Claude Lebel—Jackal

Claude Lebel—Jackal describes a pursuit between an investigator working through the machinery of the French police and an assassin whose anonymity is his strongest protection. The Jackal is initially no more than a suspected professional killer with a possible target; Lebel’s task is to turn that fragment of knowledge into a name and location before the assassin can act. Their struggle develops less through direct confrontation than through competing timetables: Lebel tries to infer the next move from incomplete traces, while The Jackal can change identities and proceed according to a schedule known only to himself.

Assignment and Unequal Knowledge

Lebel enters the pursuit after an extraordinary briefing by the Minister of the Interior. He has spent fifty minutes receiving his assignment and reading Colonel Rolland’s report before being told that the order is a directive, not a request. He is to establish his own office, obtain necessary information, and draw on the resources of the organizations represented at the conference without a limit on costs. The scale of the authority reflects the stakes: the suspected target is the President of France, but the suspected assassin is still unidentified.

Lebel’s first response is to recognize how little the investigation can usefully search for. Reviewing a decade of records, he finds no precedent for a foreign political killer of the necessary calibre operating in France. The known contract killers who had attempted to operate there were either captured or serving life sentences, and he doubts that the remaining examples resemble a political assassin capable of killing a president. He expects that The Jackal is absent from French files, and reasons that Marc Rodin would have insisted on hiring someone with no established OAS connection. The inference narrows the kind of adversary Lebel seeks while emphasizing how little he can rely on an existing dossier.

The investigation’s first advantage is institutional rather than personal. Lebel turns an office into a secure command post, making Caron his combined assistant and secretary, excluding the usual secretary from the secret, and arranging a camp bed, washing equipment, coffee, and ten outside telephone lines with an operator permanently assigned. These practical instructions establish the conditions for a round-the-clock pursuit. Lebel is not simply to solve a puzzle alone; he must coordinate a broad apparatus while keeping the investigation concealed.

Building a Profile from Almost Nothing

Lebel and Caron use encrypted international police communications to ask senior investigators abroad for help. Lebel cannot present the contact as a formal enquiry between police forces because the plot may not yet have reached the stage of a prosecutable offence. Instead, he gives a poor description and asks whether their files suggest a political assassin with several successful killings, not a gangland gunman. The pause that follows each request registers the seriousness of the possibility: the officers understand that the only target in France likely to attract such a killer is Charles de Gaulle.

This approach makes the limits of Lebel’s knowledge part of the pursuit itself. He does not yet have a name to circulate, and he cannot give foreign colleagues a conventional trail to follow. His working profile is therefore a testable hypothesis rather than a solved identity: the attacker must be an experienced contract assassin operating at political level, probably chosen because he is not already known as an OAS agent. The investigation advances by asking which records and people might distinguish that hypothesis from the many less consequential possibilities.

When Lebel returns to the conference with a message from British investigators, he announces that they may have the man’s name. The conference’s mood shifts from helpless argument toward action. The police can quietly search for Charles Calthrop, compare available descriptions, and check records without publicizing the hunt. The name brings a practical lead, but not certainty about where the suspect is or how far his plan has progressed. Lebel’s problem remains temporal as much as identificatory: the police do not know at what point in The Jackal’s timetable they have intervened.

Aliases, Records, and a Narrow Advantage

The archives eventually yield a record for Alexander James Quentin Duggan. A frontier card shows him entering France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22; another records a passenger of that name leaving for Brussels on July 31. A hotel registration under Duggan, with a passport number matching the British information, places him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Lebel chooses a discreet visit over Caron’s proposed raid. The proprietor confirms that Duggan had gone by August 15, and a plain-clothes detective is left at the hotel in case he returns.

To Lebel, the first stay is reconnaissance, not evidence that the plan has been abandoned. He reasons that an OAS sympathizer might have offered The Jackal shelter, but that an assassin who trusts no one would prefer a hotel and a false passport. The proprietor’s impression of Duggan as a gentleman sharpens, rather than softens, Lebel’s suspicion: respectability can help a dangerous stranger pass without attracting notice. Comparing photographs of Charles Calthrop and Alexander Duggan, Lebel understands that the transformation includes changes of height, hair, eyes, age, and probably manner. The alias is more than a name entered on a card; it is an attempt to make the same man difficult to recognize.

The discovered name gives Lebel one advantage: he knows the identity The Jackal is using, while The Jackal does not know that the police have uncovered it. Lebel recognizes how precarious that advantage is. If the assassin learns what the investigators know and adopts another identity before they locate him, the lead may vanish. The pursuit is therefore asymmetric. Lebel has an alias and traces of past movement; The Jackal retains knowledge of his own plan, weapon, and schedule.

From Movement to Search

When a car is found and Lebel learns that The Jackal may be in the area of Ussel, he orders a broad, low-profile search. Commissaire Valentin is told to assemble as many good men as possible, centre a square search on the car’s location, and question farmers, passing drivers, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters. The description combines appearance and circumstance: a tall blond man, English by birth but speaking good French, carrying three suitcases and a handgrip, well dressed, cash-rich, and possibly looking as if he had slept rough. The search is designed to recover ordinary sightings and attempted purchases, not merely to find a wanted face.

Lebel also insists on keeping the press away. Local reporters are to be diverted with the explanation that a crash victim may be wandering in a dazed condition, while any officers who locate the suspect must surround him rather than approach. This restraint follows from Lebel’s estimate of the danger: the police do not yet know what The Jackal is carrying, and a premature encounter could give him an opportunity to escape or act. The procedure that makes the search wide-ranging also makes secrecy and coordination essential.

A later deduction links the car’s transformation to a possible leak. Lebel reasons that The Jackal must have bought paint, and that if the vehicle was already altered on the drive from Gap to Ussel, the paint was probably bought in Gap. That timing suggests he had been warned that the police had discovered the Duggan identity and could soon trace the car. Lebel does not claim to know who passed the information: orders move through switchboard operators, telex staff, and junior executives, any of whom might be compromised. He suspects Valmy as a possible contact, but presents the leak as an inference, not a proven fact. The key consequence is clearer: The Jackal has learned that the plan is exposed in principle and has nevertheless chosen to continue.

Timetable and Convergence

The prospect that The Jackal could already be in France, even near the centre of the capital, alarms the conference. Lebel argues that the assassin alone knows his timetable. The police have been investigating for seventy-two hours but cannot tell where in that timetable their intervention falls. They may still catch him unaware after identifying and locating him under his new name; equally, the plan could be close to execution. Colonel Rolland offers another possibility: warned through Valmy, The Jackal may have left to dispose of preparations such as his gun and ammunition. Lebel’s reasoning does not erase these competing explanations; it shows why the pursuit must keep searching rather than treat an apparent disappearance as proof that the threat is over.

The question of timing eventually corrects Lebel’s own earlier assumptions. He has wondered why The Jackal did not immediately travel from Gap to Valence and take an express train, and why he spent a week in France. He recognizes that the delay was purposeful: The Jackal had selected a day on which to strike. The deduction redirects attention from escape routes toward Charles de Gaulle’s engagements and makes the assassin’s apparent inactivity part of the plan rather than a pause outside it.

At the security perimeter, a sentry reports that the street has been closed since noon and that only one person passed through a gap: an old, visibly ill cripple who lived at 154 Rue de Rennes and carried both an identity card and a Mutile de Guerre card. The report turns an unremarkable exception into a potentially decisive clue. It embodies the terms of Lebel’s contest with The Jackal: the assassin’s disguises exploit the very assumptions that ordinary checks depend on, while the police must learn to treat a credible identity as evidence to examine, not a conclusion. In the material traced here, the two men’s conflict is a race between The Jackal’s ability to conceal himself in plain sight and Lebel’s capacity to make small records, movements, and inconsistencies add up.