The Day of the Jackal

by Frederick Forsyth

  In view of his age, increasingly frequent bouts of rheumatism that were beginning to affect his legs, and a remarkably high alcohol intake, Kassel, in the general view, could be discounted as a possible Jackal.

  As the General finished, eyes turned to Commissaire Lebel. His report was sombre. During the course of the day reports had come into the PJ from the other three countries who had originally suggested possible suspects twenty-four hours earlier.

  From America had come news that Chuck Arnold, the gun salesman, was in Columbia trying to clinch a deal for his American employer to sell a consignment of ex-US Army surplus AR-10 assault rifles to the Chief of Staff. He was in any case under permanent CIA surveillance while in Bogota, and there was no indication that he was planning anything other than to put through his arms deal, despite official US disapproval.

  The file on this man had, however, been telexed to Paris, as had also the file on Vitellino. This showed that although the former Cosa Nostra gunman had not yet been located, he was five feet four inches tall, immensely broad and squat, with jet-black hair and a swarthy complexion. In view of the radical difference in appearance from the Jackal as described by the hotel clerk in Vienna, Lebel felt he too could be discounted.

  The South Africans had learned Piet Schuyper was now the head of a private army of a diamond-mining corporation in a West African country of the British Commonwealth. His duties were to patrol the borders of the vast mining concessions owned by the company and ensure a continuous disincentive to illicit diamond poachers from across the border. No inconvenient questions were asked of him as to the methods he used to discourage poaching, and his employers were pleased with his efforts. His presence was confirmed by his employers; he was definitely at his post in West Africa.

  The Belgian police had checked on their ex-mercenary. A report in the files from one of their Caribbean embassies had been unearthed, which reported the former employee of Katanga had been killed in a bar fight in Guatemala three months previously.

  Lebel finished reading the last of the reports from the file in front of him. When he looked up it was to find fourteen pairs of eyes on him, most of them cold and challenging.

  ‘Alors, rien?’

  The question from Colonel Rolland was that of everyone present.

  ‘No, nothing, I’m afraid,’ agreed Lebel. ‘None of the suggestions seem to stand up.’

  ‘Seem to stand up,’ echoed Saint-Clair bitterly, ‘is that what we have come to with your “pure detective work”? Nothing seems to stand up?’ He glared angrily at the two detectives, Bouvier and Lebel, quickly aware that the mood of the room was with him.

  ‘It would seem, gentlemen,’ the Minister quietly used the plural form to take in both the police commissaires, ‘that we are back where we started. Square one, so to speak?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ replied Lebel. Bouvier took up the cudgels on his behalf.

  ‘My colleague is searching, virtually without clues and without any sort of lead, for one of the most elusive types of men in the world. Such specimens do not advertise their professions or their whereabouts.’

  ‘We are aware of that, my dear commissaire,’ retorted the Minister, coldly, ‘the question is …’

  He was interrupted by a knock on the door. The Minister frowned; his instructions had been that they were not to be disturbed except in an emergency.

  ‘Come in.’

  One of the ministry’s porters stood in the doorway, diffident and abashed.

  ‘Mes excuses, Monsieur le Ministre. A telephone call for Commissaire Lebel. From London.’ Feeling the hostility of the room, the man tried to cover himself. ‘They say it is urgent …’

  Lebel rose.

  ‘Would you excuse me, gentlemen?’

  He returned in five minutes. The atmosphere was as cold as when he had left it, and evidently the wrangle over what to do next had continued in his absence. As he entered he interrupted a bitter denunciation from Colonel Saint-Clair, who tailed off as Lebel took his seat. The little commissaire had an envelope in his hand with scribbled writing on the back.

  ‘I think, gentlemen, we have the name of the man we are looking for,’ he began.

  The meeting ended thirty minutes later almost in a mood of levity. When Lebel had finished his relation of the message from London, the men round the table had let out a collective sigh, like a train arriving at its platform after a long journey. Each man knew that at last there was something he could do. Within half an hour they had agreed that without a word of publicity it would be possible to scour France for a man in the name of Charles Calthrop, to find him and, if deemed necessary, to dispose of him.

  The fullest known details of Calthrop, they knew, would not be available until the morning, when they would be telexed from London. But in the meantime Renseignements Généraux could check their miles of shelves for a disembarkation card filled in by this man, for a hotel card registering him at a hotel anywhere in France. The Prefecture of Police could check its own records to see if he was staying at any hotel within the confines of Paris.

  The DST could put his name and description into the hands of every border post, port, harbour and airfield in France, with instructions that such a man was to be held immediately on his touching on French territory.

  If he had not yet arrived in France, no matter. Complete silence would be maintained until he arrived, and when he did, they would have him.

  ‘This odious creature, the man they call Calthrop, we have him already in the bag,’ Colonel Raoul Saint-Clair de Villauban told his mistress that night as they lay in bed.

  When Jacqueline finally coaxed a belated orgasm from the Colonel to send him to sleep the mantlepiece clock chimed twelve and it had become August 14th.

  Superintendent Thomas sat back in his office chair and surveyed the six inspectors whom he had regrouped from their various tasks after putting down the phone following the call to Paris. Outside in the still summer night Big Ben tolled midnight.

  His briefing took an hour. One man was allocated to examine Calthrop’s youth, where his parents now lived, if indeed he had any; where he had been to school; shooting record, if any, in the cadet corps as a schoolboy. Noticeable characteristics, distinguishing marks, etc.

  A second was designated to investigate his young manhood, from school leaving, through National Service, record of service and prowess at shooting, employment following discharge from the Army, right up to the time he left the employ of the arms dealers who had dismissed him for suspected double-dealing.

  The third and fourth detectives were put on the trail of his activities since leaving his last known employers in October 1961. Where had he been, whom had he seen, what had been his income, from what sources; since there was no police record and therefore presumably no fingerprints, Thomas needed every known and latest photograph of the man, up to the present time.

  The last two inspectors were to seek to establish the whereabouts of Calthrop at that moment. Go over the entire flat for fingerprints, find where he bought the car, check at County Hall, London, for records of issue of a driving licence, and if there were none start checking with the provincial county licensing departments. Trace the car, make, age and colour, registration number. Trace his local garage to see if he was planning a long journey by car, check the cross-Channel ferries, go round all the airline companies for a booking on a plane, no matter what the destination.

  All six men took extensive notes. Only when he had finished did they rise and file out of the office. In the corridor the last two eyed each other askance.

  ‘Dry-clean and re-texture,’ said one. ‘The complete bloody works.’

  ‘The funny thing is,’ observed the other, ‘that the old man won’t tell us what he’s supposed to have done, or be going to do.’

  ‘One thing we can be sure of. To get this kind of action, it must have come down right from the top. You’d think the bugger was planning to shoot the King of Siam.’

  It took a short while
to wake up a magistrate and get him to sign a search warrant. By the small hours of the morning, while an exhausted Thomas dozed in the armchair of his office and an even more haggard Claude Lebel sipped strong black coffee in his office, two Special Branch men went through Calthrop’s flat with a fine tooth comb.

  Both were experts. They started with the drawers, emptying each one systematically into a bedsheet and sorting the contents diligently. When all the drawers were clean, they started on the woodwork of the drawerless desk for secret panels. After the wooden furniture came the upholstered pieces. When they had finished with these the flat looked like a turkey farm on Thanksgiving Day. One man was working over the drawing room, the other the bedroom. After these two came the kitchen and bathroom.

  With the furniture, cushions, pillows and coats and suits in the cupboards dealt with, they started on the floors, ceilings and walls. By six in the morning the flat was as clean as a whistle. Most of the neighbours were grouped on the landing looking at each other and then the closed door of Calthrop’s flat, conversing in whispers that hushed when the two inspectors emerged from the flat.

  One was carrying a suitcase stuffed with Calthrop’s personal papers, and private belongings. He went down to the street, jumped into the waiting squad car and drove back to Superintendent Thomas. The other started on the long round of interviews. He began with the neighbours, aware that most would have to head for their places of work within an hour or two. The local tradesmen could come later.

  Thomas spent several minutes riffling through the collection of possessions spread all over his office floor. Out of the jumble the detective inspector grabbed a small blue book, walked to the window and started to flick through it by the light of the rising sun.

  ‘Super, have a look at this.’ His finger jabbed at one of the pages in the passport in front of him. ‘See … “Republica de Dominica, Aeroporto Ciudad Trujillo, Decembre 1960, Entrada …” He was there all right. This is our man.’

  Thomas took the passport from him, glanced at it for a moment, then stared out of the window.

  ‘Oh yes, this is our man, boyo. But does it not occur to you that we’re holding his passport in our hands?’

  ‘Oh, the sod …’ breathed the inspector when he saw the point.

  ‘As you say,’ said Thomas, whose chapel upbringing caused him only very occasionally to use strong language. ‘If he’s not travelling on this passport, then what is he travelling on? Give me the phone, and get me Paris.’

  By the same hour the Jackal had already been on the road for fifty minutes and the city of Milan lay far behind him. The hood of the Alfa was down and the morning sun already bathed the Autostrada 7 from Milan to Genoa. Along the wide straight road he pushed the car well over eighty miles an hour and kept the tachometre needle flickering just below the start of the red band. The cool wind lashed his pale hair into a frenzy around the forehead, but the eyes were protected by the dark glasses.

  The road map said it was two hundred and ten kilometres to the French frontier at Ventimiglia, about a hundred and thirty miles, and he was well up on his estimated driving time of two hours. There was a slight hold-up among the lorry traffic of Genoa as it headed for the docks just after seven o’clock, but before 7.15 he was away on the A.10 to San Remo and the border.

  The daily road traffic was already thick when he arrived at ten to eight at the sleepiest of France’s frontier points, and the heat was rising.

  After a thirty-minute wait in the queue he was beckoned up to the parking ramp for Customs examination. The policeman who took his passport examined it carefully, muttered a brief ‘Un moment, monsieur’ and disappeared inside the Customs shed.

  He emerged a few minutes later with a man in civilian clothes who held the passport.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur.’

  ‘Bonjour.’

  ‘This is your passport?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was another searching examination of the passport.

  ‘What is the purpose of your visit to France?’

  ‘Tourism. I have never seen the Côte d’Azur.’

  ‘I see. The car is yours?’

  ‘No. It’s a hired car. I had business in Italy, and it has unexpectedly occasioned a week with nothing to do before returning to Milan. So I hired a car to do a little touring.’

  ‘I see. You have the papers for the car?’

  The Jackal extended the international driving licence, the contract of hire, and the two insurance certificates. The plain-clothes man examined both.

  ‘You have luggage, monsieur?’

  ‘Yes, three pieces in the boot, and a hand-grip.’

  ‘Please bring them all into the Customs hall.’

  He walked away. The policeman helped the Jackal off-load the three suitcases and the hand-grip, and together they carried them to Customs.

  Before leaving Milan he had taken the old greatcoat, scruffy trousers and shoes of André Martin, the non-existent Frenchman whose papers were sewn into the lining of the third suitcase, and rolled them in a ball at the back of the boot. The clothes from the other two suitcases had been divided between the three. The medals were in his pocket.

  Two Customs officers examined each case. While they were doing so he filled in the standard form for tourists entering France. Nothing in the cases excited any attention. There was a brief moment of anxiety as the Customs men picked up the jars containing the hair-tinting dyes. He had taken the precaution of emptying them into after-shave flasks, previously emptied. At that time after-shave lotion was not in vogue in France, it was too new on the market and mainly confined to America. He saw the two Customs men exchange glances, but they replaced the flasks in the hand-grip.

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see through the windows another man examining the boot and engine bonnet of the Alfa. Fortunately he did not look underneath. He unrolled the greatcoat and trousers in the boot and looked at them with distaste, but presumed the coat was for covering the bonnet on winter nights and old clothes were a contingency in case repairs had to be done on the car along the road. He replaced the clothes and closed the boot.

  As the Jackal finished filling in his form, the two Customs men inside the shed closed the cases and nodded to the plain-clothes man. He in turn took the entry card, examined it, checked it again with the passport, and handed the passport back.

  ‘Merci, monsieur. Bon voyage.’

  Ten minutes later the Alfa was booming into the eastern outskirts of Menton. After a relaxed breakfast at a café overlooking the old port and yacht basin, the Jackal headed along the Corniche Littorale for Monaco, Nice and Cannes.

  In his London office Superintendent Thomas stirred a cup of thick black coffee and ran a hand over his stubbled chin. Across the room the two inspectors saddled with the task of finding the whereabouts of Calthrop faced their chief. The three were waiting for the arrival of six extra men, all sergeants of the Special Branch released from their routine duties as the result of a string of telephone calls Thomas had been making over the previous hour.

  Shortly after nine, as they reported to their offices and learned of their re-deployment to Thomas’s force, the men started to trickle in. When the last had arrived he briefed them.

  ‘All right, we’re looking for a man. There’s no need for me to tell you why we want him, it’s not important that you should know. What is important is that we get him, and get him fast. Now we know, or think we know, that he’s abroad at this moment. We are pretty certain he is travelling under a false passport.

  ‘Here …’ he passed out among them a set of photographs, blown-up copies of the portrait photo on Calthrop’s passport application form … ‘is what he looks like. The chances are he will have disguised himself and therefore not necessarily respond to that description. What you are going to have to do is go down to the Passport Office and get a complete list of every application for a passport made recently. Start by covering the last fifty days. If that yields nothing, go back another f
ifty days. It’s going to a be a hard grind.’

  He continued by giving a rough description of the most common way of getting a false passport, which was in fact the method the Jackal had used.

  ‘The important thing is,’ he concluded, ‘not to be content with birth certificates. Check the death certificates. So after you’ve got the list from Passport Office, take the whole operation down to Somerset House, get settled in, divide the list of names among yourselves, and get to work among those death certificates. If you can find one application for a passport submitted by a man who isn’t alive any longer, the impostor will probably be our man. Off you go.’

  The eight men filed out, while Thomas got on to the Passport Office by phone, then the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths at Somerset House, to ensure that his team would get the fullest co-operation.

  It was two hours later as he was shaving on a borrowed electric razor plugged into his desk lamp that the senior of the two inspectors, who was the leader of the team, phoned back. There were, he said, eight thousand and forty-one applications for new passports submitted in the previous hundred days. It was the summer, he explained, holiday time. There were always more in holiday time.

  Bryn Thomas hung up and snuffled into his handkerchief.

  ‘Damn summer,’ he said.

  Just after eleven that morning the Jackal rolled into the centre of Cannes. As usual when he wanted something done, he looked for one of the best hotels, and after a few minutes’ cruising swept into the forecourt of the Majestic. Running a comb through his hair, he strode into the foyer.

  Being the middle of the morning, most of the guests were out and the hall was not busy. His elegant light suit and confident manner picked him out as an English gentleman and raised no eyebrows when he asked a bell-hop where the telephone booths were. The lady behind the counter that separated the switchboard from the entry to the cloakrooms looked up as he approached.