Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“I’ll wait,” said Quinn.

She gave him a look that regretted she had been too young to run a labor camp with him in it, and disappeared a third time. When she returned to her desk she ignored him and began to type with concentrated venom.

Another door into the reception area opened and a man came out. The sort who might well have been a truck driver; a walking refrigerator-freezer. The pale-gray suit was well enough cut almost to conceal the masses of beefy muscle beneath; the short, blow-dried hairstyle, aftershave, and veneer of civility were not cheap. Under all that he was pure knuckle-fighter.

“Herr Quinn,” he said quietly, “Herr Lenzlinger is not available to see you or answer your questions.”

“Now, no,” agreed Quinn.

“Not now, not ever, Mr. Quinn. Please go.”

Quinn had the impression the interview was over. He descended to the street and crossed the cobbles to where Sam waited in the car.

“He’s not available in working hours,” said Quinn. “I’ll have to see him at his home. Let’s get to Oldenburg.”

Another very old city, its inland port trading for centuries on the Hunte River, it was once the seat of the Counts of Oldenburg. The inner core, the Old Town, is still girdled by sections of the former city wall and a moat made up of a series of linked canals.

Quinn found the sort of hotel he preferred, a quiet inn with a walled courtyard called the Graf von Oldenburg, in Holy Ghost Street.

Before the shops closed he had time to visit a hardware store and a camping shop; from a kiosk he bought the largest-scale map of the surrounding area he could find. After dinner he puzzled Sam by spending an hour in their room, tying knots every twenty inches down the length of the fifty feet of rope he had bought from the hardware shop, finally tying a three-prong grapnel to the end.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I suspect, up a tree” was all he would say. He left her still asleep in the predawn darkness.

He found the Lenzlinger domain an hour later, due west of the city, south of the great Bad Zwischenahn Lake, between the villages of Portsloge and Janstrat. It was all flat country, running without a mountain due west across the Ems to become northern Holland sixty miles farther on.

Intersected by myriad rivers and canals, draining the wet plain toward the sea, the country between Oldenburg and the border is studded with forests of beech, oak, and conifers. Lenzlinger’s estate lay between two forests, a former fortified manor now set in its own five-acre park, the whole bounded by an eight-foot wall.

Quinn, dressed from head to toe in camouflage green, his face masked with scrim netting, spent the morning lying along the branch of a mighty oak in the woods across the road from the estate. His high-definition binoculars showed him all he needed to know.

The gray stone manor and its outbuildings formed an L shape. The shorter arm was the main house, with two stories plus attics. The longer arm had once been the stables, now converted to self-contained apartments for the staff. Quinn counted four domestic staff: a butler/steward, a male cook, and two cleaning women. It was the security arrangements that held his attention. They were numerous and expensive.

Lenzlinger had started as a young hustler in the late fifties, selling penny packets of war surplus weaponry to all comers. Without a license, his end-user certificates were forged and his questions nil. It was the age of the anticolonial wars and Third World revolutions. But operating on the fringe, he had made a living, not much more.

His big break came with the Nigerian civil war. He swindled the Biafrans of more than half a million dollars; they paid for bazookas but received cast-iron rain pipes. He was right in supposing they were too busy fighting for their lives to come north to settle accounts.

In the early seventies he got a license to trade-how much that cost him Quinn could only guess-which enabled him to supply half a dozen African, Central American, and Middle Eastern war groups, and still have time to conclude the occasional illegal deal (much more lucrative) with the E.T.A., the I.R.A., and a few others. He bought from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and North Korea, all needing hard currency, and sold to the desperate. By 1985 he was parlaying new North Korean hardware to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war. Even some governmental intelligence agencies had used his stocks when they wanted no-source weaponry for arm’s-length revolutions.

This career had made him very wealthy. It had also made him a lot of enemies. He intended to enjoy the former and frustrate the latter.

All the windows, up and down, were electronically protected. Though he could not see the devices, Quinn knew that the doors would be, as well. That was the inner ring. The outer ring was the wall. It ran right around the estate without a break, topped with two strands of razor-wire, the trees inside the park lopped back to prevent any overhanging branches. Something else, glinting in the occasional ray of wintry sunshine. A tight wire, like piano wire, running along the top of the wall, supported by ceramic studs; electrified, linked to the alarm system, sensitive to the touch.

Between the wall and the house was open ground-fifty yards of it at the closest point, swept by cameras, patrolled by dogs. He watched the two Dobermans, muzzled and leashed, being given their morning constitutional. The dog handler was too young to be Bernhardt.

Quinn observed the black-windowed Mercedes 600 leave for Bremen at five to nine. The walking refrigerator-freezer ushered a muffled, fur-hatted figure into the rear seat, took the front passenger seat for himself, and the chauffeur swept them out through the steel gates and onto the road. They passed just below the branch where Quinn lay.

Quinn reckoned on four bodyguards, maybe five. The chauffeur looked like one; the refrigerator-freezer, definitely. That left the dog handler and probably another inside the house. Bernhardt?

The security nerve center seemed to be a ground-floor room where the staff wing joined the main house. The dog handler came and went to it several times, using a small door that gave directly onto the lawns. Quinn surmised that the night guard could probably control the floodlights, the TV monitors, and the dogs from within. By noon Quinn had his plan. He descended from his tree, and returned to Oldenburg.

He and Sam spent the afternoon shopping, he for a rental van and a variety of tools, she to complete a list he had given her.

“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I could wait outside.”

“No. One vehicle on that country lane in the middle of the night is bad enough. Two is a traffic jam.”

He told her what he wanted her to do.

“Just be there when I arrive,” he said. “I suspect I may be in a hurry.”

He was outside the stone wall, parked in the lane, at 2:00 A.M. His high-roofed panel van was driven close enough to the wall for him to be able to see over it clearly when he stood on the van’s roof. The side of the van, in case of inquiry, bore the logo, created in masking tape, of a TV aerial installer. That would also account for the telescoping aluminum ladder fixed to the roof rack.

When his head came over the wall he could see by the light of the moon the leaf-bare trees of the park, the lawns running up to the house, and the dim light from the window of the guard’s control room.

The spot he had chosen for the diversion was where a single tree inside the park grew only eight feet from the wall. He stood on the roof of the van and swung the small plastic box on the end of the fishing line gently ’round and ’round. When it had enough momentum he let go the line. The plastic case curved out in a gentle parabola, went into the branches of the tree, and fell toward the ground. The fishing line jerked it up short. Quinn paid out enough line to leave the box swinging from the tree just eight feet above the turf of the park, then tied off the line.