The Day of the Jackal

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘Please get me Paris, MOLITOR 5901,’ he asked.

  A few minutes later she gestured him to a booth beside the switchboard and watched him close the sound-proof door behind him.

  ‘Alio, ici Chacal.’

  ‘Alio, ici Valmy. Thank God you’ve rung. We’ve been trying to get hold of you for two days.’

  Anyone looking through the glass panel of the booth’s door would have seen the Englishman inside stiffen and frown at the mouthpiece. For most of the ten-minute conversation he remained silent, listening. Occasionally his lips moved as he asked a short, terse question. But nobody was looking; the switchboard operator was busy in a romantic novel. The next thing she saw was the guest towering over her, the dark glasses staring down. From the meter on the switchboard she read off the charge for the call, and was paid.

  The Jackal took a pot of coffee on the terrace looking over the Croisette and the glittering sea where brown bathers romped and screamed. Deep in thought, he drew heavily on a cigarette.

  The bit about Kowalski he could follow; he remembered the hulking Pole from the hotel in Vienna. What he could not follow was how the bodyguard outside the door had known his code-name, or what he had been hired to do. Perhaps the French police had worked that out for themselves. Perhaps Kowalski had sensed what he was, for he also had been a killer, but oafish and clumsy.

  The Jackal took stock. Valmy had advised him to quit and go home, but had admitted he had no direct authority from Rodin to cancel the operation. What had happened confirmed the Jackal’s intense suspicions of the security slackness of the OAS. But he knew something that they did not; and something that the French police could not know. It was that he was travelling under an assumed name with a legitimate passport in that name, and three separate sets of false papers, including two foreign passports and disguises to match, up his sleeve.

  Just what did the French police, this man Valmy had mentioned, Commissaire Lebel, have to go on? A rough description, tall, blond, foreign. There must be thousands of such men staying in France in August. They could not arrest every one.

  The second advantage he had was that the French police were hunting for a man carrying the passport of Charles Calthrop. Then let them, and good luck. He was Alexander Duggan, and could prove it.

  From here on, with Kowalski dead, nobody, not even Rodin and his henchmen, knew who he was or where. He was on his own at last, and that was the way he had always wanted it to be.

  Nevertheless, the dangers had increased, there was no doubt of it. With the idea of an assassination once revealed, he would be attacking a fortress of security that was on its guard. The question was: could his plan for carrying out the killing beat the security screen. On balance, he was confident that it could. The question still remained, and it had to be answered. To go back, or to go on? To go back would be to enter into dispute with Rodin and his bunch of thugs over the ownership of the quarter million dollars presently in his account in Zürich. If he refused to hand the bulk of it back they would not hesitate to track him down, torture him for the signed paper that would release the money from the account, then kill him. To stay ahead of them would cost money, a lot of it, probably the full extent of the money he possessed.

  To go on would mean further dangers until the job was over. It would become ever harder to pull back at the last minute as the day approached.

  The bill came, he glanced at it and winced. God, the prices these people charged! To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have dollars, and dollars and even more dollars. He looked out at the jewelled sea and the lithe brown girls walking along the beach, the hissing Cadillacs and snarling Jaguars that crept along the Croisette, their bronzed young drivers keeping half an eye on the road and the other flicking across the pavements for a likely pick-up. This was what he had wanted for a long time, from the days when he had pressed his nose to the travel agent’s windows and gazed at the posters showing another life, another world, far from the drudgery of the commuter train and the forms in triplicate, the paper clips and tepid tea. Over the past three years he had almost made it; a glimpse here, a touch there. He had got used to good clothes, expensive meals, a smart flat, a sports car, elegant women. To go back meant to give it all up.

  The Jackal paid the bill and left a large tip. He climbed into the Alfa and headed away from the Majestic and into the heart of France.

  Commissaire Lebel was sitting at his desk, feeling as though he had never slept in his life and probably never would again. In the corner Lucien Caron snored loudly on the camp-bed, having been up all night masterminding the search through the records for Charles Calthrop somewhere on the face of France. Lebel had taken over at dawn.

  In front of him now was a growing pile of reports from the various agencies whose task it was to keep check on the presence and whereabouts of foreigners in France. Each one bore the same message. No man of that name had crossed any border point legally since the start of the year, the farthest back the checks had extended. No hotel in the country, either in the provinces or Paris, had taken in a guest of that name, at least, not under that name. He was not on any list of undesirable aliens, nor had he ever come to the notice of the French authorities in any way.

  As each report came in, Lebel wearily told the informant to go on checking further and further back until any visit Calthrop had ever paid to France could be traced. From that, possibly, could be established whether he had a habitual place of residence, a friend’s house, a favourite hotel, where he might even now be masquerading under an assumed name.

  Superintendent Thomas’s call of that morning had come as yet another blow to hopes of an early capture of the elusive killer. Once again the phrase ‘back to square one’ had been used, but fortunately this time it was only between Caron and himself. The members of the evening council had not yet been informed that the Calthrop lead was probably going to prove abortive. This was something he was going to have to tell them that evening at ten o’clock. If he could not produce an alternative name to Calthrop, he could imagine once again the scorn of Saint-Clair and the silent reproach of the rest.

  Two things only could comfort him. One was that at least they now had a description of Calthrop and a photograph of his head and shoulders, full-face to the camera. He had probably changed his appearance considerably if he had taken a false passport, but still, it was better than nothing. The other thing was that no one else on the council could think of anything better to do than what he was doing—check everything.

  Caron had put forward the idea that perhaps the British police had surprised Calthrop while he was away from his flat on an errand in the town; that he had no alternative passport; that he had gone to ground and cried off on the whole operation.

  Lebel had sighed.

  ‘That would indeed be lucky,’ he told his adjutant, ‘but don’t count on it. The British Special Branch reported that all his washing things and shaving tackle were missing from the bathroom, and that he had mentioned to a neighbour that he was going away touring and fishing. If Calthrop left his passport behind, it was because he no longer needed it. Don’t count on this man making too many errors; I’m beginning to get a feeling about the Jackal.’

  The man the police of two countries were now searching for had decided to avoid the agonising congestion of the Grande Corniche on its murderous way from Cannes to Marseilles, and to stay away from the southern part of the RN7 when it turned north out of Marseilles for Paris. Both roads in August he knew to be a refined form of hell on earth.

  Safe in his assumed and documented name of Duggan, he decided to drive leisurely up from the coast through the Alpes Maritimes where the air was cooler in the altitude, and on through the rolling hills of Burgundy. He was in no particular hurry, for the day he had set for his kill was not yet on him, and he knew he had arrived in France slightly ahead of schedule.

  From Cannes he headed due north, taking the RN85 through the picturesque perfume town of Grasse and on towards Castellane where the tu
rbulent Verdon river, tamed by the high dam a few miles upstream, flowed more obediently down from Savoy to join the Durance at Cadarache.

  From here he pushed on to Barréme and the little spa town of Digne. The blazing heat of the Provençal plain had fallen away behind him, and the air of the hills was sweet and cool even in the heat. When he stopped he could feel the sun blazing down, but when motoring the wind was like a cooling shower and smelled of the pines and woodsmoke from the farms.

  After Digne he crossed the Durance and ate lunch in a small but pretty hostelry looking down into the waters. In another hundred miles the Durance would become a grey and slimy snake hissing shallow amid the sun-bleached shingle of its bed at Cavaillon and Plan d’Orgon. But here in the hills it was still a river, the way a river should look, a cool and fishful river with shade along its banks and grass growing all the greener for its presence.

  In the afternoon he followed the long northward curving run of the RN85 through Sisteron, still following the Durance upstream on its left bank until the road forked and the RN85 headed towards the north. As dusk was falling he entered the little town of Gap. He could have gone on towards Grenoble, but decided that as there was no hurry and more chance of finding rooms in August in a small town, he should look around for a country-style hotel. Just out of town he found the brightly gabled Hôtel du Cerf, formerly a hunting lodge of one of the Dukes of Savoy, and still retaining an air of rustic comfort and good food.

  There were several rooms still vacant. He had a leisurely bath, a break with his usual habit of showering, and dressed in his dove-grey suit with a silk shirt and knitted tie, while the room-maid, after receiving several winning smiles, had blush-fully agreed to sponge and press the check suit he had worn all day so that he could have it back by morning.

  The evening meal was taken in a panelled room overlooking a sweep of the wooded hillside, loud with the chatter of cicadas among the pinèdes. The air was warm and it was only halfway through the meal when one of the women diners, who wore a sleeveless dress and a decolleté, commented to the maître d’hôtel that a chill had entered the air that the windows were closed.

  The Jackal turned round when he was asked if he objected to the window next to which he sat being closed, and glanced at the woman indicated by the maître as the person who had asked that they be shut. She was dining alone, a handsome woman in her late thirties with soft white arms and a deep bosom. The Jackal nodded to the maître to close the windows, and gave a slight inclination of the head to the woman behind him. She answered with a cool smile.

  The meal was magnificent. He chose speckled river trout grilled on a wood fire, and tournedos broiled over charcoal with fennel and thyme. The wine was a local Côtes du Rhône, full, rich and in a bottle with no label. It had evidently come from the barrel in the cellar, the proprietor’s personal choice for his vin de la maison. Most of the diners were having it, and with reason.

  As he finished his sorbet he heard the low and authoritative voice of the woman behind him telling the maître that she would take her coffee in the residents’ lounge, and the man bowed and addressed her as ‘Madame la Baronne’. A few minutes later the Jackal had also ordered his coffee in the lounge, and headed that way.

  The call from Somerset House came for Superintendent Thomas at a quarter past ten. He was sitting by the open window of the office staring down into the now silent street where no restaurants beckoned late diners and drivers into the area. The offices between Millbank and Smith Square were silent hulks, lightless, blind, uncaring. Only in the anonymous block that housed the offices of the Special Branch did the lights burn late as always.

  A mile away, in the bustling Strand, the lights were also burning late in the section of Somerset House that housed the death certificates of millions of Britain’s deceased citizens. Here Thomas’s team of six detective sergeants and two inspectors were hunched over their piles of paper work, rising every few minutes to accompany one of the staff clerks, kept back at work long after the others had gone home, down the rows of gleaming files to check on yet another name.

  It was the senior inspector in charge of the team who rang. His voice was tired, but with a touch of optimism, a man hoping that what he had to say would get them all released from the grind of checking hundreds of death certificates that did not exist because the passport holders were not dead.

  ‘Alexander James Quentin Duggan,’ he announced briefly, after Thomas had answered.

  ‘What about him?’ said Thomas.

  ‘Born April 3rd, 1929, in Sambourne Fishley, in the parish of St Mark’s. Applied for a passport in the normal way on the normal form on July 14th this year. Passport issued the following day and mailed July 17th to the address on the application form. It will probably turn out to be an accommodation address.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Thomas. He disliked being kept waiting.

  ‘Because Alexander James Quentin Duggan was killed in a road accident in his home village at the age of two and a half, on November 8th, 1931.’

  Thomas thought for a moment.

  ‘How many more of the passports issued in the last hundred days remain to be checked?’ he asked.

  ‘About three hundred to go,’ said the voice on the phone.

  ‘Leave the others to continue checking the remainder, just in case there is another phoney among the bunch,’ instructed Thomas. ‘Hand over the team leadership to the other fellow. I want you to check out that address to which the passport was sent. Report back to me by phone the moment you have found it. If it’s an occupied premises, interview the householder. Bring me back the full details on the phoney Duggan, and the file copy of the photograph he submitted with the application form. I want to have a look at this lad Calthrop in his new disguise.’

  It was just before eleven that the senior inspector phoned back in. The address in question was a small tobacconist and newsagent shop in Paddington, the kind that had a window full of cards advertising the addresses of prostitutes. The owner, living above the shop, had been roused and had agreed he often took in mail for customers who had no fixed address. He made a charge for his services. He could not remember a regular customer named Duggan, but it could have been that Duggan only called twice, once to arrange for his mail to be received there, the second time to pick up the one envelope that he was waiting for. The inspector had showed the newsagent a photograph of Calthrop, but the man could not recognise him. He also showed him the photograph of Duggan on the application form, and the man said he thought he remembered the second man, but could not be sure. He felt the man might have worn dark glasses. Many of those who came into his shop to buy the erotic pin-up magazines displayed behind the counter wore dark glasses.

  ‘Bring him in,’ ordered Thomas, ‘and get back here yourself.’ Then he picked up the phone and asked for Paris.

  A second time, the call came halfway through the evening conference. Commissaire Lebel had explained that beyond a doubt Calthrop was not inside France under his own name, unless he had smuggled himself into the country in a fishing boat or across one of the land borders at an isolated spot. He personally did not think a professional would do that, because at any subsequent spot check by the police he could be caught for not having his papers in order, that is, having no entry stamp on his passport.

  Nor had any Charles Calthrop checked into any French hotel in his own name.

  These facts were corroborated by the head of the Central Records office, the head of the DST and the Prefect of Police of Paris, so they were not disputed.

  The two alternatives, argued Lebel, were that the man had not made any provision for obtaining a false passport, and had thought he was unsuspected. In that case, the police raid on his flat in London must have caught him short. He explained that he did not believe this, as Superintendent Thomas’s men had found gaps in the wardrobe and half-empty clothes drawers, and absence of washing accoutrements and shaving tackle, indicating that the man had left his London flat for a planned absence elsewhere. Thi
s was borne out by a neighbour, who reported Calthrop as having said he was going touring by car in Scotland. Neither the British nor the French police had any reason to believe this was true.

  The second alternative was that Calthrop had acquired a false passport, and this was what the British police were presently searching for. In that event, he might either still not be in France, but at some other place completing his preparations, or he might already have entered France unsuspected.

  It was at this point that several of the conference members exploded.

  ‘You mean he might be here, in France, even in the centre of Paris?’ expostulated Alexandre Sanguinetti.

  ‘The point is,’ explained Lebel, ‘that he has got his timetable, and only he knows it. We have been investigating for seventy-two hours. We have no way of knowing at which point in the man’s timetable we have intervened. The one thing we can be sure of is, that apart from knowing we are aware of the existence of a plot to assassinate the President, the killer cannot know what progress we have made. Therefore we stand a reasonable chance of apprehending an unsuspecting man, as soon as we have him identified under his new name, and located under that name.’

  But the meeting refused to be mollified. The thought that the killer might even then be within a mile of them, and that in that man’s timetable the attempt on the life of the President might be for tomorrow, caused each of them acute anxiety.

  ‘It could be, of course,’ mused Colonel Rolland, ‘that having learned from Rodin, through the unknown agent Valmy, that the plan was exposed in principle, that Calthrop then left his flat to dispose of the evidence of his preparations. His gun and ammunition, for example, could even now be tipped into a lake in Scotland, so that he can present himself to his own police on his return as clean as a whistle. In that event it would be very difficult to bring charges.’