‘This man is supposed to be after De Gaulle?’
‘Must be, by the sound of the enquiry. But the French must be playing it very cagey. They obviously don’t want any publicity.’
‘Obviously. But why not contact us direct?’
‘The request for suggestions as to a name has been put through on the old boy network. From Lebel to Mallinson, direct. Perhaps the French Secret Service doesn’t have an old boy network with your section.’
If Lloyd had noticed the reference to the notoriously bad relations between the SDECE and the SIS, he gave no sign of it.
‘What are you thinking?’ asked Thomas after a while.
‘Funny,’ said Lloyd staring out over the river. ‘You remember the Philby case?’
‘Of course.’
‘Still a very sore nerve in our section,’ resumed Lloyd. ‘He went over from Beirut in January ’61. Of course, it didn’t get out until later, but it caused a hell of a rumpus inside the Service. A lot of people got moved around. Had to be done, he had blown most of the Arab Section and some others as well. One of the men who had to be moved very fast was our top resident in the Caribbean. He had been with Philby in Beirut six months before, then transferred to Carib.
‘About the same time the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, was assassinated on a lonely road outside Ciudad Trujillo. According to the reports he was killed by partisans—he had a lot of enemies. Our man came back to London then, and we shared an office for a while until he was re-deployed. He mentioned a rumour that Trujillo’s car was stopped, for the ambushers to blow it open and kill the man inside, by a single shot from a marksman with a rifle. It was a hell of a shot—from one hundred and fifty yards at a speeding car. Went through the little triangular window on the driver’s side, the one that wasn’t of bullet-proof glass. The whole car was armoured. Hit the driver through the throat and he crashed. That was when the partisans closed in. The odd thing was, rumour had it the shooter was an Englishman.’
There was a long pause as the two men, the empty beer mugs swinging from their fingers, stared across the now quite darkened waters of the Thames. Both had a mental picture of a harsh, arid landscape in a hot and distant island; of a car careering at seventy miles an hour off a bitumen strip and into the rocky verge; of an old man in fawn twill and gold braid, who had ruled his kingdom with an iron and ruthless hand for thirty years, being dragged from the wreck to be finished off with pistols in the dust by the roadside.
‘This … man … in the rumour. Did he have a name?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was just talk in the office at the time. We had an awful lot on our plate then, and a Caribbean dictator was the last thing we needed to worry about.’
‘This colleague, the one who talked to you. Did he write a report?’
‘Must have done. Standard practice. But it was just a rumour, understand. Just a rumour. Nothing to go on. We deal in facts, solid information.’
‘But it must have been filed, somewhere?’
‘Suppose so,’ said Lloyd. ‘Very low priority, only a bar rumour in that area. Place abounds in rumours.’
‘But you could just have a look back at the files, like? See if the man on the mountain had a name?’
Lloyd pulled himself off the rail.
‘You get on home,’ he said to the Superintendent. ‘I’ll ring you if there’s an
ything that might help.’
They walked back into the rear bar of the pub, deposited the glasses, and made for the street door.
‘I’d be grateful,’ said Thomas as they shook hands. ‘Probably nothing in it. But just on the off-chance.’
While Thomas and Lloyd were talking above the waters of the Thames, and the Jackal was scooping the last drops of his Zabaglione from the glass in a roof-top restaurant in Milan, Commissaire Claude Lebel attended the first of the progress report meetings in the conference room of the Interior Ministry in Paris.
The attendance was the same as it had been twenty-four hours earlier. The Interior Minister sat at the head of the table, with the department heads down each side. Claude Lebel sat at the other end with a small folder in front of him. The Minister nodded curtly for the meeting to begin.
His chef de cabinet spoke first. Over the previous day and night, he said, every Customs officer on every border post in France had received instructions to check through the luggage of tall blond male foreigners entering France. Passports particularly were to be checked, and were to be scrutinised by the DST official at the Customs post for possible forgeries. (The head of the DST inclined his head in acknowledgement.) Tourists and business men entering France might well remark a sudden increase in vigilance at Customs, but it was felt unlikely that any victim of such a baggage search would realise it was being applied across the country to tall blond men. If any enquiries were made by a sharp-eyed Press man, the explanation would be that they were nothing but routine snap searches. But it was felt no enquiry would ever be made.
He had one other thing to report. A proposal had been made that the possibility be considered of making a snatch on one of the three OAS chiefs in Rome. The Quai d’Orsay had come out strongly against such an idea for diplomatic reasons (they had not been told of the Jackal plot) and they were being backed in this by the President (who was aware of the reason). This must therefore be discounted as a way out of their difficulties.
General Guibaud for the SDECE said a complete check of their records had failed to reveal knowledge of the existence of a professional political killer outside the ranks of the OAS or its sympathisers, and who could not be completely accounted for.
The head of Renseignements Généraux said a search through France’s criminal archives had revealed the same thing, not only among Frenchmen but also among foreigners who had ever tried to operate inside France.
The chief of the DST then made his report. At 7.30 that morning a call had been intercepted from a post office near the Gare du Nord to the number of the Rome hotel where the three OAS chiefs were staying. Since their appearance there eight weeks before, operators on the international switchboard had been instructed to report all calls placed to that number. The one on duty that morning had been slow on the uptake. The call had been placed before he had realised that the number was the one on his list. He had put the call through, and only then rung the DST. However, he had had the sense to listen in. The message had been: ‘Valmy to Poitiers. The Jackal is blown. Repeat. The Jackal is blown. Kowalski was taken. Sang before dying. Ends.’