Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“How would a man like that get entry and residence permits in Holland?” he asked.

“Well, if he married a Dutch girl he’d get it. That would even give him the right to naturalization. Then he could just disappear.”

“Social security, income tax, Immigration?”

“They wouldn’t tell you,” said De Groot. “The man would have the right to privacy. Even to tell me, I’d have to present a criminal case against the man to justify my inquiry. Believe me, I just can’t do that.”

“No way at all you could help me?” asked Quinn.

De Groot stared out of the window.

“I have a nephew with the BVD,” he said. “It would have to be unofficial… Your man might be listed with them.”

“Please ask him,” said Quinn. “I’d be very grateful.”

While Quinn and Sam strolled up the Oosterstraat looking for a place to lunch, De Groot called his nephew in The Hague. Young Koos De Groot was a junior officer with the Binnenlandse Veiligheids Dienst, Holland’s small Internal Security Service. Though he had great affection for the bearlike uncle who used to slip him ten-guilder notes when he was a boy, he needed a deal of persuading. Tapping into the BVD computer was not the sort of thing a Community cop from Groningen called for every day of the week.

Papa De Groot called Quinn the next morning and they met an hour later at the police station.

“He’s some fellow, your Pretorius,” said De Groot, studying his notes. “It seems our BVD were interested enough when he arrived in Holland ten years ago to file his details, just in case. Some of them come from him-the flattering bits. Others come from newspaper cuttings. Jan Pieter Pretorius, born Bloemfontein 1942-that makes him forty-nine now. Gives his profession as sign painter.”

Quinn nodded. Someone had repainted the Ford Transit, put the BARLOW’S ORCHARD PRODUCE sign on the side, and painted apple crates on the inside of the rear windows. He surmised Pretorius was also the bomb man whose device had torched the Transit in the barn. He knew it could not be Zack. In the Babbidge warehouse Zack had sniffed marzipan and thought it might be Semtex. Semtex is odorless.

“He returned to South Africa in 1968 after leaving Ruanda, then worked for a while as a security guard on a De Beers diamond mine in Sierra Leone.”

Yes, the man who could tell diamonds from paste, and knew about cubic zirconia.

“He had wandered as far as Paris twelve years ago; met a Dutch girl working for a French family, married her. That gave him access to Holland. His father-in-law installed him as barman-apparently the father-in-law owns two bars. The couple divorced five years ago, but Pretorius had saved enough to buy his own bar. He runs it and lives above it.”

“Where?” asked Quinn.

“A town called Den Bosch. You know it?”

Quinn shook his head. “And the bar?”

“De Gouden Leeuw-the Golden Lion,” said De Groot.

Quinn and Sam thanked him profusely and left. When they had gone, De Groot looked down from the window and watched them cross the Rade Markt and head back to their hotel. He liked Quinn, but he was worried by the inquiry. Perhaps it was all legitimate, no need to worry. But he would not want Quinn on a manhunt coming into his town to face a South African mercenary… He sighed and reached for the phone.

“Find it?” asked Quinn as he drove south out of Groningen. Sam was studying the road map.

“Yep. Way down south, near the Belgian border. Join Quinn and see the Low Countries,” she said.

“We’re lucky,” said Quinn. “If Pretorius was the second kidnapper in Zack’s gang, we could have been heading for Bloemfontein.”

The E.35 motorway ran straight as an arrow south-southeast to Z wolle, where Quinn turned onto the A. 50 highroad due south for Apeldoorn, Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Den Bosch. At Apeldoorn, Sam took the wheel. Quinn put the backrest of the passenger seat almost horizontal and fell asleep. He was still asleep, and it was his seatbelt that saved his life, in the crash.

Just north of Arnhem and west of the highway is the gliding club of Terlet. Despite the time of year it was a bright sunny day, rare enough in Holland in November to have brought out the enthusiasts. The driver of the truck thundering along in the opposite lane was so busy gazing at the glider, which wing-tilted right over the highway in front of him as it lined up to land, that he failed to notice he was drifting over to the oncoming lane.

Sam was sandwiched between the timber stakes running along the edge of the sandy moorland to her right and the bulk of the swerving juggernaut to her left. She tried to brake and almost made it. The last three feet of the swaying trailer clipped the front left fender of the Sierra and flicked it off the road, as a finger and thumb will flick a fly off a blotter. The truck driver never even noticed and drove on.

The Sierra mounted the curb as Sam tried to bring it back onto the road, and she would have made it but for the vertical stakes in a line beyond the curb. One of them mashed her right front wheel and she went out of control. The Sierra careered down the bank, almost rolled, recovered, and ended up axle-deep in the soft wet sand of the moor.

Quinn straightened his seat and looked across at her. Both were shaken but unhurt. They climbed out. Above them, cars and trucks roared on south to Arnhem. The ground all around was flat; they were in easy view of the road.

“The piece,” said Quinn.

“The what?”

“The Smith & Wesson. Give it to me.”

He wrapped the pistol and its ammunition in one of her silk scarves from the vanity case and buried it under a bush ten yards from the car, mentally marking the place in the sand where it lay. Two minutes later a red-and-white Range Rover of the Rijkspolitie, the Highway Patrol, stood above them on the hard shoulder.

The officers were concerned, relieved to see they were unhurt, and asked for their papers. Thirty minutes later, with their luggage, they were deposited in the rear courtyard of the gray concrete-slab police headquarters in Arnhem’s Beek Straat. A sergeant showed them up to an interview room, where he took copious particulars. It was past lunch when he had finished.

The car-rental agency representative had not had a busy day-tourists tend to become thin on the ground in mid-November-and was quite pleased to take a call in his Heuvelink Boulevard office from an American lady inquiring about an agency car. His joy faded somewhat when he learned she had just totaled one of his company’s Sierras on the A.50 at Terlet, but he recalled his firm’s admonition to try harder, and he did.

He came around to the police station and conversed with the sergeant. Neither Quinn nor Sam could understand a word. Fortunately, both Dutchmen spoke good English.

“The police recovery team will bring the Sierra in from where it is… parked,” he said. “I will have it collected from here and taken to our company workshops. You are fully insured, according to your papers. It is a Dutch-hired car?”

“No, Ostende, Belgium,” said Sam. “We were touring.”

“Ah,” said the man. He thought: paperwork, a lot of paperwork. “You wish to rent another car?”

“Yes, we would,” said Sam.

“I can let you have a nice Opel Ascona, but in the morning. It is being serviced right now. You have a hotel?”

They did not, but the helpful police sergeant made a call and they had a double room at the Rijn Hotel. The skies had clouded over again; the rain began to come down. The agency man drove them a mile up the Rijnkade embankment to the hotel, dropped them off, and promised to have the Opel at the front door at eight next day.

The hotel was two-thirds empty and they had a large double room on the front, overlooking the river. The short afternoon was closing in; the rain lashed the windows. The great gray mass of the Rhine flowed past toward the sea. Quinn took an upright armchair by the window bay and gazed out.