The Negotiator (50 page)

“I wonder,” said Sam as they were marched into the police station on Tolbrug Straat, “whether there is a market for the definitive anthology of Dutch precinct houses?”

By chance the Den Bosch police station is right across the street from the Groot Zieken Gasthaus—literally the Big Sick Guesthouse—to whose hospital morgue the body of Jan Pretorius was taken to await autopsy.

Chief Inspector Dykstra had thought little of Papa De Groot’s warning call of the previous morning. An American trying to look up a South African did not necessarily spell trouble. He had dispatched one of his sergeants in the lunch hour. The man had found the Golden Lion bar closed and had reported back.

A local locksmith had secured them entry, but everything had seemed in order. No disturbance, no fight. If Pretorius wished to lock up and go away, he had the right to do so. The proprietor of the bar across and down the street said he thought the Golden Lion had been open until about midday. The weather being the way it was, the door would normally be closed. He had seen no customers enter or leave the Golden Lion, but that was not odd. Business was slack.

It was the sergeant who asked to stake out the bar a little longer, and Dykstra had agreed. It had paid dividends; the American arrived twenty-four hours later.

Dykstra sent a message to the Gerechtelijk Laboratorium in Voorburg, the country’s central pathology laboratory. Hearing it was a bullet wound, and a foreigner, they sent Dr. Veerman himself, and he was Holland’s leading forensic pathologist.

In the afternoon Chief Inspector Dykstra listened patiently to Quinn explaining that he had known Pretorius fourteen years ago in Paris and had hoped to look him up for old times’ sake while touring Holland. If Dykstra disbelieved the story, he kept a straight face. But he checked. His own country’s BVD confirmed that the South African had been in Paris at that time; Quinn’s former Hartford employers confirmed that, yes, Quinn had been heading their Paris office in that year.

The rented car was brought around from the Central Hotel and thoroughly searched. No gun. Their luggage was retrieved and searched. No gun. The sergeant admitted neither Quinn nor Sam had had a gun when he found them in the cellar. Dykstra believed Quinn had killed the South African the previous day, just before his sergeant mounted the stakeout, and had come back because he had forgotten something that might be in the man’s pockets. But if that were the case, why had the sergeant seen him trying to gain access via the front door? If he had locked the door after him following the killing of the South African, he could have let himself back in. It was puzzling. Of one thing Dykstra was certain: He did not think much of the Paris connection as a reason for the visit.

Professor Veerman arrived at six and was finished by midnight. He crossed the road and took a coffee with a very tired Chief Inspector Dykstra.

“Well, Professor?”

“You’ll have my full report in due course,” said the doctor.

“Just the outline, please.”

“All right. Death from massive laceration of the brain caused by a bullet, probably nine millimeter, fired at close range through the left temple, exiting through the right. I should look for a hole in the woodwork somewhere in that bar.”

Dykstra nodded. “Time of death?” he asked. “I am holding two Americans who discovered the body, supposedly on a friendly visit. Though they broke into the bar to find it.”

“Midday yesterday,” said the professor. “Give or take a couple of hours. I’ll know more later, when the tests have been analyzed.”

“But the Americans were in Arnhem police station at midday yesterday,” said Dykstra. “That’s unarguable. They crashed their car at ten and were released to spend the night at the Rijn Hotel at four. They could have left the hotel in the night, driven here, done it, and got back by dawn.”

“No chance,” said the professor, rising. “That man was dead no later than two
P.M.
yesterday. If they were in Arnhem, they’re innocent parties. Sorry. Facts.”

Dykstra swore. His sergeant must have mounted his stakeout within thirty minutes of the killer’s leaving the bar.

“My Arnhem colleagues tell me you were heading for the ferry at Vlissingen when you left yesterday,” he told Sam and Quinn as he released them in the small hours.

“That’s right,” said Quinn, collecting his much-examined luggage.

“I would be grateful if you would continue there,” said the Chief Inspector. “Mr. Quinn, my country likes to welcome foreign visitors, but wherever you go it seems the Dutch police are put to a lot of extra work.”

“I’m truly sorry,” said Quinn with feeling. “Seeing as how we’ve missed the last ferry, and are hungry and tired, could we finish the night at our hotel and go in the morning?”

“Very well,” said Dykstra. “I’ll have a couple of my men escort you out of town.”

“I’m beginning to feel like royalty,” said Sam as she went into the bathroom back at the Central Hotel. When she emerged, Quinn was gone. He returned at 5:00
A.M
., stashed the Smith & Wesson back in the base of Sam’s vanity case, and caught two hours’ sleep before the morning coffee arrived.

The drive to Flushing was uneventful. Quinn was deep in thought. Someone was wasting the mercenaries one after the other, and now he really had run out of places to go. Except maybe ... back to the archives. There might be something more to drag from them, but it was unlikely, very unlikely. With Pretorius dead, the trail was cold as a week-dead cod, and stank as badly.

A Flushing police car was parked near the ramp of the ferry for England. The two officers in it noted the Opel Ascona driving slowly into the hull of the roll-on roll-off car-carrier, but waited till the doors closed shut and the ferry headed out into the estuary of the Westerschelde before informing their headquarters.

The trip passed quietly. Sam wrote up her notes, now becoming a travelogue of European police stations; Quinn read the first London newspapers he had seen in ten days. He missed the paragraph that began: “Major KGB Shake-up?” It was a Reuters report out of Moscow, alleging that the usual informed sources were hinting at forthcoming changes at the top of the Soviet secret police.

Quinn waited in the darkness of the small front garden in Carlyle Square, as he had for the previous two hours, immobile as a statue and unseen by anyone. A laburnum tree cast a shadow that shielded him from the light of the streetlamp; his black zip-up leather windbreaker and his immobility did the rest. People came past within a few feet but none saw the man in the shadows.

It was half past ten; the inhabitants of this elegant Chelsea square were returning from their dinners in the restaurants of Knightsbridge and Mayfair. David and Carina Frost went by in the back of their elderly Bentley toward their house farther up. At eleven the man Quinn waited for arrived.

He parked his car in a residents’ bay across the road, mounted the three steps to his front door, and inserted his key in the lock. Quinn was at his elbow before it turned.

“Julian.”

Julian Hayman spun in alarm.

“Good God, Quinn, don’t do that. I could have flattened you.”

Hayman was still, years after leaving the regiment, a very fit man. But years of city living had blurred the old cutting edge, just a fraction. Quinn had spent those years toiling in vineyards beneath a blazing sun. He declined to suggest it might have been the other way around, if it ever came to it.

“I need to go back into your files, Julian.”

Hayman had quite recovered. He shook his head firmly.

“Sorry, old boy. Not again. No chance. Word is, you’re taboo. People have been muttering—on the circuit, you know—about the Cormack affair. Can’t risk it. That’s final.”

Quinn realized it was final. The trail had ended. He turned to go.

“By the way,” Hayman called from the top of the steps. “I had lunch yesterday with Barney Simkins. Remember old Barney?”

Quinn nodded. Barney Simkins, a director of Broderick-Jones, the Lloyd’s underwriters who had employed Quinn for ten years all over Europe.

“He says someone’s been ringing in, asking for you.”

“Who?”

“Dunno. Barney said the caller played it very close. Just said if you wanted to contact him, put a small ad in the
International Herald Tribune
, Paris edition, any day for the next ten, and sign it Q.”

“Didn’t he give any name at all?” asked Quinn.

“Only one, old boy. Odd name. Zack.”

Chapter 15

Quinn climbed into the car beside Sam, who had been waiting around the corner in Mulberry Walk. He looked pensive.

“Won’t he play?”

“Mmmm?”

“Hayman. Won’t he let you go back into his files?”

“No. That’s out. And it’s final. But it appears someone else does want to play. Zack has been phoning.”

She was stunned.

“Zack? What does he want?”

“A meeting.”

“How the hell did he find you?”

Quinn let in the clutch and pulled away from the curb.

“A long shot. Years ago there was an occasional mention of me when I worked for Broderick-Jones. All he had was my name and my job. Seems I’m not the only one who checks back through old newspaper clippings. By a fluke, Hayman was lunching with someone from my old company when the subject came up.”

He turned into Old Church Street and right again on the King’s Road.

“Quinn, he’s going to try to kill you. He’s wiped out two of his own men already. With them gone he gets to keep all the ransom for himself; with you out of the way the hunt dies. He obviously reckons you’re more likely to trace him than the FBI.”

Quinn laughed shortly.

“If only he knew. I haven’t the faintest idea who he is or where he is.”

He decided not to tell her he no longer believed Zack was the killer of Marchais and Pretorius. Not that a man like Zack would balk at eliminating his own kind if the price was right. Back in the Congo several mercenaries had been wasted by their own kind. It was the coincidence of the timing that worried him.

He and Sam had got to Marchais a few hours after his death; fortunately for them, there were no police about. But for a fluke crash outside Arnhem they would have been in Pretorius’s bar with a loaded gun an hour after
he
died. They would have remained in detention for weeks while the Den Bosch police investigated the case.

He turned left off King’s Road into Beaufort Street, heading for Battersea Bridge, and ran straight into a traffic jam. London traffic is no stranger to snarls, but at that hour on a winter’s night the run south through London should have been clear enough.

The line of cars he was in edged forward and he saw a uniformed London policeman directing them around a series of cones that blocked off the nearside lane. Turn and turn about the cars heading north and those heading south had to use the single remaining lane in the street.

When they came abreast of the obstruction Quinn and Sam saw two police cars, the blue lights on their roofs flashing as they turned. The police cars hemmed in an ambulance, parked with its doors open. Two attendants were climbing out of the rear with a stretcher, and approached a shapeless mass on the pavement, hidden under a blanket.

The traffic control policeman impatiently waved them on. Sam squinted up at the face of the building outside which the form on the pavement lay. The windows on the top floor were open and she saw a policeman’s head poking out as he gazed down.

“Someone seems to have fallen eight floors,” she remarked. “The police are looking out the open window up there.”

Quinn grunted and concentrated on not hitting the tail-lights of the car in front of him, whose driver was also gawping at the accident. Seconds later the road cleared and Quinn gunned the Opel over the bridge across the Thames, leaving behind him the dead body of a man he had never heard of and never would: the body of Andy Laing.

“Where are we going?” asked Sam.

“Paris,” said Quinn.

Coming back to Paris for Quinn was like coming home. Though he had spent a longer time based in London, Paris held a special place in his life.

He had wooed and won Jeannette there, had married her there. For two blissful years they had lived in a small flat just off the rue de Grenelle; their daughter had been born at the American Hospital in Neuilly.

He knew bars in Paris, dozens of bars, where after the death of Jeannette and their baby Sophie on the Orléans highway he had tried to obliterate the pain with drink. He had been happy in Paris, been in heaven in Paris, known hell in Paris, waked up in gutters in Paris. He knew the place.

They spent the night at a motel just outside Ashford and caught the 9:00
A.M
. Hovercraft from Folkestone to Calais, arriving in Paris in time for lunch.

Quinn checked them into a small hotel just off the Champs-Elysées and disappeared with the car to find a place to park it. The Eighth Arrondissement of Paris has many charms, but ample parking is not one of them. To have parked outside the Hôtel du Colisée in the street of the same name would have been to invite a wheel-clamp. Instead he used the twenty-four-hour underground parking lot in rue Chauveau-Lagarde, just behind the Madeleine, and took a cab back to the hotel. He intended to use cabs anyway. While in the area of the Madeleine he noted two other items he might need.

After lunch Quinn and Sam took a cab to the offices of the
International Herald Tribune
at 181 Avenue Charles-de-Gaulle in Neuilly.

“I’m afraid we can’t get it in tomorrow’s edition,” said the girl at the front desk. “It will have to be the day after. Insertions are only for the following day if entered by eleven-thirty
A.M
.”

“That’ll be fine,” said Quinn and paid cash. He took a complimentary copy of the paper and read it in the taxi back to the Champs-Elysées.

This time he did not miss the story, datelined out of Moscow, whose headline read:
GEN. KRYUCHKOV OUSTER
. There was a sub-headline:
KGB CHIEF FIRED IN BIG SECURITY
SHAKE-UP
. He read the story out of interest but it signified nothing to him.