Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

He wandered up the Guit Straat and the Pauli Plein, took a small beer in each of the bars, then cut back into Schipperstraat and started again. The girls thought he wanted a woman but was having trouble making up his mind. The male customers ignored him, since they were always on the move themselves. A couple of barmen, on his third visit, nodded and grinned: “Back again, no luck?”

They were right, but in a different sense. He had no luck and before dawn rejoined Sam in the car. She was half asleep, the engine running to keep the heater on.

“What now?” she asked as she drove him back to the hotel.

“Eat, sleep, eat, start again tomorrow night,” he said.

She was particularly erotic through the morning they spent in bed, suspecting Quinn might have been tempted by some of the girls and their outfits on display in Schipperstraat. He was not, but saw no reason to disabuse her.

Peter Cobb saw Cyrus Miller at his own request atop the Pan-Global Building in Houston the same day.

“I want out,” he said flatly. “This has gone too far. What happened to that young boy was awful. My associates feel the same. Cyrus, you said it would never come to that. You said the kidnap alone would suffice to… to change things. We never thought the boy would die. But what those animals did to him… that was horrible… immoral…”

Miller rose from behind his desk and his eyes blazed at the younger man.

“Don’t you lecture me about morality, boy. Don’t you ever do that. I didn’t want that to happen either, but we all knew it might have to. You, too, Peter Cobb, as God will be your judge-you, too. And it had to be. Unlike you I have prayed for His guidance; unlike you I have spent nights on my knees praying for that young man.

“And the Lord answered me, my friend; and the Lord said: Better that one young lamb go to the slaughter than that the whole flock perish. We are not talking about one man here, Cobb. We are talking of the safety, of the survival, of the very lives of the entire American people. And the Lord has told me: what must be, must be. That Communist in Washington must be brought down before he destroys the temple of the Lord, the temple that is this entire land of ours. Go back to your factory, Peter Cobb. Go back and turn the plowshares into the swords we must have to defend our nation and destroy the Antichrists of Moscow. And be silent, sir. Talk to me no more of morality, for this is the Lord’s work and He has spoken to me.”

Peter Cobb went back to his factory a very shaken man.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev also had a serious confrontation that day. Once again Western newspapers were spread over the long conference table running almost the length of the room, their pictures telling part of the story, their screaming headlines the rest. Only for the latter did he need a Russian translation. The Foreign Ministry translations were pinned to each newspaper.

On his desk were more reports that needed no translation. They were in Russian, coming from ambassadors across the world, from consuls general and the U.S.S.R.’s own foreign correspondents. Even the East European satellites had had their anti-Soviet demonstrations. Moscow’s denials had been constant and sincere, and yet…

As a Russian, and a Party apparatchik of years of practice, Mikhail Gorbachev was no milksop in the business of realpolitik. He knew about disinformation; had not the Kremlin founded an entire department devoted to it? Was there not in the KGB a whole directorate dedicated to the sowing of anti-Western sentiment by the well-placed lie or the even more damaging half-truth? But this act of disinformation was unbelievable.

He awaited the man he had summoned with impatience. It was close to midnight and he had had to cancel a weekend of duck-shooting on the northern lakes, along with spicy Georgian food, one of his two great passions.

The man came just after midnight.

A General Secretary of the U.S.S.R., of all people, should not expect a Chairman of the KGB to be a warm, lovable fellow, but there was a cold cruelty about the face of Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov that Gorbachev found personally unlikable.

True, he had promoted the man from the post of First Deputy Chairman when he had secured the ouster of his old antagonist Chebrikov three years earlier. He had had little choice. One of the four Deputy Chairmen had to take the slot, and he had been sufficiently taken with Kryuchkov’s lawyer background to offer him the job. Since then he had begun to nurture reservations.

He recognized that he might have been swayed by his desire to turn the U.S.S.R. into a “socialist law-based state,” in which the law would be supreme, a concept formerly regarded by the Kremlin as bourgeois. It had been a pretty frantic time, those first few days of October 1988, when he had summoned a sudden extraordinary meeting of the Central Committee and inaugurated his own Night of the Long Knives against his opponents. Maybe in his hurry he had overlooked a few things. Like Kryuchkov’s background.

Kryuchkov had worked in Stalin’s Public Prosecutor office, not a job for the squeamish, and had been involved in the savage repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, joining the KGB in 1967. It was in Hungary he had met Andropov, who went on to head the KGB for fifteen years. It was Andropov who had nominated Chebrikov as his successor, and Chebrikov who had picked Kryuchkov to head up the foreign espionage arm, the First Chief Directorate. Maybe he, the General Secretary, had underestimated the old loyalties.

He looked up at the high-domed forehead, the freezing eyes, thick gray sideburns, and grim, down-turned mouth. And he realized this man might, after all, be his opponent.

Gorbachev came around the desk and shook hands; a dry, firm grip. As always when he talked, he maintained vigorous eye contact, as if seeking shiftiness or timidity. Unlike most of his predecessors, he was pleased if he found neither. He gestured at the overseas reports. The general nodded. He had seen them all, and more. He avoided Gorbachev’s eye.

“Let’s keep it short,” said Gorbachev. “We know what they are saying. It’s a lie. Our denials continue to go out. This lie must not be allowed to stick. But where does it come from? On what is it based?”

Kryuchkov tapped the massed Western reports with contempt. Though a former KGB rezident in New York, he hated America.

“Comrade General Secretary, it appears to be based on a British report by the scientists who carried out the forensic examination of the way that American died. Either the man lied, or others took his report and altered it. I suspect it is an American trick.”

Gorbachev walked back behind his desk and resumed his seat. He chose his words carefully.

“Could there… under any circumstances… be any part of truth in this accusation?”

Vladimir Kryuchkov was startled. Within his own organization there was a department that specifically designed, invented, and made in its laboratories the most devilish devices for the ending of life, or simply for incapacitation. But that was not the point; they had not assembled any bomb to be concealed in Simon Cormack’s belt.

“No, Comrade, no, surely not.”

Gorbachev leaned forward and tapped his blotter.

“Find out,” he ordered. “Once and for all, yes or no, find out.”

The general nodded and left. The General Secretary stared down the long room. He needed-perhaps he should say “had needed”-the Nantucket Treaty more than the Oval Office knew. Without it his country faced the specter of the invisible B-2 Stealth bomber, and he the nightmare of trying to find 300 billion rubles to rebuild the air-defense network. Until the oil ran out.

Quinn saw him on the third night. He was short and stocky, with the puffed ears and broadened nose of a pug, a knuckle-fighter. He sat alone at the end of the bar in the Montana, a grubby dive in Oude Mann Straat, the aptly named Old Man Street. There were another dozen people in the bar, but no one talked to him and he looked as if he did not wish them to.