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- Herausgeber: Alfredbooks
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
by Alfred Bekker A new case for Commissaire Marquanteur and his team of investigators in Marseille. A bank in Marseille is repeatedly the target of cash-in-transit robberies. The perpetrators disappear unrecognized until the day when one of the security guards is shot dead, seemingly without reason. The FoPoCri search for clues and connections, but find nothing - until a tiny detail exposes one of the perpetrators. Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, crime thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton Reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Jack Raymond, Robert Gruber, Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden and Janet Farell.
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Alfred Bekker
Marquanteur And The Dragon Of Marseille: France Crime Thriller
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Marquanteur And The Dragon Of Marseille: France Crime Thriller
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Marquanteur And The Dragon Of Marseille: France Crime Thriller
by Alfred Bekker
A new case for Commissaire Marquanteur and his team of investigators in Marseille.
A bank in Marseille is repeatedly the target of cash-in-transit robberies. The perpetrators disappear unrecognized until the day when one of the security guards is shot dead, seemingly without reason. The FoPoCri search for clues and connections, but find nothing - until a tiny detail exposes one of the perpetrators.
Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, crime thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton Reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Jack Raymond, Robert Gruber, Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden and Janet Farell.
Copyright
A CassiopeiaPress book: CASSIOPEIAPRESS, UKSAK E-Books, Alfred Bekker, Alfred Bekker presents, Casssiopeia-XXX-press, Alfredbooks, Uksak Special Edition, Cassiopeiapress Extra Edition, Cassiopeiapress/AlfredBooks and BEKKERpublishing are imprints of
Alfred Bekker
© Roman by Author
© this issue 2024 by AlfredBekker/CassiopeiaPress, Lengerich/Westphalia
The fictional characters have nothing to do with actual living persons. Similarities between names are coincidental and not intended.
All rights reserved.
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1
Marseille...
It's a good thing I never got a tattoo.
For several reasons. One of them is that I would probably never have become what I am now: Commissaire.
My name is Pierre Marquanteur and together with my colleague François Leroc I am in the so-called "Force spéciale de la police criminelle", FoPoCri for short, which is based here in Marseille and deals with the so-called big fish.
With cases that have something to do with organized crime, for example, or simply cases that the other departments can't really handle.
But back to the matter of the tattoos.
They used to be an exclusion criterion when applying to the police.
In the meantime, the regulations have become somewhat more liberal.
But in the past, it was probably thought that only criminals and sailors got tattoos.
But not police officers.
However, I prefer to remain a blank slate in the truest sense of the word.
Not like Marie from Club 666 in Point-Rouge.
She's standing at the bar with her plunging neckline and everyone can read what it says: I belong to Vladi.
Vladi was her ex.
Also known as the rough Vladi.
This Vladi died half a year ago in a shoot-out among rockers, but Marie hadn't been with him for a long time by then.
Some things end quickly and suddenly.
A love.
Or a life.
Only a tattoo will last until the end of your life.
Or even beyond that.
And sometimes it helps to solve murders.
But first things first!
2
"What's this here? The red wave?" growled Vincent Nemiére, one of the two guards in the Telso Secure armored van, as his colleague Didier Retesse slammed on the brakes at the intersection of Rue des Estere and Avenue Jarre.
The traffic light had just turned red. Vincent Nemiére glanced at the watch on his wrist.
"Do you think we'll be able to finish our tour before the soccer broadcast, Didier?"
At that moment, the doors of the van waiting in front of them opened and several masked men jumped out. They were wearing army combat uniforms. Their faces were covered with balaclavas, leaving only their eyes uncovered.
Four men also jumped out of a limousine positioned in the right-hand lane and took up position. A dozen muzzles were aimed at the Telso van.
"I don't think we're going to make it, Vincent," Didier Retesse muttered grimly between his teeth.
He pressed a button to activate an alarm signal, which was transmitted by radio to the nearest Marseille police station.
One of the gangsters made a clear gesture to the occupants of the Telso van, telling them to leave the vehicle.
"Those idiots! They can wait until the police come!" growled Vincent Nemiére, while his colleague spoke to a policeman.
A few minutes at most. Then the police would show up in force, possibly even supported by special units. Retesse announced how many perpetrators there were and how they were armed.
They had practiced this hundreds of times - and now it was the real thing.
"The car is armored," Nemiére also reported.
"Then I don't need to tell you that you should stay in the van under all circumstances," the policeman instructed them. His name was Bastien Kranz. He promised that all the forces within range would go to the scene immediately - including a police helicopter.
"I already had a feeling this morning that something was going to go wrong," said Vincent Nemiére. The sound of his voice vibrated slightly, revealing how he was feeling.
Nemiére and Retesse were equipped with short-barreled revolvers. Nemiére drew his .38 from his holster and checked the load. In the five years he had been working as a guard for Telso Secure, he had never used the weapon - and this time there was nothing to suggest that he would. The van was armored. Even though the gang simply opened fire and unleashed a veritable hail of bullets on the front of the van with the driver's cab, the occupants remained unharmed. The armored glass of the windshield was designed to safely catch even large-caliber projectiles.
Six raids had recently been carried out on Telso Secure's vehicles. The security guards had only been harmed in two cases. These robberies had been committed when the wagon was being loaded or unloaded and the colleagues were therefore unprotected.
But as long as they stayed in the cabin, they were safe.
At least that's what Vincent Nemiére kept telling himself. He had a wife and two small children - twins. They had only been born a few months ago and Vincent had been delighted to have the job at Telso.
The security people there were not well paid, and there was certainly a certain amount of risk involved. But for Vincent Nemiére, it was his first permanent job in a long time, so he was glad to have found something that seemed reasonably crisis-proof.
His thoughts were racing through his head. He thought of his wife and children and the soccer match that he was now certain to miss, regardless of what else might happen. It all mixed together in these seconds to form a whirlpool of incoherent impressions - until a shock brought this state to an abrupt end.
Vincent Nemiére blanched as he looked into the muzzle of the bazooka, which one of the masked men had positioned and aimed at the windshield.
There was no armor against such a projectile.
For a brief moment, Vincent Nemiére wondered why the perpetrators had not simply attached an explosive charge to the back door of the van. Several of the last robberies had gone like this. Meanwhile, the security guards had stayed in their cabin while there had been a bang behind them.
The gangsters had no way of knowing that the back doors of the Telso transporters were now specially protected against explosives.
Actually ...
Again, a clear gesture was made.
Vincent Nemiére and Didier Retesse had no other choice - if they didn't want to risk being blown to pieces by the bazooka they fired.
Armored glass did not protect in this case.
Didier Retesse hesitantly opened the door.
One of the gunmen pulled him out of the cabin. Then it was Nemiére's turn. He was also roughly dragged outside and immediately disarmed.
But in terms of firepower, a .38 Special was hopelessly inferior to the more modern weaponry of this almost militarily organized gang.
"Open up!" shouted one of them, addressing Nemiére.
"Go on, Vincent, we have no other choice," Retesse whispered to him.
Police sirens wailed in the distance.
Vincent Nemiére felt a pistol at his temple. The guy was breathing heavily and seemed quite nervous.
"Open up!" he hissed.
Vincent Nemiére didn't need to be told twice. The masked man pushed him in front of him with his gun at the ready. Another gangster was carrying Retesse and pushed him forward.
Nemiére took his bunch of keys from his belt and opened the specially secured rear door of the van. Two masked men jumped inside the van. A small explosive charge opened another, less robust lock.
The guy who had put the gun to Vincent Nemiére's temple kept his automatic aimed at the guard the whole time. His arms were outstretched. The sleeves of his camouflage army jacket had ridden up a few centimetres.
A tattoo was visible on his forearm. It was a two-headed dragon.
The masked man noticed Vincent Nemiére's stare. Nemiére swallowed. The masked man suddenly pulled the trigger. Hit, Nemiére sank to the ground. He remained motionless.
"Hey, are you crazy!" shouted one of the other masked men.
In a panic, Retesse tried to break free at the same moment. The masked man, who had already shot Nemiére, struck him down with a well-aimed shot.
A masked man with an Uzi at the ready approached the murderer and pushed him roughly.
"What are you doing, you idiot?"
"The guy recognized me!"
"How can you do that? You're not really ticking anymore!" He pointed to the open van. "Everything we can grab in terms of money bomb tapes and so on will be taken, and then let's get out of here!"
3
François and I were on our way to interview a witness who had contacted us to testify in a drug case. His name was Martin Jesson, he was a self-employed financial consultant and he was able to give us important information about the dark channels through which some drug syndicates made their black money white.
Martin Jesson lived in one of the apartments at Seepark. But Jesson stood us up.
He had preferred to go away for three weeks, as we learned from the apartment building's security service. He had signed out there for this time. He had left his apartment early in the morning. We found out by phone that he had gone to Marseille airport and taken a flight to the Cayman Islands. Perhaps someone had strongly advised him to leave Marseille and renounce his statement. Our hands were tied. It was always the same. The law of silence allowed organized crime to flourish. Only when it was broken did we at FoPoCri have a chance.
The apartment's security service - a company called Telso Secure, as you could see from the small inscription on the uniforms at chest height - was kind enough to let us into Martin Jesson's apartment with a master key.
We would never have gotten a search warrant for that. After all, there was nothing against Jesson, and the fact that he had vaguely offered us a few clues about dubious financial transactions by a couple of well-known drug barons who we had long wanted to see behind bars was simply not enough.
Our reason for being able to inspect the apartment was the suspicion that Martin Jesson might have been the victim of a crime. If what he had so boldly offered us on the phone was true, and he could actually make a few relevant statements about the money laundering channels of the drug syndicates, he was certainly on the hit list of some payroll killer.
"A crime?" echoed Jean Tallien, the head of the day shift for the Telso Secure people on duty in the building. "He left the building and personally signed out to my colleague. Jesson wanted someone to be found to look after the fish in his aquarium. He wouldn't be able to assign anyone else to do this in a hurry."
"Don't tell me you do something like that," I marveled.
Jean Tallien shrugged his shoulders.
"We do what we can. We are courteous and do a good job. We want the residents of this house to feel as safe as in Abraham's bosom!"
"Did anyone really see Jesson leave the building, or are you just assuming that because he signed out to you?" asked my colleague François Leroc.
Jean Tallien rolled his eyes in annoyance.
"Of course, you can put something together that way ..." He sighed audibly and then added: "We have video recordings in the corridors, of course. If you want to take the trouble to watch them all ..."
"We'll do that," I announced. "But it's much easier if you let us look in the apartment."
He wrestled with himself for a moment, then led us to Jesson's apartment.
"If I lose my job because of this, then ..."
"Because you helped us, Mr. Tallien?" I cut him off. "Hardly."
"I earn a pittance here - even though I'm a shift supervisor. But damn it, I'm dependent on the money."
"No one will dispute that with you."
Tallien seemed quite irritable. I asked myself why.
He finally opened Jesson's apartment for us. We stepped inside. The square meters had to be somewhere around a hundred - which meant that Jesson's apartment was considerably larger than the average in Marseille. His business seemed to be doing well enough to allow him this luxury.
There were a few modern paintings on the walls.
"I wonder if Jesson bought them as an investment or if he was really interested in art," said François.
"Art is ideal for money laundering," I pointed out.
The apartment looked like it had been licked clean. Someone seemed to have given everything a shiny clean. The furniture in the kitchen was also so shiny that you could see yourself reflected in it.
In the bedroom, we found the bundle wrapped in plastic. A rigid face with wide open eyes stared back at us through the milky, cloudy plastic sheeting. There was a bullet hole in the temple area.
"Martin Jesson!" I groaned.
François had already taken his cell phone out of the inside pocket of his jacket and was about to connect to our office at La Canebière on speed dial.
Jean Tallien turned his head away. The Telso Secure guard had gone as pale as the wall. He was obviously not used to something like this.
4
Our colleagues arrived one by one. The colleagues from the relevant department arrived first. The colleagues from our department arrived a little later. Our colleague Stéphane Caron was in charge of the money laundering case. He was the deputy head of our department. He came to Martin Jesson's apartment accompanied by our colleagues Boubou Ndonga and Fred Lacroix and gave us a friendly welcome.
Dr. Bernard Neuville, a forensic pathologist on behalf of the coroner's office, arrived half an hour late because the traffic around the Seepark had delayed him. There were roadworks near the bridge over the A 507, which made it a real pain to drive north or south along the Seepark. Unfortunately, all the alternative roads were probably also very busy, so at the moment you simply had to allow half an hour more than usual.
It took an hour and a half before the forensic experts from the investigation team of the identification service were finally able to examine the crime scene. This central forensics service was also based at La Canebiére and was used by all Marseille police units for their investigations.
In between, I called our office again.
I was put through to my colleague Maxime Valois, an office worker from our investigations department. In the meantime, Maxime had contacted the airport again. A man named Martin Jesson was indeed on the passenger list of an airplane that had taken off for the Cayman Islands on schedule.
