The Negotiator (46 page)

Moritz thought it over.

“If he is a law-abiding citizen—and even a former mercenary might never have committed an offense inside Germany—he would not have a police record,” he said. “As for the income tax and social security people, they would regard this as privileged information, not to be divulged to an inquiry from you, or even me.”

“They
would
respond to a police inquiry,” said Quinn. “I thought you might perhaps have a friend or two in the city or state police.”

“Ah,” said Moritz. Only he would ever know just how much he had donated to the police charities of the city of Dortmund and the state of Westphalia. As in any country in the world, money is power and both buy information. “Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll phone you.”

He was true to his word, but his tone when he called the Roemischer Kaiser the following morning after breakfast was distant, as if someone had given him a warning along with the information.

“Werner Richard Bernhardt,” he said as if reading from notes, “aged forty-eight, former Congo mercenary. Yes, he’s alive, here in Germany. He works on the personal staff of Horst Lenzlinger, the arms dealer.”

“Thank you. Where would I find Herr Lenzlinger?”

“Not easily. He has an office in Bremen but lives outside Oldenburg, in Ammerland County. Like me, a very private man. There the resemblance ends. Be careful of Lenzlinger, Herr Quinn. My sources tell me that despite the respectable veneer he is still a gangster.”

He gave Quinn both addresses.

“Thank you,” said Quinn as he noted them. There was an embarrassed pause on the line.

“One last thing. I am sorry. A message from the Dortmund police. Please leave Dortmund. Do not come back. That is all.”

The word of Quinn’s role in what had happened on the side of a Buckinghamshire road was spreading. Soon doors would start to close in many places.

“Feel like driving?” he asked Sam when they were packed and checked out.

“Sure. Where to?”

“Bremen.” She studied the map.

“Good God, it’s halfway back to Hamburg.”

“Two thirds, actually. Take the E.37 for Osnabrück and follow the signs. You’ll love it.”

That evening Colonel Robert Easterhouse flew out of Jiddah for London, changed planes, and flew on directly to Houston. On the flight across the Atlantic he had access to the whole range of American newspapers and magazines.

Three of them carried articles on the same theme, and the reasoning of all the writers was remarkably similar. The presidential election of November 1992 was now just twelve months away. In the normal course of events the Republican party choice would be no choice at all. President Cormack would secure the nomination unopposed for a second term of office.

But the course of events these past six weeks had not been normal, the scribes told their readers—as if they needed to be told. They went on to describe the effect on President Cormack of the loss of his son as traumatic and disabling.

All three writers listed a chronicle of lapses of concentration, canceled speaking engagements, and abandoned public appearances in the previous fortnight since the funeral on Nantucket island. “The Invisible Man,” one of them called the Chief Executive.

The summary of each was also similar. Would it not be better, they wrote, if the President stepped down in favor of Vice President Odell, giving Odell a clear twelve months in office to prepare for reelection in November ’92?

After all, reasoned
Time
, the main plank of Cormack’s foreign, defense, and economic policy, the shaving of $100 billion off the defense budget with a matching reduction by the U.S.S.R., was already dead in the water.

“Belly up” was how
Newsweek
described the chances of the treaty’s ratification by the Senate after the Christmas recess.

Easterhouse landed at Houston close to midnight, after twelve hours in the air and two in London. The headlines on the newsstands in the Houston airport were more overt: Michael Odell was a Texan and would be the first Texan President since Lyndon Johnson if he stepped into Cormack’s shoes.

The conference with the Alamo Group was scheduled in two days’ time in the Pan-Global Building. A company limousine took Easterhouse to the Remington, where a suite had been reserved for him. Before turning in, he caught a late news summary. Again, the question was being asked.

The colonel had not been informed of Plan Travis. He did not need to know. But he did know that a change of Chief Executive would remove the last stumbling block to the fruition of all his endeavors—the securing of Riyadh and the Hasa oil fields by an American Rapid Deployment Force sent in by a President prepared to do it.

Fortuitous, he thought as he drifted into sleep. Very fortuitous.

The small brass plaque on the wall of the converted warehouse beside the paneled teak door said simply:
THOR SPEDITION
AG
. Lenzlinger apparently hid the true nature of his business behind the façade of a trucking company, though there were no rigs to be seen and the smell of diesel had never penetrated the carpeted privacy of the fourth-floor suite of offices to which Quinn mounted.

There was an intercom to seek admittance from street level, and another with closed-circuit TV camera at the end of the corridor on the fourth floor. The conversion of the warehouse in a side street off the old docks—where the river Weser pauses on its way to the North Sea to provide the reason for old Bremen’s existence—had not been cheap.

The secretary, when he met her in the outer office, seemed typecast. Had Lenzlinger had any trucks, she could easily have kick-started them.

“
Ja, bitte
?” she asked, though her gaze made plain it was he, not she, who was the supplicant.

“I would like the opportunity of speaking with Herr Lenzlinger,” said Quinn.

She took his name and vanished into the private sanctum, closing the door behind her. Quinn had the impression that the mirror set into the partition wall was one-way. She returned after thirty seconds.

“And your business, please, Herr Quinn.”

“I would like the chance to meet an employee of Herr Lenzlinger, a certain Werner Bernhardt,” he said.

She went backstage again. This time she was gone more than a minute. When she returned she closed the door firmly on whoever sat within.

“I regret, Herr Lenzlinger is not available to speak with you,” she said. It sounded final.

“I’ll wait,” said Quinn.

She gave him a look that regretted she had been too young to run a labor camp with him in it, and disappeared a third time. When she returned to her desk she ignored him and began to type with concentrated venom.

Another door into the reception area opened and a man came out. The sort who might well have been a truck driver; a walking refrigerator-freezer. The pale-gray suit was well enough cut almost to conceal the masses of beefy muscle beneath; the short, blow-dried hairstyle, aftershave, and veneer of civility were not cheap. Under all that he was pure knuckle-fighter.

“Herr Quinn,” he said quietly, “Herr Lenzlinger is not available to see you or answer your questions.”

“Now, no,” agreed Quinn.

“Not now, not ever, Mr. Quinn. Please go.”

Quinn had the impression the interview was over. He descended to the street and crossed the cobbles to where Sam waited in the car.

“He’s not available in working hours,” said Quinn. “I’ll have to see him at his home. Let’s get to Oldenburg.”

Another very old city, its inland port trading for centuries on the Hunte River, it was once the seat of the Counts of Oldenburg. The inner core, the Old Town, is still girdled by sections of the former city wall and a moat made up of a series of linked canals.

Quinn found the sort of hotel he preferred, a quiet inn with a walled courtyard called the Graf von Oldenburg, in Holy Ghost Street.

Before the shops closed he had time to visit a hardware store and a camping shop; from a kiosk he bought the largest-scale map of the surrounding area he could find. After dinner he puzzled Sam by spending an hour in their room, tying knots every twenty inches down the length of the fifty feet of rope he had bought from the hardware shop, finally tying a three-prong grapnel to the end.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I suspect, up a tree” was all he would say. He left her still asleep in the predawn darkness.

He found the Lenzlinger domain an hour later, due west of the city, south of the great Bad Zwischenahn Lake, between the villages of Portsloge and Janstrat. It was all flat country, running without a mountain due west across the Ems to become northern Holland sixty miles farther on.

Intersected by myriad rivers and canals, draining the wet plain toward the sea, the country between Oldenburg and the border is studded with forests of beech, oak, and conifers. Lenzlinger’s estate lay between two forests, a former fortified manor now set in its own five-acre park, the whole bounded by an eight-foot wall.

Quinn, dressed from head to toe in camouflage green, his face masked with scrim netting, spent the morning lying along the branch of a mighty oak in the woods across the road from the estate. His high-definition binoculars showed him all he needed to know.

The gray stone manor and its outbuildings formed an
L
shape. The shorter arm was the main house, with two stories plus attics. The longer arm had once been the stables, now converted to self-contained apartments for the staff. Quinn counted four domestic staff: a butler/steward, a male cook, and two cleaning women. It was the security arrangements that held his attention. They were numerous and expensive.

Lenzlinger had started as a young hustler in the late fifties, selling penny packets of war surplus weaponry to all comers. Without a license, his end-user certificates were forged and his questions nil. It was the age of the anticolonial wars and Third World revolutions. But operating on the fringe, he had made a living, not much more.

His big break came with the Nigerian civil war. He swindled the Biafrans of more than half a million dollars; they paid for bazookas but received cast-iron rain pipes. He was right in supposing they were too busy fighting for their lives to come north to settle accounts.

In the early seventies he got a license to trade—how much that cost him Quinn could only guess—which enabled him to supply half a dozen African, Central American, and Middle Eastern war groups, and still have time to conclude the occasional illegal deal (much more lucrative) with the E.T.A., the I.R.A., and a few others. He bought from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and North Korea, all needing hard currency, and sold to the desperate. By 1985 he was parlaying new North Korean hardware to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war. Even some governmental intelligence agencies had used his stocks when they wanted no-source weaponry for arm’s-length revolutions.

This career had made him very wealthy. It had also made him a lot of enemies. He intended to enjoy the former and frustrate the latter.

All the windows, up and down, were electronically protected. Though he could not see the devices, Quinn knew that the doors would be, as well. That was the inner ring. The outer ring was the wall. It ran right around the estate without a break, topped with two strands of razor-wire, the trees inside the park lopped back to prevent any overhanging branches. Something else, glinting in the occasional ray of wintry sunshine. A tight wire, like piano wire, running along the top of the wall, supported by ceramic studs; electrified, linked to the alarm system, sensitive to the touch.

Between the wall and the house was open ground—fifty yards of it at the closest point, swept by cameras, patrolled by dogs. He watched the two Dobermans, muzzled and leashed, being given their morning constitutional. The dog handler was too young to be Bernhardt.

Quinn observed the black-windowed Mercedes 600 leave for Bremen at five to nine. The walking refrigerator-freezer ushered a muffled, fur-hatted figure into the rear seat, took the front passenger seat for himself, and the chauffeur swept them out through the steel gates and onto the road. They passed just below the branch where Quinn lay.

Quinn reckoned on four bodyguards, maybe five. The chauffeur looked like one; the refrigerator-freezer, definitely. That left the dog handler and probably another inside the house. Bernhardt?

The security nerve center seemed to be a ground-floor room where the staff wing joined the main house. The dog handler came and went to it several times, using a small door that gave directly onto the lawns. Quinn surmised that the night guard could probably control the floodlights, the TV monitors, and the dogs from within. By noon Quinn had his plan. He descended from his tree, and returned to Oldenburg.

He and Sam spent the afternoon shopping, he for a rental van and a variety of tools, she to complete a list he had given her.

“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I could wait outside.”

“No. One vehicle on that country lane in the middle of the night is bad enough. Two is a traffic jam.”

He told her what he wanted her to do.

“Just be there when I arrive,” he said. “I suspect I may be in a hurry.”

He was outside the stone wall, parked in the lane, at 2:00
A.M
. His high-roofed panel van was driven close enough to the wall for him to be able to see over it clearly when he stood on the van’s roof. The side of the van, in case of inquiry, bore the logo, created in masking tape, of a TV aerial installer. That would also account for the telescoping aluminum ladder fixed to the roof rack.

When his head came over the wall he could see by the light of the moon the leaf-bare trees of the park, the lawns running up to the house, and the dim light from the window of the guard’s control room.

The spot he had chosen for the diversion was where a single tree inside the park grew only eight feet from the wall. He stood on the roof of the van and swung the small plastic box on the end of the fishing line gently ’round and ’round. When it had enough momentum he let go the line. The plastic case curved out in a gentle parabola, went into the branches of the tree, and fell toward the ground. The fishing line jerked it up short. Quinn paid out enough line to leave the box swinging from the tree just eight feet above the turf of the park, then tied off the line.