Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

Sam came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, brushing her wet hair. She was about to say something when she saw what lay on the bed, and stopped. Her face crumpled.

It was not what tradition calls a lady’s weapon. It was a Smith & Wesson long-barreled.38 revolver, and the shells laid on the coverlet beside it were hollow-point. A man-stopper.

“Quinn,” said Sam, “I swear to God, Brown sicked that piece onto me before he’d agree to let me come with you. In case things got rough, he said.”

Quinn nodded and toyed with his food, which was excellent. But he had lost his appetite.

“Look, you know it hasn’t been fired. And I haven’t been out of your sight since Antwerp.”

She was right, of course. Though he had slept for twelve hours the previous night, long enough for someone to motor from Antwerp to Wavre and back with time to spare, Madame Gamier had said her lodger left for work on the Ferris wheel that morning after breakfast. Sam had been in bed with Quinn when he woke at six.

But there are telephones in Belgium.

Sam had not got to Marchais before him; but someone had. Brown and his FBI hunters? Quinn knew they, too, were out in Europe, with the full backing of the national police forces behind them. But Brown would want his man alive, able to talk, able to identify the accomplices. Maybe. He pushed his plate away.

“Been a long day,” he said. “Let’s go sleep.”

But he lay in the darkness and stared at the ceiling. At midnight he slept; he had decided to believe her.

They left in the morning after breakfast. Sam took the wheel.

“Where to, O Master?”

“Hamburg,” said Quinn.

“Hamburg? What’s with Hamburg?”

“I know a man in Hamburg” was all he would say.

They took the motorways again, south to cut into the E.41 north of Namur, then the long die-straight highway due east, to pass Liège and cross the German frontier at Aachen. She turned north through the dense industrial sprawl of the Ruhr past Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen, to emerge finally into the agricultural plains of Lower Saxony.

Quinn spelled her at the wheel after three hours, and after two more they paused for fuel and a lunch of meaty Westphalian sausages and potato salad at a Gasthaus , one of the myriad that appear every two or three miles along the major German routes. It was already getting dark when they joined the columns of traffic moving through the southern suburbs of Hamburg.

The old Hanseatic port city on the Elbe was much as Quinn recalled it. They found a small, anonymous, but comfortable hotel behind the Steindammtor and checked in.

“I didn’t know you spoke German too,” said Sam when they reached their room.

“You never asked,” said Quinn. In fact he had taught himself the language years before, because in the days when the Baader-Meinhof gang was on the rampage, and then its successor, the Red Army Faction, was in business, kidnaps had been frequent in Germany, and often very bloody. Three times in the late seventies he had worked on cases in the Federal Republic.

He made two phone calls, but learned the man he wanted to speak to would not be in his office until the following morning.

General Vadim Vassilievich Kirpichenko stood in the outer office and waited. Despite his impassive exterior he felt a twinge of nervousness. Not that the man he wished to see was unapproachable; his reputation was the opposite and they had met several times, though always formally and in public. His qualms stemmed from another factor: To go over the heads of his superiors in the KGB, to ask for a personal and private meeting with the General Secretary without telling them, was risky. If it went wrong, badly wrong, his career would be on the line.

A secretary came to the door of the private office and stood there.

“The General Secretary will see you now, Comrade General,” he said.

The Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, senior professional intelligence officer of the espionage arm, walked straight down the long room toward the man who sat behind his desk at the end. If Mikhail Gorbachev was puzzled by the request for the meeting, he did not show it. He greeted the KGB general in comradely fashion, calling him by his first name and patronymic, and waited for him to proceed.

“You have received the report from our London station regarding the so-called evidence extracted by the British from the corpse of Simon Cormack.”

It was a statement, not a question. Kirpichenko knew the General Secretary must have seen it. He had demanded the results of the London meeting as soon as they came in. Gorbachev nodded shortly.

“And you will know, Comrade General Secretary, that our colleagues in the military deny the photograph was of a piece of their equipment.”

The rocket programs of Baikonur come under the military. Another nod. Kirpichenko bit the bullet.

“Four months ago I submitted a report received from my resident in Belgrade which I believed to be of such importance that I marked it for passing on by the Comrade Chairman to this office.”

Gorbachev stiffened. The matter was out. The officer in front of him, though a very senior man, was going behind Kryuchkov’s back. It had better be serious, Comrade General, he thought. His face remained impassive.

“I expected to receive instructions to investigate the matter further. None came. It occurred to me to wonder if you ever saw the August report-it is, after all, the vacation month…”

Gorbachev recalled his broken vacation. Those Jewish refuseniks being hammered right in front of the whole Western media on a Moscow street.

“You have a copy of that report with you, Comrade General?” he asked quietly. Kirpichenko took two folded sheets from his inner jacket pocket. He always wore civilian clothes, hated uniforms.

“There may be no linkage at all, General Secretary. I hope not. But I do not like coincidences. I am trained not to like them.”

Mikhail Gorbachev studied the report from Major Kerkorian in Belgrade, and his brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“Who are these men?” he asked.

“Five American industrialists. The man Miller we have tagged as an extreme right-winger, a man who loathes our country. The man Scanlon is an entrepreneur, what the Americans call a hustler. The other three manufacture extremely sophisticated weaponry for the Pentagon. With the technical details that they carry in their heads alone, they should never have exposed themselves to the danger of possible interrogation by visiting our soil.”

“But they came?” asked Gorbachev. “Covertly, by military transport? To land at Odessa?”

“That’s the coincidence,” said the spy chief. “I checked with the Air Force traffic control people. As the Antonov left Romanian air space to enter Odessa control area, it varied its own flight plan, overflew Odessa, and touched down at Baku.”

“Azerbaijan? What the hell were they doing in Azerbaijan?”

“Baku, Comrade General Secretary, is the headquarters of High Command South.”

“But that’s a top-secret military base. What did they do there?”

“I don’t know. They disappeared when they landed, spent sixteen hours inside the base, and flew back to the same Yugoslav air base in the same plane. Then they went back to America. No boar-hunting, no vacation.”

“Anything else?”

“One last coincidence. On that day, Marshal Kozlov was on an inspection visit of the Baku headquarters. Just routine. So it says.”

When he had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev stopped all calls and reflected on what he had learned. It was bad, all bad, almost all. There was one recompense. His adversary, the diehard general who ran the KGB, had made a very serious mistake.