Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“I should call Kevin Brown,” said Sam. “Tell him what we’ve found.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Quinn.

“He’ll be mad.”

“Well, you can tell him we found one of the kidnappers and left him on top of a Ferris wheel with someone else’s bullet in his skull. You can tell him you’ve been carrying an illegal gun through Belgium, Germany, and Holland. You want to say all that on an open line?”

“Yeah, okay. So I should write up some notes.”

“You do that,” said Quinn.

She raided the mini-bar, found a half-bottle of red wine, and brought him a glass. Then she sat at the desk and began to write on hotel notepaper.

Three miles upstream of the hotel, dim in the deepening dusk, Quinn could make out the great black girders of the old Arnhem Bridge, the “bridge too far,” where in September 1944, Colonel John Frost and a small handful of British paratroopers had fought and died for four days, trying to hold off SS Panzers with bolt-action rifles and Sten guns while Thirty Corps vainly fought up from the south to relieve them on the northern end of the bridge. Quinn raised his glass toward the steel joists that reared into the rainy sky.

Sam caught the gesture and walked over to the window. She looked down to the embankment.

“See someone you know?” she asked.

“No,” said Quinn. “They have passed by.”

She craned to look up the street.

“Don’t see anyone.”

“A long time ago.”

She frowned, puzzled. “You’re a very enigmatic man, Mr. Quinn. What is it you can see that I can’t?”

“Not a lot,” said Quinn, rising. “And none of it very hopeful. Let’s go see what the dining room has to offer.”

The Ascona was there promptly at eight, along with the friendly sergeant and two motorcycle police outriders.

“Where are you heading, Mr. Quinn?” asked the sergeant.

“Vlissingen, Flushing,” said Quinn, to Sam’s surprise. “To catch the ferry.”

“Fine,” said the sergeant. “Have a good trip. My colleagues will guide you to the motorway southwest.”

At the junction to the motorway the outriders pulled over and watched the Opel out of sight. Quinn had that Dortmund feeling again.

General Zvi ben Shaul sat behind his desk and looked up from the report at the two men in front of him. One was the head of the Mossad department covering Saudi Arabia and the entire peninsula from the Iraqi border in the north to the shores of South Yemen. It was a territorial fiefdom. The other man’s specialty knew no borders and was ‘in its way even more important, especially for the security of Israel. He covered all Palestinians, wherever they might be. It was he who had written the report on the Director’s desk.

Some of those Palestinians would dearly have loved to know the building where the meeting was taking place. Like many of the curious, including a number of foreign governments, the Palestinians still imagined that the Mossad’s headquarters remained in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. But since 1988 their new home had been a large modern building right in the center of Tel Aviv, around a corner from Rehov Shlomo Ha’melekh (King Solomon Street) and close to the building occupied by AMAN, the military intelligence service.

“Can you get any more?” the general asked David Gur Arieh, the Palestinian expert. The man grinned and shrugged.

“Always you want more, Zvi. My source is a low-level operative, a technician in the motor vehicle workshops for the Saudi Army. That’s what he’s been told. The Army’s to be marooned in the desert for three days during next April.”

“It smells of a coup,” said the man who ran the Saudi department. “We should pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them?”

“If someone toppled King Fahd and took over, whom would it likely be?” asked the Director. The Saudi expert shrugged.

“Another Prince,” he said. “Not one of the brothers. More likely the younger generation. They’re greedy. However many billions they skim through the Oil Quota Commission, they want more. No, it may be they want it all. And of course the younger men tend to be more… modern, more Westernized. It could be for the better. It is time the old men went.”

It was not the thought of a younger man ruling in Riyadh that intrigued ben Shaul. It was what the Palestinian technician who had given the orders to Gur Arieh’s source had let slip. Next year, he had gloated, we Palestinians will have the right to become naturalized citizens here.

If that was true, if that was what the unnamed conspirators had in mind, the perspectives were astounding. Such an offer by a new Saudi government would suck a million homeless and landless Palestinians out of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon to a new life far in the South. With the Palestinian sore cauterized, Israel, with her energy and technology, could enter into a relationship with her neighbors that could be beneficial and profitable. It had been the dream of the founders, back to Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Ben Shaul had been taught the dream as a boy, never thought to see it happen. But…

“You going to tell the politicians?” asked Gur Arieh.

The Director thought of them squabbling away up in the Knesset, splitting semantic and theological hairs while his service tried to tell them on which side of the sky the sun rose. April was a long way off still. There would be a leak if he did. He closed the report.

“Not yet,” he said. “We have too little. When we have more I will tell them.”

Privately, he had decided to sit on it.

Lest they fall asleep, visitors to Den Bosch are met with a quiz game devised by the town’s planners. It is called Find a Way to Drive into the Town Center. Win, and the visitor finds Market Square and a parking space. Lose, and a labyrinthine system of one-way streets dumps him back on the ring road.

The city center is a triangle: Along the northwest runs the Dommel river; along the northeast, the Zuid-Willemsvaart canal; and along the southern third side, the city wall. Sam and Quinn beat the system at the third attempt, reached the market, and claimed their prize: a room at the Central Hotel on Market Square.

In their room Quinn consulted the telephone directory. It listed only one Golden Lion bar, on a street called Jans Straat. They set off on foot. The hotel reception desk had provided a line-drawing map of the town center, but Jans Straat was not listed. A number of citizens around the square shook their heads in ignorance. Even the street-corner policeman had to consult his much-thumbed town plan. They found it eventually.

It was a narrow alley, running between the St. Jans Singel, the old towpath along the Dommel, and the parallel Molenstraat. The whole area was old, most of it dating back three hundred years. Much of it had been tastefully restored and renovated, the fine old brick structures retained, along with their antique doors and windows, but fitted out with smart new apartments inside. Not so the Jans Straat.

It was barely a car’s width wide and the buildings leaned against each other for support. There were two bars in it, for at one time the bargemen plying their trade up the Dommel and along the canals had moored here to quench their thirst.

The Gouden Leeuw was on the south side of the street, twenty yards from the towpath, a narrow-fronted two-story building with a faded sign that announced its name. The ground floor had a single bow window whose small panes were of opaque and colored glass. Beside it was the single door giving access to the bar. It was locked. Quinn rang the bell and waited. No sound, no movement. The other bar in the street was open. Every bar in Den Bosch was open.

“Now what?” asked Sam. Down the street a man in the window of the other bar lowered his paper, noted them, and raised the paper again. Beside the Golden Lion was a six-foot-high wooden door apparently giving access to a passage to the rear.