The Negotiator (47 page)

He started the engine and ran the van quietly down the wall a hundred yards, to a point opposite the guard’s control house. The van now had steel brackets bolted to its sides, something that would perplex the rental company in the morning. Quinn slotted the ladder into them so that the aluminum structure jutted high above the wall. From its topmost rung he could jump forward and down into the park, avoiding the razor-wire and sensor cord. He climbed the ladder, attached his escape rope to the topmost rung, and waited. He saw the loping shape of a Doberman cross a patch of moonlight inside the park.

The sounds, when they came, were too low for him to hear, but the dogs heard them. He saw one stop, pause, listen, and then race off toward the spot where the black box swung from its nylon line among the trees. The other followed seconds later. Two cameras on the house wall swiveled to follow them. They did not return.

After five minutes the narrow door opened and a man stood there. Not the morning’s dog handler, the night guard.

“Lothar, Wotan,
was ist denn
los
?” he called softly. Now he and Quinn could hear the Dobermans growling, snarling with rage, somewhere in the tree line. The man went back, studied his monitors, but could see nothing. He emerged with a flashlight, drew a handgun, and went after the dogs. Leaving the door unlocked.

Quinn came off the top of the ladder like a shadow, forward and out, then twelve feet down. He took the landing in a paratroop roll, came up and ran through the trees, across the lawn, and into the control house, turning and locking the door from the inside.

A glance at the TV monitors told him the guard was still trying to retrieve his Dobermans a hundred yards up along the wall. Eventually the man would see the tape recorder hanging from its twine eight feet above the ground, the dogs leaping in rage to try to attack it as the recorder uttered its endless stream of growls and snarls at them. It had taken Quinn an hour in the hotel room to prepare that tape, to the consternation of the other guests. By the time the guard realized he had been tricked, it would be too late.

There was a door inside the control room, communicating with the main house. Quinn took the stairs to the bedroom floor. Six carved-oak doors, all probably to bedrooms. But the lights Quinn had seen at dawn that morning indicated the master bedroom must be at the end. It was.

Horst Lenzlinger awoke to the sensation of something hard and painful being jabbed into his left ear. Then the bedside light went on. He squealed once in outrage, then stared silently at the face above him. His lower lip wobbled. It was the man who had come to his office; he had not liked the look of him then. He liked him now even less, but most of all he disliked the barrel of the pistol stuck half an inch into his earhole.

“Bernhardt,” said the man in the camouflage combat suit. “I want to speak to Werner Bernhardt. Use the phone. Bring him here. Now.”

Lenzlinger scrabbled for the house phone on his night table, dialed an extension, and got a bleary response.

“Werner,” he squeaked, “get your arse up here. Now. Yes, my bedroom. Hurry.”

While they waited, Lenzlinger looked at Quinn with a mixture of fear and malevolence. On the black silk sheets beside him the bought-in-Vietnam child whimpered in her sleep, stick-thin, a tarnished doll. Bernhardt arrived, polo-neck sweater over his pajamas. He took in the scene and stared in amazement.

He was the right age, late forties. A mean, sallow face, sandy hair going gray at the sides, gray-pebble eyes.

“
Was
ist denn hier
, Herr Lenzlinger?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” said Quinn in German. “Tell him to answer them, truthfully and fast. Or you’ll need a spoon to get your brains off the lampshade. No problem, sleazebag. Just tell him.”

Lenzlinger told him. Bernhardt nodded.

“You were in the Fifth Commando under John Peters?”

“
Ja
.”

“Stayed on for the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, and the siege?”

“
Ja
.”

“Did you ever know a big Belgian called Paul Marchais? Big Paul, they called him.”

“Yes, I remember him. Came to us from the Twelfth Commando, Schramme’s crowd. So what?”

“Tell me about Marchais.”

“What about him?”

“Everything. What was he like?”

“Big, huge, six feet six or more, good fighter, a former motor mechanic.”

Yeah, thought Quinn, someone had to put that Ford Transit van back in shape, someone who knew motors and welding. So the Belgian was the mechanic.

“Who was his closest buddy, from start to finish?”

Quinn knew that combat soldiers, like policemen on the beat, usually form partnerships; trust and rely on one man more than any other when the going gets really rough. Bernhardt furrowed his brow in concentration.

“Yes, there was one. They were always together. They palled up during Marchais’s time in the Fifth. A South African. They could speak the same language, see? Flemish or Afrikaans.”

“Name?”

“Pretorius—Janni Pretorius.”

Quinn’s heart sank. South Africa was a long way off, and Pretorius a very common name.

“What happened to him? Back in South Africa? Dead?”

“No, the last I heard he had settled in Holland. It’s been a bloody long time. Look, I don’t know where he is now. That’s the truth, Herr Lenzlinger. It’s just something I heard ten years back.”

“He doesn’t know,” protested Lenzlinger. “Now get that thing out of my ear.”

Quinn knew he would get no more from Bernhardt. He grabbed the front of Lenzlinger’s silk nightshirt and swung him off the bed.

“We walk to the front door,” said Quinn. “Slow and easy. Bernhardt, hands on top of the head. You go first. One move and your boss gets a second navel.”

In single file they went down the darkened stairs. At the front door they heard a hammering from outside—the dog handler trying to get back in.

“The back way,” said Quinn. They were halfway through the passage to the control house when Quinn hit an unseen oak chair and stumbled. He lost his grip on Lenzlinger. In a flash the tubby little man was off toward the main hall, screaming his head off for his bodyguards. Quinn flattened Bernhardt with a swipe from the gun and ran on to the control room and its door to the park.

He was halfway across the grass when the screaming Lenzlinger appeared in the door behind him, yelling for the dogs to come around from the front. Quinn turned, drew a bead, squeezed once, turned and ran on. There was a shriek of pain from the arms dealer and he vanished back inside the house.

Quinn jammed his gun in his waistband and made his escape rope just ten yards ahead of the two Dobermans. He swung up the wall as they leaped after him, trod on the sensor wire—triggering a shrill peal of alarm bells from the house—and dropped to the roof of the van. He had discarded the ladder, got the van in gear, and raced off down the lane before a pursuit group could be organized.

Sam was waiting as promised in their car, all packed and checked out, opposite the Graf von Oldenburg. He abandoned the van and climbed in beside her.

“Head west,” he said. “The E.22 for Lier and Holland.”

Lenzlinger’s men were in two cars and radio-linked, with each other and to the manor house. Someone in the house phoned the city’s best hotel, the City Club, but were told Quinn was not registered there. It took the caller another ten minutes, running down the hotel list, to ascertain from the Graf von Oldenburg that Herr and Frau Quinn had checked out. But the caller got an approximate description of their car.

Sam had cleared the Ofener Strasse and reached the 293 ring road when a gray Mercedes appeared behind them. Quinn slid down and curled up until his head was below the sill. Sam turned off the ring road onto the E.22 autobahn; the Mercedes followed.

“It’s coming alongside,” she said.

“Drive normally,” mumbled Quinn from his hiding place. “Give ’em a nice bright smile and a wave.”

The Mercedes pulled up alongside. It was still dark, the interior of the Ford invisible from outside. Sam turned her head. She knew neither of them, the refrigerator-freezer or the dog handler of the previous morning.

Sam flashed a beaming smile and a little wave. The men stared, expressionless. Frightened people on the run do not smile and wave. After several seconds, the Mercedes accelerated ahead, did a U-turn at the next intersection, and went back toward town. After ten minutes Quinn emerged and sat up again.

“Herr Lenzlinger doesn’t seem to like you,” said Sam.

“Apparently not,” said Quinn sadly. “I’ve just shot his pecker off.”

Chapter 14

It is now confirmed that the Saudi jamboree to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of the declaration of the Kingdom will be on April 17th next,” Colonel Easterhouse told the Alamo Group later that morning.

They were seated in the spacious office of Cyrus Miller atop the Pan-Global Tower in downtown Houston.

“The half-billion-dollar stadium, entirely covered with a two-hundred-meter-wide acrylic dome, is complete, ahead of schedule. The other half of this billion-dollar exercise in self-glorification will be spent on food, jewelry, gifts, hospitality, extra hotels and guest mansions for the statesmen of the world, and on the pageant.

“Seven days before the actual pageant, before the expected fifty thousand international guests arrive, there will be a full dress rehearsal. The climax of the entire four-hour pageant will be the storming of a life-size replica model of the old Musmak Fortress, as it stood in 1902. The structure will be completed by Hollywood’s most skilled set designers and builders. The ‘defenders’ will be drawn from the Royal Guard and dressed in the Turkish clothes of those days. The attacking group will be composed of fifty younger princes of the House, all on horseback, and led by a young relative of the King who bears a resemblance to the Sheikh Abdal Aziz of 1902.”

“Fine,” drawled Scanlon. “Love the local color. What about the coup?”

“That’s when the coup takes place,” said the colonel. “In that vast stadium, on rehearsal night, the only audience will be the topmost six hundred of the Royal House, headed by the King himself. All will be fathers, uncles, mothers, and aunts of the participants. All will be packed into the royal enclosure. As the last participants of the previous presentation leave, I will computer-lock the exit doors. The entrance doors will open to admit the fifty riders. What is not foreseen, except by me, is that they will be followed by ten fast-driving trucks disguised as Army vehicles and parked near the entrance gates. Those gates will stay open until the last truck has passed inside, then be computer-locked. After that, no one leaves.

“The assassins will leap out of the trucks, run toward the royal enclosure, and begin firing. One group alone will stay on the floor of the arena to dispatch the fifty princes and the Royal Guard ‘defenders’ of the dummy Musmak Fortress, all armed only with blanks.

“The five hundred Royal Guards surrounding the royal enclosure will attempt to defend their charges. Their ammunition will be defective. In most cases it will detonate in the magazines, killing the man holding the gun. In other cases it will jam. The complete destruction of the Royal House will take about forty minutes. Every stage will be filmed by the video cameras and patched through to Saudi TV; from there the spectacle will be available to most of the Gulf States.”

“How you going to get the Royal Guard to agree to a reissue of ammunition?” asked Moir.

“Security in Saudi Arabia is an obsession,” replied the colonel, “and for that very reason arbitrary changes in procedure are constant. So long as the authority on the order looks genuine, they will obey orders. These will be given in a document prepared by me, over the real signature of the Minister of the Interior, which I have obtained on a blank sheet. Never mind how. Major General Al-Shakry, of Egypt, is in charge of the ordnance depot. He will provide the defective issue of bullets. Later, Egypt will have to have access to Saudi oil at a price she can afford.”

“And the regular Army?” asked Salkind. “There are fifty thousand of them.”

“Yes, but they are not all in Riyadh. The locally-based Army units will have been on maneuvers a hundred miles away, due back in Riyadh the day before the dress rehearsal. The Army’s vehicles are maintained by Palestinians, part of the huge foreign presence in the country of foreign technicians who do the jobs the Saudis cannot. They will immobilize the vehicles, marooning the nine thousand Army troops from Riyadh in the desert.”

“What’s the Palestinians’ kickback?” asked Cobb.

“A chance of naturalization,” said Easterhouse. “Although the technical infrastructure of Saudi depends on the quarter-million Palestinians employed at every level, they are always denied nationality. However loyally they serve, they can never have it. But under the post-Imam regime they could acquire it on the basis of six months’ residence. That measure alone will eventually suck a million Palestinians south from the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon, to reside in their new homeland south of the Nefud, bringing peace to the northern Middle East.”

“And after the massacre?” Cyrus Miller asked the question. He had no time for euphemisms.

“In the last stages of the firefight inside the stadium, it will catch fire,” said Colonel Easterhouse smoothly. “This has been arranged. The flames will engulf the structure fast, disposing of the remains of the Royal House and their assassins. The cameras will continue to run until meltdown, followed on screen by the Imam himself.”

“What is he going to say?” queried Moir.

“Enough to terrify the entire Middle East and the West. Unlike Khomeini, who always spoke very quietly, this man is a firebrand. When he speaks he becomes carried away, for he speaks the message of Allah and Mohammed, and wishes to be heard.”

Miller nodded understandingly. He, too, knew the conviction of being a divine mouthpiece.

“By the time he has finished threatening all the secular and Sunni orthodox regimes around Saudi’s borders with their imminent destruction; promising to use the entire four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollars-a-day income in the service of Holy Terror, and to destroy the Hasa oil fields if thwarted, every Arab kingdom, emirate, sheikhdom, and republic, from Oman in the south up north to the Turkish border, will be appealing to the West for help. That means America.”