Jack Higgins: Eye Of The Storm aka Midnight Man

“I brought a load in from Dijon a couple of hours ago. Intended to drive back tonight, but the damn truck’s giving trouble. I need a bed.”

“Thirty francs, monsieur.”

“You’re kidding,” Dillon said. “I’ll be out of here at the crack of dawn.”

The old man shrugged. “All right, you can have number eighteen on the second landing for twenty, but the bed hasn’t been changed.”

“When does that happen, once a month?” Dillon took the key, gave him his twenty francs and went upstairs.

The room was as disgusting as he expected even in the diffused light from the landing. He closed the door, moved carefully through the darkness and looked out cautiously. There was a movement under a tree on the river side of the road. Gaston Jobert stepped out and hurried away along the pavement.

“Oh, dear,” Dillon whispered, then lit a cigarette and went and lay on the bed and thought about it, staring up at the ceiling.

Pierre, sitting at the bar of Le Chat Noir waiting for his brother’s return, was leafing through Paris Soir for want of something better to do when he noticed the item on Margaret Thatcher’s meeting with Mitterrand. His stomach churned and he read the item again with horror. It was at that moment the door opened and Gaston hurried in.

“What a night. I’m frozen to the bone. Give me a cognac.”

“Here.” Pierre poured some into a glass. “And you can read this interesting tidbit in Paris Soir while you’re drinking.”

Gaston did as he was told and suddenly choked on the cognac. “My God, she’s staying at Choisy.”

“And leaves from that old air-force field at Valenton. Leaves Choisy at two o’clock. How long to get to that railway crossing? Ten minutes?”

“Oh, God, no,” Gaston said. “We’re done for. This is out of our league, Pierre. If this takes place, we’ll have every cop in France on the streets.”

“But it isn’t going to. I knew that bastard was bad news. Always something funny about him. You managed to follow him?”

“Yes, he doubled around the streets for a while, then ended up at that fleapit old François runs just along the river. I saw him through the window booking in.” He shivered. “But what are we going to do?” He was almost sobbing. “This is the end, Pierre. They’ll lock us up and throw away the key.”

“No they won’t,” Pierre told him. “Not if we stop him, they won’t. They’ll be too grateful. Who knows, there might even be a reward in it. Now what’s Inspector Savary’s home number?”

“He’ll be in bed.”

“Of course he will, you idiot, nicely tucked up with his old lady where all good detectives should be. We’ll just have to wake him up.”

Inspector Jules Savary came awake cursing as the phone rang at his bedside. He was on his own, for his wife was spending a week in Lyons at her mother’s. He’d had a long night. Two armed robberies and a sexual assault on a woman. He’d only just managed to get to sleep.

He picked up the phone. “Savary here.”

“It’s me, Inspector, Pierre Jobert.”

Savary glanced at the bedside clock. “For Christ’s sake, Jobert, it’s two-thirty in the morning.”

“I know, Inspector, but I’ve got something special for you.”

“You always have, so it can wait till the morning.”

“I don’t think so, Inspector. I’m offering to make you the most famous cop in France. The pinch of a lifetime.”

“Pull the other one,” Savary said.

“Margaret Thatcher. She’s staying at Choisy tonight, leaves for Valenton at two? I can tell you all about the man who’s going to see she never gets there.”

Jules Savary had never come awake so fast. “Where are you, Le Chat Noir ?”

“Yes,” Jobert told him.

“Half an hour.” Savary slammed down the phone, leapt out of bed and started to dress.

It was at exactly the same moment that Dillon decided to move on. The fact that Gaston had followed him didn’t necessarily mean anything more than the fact that the brothers were anxious to know more about him. On the other hand…

He left, locking the door, found the back stairs and descended cautiously. There was a door at the bottom that opened easily enough and gave access to a yard at the rear. An alley brought him to the main road. He crossed, walked along a line of parked trucks, chose one about fifty yards from the hotel, but giving him a good view. He got his knife out, worked away at the top of the passenger window. After a while it gave so that he could get his fingers in and exert pressure. A minute later he was inside. Better not to smoke, so he sat back, collar up, hands in pockets, and waited. It was half past three when the four unmarked cars eased up to the hotel. Eight men got out, none in uniform, which was interesting.

“Action Service, or I miss my guess,” Dillon said softly.

Gaston Jobert got out of the rear car and stood talking to them for a moment, then they all moved into the hotel. Dillon wasn’t angry, just pleased that he’d got it right. He left the truck, crossed the road to the shelter of the nearest alley and started to walk to the warehouse in rue de Helier.

The French secret service, notorious for years as the SDECE, has had its name changed to Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, DGSE, under the Mitterrand government in an attempt to improve the image of a shady and ruthless organization with a reputation for stopping at nothing. Having said that, measured by results, few intelligence organizations in the world are so efficient.

The service, as in the old days, was still divided into five sections and many departments, the most famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, being Section 5, more commonly known as Action Service, the department responsible for the smashing of the OAS.

Colonel Max Hernu had been involved in all that, had hunted the OAS down as ruthlessly as anyone, in spite of having served as a paratrooper in both Indochina and Algeria. He was sixty-one years of age, an elegant, white-haired man who now sat at his desk in the office on the first floor of DGSE’s headquarters on the Boulevard Mortier. It was just before five o’clock and Hernu, wearing horn-rimmed reading glasses, studied the report in front of him. He had been staying the night at his country cottage forty miles out of Paris and had only just arrived. Inspector Savary watched respectfully.

Hernu removed his glasses. “I loathe this time of the morning. Takes me back to Dien Bien Phu and the waiting for the end. Pour me another coffee, will you?”

Savary took his cup, went to the electric pot on the stand and poured the coffee, strong and black. “What do you think, sir?”

“These Jobert brothers, you believe they’re telling us everything?”

“Absolutely, sir, I’ve known them for years. Big Pierre was OAS, which he thinks gives him class, but they’re second-rate hoods really. They do well in stolen cars.”

“So this would be out of their league?”

“Very definitely. They’ve admitted to me that they’ve sold this man Rocard cars in the past.”

“Of the hot variety?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course they are telling the truth. The ten thousand dollars speak for them there. But this man Rocard, you’re an experienced copper, Inspector. How many years on the street?”

“Fifteen, sir.”

“Give me your opinion.”

“His physical description is interesting because according to the Jobert boys, there isn’t one. He’s small, no more than one sixty-five. No discernible color to the eyes, fair hair. Gaston says the first time they met him he thought he was a nothing, and then he apparently half-killed some guy twice his size in the bar in about five seconds flat.”