Brigade Criminelle

The Brigade Criminelle is the investigative unit at the center of the French police response to the threat against Charles de Gaulle. Led by Maurice Bouvier, it provides the experienced detective Claude Lebel, the confidential working base, and the methodical inquiry through which an almost nameless assassin is sought across borders and across France. Its work makes the manhunt an institutional undertaking: disciplined routine must be reorganized around an emergency for which there is, at first, no crime scene, no suspect’s true name, and scarcely any usable description.

Institutional Position and Leadership

The Brigade Criminelle is part of the French Judicial Police system. Bouvier heads the brigade, while Lebel has risen through its Homicide Division. The unit is represented at the Ministry’s crisis meeting by Bouvier, seated among the heads of other departments summoned to coordinate the response. The Minister stresses absolute secrecy and requires senior officials to give the affair immediate, personal attention; work may not simply be passed down to junior staff when doing so would reveal the reason for it. The brigade therefore enters the investigation as one element in a larger state effort, but its chief is asked to supply the detective who will direct the inquiry.

Bouvier names his own deputy as France’s best detective. Lebel had become head of Homicide three years earlier, after a vacancy arose, and his colleagues had considered the appointment deserved. His record was steady: he had handled cases through to arrest, though one accused person was acquitted on a technicality. When the previous deputy chief, Depuy, died suddenly, Bouvier selected Lebel as his replacement. The choice places the investigation in the hands of a detective known for reliability rather than publicity.

The brigade’s internal culture is associated with old-style police work. Lebel is regarded as a plodder: slow, precise, methodical, and painstaking, with little appetite for press attention. He understands investigation as routine inquiry, checking and rechecking, and gradually assembling separate facts into a case that can withstand scrutiny. That temperament becomes an operational asset when the manhunt offers no obvious starting point and requires conclusions to be revised as new records and sightings emerge.

From Homicide Work to a National Assignment

Lebel is summoned from the conference and spends fifty minutes receiving the Minister’s briefing. The meeting is not a consultation: it is a directive, accompanied by extensive information about the threat. He is promised his own office, access to necessary information, and the resources of the departments represented at the table, with no limit placed on expenditure. Yet the scale of the authority contrasts with the poverty of the evidence. The investigators know of a code-name, not a real identity; there are no witnesses Lebel can question, and no offence has yet been committed.

After the meeting, Bouvier confirms that he proposed putting the French Judicial Police in charge because the other departments might otherwise debate without reaching an effective course of action. He tells Lebel to clear his ordinary workload, assigning Favier and Malcoste to take over his outstanding cases. Lebel prefers to stay in his existing office. Bouvier makes that office the headquarters of Operation “Find the Jackal,” and Lebel asks for Lucien Caron, a younger inspector who has worked with him in Homicide, as his assistant.

The conversion of the office into a command post is practical and deliberately spare. Lebel orders his regular secretary transferred or placed on paid leave so that no uninformed person can enter the secret. Caron is to act as both assistant and secretary; a camp bed, linen, washing and shaving supplies, and a coffee percolator are brought in. Ten outside telephone lines and a permanently assigned operator are requested, with Bouvier available to settle any dispute over access. A circular gives Caron authority to obtain from departmental chiefs whatever Lebel could request himself. These arrangements turn the brigade’s ordinary workspace into a secluded hub for a case that must be pursued continuously without exposing its purpose.

Building a Confidential Manhunt

Lebel’s first major step is to seek confidential help from senior criminal investigators in other countries. He argues that a political contract assassin might already appear in foreign police files, even if he has never operated in the country holding the record. Because no formal offence has yet been established, he presents the contacts as personal inquiries rather than official requests between police forces. The calls are made through secure communications, and Lebel gives each colleague the limited description available before explaining the decisive qualification: the unknown man would have to be a professional political assassin with successful killings behind him, not merely a gangland gunman.

The information problem shapes the questions. Lebel cannot offer a known name or a reliable identity; he asks the foreign officers whether such a figure is recorded or comes to mind. This approach extends the brigade’s reach without pretending that an official case already exists. It also reflects the investigation’s central difficulty: the police have to search for a person by the professional profile he is likely to have left in records, while keeping the purpose of the inquiry concealed.

The brigade’s work combines those broad contacts with close examination of routine documentation. During an overnight review of the archives, investigators find an entry for Alexander James Quentin Duggan, who entered France from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22. A further frontier report records Duggan travelling back toward Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel registration under the same name, with a passport number matching information from London, places him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Rather than immediately order a raid, Lebel visits quietly and learns from the proprietor that the man was no longer there by August 15. The episode exemplifies the brigade’s preference for checking what a record actually establishes before turning it into an arrest attempt.

Inference, Search, and Operational Limits

As evidence accumulates, Lebel uses competing explanations rather than treating a clue as proof. When the car is found and the investigation points to paint bought in Gap, he reasons that the vehicle may already have been transformed before it was driven onward to Ussel. If so, the purchase suggests that the fugitive had been warned that Duggan’s identity was under scrutiny and left quickly. Lebel cannot identify the source of the warning: it might have come through someone inside the meeting’s wider communications chain, or through the known contact called Valmy. The evidence narrows the possibilities without resolving them.

The brigade’s response includes a field search directed from Clermont-Ferrand. Lebel orders a team to Ussel, instructing officers to make the place where the car was found the center of a square search. They are to question farmers, people who regularly use the road, shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters, looking for a tall blond Englishman who speaks good French and may be carrying three suitcases, a handgrip, and substantial cash. The press is to be kept away through a cover story about a possible dazed survivor of a car accident. If officers locate the man, they are told to surround him and hold the position rather than approach him. The instructions reveal both the scale of the search and the danger of alerting a fugitive who may be armed.

Lebel’s timetable analysis supplies another change in direction. He asks why the fugitive, after leaving Gap, did not immediately assume the identity of Pastor Jensen, travel to Valence, and take an express train to Paris. The week spent apparently doing nothing suggests that the delay is purposeful: the assassin has selected a particular day. Lebel therefore asks about the President’s engagements over the coming days. Attention shifts from simply finding where the man has gone to predicting when his plan requires him to act.

The pursuit nevertheless exposes limits in surveillance. At a controlled street gap, an officer reports that only one person has passed through: an elderly, visibly ill cripple who lived nearby and presented an identity card and a Mutile de Guerre card. The guard had allowed him through because he appeared exhausted and unthreatening. The encounter makes the disguise’s ordinary credibility part of the problem: an identity supported by plausible papers and an appearance that invites pity can defeat a checkpoint’s judgment. Elsewhere, investigators report fingerprinting both the car and a room at the chateau, with hundreds of sets matching. Such physical traces can connect locations, but the investigation still depends on interpreting them alongside travel records, witness reports, and the fugitive’s apparent schedule.

Narrative Role

The Brigade Criminelle’s significance lies in the contrast between its unglamorous procedures and the extraordinary stakes of the case. Its chief chooses a detective whose strengths are patience and exactness; that detective responds to uncertainty with file searches, discreet interviews, carefully framed foreign inquiries, and field instructions precise enough to guide a regional search. The brigade does not begin with a clear trail. It builds one from dates on entry cards, a hotel registration, a transformed car, and reports from local witnesses, repeatedly distinguishing what the evidence shows from what it only suggests.

The manhunt also tests the limits of institutional coordination. Lebel receives exceptional authority and access to other departments, yet secrecy restricts who can be told what, and a warning may have reached the fugitive before the investigation could act on its own findings. The brigade’s collective method can make a wide search possible, but it cannot eliminate delay, uncertainty, or the advantage conferred by a false identity. In that tension, the unit embodies the novel’s procedural drama: police work advances by accumulation, while the assassin’s schedule remains hidden until the clues begin to disclose it.