Death on the Pont Noir - By Adrian Magson Page 0,43

the DS which puzzled him most. Nobody trashes a car like that without good cause. A rehearsal for a film, maybe, but with a fake camera, this was clearly no film.

Which left one thing.

It had been a rehearsal for something else.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Unable to sleep for the thoughts whirling around in his head, Rocco got up early, put a saucepan of water on a low heat, then dressed quickly in a tracksuit and went for a run. It was still dark outside, but he was able to follow the lane out from the village easily enough, his usual training route when he was in the mood.

The air was bitingly cold and deathly still, and he’d even got the jump on the village cockerels, usually so vocal and quick to wake everyone. Other than the brief stomping of a few cows startled by his passing, and one or two early birds ignoring the mad human to start the day with their singing, he was alone. No traffic, either, as usual. Perfect.

He covered a kilometre at a brisk rate, then turned and jogged back. In spite of the temperature, he’d built up a sweat and his lungs were aching as they took in the chilled air. As a training run it was nothing like enough, but better than nothing.

Back indoors, he bathed, drank his coffee, then headed for the car. He wanted to get to the office before the main shift came on and the atmosphere got blown to hell by noise, confusion and the daily briefing, which he tried to miss anyway. He also wanted to take a good look at the wall map and have a think.

The map in the main office was big enough to include even small details of the countryside up to thirty kilometres out from Amiens, including tracks, streams, old WWI and WWII ammunition sites, trenches and other topographical details natural and man-made. The only items not marked were the many filled-in shell craters left over from the war, their locations circular white scars on the land and still visible if one knew where to look.

Rocco focused on the roads.

He grabbed a chair and sat down with a fresh coffee, staring up at the map and following the network of major roads likely to be used during a visit, linking Amiens with the safest routes in and out, and the quickest route to and from Paris. He discounted the main national roads, where ambush points were aplenty simply by being accessible from both sides. Saint-Cloud and his men would have the most obvious choke points covered, using the local police to flood the area and discourage anyone from considering any possible assault. Instead, he looked for some kind of pattern elsewhere, something that would jump off the wall and smack him between the eyes.

But nothing did.

He made more coffee, brutally strong this time, with lots of sugar, and tried to stop thinking like a policeman. He had to get into the mind of the attackers, of the men who wanted de Gaulle out of the picture for ever. He had to picture how, rather than preventing a killing, he would execute one. He had to go against the grain.

To think like an assassin.

He shuffled close to the map on the chair and sat back, eyeing the uneven web of roads. He automatically discounted anywhere close to villages or towns, anywhere where security forces would be certain to close down the area, flooding all possible means of escape with men and guns. That way lay certain failure.

So, somewhere remote, then.

He thought about where de Gaulle would be likely to go if he came here. And come here he would, he was certain of that. There could only be a limited number of places the president would consider worthwhile visiting out here, from strategically important industrial sites to places of national interest. And each one of those would have to be a point of maximum political impact. The president would want it, the advisors would suggest it – and the public would expect it.

Something out there must ring a bell.

He thought back to previous attacks. The only common denominators seemed to be de Gaulle on one side and his enemies on the other. And although the use of cars, guns and explosives was common, as were roadside attacks, none of them presented a pattern. All the attacks were clearly planned, but the methodology was almost random in nature, perpetrated by different groups with different training, skills and reasoning. Except