Frederick Forsyth: The Negotiator

The other man cut off the call.

At five minutes to eleven John Cormack sat at his desk and surveyed the handwritten letter to the American people. It was gracious and regretful. Others would have to read it aloud, reproduce it in their newspapers and magazines, on their radio programs and TV shows. After he was gone. It was eight days to Christmas. But this year another man would celebrate the festive season in the Mansion. A good man, a man he trusted. Michael Odell, forty-first President of the United States. The phone rang. He glanced at it with some irritation. It was his personal and private number, the one he gave only to close and trusted friends who might call him without introduction at any hour.

“Yes?”

“Mr. President?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Quinn. The negotiator.”

“Ah… yes, Mr. Quinn.”

“I don’t know what you think of me, Mr. President. It matters little now. I failed to get your son back to you. But I have discovered why. And who killed him. Please, sir, just listen. I have little time.

“At five tomorrow morning a motorcyclist will stop at the Secret Service post at the public entrance to the White House on Alexander Hamilton Place. He will hand over a package, a flat cardboard box. It will contain a manuscript. It is for your eyes and yours only. There are no copies. Please give orders for it to be brought to you personally when it arrives. When you have read it, you will make the dispositions you see fit. Trust me, Mr. President. This one last time. Good night, sir.”

John Cormack stared at the buzzing phone. Still perplexed, he put it down, lifted another, and gave the order to the Secret Service duty officer.

Quinn had a small problem. He did not know “the usual place,” and to have admitted that would have blown away his chances of the meeting. At midnight he found the Georgetown address Sam had given him, parked the big Honda down the street, and took up his station in the deep shadow of a gap between two other houses across the street and twenty yards up.

The house he watched was an elegant five-story redbrick mansion at the western end of N Street, a quiet avenue that terminates there with the campus of Georgetown University. Quinn calculated such a place would have to cost over $2 million.

Beside the house were the electronically operated doors of a double garage. Lights burned in the house on three floors. Just after midnight those in the topmost floor, the staff quarters, went out. At one o’clock only one floor remained illuminated. Someone was still awake.

At twenty past one the last lights above the ground floor went out; others downstairs came on. Ten minutes later a crack of yellow appeared behind the garage doors-someone was getting into a car. The light went out and the doors began to rise. A long black Cadillac limousine emerged, turned slowly into the street, and the doors closed. As the car headed away from the university Quinn saw there was just one man at the wheel, driving carefully. He walked unobtrusively to his Honda, started up, and cruised down the street in the wake of the limousine.

It turned south on Wisconsin Avenue. The usually bustling heart of Georgetown, with its bars, bistros, and late shops, was quiet at that hour of a deep mid-December night. Quinn stayed back as far as he dared, watching the taillights of the Cadillac swing east onto M Street and then right on Pennsylvania Avenue. He followed it around the Washington Circle and then due south on Twenty-third Street, until it turned left into Constitution Avenue and pulled to a halt by the curb under the trees just beyond Henry Bacon Drive.

Quinn slewed quickly off the avenue, over the curb, and into a clump of bushes, killing his engine and lights as he did so. He watched the taillights die on the Cadillac and the driver climb out. The man glanced around him, watched a taxi cruise past looking forlornly for a fare, noticed nothing else, and began to walk. Instead of coming down the pavement he stepped over the railing bordering the greensward of West Potomac Park and began to cross the grass in the direction of the Reflecting Pool.

Out of the range of the streetlamps the darkness enveloped the figure in the black overcoat and hat. To Quinn’s right the bright illumination of the Lincoln Memorial lit the bottom end of Twenty-third Street, but the light hardly reached across the grass and into the trees of the park. Quinn was able to close up to fifty yards and keep the moving shadow in vision.

The man skirted the western end of the Vietnam Memorial, then cut half-left to slant away toward the high ground, heavily studded with trees, between the Constitution Gardens lake and the bank of the Reflecting Pool.

Far to Quinn’s left he could make out the glimmer of light from the two bivouacs where veterans kept vigil for the Missing in Action of that sad and distant war. His quarry was using a diagonal route to avoid passing too close to this single sign of life in the park at that hour.

The Memorial is a long wall of black marble, ankle-high at each end but seven feet deep at the center, recessed into the ground of the Mall and shaped like a very shallow chevron. Quinn stepped over the wall in the path of his quarry at the point where it was only a foot high, then crouched low in the shadow of the stone as the man ahead of him turned, as if hearing some scrape of shoe on gravel. With his head above the level of the surrounding lawn, Quinn could see him scan the park and the Mall before moving on.

A pale sickle moon emerged from behind the clouds. By its light Quinn could see the length of the marble wall incised with the names of the fifty-eight thousand men who died in Vietnam. He stooped briefly to kiss the icy marble and moved on, crossing the further stretch of lawn to the grove of towering oaks where stand the life-size bronze statues of veterans of the war.

Ahead of Quinn, the man in the black coat stopped and turned again to survey the ground behind him. He saw nothing; the moonlight picked out the oaks, bare of leaf and stark against the glow from the now-distant Lincoln Memorial, and glinted on the figures of the four bronze soldiers.

Had he known or cared more, the man in the coat would have known there are only three soldiers on the plinth. As he turned to walk on, the fourth detached himself and followed.

Finally the man reached “the usual place.” At the height of the knoll between the lake in the gardens and the Reflecting Pool itself, surrounded by discreet trees, stands a public toilet, illuminated by a single lamp, still burning at that hour. The man in the black coat took up his station near the lamp and waited. Two minutes later Quinn emerged from the trees. The man looked at him. He probably went pale-it was too dim to see. But his hands shook; Quinn could see that. They looked at each other. The man in front of Quinn was fighting back a rising tide of panic.

“Quinn,” said the man. “You’re dead.”

“No,” said Quinn reasonably. “Moss is dead. And McCrea. And Orsini, Zack, Marchais, and Pretorius. And Simon Cormack-oh, yes, he’s dead. And you know why.”

“Easy, Quinn. Let’s behave like reasonable people. He had to go. He was going to ruin us all. Surely you can see that.” He knew he was talking for his life now.

“ Simon ? A college student?”

The surprise of the man in the dark coat overcame his nervousness. He had sat in the White House, heard the details of what Quinn could do.

“Not the boy. The father. He has to go.”

“The Nantucket Treaty?”

“Of course. Those terms will ruin thousands of men, hundreds of corporations.”

“But why you? From what I know, you’re an extremely wealthy man. Your private fortune is enormous.”

The man Quinn faced laughed shortly.