by Lex Lander
Though sceptical, Garbe agreed to meet his anonymous caller at an isolated spot near the south coast of the Brittany peninsula. The informant took precautions to ensure that he was not being lured into a trap, including sporting a false beard, false nose, and dark glasses. Other than wiring himself to record their conversation, however, Garbe played it straight. His desire for the exclusive rights to the story far surpassed any notion of public duty.
The informant handed over extracts from the dossier, including a lengthy report dated March 1996 from the Director General of the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité - the security body that includes the presidential bodyguard) to the Minister of the Interior. The report set out how a clandestine militant organisation of New Zealand origin had hired a professional killer to assassinate the President of France in retribution for the nuclear tests at the Muroroa Atoll.
The report further attested that a government minister and a senior officer in the CRS were implicated, together with a notorious Corsican terrorist. Other key participants were a New Zealand multi-millionaire, and two green activists, one American, the other a New Zealander. The assassin was an American, resident in France at the time, ex-husband of a French socialite and member of the aristocracy.
The assassination was foiled when the CRS infiltrated the cabal. However, they failed to bring the instigators of the plot to justice. These individuals remain at large to this day.
The informant would not disclose how he came by the dossier. His price was one million French francs en liquide. He and Garbe parted, having arranged to speak again on the telephone forty-eight hours later.
During these forty-eight hours, Garbe negotiated with a major French magazine (rumoured to be L’Express, though they steadfastly deny it, maintaining that they ‘don’t spend that sort of money’.) to pay the asking price. A rendezvous was arranged between Garbe and the informant for delivery of the dossier, but the man didn’t show up and nothing more was heard from him.
Garbe was not about to let the story go. Funded in part by the unnamed publication, in part by his modest savings, he spent the next sixteen months tracking down the informant and eventually came up with an identity - a middle-ranking civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior, by the name of Vincent de Poilu, one of whose minor duties was to supervise the shredding of confidential material. Via further backdoor enquiries among de Poilu’s fellow officials, Garbe learned that the man had quit the department the day after his second telephone conversation with him, when the arrangements were made for the handover. The rather seedy apartment in Gennevilliers where de Poilu had lived with his wife proved now to be occupied by an Algerian family, who were no wiser than the civil servant’s colleagues as to the couple’s whereabouts.
The magazine’s flagging commitment was revived by this development, and Garbe was authorised to hire a private detective. On 21st August 1998, nearly two years since de Poilu first made contact, the detective reported that he had traced the de Poilu couple to an apartment in the Belgian town of Louvain, living under the name of Wargniez.
Hot-footing it to Louvain, Garbe cornered ‘Wargniez’ at the small electrical goods store of which he was manager. By a combination of bribery and intimidation, he persuaded the former civil servant to co-operate. Despite his terror of discovery, Wargniez/de Poilu admitted that he had held onto the six-hundred-page file on the assassination attempt. It was lodged in a safe deposit box at the Cera Bank, in Parijsstraat.
A new deal was clinched for the same price as before, and this time the exchange went ahead (though Wargniez/de Poilu and his wife have since gone missing again).
Burning midnight oil, Garbe read the report from end to end and realised that he had on his hands a scalding hot property. Too hot, in fact. No French publishing house would dare publish it, as it would be all too obvious that secret government papers were the source, though his employers would be free to sell the foreign rights with impunity. However, something about the account still troubled Garbe: it was incomplete. The principals behind the assassination attempt referred to throughout as ‘G’ and ‘R’ were still at large and their whereabouts uncertain.
The magazine concurred in Garbe’s view that the account could only be sold abroad, but before passing it on to their foreign rights agent they commissioned Garbe to try to trace the people who issued the contract on the life of President Chirac.
Money was no longer an object. Garbe flew to Auckland, New Zealand, and easily obtained the name of the man whom it was suspected had financed the operation, if only indirectly - one Edward Nixon. Nixon apparently left New Zealand for good at the end of 1995 and died in the USA in April 1996, of cancer of the liver, shortly before the attempt on Chirac’s life.
Garbe appeared to have reached an impasse. The only remaining avenue of enquiry was Greenpeace. At their headquarters in Auckland’s Parnell district, he met a leading woman activist, who insisted on remaining anonymous. This woman, accordingly anonymous in Garbe’s notes, was unable to throw further light on Nixon’s involvement, but a passing remark about two leading militants, who coincidentally quit Greenpeace in the autumn of 1995, stirred up the reporter’s curiosity. The two renegades were named as Sheryl Glister, an American woman, and Gary Rosenbrand, a Kiwi (‘G’ and ‘R’?); the former was living ‘somewhere overseas’, but Rosenbrand had a house in the Auckland North Shore suburb of Takapuna. He was believed to be no longer active in any environmental movement.
To persuade Rosenbrand to see him, Garbe made a nuisance of himself. Only when he threatened to expose the New Zealander as a leading participant in the plot did his resistance collapse. At his one and only interview, Rosenbrand co-operated in adding much ‘between the lines’ material. More importantly, he told Garbe where he could get in touch with Sheryl Glister, putative leader of the breakaway faction.
Garbe flew to Hawaii and paid an unannounced call on Ms Glister at her Honolulu apartment. She was not at home, but by literally camping on her doorstep until the small hours, he was able to confront her on her return. Unlike Rosenbrand, she readily agreed to an interview, and Garbe was able to strike up a rapport with her in the hour that followed. The intelligence she supplied during the session was off the record, though Garbe secretly recorded it, and could not, she insisted, be publicised ‘until my death’. She did relent enough to allow him to quote the last few lines of their conversation, recorded as follows:
Garbe: ‘What’s your next move, Sheryl? Will you quit?’
Glister: ‘Not me. Heck, my work is no more over now than it was in 1995. Out there are still nuclear weapons, still governments playing with them, still megalomaniacs threatening to use them. India and Pakistan, for instance. What a pair of beauties! [Laughter]. Their leaders need their heads cracking together. A simultaneous execution would be kind of apt, don’t you think, Thierry?’ [Prolonged laughter].
In the end, nobody would publish the report and the magazine that had recruited Garbe was obliged to write off its investment. But Garbe himself was far from done with it. He had kept a copy of the whole dossier. He returned to Honolulu in March 1999 and over a period of two weeks persuaded, bullied, and cajoled Sheryl Glister into filling in the gaps in the chronicle, and ultimately agreeing to his commissioning a book on the subject.
The author, then living near Grenoble in France, was roped in to ‘novelise’ the mish-mash of documents and notes. Garbe summarized the report and his recordings of the interviews with Rosenbrand and Glister, while the author introduced dialogue, dramatization, and most notably fleshed out a relevant love affair that the official report voyeuristically dwelt on at some length.
This narrative is, therefore, based roughly one-third on the report produced by the Ministry of the Interior, which incorporates reports from other government departments and personnel, one third on the interviews with Glister and Rosenbrand, and one third on the author’s storytelling skills. It is for the reader to judge how much of it really happened.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
In 1971, a book entitled The Day of the Jackal, written by freelance news reporter Frederick Forsyth, was published. It was an account of an assassination attempt on the life of Charles de Gaulle that purported to have taken place in Paris on Liberation Day, 25th August 1963. A deserved worldwide bestseller, it has twice been made into a movie, though the second one had little in common with the book.
At the time of publication there was speculation as to how much of Forsyth’s tale was fact and how much was fiction. Nobody really knows for sure to this day. Probably it was a bit of both. De Gaulle certainly survived a number of assassination attempts, that much is a matter of record. The ‘Jackal’ affair was to be the last recorded attempt on the life of a French president for over thirty years.
The only similarity between Forsyth’s narrative and mine is the target - the President of France, in this case Jacques Chirac, the incumbent at the time in which the events are set. Thierry Garbe, the French journalist who brought the evidence to me swears the story is true. Not all of the facts stack up, though many do. Anyhow, I took Garbe’s material at face value, added some colour to the black-and-white of the evidence by fleshing out the principal players, introducing some personal strife, and creating quite a lot of wholly imaginary dialogue. Having said this, sections of the dialogue not invented by me are based on hearsay from a key player, and the rest is verbatim, for reasons that will become apparent as the narrative draws to a close.
Only one of the key players remains unidentified to this day - the French government minister who, if not actually a conspirator, was privy to the plot. The motives behind his complicity are not clear and seem unlikely ever to become known.
Finally, the names of some people and places have been changed, and some haven’t. Those of the protagonists still living will know which. The rest will have to speculate.
LL, September 2012
the ANDRÉ WARNER, MANHUNTER series
A new series of crime thrillers by Lex Lander, author of
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER JACKAL
Volume I - END AS AN ASSASSIN - available as an eBook from January 2016
Volume II - I KILL - available as an eBook from February 2016
Volume III - THE MAN WHO HUNTED HIMSELF - available as an eBook
autumn 2016
Paperback publication dates will be announced during 2016
AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS FROM AMAZON, SMASHWORDS, KOBO, APPLE, etc
for a preview of END AS AN ASSASSIN read on …
END AS AN ASSASSIN
Lex Lander
One
* * *
A contract to kill is not a signed document. It’s not even a document. Or even a handshake. It’s a pledge between the contractor and the contractee that in return for a sum of money a certain person will be assassinated.
Traditionally fifty per cent of the fee is paid up front. From that point onwards it is binding on both parties. Reneging is out of the question. If the assassin does not deliver, the word will travel and he will never find employment again. Moreover he may himself be hunted down in retribution. Conversely, if the hirer does not pay the balance of the fee, he in turn becomes a legitimate target for the assassin who, for the sake of his reputation, cannot forgive the default. In his case retribution is not a matter of ego, it’s a commercial imperative.
It is therefore, a ‘perfect’ contract. A win-win scenario.
Except for the victim.
* * *
The warble of my cell phone dragged me from my afternoon doze. Initially disorientated, I rolled from my side onto my back and forced my eyes open. It was a bleary world out there. I blinked repeatedly and fast like a machine gone berserk. The balloon of confusion popped and the walls of the hotel room swam into focus. I reached for the trilling, annoying, indispensible piece of plastic on the bedside table. UNKNOWN CALLER the green screen announced. I touched the response icon.
“Yes?” I snapped, making no effort to suppress my irritation.
“Townsend, c’est bien vous?” my unknown caller – male, French – queried. He was using my current alias, so it could only be one of two people. In any case, I was sure I recognized the Parisian accent of my paymaster.
My confirmation was a laconic “Oui.”
“Ici Bonhomme.”
Bonhomme translates as Goodman in English. Was it his real name? I guessed not. Same as mine wasn’t Townsend. In the world where I did business pseudonyms were the rule.
“You received the transfer?” he asked. He sounded edgy.
“Yes.” The second stage instalment of two hundred thousand American dollars, minus a precise two thousand two hundred of extortionate bank charges, had showed up in my Swiss account this very morning. “Have you got the arrival time?”
“That’s my reason for calling. They will land at München at eighteen-fifty. From there it is about an hour by car.”
Suddenly, I was wide awake. I sat up and swung my legs off the edge of the bed.
“Whoa there, just a minute. What do you mean, they?”
“The woman will be with him.” No wonder he was edgy. The woman wasn’t part of the program.
This then was it, the dreaded unforeseen.
“Look, Bonhomme,” I said, letting a snarl creep into my voice. “She’s not supposed to be here until the day after tomorrow. If she’s around tomorrow night it will totally fuck up the job.”
A short silence, then, “She’s expendable.”
“Expendable! That’s big of you. You mean you expect me to take her out too?”
“If she’s there, you’ll have no choice.”
He was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better about it.
“The price just went up,” I told him.
“Don’t try to blackmail me, Townsend. You’ll be sorry if you do.”
“And don’t try to get two jobs done for the price of one,” I countered. I gave him a couple of beats to think about it. “Another hundred thousand or it’s off.”
To my surprise, he didn’t go volcanic.
“Very well.” He sighed. “But it will not reach your account until tomorrow.”
The connection was cut, leaving me glowering at my reflection in the cell phone’s screen. The additional hundred grand was a malus not a bonus. I didn’t need the money and I didn’t need more blood on my conscience. Female blood, especially.
Fuming, I flopped back on my pillow. The job had just been transformed from straightforward low-risk, to complicated and tricky, with my neck on the chopping block if it went awry. The collateral damage was anathema, professional and personal. Killing an innocent party transgressed a private code; that the party in this instance was female just added to the anguish. Too late now to make new arrangements. The venue – their secret love nest – was custom built for the job, and none of the alternatives came within a mile of it for suitability. Whatever heart searching was involved, I was not about to compromise the outcome.
Another – albeit lesser – worry was the identity of the woman. His mistress was the free-ranging wife of a prominent German politician and businessman. When this hit the press the stink was going to be noxious.
Aside from the nuisance factor of a double killing, only the escape route was causing me the odd twinge of concern: a narrow, twisting track without a single exit; a good three minutes’ driving and nowhere to hide. Meeting an oncoming vehicle would mean pulling over, backing up, and God knows what else. Plenty of opportunity for the other driver to sum me up, with my car and my license plate, and wonder what the hell I was doing on a road that led only to one place. The risk of such an encounter was slight, but I’d lived to a ripe thirty-eight and a few months by keeping risks to an irreducible minimum.
By now, I was thoroughly awake, if not refreshed, and slid off the bed.
Outside it was gray, damp and dismal; November in Bavaria. It didn’t make poetry. It didn’t chime with sunshine and trees in blossom and a glass of wine on the terrace. Bene
ath saturnine skies, mist hung motionless in cobwebs, with incessant rain varying only in its intensity. Which is how it had been since I set foot in Oberpframmern, on the outskirts of München, two days ago.
From the window of my functional, plastic-veneered hotel room cubicle, I looked out over the Höhenkirchenwald a roller-coaster landscape coated with black conifers, with here and there a farm. On the other side of the rolling hills, this time tomorrow give or take an hour, I would enter the house where the hit would be staying, and place two, maybe three, bullets where they would do lethal harm. Same for the woman. As far as the guy was concerned, no qualms on my part, and no regrets. As for her, I just hoped I was ruthless enough to do the deed.
Another Day,
Another Jackal
Contents
Cover page
Title page
Copyright
Part One - OCTOBER - Another Kind of Revolution
Part Two - NOVEMBER - A Plot Without Gunpowder
Part Three - JANUARY - Happy New Year, Mr Chirac!
Part Four - FEBRUARY - A Leap Year of Faith
Part Five - MARCH - Madness in the Air
Part Six - APRIL - No Place for Fools
Part Seven - MAY - Bugs Everywhere
Part Eight - JUNE - Midsummer Execution
Part Nine - JULY - Missing Persons not Missing