Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“No chance,” said the professor, rising. “That man was dead no later than two P.M.yesterday. If they were in Arnhem, they’re innocent parties. Sorry. Facts.”

Dykstra swore. His sergeant must have mounted his stakeout within thirty minutes of the killer’s leaving the bar.

“My Arnhem colleagues tell me you were heading for the ferry at Vlissingen when you left yesterday,” he told Sam and Quinn as he released them in the small hours.

“That’s right,” said Quinn, collecting his much-examined luggage.

“I would be grateful if you would continue there,” said the Chief Inspector. “Mr. Quinn, my country likes to welcome foreign visitors, but wherever you go it seems the Dutch police are put to a lot of extra work.”

“I’m truly sorry,” said Quinn with feeling. “Seeing as how we’ve missed the last ferry, and are hungry and tired, could we finish the night at our hotel and go in the morning?”

“Very well,” said Dykstra. “I’ll have a couple of my men escort you out of town.”

“I’m beginning to feel like royalty,” said Sam as she went into the bathroom back at the Central Hotel. When she emerged, Quinn was gone. He returned at 5:00 A.M., stashed the Smith & Wesson back in the base of Sam’s vanity case, and caught two hours’ sleep before the morning coffee arrived.

The drive to Flushing was uneventful. Quinn was deep in thought. Someone was wasting the mercenaries one after the other, and now he really had run out of places to go. Except maybe… back to the archives. There might be something more to drag from them, but it was unlikely, very unlikely. With Pretorius dead, the trail was cold as a week-dead cod, and stank as badly.

A Flushing police car was parked near the ramp of the ferry for England. The two officers in it noted the Opel Ascona driving slowly into the hull of the roll-on roll-off car-carrier, but waited till the doors closed shut and the ferry headed out into the estuary of the Westerschelde before informing their headquarters.

The trip passed quietly. Sam wrote up her notes, now becoming a travelogue of European police stations; Quinn read the first London newspapers he had seen in ten days. He missed the paragraph that began: “Major KGB Shake-up?” It was a Reuters report out of Moscow, alleging that the usual informed sources were hinting at forthcoming changes at the top of the Soviet secret police.

Quinn waited in the darkness of the small front garden in Carlyle Square, as he had for the previous two hours, immobile as a statue and unseen by anyone. A laburnum tree cast a shadow that shielded him from the light of the streetlamp; his black zip-up leather windbreaker and his immobility did the rest. People came past within a few feet but none saw the man in the shadows.

It was half past ten; the inhabitants of this elegant Chelsea square were returning from their dinners in the restaurants of Knightsbridge and Mayfair. David and Carina Frost went by in the back of their elderly Bentley toward their house farther up. At eleven the man Quinn waited for arrived.

He parked his car in a residents’ bay across the road, mounted the three steps to his front door, and inserted his key in the lock. Quinn was at his elbow before it turned.

“Julian.”

Julian Hayman spun in alarm.

“Good God, Quinn, don’t do that. I could have flattened you.”

Hayman was still, years after leaving the regiment, a very fit man. But years of city living had blurred the old cutting edge, just a fraction. Quinn had spent those years toiling in vineyards beneath a blazing sun. He declined to suggest it might have been the other way around, if it ever came to it.

“I need to go back into your files, Julian.”

Hayman had quite recovered. He shook his head firmly.

“Sorry, old boy. Not again. No chance. Word is, you’re taboo. People have been muttering-on the circuit, you know-about the Cormack affair. Can’t risk it. That’s final.”

Quinn realized it was final. The trail had ended. He turned to go.

“By the way,” Hayman called from the top of the steps. “I had lunch yesterday with Barney Simkins. Remember old Barney?”

Quinn nodded. Barney Simkins, a director of Broderick-Jones, the Lloyd’s underwriters who had employed Quinn for ten years all over Europe.

“He says someone’s been ringing in, asking for you.”

“Who?”

“Dunno. Barney said the caller played it very close. Just said if you wanted to contact him, put a small ad in the International Herald Tribune , Paris edition, any day for the next ten, and sign it Q.”

“Didn’t he give any name at all?” asked Quinn.

“Only one, old boy. Odd name. Zack.”

Quinn climbed into the car beside Sam, who had been waiting around the corner in Mulberry Walk. He looked pensive.

“Won’t he play?”

“Mmmm?”

“Hayman. Won’t he let you go back into his files?”

“No. That’s out. And it’s final. But it appears someone else does want to play. Zack has been phoning.”

She was stunned.

“Zack? What does he want?”

“A meeting.”

“How the hell did he find you?”

Quinn let in the clutch and pulled away from the curb.

“A long shot. Years ago there was an occasional mention of me when I worked for Broderick-Jones. All he had was my name and my job. Seems I’m not the only one who checks back through old newspaper clippings. By a fluke, Hayman was lunching with someone from my old company when the subject came up.”

He turned into Old Church Street and right again on the King’s Road.

“Quinn, he’s going to try to kill you. He’s wiped out two of his own men already. With them gone he gets to keep all the ransom for himself; with you out of the way the hunt dies. He obviously reckons you’re more likely to trace him than the FBI.”

Quinn laughed shortly.

“If only he knew. I haven’t the faintest idea who he is or where he is.”

He decided not to tell her he no longer believed Zack was the killer of Marchais and Pretorius. Not that a man like Zack would balk at eliminating his own kind if the price was right. Back in the Congo several mercenaries had been wasted by their own kind. It was the coincidence of the timing that worried him.

He and Sam had got to Marchais a few hours after his death; fortunately for them, there were no police about. But for a fluke crash outside Arnhem they would have been in Pretorius’s bar with a loaded gun an hour after he died. They would have remained in detention for weeks while the Den Bosch police investigated the case.

He turned left off King’s Road into Beaufort Street, heading for Battersea Bridge, and ran straight into a traffic jam. London traffic is no stranger to snarls, but at that hour on a winter’s night the run south through London should have been clear enough.

The line of cars he was in edged forward and he saw a uniformed London policeman directing them around a series of cones that blocked off the nearside lane. Turn and turn about the cars heading north and those heading south had to use the single remaining lane in the street.

When they came abreast of the obstruction Quinn and Sam saw two police cars, the blue lights on their roofs flashing as they turned. The police cars hemmed in an ambulance, parked with its doors open. Two attendants were climbing out of the rear with a stretcher, and approached a shapeless mass on the pavement, hidden under a blanket.

The traffic control policeman impatiently waved them on. Samsquinted up at the face of the building outside which the form on the pavement lay. The windows on the top floor were open and she saw a policeman’s head poking out as he gazed down.

“Someone seems to have fallen eight floors,” she remarked. “The police are looking out the open window up there.”