MOSSAD
AFTER SPENDING THE NIGHT IN jail, Lancelot weighed his options and called Maître Brien, who hurried down and in no time obtained his release with a caution. Brien assured him he could have been charged with possessing an illegal firearm. They went drinking in Old Montreal to celebrate.
The next day, the list from the glove compartment landed on the desk of Detective Lieutenant Gilbert Massicotte, head of CATS, who examined it with interest. It took him thirty minutes to connect the word “Golan” with the Israeli consul.
“Good God, it looks like the bastards were cooking up a kidnapping,” he said to himself.
It was a good thing he’d tipped off the Montreal Police about Lancelot and his rented Econoline van.
By the time he could procure a warrant to bring him in for questioning, the cockroach had had time to disappear back into the woodwork. He was already well known to the police; he had a kind of gift for being recognized, and his dossier with the antiterrorist squad was a thick one. Arrested in 1963 for throwing Molotov cocktails, he’d been photographed at many demonstrations since then, and by the winter of 1970 had achieved the status of a wanted revolutionary. The plot against the Israeli consul catapulted him from Robin Hood to Punchinello among the secret police. Surveillance teams were put on his trail, and he was soon reported to be hanging around with several local members of the Mossad, the benchmark in the terrorist profession.