The Negotiator (51 page)

The agency correspondent reported that the Soviet Politburo had received “with regret” the resignation and retirement of KGB Chairman General Vladimir Kryuchkov. A deputy chairman would head the Committee pro tem, until the Politburo appointed a successor.

The report surmised that the changes appeared to have been in response to Politburo dissatisfaction, particularly with the performance of the First Chief Directorate, of which Kryuchkov himself had been a former head. The reporter finished his piece with the suggestion that the Politburo—a thinly veiled reference to Gorbachev himself— wished to see newer and younger blood moving into the top slot of the U.S.S.R.’s overseas espionage service.

That evening and through the following day, Quinn gave Sam, who had never seen Paris before, the tourist’s menu. They took in the Louvre, the Tuileries Gardens in the rain, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower, rounding off their free day at the Lido cabaret.

The ad appeared the following morning. Quinn rose early and bought a copy from a vendor on the Champs-Elysées at seven to make sure it was in. It said simply: “Z. I’m here. Call me on ... Q.” He had given the hotel number, and warned the operator in the small lobby that he expected a call. He waited for it in his room. It came at nine-thirty.

“Quinn?” The voice was unmistakable.

“Zack, before we go any further, this is a hotel. I don’t like hotel phones. Call me at this public booth in thirty minutes.”

He dictated the number of a phone booth just off the Place de la Madeleine. He left Sam behind, still in her nightgown, calling, “I’ll be back in an hour.”

The phone in the booth rang at exactly ten.

“Quinn, I want to talk to you.”

“We are talking, Zack.”

“I mean face-to-face.”

“Sure, no problem. You say when and where.”

“No tricks, Quinn. Unarmed, no backup.”

“You got it.”

Zack dictated the time and the place. Quinn made no notes—there was no need. He returned to the hotel. He found Sam in the lounge-cum-bar, with croissants and milky coffee before her. She looked up eagerly.

“What did he want?”

“A meeting, face-to-face.”

“Quinn, darling, be careful. He’s a killer. When and where?”

“Not here,” he said. There were other tourists having a late breakfast. “In our room.”

“It’s a hotel room,” he told her when they were upstairs. “Tomorrow at eight in the morning. His room at the Hôtel Roblin. Reserved in the name of—would you believe it?—Smith.”

“I have to be there, Quinn. I don’t like the sound of it. Don’t forget I’m weapon-trained too. And you are definitely carrying the Smith & Wesson.”

“Sure,” said Quinn.

Several minutes later Sam made an excuse and went down to the bar. She was back after ten minutes. Quinn recalled that there was a phone on the end of the bar.

She was asleep when he left at midnight, the bedside alarm clock set for six in the morning. He moved through the bedroom like a shadow, picking up his shoes, socks, trousers, shorts, sweater, jacket, and gun as he went. There was no one in the corridor. He dressed there, stuck the pistol in his belt, adjusted the windbreaker to cover it, and went silently downstairs.

He found a cab on the Champs-Elysées and was at the Hôtel Roblin ten minutes later.

“
La chambre de Monsieur Smith,
s’il vous plaît
,” he told the night porter. The man checked a list and gave him the key. Number 10. Second floor. He mounted the stairs and let himself in.

The bathroom was the best place for the ambush. The door was in the corner of the bedroom and from it he could cover every angle, especially the door to the corridor. He removed the bulb from the main light in the bedroom, took an upright chair and placed it inside the bathroom. With the bathroom door open just enough to give him a two-inch crack, he began his vigil. When his night-sight came he could clearly make out the empty bedroom, dimly lit by the light from the street coming through the windows, whose curtains he had left open.

By six no one had come; he had heard no footsteps in the corridor. At half past six the night porter brought coffee to an early riser down the corridor; he heard the footsteps passing the door, then returning to the stairs to the lobby. No one came in; no one tried to come in.

At eight he felt the sense of relief washing over him. At twenty past the hour he left, paid his bill, and took a cab back to the Hôtel du Colisée. She was in the bedroom and nearly frantic.

“Quinn, where the hell have you been? I’ve been desperate with worry. I woke at five ... you weren’t there. ... For God’s sake, we’ve missed the rendezvous.”

He could have lied, but he was genuinely remorseful. He told her what he had done. She looked as if he had hit her in the face.

“You thought it was me?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he admitted. After Marchais and Pretorius he had become obsessed with the idea that someone was tipping off the killer or killers; how else could they twice get to the vanished mercenaries before he and Sam did? She swallowed hard, composed herself, hid the hurt inside her.

“Okay, so when is the real rendezvous, may I ask? That is, if you trust me enough now.”

“It’s in an hour, at ten o’clock,” he said. “A bar off the rue de Chalón, right behind the Gare de Lyon. It’s a long haul—let’s go now.”

It was another cab ride. Sam sat silently reproachful as they rode down the quays along the north bank of the Seine from the northwest to the southeast of the city. Quinn dismissed the taxi on the corner of the rue de Chalón and the Passage de Gatbois. He decided to walk the rest.

The rue de Chalón ran parallel to the railway tracks heading out of the station toward the south of France. From beyond the wall they could hear the clang of trains moving over the numerous points outside the terminus. It was a dingy street.

Off the rue de Chalón a number of narrow streets, each called
Passage
, connected up to the bustling Avenue Daumesnil. One block down from where he had paid off the cab Quinn found the street he sought, the Passage de Vautrin. He turned into it.

“It’s a hell of a dingy place,” remarked Sam.

“Yeah, well, he picked it. The meeting is in a bar.”

There were two bars in the street and neither was any threat to the Ritz.

Chez Hugo was the second one, across the street and fifty yards up from the first. Quinn pushed open the door. The bar counter was to his left; to his right, two tables near the street window, which was masked by thick lace curtains. Both tables were empty. The whole bar was empty except for the unshaven proprietor, who tended his espresso machine behind the counter. With the open door behind him and Sam standing there, Quinn was visible, and he knew it. Anyone in the dark recesses at the rear would be hard to see. Then he saw the bar’s only customer. Right at the back, alone at a table, a coffee in front of him, staring at Quinn.

Quinn walked the length of the room, followed by Sam. The man made no move. His eyes never left Quinn, except to flicker once over Sam. Eventually Quinn stood above him. He wore a corduroy jacket and open-necked shirt. Thinning sandy hair, late forties, a thin, mean face, badly pockmarked.

“Zack?” said Quinn.

“Yeah. Siddown. Who’s she?”

“My partner. I stay, she stays. You wanted this. Let’s talk.”

He sat down opposite Zack, hands on the table. No tricks. The man stared at him malevolently. Quinn knew he had seen the face before, thought back to Hayman’s files, and those of Hamburg. Then he got it. Sidney Fielding, one of John Peters’s section commanders in the Fifth Commando at Paulis, ex-Belgian Congo. The man trembled with a barely controlled emotion. After several seconds Quinn realized it was rage, but mixed with something else. Quinn had seen the look in the eyes many times, in Vietnam and elsewhere. The man was afraid, bitter and angry but also very badly frightened. Zack could contain himself no longer.

“Quinn, you’re a bastard. You and your people are lying bastards. You promised no manhunt, said we’d just have to disappear and after a couple of weeks the heat would be off. Some shit. Now I hear Big Paul’s gone missing and Janni’s in a morgue in Holland. No manhunt, hell. We’re being wasted.”

“Hey, ease up, Zack. I’m not one of the ones who told you that. I’m on the other side. Why don’t we start at the beginning? Why did you kidnap Simon Cormack?”

Zack looked at Quinn as if he had just asked if the sun was hot or cold.

“Because we was paid to,” he said.

“You were paid up front? Not for the ransom?”

“No, that was extra. Half a million dollars was the fee. I took two hundred for me, one hundred each for the other three. We was told the ransom was extra—we could get as much as we could, and keep it.”

“All right. Who paid you to do it? I swear I wasn’t one of them. I was called in the day after the snatch, to try and get the kid back. Who set it up?”

“I dunno his name. Never did. He was American, that’s all I know. Short, fat man. Contacted me here. God knows how he found me—must have had contacts. We always met in hotel rooms. I’d come there and he would always be masked. But the money was up front and in cash.”

“What about expenses? Kidnappings come expensive.”

“On top of the fee. In cash. Another hundred thousand dollars I had to spend.”

“Did that include the house you hid in?”

“No, that was provided. We met in London a month before the job. He gave me the keys, told me where it was, told me to get it ready as a bunk-hole.”

“Give me the address.”

Zack gave it to him. Quinn noted it. Nigel Cramer and the forensic scientists from the labs of the Metropolitan Police would later visit the place and take it apart in their search for clues. Records would show it was not rented at all. It had been bought quite legitimately for £200,000 through a firm of British lawyers acting for a Luxembourg-registered company.

The company would prove to be a bearer-share shell corporation represented quite legally by a Luxembourg bank acting as nominee, and who had never met the owner of the shell company. The money used to buy the house had come to Luxembourg in the form of a draft issued by a Swiss bank. The Swiss would declare that the draft had been bought for cash in U.S. dollars at their Geneva branch, but no one could recall the buyer.

The house, moreover, was not north of London at all; it was in Sussex to the south, near East Grinstead. Zack had simply been motoring around the orbital M.25 to make his phone calls from the northern side of the capital.

Cramer’s men would scour the place from top to bottom; despite the cleaning-up efforts by the four mercenaries, there were some overlooked fingerprints, but they belonged to Marchais and Pretorius.

“What about the Volvo?” asked Quinn. “You paid for that?”

“Yeah, and the van, and most of the other gear. Only the Skorpion was given us by the fat man. In London.”

Unknown to Quinn, the Volvo had already been found outside London. It had overstayed its time in a multistory parking lot at London’s Heathrow Airport. The mercenaries, after driving through Buckingham on the morning of the murder, had turned south again and back to London. From Heathrow they had taken the airport shuttle bus to London’s other air terminus at Gatwick, ignored the airport, and boarded the train for Hastings and the coast. Separate taxis had brought them to Newhaven to catch the noon ferry to Dieppe. Once in France they had split up and gone to earth.

The Volvo, examined by the Heathrow Airport police, was seen to have breathing holes punctured in the floor of the trunk, and a lingering smell of almonds. Scotland Yard was called in, the original owner traced. But it had been bought for cash, the change-of-owner documentation had never been completed, and the description of the buyer matched that of the ginger-haired man who had bought the Ford Transit.

“It was the fat man who was giving you all the inside information?” asked Quinn.

“What inside information?” said Sam suddenly.

“How did you know about that?” asked Zack suspiciously. He evidently still suspected that Quinn might be one of his employers-turned-persecutors.

“You were too good,” said Quinn. “You knew to wait until I was in place, then ask for the negotiator in person. I’ve never known that before. You knew when to throw a rage and when to back off. You changed from dollars to diamonds, knowing it would cause a delay when we were ready to exchange.”

Zack nodded. “Yeah, I was briefed before the kidnap on what to do, when and how to do it. While we were hiding, I had to make another series of phone calls. Always while out of the house, always from one phone booth to another, according to an arranged list. It was the fat man; I knew his voice by then. He occasionally made changes—fine-tuning, he called it. I just did what I was told.”

“All right,” said Quinn. “And the fat man told you there’d be no problem getting away afterward. Just a manhunt for a month or so, but with no clues to go on, it would all die down and you could live happily ever after. You really believed that? You really thought you could kidnap and kill the son of an American President and get away? Then why did you kill the kid? You didn’t have to.”

Zack’s facial muscles worked in something like a frenzy. His eyes bulged with anger.

“That’s the point, you shit. We didn’t kill him. We dumped him on the road like we was told. He was alive and well—we hadn’t hurt him at all. And we drove on. First we knew he was dead was when it was made public the next day. I couldn’t believe it. It was a lie. We didn’t do it.”

Outside in the street a car cruised around the corner from the rue de Chalón. One man drove; the other was in back, cradling the rifle. The car came up the street as if looking for someone, paused outside the first bar, advanced almost to the door of Chez Hugo, then backed up to come to rest halfway between the two. The engine was kept idling.

“The kid was killed by a bomb planted in the leather belt he wore around his waist,” said Quinn. “He wasn’t wearing that when he was snatched on Shotover Plain. You gave it to him to wear.”

“I didn’t,” shouted Zack. “I bloody didn’t. It was Orsini.”