Belgium serves as both a working base and a corridor in the Jackal’s preparations for the assassination. In Brussels he meets the armourer M. Goossens to discuss the custom rifle, then plans to test it in the Ardennes. The country also frames a deliberate contrast: while the Jackal moves through Belgian towns and countryside under an ordinary travel pretext, investigators later recover records of a suspect named Duggan crossing between Brussels and France.

Brussels: the rifle and its maker

On the morning of his appointment, the Jackal leaves the Amigo Hotel and takes a taxi to a corner near M. Goossens’s home. He has called the armourer over breakfast using the name Duggan. Rather than go directly to the door, he reaches the street half an hour early and watches it from a bench in a small public garden, sheltering his observation behind a newspaper. The measured wait establishes the care with which he approaches even a meeting with a specialist already involved in his preparations.

Goossens lets him into a room off the hallway and locks the front door behind him, securing it with the chain. When asked whether there are problems, the armourer admits that there are. The Jackal listens without showing his annoyance as Goossens explains that finishing the weapon may take five or six days, perhaps a week. The delay will alter his travel plans, but he accepts it: he needs the rifle to be perfect, and the time in Belgium can also let him become accustomed to using it.

The Jackal asks for the finished gun, ordinary ammunition, and one doctored round, as well as a place where he can practise in secrecy at a distance of roughly 130 to 150 metres in the open air. Goossens recommends the Ardennes, where broad stretches of forest might allow a man to be alone for hours. He advises against the coming weekend, when picnickers could fill the woods, and proposes Monday the 5th instead. The exchange gives Belgium a precise operational function: it is where equipment is being completed and where the assassin expects to test it away from public attention.

A journey staged as leisure

The Jackal spends the weekend at the seaside in Zeebrugge. He buys swimming trunks, sunbathes on the beach, swims in the North Sea, and walks around the harbour and along the mole. The setting carries a history of violence: British sailors and soldiers had fought and died there forty-six years earlier. Yet the present scene is one of families in the sunshine, with children playing in the surf. The Jackal does not ask the older men fishing along the mole whether they remember the fighting; the past is visible in the place, but he does not engage with it.

On Sunday he packs and drives through the Flemish countryside, walking the narrow streets of Ghent and Bruges before lunching at the Siphon restaurant at Datum. He then turns back towards Brussels. These excursions extend the period he can spend in Belgium without appearing to be occupied solely with the rifle. Before retiring, he requests an early call, breakfast in bed, and a packed lunch, saying he intends to drive into the Ardennes the next day to visit his elder brother’s grave. He tells the hotel clerk that his brother died in the Battle of the Bulge between Bastogne and Malmedy. The account is presented as the explanation he gives the clerk, not as independent confirmation of a family history; its immediate practical result is that his planned journey has an innocent-sounding purpose.

The Ardennes plan and departure

On Monday morning, the Jackal carefully packs the rifle components, wrapping each in foam rubber and tying the bundles with twine before placing them at the bottom of his rucksack. Paint tins, brushes, denim trousers, a checked shirt, socks, and boots go above them; a shopping bag and a box of bullets occupy the outer pockets. His clothing is also selected for the journey: a striped shirt, a lightweight dove-grey suit, black leather sneakers, and a black knitted tie. The concealed weapon and the materials for changing his appearance travel together, organized so that the outward impression is that of a man on an ordinary trip.

He locks his car in the hotel garage, collects the packed lunch, and leaves Brussels by nine, driving along the old E. 40 towards Namur. His map gives the distance to Bastogne as ninety-four miles; he expects to cover about a hundred miles by noon, allowing for the additional distance to a quiet place in the hills and forests south of the town. The account therefore carries the earlier plan beyond the meeting with Goossens: Belgium is not simply where the weapon is discussed, but the launching point for a carefully timed drive towards the testing ground.

Belgium in the police reconstruction

Belgium returns in the investigative record through the name the Jackal has used with Goossens: Duggan. While French investigators search their archives, a card is found showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22. A second report records Duggan among the passengers on the Etoile du Nord Express travelling from Paris to Brussels on July 31. A hotel card in France, filled out in the same name and carrying a passport number that matches information from London, places him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30.

These records make the Brussels connection legible only after the fact. The Jackal has used the name Duggan in Belgium and carried it across borders; the railway records and hotel registration let the investigators begin to assemble movements around that identity. Belgium consequently occupies two different positions in the story: it is the practical setting for the rifle’s preparation and proposed test, and one end of a documented route that helps police turn a thin description into a traceable sequence of travel.