Diamondhead

by Patrick Robinson

  Then he moved a hundred yards along the woods and made his exit, onto the river road. He walked casually to the bus stop, where a young girl of around eighteen was already waiting. It was 7:08, and the scene on the river was chaotic. A helicopter was running up and down the shore at a low level, east of the bridge, right in front of them. Another was searching the bank downstream, on the far side of the span. Two coast guard launches were on their way across the river from the north shore. The evening sky had clouded over, and the two boats had bright searchlights on the water. There were four police cars in the middle of the bridge, blue lights flashing, officers aiming radar guns hopefully over the surface, guns normally used to trap speeding motorists. There was another cluster of police cruisers at this end of the bridge, and Mack could see three red lights, probably signifying crash barriers, barring traffic from crossing before a search of their vehicles was conducted.

  None of that mattered to Mack. What did worry him was the police car coming dead ahead along the river road, moving slowly, watchful and deliberate. When it reached the bus stop, it pulled up right alongside, and the driver jumped out and opened the door to allow the passenger in the near-side rear seat to exit. Detective Inspector Paul Ravel stepped out. Chief Pierre Savary stayed where he was.

  “Good evening, mademoiselle, monsieur,” said Paul. “This is just a routine check—but have either of you seen anyone along here who looks as if he might have just swum across the river?”

  Mack raised his eyebrows, in the time-honored way of the truly astonished. The girl giggled and said, “Swum across the river! I didn’t think anyone had ever done that.”

  “Sir,” said Mack, “could you tell me what is going on over there?”

  Detective Inspector Ravel replied, “There has been an attempt on the life of Monsieur Henri Foche. We are searching the area.”

  “Wow!” said the girl. “My father was going to vote for him. Is he okay?”

  “We have not yet been informed. But I would like to see identification.”

  The girl produced a couple of credit cards, and Mack pulled out his passport, handed it over, and inquired, “Al-Qaeda again?”

  “No one’s said so yet. But we wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Ravel looked at the passport carefully and then said, “American, eh?”

  “Yes, Officer.”

  “How long have you been in France?”

  “Two weeks.”

  Ravel flicked through the pages and said, “There’s no immigration stamp. How did you come in?”

  “Cross-Channel ferry to Calais. They just looked at my passport through the car window.”

  “Do you have a return ticket?”

  “No, Officer. I’m going on down to Rome with friends. Then I’m flying home via Dublin.”

  “Do you have that return air ticket?”

  “I have the e-ticket document.”

  “May I see it?”

  Mack groped in one of the side pockets of his leather bag, produced it, and handed it to Paul Ravel.

  After a very quick glance, he handed it back to Mack and said, “Thank you, Mr. Simpson. I’m sorry to bother you. But if either one of you sees anyone who looks as if he might have been in the river, don’t approach him, but please do let us know, won’t you?” He handed them each a card containing a succession of police numbers.

  “Sure will,” replied Mack. “Hope you catch him. From what I read, Henri Foche is a very capable man.”

  Paul Ravel reboarded the cruiser.

  “Any good?” asked Savary.

  “Well, he was the right height, and his passport was not stamped when he came into the country. But there were a few gaps.”

  “Such as?”

  “As you know, at the busy times of the day, hundreds of people come through French ferry ports without having their passports stamped. Especially Calais, where he came in. The rest were just minor discrepancies, like his entire appearance, name, address, nationality, and the fact that he was dry. That’s quite unusual for someone who just jumped from a seventy-five-foot building into the harbor, and somehow swam across the Loire fully dressed. There was no other way he could have reached this side of the river.”

  “Hmmmm,” replied Savary expansively. “Was he French?”

  “No. American. American passport and address somewhere in Massachusetts. Showed me his return ticket.”

  “I suppose it was only about a billion-to-one shot that he was our man.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, sir. There are only sixty million people in France. Half of them are women, and half of the rest are babies or elderly. So it must have been fifteen million to one.”

  “I feel better already,” said Pierre.

  The cruiser accelerated farther along the road and stopped alongside two more pedestrians. As it did so, the bus to Nantes came into sight, rumbling along from the bridge. There were just two elderly ladies on board.

  The girl and Mack both climbed aboard, and the doors shut. Mack chose the corner seat on the empty back row bench. As he sat down he glanced ahead and noticed the police cruiser was making a U-turn and heading back to the bridge.

  Pierre Savary had finally accepted there was no point in searching on this side of the river. Not only had they found nothing, seen nothing, but everyone to whom they had spoken looked at them as if they were stark-raving mad at the mere thought of some maniac jumping in the Loire and swimming all the way across.

  Paul Ravel knew how badly his boss had taken it—the assassination against all the odds, his friend Henri gunned down right before his eyes, new security chief Raul Declerc hurled out of a window to his death, and then the total disappearance of the perpetrator.

  Just twenty-four hours previously everything had seemed so controlled. They had the killer’s name, address, and description, confirmed and corroborated by several sources. They even had his passport number, driver’s license. The shipyard had contained sufficient security guards to defend the beaches of Normandy in 1944. And they knew the assassin was in Saint-Nazaire. His car had been found in a public parking garage on Place des Martyrs. And now he was well and truly missing, vanished from the face of the earth. Paul Ravel’s logic told him the man was dead, probably drowned, and his body would wash up somewhere along the coast in the next five or six days.

  Pierre Savary’s logic also told him told him the man must have drowned in the powerful currents of the estuary, and he might well never be seen or heard from again. Yet a sense of failure settled on him. That was inexplicable, except that Pierre was damned sure the assassin was somehow still alive. And he could not be seen to give up. “We’d better keep the police cordon around the town,” he said. “Stop and question every driver. And intensify the search of the shipyard. Because that’s the most likely place he’ll be. He can’t still be in the water.”

  “Sir, we’ve searched that place high and low.”

  “I know we have,” replied Pierre. “But this character is on the move. Just think. He could have been hiding out along the wharves, staying in the water for maybe an hour, then crept out and found somewhere to wait it out. He may have had an accomplice. But somewhere, someplace, if he’s alive, he must have come out of the fucking river.”

  At 7:15 P.M. the head of the Administration Department walked out onto the steps of the Central Hospital of Saint-Nazaire and announced to the waiting journalists that Monsieur Henri Foche was dead. He had died of two gunshot wounds, to the head and chest. Surgeons had worked for some time to revive him, but the official hospital report would state he was dead on arrival. “There was never any realistic possibility he could be saved,” said the spokesman. “But everyone in our emergency room wanted to try.”

  He was accompanied on the hospital steps by Claudette Foche, who was still wearing her blood-spattered clothes. The sight of her was a chilling, inevitable reminder of that November day in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, when the devastated Jacqueline Kennedy stepped, blood-spattered, onto the aircraft bearing the body
of JFK, her slain husband.

  The spokesman had no intention of conducting a press conference, and after the formal announcement, with a barrage of questions being shouted at him from all angles, he led Madame Foche back inside the building.

  Among the pack of reporters at the base of the main steps to the hospital was Étienne Brix, Le Monde’s newly promoted bureau chief for Brittany. He had driven down from Rennes on pure instinct, sharing a car with a three-man television crew from France 3, a station always on its toes for regional news.

  Étienne, the man who had first cracked the story of the Val André killer and his relentless pursuit of Henri Foche, knew more about the background to the killing than any of his journalistic cohorts. Most of them knew only what he had written in this morning’s edition of his newspaper. None of them knew about the missing car or the police manhunt that had gone so severely wrong.

  When the scribes began to write their hastily assembled stories for the news media all over France, Étienne would again be way out in front, because he alone, thanks to the distant Inspector Varonne back in Rennes, understood the catastrophic failure of the security forces. And right now there were no further restrictions on what he could and could not use.

  He called the news editor in Paris instantly and alerted everyone to the story. The wire agencies would probably be on the case, but he would file personally in one hour. He needed to make three more calls. Étienne’s epic, which landed on the news desk of Le Monde, bylined by Étienne Brix, read:Henri Foche, the front-running leader of the Gaullist Party and almost certainly the next president of France, was gunned down by an assassin’s bullet in a Saint-Nazaire shipyard late yesterday afternoon.

  Monsieur Foche was pronounced dead on arrival at the city’s Central Hospital. He had been shot twice, in the head and chest. His wife, Claudette, who had accompanied him on the journey from their home in Rennes, was in the operating room while surgeons fought to revive him. Bravely, she stood on the steps outside the hospital as the announcement was formally made that her husband was dead.

  In truth, Henri Foche never had a chance. The first bullet took him in the central area of the forehead, and police say it was a deadly high-velocity projectile that blew his head asunder. The second one did the same to his heart. Henri Foche was almost certainly dead before he hit the ground.

  Police have long believed there was an assassin stalking the Gaullist leader, much as the Los Angeles Police Department did during the final hours of Bobby Kennedy’s life in 1968.

  Two days ago both of Foche’s personal bodyguards, Marcel Joffre and Raymond Dunant, were murdered on the beach at Val André in North Brittany. Police believed then that their killer was really after Foche himself. And I can now reveal that for the past twenty-four hours there has been a massive nationwide police dragnet spread across France.

  Desperately they searched for the killer, watching the hours tick away to the fateful moment when the Gaullist firebrand would take his place on the podium in the shipyard to give what many anticipated would be one of his greatest speeches. They had the assassin’s description: big, black hair, black-bearded. They had his name and address: Gunther Marc Roche, of 18 rue de Basle, Geneva, Switzerland. They had his passport number. They had his Swiss driver’s license number. They had the license-plate number of the car he purchased to make his getaway from Val André. They even found the car, in a public parking garage in Saint-Nazaire.

  According to Fox News in the United States, the president of France himself ordered an extra thousand security men into Saint-Nazaire to protect Henri Foche. The entire town swarmed with armed police and national guards.

  But the authorities had other information—French military experts, called in to assist in the original investigation, were certain the man who broke the necks of both bodyguards had served as a member of the Special Forces somewhere, either in the French Foreign Legion, Great Britain’s SAS, or the U.S. Navy’s SEAL teams.

  The killings bore the hallmarks of a man trained in the most brutal forms of unarmed combat, not to mention the accompanying skills such men have as snipers. With his assassination mission accomplished, the man apparently made a death-defying leap from the high floor of the warehouse into the Loire River. Again, authorities consider this was likely to be the action of a trained Special Forces combatant.

  And so it proved. Henri Foche was shot down in what turned out to be a welter of blood. Three security guards were found dead in the empty sixth-floor warehouse room from which Roche fired the shot that killed the king of the Gaullists. Two of them had crushing, murderous wounds to their skulls; the third had had his throat cut.

  Sometime in the moments after they were killed, Monsieur Foche’s new head of security, Raul Declerc of Marseille, was hurled out of the same window, presumably by the same man. He died instantly after the sixty-three-foot fall, in full view of the hundreds of shipyard workers who were on the main concourse to hear Henri Foche’s speech.

  The remainder of the story was essentially background, though Étienne Brix would spend much of this night interviewing local people and the police.

  He ended his front-page lead for Le Monde with these words: Last night police were warning that the big bearded killer from Geneva was still at large. He should not under any circumstances be approached by members of the public.

  Le Monde’s splash headline was:HENRI FOCHE SLAIN BY ASSASSIN’S BULLETS POLICE CORDON FAILS TO PROTECT GAULLIST LEADER FROM “PREDICTABLE” MURDER

  The wire agencies, operating under terrific pressure at 7:20 in the evening, flashed:Saint-Nazaire, Brittany. Wednesday. Henri Foche assassinated, 4:45 P.M. in Saint-Nazaire Maritime shipyard. Shot twice, head and chest. Gaullist leader dead on arrival at Central Hospital. Wife Claudette by his side until the end. Assassin still at large.

  By 7:30 P.M. every media newsroom in the world was onto the story. Fox News in New York was quickly into its stride, leaving CNN standing, with most of its staff still trying to find another dozen reasons to criticize the Republican president.

  Fox interrupted everything for the news flash. Norman Dixon was yelling instructions, Laxton was on the line from Paris with one of the fastest stories ever written, wrapping up details from every which way with uncanny accuracy and perception.

  Things were happening so fast that Dixon pulled “the talent,” removing the girl who looked like the cover of Vogue from the front line of the action. Instead, he installed in front of the camera a very sharp young former sportswriter from London named John Morgan to address the nation.

  “We need someone who can hang in there,” growled Norman. “They gotta read fast, adapt, adjust, edit, and add stuff, without a break. Sports guys know how to do that—get in there, Morgan, and let’s go.”

  Fox was first by a mile. It was 1:30 P.M. on the East Coast of the United States, just about at the conclusion of the lunchtime bulletin. BREAKING NEWS! flashed on the screen, and John Morgan came on to announce the murder of the next president of France.

  Eddie Laxton’s story was packed with detail, mostly gathered and rewritten from Étienne’s galaxy of innuendo, using his time-honored Fleet Street knack of putting 2 and 2 together and getting about 390. But Eddie knew what he was doing, and while he was not quite up to speed with on-the-spot Étienne Brix, he was not that far behind, and he was gaining.

  The hub of the investigation now swung automatically to the Prefecture de Police in Paris, and by 7:38 Eddie Laxton was in there, talking to officers, chatting to old contacts, and firing back the minutiae on what was now an open cell phone line, direct to Norman Dixon’s assistant in New York.

  Of all the reporters in the entire world working on this story, trying to make sense of arched, defensive police statements, Eddie was the first one to conclude, “These bastards haven’t the first clue who the assassin is. They don’t know his name, his address, or his nationality. They don’t know who hired him, or why. I’m not even sure about that black-beard bullshit, either.”

  He
told the reporter in New York to put him directly on the line to Norman Dixon, to whom he spelled out his doubts. Norman never hesitated. He wrote down on a sheet of copy paper, “French police yesterday admitted they had no idea as to the identity of the assassin. They suspected a completely false trail, and they’d heard nothing from al-Qaeda. Worse yet, the man who had killed Henri Foche had vanished.”

  The subeditor passing the copy over to John Morgan risked a note of caution. “What if the gendarmes deny this?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about that damned rubbish,” replied Norman. “They’ll only deny it if they have answers. And Eddie says they have none. Hand it to John.”

  Jane Remson was out on the terrace reading a magazine and waiting for Harry to come and join her for lunch. Awaiting him was his favorite combination of food in all the world—a smoked salmon sandwich, with just a light sprinkle of lemon on brown bread and butter, accompanied by a glass of chilled white wine.