The Jackal slips past a police convoy in Die

The Jackal’s passage through Die is a narrow escape built on timing rather than force: with his rifle still inaccessible inside the Alfa Romeo and no other weapon on him, he stops when a motorcycle policeman signals him, waits as a police convoy rushes past, and drives away when the officer lets him proceed. The encounter captures the chase’s central imbalance: the police are mobilizing across France, but a momentary gap in their attention is enough for their quarry to slip through.

The Pursuit Reaches Die

The Jackal has decided that the Alfa Romeo is worth the risk of driving across country to Corrèze. His false name has been discovered, he expects the police to trace his point of entry and search for the car, and he needs somewhere to lie low before the assassination. He changes the number plates, discards the remaining paint and brushes, and returns to the road. At 3:41 p.m. he is driving on the RN93; Die lies seven miles farther on.

A helicopter passes high overhead as he approaches the village. Near the main square and its war memorial, a large motorcycle policeman stands in the road and waves him to the extreme right. The Jackal knows his gun is still in its tubes, wired to the car’s chassis, and that he has neither an automatic nor a knife. He briefly weighs striking the officer with the car and fleeing against stopping, abandoning the Alfa farther down the road, and attempting another disguise while burdened with four pieces of luggage.

The Convoy Passes

The officer turns away to scan the road in the opposite direction just as the Alfa slows. The Jackal slides the car to the roadside and waits. Sirens sound from the far side of the village, and the convoy arrives too quickly for him to escape without drawing attention: four Citroën police cars and six Black Marias race through Die. The motorcycle policeman steps aside and salutes; through the vans’ wired windows, the Jackal can see helmeted police with submachine guns across their knees.

The convoy heads down the road from which the Jackal came, passing the parked Alfa without stopping. Its sudden arrival gives way just as quickly to departure. The traffic policeman lowers his arm, gestures indolently for the Jackal to continue, and returns to his motorcycle. The Alfa disappears around the corner heading west. The Jackal has neither confronted the officer nor needed to use the weapon concealed in the car; his immediate escape depends on being overlooked while the police force surges past him.

The Search Continues Elsewhere

At 4:50 p.m., Claude Lebel reaches the Hotel du Cerf with Caron, whose MAT 49 is loaded and cocked beneath his mackintosh. The hotel has been isolated for five hours, but its proprietor’s reaction leaves Lebel with the sense that the Jackal is not there. The contrast is stark: police can cordon off a building and arrive heavily armed, yet the man they seek has already passed through Die in a car they did not stop.

Later, Lebel directs a team to Ussel, ordering a square search centered on the place where the car was found. Officers are to question people at farmhouses, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks, while keeping the press away and surrounding the suspect rather than approaching him if they locate him. The manhunt therefore shifts from a failed hotel raid to a broad canvass for the fugitive and the traces he leaves behind.

Significance of the Escape

The Die encounter compresses the larger pursuit into a single roadside reversal. A conspicuous convoy, carrying armed police, passes within view of the very car its occupants might have been searching for; the motorcycle officer’s glance away creates the opening, and the Jackal’s stillness preserves it. The scene does not show him defeating the police by superior firepower. It shows how a fugitive can exploit the unevenness of a nationwide search, in which force and information do not arrive everywhere at once.