Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“Let’s get out of here, fast,” he said. “My girl’s husband has just showed up with some hired muscle.”

Marcel Dupont was an old man with a walrus moustache who had driven a cab on the streets of Paris for forty-five years. Before that he had fought with the Free French. He had bailed out of a few places in his time, one step ahead of the hard squad. He was also a Frenchman and the blond girl being dragged into his cab was quite an eyeful. He was also a Parisian and knew a fat bundle of banknotes when he saw one. It had been a long time since Americans gave $10 tips. Nowadays most of them seemed to be in Paris on a $10-a-day budget. He left a stream of black rubber smoke as he went up the passage and into Avenue Daumesnil.

Quinn had reached across Sam to give the swinging door a hard tug. It hit some impediment, closed at the second slam. Sam leaned back in the seat, white as a sheet. Then she noticed her treasured crocodile-skin handbag from Harrods. The force of the closing door had shattered the frame near the base, splitting the stitching. She examined the damage and her brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“Quinn, what the hell’s this?”

“This” was the jutting end of a black-and-orange wafer-thin battery, of the type used to power Polaroid cameras. Quinn’s penknife slit the rest of the stitching along the base of the bag’s frame to reveal the battery was one of a linked set of three, two and a half inches wide, four inches long. The transmitter and bleeper were in a printed circuit board, also in the base, with a wire leading to a microphone in the stud that formed the bottom of the hinge. The aerial was in the shoulder strap. It was a miniature, professional, state-of-the-art device and voice-activated to save power.

Quinn looked at the components on the rear seat between them. Even if it still worked, it would now be impossible to pass disinformation through it. Sam’s exclamation would have alerted the listeners to its discovery. He emptied all her effects from the upturned handbag, asked the driver to pause by the curb, and threw the handbag and electronic bug into a garbage bin.

“Well, that accounts for Marchais and Pretorius,” said Quinn. “There must have been two of them; one staying close to us, listening to our progress, phoning forward to his friend who could get to the target before us. But why the hell didn’t they show up at this morning’s phony rendezvous?”

“I didn’t have it,” said Sam suddenly.

“Didn’t have what?”

“Didn’t have the purse with me. I was having breakfast in the bar-you wanted to talk upstairs. I forgot my purse, left it on the banquette. I had to go back for it, thought it might have been stolen. Wish to God it had been.”

“Yeah. All they heard was me telling the cabdriver to drop us on the rue de Chalón, at the corner of the street. And the word bar . There were two in that street.”

“But how the hell could they have done that to my bag?” she asked. “It’s been with me ever since I bought it.”

“That’s not your bag-that was a duplicate,” said Quinn. “Someone spotted it, made up the replica, and did the switch. How many people came to that apartment in Kensington?”

“After you ran out? The world and his mother. There was Cramer and the Brits, Brown, Collins, Seymour, another three or four FBI men. I was up at the embassy, down at that manor house in Surrey where they kept you for a while, over to the States, back again-hell, I’ve been everywhere with it.”

And it would take five minutes to empty the old bag, put the contents in the duplicate, and effect the switch.

“Where do you want to go, mate?” asked the driver.

The Hôtel du Colisée was out; the killers would know of that. But not the garage where he had parked the Opel. He had been there alone, without Sam and her lethal handbag.

“Place de la Madeleine,” he said, “corner of Chauveau-Lagarde.”

“Quinn, maybe I should head back to the States with what we just heard. I could go to our embassy here and insist on two U.S. marshals as escort. Washington’s got to hear what Zack told us.”

Quinn stared out at the passing streets. The cab was moving up the rue Royale. It skirted the Madeleine and dropped them at the entrance to the garage. Quinn tipped the friendly cabdriver heavily.

“Where are we going?” asked Sam when they were in the Opel and heading south across the Seine toward the Latin Quarter.

“You’re going to the airport,” said Quinn.

“For Washington?”

“Absolutely not for Washington. Listen, Sam, now more than ever you should not go back there unprotected. Whoever’s behind this, they’re much higher than a bunch of former mercenaries. They were just the hired hands. Everything that was happening on our side was being fed to Zack. He was forewarned of police progress, the dispositions in Scotland Yard, London, and Washington. Everything was choreographed, even the killing of Simon Cormack.

“When that kid ran along that roadside, someone had to be up in those trees with the detonator. How did he know to be there? Because Zack was told exactly what to do at every stage, including the release of both of us. The reason he didn’t kill me was because he wasn’t told to. He didn’t think he was going to kill anybody.”

“But he told us who,” protested Sam. “It was this American, the one who set it up and paid him, the one he called the fat man.”

“And who told the fat man?”

“Oh. There’s someone behind the fat man.”

“There has to be,” said Quinn. “And high-real high. ’Way up there. We know what happened and how, but not who or why. You go back to Washington now and you tell them what we heard from Zack. What have we got? The claims of a kidnapper, criminal, and mercenary, now conveniently dead. A man running scared at the aftermath of what he’s done, trying to buy his freedom by wasting his own colleagues and handing back the diamonds, with a cock-and-bull story that he was put up to it all.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“You go into hiding. I go after the Corsican. He’s the key. He’s the fat man’s employee, the one who provided the deadly belt and put it on Simon. Five will get you ten Zack was ordered to spin out the negotiations by an extra six days, switching his demand from cash to diamonds, because the new clothes were not ready. The schedule was being thrown out of kilter, moving too fast, had to be slowed down. If I can get to Orsini, take him alive, get him to talk, he probably knows the name of his employer. When we have the name of the fat man, then we can go to Washington.”

“Let me come with you, Quinn. That was the deal we made.”

“It was the deal Washington made. The deal’s off. Everything Zack told us was recorded by that bug in your purse. They know that we know. For them now the hunt is on for you and me. Unless we can deliver the fat man’s name. Then the hunters become the hunted. The FBI will see to that. And the CIA.”

“So where do I go to ground, and for how long?”

“Until I call you and tell you we’re in the clear, one way or the other. As to where-Málaga. I have friends in the South of Spain who’ll look after you.”

Paris, like London, is a two-airport city. Ninety percent of overseas flights leave from Charles de Gaulle to the north of the capital. But Spain and Portugal are still served from the older airport at Orly in the south. To add to the confusion, Paris also has two separate terminuses, each serving different airports. Buses for Orly depart from Maine-Montparnasse in the Latin Quarter. Quinn drew up there thirty minutes after leaving the Madeleine, parked, and led Sam inside the main hall.

“What about my clothes, my things at the hotel?” she complained.