Russian Roulette- the Story of an Assassin pdfdrive com

arrondissement
, in a quiet street of flats and houses
not far from the Panthéon, the elaborate church that had been modelled
on a similar building in Rome and where many of the great and good of
France were buried. Hunter had received a full briefing in an envelope
sealed with a scorpion. I guessed it had been delivered to his hotel room
by someone like Marcus, who had done the same for me in New York.
The two of us went to a café on the Champs-Elysées. It might have
seemed odd to discuss this sort of business in a public place but in fact it
was safer to choose somewhere completely random. We could make sure
we weren’t being followed. And we knew it couldn’t be bugged.
Vosque provided a very different challenge to the Commander. He
might be easier to reach but he probably knew we were coming so there
was a good chance he had taken precautions. He would carry a gun. He
could expect protection from the French police. As far as they were
concerned, he was one of them, a senior officer and a man to be
respected. If he was gunned down in the street, there would be an
immediate outcry. Ports and airports would be closed. We would find
ourselves at the centre of an international manhunt.
He lived alone. Hunter produced some photographs of his address.
They had been provided by Scorpia and showed a ground-floor
apartment with glass doors and double-height windows on the far side of
a courtyard shared by two more flats. Although one of these was empty,
the other was occupied by a young artist, a potential witness. An
archway opened onto the street. There was no other way in and an
armed policeman – a 
gendarme
– had been stationed in the little room

---

that had once been the porter’s lodge. To reach Vosque, we had to get
past him.
In all our discussions, we called Vosque “the Cop”. As always, it was
easier to depersonalize him. On the Saturday, we watched him leave the
flat and walk to his local supermarket, two streets away. He was a short,
bullish man, in his late forties. As he walked, he swung his fists and you
could imagine him lashing out at anyone who got in his way. He was
almost bald with a thick moustache that didn’t quite stretch to the end
of his lip. He was wearing an old-fashioned suit but no tie. After he had
done his shopping, he stopped at a café for a cigar and a 
demi-pression
of
beer. Nobody had escorted him and I thought it would be a simple
matter to shoot him where he sat. We could do it without being seen.
But Hunter wasn’t having any of it. “That’s not what Scorpia wants,”
he said. “He has to be killed in his home.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
I didn’t like the sound of that but I knew better than to ask anything
more.
Our Paris holiday was over. Even the weather had changed. On Sunday
morning it rained and the whole city seemed to be sulking, the water
spitting off the pavements and forming puddles in the roads. This was
the day when Vosque was going to die. If we wanted to find him alone
in his flat, it made sense. Monday to Friday he would be in his office,
which was situated inside the Interior Ministry. According to his file,
most evenings he went out drinking or ate with friends in cheap
restaurants around the Gare St-Lazare. Sunday for him was dead time –
in more than one sense.
That morning, Annabelle Finnan, the artist who lived next door to
Vosque, received a telephone call from the town of Orléans, telling her
that her elderly mother had been run over by a van and was unlikely to
survive. This was untrue but Annabelle left at once. We were waiting in
the street and saw her flag down a taxi. Then we moved forward.
We were both wearing cheap suits, white shirts and black ties. We
were carrying bibles. The disguise had been Hunter’s idea and it was a
brilliant one. We had come as Jehovah’s Witnesses. There had been real
ones, apparently, working in the area and nobody would have noticed
two more, following in their wake. The