The world's biggest soccer organization..........for any sport for that matter..........is headquartered in France..........FIFA.......


Vienna, Austria and Paris, France.......

Part One: Anatomy of a Plot[edit]

The book begins in 1962 with the (historical) failed attempt on de Gaulle's life planned by Col. Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart: Operation Charlotte Corday. Following the arrest of Bastien-Thiry and the other conspirators, the French security forces wage a short but extremely vicious "underground" war with the terrorists of the OAS, a militant right-wing group who have labelled de Gaulle a traitor to France after his grant of independence to Algeria.

The French secret service, particularly its covert operations directorate (the "Action Service"), is remarkably effective in infiltrating the terrorist organisation with their own informants, allowing them to kidnap and neutralise the terrorists' chief of operations, Antoine Argoud. The failure of the Petit-Clamart assassination, and a subsequent attempt at the École Militaire, coupled with Bastien-Thiry's eventual execution by firing squad, likewise cripple the morale of the terrorists.

Argoud's deputy, Lt Col Marc Rodin, carefully examines their few remaining options and determines that the only way to succeed in killing de Gaulle is to hire a professional assassin from outside the organisation, someone completely unknown to both the French authorities and the OAS itself. After inquiries, he contacts an Englishman (whose name is never given), who meets with Rodin and his two principal deputies in Vienna, and agrees to assassinate de Gaulle for the sum of $500,000 (approximately $2.87 million in 2013). The four men also agree on his code name, "The Jackal." The three OAS leaders then take up residency on the top floor of a Rome hotel guarded by a group of ex-legionnaires to avoid the risk of being captured or killed like Argoud.

The remainder of Part One describes the Jackal's exhaustive preparations for the assassination. He first acquires a legitimate British passport under a false name, under which he plans to operate for the majority of his mission. He eventually steals the passports of two foreign tourists visiting London who superficially resemble him for use in an emergency. With his primary phony passport, the Jackal travels to Brussels, where he commissions a specialised sniper rifle of extreme slimness and an appropriate silencer along with a small supply of exploding bullets from a master gunsmith; he also acquires a set of forged French identity papers from a master forger. The latter makes the mistake of attempting to blackmail him, for which the Jackal breaks his neck and locks his body in a large trunk where he (correctly) guesses it will not be found for a long time. After exhaustively researching a series of books and articles by, and about, de Gaulle, the Jackal travels to Paris to reconnoitre the most favourable spot and the best possible day for the assassination.