There were no turnings for the next twenty kilometres, before the toll gates. When the BMW reached them, the Citroën was already second in the queue for the fast gate, and drove through a full minute before the BMW — enough to put nearly a kilometre between them.
The two men in the BMW snapped on safety belts and were pressed back in their seats as the engine hummed powerfully through the automatic gears, the tyres drumming on the concrete surface. The rain clouds were drawing closer, the sky ahead darkening over the pale ribbon of road that stretched unbroken for 300 miles to Lyon.
The passenger had unfolded a map of France on which a number of exits from the autoroute were ringed in red. There were altogether eighteen on this stretch; though the most likely ones for the Citroën to take were in the wine-rich Côte d’Or, between Auxerre and Beaune.
Neither he nor the driver had spoken since leaving the Péripherique. Their manner was calm, methodical, bored: they reacted as though this were a routine run that they made every day of the week.
Fifteen kilometres beyond the toll gate, the BMW closed in on the Citroën, but for several seconds the car ahead held obstinately to the outside lane. The BMW flashed its lights again and its horn howled above the slipstream as it drew dangerously close. The sloping rear window of the Citroën was shaded green, but the two men in the car behind it could just make out the shape of a man’s head.
The Citroën finally pulled over, and the BMW slid effortlessly past, neither its passenger nor driver glancing at the other car.
From now on the two men in the BMW followed the rule book. The next exit, to Nemours, was twenty-nine kilometres ahead. When they were five kilometres from it, the BMW slowed until the low silhouette of the Citroën showed in its mirror. If the men in the Citroën were expecting to be followed, they would normally be looking for a car behind, not in front; but even if the Citroën’s driver were anticipating this technique, it was virtually impossible — on a long stretch of road where most cars would be travelling several hundred kilometres — for him to be ever certain of his pursuer. The real problems for the men in the BMW would arise when their quarry left the autoroute.
As they approached the Nemours exit, the Citroën was again in the outside lane, overtaking everything except the BMW, which had now pulled out of sight. A few minutes later they hit the rain.
The BMW driver switched on his side lights. Four seconds later a pair of yellow fish-eyed headlamps flared in his mirror. He pulled over, momentarily blinded by a fog of spray. A glowing red bar of light swept past and shrank into the blurred twilight of the storm.
The BMW had slowed to under 100 kmph and was now keeping to the centre lane. The Citroën passed them a few minutes later, ten kilometres before the exit to Courtenay. The radio under the BMW dashboard crackled to life. The passenger pressed the switch of the hand microphone and spoke back slowly and deliberately: the target was past Courtenay — next exit, Auxerre.
The autoroute was beginning to curve and climb through an ugly rock-strewn landscape where convoys of juggernauts were bunched together, wheezing at walking pace along the inside lane. The BMW passed a sign marked Diversion; then a diagonal row of orange beacons, and a bulldozer parked on the soft shoulder which had been churned up into a yellow swamp blistered by rain.
The traffic was now crowded into single file, crawling uphill with the belching juggernauts. The Citroën was only three cars in front of the BMW; and directly in front of the Citroën was the car that had raced past them several minutes ago, with its glowing bar of red rear lights. The men in the BMW recognized the long, low sledge shape of the Maserati.
At the same moment the radio crackled again, its instructions brief and precise. The passenger acknowledged them, then flicked a switch under the dashboard that sent out a deep, steady whine. He sat back and lit two cigarettes, passing one to the driver. ‘They might have warned us,’ he said.
‘They never warn us,’ the driver said, with a slight shrug of his big square shoulders.
There were about a dozen elderly men in the café, hunched over pine tables, drinking thimbles of framboise, poire, and other white spirits popular in the Jura. They scarcely seemed to notice as the three strangers entered, bringing with them a blast of cold air.
The proprietor took them for foreign businessmen on their way to Switzerland. For although the café was in a desolate spot on a minor road through the mountains east of Besançon, strangers were not unusual. Tourists often used the narrow cross-country road as a shortcut from Dijon down to Berne or up to Basel.
The three men sat at a corner table and ordered coffee. They talked quietly, urgently, emphasizing every word with quick didactic gestures; then one of them got up and asked the proprietor, in thickly accented French, if he could use the telephone for a long-distance call. He was shown into a corner under the stairs where he stayed a full five minutes. As the proprietor went through to the kitchen, he heard the man talking in a language which he had never heard before.
When the stranger returned to his table, he had a pinched, tight-mouthed expression. He said something without sitting down and the other two got up, leaving their coffees half drunk. The man left a 100-franc note, without waiting for the bill or the telephone charge, and the three of them marched out.
On the sloping gravel parking lot were two cars that stood out instantly from the other, local vehicles. One was the silver-grey Citroën CX; the other, the long, low, elegant shape of a maroon Maserati with wire wheels and four exhaust pipes as wide as trumpets. There was just one person inside, the driver — a dark man in a sports jacket who was leaning back in the bucket seat, smoking a cigarette and reading a map.
The man who had made the telephone call hesitated. He already had the Citroën keys in his hand, and now clenched his fist so that the sharp metal edges jutted out between his knuckles. One of his companions murmured to him, and the man frowned and stood staring at the reclining figure in the Maserati, who did not even look round. The man grunted and opened the Citroën door, and the other two followed. As they drove away, they saw that the man in the Maserati had still not moved.
During the climb to the Col, the driver’s hands had begun to sweat on the wheel as he wrenched the Citroën round the steep blind bends between dense pines, with a shriek of tyres and an almost continuous blast on the horn, his eyes flitting every few seconds from the road to the mirror; but this time there was no car behind. He found himself growing angry, slamming his fist against the gear lever, causing the smooth cushioned car to shudder at each turn. He was not frightened of danger, but he hated disorder — and above all, he hated and feared things that made no sense. And that Maserati made no sense — no sense at all! His two companions, sensing his anger, did not disturb him.
They reached the Col, and began the corkscrew descent, still in silence. Again, as they rounded each bend, the driver glanced in his mirror, but there was still no sign of the Maserati. They now came to a particularly treacherous corner, where the outside shoulder of the road had partially subsided, the surface cracked and buckled like charred wood, sloping down to the edge of a gully. The remains of a triangular ‘Danger’ sign, symbolically bent and dented, with the black painted exclamation mark half erased by rust, leaned crookedly backwards out of a pile of grit.
The driver swung the Citroën into the centre of the road, keeping his thumb down on the horn, while his right hand changed violently down into second gear. The car bucked and the engine gave a shrill whine that carried above the sound of the horn. It slewed sideways, the rear wheels stopping less than a foot from the edge, while the front driving wheels shrieked in a dry skid, scrabbling for a grip on the steep camber.
The driver uttered a long imaginative obscenity, as the wheels caught and the car swerved back into the centre of the road. He had slowed to 30 kmph, but completed the turn and was confronted by another bend, less than twenty yards ahead, where the road doubled back almost beneath them.
Here there was a second danger signal: this
time a portable reflector triangle that had been set up a few feet from the edge. But it was not this that had warned the driver. A man was standing on the bank opposite, half hidden in the shadow of the trees; and a few yards beyond and below him, in a shallow layby scooped out of the bend, stood a white BMW 30 SI, with Paris plates.
The Citroën had jerked to a halt, and for the first time the driver took his thumb off the horn. He opened his mouth to shout, but the words were shattered by a sound like a paper bag bursting, and the windshield turned a frosty white. A shower of crystals hit his face, and something harder struck his jaw and chest. The force smacked his head back against the seat, and the air was sealed in his lungs. When he tried to breathe, the lower part of his face felt loose and odd, like a bagful of pebbles. In those last seconds he heard the staccato bop! bop! bop! — and this time the whole windshield crumbled into the car, like a sheet of crushed ice. The driver experienced a blinding light, then nothing.
The man beside him was wedged under the dashboard, shot between the eyes. His shoulders and hair were spattered with glass and splinters of bone from the pulpy grey hole which the soft-nosed bullet had torn out of the back of his head. He had managed to lift the mat off the floor, and his hands had locked round the plastic stock of an automatic carbine, when the bullet struck.
In the back scat the third man had reacted first by lunging at the offside door, away from the gunman, then had apparently thought better of it and flung himself on the floor. He was unarmed, and knew that he had no chance of reaching the carbine under the front seat. His only hope was to feign death, waiting until the gunman arrived to study his results, then to attack him hand-to-hand, and to try and disarm him.
The man under the trees now slithered down the stony bank and reached the road. He was holding another, stubbier carbine with a curved magazine that jogged against his thigh as he came forward. He paused, listening. Silence. He made a brief signal to the BMW below, and drew from his raincoat what looked like a pale green beer can. He walked forward until he was a dozen paces from the Citroën.
There was no movement from the car. Using the thumb of his left hand, which still held the carbine, he raised the can, ripped a length of wire out of it, and lobbed it uphill where it bounced neatly between the Citroën’s front wheels.
It exploded a second later, lifting the car a couple of inches off the road where it seemed to hang suspended above a glaring bubble of light, as though a gigantic flash bulb had gone off, throwing the surrounding pines into unnatural relief.
The man had turned and begun running as soon as he had thrown the bomb. He was halfway to the BMW, when there was a second explosion, as the Citroën’s fuel tank ignited. For several seconds the glowing white light all around turned a warmer orange. He reached the car below, where the driver already had the engine running. The BMW began to move before the man had time to close the door.
Above them a cauliflower of smoke was rising to the top of the trees; and under it, the ball of fire was now turning a livid green in which the black skeleton of the Citroën shimmered and shrank, its chassis now sunk on to the road where it was beginning to melt and spread out over the liquid tarmac in pools of white-hot metal.
The police arrived twenty minutes later, when the fire was still burning with a dense white smoke that gave off impenetrable fumes. Two convoys of traffic had gathered along the road in both directions; and the police radioed for reinforcements with firefighting and breathing equipment.
It was not until the next day that forensic experts confirmed that the burning explosive had been white phosphorus — a rare and lethal substance, restricted almost entirely to military use. The Police Routière had no record of such a load being transported anywhere in France on the previous day; and no military establishment in the country had reported the loss or theft of white phosphorus.
The forensic report could only state that at least two people had died in the car; for apart from a small amount of body fat adhering to the melted metal and congealed tarmac, which had been scraped up with the chassis, only the remains of several teeth had been found; and these had belonged to more than one person.
The Inspector who had been called in from the Police Criminelle in Dijon, ordered a further, more intensive examination of the wreckage, together with a thorough search of the area surrounding the fire. By the following evening the make of car had been identified as the Citroën CX, though the number plates, chassis and engine markings had been obliterated.
The police also made three important discoveries. The first was a fragment of metal, deformed at one end but almost intact at the other. For some time the experts were perplexed. They tried fitting it to every known part of the Citroën mechanism, and checked it against all known car accessories. It was one of the ballistics experts who finally recognized it as part of an American MI6 carbine.
The second discovery was of eighteen empty 7.62mm shells, scattered over a small area on the bank of the road opposite where the wreck had been found. At first the police were again puzzled by the markings round the firing cap; until the same ballistics expert confirmed that they were Russian, and that the shells fitted the Kalashnikov AK 47, the standard Soviet submachine gun.
The third, perhaps most important find, was a curved disc, blackened but unmelted by the heat, with two holes in each end. In the laboratory it was cleaned, and found to bear the engraved name ‘Pierre-Baptiste Chamaz’ and what appeared to be an inscription in Arabic. The metal was identified as a rare heat-resistant alloy used in the aerospace industry, and not available on the open market.
The inspector was satisfied that it was part of an identity bracelet, belonging perhaps to a pilot or fireman — someone who faced the regular hazard of being burnt to death. He was also satisfied that he had a case of murder on his hands. The fact that at least two weapons had been used — one American, the other of Communist origin — also suggested a political motive. Reluctantly — for he was an ambitious man — he now referred the case to Paris, but not before he had given an extended Press conference during which he was photographed from many angles, holding up Chamaz’s identity bracelet, the fragment of the American carbine, and a number of Russian machinegun shells.
The case received wide publicity in both the local and national Press. A squad of detectives from the capital had meanwhile set up their headquarters in Besançon, with open lines to the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) — The French Security Service — and to Interpol headquarters, both in Paris. No record could be found on the files of either organization relating to a Monsieur Pierre-Baptiste Chamaz. But a Professor of Arabic, from Grenoble University, translated the inscription on the bracelet as ‘Silence Speaks the Truth’.
It was the third day before the police obtained their first tentative lead: the proprietor of the Café du Col, on the road eight kilometres away from the scene of the incident, remembered the three strangers who had entered the café about half an hour before the police were first alerted, which meant around ten minutes before the explosion. His description of the three was not inspired, but he did remember that they had arrived in a Citroën; and one of them had made a long-distance telephone call in a language which the proprietor insisted was not European.
Here the police had their first and only piece of luck. The café telephone was not yet on automatic, and all long-distance calls had to go through the operator in Besançon. Enquiries at the town’s Central Post Office, giving the time of the call to the nearest quarter of an hour, produced an operator who remembered it at once. The man had been abrupt and impatient, she said; he had asked, in a foreign accent, for a Paris number. When she had told him there would be a slight delay, he had shouted at her that it was ‘a matter of the most supreme priority’, adding the phrase, ‘un appel diplomatique d’urgence!’
She looked up her file for that afternoon and found the number, which Paris reported as unlisted and belonging to an address in the Seventeenth Arondissement under the subscriber’s name of B
loch.
That evening three armed plain-clothes officers from the DST called at the address — a top-floor flat in a dingy house behind the Place Clichy. The old concierge told them that during the ten months that Monsieur Bloch had rented the flat, he had never even set eyes on him. The officers went upstairs and found a door with a complicated triple lock which could not be picked by the usual methods. A police locksmith was called, and was only able to release two of the locks; the third had to be cut by oxyacetylene.
Inside they found a two-roomed flat. The air was stale, the utility furniture thick with dust. There was a single bed with a bare mattress; a tiny bathroom with no towel, soap, or lavatory paper; the kitchenette had no crockery or utensils; the main room was bare of books, magazines, old newspapers, even ashtrays. The only individual features were a reproduction of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ and a black telephone of unusual design, with four coloured buttons instead of a dial. The officers made an intensive search of the flat, even removing planks of uncarpeted floor and sounding every inch of the walls, but found nothing.
The DST now concentrated on the telephone. They had discovered that it was not a direct line, but connected to a scrambler — a device that is illegal in France, except where permission is granted under special circumstances, usually at the behest of the Embassy of a friendly power. In this case, no such permission had been given.
When the officers tried the number from an outside phone, it rang for a full two minutes; then a man’s voice, with a slight accent, answered, ‘Michel ici.’ The officer asked to whom he was speaking. The voice replied, ‘What number do you want?’ Careful not to alert suspicion, the officer quoted back the number with the last two digits reversed. ‘You have the wrong number,’ the voice said, and the line went dead.
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