Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“So it checks.”

“Yes, Mr. President, everything.”

“Mr. Weintraub?”

“I regret I have to confirm that Duncan McCrea was indeed hired locally in Central America on the recommendation of Irving Moss. He was used as a gofer down there for two years, then brought to America and sent to Camp Peary for training. After Moss was fired, any of his protégés should have been checked out. They weren’t. A lapse. I’m sorry.”

“You were not Deputy Director of Operations in those years, Mr. Weintraub. Please go on.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. We have learned from… sources… enough to confirm what the KGB rezident in New York told us unofficially. A certain Marshal Kozlov has been detained for interrogation concerning the supplying of the belt that killed your son. Officially, he has resigned on grounds of health.”

“He will confess, do you think?”

“At Lefortovo prison, sir, the KGB has its little ways,” Weintraub admitted.

“Mr. Kelly?”

“Some things, Mr. President, will never be provable. There is no trace of the body of Dominique Orsini, but the Corsican police have established that two rounds of buckshot were indeed fired into a rear bedroom above a bar in Castelblanc. The Smith & Wesson pistol we issued to Special Agent Somerville must be presumed lost forever in the Prunelli River. But everything that is provable, has been proved. The whole lot. The manuscript is accurate to the last detail, sir.”

“And the five men, the so-called Alamo Five?”

“We have three in custody, Mr. President. Cyrus Miller can almost certainly never stand trial. He is deemed to be clinically insane. Melville Scanlon has confessed everything, including the details of a further conspiracy to topple the monarchy of Saudi Arabia. I believe the State Department has already taken care of that side of things.”

“It has,” said the President. “The Saudi government has been informed and has taken appropriate measures. And the other men of the Alamo Five?”

“Salkind appears to have vanished-we believe to Latin America. Cobb was found hanged in his garage, by his own hand. Moir confirms everything admitted by Scanlon.”

“No details still adrift, Mr. Kelly?”

“None that we can discern, Mr. President. In the time allowed we have checked everything in Mr. Quinn’s manuscript. Names, dates, times, places, car rentals, airline tickets, apartment rentals, hotel bookings, the vehicles used, the weapons-everything. The police and immigration authorities in Ireland, Britain, Belgium, Holland, and France have sent us every record. It all checks.”

President Cormack glanced briefly toward the empty chair on his side of the table.

“And my… my former colleague?”

The Director of the FBI nodded toward Philip Kelly.

“The last three pages of the manuscript make claims to a conversation between the two men on the night in question of which there is no confirmation, Mr. President. We still have no trace of Mr. Quinn. But we have checked the staff at the house in Georgetown. The official chauffeur was sent home on the grounds that the car would not be used again that night. Two of the staff recall being awakened around half past one by the sound of the garage doors opening. One looked out and saw the car going down the street. He thought it might have been stolen, so he went to rouse his master. He was gone-with the car.

“We have checked all the stock portfolios in his blind trusts, and there are huge holdings in a number of defense contractors whose share values would undoubtedly be affected by the terms of the Nantucket Treaty. It’s true-what Quinn claims. As to what the man said, we will never know for sure. One can either believe Quinn or not.”

President Cormack rose.

“Then I do, gentlemen. I do. Call off the manhunt for him, please. That is an executive order. Thank you for your efforts.”

He left by the door opposite the fireplace, crossed the office of his personal secretary, asking that he not be disturbed, entered the Oval Office, and closed the door behind him.

He took his seat behind the great desk under the green-tinted windows of five-inch bulletproof glass that give onto the Rose Garden, and leaned back in the high swivel chair. It had been seventy-three days since he had last taken this seat.

On his desk was a silver-framed photograph. It showed Simon, a picture taken at Yale in the fall before he left for England. He was twenty then, his young face full of vitality and zest for life and great expectations.

The President took the picture in both hands and gazed at it a long time. Finally he opened a drawer on his left.

“Goodbye, son,” he said.

He placed the photograph facedown in the drawer, closed it, and depressed a switch on his intercom.

“Send Craig Lipton in to see me, please.”

When his Press Secretary arrived, the President told him he wanted one hour of prime-time television on the major channels the following evening for an address to the nation.

The landlady of the rooming house in Alexandria was sorry to lose her Canadian guest, Mr. Roger Lefevre. He was so quiet and well-behaved; no trouble at all. Not like some she could mention.

The evening he came down to settle his account and say goodbye she noticed he had shaved off his beard. She approved; it made him look much younger.

The television in her living room was on, as always. The tall man stood in the door to make his farewell. On the screen a serious-faced anchorman announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

“Are you sure you can’t stay a little longer?” asked the landlady. “The President’s going to speak. They say the poor man’s bound to resign.”

“My cab’s at the door,” said Quinn. “I have to go.”

On the screen the face of President Cormack flashed up. He was sitting foursquare behind his desk in the Oval Office, beneath the Great Seal. He had scarcely been seen for eighty days, and viewers knew he looked older, more drawn, more lined than three months earlier. But that beaten look in the photograph that had been flashed around the world, his face as he stood beside the grave in Nantucket, was gone. He held himself erect and looked straight into the camera lens, establishing direct, if electronic, eye contact with more than 100 million Americans and many more millions around a world linked by satellite into the transmission. There was nothing weary or defeated about his posture; his voice was measured, grave but firm.

“My fellow Americans…” he began.

Quinn closed the front door and went down the steps to his cab.

“Dulles,” he said.

Along the sidewalks the lights were bright with Christmas decorations, the store Santas ho-ho-ho-ing as best they could with a transistor radio slapped to one ear. The driver headed southwest on the Henry Shirley Memorial Highway to take a right onto River Turnpike and another to the Capital Beltway.

After several minutes Quinn noticed an increasing number of drivers pulling over to the curb to concentrate on the broadcast coming over their car radios. On the sidewalks, groups began to form, clustered around a radio. The driver of the blue-and-white cab had a pair of earphones over his head. Just onto the turnpike he yelled, “Sheeee-yit, man, I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

He turned his head around, ignoring the road.

“You want me to put this on the speaker?”

“I’ll catch the repeat later,” said Quinn.

“I could pull over, man.”

“Drive on,” said Quinn.

At Dulles International, Quinn paid off the cab and strode through the doors toward British Airways check-in. Across the concourse most of the passengers and half the staff were gathered around a TV set mounted on a wall. Quinn found one clerk behind the check-in desk.