The next 'interruption' followed in less than ten minutes. It was - appropriately, thought McAuliff - a news report out of London. This intrusion warranted a line of moving print across the television screen: 'Killings in London Full Report on News Hour.' The radio allowed a long musical commercial to run its abrasive course before the voice returned, now authoritatively bewildered.
The details were still sketchy, but not the conclusions. Four high-ranking figures in government and industry had been slain. A director of Lloyds, an accounts official of Inland Revenue, and two members of the House of Commons, both chairing trade committees of consequence. The methods: two now familiar, two new - dramatically oriented.
A high-powered rifle fired from a window into a canopied entrance in Belgravia Square. A dynamited automobile, blown up in the Westminster parking area. Then the new: poison - temporarily identified as strychnine - administered in a Beefeater martini, causing death in ten minutes; a horrible, contorted, violent death... the blade of a knife thrust into moving flesh on a crowded corner of The Strand.
Killings accomplished; no killers apprehended. R. C. Holcroft stood by the hotel window listening to the excited tones of the Jamaican announcer. When Holcroft spoke, his shock was clear.
'My God... Every one of those men at one time or another was under the glass - '
'The what?'
'Suspected of high crimes. Malfeasance, extortion, fraud... Nothing was ever proved out.'
'Something's been proved out now.'
Paris was next. Reuters sent out the first dispatches picked up by all the wire services within minutes. Again the number was... four. Four Frenchmen - actually, three French men and one woman. But still four.
Again, they were prominent figures in industry and government. And the MOs were identical: rifle, explosives, strychnine, knife.
The French woman was a proprietor of a Paris fashion house. A ruthless, hated, sadistic lesbian long considered an associate of the Corsicans. She was shot from a distance as she emerged from a doorway on the St Germain des Pres. Of the three men, one was a member of the president's all-important Elysee Financial; his Citroen exploded when he turned his ignition on in the Rue de Bac. The two other Frenchmen were powerful executives in shipping companies - Marseilles-based, under Paraguyan flag - owned by the Marquis de Chatellarault. The first spastically lurched and died over a cafe table in the Montmarte - strychnine in his late-morning espresso. The second had his chest torn open by a butcher's knife on the crowded sidewalk outside the Georges Cinque Hotel.
Minutes after Paris came Berlin. The Berlin of the Bonn government. There were only rumours out of the East - sirens were heard beyond the bridges, the Wall; police radios were intercepted - but nothing was clear.
On the Kurfurstendam Strasse, the Unter Schriftfuhrer of the Bundestag's AuBenpolitik was shot from the roof of a nearby building as he was on his way to a luncheon appointment. A Direktor of Mercedes Benz stopped for a traffic light on the Autobahn, where two grenades were thrown into the front seat of his car, demolishing automobile and driver in seconds. A known narcotics dealer was given poison in his glass of heavy lager at the Grand Hotel, and an appointee of the Einkunfte Finanzamt was stabbed expertly - death instantaneous - through the heart in the crowded lobby of the government building.
Rome followed. A financial strategist for the Vatican, a despised cardinal devoted to the church militants' continuous extortion of the uninformed poor, was dropped by an assassin firing a rifle from behind a Bernini in St Peter's Square. A funzionario of Milan's Mondadori drove into a cul-de-sac on the Via Condotte, where his automobile exploded. A lethal dose of strychnine was administered with cappuccino to a direttore of customs at Rome's Fiumicino Airport. A knife was plunged into the ribs of a powerful broker of the Borsa Valori as he walked down the Spanish Steps into the Via Due Macelli.
London, Paris, Berlin, Rome.
And always the figure was four... and the methods identical: rifle, explosives, strychnine, knife. Four diverse, ingenious modi operandi. Each strikingly news-conscious, oriented for shock. All killings the work of expert professionals; no killers caught at the scenes of violence.
The radio and the television stations no longer made attempts to continue regular programming. As the names came, so too did progressively illuminating biographies.
And another pattern emerged, lending credence to Holcroft's summary of the four slain Englishmen: The victims were not ordinary men of stature in industry and government. There