Frederick Forsyth: The Negotiator

Quinn had no illusions he would die with one clean shot through the head or heart. He had recognized Moss’s face, recalled his name now. Knew his warped pleasures. He wondered if he could take the pain and not give Moss the satisfaction of crying out. And he thought of Sam, and what she would go through before she died.

“Kneel down,” said Moss. His breath was coming in short wheezes and snorts. Quinn knelt. He wondered where the first slug would take him. He heard the bolt of the rifle ten yards behind him clatter in the freezing dry air. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited.

The crash, when it came, seemed to fill the clearing and echo off the mountain. But the snow muffled it so quickly that no one on the road far below would have heard it, let alone the village ten miles away.

Quinn’s first sensation was bewilderment. How could a man miss at that range? Then he realized it was all part of Moss’s game. He turned his head. Moss was standing pointing the rifle at him.

“Get on with it, sleazeball,” said Quinn. Moss gave a half-smile and began to lower the rifle. He dropped to his knees, reached forward, and placed both his hands in the snow in front of him.

It seemed longer in retrospect, but it was only two seconds that Moss stared at Quinn, on his knees with his hands in the snow, before he leaned his head forward, opened his mouth, and brought up a long bright stream of glittering blood. Then he gave a sigh and rolled quietly sideways into the snow.

It took several more seconds for Quinn to see the man, so good was his camouflage. He stood at the far side of the clearing between two trees, quite motionless. The country was wrong for skis, but the man wore snowshoes, like oversized tennis rackets, on each foot. His locally bought arctic clothing was caked with snow, but both the quilted trousers and parka were in the palest blue, the nearest the store had to the color white.

Stiff hoarfrost had clotted on the strands of fur that stuck out from his parka hood, and on his eyebrows and beard. Between the facial hair the skin was caked with grease and charcoal, the arctic soldier’s protection against temperatures of thirty degrees below zero. He held his rifle easily across his chest, aware he would not need a second shot.

Quinn wondered how he could have survived up here, bivouacking in some ice hole in the hill behind the cabin. He supposed that if you could take a winter in Siberia you could take Vermont.

He braced his arms and pulled and tugged until his cuffed hands came under his backside, then squeezed one leg after another through his arms. When he had his hands in front of him he fumbled in Moss’s parka until he found the key, then released his hands. He picked up Moss’s rifle and rose to his feet. The man across the clearing watched impassively.

Quinn called across to him: “As they say in your country -spasibo .”

The man’s half-frozen face gave a flicker of a smile. When he spoke, Andrei the Cossack still used the tones of London’s clubland.

“As they say in your country, old boy-Have a nice day.”

There was a swish from the snowshoes, then another, and he was gone. Quinn realized that after dumping him at Birmingham, the Russian must have driven to London Heathrow, caught a direct flight to Toronto, and tailed him up into these mountains. He knew a bit about insurance. So, apparently, did the KGB. He turned and began to slog through the knee-deep snow back to the cabin.

He paused outside to peer through the small round hole in the mist that covered the living-room window. No one there. With the rifle pointed straight ahead, he eased open the latch and gave the front door a gentle kick. There was a whimper from the bedroom. He crossed the open floor of the living room and stood in the bedroom door.

Sam was naked, facedown on the bed, spread-eagled, her hands and feet knotted with ropes to the four corners. McCrea was in his shorts, his back to the door, two thin lengths of electric cord dangling from his right hand.

He was smiling still. Quinn caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above the chest of drawers. McCrea heard the footfall and turned. The bullet took him in the stomach, an inch above the navel. It went on through and destroyed the spine. As he went down, he stopped smiling.

For two days Quinn nursed Sam like a child. The paralyzing fear she had experienced caused her to shiver and weep alternately, while Quinn held her in his arms and rocked her to and fro. Otherwise she slept, and that great healer had its benign effect.

When he felt he could leave her, Quinn drove to St. Johnsbury, phoning the FBI personnel officer to claim he was her father in Rockcastle. He told the unsuspecting officer she was visiting him and had caught a heavy cold. She would be back at her desk in three or four days.

At night, while she slept, he wrote the second and real manuscript of the events of the past seventy days. He could tell the tale from his own point of view, omitting nothing, not even the mistakes he had made. To this he could add the story from the Soviet side, as told him by the KGB general in London. The sheets Moss had read made no mention of this; he had not reached that point in the story when Sam had told him the DDO wanted a meeting.

He could add the story from the mercenaries’ point of view, as told by Zack just before he died, and finally he could incorporate the answers given him by Moss himself. He had it all-almost.

At the center of the web was Moss; behind him, the five paymasters. Feeding into Moss had been the informants: Orsini from inside the kidnappers’ hideout, McCrea from the Kensington apartment. But there was one more, he knew; someone who had to have known everything the authorities in Britain and America had known, someone who had monitored the progress of Nigel Cramer for Scotland Yard and Kevin Brown for the FBI, someone who knew the deliberations of the British COBRA committee and the White House group. It was the one question Moss had not answered.

He dragged the body of Moss back from the wilderness and laid him alongside McCrea in the unheated lean-to where the firewood was stored, where both bodies quickly became as rigid as the cords of pine among which they lay. He rifled the pockets of both men and surveyed the haul. Nothing was of value to him, save possibly the private phone book that came from Moss’s inside breast pocket.

Moss had been a secretive man, created by years of training and of surviving on the run. The small book contained more than 120 telephone numbers, but each was referred to only by initials or a single first name.

On the third morning Sam came out of the bedroom after ten hours of unbroken sleep and no nightmares.

She curled up on his lap and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“How you feeling?” he asked her.

“I’m fine now. Quinn, it’s okay. I’m all right. Where do we go now?”

“We have to go back to Washington,” he said. “The last chapter will be written there. I need your help.”

“Whatever,” she said.

That afternoon he let the fire go out in the stove, shut everything down, cleaned and locked the cabin. He left Moss’s rifle and the Colt.45 that McCrea had brandished. But he took the notebook.

On the way down the mountain he hitched the abandoned Dodge Ram behind the Jeep Renegade and towed it into St. Johnsbury. Here the local garage was happy to get it started again and he left them the Jeep with its Canadian plates to sell as best they could.

They drove the Ram to Montpelier airport, turned it in, and flew to Boston and then to Washington National. Sam had her own car parked there.

“I can’t stay with you,” he told her. “Your place is still tapped.”

They found a modest rooming house a mile from her apartment in Alexandria where the landlady was glad to rent her upper front room to the tourist from Canada. Late that night Sam took Moss’s phone book with her, let herself back into her own place and, for the benefit of the phone tap, called the Bureau to say she would be at her desk in the morning.