The Jackal’s sniper rifle

The Jackal’s sniper rifle is presented not as a weapon openly carried into action but as a set of components repeatedly hidden in ordinary objects. Its preparation turns luggage, a simulated injury, and the structure of a car into successive layers of concealment. The rifle’s path through these disguises shows how the planned assassination depends on making a dangerous object pass unnoticed through routine inspection and travel.

Design and Concealment in Transit

The rifle travels in component form, its parts contained in thin steel tubes. When an Italian customs officer asks The Jackal to open one of his larger suitcases, the selected case holds clothing associated with the fictitious Danish pastor and American student: among other things, a dark-grey suit, a white shirt, sneakers, walking shoes, a windcheater, and socks. A Danish book with a cover showing Chartres Cathedral also attracts no suspicion. The officer does not inspect the carefully resewn slit in the lining or find the false identity papers. The rifle components are not in that suitcase, however: the parts of a complete sniper’s rifle lie only three feet away across the desk, in another piece of luggage. The officer suspects nothing, closes the case, and chalks all four cases after his perfunctory inspection.

This near encounter establishes the practical importance of distributing concealment across several containers. The customs officer opens a case, but the choice of case determines what he can see; the rifle remains close enough to be vulnerable, yet outside the inspection. The scene gives the weapon a presence before it is assembled: it is not displayed as a rifle, but exists as hidden parts among the Jackal’s travel arrangements.

The Disguise of Injury

In Milan, The Jackal deposits two suitcases and a hand-grip in the left-luggage office, retaining the case containing a long French military overcoat. He then enters a toilet and waits until the room is briefly empty before locking himself in a cubicle. With his foot propped on the lavatory seat, he spends ten minutes clipping plaster from what appears to be a fractured ankle. Beneath it are cotton-wool pads that had supplied the bulk of a foot encased in plaster; a silk sock and a slim leather moccasin, taped to his calf during the supposed injury, complete the transformation back to a fit traveller.

The concealment depends on the injury having looked credible enough to shape how others respond to him. Once free of the plaster, he gathers the plaster and cotton wool and puts them down the toilet. The first flush partly jams, but the obstruction clears with the second. The disguise has served its purpose: he can now move without appearing to have recovered implausibly quickly, because he does not return to the left-luggage office himself. Instead, he gives a porter the baggage check and money, says he will change currency, and has the porter retrieve the remaining luggage while he waits at the bureau de change.

From Suitcase to Chassis

With the toilet cubicle secured, The Jackal lays the suitcase containing the overcoat on top of the toilet and arranges the circular steel tubes holding the rifle parts among the coat’s folds. He tightens the interior straps so the contents cannot knock together, closes the case, and leaves while other people are at the washbasins and urinals. The rifle’s components have now been moved into a case whose contents can plausibly be read as clothing, with the straps also preventing the hidden tubes from giving themselves away through movement.

The suitcase is only an intermediate hiding place. After obtaining the Alfa Romeo, The Jackal returns to the hotel, retrieves the case containing the rifle parts, and takes it to a rented garage. There, with the door shut, he uses a soldering iron connected to an overhead light socket and a powerful torch to work beneath the car. He has chosen the Alfa partly because its steel chassis has a deep inner flange. Over two hours, he welds the thin tubes into that flange, wrapping each in sacking and securing them with steel wire; where the wire touches the edge of the chassis, he spot-welds it in place.

By the end of the job, the tubes are almost undetectable except under a close search from beneath the car. The Jackal expects dust and mud to cover them further. His overalls are smeared with grease, and his hands ache from tightening the wire, physical costs recorded alongside the care of the work. He hides the overalls, soldering iron, and remaining wire beneath old rags in the garage, while the metal clippers go into the car’s glove compartment. The weapon’s concealment has thus shifted from a suitcase that can be inspected to the hidden structure of a vehicle.

Function in the Assassination Plan

The rifle’s concealment is part of a larger effort to move through France without exposing the plan. In the police inquiry, Claude Lebel tells foreign colleagues that investigators are seeking an unknown man who would have to be one of the world’s leading professional contract-hire assassins, a political killer with successful killings behind him. At a later conference, Lebel stresses that the assassin alone knows his timetable, and that the police do not know at what point their investigation has intersected with it. The hidden rifle gives material form to that uncertainty: the authorities may know that a plot exists while remaining unaware of where its equipment is concealed.

The investigation’s clues gradually narrow the gap. After learning that the pseudonym Alexander Duggan has been exposed, The Jackal is suspected of transforming his car and leaving it behind; Lebel reasons that he must have bought paint in Gap and infers that someone tipped him off. The police then seek a tall, blond Englishman carrying three suitcases and a hand-grip, but the car itself has already become part of the concealment strategy. The rifle’s route—from separated parts in luggage, through a case packed around an overcoat, to tubes fixed beneath the car—makes the object inseparable from the disguises and delays that frustrate the search.

The rifle therefore functions in these scenes as both an assassination instrument and a concealed logistical problem. Its physical form keeps changing in the reader’s view: first a collection of components near, but not inside, the case customs opens; then tubes among folds of clothing; finally tubes incorporated into a car’s chassis. The preparation shown here is exacting, but the evidence in these scenes does not show the weapon being retrieved or fired. What it does establish is how much of the plan depends on keeping the rifle unseen while the assassin moves.