Frederick Forsyth - The Day of the Jackal

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 tachometer 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 Cote 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 plainclothes 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 Andre 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 aftershave 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 plainclothes 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, blownup 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 the 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 fifty days. It's going to 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 imposter will probably be our man. Off you go.»