The Non-Credible Threat Strategy

The Non-Credible Threat Strategy is the deceptive logic Agnès identifies in Jarret’s plan: a threat had to be alarming enough to damage the police and redirect blame, yet not credible enough to provoke the countermeasures that would obstruct his abductions. Its importance lies in that balance. The threat was not an isolated act of intimidation but a means of serving several objectives while hiding the crime’s personal motivation.

Design and Constraints

Agnès discusses the strategy when Paul Darac asks her to consider one final point about the case. She understands that Jarret’s first objective was revenge against her father. The threat’s design, however, suggests that revenge was not his only aim: its effects were meant to reach beyond the immediate victims and implicate the institution investigating them.

The plan depended on restraint. Had the threat seemed fully credible, authorities in Paris might have mobilized substantial resources, including stop-and-search operations and additional surveillance. Such measures would have made it harder for Jarret to carry out the abductions. Agnès also recognizes that a major response could have disrupted his primary purpose: taking revenge on her father. The threat therefore had to seem consequential without becoming convincing enough to bring the machinery of security down on the perpetrators.

Institutional Reprisal

A second objective, as Agnès understands it, was to discredit the Police Judiciaire by turning its wartime history into a weapon against it. Jarret wanted the public and the press to believe that the police had ignored a warning and that two commissaires had consequently been murdered. The intended accusation would make the institution appear culpable not only for what its predecessors had done during the war, but also for what they had failed to do.

That reputational attack was conditional on the abductions ending in the victims’ deaths. Agnès observes that if both her father and she had been murdered, the outcome would have looked disastrous for the Brigade. Her dry correction—from the victims looking bad to the Brigade looking bad—clarifies the threat’s institutional target: the appearance of police failure was part of the intended harm, not merely an incidental consequence.

Displaced Blame and Significance

Agnès identifies a third objective in Jarret’s use of the label “Just Cause”: to point blame for the outrage toward the Muslim community. A terrorist organization of any kind could have served as a diversion, but that particular label placed suspicion on a community and risked obscuring the abductions’ personal motivation. The strategy thus joined institutional reprisal to the deliberate displacement of blame onto a wider group.

Her final reflection broadens the significance of the plan beyond its tactical ingenuity. She links its machinery of accusation to race and blood, and grieves that people seem unable to get beyond them. The threat works by exploiting established prejudices: it invites the public to accept a collective, racialized explanation instead of looking toward a private revenge. Its calculated ambiguity protects the abductions operationally while making the false explanation socially legible. In Agnès’s account, that double use of suspicion is among the case’s saddest consequences.