The ambush and assault on Viktor Kowalski

The ambush and assault on Viktor Kowalski turn a coerced appeal for help into a brutal attempt to seize him alive. JoJo’s family is used to draw Kowalski toward the trap, but when the attackers close in, they discover that capturing him will demand far more than intimidation.

Coercion and the Trap

In JoJo’s flat, two men from SDECE Action Service remain with guns in hand: one covering JoJo, the other watching his ashen-faced wife. JoJo has just spoken with Kowalski. Kowalski hung up without agreeing to come, leaving JoJo unable to know whether his friend will respond. Under the men’s pressure, JoJo insists that Kowalski will come if he can, for the sake of the girl. The appeal is therefore not an uncomplicated request for help; the men have made JoJo’s family part of the leverage.

JoJo demands that the armed men leave, but they refuse to let him and his wife stay behind. They say the couple must accompany them so they cannot talk about what happened or telephone Rome, disguising their removal as a holiday at a pleasant mountain hotel. The threat makes the purpose of JoJo’s call plain: the men are using his concern for the girl to draw Kowalski into their reach, while isolating the people who might otherwise alert others or seek help.

The Ambush in Flat 23

Kowalski reaches Flat 23 in the same Marseille building where JoJo lives. He finds the door identified by a typed card bearing the name Grzybowski, but as it opens, a pickaxe handle swings at his forehead. The blow splits his skin without breaking his skull. Doors on both sides open at once, and attackers surge from the adjoining flats. In the narrow corridor, Kowalski cannot use his height and strength to full advantage, so he drives forward into Flat 23, forcing space between himself and the men closing around him.

Inside, he draws his Colt from beneath his arm and fires toward the doorway. A stave strikes his wrist, knocking the aim downward; the bullet tears off one attacker’s kneecap. Another blow numbs Kowalski’s fingers and disarms him. Five men overwhelm him in a fight lasting three minutes. He nearly reaches his gun twice, but a kick sends it spinning across the sitting room. The attackers use leather-wrapped coshes, and a doctor later estimates that Kowalski took about twenty blows to the head before he lost consciousness. His nose is broken, part of an ear is cut away, and his face is badly bloodied; his resistance continues largely by reflex.

The struggle leaves the attackers injured as well. One clutches the wrecked knee, another suffers a severe groin injury, and a third is knocked unconscious. Only three assailants remain standing when Kowalski finally goes down. Their leader checks that the Pole is still alive, then reports by telephone that the capture has succeeded and asks for two ambulances rather than a police van. The men had expected him to fall in the passage; instead, broken furniture litters the flat, and the leader complains that headquarters had not warned them what Kowalski was like.

The doctor examines the unconscious Kowalski and gives him an injection before stretcher-bearers carry him away. The operation has also occupied the neighboring flats: when asked whether there are residents who might have witnessed the fight, the Corsican says the men took the entire floor. The effort to secure Kowalski alive thus depends not only on overpowering him, but on controlling the building and arranging medical transport quickly enough to remove him from the scene.

The Capture Amid the Wider Manhunt

The assault takes place within a contest of concealment as well as force. While Kowalski is being seized in Marseille, Claude Lebel is trying to identify the political assassin behind the threat to the President. He contacts senior crime investigators abroad, but carefully presents the approach as a routine tip-off rather than an official police enquiry: the authorities do not yet know whether the intention to offend has become a concrete plan, and they have neither a name nor more than a poor description. What Lebel can specify is the kind of man they need to find: a professional political assassin with several successful killings behind him, not a gangland gunman. The disparity is stark. The attackers know exactly whom they have come to take; the investigators still have to define the unknown adversary before they can locate him.

That uncertainty persists as the inquiry advances. After seventy-two hours, Lebel argues that the assassin has a timetable known only to himself, and that the police cannot tell where in it they have intervened. The authorities know that the plot has been exposed in principle, but cannot assume the killer knows how much they have discovered. If they identify and locate him under his adopted name, Lebel reasons, they may still catch him unaware. The capture of Kowalski is thus set against an investigation whose central difficulty is not simply assembling forces, but acting on incomplete knowledge before the assassin’s own schedule runs out.

Lebel’s later deductions show how small practical clues may narrow that uncertainty without resolving it at once. The altered car suggests that the killer bought paint in Gap; if so, someone warned him that his Alexander Duggan identity had been uncovered, allowing him to anticipate the police and leave quickly. Lebel cannot establish that the warning came from inside the conference, since information passed through switchboard operators, telex staff, and junior executives. He does, however, suspect the assassin’s single contact, the person known as Valmy, whose message to Rome had been intercepted by the DST. The investigation therefore moves through competing possibilities—an internal leak, a clandestine contact, or both—rather than treating one explanation as proven.

The same habit of revising an apparent explanation governs Lebel’s reading of the killer’s movements. He had been certain for a week that the assassin had chosen his day, yet initially failed to understand why he had spent time in France after leaving Gap instead of immediately taking the express from Valence to Paris. The delay itself becomes evidence: the killer is not merely escaping the search but waiting for the day he has selected. The Marseille assault is one violent episode in a pursuit shaped by this asymmetry—an operation to capture a known man alive, set beside a search for a still-unidentified assassin whose preparations, aliases, and timing must be inferred from scattered clues.

The Choice Before the Assault

Kowalski’s response to JoJo Grzybowski’s call is not an immediate promise of help. After hearing that it could take a week or perhaps two or three, he stares at the telephone, hangs up without answering, pays for the call, and returns to the hotel with his mail. He snaps the steel case on his wrist shut, a small, controlled gesture against the turmoil of his thoughts. For the first time in many years, he has no one to turn to for orders on how to solve a problem by violence. That loss of direction distinguishes the crisis from the military conflicts that have shaped his life: the decision now presses on him through JoJo Grzybowski’s family, not through a commander or a chain of command.

The assault that follows gives physical form to the choice and its cost. The attackers intend to take Kowalski alive, but their plan depends on his being subdued quickly; instead, he fights until blows to the head, a broken nose, and a slashed ear leave him unconscious. Even then, the men arrange ambulances rather than a police van, and the Corsican confirms that they have taken the whole floor. The operation is therefore both a capture and a managed removal: Kowalski’s resistance makes the seizure costly, while the surrounding flats and medical response are controlled to keep the violence from drawing outside attention.