Stone Leopard by Colin Forbes

Author:Colin Forbes [Forbes, Colin]
Language: fra
Format: epub
Tags: Action & Adventure, Mystery & Detective, General, Fiction, Attempted Assassination, World Politics, Suspense Fiction, Espionage, Large Type Books, Paris (France), Spy Stories
ISBN: 9782714411129
Google: P0otSQAACAAJ
Amazon: B000GLNAZK
Publisher: Pan
Published: 1975-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

ON THE EVENING of Sunday, 19 December, Grelle waited in his office for Boisseau to return from Strasbourg, but as the hours ticked away the police prefect was far from idle. For a good part of the day he had been immersed in tightening up the security arrangements for the presidential motorcade drive to Charles de Gaulle Airport—or Roissy as it was often called —on the morning of 23 December when Florian departed for Russia.

Marc Grelle had made himself an expert on death by assassination—on the methods used, on the people who used them. He had made a particular study of the thirty-one attempts which had been made to assassinate General de Gaulle, on the reasons why they might have succeeded, on the reasons why they failed. The list of techniques employed was formidable.

Killing by remote detonation of explosive charges under a moving vehicle; killing by sniper armed with rifle and telescopic sight; killing at close quarters—by stabbing, by shooting; killing by imposture—by use of a stolen military or police uniform; killing by motor-bike outrider approaching presidential car; killing by suicidal air collision—one plane crashing into another carrying the president; killing by absurdly exotic methods—using a camera-gun, using explosive-carrying dogs trained to run to a certain spot where the president was due to speak; and killing by motorized ambush.

The last method was the favourite, and Grelle could see why. The motorized ambush was most deadly because it used highly-trained thugs at short range, men who could react at the last split second according to circumstances. De Gaulle had, in fact, come closest to death when his motorcade was ambushed by other cars. With this catalogue of assassination attempts in his head, Grelle, aided by the tireless Boisseau, set out to counter every one of them. He was still working on the problem when his deputy returned from Strasbourg.

It was nine in the evening, and Boisseau, who had had nothing to eat since lunch, sent out to the corner brasserie for food. He ate his meal at the prefect’s desk while he went on reporting about the Strasbourg trip. ‘You see,’ he continued, Jouvel’s suicide is technically sound, no doubt about that, and few people can fake that kind of death. As you know, they would overlook certain details…

`Unless we are confronted with a professional assassin? Which would give rise to all sorts of unpleasant implications…

`What I don’t like,’ Boisseau remarked, sopping up gravy with a piece of bread, ‘is those two men who called on the tart and asked her—quite independently—almost the self-same questions about Jouvel. And that when Jouvel normally had no one calling on him or even interested in him. So, who were those two strangers—to say nothing of the man with the umbrella whom none of the tenants recognized ?’

`Face it,’ Grelle advised, Jouvel may well have committed suicide and these other people are probably irrelevant. At this end we are getting nowhere yet—neither Roger Danchin nor Alain Blanc have made contact with any known Soviet link.

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