All three of them were silent for a few moments. Then the senior doctor said quietly, “Your man, Inspector, served in either the SAS, the U.S. Navy SEALs, or the First Marine Paras. I’d bet the farm on that.”
Detective Inspector Ravel saw the two men out, inquiring, “Where are you parked?”
“On the beach, just as you said, sir. You need anything more, we’ll be back in Paris two hours from now.”
Ten minutes later, Paul heard the clatter of Aerospatiale’s Alouette III swooping low over Porte St. Thomas, then heading due east, straight for the northern suburbs of the City of Light.
Paul sat in deep contemplation, wondering how his new information could possibly help him solve this double murder case. And after about five minutes of soul-searching, he decided it was essentially a blind alley.
He checked on his computer, Googled the SAS and the SEALs, and added up the number of serving personnel, combat troops trained in this level of violence. In Great Britain and the United States alone there were a few more than three thousand. In France he thought there were another one thousand maximum. If he took a ten-year assessment, there were probably around ten thousand such men in all the world, only four thousand of whom could be accounted for. The rest could be anywhere. And it was a million-to-one chance that any commanding officer would have a sudden memory flash identifying a former combatant who might have gone into France to murder the next president. And anyway the Americans and the Brits would not be so likely to tell him details about their most secretive personnel.
“This is fairyland,” he murmured. “But I better call Pierre Savary and tell him the opinions of the doctors.”
This took just a few minutes because the Brittany police chief realized it was a wild goose chase pursuing such avenues. Besides, there was so little time. “You’re not planning to chase down the Special Forces commanders and question them, are you?” demanded Pierre.
“Absolutely not,” replied Paul. “That would be a monumental waste of time. It’s the type of stuff that would be damning evidence against a defendant charged with these murders in a court of law. You know, ‘The guy once served in the SAS. He’d know how to do it,’ etc. But it’s never going to help us find him.”
The more Chief Savary heard from Paul Ravel, the better he liked him. He said, “My thoughts precisely. Let’s just concentrate on finding the goddamned car. Hopefully, the bastard will still be in it.”
“I doubt that, sir. But when we find it, it will be the biggest break we’ve had so far. I’ll stay right on it.”
Pierre Savary liked the “when” rather than an “if.” He liked that a great deal. His mood of mild self-congratulation ended, however, as soon as he put down his phone. Because it rang again, almost immediately, and he thought, correctly, there was an angry edge to the ring.
Henri Foche was not pleased. “Have your guys found this Peugeot yet?” he asked. “Because if they haven’t, I am obliged to wonder, why the hell not?”
“Mostly because not one of the hundreds of police officers I have on the case has seen it. If anyone had, we’d probably have this Gunther character under lock and key.”
“All I know is, first we have him trapped on a red fishing boat sixty-five-feet long a mile offshore, and he manages to vanish, with his boat. And then, with all the resources of one of the biggest, most modern police forces in Europe, we can’t find his car.”
“Well, Hans Blix couldn’t find Saddam’s atom bomb, but no one held it against him.”
Henri Foche chuckled. He and Pierre Savary had known each other a long time. And he believed that if the Brittany boys could not find that car, then it was far away.
“You’ll understand I’m getting slightly jumpy about all this,” he said. “I mean, it’s apparently me this character is trying to kill. And unless he’s blind, he must now know I’m due to speak in Saint-Nazaire tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’m sure he does, Henri,” replied the police chief. “And I am afraid I have some even more alarming news for you—this Gunther Marc Roche is almost certainly a former member of the Special Forces, either the U.S. Navy SEALs, the British SAS, or the French First Marine Paras. We’ve called in military specialists from Paris. And they are quite certain Marcel and Raymond were killed by a highly trained member of such an organization. Just because no civilian could possibly have killed quite like that.”
“Well, now that I am probably as good as dead, perhaps you can tell me if anyone is planning to do something about it.”
“We are doing all that we can, Henri. You know that. And we have made progress. We know the guy’s name and address; we have a description. We have his car number.”
“Perhaps I should remind you, all four of those assets you just listed can change inside a very few minutes—his name, address, description, and car number. Right now we have almost nothing. Have the Swiss checked in about his address?”
“Not yet, Henri. I’ll try to keep you up to date.”
Even as they spoke, there was chaos on the rue de Basle in Geneva. Especially outside number 18. The police had decided to cordon off the busy street a few blocks west of the downtown area of Switzerland’s greatest city. There were police cruisers at either end of the rue de Basle, positioned alongside ambulances, in case this confrontation became violent. No one knew whether Gunther Marc Roche was a member of a group of international assassins, all armed to the teeth.
When the police went in, they went in hard, fifteen of them, racing out of their cruisers and straight through the front door, machine guns raised. Which came as something of a shock to the three elderly ladies trying to draw their pensions in a local branch of Geneva Credit and Savings.
It was a relatively modest door on the street, and there had been no time to check what lay behind it. The Swiss police, rigid with embarrassment, put down their arms, and apologized for the intrusion. They did speak to the manager, who explained that the whole of the street-level floor was occupied by his bank and there were no apartments in the three floors above, just offices. No, he had never heard of anyone named Gunther Marc Roche.
The police conducted a routine search of the building, speaking to various secretaries and office managers, but this was not a residential building, no one lived here, and the entire fictitious credentials of Gunther Marc Roche were blown dramatically over the Alps in about twenty minutes.
The head of the Geneva Police Department only just stopped himself from firing off a memorandum to the French police in Brittany, warning them to be much more careful in the future about wasting his valuable time. He did not even bother to send a standard police report about the “raid.” He simply sent an e-mail to Detective Inspector Paul Ravel, confirming there was no Gunther Marc Roche at 18 rue de Basle, and neither was there anyone else. Number 18 was just a regular small office block, no residents.
The signal from Geneva gave Paul Ravel no comfort. It only confirmed what he already knew, that this trained killer from the SAS, or somewhere like it, was a master of deception. Monsieur Laporte had been definite; he’d seen the passport and driver’s license.
In his heart he believed this investigation would soon switch its base to Saint-Nazaire. He was nearly certain that’s where “Gunther” was headed, and sometime in the late afternoon tomorrow, he would attempt to blow Monsieur Foche’s head off. In Paul’s opinion, the president of France should order in the army to protect the Gaullist leader. Because from what he knew about this ruthless enemy, anything less would have no effect whatsoever.
CHAPTER
11
Mack reached the coastal town of Vannes in the early afternoon, roughly
around the time when Detective Inspector Paul Ravel was discovering the Swiss hijacker had almost certainly served in the Special Forces. Mack had no idea how much the French authorities now knew about him, whether they had discovered the scuttled
Eagle,
and whether Monsieur Laporte had shot his mouth off to the gendarmes.
As far as he could tell, there was little else to link him to any kind of crime. The key was Laporte, and if the garage owner had handed over details of the Peugeot, it meant that the French police had by now organized a nationwide dragnet to hunt him down. However, they were looking for the wrong number plates. Mack glanced at his watch and decided that if the bodies had been found around nine o’clock, Laporte would have been cooperating very soon afterward, and anytime now the police would be picking up the two guys in the Citroën. Which meant they would soon know the replaced plate numbers on the Peugeot, and despite the fact he was yearning for a cup of coffee, Mack hit the gas pedal, and drove on hard toward Saint-Nazaire, another forty-two miles.
He arrived on the outskirts of the shipbuilding city at three o’clock and took a quick tour around the main streets in order to establish his bearings. He found what he was looking for, a large hardware store, and then a central public parking garage. He drove very carefully down the slope of the latter, looking for the closed-circuit television cameras.
Taking his ticket from the machine, he deliberately drove the wrong way, against the white-painted floor arrows, and hoped to hell no one came the other way. At the end of the line there was a wide circular ramp leading down to the lower level. He took that, and again drove the wrong way down the lines of parked cars.
He found a space, parked the Peugeot for the last time, and retrieved his toolbox and bag from the trunk. He checked again the closed-circuit cameras, and was confident none of them was aimed at the Peugeot. Using his trusty screwdriver, he swiftly removed the license plates, locked the car, and left.
On the upper level he tossed the plates and the keys into a trash bin, which was lined with a black plastic bag, and counted on his luck that no one would ever search it. And then he left, carrying his toolbox and leather bag, abandoning the car for which half the police patrols in France were searching: the one parked in a remote corner on the lower level, away from the cameras. The one with no plates.
Mack knew where he was going. And he was in a major hurry to get away from that car. No one knew what he looked like, or who he was. But they knew about that Peugeot. It thus took a considerable amount of self-control to hang around near the entrance for almost twenty minutes until the attendant was heavily engaged with another driver, who had perhaps mislaid his ticket.
At that point Mack, who still looked like Jeffery Simpson, walked very quickly up the slope and out into the busy streets of Saint-Nazaire. It took him ten minutes to locate the hardware store, and he wasted no time once he was inside. He found the area where regular tools were sold, hammers, wrenches, chisels, pliers, and so on. At the end of the display he found a shelf stacked with both gardener’s and workman’s boots and overalls. Green and blue. And the blue was the shipyard blue, the same as he had seen in the picture in
Le Monde.
Keeping his driving gloves tightly on, Mack selected XXL overalls and a pair of the largest black work boots. He then moved to the electrical area and chose a small, powerful flashlight, a slim pocket calculator, and three small batteries. Just along the aisle was the sporting goods section, which offered shotguns (all padlocked), fishing rods and knives, and some clothing, including green gum boots, socks, caps, and belts. He chose a sheathed fishing knife, one cap, and two pairs of socks.
He moved to the counter to pay and pushed the knife into one of the boots. He stuck a pair of socks into each boot, and paid for everything except the knife, which the shop assistant did not notice. On his way out he gave the cap and socks back, slipping them onto their original shelves, which he considered to be a fair exchange.
There was a sense of relief in his mind as he left the store. For several days now he had been essentially unarmed, except for the sniper rifle, which, in an urgent situation, would of course be hopelessly too slow.
Mack was not used to being unarmed. He never went into combat without at least a service revolver and a knife, and while this French operation was rather different from his normal SEAL missions, he needed something. Mack was happy to face two assailants with machine guns, just so long as he had a decent blade with which to . . . well . . . in a way . . . defend himself.
But he did not need some assistant to be telling the French police a tall foreigner had just purchased a potentially lethal fishing knife in the Saint-Nazaire hardware store. Thus the elaborate deception at the counter, where the girl had been friendly and only too happy to give him some two-euro coins instead of a banknote.