The Jackal alters an Alfa Romeo to escape Gap

The Jackal alters an Alfa Romeo to escape Gap by turning a conspicuous white Italian car into a plausible blue vehicle with fictitious French plates. The work buys him a chance to travel toward Corrèze and lie low, but it is a hurried disguise with mismatched papers, undertaken while the police are already mobilizing around Gap.

The escape route

After leaving Gap, the Jackal drove west through Veyne and Aspres-sur-Buech, pushing the car hard along the mountain bends. He joined the RN93, which followed the Drôme eastward, then continued for eighteen miles along a road that crossed back and forth over the river. Shortly after Luc-en-Diois, he chose a side road into the hills and, after another mile and a half, took a path into the woods. There, away from the main road, he had room to work on the car without being immediately exposed to passing traffic.

Repainting and false plates

Stripped to the waist, the Jackal spent two hours on the car. By mid-afternoon it was a deep, gleaming blue; the paint was already mostly dry, though the amateur finish would withstand close scrutiny only poorly and was more likely to pass in the dusk. He had removed both number plates and painted fictitious French registration numbers on their backs, ending in 75, the code for Paris. He chose that ending because Paris-coded numbers were common on French roads, making the invented registration less conspicuous.

The disguise altered the car’s visible identity but not its paperwork. Its hiring and insurance documents described the white Italian Alfa Romeo, not the blue car with French plates. A roadside check could therefore expose him. As he wiped paint from his hands with a rag dipped in petrol, he weighed the risk of driving in bright sunlight, which might reveal the poor paintwork, against waiting until dusk and losing time.

The pressure to keep moving

The Jackal expected that discovery of his false name would soon lead investigators to his point of entry into France and then to a search for the car. He was several days ahead of the planned assassination and needed somewhere to lie low; Corrèze, roughly 250 miles away across country, was his intended destination. The car offered the quickest way there, despite the danger that every speed patrol in the country might soon be looking for a white Italian Alfa Romeo and a blond Englishman.

He decided to leave at once rather than wait for better light. After screwing on the altered plates and discarding the remaining paint and brushes, he pulled on his polo-necked silk sweater and jacket, started the engine, and returned to the RN93. He checked his watch as he drove: it was 3:41 in the afternoon. The precise departure time marks the change from concealment in the woods back to movement on public roads, where the hastily modified car had to pass as ordinary traffic.

A disguise made under pursuit

The Jackal’s stop to repaint the car coincided with an expanding police response. At Gap, officers were placing steel roadblocks on the exits and posting men in the undergrowth; armed police were assembling at Grenoble and Lyon, while a helicopter was being prepared at Satory Camp for Claude Lebel’s flight to the area. The contrast defines the episode: the police were building a coordinated perimeter, while the Jackal relied on a secluded work site, a common registration code, and a calculated gamble that the paint would pass at a glance.

The operation also reflects the wider procedural hunt. Lebel had received a ministerial directive giving him access to extensive police resources, then sought help from foreign police files for a political assassin whose name and description were initially uncertain. Later archive checks traced Alexander James Quentin Duggan’s entry from Brussels and a stay at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine. Against that growing network of records and searches, the Alfa’s repainting was a temporary attempt to sever the visible link between the Jackal and his route—not a repair of the documentary trail that could still identify the vehicle.