by Lex Lander
With the gun cradled in his arms, and the hammer with its padded head and a couple of six-inch nails in his pocket he advanced cautiously to within three metres of the edge of the trees. From here he had a clear field of fire yet would still be deep enough in the copse to stay undetected. He hammered a nail about four centimetres deep into a tree trunk, at shoulder height. Using the nail as a rest for the gun barrel, he adopted a firing stance. The scope came naturally to his eye. He swept the sky, like an anti-aircraft gunner searching for bombers. Imitated sotto voce the tacka-tacka-tacka of a machinegun. Suddenly felt self-conscious, and shook his head sheepishly.
He was ready. He stood the Barrett against the tree.
Eleven o’clock. A helicopter showed up, swooping over and, for the first time, alongside the copses, skimming the ground. Lux retreated a good twenty metres into the trees and was spread-eagled on the ground when the machine flew past at walking pace. No reason for its crew of two to suspect the copse concealed a prospective assassin. After all, it had been combed before dark the previous evening, since when the estate had been sealed tighter than a pharaoh’s tomb. Nobody had entered who hadn’t been accounted for.
Satisfied, the helicopter went away, the crew complacent in the certainty that the estate was impenetrable. Perhaps they forgot that the tombs of the pharaohs had not proved quite as impenetrable as their architects intended.
Lux fetched his provisions and resumed his firing position. Squatting, his back supported by a tree, he drank water, nibbled at an apple. It was coming up to 11.30 and the heat was beginning to seriously bother him when a flurry of movement down at the house drew his attention. A stream of men, mostly plain-clothes but interspersed with a few uniformed CRS, spilled from the front entrance to join the dozen or so already outside. Through the binoculars Lux sought out Barail, but in vain. The Commissaire was no doubt continuing to direct operations from behind the drinks cabinet.
A shortish, stocky man seemed to be in charge, his mouth going like a fish’s as he barked orders, finger stabbing here and there. The bulk of the force formed a border to the asphalted semi-circle; a tight cluster, six or maybe seven. Lux guessed that these were part of the President’s personal bodyguard. Others were sure to be accompanying him in the helicopter.
No sooner were the dispositions completed, the stocky man looking about him, fists on hips, when the far-off stutter of a helicopter entered the valley. The engine note was vaguely different from that of the gendarmerie machine; deeper, more obtrusive.
While the new arrival was still no more than a speck on the sky’s flawless blue Lux trained the binoculars on it. It was approaching from the southwest. This then could be the President. A good half-hour late. He estimated it would touch down no more than five minutes from now. He brought the machine up close with the binoculars’ zoom facility. The pilot was alone at the controls; shaven-headed with a droopy moustache, speaking into the transmitter mouthpiece that curled around his jaw. The Chiracs, assuming they were on board, would be in the four-seat passenger section behind. From hours spent studying the manual Lux was well acquainted with the internal layout of the Ecureuil. The passengers would only come in sight if the machine turned sideways on to him. Whether they did or didn’t, would have no impact on his plans.
The patrol helicopter batted overhead and Lux prepared to hit the ground if it repeated its previous tactic of coming alongside. But no, it circled the copse once and headed off towards the approaching machine. Just going through the motions.
Lux hurried back to his bivouac and flung everything expendable into the trench: binoculars, protective glasses, bottle of water, provisions. When he returned to his firing position the approaching helicopter was much closer and on its descent. He hoisted the Barrett onto the branch and folded his fingers almost tenderly around the pistol grip.
The presidential helicopter almost filled the scope lens. Lux placed the crosshairs in the centre of the pilot’s forehead. He could take him out now and the chances were the machine would plummet to earth and explode on impact, killing its occupants.
Lux never relied on chance. The helicopter was now nearly over the house and maybe two hundred feet up; the gendarmerie machine took up position to its right, maintaining a stationary hover. Lux dragged back the cocking lever of the Barrett. Again he put his eye to the scope. The helicopter was still head on to him. Even as he silently willed it to turn, it commenced a leisurely anti-clockwise pirouette on its axis. The glass panel of the passenger compartment was presented to Lux: there were only two passengers, a man and a woman. No bodyguards, surprisingly. The man was on the right, Lux’s side. It was Chirac all right, his head turned towards his wife and tilted a little as if he were having difficulty hearing her; her face, partially obscured, was close to his ear.
The American’s finger instinctively tightened around the trigger but the helicopter was still rotating and such a small target as a person’s head required virtual total absence of movement, if only for a second.
Which was why he had decided not to shoot the President.
As the helicopter came fully broadside on he squeezed the trigger. A sound no louder than a cough as the bullet left the muzzle. The crack it emitted as it passed through the sound barrier was lost in the din of the two engines. One second later the projectile struck the helicopter near the base of the fuselage, behind the cabin. It pierced the unarmoured metal and, being a bullet that was designed to explode on impact, it burst into a million fragments. The contents of the aft bay fuel tank that had been pierced by the bullet exploded in their turn, ripping the helicopter apart and dealing instant death to all living souls in it.
Even as torn metal and plastic rained to earth with the remains of the mortally wounded machine, supported by its still-twisting rotor, descending more slowly in its wake, Lux was going hell for leather back into the depths of the copse. He stopped by the trench, dropped the rifle in it, followed by the fatigues. He jammed the gendarme’s kepi on his head and strapped the gun belt, complete with automatic, around his waist. Working fast and frantically with the spade he filled in the trench with the loose earth.
A third explosion made the ground shudder under his feet. From close at hand came shouting. The gendarmes guarding the wall, he supposed; no one from below could have gotten up here in the time. He finished levelling the trench and stamped the earth flat.
More shouts. Through a slender gap in the trees he saw the back of a gendarme running down the hill, towards the devastation at its foot. Then another, then a third, stumbling but recovering. From somewhere below a siren brayed.
Now Lux was entering into the truly unknown and unpredictable. His next move would be governed by the behaviour of the security forces, especially the gendarmerie with whom he proposed to mingle. If the gendarmes were assuming that the explosion was accidental or had been caused by a bomb, they would have no reason to continue to guard the wall. So if the general trend was to rush to help, Lux was happy to conform. What he could not do was simply march brazenly out of cover in full view of the police.
Still clutching the spade, he set off for the other side of the copse, a distance of perhaps a hundred metres. Nearing the end of trees, he ducked back behind one as a gendarme dropped from the wall and ran straight towards him, apparently bent on taking the shortest route. Here it was - the unforeseen. The thing he had dreaded.
He slipped behind a tree and waited, listening to the thud of the man’s feet as he blundered through the copse. As he passed Lux, he stumbled over an exposed root, and measured his length in the pine needles, his kepi spinning away. Lux froze and prepared to take action. The man cursed, went after his kepi on hands and knees. On recovering it he got up and, to Lux’s relief, went on at a stagger, oblivious of his brush with certain death.
Lux shoved the spade under a clump of bushes. It would be found easily enough but not, he hoped, until he was long departed and might not even be connected with the destruction of the Presidential helicopter. He covered the few
remaining metres to the edge of the trees and cautiously checked right and left. Farther along on his left, yet another gendarme was scrambling over the wall. He fell awkwardly but was back on his feet at once and blundering down the hill. Lux chose right, running along the edge of the copse. At its southern end he followed it round. Now the results of his handiwork were revealed to him: the blazing wreckage of the helicopter, the milling security forces, their numbers swelling by the second as gendarmes arrived literally from all corners of the estate.
The patrol helicopter whirled by overhead as Lux took off after the other gendarmes. He forced himself to disregard it. He had nothing to fear from that quarter as the crew could have no way of knowing the explosion had been caused by a bullet. This was the beauty of his chosen method of killing Chirac.
As he reached the foot of the hill he became just another cop among many in the midst of chaos. He drew as close to the burning wreck as the heat would allow, noting that a number of bodies lay about, each with a small group in attendance. The Chiracs were not recognisably among them, so these were most likely victims of falling debris. A number of CRS men were tackling the blaze with fire extinguishers and making no impression at all; two gendarmes were in the process of connecting a garden hose. Unpreparedness was absolute.
‘It must have been a bomb,’ he heard a plain-clothes man say to a gendarme with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.
Good, Lux thought. That was what he meant them to assume.
The best time to slip away was now, while confusion was at its peak. Putting on an air of a man going about his business, he jogged off to the car park in search of his car. It was where Barail had said it would be and so were the keys. He started up and drove out. No one paid him any heed. A left turn onto the driveway. Accelerating hard, like a man on an urgent errand, but not too hard like a man on the run. The next and last obstacle was the barrier at the gate. The driveway was deserted apart from a CRS man hurrying towards the house. The barrier was down, manned by two more CRS. Security hadn’t entirely relaxed then. Lux prayed that neither of the men was the one who checked him in last night.
He braked. The shorter of the two CRS, whose epaulettes denoted the rank of brigadier-major, ambled up.
‘Salut, mon vieux,’ he hailed Lux. ‘On a entendu une explosion. Qu’est-ce qui se passe?’ What’s happening?
‘A bomb. The helico has been blown to pieces.’
The CRS brigadier-major blanched. ‘You don’t say! What about JC?’
Lux shrugged. ‘Injured, at least.’ Straining to speak accentless French.
‘Où vas-tu?’ Where are you going?
The man’s life hinged on his acceptance of Lux’s answer. ‘We’ve called the fire brigade. I’ve been ordered to wait at the end of the road and guide them here.’
The barrier was on its way up even as he spoke.
‘Allez-y. Don’t drive too fast, hey?’
Lux felt he had already pushed his French too far so he settled for a nod. He slipped the clutch and passed through the barrier.
After the first bend he let the engine rip. Down the track at teeth-rattling speed to where Leandri was supposed to be waiting in the Jeep. Almost home free and another five million dollars in the bag.
Leandri was at the old barn, sitting astride the front wheel of a dilapidated tractor, exploring his teeth with a match. Inside, the black Citroën, its nose in a band of sunlight, the rest in shadow. Bernanos was not in evidence. Lux drove straight into the barn and climbed out.
‘Va bien?’ Leandri asked in greeting.
‘So far,’ Lux replied. ‘Bernanos gone?’
‘Last night. The suit is in the car and I have the ID.’
Lux stripped off the gendarme uniform, exchanging it for the charcoal grey suit that lay neatly folded on the back seat of the Citroen, the same suit that recently adorned Robert Bernanos. It smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.
‘I heard an explosion,’ Leandri said, unconsciously parroting the CRS brigadier-major. ‘Was that you?’
‘Don’t ask, pal. Give me the ID.’
Leandri handed over Lux’s CRS card.
‘Right,’ Lux said, in his haste making a hash of knotting his necktie. ‘Let’s hit the road, Tomas.’
Blasting along the D27 they passed two fire appliances going the other way, beacons flashing and sirens at full scream, and a kilometre or so farther a whole convoy of ambulances led by a police car.
‘They’ll be setting up road blocks,’ Leandri mused.
‘Not for us.’ Lux patted his pocket containing the ID card. ‘We’re with the good guys.’
* * *
But road blocks cannot be organised at a snap of the fingers. The security forces were initially convinced that a bomb had been planted on the helicopter and that no fleeing assassin existed to be stopped. Barail, the senior security officer present, issued no instructions. It was left to Mazé to take the initiative and, as a precaution, arrange to have the whole area cordoned off within a five-mile radius, despite the pooh-poohing of Capitaine Petit, the senior gendarmerie officer present.
‘It was a bomb, mon vieux,’ he protested as they stood together and watched the futile efforts of their men to douse the blaze with a garden hose and fire extinguishers from their cars’ emergency kits. ‘Do you think the assassin came here to observe the results of his handicraft?’
‘We cannot be sure,’ Mazé returned, ‘therefore we must not squander the opportunity.’
Even so it was after one pm. when the first road block was set up on the D27, north of Les Molières, this being the likeliest escape route. An hour more elapsed before every route out of Les Molières was covered within a radius of ten kilometres. By then the black Citroën with the government plates was in a private garage beneath an apartment block in Cannes, awaiting new plates and a respray by a local firm that specialised in providing new identities for stolen cars. Lux was stepping out of a taxi in the Place Wilson, in Nice, and Leandri was enjoying a café cappuccino at Cannes central station as he waited for the 2.45 train to Toulon.
* * *
Unable to bear looking upon the outcome of his machinations, Julien Barail remained in his makeshift operations centre. In his hand a glass of whisky, his fourth of the day.
When the explosion occurred at 12.07pm it blew out most of the windows in the upper floor of the Crillon house but left the lower more or less unscathed. His senses blunted by alcohol, Barail’s flinch was no more than a reflex. He did not at once connect it with the President. Even the crash to earth of the wrecked helicopter and the further explosions, one of which did shatter both windows of the study, failed to stir him. While all outside was in uproar he continued to stare down at his hands; splayed flat on the desktop they resembled a pair of anaemic starfish.
He knew he should join his deputy outside, take charge, issue orders. It was his job. To remain in the house was to invite attention and comment. Yet he could not bring himself to mingle with his colleagues. His perfidy had come home to roost.
It was after one o’clock before anyone entered his temporary office (though he was not aware of it, two CRS men had been stationed outside his door since ten minutes after the helicopter plummeted to earth). At about the time Lux and Leandri were turning onto the D25 at Ste Maxime, Mazé barged in without knocking, the two CRS men in tow.
‘Commissaire Divisionnaire Barail,’ Mazé barked, coming to attention before the man who, conspirator or not, remained his superior. ‘In the name of the Republic, I am placing you under arrest for complicity in murder.’
Mazé’s proclamation with its death knell ring took a while to sink in. Barail’s face remained empty of emotion and he did not stir.
‘Did you hear me, Commissaire?’ Mazé said, fidgeting, still at attention.
With a long sigh Barail rose. ‘What are you raving about?’ he said, bluffing to the last. ‘Are you insane?’
‘We have known of your complicity for several months, Commissaire, so it is useles
s to expostulate. If you co-operate I will leave the cuffs off.’
A further blast outside accompanied by more crashing of glass triggered renewed shouting: ‘Attention! Gardez-vous tous!’ Something metallic clattered on the asphalt.
‘Is the President injured?’ Barail’s voice had a dead quality, like a machine-made recording.
‘Need you ask? Every living person in that helicopter was killed instantly when it blew up.’
Barail abandoned the refuge of his desk, his movements those of an octogenarian, his shoulders no longer square, his demeanour that of a broken man.
‘Are you armed?’ Mazé asked.
Barail shook his head, but Mazé had him frisked anyway.
‘One more matter before we leave,’ Mazé said. ‘We must know if it was a bomb, and if the assassin is here or has been here.’
‘You speak in riddles, Mazé. If sabotage has occurred it is none of my doing.’
Mazé’s smile was without humour or warmth. ‘When you have listened to the tapes of your conversations with Agent 411 you will cease to protest your innocence, monsieur. Now … is he here or not?’
Since Barail presumed Lux was long gone he could have honestly replied ‘No.’ Instead he chose to maintain his virtuous stance.
‘As I am not involved in this unspeakable crime, I cannot help you. Who in God’s name is Agent 411? If you feel a compulsion to arrest me, go ahead. I will not make difficulties for you.’
At heart a compassionate man, Mazé felt almost sorry for his chief. He touched his shoulder, conveying a little of that sympathy while asserting his authority.
‘Come, Commissaire,’ he said in a soothing tone, such as a doctor might use on a hypochondriac patient. ‘Le Renard is expecting us and he is not in the best of humour.’
