Another Day, Another Jackal

by Lex Lander

  ‘Now what do we have here?’ Leandri crooned, slitting the envelope with the knife and thereby demonstrating its sharpness. At this point his wife came out of the cabin. Leandri prancing around with a foot-long sticker was clearly a regular event for she came and cleared away the glasses, detouring around him without so much as a flickered eyelid.

  ‘Another beer, chérie?’ she enquired.

  He looked up from groping inside the slashed envelope. ‘Why not? For my friend too.’

  As his wife went off, hips in full gyration, he extracted the wad of 500F notes with a triumphant ‘Voila!’

  Lux eyed him sourly. If Leandri’s behaviour amounted to no more than theatricals he would go along with it, humour him; the stakes were too high for outrage. But if this was a shakedown he’d be one sorry mec when Lux got through with him.

  ‘It looks to me like about two hundred notes,’ Leandri said, measuring the depth of the wad with an apparently expert eye. ‘Maybe a little more. A hundred thousand francs?’ He snorted. ‘You think I come that cheap?’

  ‘One hundred and twenty five thousand,’ Lux corrected. ‘I figured a half a million was about the rate for the job. That represents twenty-five per cent.’

  Only slightly mollified, Leandri said, ‘We have agreed six hundred thousand.’

  ‘So I’ll send you the difference tomorrow morning by special messenger. Okay?’

  Leandri nodded slowly as if unsure. His wife brought the beers, twitched a timid smile at Lux. She reminded him of a little mouse. She came, she went, disturbing only the blades of grass she trod.

  Lux added, ‘But the deal is twenty-five per cent up front - not a sou more.’

  Leandri laughed suddenly and it was like seeing someone undergo a personality change. ‘You win, Yank. Send me the rest of the deposit tomorrow.’

  Lux eased himself out of the chair, stretched, making a big show of it, flinging his arms out. Leandri was no longer interested in him. He was stuffing the money back in the envelope when Lux brought his fist round in a loop that caught him high on the cheekbone, tearing the skin, lifting him clean off his feet.

  Just beyond where they had been sitting the lawn sloped away and Leandri went down this like a rolling barrel, losing the wad of money and the knife. Only when his shoulders thudded into weeping willow at the base of the slope was his descent arrested. The impact squeezed a yell of hurt from his lips and brought his wife out at a run. She didn’t spot him right away, obscured as he was by the willow’s drooping foliage and stood there, rigid with fright, staring at Lux.

  ‘‘Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?’?’ she demanded. What happened?

  ‘Your husband slipped and lost his balance,’ Lux said blandly, indicating the groaning form below.

  ‘Oh, Bon Dieu!’ She rushed off down the slope like a hundred-metres sprinter leaving the blocks.

  Leandri’s groans intensified when she arrived at his side. As Lux suspected, the man was a great one for theatricals. Lux retrieved the dropped money and knife and resumed his seat. He crossed his right leg over his left knee and ripped the Jetfire automatic free of the two strips of masking tape that secured it to his right ankle.

  Leandri’s recovery, like everything else about him, was fast. He stormed up the incline, dabbing his bloody cheek with a handkerchief, his wife scampering behind him, hands fluttering.

  ‘Give me the knife,’ were his first words to Lux.

  ‘Here.’ Lux tossed it to him, waggled the gun gently to make sure he had noticed it. ‘See this, Leandri? Any more tricks like that and I’ll put a bullet through one of your kneecaps, or both if you really beg for it. Take it from me, the pain is excruciating. Plus, it’ll be a year before you walk without crutches.’

  ‘You don’t scare me,’ Leandri sneered. ‘All I have to do is make a phone call and you’ll be riding home in a hearse.’

  ‘Bigger men than you have made threats like that and I’m still around.’ Lux lowered the gun, let it dangle at his side, a flag of truce. ‘Now, do we still have a deal, or don’t we?’

  Still pressing the red-stained handkerchief to his face, Leandri glowered briefly. Then came that abrupt joyful laugh that sounded as if it belonged to another person. He snapped the switchblade shut.

  ‘You’re all right, Yank,’ he said, which Lux translated as praise. His wife, stopping a couple of paces short of him, broke into a smile of pure relief. Lux guessed Leandri wasn’t above taking out his annoyance on her by way of good old-fashioned chastisement.

  ‘Now we’ve gotten the crap out of the way,’ Lux said, ‘let’s talk practical matters. First of all I need a passport size photograph of you.’

  Leandri’s eyes reduced to slits. ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘For the purpose of providing you with phoney documentation. If you want to alter your appearance, by wearing a false moustache say, or colouring your hair, that’s up to you. But no glasses and no beard. You can choose your own name.’

  ‘What about my assistant? Will he not also need identification?’

  ‘Yes, but his face will not be his own.’

  ‘Really?’ Leandri nibbled at his lip. He waited for Lux to elaborate, his features composed in an enquiry.

  ‘When the time comes, I’ll explain. The less you know now, the less you can tell to others.’

  As a fellow outlaw Leandri could not dispute the logic of Lux’s preoccupation with security. With the best grace he could muster he gestured his acceptance.

  It was early evening and cool up here in the foothills of the Massif when Lux left. He had achieved an understanding with Leandri. Under the flash exterior there beat the heart of a true pro, a man who would not cave in under pressure. A man who could act out a part and not forget his lines. A man who would choose his assistant with infinite care. A man, in short, who could do the job.

  * * *

  Belgium is the legitimate supplier of an estimated eighty per cent of all illicit arms purchased in Europe. It is the only country in the EU whose citizens could buy a firearm literally ‘over the counter’ with minimal fuss. Of course, proof of identity must be produced. To the purchaser with no ulterior intent, this requirement causes no inconvenience. To the wrongdoer it causes no inconvenience in practice either: he or, occasionally, she, produces his or her forged or stolen documents and the transaction proceeds as smoothly as would the purchase of a box of Belgian chocolates. The purchase is logged in a register which can be, and is, inspected periodically by the police. But an entry is hardly ever checked and the false names and addresses that account for a significant proportion of the total do not call attention to themselves. Even ‘Donald Duck, Disneyland, USA,’ transcribed from the apparently bona-fide passport of a recent purchaser at the Boghe establishment in Leuven, raised no inspectorial eyebrows when the local flic dropped in for a casual thumb-through the register a few days after the entry was made.

  Jean-Louis Boghe, known to his Anglo-Saxon clientele as the Bogey man, ran a legitimate retail gun store, trading as JLB Aarmz SA/NV. It was a business of respectable pedigree, established by his uncle in 1958. Following his uncle’s death in 1982, ironically in a shooting accident, and in the absence of any direct heirs, Jean-Louis had taken over the business at the request of his aunt, to whom he paid a share of the profits until her death in 1994. He handled mainly hunting rifles, shotguns, and handguns for personal protection, in that order of sales volume. His wares were displayed in the window and on racks along two walls inside the spacious shop, and, in the case of handguns, under glass topped counters. The glass was bulletproof and all weapons were locked or chained in one manner or another. Ammunition was stored in a strong room in the back, the door operated by a combination lock. In short, Jean-Louis Boghe complied with the regulations - such as they were - and was perceived by the local police as a ‘responsible’ arms trader.

  That was the public JLB Aarmz. A profitable, secure retail outlet, with no debts and no worries. Behind the scenes or, more accurately, at his mini-chate
au twenty kilometres from St Pieterskerk in the centre of Leuven, Jean-Louis Boghe ran and still runs another kind of arms operation. Here would-be purchasers need show no papers or ID. The only paper required to complete a transaction is the cash variety, any hard currency will do, but there are discounts for US dollars and Swiss francs, and gold qualifies for special terms. The hardware too has little in common with that on display in the store. Here, in the cellar with the concealed entrance below Boghe’s chateau, are to be found the whole gamut of personal weaponry - from submachine guns through grenade launchers to handheld missile launchers. Boghe can also obtain killing machines with even more grunt, all the way up to surplus Russian Sukhoi strike aircraft that even come with a 12-month international warranty, courtesy of the Russian Air Force.

  It was to this place that Dennis Lux was driven, from the Martelarenplein Station, on a sunny May afternoon, one of Boghe’s perks to his regular clients being a chauffeured collection service. It was perhaps Lux’s twelfth visit in seven years. He knew the route by heart and was particularly attracted to the rolling, wooded countryside through which it wove. The driver was Flemish, his French was non-existent, and what was more he never spoke. Or not to Lux, at any rate.

  Jean-Louis Boghe was his employee’s exact converse - effusive and voluble, always delighted to welcome a client back for more of his deadly wares.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to see you again, Dennis,’ he burbled, wringing the American’s hand as if it were a wet cloth from which he was trying to remove all moisture. ‘It must be at least six months …’

  ‘Seven,’ Lux said, blowing on his mangled digits. He was not one for flamboyance, preferring to deal at arm’s length in every sense. ‘And how are you, Bogey?’

  ‘Very well, as always,’ Boghe said as he hustled his visitor through to the sitting room.

  Lux was pressed into the ornate Louis Quinze armchair with its tapestried upholstery. While Boghe went off to make coffee Lux looked around for recent acquisitions, the arms trader being an avid hoarder of antiques. He saw only one that he did not recognise from his last visit: a painting of a ruined mill by a placid stream, with two boys rod fishing and a dog burrowing in a patch of bare earth nearby. Far off a stand of trees in full foliage, the whole scene under the evening sun and pink tinted sky.

  ‘Do you have the merchandise?’ Lux said to Boghe, as the latter deposited a silver tray containing a coffee pot, a milk jug and two diminutive cups on a side table between Lux’s chair and another identical chair. From previous meetings he knew the importance of steering Boghe straight onto the matter in hand, otherwise he would ramble for ever about old times, politics, art, the never-ending stream of regulations spewed out by the EU Commission, anything at all but business.

  ‘It is here,’ Boghe said, pouring coffee for both of them. ‘It is not easy to get hold of, you know, this particular rifle.’

  ‘Oh, quit hyping up the price, Bogey. You know me better than that.’

  Boghe’s grin was sheepish. Now in his fifty-first year he looked and behaved like a much younger man; only his thinning blond hair devalued the impression. He was very sensitive about his depleted locks and forever resolving to consult a trichology practitioner. Too vain, too self-conscious, he would probably put it off until it was too late for anything but a full-blown wig.

  Lux drained his cup in a single swallow. Boghe made superb coffee and he gladly accepted the offer of a refill. Boghe, sipping his, eyed the American speculatively, wondering who was going to be on the receiving end of the prodigious half-inch calibre bullets that his chosen weapon fired.

  ‘A big job, eh?’ he hazarded.

  ‘One day your curiosity will get you killed,’ Lux said, his tone light, his meaning serious. ‘Like the cat.’

  ‘You are right. Me and my big nose.’ Boghe polished off his coffee. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Lead on, pal.’

  To access the underground store-room involved entering a study whose walls were lined with bookshelves. A two-foot wide section was designed to swing out on command from a remote control; beyond lay a steel door with a digital combination lock. Boghe would key in a five-digit code and lo! the door would swing inwards. Stone steps, much worn, led down to the vast, air-conditioned cellar where in days gone by only wine had been stored.

  Here, on a very long oak table, stood the gun Lux had ordered and already half paid for. It was propped on a bipod, facing towards three conventional round targets, standing side by side, as yet unblemished. Beside the gun a square carton of ammunition, bearing the red Winchester cowboy logo and prominent ‘X’ for excellence, and beside the carton a set of ear muffs.

  Lux descended the steps behind Boghe and together they walked over to the table. Without touching the rifle, Lux circumnavigated the table, viewing the gun from all angles. The Barrett Model M82A1 “Special Application Scoped Rifle” (to cite its US armed forces designation) is manufactured in the USA by Barrett Firearms Manufacturing Inc. of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and is in service with the US Marine Corps, the Navy SEALS, and Special Forces in a number of countries. It is nearly six feet long, fires a 0.5in calibre round, and is accurate at over a mile - a distance that the bullet takes about two seconds to travel. It has an exceptionally flat velocity up to half a mile, one reason why Lux had chosen it. This particular version was fitted with the detachable arrowhead muzzle brake which, for the job in hand, would be replaced by a sound suppressor. The fold-down carrying handle that was normally attached to the upper housing had been removed at Lux’s behest.

  ‘A magnificent weapon,’ Boghe remarked, dwelling on it as if it were his personal creation. ‘None better for range and hitting power.’

  Lux grunted his agreement then reached across the table and hefted the gun. It weighed a muscle-aching thirty pounds fully-loaded with ten rounds. ‘A monster’ Boghe had called it and the description was apt. But it was the gun for the job. Because of the size of the bullet a hit on what is euphemistically known as a soft target almost anywhere above the waist was almost guaranteed to result in death - if not from destruction of a vital organ, then from the trauma to the system or massive loss of blood.

  Lux walked to the far end of the table and set the gun down there. He looked pointedly at Boghe.

  ‘It is loaded,’ Boghe confirmed.

  ‘And the silencers?’

  ‘The sound suppressors are ready. I made three and tested one to destruction. Do you wish to test another one here?’

  Lux shook his head. ‘I trust you.’

  ‘J’espère bien. Now I will leave you to test to your satisfaction.’

  ‘Give me thirty minutes.’

  Lux waited until he was alone. He peeled off his jacket and hung it on the nearest of a row of coat hooks screwed to the wall. He rolled up his sleeves. He positioned the ear muffs headband very precisely on his head. He climbed on to the table and spread-eagled himself behind the Barrett. He tucked the rubber-padded stock into his shoulder and cocked the gun, appreciating the healthy clack of the first round entering the breech.

  Even with the Swarovski scope set at a modest 3X magnification, the middle of the target’s three roundels filled it. He positioned the crosshairs plumb centre of the bull. He wrapped his fingers around the pistol-type grip. He caressed the trigger lightly, assessing the amount of slack in the two-stage pull.

  He fired and took out the whole bull in one.

  * * *

  Lux counted the last five-hundred-franc note onto the table.

  ‘Delivery included - right?’

  ‘But of course. And the address?’

  The address was always different, always used only once. Accommodation addresses prepared to accept illicit merchandise were scarce and commanded a high premium but were a necessary precaution. Lux dictated the details and Boghe scrawled them in a hand that to Lux was indecipherable. Nonetheless, the goods always seemed to get there, so he had long since ceased to ask the arms trader to read it back.

  ‘On the 23rd
,’ Boghe said. ‘Probably late afternoon.’

  Lux didn’t even bother to emphasise the need for delivery not to be delayed. It was never necessary to repeat any instruction or double check with Boghe. The rapport and mutual understanding between client and supplier was absolute, as it must be between all lawbreakers.

  ‘Two more things,’ Lux said, as he shoved his wallet back in his jacket pocket. ‘I prefer the Ubertl Mil-dot scope to the Swarovski. See to it, will you?’

  ‘Perfectionist. You realise they are only made for the US Marines and the FBI. They are as hard to come by as square eggs.’

  ‘Just get me one, Bogey. Bribe and corrupt in high places.’

  ‘And the other thing?’

  ‘Raufoss ammunition.’

  Boghe looked mildly startled. ‘That is even more difficult than the scope. I don’t traffic in that stuff.’

  ‘I know.’ Lux put his arm around Boghe’s shoulder and they walked towards the door like that. ‘But I’m sure you know someone who does.’

  Boghe went through a pantomime of lip-pursing and eyebrow-writhing before finally nodding. ‘But it will be very expensive. Maybe thirty dollars apiece. The risks are considerable.’

  ‘Twenty rounds, okay, Bogey?’

  ‘Okay, Dennis. You’re the boss.’

  They had reached the door.

  ‘You got it,’ Lux said, and with a farewell pat on the arms trader’s shoulder he went out to the waiting car.

  * * *

  With the walking stick he affected when posing as a member of the landed gentry Commissaire Barail slashed at the clump of dandelions that lay in his path, and succeeded in causing an explosion of spores. It was a childish act and he derived a childish pleasure from it. He began to hum under his breath.

  As he and his three fellow walkers breasted a gentle incline, the chateau ahead rose in magnificent contrast to the backdrop of hills, chequered yellow with rape and green with young corn. The sun shone from a velvet blue sky that was sprinkled only lightly with benign cumuli. It was spring, and the land was aglow with it.