Rodin and seen the legionnaire dismissed to return to his guard duties. The three OAS chiefs were sitting in the drawing-room of their suite. Rodin withdrew a piece of paper from his inside pocket and passed it over to Casson.

Casson read it and passed it to Montclair. Both men finally looked at their leader for an answer. There was none. Rodin sat staring out of the windows across the baking roofs of Rome, brow furrowed in thought.

‘When did it come?’ asked Casson eventually.

‘This morning,’ replied Rodin briefly.

‘You’ve got to stop him,’ protested Montclair. ‘They’ll have half France on the lookout for him.’

‘They’ll have half of France on the lookout for a tall blond foreigner,’ said Rodin quietly. ‘In August there are over one million foreigners in France. So far as we know they have no name to go on, no face, no passport. Being a professional he is probably using a false passport. They still have a long way to go to get him yet. There’s a good chance he will be forewarned if he rings Valmy, and then he’ll be able to get out again.’

‘If he rings Valmy he will, of course, be ordered to drop the operation,’ said Montclair. ‘Valmy will order him.’

Rodin shook his head.

‘Valmy does not have the authority to do that. His orders are to receive information from the girl and pass it on to the Jackal when he is telephoned. He will do that, but nothing else.’

‘But the Jackal must realize of his own accord that it is all over,’ protested Montclair. ‘He must get out of France as soon as he rings Valmy the first time.’

‘In theory, yes,’ said Rodin thoughtfully. ‘If he does he hands back the money. There’s a lot at stake, for all of us, including him. It depends how confident he feels of his own planning.’

‘Do you think he has a chance now... now that this has happened?’ asked Casson.

‘Frankly, no,’ said Rodin. ‘But he is a professional. So am I, in my way. It is a frame of mind. One does not like to stand down an operation one has planned personally.’

‘Then for God’s sake recall him,’ protested Casson.

‘I can’t. I would if I could, but I can’t. He’s gone. He’s on his way. He wanted it this way and now he’s got it. We don’t know where he is or what he is going to do. He’s completely on his own. I can’t even call up Valmy and order him to instruct the Jackal to drop the whole thing. To do so would risk “blowing” Valmy. Nobody can stop the Jackal now. It’s too late.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Commissaire Claude Lebel arrived back in his office just before six in the morning to find Inspector Caron looking tired and strained, in shirt-sleeves at his desk.

He had several sheets of foolscap paper in front of him covered with handwritten notes. In the office some things had changed. On top of the filing cabinets an electric coffee percolator bubbled, sending out a delicious aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Next to it stood a pile of paper cups, a tin of unsweetened milk and a bag of sugar. These had come up from the basement canteen during the night.

In the corner between the two desks a single truckle bed had been set up, covered with a rough blanket. The wastepaper basket had been emptied and stored next to the armchair by the door.

The window was open still, a faint haze of blue smoke from Caron’s cigarettes drifting out into the cool morning. Beyond the window the first flecks of the coming day mottled the spire of St Sulpice.

Lebel crossed to his desk and slumped into the chair. Although it was only twenty-four hours since he had woken from his last sleep he looked tired, like Caron.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been through the lot over the past ten years. The only foreign political killer who ever tried to operate here was Degueldre, and he’s dead. Besides, he was OAS and we had him on file as such. Presumably Rodin has chosen a man who has nothing to do with the OAS, and he’s quite right. There were only four contract-hire killers who tried it in France over the past ten years – apart from the home-grown variety – and we got three. The fourth is serving a lifer in Africa somewhere. Besides, they were all gangland killers, not of the calibre to shoot down a President of France.

‘I got on to Bargeron of Central Records and they’re doing a complete double-check, but I suspect already that we don’t have this man on file. Rodin would in any case insist on that before hiring him.’

Caron lit up another Gaulloise, blew out the smoke and sighed.

‘So we have to start from the foreign end?’

‘Precisely. A man of this type must have got his training and experience somewhere. He wouldn’t be one of the world’s tops unless he could prove it with a string of successful jobs behind him. Not presidents perhaps, but important men, bigger than mere underworld caïds. That means he must have come to someone’s attention somewhere. Surely. What have you arranged?’

Caron picked up one of the sheets of paper, showing a list of names with, in the left-hand column, a series of timings.

‘The seven are all fixed,’ he said. ‘You start with Head of the Office of Domestic Intelligence at ten past seven. That’s ten past one in the morning Washington time. I fitted him in first because of the lateness of the hour in America.

‘Then Brussels at half past seven, Amsterdam at quarter to eight and Bonn at eight-ten. The link is arranged with Johannesburg at eight-thirty and with Scotland Yard at nine. Lastly there is Rome at nine-thirty.’

‘The heads of Homicide in each case?’ asked Lebel.

‘Or the equivalent. With Scotland Yard it’s Mr Anthony Mallinson, Assistant Commissioner Crime. It seems they don’t have a homicide section in the Metropolitan Police. Apart from that, yes, except South Africa. I couldn’t get Van Ruys at all, so you’re talking to Assistant Commissioner Anderson.’

Lebel thought for a moment.

‘That’s fine. I’d prefer Anderson. We worked on a case once. There’s the question of language. Three of them speak English. I suppose only the Belgian speaks French. The others almost certainly can speak English if they have to...’

‘The German, Dietrich, speaks French,’ interjected Caron.

‘Good, then I’ll speak to those two in French personally. For the other five I’ll have to have you on the extension as interpreter. We’d better go. Come on.’

It was ten to seven when the police car carrying the two detectives drew up outside the innocent green door in the tiny Rue Paul Valéry which housed the headquarters of Interpol at that time.

For the next three hours Lebel and Caron sat hunched over the telephone in the basement communications room talking to the world’s top crime busters. From the seemingly tangled porcupine of aerials on the roof of the building the high-frequency signals beamed out across three continents, streaming high beyond the stratosphere to bounce off the ionic layer above and home back to earth thousands of miles away to another stick of aluminium jutting from a tiled rooftop.

The wavelengths and scramblers were uninterceptable. Detective spoke to detective while the world drank its morning coffee or final nightcap.

In each telephone conversation Lebel’s appeal was much the same.

‘No, Commissioner, I cannot yet put this request for your assistance on the level of an official enquiry between our two police forces... certainly I am acting in an official capacity... It is simply that for the moment we are just not sure if even the intent to commit an offence has been formulated or put into the preparation stage... It’s a question of a tip-off, purely routine for the moment... Well, we are looking for a man about whom we know extremely little... not even a name, and only a poor description...’

In each case he gave the description as best he knew it. The sting came in the tail, as each of his foreign colleagues asked why their help was being sought, and what clues they could possibly go on. It was at that point that the other end of the line became tensely silent.

‘Simply this; that whoever this man is or may be, he must have one qualification that marks him out... he would have to be one of the world’s top professional contract-hire assassins... no, not a gangland trigger, a political assassin with several successful kills behind him. We would be interested to know if you have anybody like that on your files, even if he has never operated in your own country. Or anybody that even springs to mind.’

Inevitably there was a long pause at the other end before the voice resumed. Then it was quieter, more concerned.

Lebel had no illusions that the heads of the Homicide departments of the major police forces of the Western world would fail to understand what he was hinting at but could not say. There was only one target in France that could interest a first-league political killer.

Without exception the reply was the same. ‘Yes, of course. We’ll go through all the files for you. I’ll try and get back to you before the day is out. Oh, and, Claude, good luck.’

When he put down the radio-telephone receiver for the last time, Lebel wondered how long it would be before the Foreign Ministers and even Prime Ministers of the seven countries would be aware of what was on. Probably not long. Even a policeman had to report to the politicians something of that size. He was fairly certain the Ministers would keep quiet about it. There was, after all, a strong bond over and above political differences between the men of power the world over. They were all members of the same club, the club of the potentates. They stuck together against common enemies, and what could be more inimical to any of them than the activities of a political assassin? He was aware all the same that if the enquiry did become public knowledge and reached the Press, it would be blasted across the world and he would be finished.

The only people who did worry him were the English. If it could only be kept between cops, he would have trusted Mallinson.

But he knew that before the day was out it would have to go higher than Mallinson. It was only seven months since Charles de Gaulle had brusquely rebuffed Britain from the Common Market, and in the wake of the General’s 14th January press conference the London Foreign Office, as even so apolitical a creature as Lebel was aware, had become almost lyrical in its campaign of words planted through the political correspondents against the French President. Would they now use this to get their revenge on the old man?

Lebel stared for a moment at the now silent transmitter panel in front of him. Caron watched him quietly.

‘Come on,’ said the little Commissaire, rising from the stool and heading for the door, ‘let’s get some breakfast and try to get some sleep. There’s not much more we can do now.’

Assistant Commissioner Anthony Mallinson put down the telephone with a thoughtful frown and left the communications room without acknowledging the salute of the young policeman who was entering to take up his morning shift. He was still frowning as he went back upstairs to his spacious but soberly appointed office overlooking the Thames.

There was no doubt in his mind what kind of enquiry Lebel had been making, nor of his motives for making it. The French police had got some kind of a tip-off that a top-class assassin was on the loose, and that it affected them. As Lebel had predicted to himself, it took very little acumen to work out who could be the only possible target in France in August 1963 for that kind of killer. He considered Lebel’s predicament with the knowledge of a long-time policeman.

‘Poor bastard,’ he said aloud as he stared down at the warm and sluggish river flowing past the Embankment beneath his window.

‘Sir?’ asked his personal aide, who had followed him into the office to put the morning mail that needed his attention on the walnut desk.

‘Nothing.’ Mallinson continued to stare out of the window as the PA left. However he might feel for Claude Lebel in his task of trying to protect his president without being able to launch an official manhunt, he too had masters. Sooner or later they would have to be told of Lebel’s request to him that morning. There was the daily heads-of-department conference at ten, in half an hour’s time. Should he mention it there?

On the balance he decided not to. It would be enough to write a formal but private memorandum to the Commissioner himself, outlining the nature of Lebel’s request. The necessity for discretion would explain later, if necessary, why the matter had not been raised at the morning meeting. In the meantime it would do no harm to put through the enquiry without revealing why it was being made.

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