Lebel exposes Valmy’s leak and pursues the Jackal

Lebel exposes Valmy’s leak and pursues the Jackal through a shift from inference to recorded proof: after recognizing that the assassin has repeatedly learned of police moves, Claude Lebel traces a warning call to Valmy, captures him, and briefly impersonates him on the telephone. The sequence turns the investigation inward. The danger is no longer only that the Jackal can evade a nationwide search; someone close to the operation is helping him do so. A tape recording makes that betrayal audible, identifies Jacqueline as the source of a crucial warning, and brings Colonel Saint-Clair’s connection to her into the open.

The pattern of the leak

Lebel’s suspicions take shape against the scale of the hunt. At the start of the investigation, he has been given broad authority and the resources of the organizations represented at the Interior Ministry briefing. He turns those powers into a working office, with Caron as his assistant, dedicated telephone lines, and access to other departments. Yet coordination creates an exposure of its own: Lebel reports his progress at the nightly meetings, and information from those briefings appears to reach the fugitive.

When Lebel later explains the pattern to the Minister and the assembled officials, he points to three occasions on which the police came within hours of catching the Jackal. After the first two, a warning reached the assassin early in the morning, following Lebel’s report to the meeting. The latest escape follows Valmy’s arrest: because Lebel cannot convincingly take Valmy’s place on the telephone, the Jackal realizes that something has changed and abandons his current identity. Lebel rejects the Minister’s suggestion that the assassin is simply lucky. His escapes have followed a chain of leaks.

The need to keep the case secret makes that diagnosis harder to act upon. The President has ordered no publicity and no nationwide search while the threat remains unconfirmed; any appearance of public alarm would reveal the danger and, in the President’s view, make France look as though it were hiding from a single foreigner. Lebel’s investigation therefore depends on quiet coordination and on what officials say inside restricted meetings. The same arrangement that gives him access to national resources also creates an opportunity for someone to pass his briefings to the Jackal.

Tracing the warning

The decisive lead arrives through technical surveillance. At six in the morning, after waiting through the night, Lebel receives a call from engineers at the DST and goes with Caron to their communications laboratory. They listen to a recording of a telephone exchange. A woman identifies herself as Jacqueline and tells the man at the other end, who identifies himself as Valmy, that the police know the Jackal is posing as a Danish parson. She reports that officers are checking the hotel registration cards of Danes in Paris through the night and will then visit each one. Valmy acknowledges the warning and ends the call.

The recording supplies more than the content of the leak. By measuring the delay as the telephone dial returned to its starting position, the engineers identify the number Jacqueline called as MOLITOR 5901. Lebel gets the address and takes Caron to Valmy’s flat. The timing matters: the warning concerns an active police search, so the informer has given the Jackal a chance to anticipate the next step rather than merely confirming what the police already know.

The arrest is quiet and controlled. At seven, the schoolmaster is making breakfast when four men arrive. He recognizes the visitors, but Lebel, the short and mild-looking man among them, gestures for the uniformed officers to stay back and tells Valmy that his telephone has been tapped. Valmy steps aside and lets them enter. The contrast between the unobtrusive morning routine and the surveillance operation around it sharpens the revelation: the leak has been passing through the ordinary life of a man who appears to be a schoolmaster.

Using the captured channel

The arrest does not end the danger, because the Jackal may still call Valmy. Lebel remains behind after the other officers take the schoolmaster downstairs. He looks through the papers Valmy had been correcting: ordinary school examination papers, consistent with a man working from his flat. Valmy had apparently needed to stay there during the day, available by telephone if the Jackal called. Lebel recognizes that the telephone can still serve the investigation, but only if the caller does not learn that Valmy has been arrested.

At ten past seven the telephone rings. Lebel waits several seconds before answering and identifies himself as Valmy. The caller identifies himself as the Jackal and asks what is new. Lebel says that the police have lost the trail in Corrèze. The lie is meant to keep the Jackal from immediately abandoning his position; Lebel needs him to believe that the pursuit has stalled. The assassin offers no confirmation that he believes the report, and the call ends quickly. With sweat on his forehead, Lebel races downstairs and orders the driver back to the office.

The deception buys no simple victory. In a hotel telephone booth, the Jackal is already trying to reconstruct what the police may know: the taxi driver at Egletons, the Château de la Haute Chalonnière, the body there, the missing Renault and its discovery in Tulle. The narrative places Lebel’s brief, deliberate falsehood beside the fugitive’s rapid deduction. The police have disrupted the channel, but the Jackal remains alert to its implications and changes his identity again. The exchange demonstrates both the value and the limit of the trap: it can delay him, but it cannot make him stop reasoning.

The recording exposes the breach

Lebel presents the case to the officials at their next meeting. The Minister interrupts his report to call the Jackal extraordinarily lucky, but Lebel answers that luck cannot explain the repeated escapes. He describes the early-morning warnings after two briefings and the latest change of identity after Valmy’s arrest and the failed impersonation. Then he places a portable tape recorder on the table and plays the intercepted conversation.

The recording changes the discussion from suspicion to evidence. When the Minister asks whose voice is heard, Lebel does not answer. Colonel Saint-Clair rises slowly while the other officials turn their attention to him. He says that the woman is a friend of his who is staying with him and leaves the room to write his resignation. The scene establishes that the leak came from Jacqueline and connects her to Saint-Clair, whose position inside the presidential security arrangements gives the betrayal particular weight. It does not show him passing the information himself; the revealed link is that the person warning Valmy is his friend and is staying with him.

Lebel’s pursuit therefore reaches a consequential internal discovery without resolving the larger chase. The tape exposes how the Jackal has repeatedly been warned, turns a pattern of suspicious timing into proof, and forces Saint-Clair out of his post. But the assassin has escaped the Valmy telephone trap, and Lebel must continue the hunt with the knowledge that the breach has reached into the circle responsible for protecting the President.