The Negotiator

Chapter 12

They laid him down on Prospect Hill, the cemetery on the island of Nantucket, and the chill November wind keened out of the north across the Sound.

The service was in the small Episcopalian church on Fair Street, far too small to hold all who wanted to attend. The First Family was in the front two rows of pews, with the Cabinet behind them and a variety of other dignitaries in the rear. At the family’s request it was a small and private service-foreign ambassadors and delegates were asked to attend a memorial service in Washington to be held later.

The President had asked for privacy from the media, but a number had turned up anyway. The islanders-there were no vacationers on the island in that season-took his wish very literally. Even the Secret Service men, not known for their exquisite manners, were surprised to be upstaged by the grim and silent Nantucketers, who quietly lifted several cameramen physically out of the way and left two of them protesting the ruin of their exposed film rolls.

The casket was brought to the church from the island’s only funeral parlor on Union Street, where it had rested during the time between its arrival by military C-130-the small airfield could not take the Boeing 747-and the start of the service.

Halfway through the ceremony the first rains came, glittering on the gray slate roof of the church, washing down the stained-glass windows and the pink and gray stone blocks of the building.

When it was over, the casket was placed in a hearse, which proceeded at walking pace the half mile to the Hill; out of Fair Street, over the bumpy cobblestones of Main Street, and up New Mill Street to Cato Lane. The mourners walked in the rain, headed by the President, whose eyes were fixed on the flag-draped coffin a few feet in front of him. His younger brother supported a weeping Myra Cormack.

The way was flanked by the people of Nantucket, bareheaded and silent. There were the tradesmen who had sold the family fish, meat, eggs, and vegetables; restaurateurs who had served them in the scores of good eating houses around the island. There were the walnut faces of the old fishermen who had once taught the tow-haired youngster from New Haven to swim and dive and fish, or taken him scalloping off the Sankaty Light.

The caretaker and the gardener stood weeping on the corner of Fair Street and Main, to take a last look at the boy who had learned to run on those hard, tide-washed beaches from Coatue up to Great Point and back to Siasconset Beach. But bomb victims are not for the eyes of the living and the casket was sealed.

At Prospect Hill they turned into the Protestant half of the cemetery, past hundred-year-old graves of men who had hunted whales in small open boats and carved scrimshaw by oil lamps through the long winter nights. They came to the new section where the grave had been prepared.

The people filed in behind and filled the ground, row on row, and in that high open place the wind tore across the Sound and through the town to tug at hair and scarves. No shop was open that day, no garage, no bar. No planes landed, no ferries docked. The islanders had locked out the world to mourn one of their own, even by adoption. The minister began to intone the old words, his voice carried away on the wind.

High above, a single gyrfalcon, drifting down from the Arctic like a snowflake on the blast, looked down, saw every detail with his incredible eyes, and his single lost-soul scream was pulled away down the wind.

The rain, which had held off since the church service, resumed again, coming in flurries and squalls. The locked sails of the Old Mill creaked down the road. The men from Washington shivered and huddled into their heavy coats. The President stood immobile and stared down at what was left of his son, immune to the cold and the rain.

A yard from him stood the First Lady, her face streaked with rain and tears. When the preacher reached “the Resurrection and the Life,” she seemed to sway as if she might fall.

By her side a Secret Service man, open-coated to reach the handgun beneath his left armpit, crew-cut and built like a linebacker, overlooked protocol and training to wrap his right arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him and wept into his soaked jacket.

John Cormack stood alone, isolated in his pain, unable to reach out, an island.

A photographer, smarter than the rest, took a ladder from a backyard a quarter of a mile away and climbed the old wooden windmill on the corner of South Prospect Street and South Mill Street. Before anyone saw him using a telephoto lens, and by the light of a single wintry shaft that penetrated the clouds, he took one picture over the heads of the crowd of the group by the side of the grave.

It was a picture that would flash around America and the world. It showed the face of John Cormack as none had ever seen it: the face of an old man, a man aged beyond his years, sick, tired, drained. A man who could take no more; a man ready to go.

At the entrance to the cemetery the Cormacks stood later as the mourners passed by. None could find words to say. The President nodded as if he understood, and shook hands formally.

After the few from the immediate family came his closest friends and colleagues, headed by the Vice President and the six members of the Cabinet who formed the core of the committee seeking to handle the crisis for him. With four of them-Odell, Reed, Donaldson, and Walters-he went back a long time.

Michael Odell paused for a moment in an attempt to find something to say, shook his head, and turned away. The rain pattered on his bowed head, plastering the thick gray hair to his scalp.

Jim Donaldson’s precise diplomacy was equally disarmed by his emotions; he, too, could only stare in mute sympathy at his friend, shake his limp, dry hand, and pass on.

Bill Walters, the Attorney General, hid what he felt behind formality. He murmured, “Mr. President, my condolences. I’m sorry, sir.”

Morton Stannard, the banker from New York translated to the Pentagon, was the oldest man there. He had attended many funerals, of friends and colleagues, but nothing like this. He was going to say something conventional, but could only blurt out: “God, I’m so sorry, John.”

Brad Johnson, the black academic and National Security Adviser, just shook his head as if in bewilderment.

Hubert Reed of the Treasury surprised those standing close to the Cormacks. He was not a demonstrative man, too shy for overt demonstrations of affection, a bachelor who had never felt the need for wife or children. But he stared up at John Cormack through streaked glasses, held out his hand, and then reached up spontaneously to embrace his old friend with both arms. As if surprised at his own impulsiveness, he then turned and hurried away to join the others climbing into their waiting cars for the airfield.

The rain eased again and two strong men began to shovel wet earth into the hole. It was over.

Quinn checked the ferry times out of Dover for Ostende and found they had missed the last of the day. They spent the night at a quiet hotel and took the train from Charing Cross in the morning.

The crossing was uneventful and by the late morning Quinn had rented a blue medium-sized Ford from a local rental agency and they were heading for the ancient Flemish port that had been trading on the Scheide since before Columbus sailed.

Belgium is interlaced by a very modern system of high-class motorways; distances are short and times even shorter. Quinn chose the E.5 east out of Ostende, cut south of Bruges and Ghent, then northeast down the E.3 and straight into the heart of Antwerp in time for a late lunch.

Europe was unknown territory for Sam; Quinn seemed to know his way around. She had heard him speak rapid and fluent French several times during the few hours they had been in the country. What she had not realized was that each time Quinn had asked if the Fleming would mind if he spoke French before he launched into it. The Flemish usually speak some French, but like to be asked first. Just to establish that they are not Walloons.

They parked the car, took lodgings in a small hotel on the Italie Lei, and walked around the corner to one of the many restaurants flanking both sides of the De Keyser Lei for lunch.

“What exactly are you looking for?” asked Sam as they ate.

“A man,” said Quinn.

“What kind of a man?”

“I’ll know when I see him.”

After lunch Quinn consulted a taxi driver in French and they took off. He paused at an art shop, made two purchases, bought a street map from a curbside kiosk, and had another conference with the driver. Sam heard the words Falcon Rui and then Schipperstraat. The driver gave her a bit of a leer as Quinn paid off the taxi.

The Falcon Rui turned out to be a run-down street fronted by several low-budget clothing shops, among others. In one, Quinn bought a seaman’s sweater, canvas jeans, and rough boots. He stuffed these into a canvas bag and they set off toward Schipperstraat. Above the roofs she could see the beaks of great cranes, indicating they were close to the docks.

Quinn turned off the Falcon Rui into a maze of narrow, mean streets that seemed to make up a zone of old and seedy houses between the Falcon Rui and the River Scheide. They passed several rough-looking men who appeared to be merchant seamen. There was an illuminated plate-glass window to Sam’s left. She glanced in. A hefty young woman, bursting out of a skimpy pair of briefs and a bra, lounged in an armchair.

“Jesus, Quinn, this is the red light district,” she protested.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what I asked the cabdriver for.”

He was still walking, glancing left and right at the signs above the shops. Apart from the bars and the illuminated windows where the whores sat and beckoned, there were few shops. But he found three of the sort he wanted, all within the space of two hundred yards.

“Tattooists?” she queried.

“Docks,” he said simply. “Docks mean sailors; sailors mean tattoos. They also mean bars and girls and the thugs who live off girls. We’ll come back tonight.”

Senator Bennett Hapgood rose at his appointed time on the floor of the Senate and strode to the podium. The day after the funeral of Simon Cormack both houses of Congress had once again put on the record their shock and revulsion at what had happened on a lonely roadside far away in England the previous week.

Speaker after speaker had called for action to trace the culprits and bring them to justice, American justice, no matter what the cost. The President pro tem of the Senate hammered with his gavel.

“The junior senator from Oklahoma has the floor,” he intoned.

Bennett Hapgood was not known as a heavyweight within the Senate. The session might have been thinly attended but for the matter under discussion. It was not thought the junior senator from Oklahoma would have much more to add. But he did. He uttered the habitual words of condolence to the President, revulsion at what had happened, and eagerness to see the guilty brought to justice. Then he paused and considered what he was about to say.

He knew it was a gamble, one hell of a gamble. He had been told what he had been told, but he had no proof of it. If he was wrong, his fellow senators would put him down as just another hayseed who used serious words with no serious intent. But he knew he had to go on or lose the support of his new and very impressive financial backer.

“But maybe we do not have to look too far to find out who were the culprits of this fiendish act.”

The low buzz in the chamber died away. Those in the aisles, about to depart, stopped and turned.

“I would like to ask one thing: Is it not true that the bomb which killed that young man, the only son of our President, was designed, made, and assembled wholly within the Soviet Union, and provably so? Did that device not come from Russia?”

His natural demagoguery might have carried him further. But the scene disintegrated in confusion and uproar. The media carried his question to the nation within ten minutes. For two hours the administration fenced and hedged. Then it had to concede the contents of the summary of Dr. Barnard’s report.

By nightfall the bleak and black rage against someone unknown, which had run like a growling current through the people of Nantucket the previous day, had found a target. Spontaneous crowds stormed and wrecked the offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot at 630 Fifth Avenue in New York, before the police could throw a cordon ’round the building. Its panic-stricken staff ran upstairs seeking shelter from the mob, only to be rebuffed by the office workers on the floors above them. They escaped, along with the others in the building, through the help of the Fire Department when the Aeroflot floors were set afire and the whole building evacuated.

The NYPD got reinforcements to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations at 136 East 67thStreet just in time. A surging mob of New Yorkers tried to force their way into the cordoned-off street; fortunately for the Russians the blue-uniformed lines held. The New York police found themselves wrestling with a crowd intent on doing something with which many of the policemen privately sympathized.

It was the same in Washington. The capital’s police were forewarned and sealed off both the Soviet embassy and the consulate on Phelps Place just in time. Frenzied telephone appeals from the Soviet ambassador to the State Department were met with an assurance that the British report was still under examination and might prove to be false.

“We wish to see that report,” insisted Ambassador Yermakov. “It is a lie. I will be categorical. It is a lie.”

The agencies Tass and Novosti, along with every Soviet embassy in the world, issued a late-night flat denial of the findings of the Barnard report, accusing London and Washington of a vicious and deliberate calumny.

“How the hell did it get out?” demanded Michael Odell. “How the hell did that man Hapgood get to hear of it?”

There was no answer. Any major organization, let alone a government, cannot function without a host of secretaries, stenographers, clerks, messengers, any one of whom can leak a confidential document.

“One thing is certain,” mused Stannard of Defense. “After this, the Nantucket Treaty is dead as a dodo. We have to review our defense appropriations now on the basis that there will be no reductions, no limits at all.”

Quinn had begun trawling the bars in the maze of narrow streets running off Schipperstraat. He was there by ten that evening and stayed till the bars closed just before dawn, a rangy seaman who seemed half drunk, spoke slurred French, and nursed a small beer in bar after bar. It was cold outside and the thinly clad prostitutes shivered over their electric heaters behind their windows. Sometimes they came off shift, pulled on a coat, and scuttled down the pavement to one of the bars for a drink and the usual exchange of crude pleasantries with the barman and regulars.

Most of the bars had names like Las Vegas, Hollywood, California, their optimistic owners hoping that names redolent of foreign glamour would entice the wandering sailor to think that opulence lay beyond the chipped doors. By and large they were sleazy places, but warm and serving good beer.

Quinn had told Sam she would have to wait, either at the hotel or in the car parked two corners away on Falcon Rui. She chose the car, which did not prevent her receiving a fair share of propositions through the windows.

Quinn sat and drank slowly, watching the surging tide of locals and foreigners that ebbed in and out of these streets and their bars. On his left hand, picked out in India ink from the art shop, slightly smudged to give the impression of age, was the motif of the black spider’s web, the bright red spider at its center. All night he scanned other left hands but saw nothing like it.

He wandered up the Guit Straat and the Pauli Plein, took a small beer in each of the bars, then cut back into Schipperstraat and started again. The girls thought he wanted a woman but was having trouble making up his mind. The male customers ignored him, since they were always on the move themselves. A couple of barmen, on his third visit, nodded and grinned: “Back again, no luck?”

They were right, but in a different sense. He had no luck and before dawn rejoined Sam in the car. She was half asleep, the engine running to keep the heater on.

“What now?” she asked as she drove him back to the hotel.

“Eat, sleep, eat, start again tomorrow night,” he said.

She was particularly erotic through the morning they spent in bed, suspecting Quinn might have been tempted by some of the girls and their outfits on display in Schipperstraat. He was not, but saw no reason to disabuse her.

Peter Cobb saw Cyrus Miller at his own request atop the Pan-Global Building in Houston the same day.

“I want out,” he said flatly. “This has gone too far. What happened to that young boy was awful. My associates feel the same. Cyrus, you said it would never come to that. You said the kidnap alone would suffice to… to change things. We never thought the boy would die. But what those animals did to him… that was horrible… immoral…”

Miller rose from behind his desk and his eyes blazed at the younger man.

“Don’t you lecture me about morality, boy. Don’t you ever do that. I didn’t want that to happen either, but we all knew it might have to. You, too, Peter Cobb, as God will be your judge-you, too. And it had to be. Unlike you I have prayed for His guidance; unlike you I have spent nights on my knees praying for that young man.

“And the Lord answered me, my friend; and the Lord said: Better that one young lamb go to the slaughter than that the whole flock perish. We are not talking about one man here, Cobb. We are talking of the safety, of the survival, of the very lives of the entire American people. And the Lord has told me: what must be, must be. That Communist in Washington must be brought down before he destroys the temple of the Lord, the temple that is this entire land of ours. Go back to your factory, Peter Cobb. Go back and turn the plowshares into the swords we must have to defend our nation and destroy the Antichrists of Moscow. And be silent, sir. Talk to me no more of morality, for this is the Lord’s work and He has spoken to me.”

Peter Cobb went back to his factory a very shaken man.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev also had a serious confrontation that day. Once again Western newspapers were spread over the long conference table running almost the length of the room, their pictures telling part of the story, their screaming headlines the rest. Only for the latter did he need a Russian translation. The Foreign Ministry translations were pinned to each newspaper.

On his desk were more reports that needed no translation. They were in Russian, coming from ambassadors across the world, from consuls general and the U.S.S.R.’s own foreign correspondents. Even the East European satellites had had their anti-Soviet demonstrations. Moscow’s denials had been constant and sincere, and yet…

As a Russian, and a Party apparatchik of years of practice, Mikhail Gorbachev was no milksop in the business of realpolitik. He knew about disinformation; had not the Kremlin founded an entire department devoted to it? Was there not in the KGB a whole directorate dedicated to the sowing of anti-Western sentiment by the well-placed lie or the even more damaging half-truth? But this act of disinformation was unbelievable.

He awaited the man he had summoned with impatience. It was close to midnight and he had had to cancel a weekend of duck-shooting on the northern lakes, along with spicy Georgian food, one of his two great passions.

The man came just after midnight.

A General Secretary of the U.S.S.R., of all people, should not expect a Chairman of the KGB to be a warm, lovable fellow, but there was a cold cruelty about the face of Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov that Gorbachev found personally unlikable.

True, he had promoted the man from the post of First Deputy Chairman when he had secured the ouster of his old antagonist Chebrikov three years earlier. He had had little choice. One of the four Deputy Chairmen had to take the slot, and he had been sufficiently taken with Kryuchkov’s lawyer background to offer him the job. Since then he had begun to nurture reservations.

He recognized that he might have been swayed by his desire to turn the U.S.S.R. into a “socialist law-based state,” in which the law would be supreme, a concept formerly regarded by the Kremlin as bourgeois. It had been a pretty frantic time, those first few days of October 1988, when he had summoned a sudden extraordinary meeting of the Central Committee and inaugurated his own Night of the Long Knives against his opponents. Maybe in his hurry he had overlooked a few things. Like Kryuchkov’s background.

Kryuchkov had worked in Stalin’s Public Prosecutor office, not a job for the squeamish, and had been involved in the savage repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, joining the KGB in 1967. It was in Hungary he had met Andropov, who went on to head the KGB for fifteen years. It was Andropov who had nominated Chebrikov as his successor, and Chebrikov who had picked Kryuchkov to head up the foreign espionage arm, the First Chief Directorate. Maybe he, the General Secretary, had underestimated the old loyalties.

He looked up at the high-domed forehead, the freezing eyes, thick gray sideburns, and grim, down-turned mouth. And he realized this man might, after all, be his opponent.

Gorbachev came around the desk and shook hands; a dry, firm grip. As always when he talked, he maintained vigorous eye contact, as if seeking shiftiness or timidity. Unlike most of his predecessors, he was pleased if he found neither. He gestured at the overseas reports. The general nodded. He had seen them all, and more. He avoided Gorbachev’s eye.

“Let’s keep it short,” said Gorbachev. “We know what they are saying. It’s a lie. Our denials continue to go out. This lie must not be allowed to stick. But where does it come from? On what is it based?”

Kryuchkov tapped the massed Western reports with contempt. Though a former KGB rezident in New York, he hated America.

“Comrade General Secretary, it appears to be based on a British report by the scientists who carried out the forensic examination of the way that American died. Either the man lied, or others took his report and altered it. I suspect it is an American trick.”

Gorbachev walked back behind his desk and resumed his seat. He chose his words carefully.

“Could there… under any circumstances… be any part of truth in this accusation?”

Vladimir Kryuchkov was startled. Within his own organization there was a department that specifically designed, invented, and made in its laboratories the most devilish devices for the ending of life, or simply for incapacitation. But that was not the point; they had not assembled any bomb to be concealed in Simon Cormack’s belt.

“No, Comrade, no, surely not.”

Gorbachev leaned forward and tapped his blotter.

“Find out,” he ordered. “Once and for all, yes or no, find out.”

The general nodded and left. The General Secretary stared down the long room. He needed-perhaps he should say “had needed”-the Nantucket Treaty more than the Oval Office knew. Without it his country faced the specter of the invisible B-2 Stealth bomber, and he the nightmare of trying to find 300 billion rubles to rebuild the air-defense network. Until the oil ran out.

Quinn saw him on the third night. He was short and stocky, with the puffed ears and broadened nose of a pug, a knuckle-fighter. He sat alone at the end of the bar in the Montana, a grubby dive in Oude Mann Straat, the aptly named Old Man Street. There were another dozen people in the bar, but no one talked to him and he looked as if he did not wish them to.

He held his beer in his right hand, his left clutching a hand-rolled cigarette, and on the back was the black web and the spider. Quinn strolled down the length of the bar and sat down two barstools away from the man.

They both sat in silence for a while. The pug glanced at Quinn but took no other notice. Ten minutes went by. The man rolled another cigarette. Quinn gave him a light. The pug nodded but gave no verbal thanks. A surly, suspicious man, not easy to draw into conversation.

Quinn caught the barman’s eye and gestured to his glass. The barman brought another bottle. Quinn gestured to the empty glass of the man beside him and raised an eyebrow. The man shook his head, dug in his pocket, and paid for his own.

Quinn sighed inwardly. This was hard going. The man looked like a bar-brawler and a petty crook without even the brains to be a pimp, which does not need much. The chances that he spoke French were slim, and he was certainly surly enough. But his age was about right, late forties, and he had the tattoo. He would have to do.

Quinn left the bar and found Sam slumped in the car two corners away. He told her quietly what he wanted her to do.

“Are you out of your mind?” she said. “I can’t do that. I’d have you know, Mr. Quinn, I am a Rockcastle preacher’s daughter.” She was grinning as she said it.

Ten minutes later Quinn was back on his barstool when she came in. She had hiked her skirt so high the waistband must have been under her armpits, but covered by her polo-neck sweater. She had used the entire Kleenex box from the glove compartment to fill out her already full bosom to startling proportions. She swayed over to Quinn and took the barstool between him and the pug. The pug stared at her. So did everyone else. Quinn ignored her.

She reached up and kissed his cheek, then stuck her tongue in his ear. He still ignored her. The pug returned to staring at his glass, but darted an occasional glance at the bosom that jutted over the bar. The barman came up, smiled, and looked inquiring.

“Whisky,” she said. It is an international word, and uttering it does not betray country of origin. He asked her in Flemish if she wanted ice; she did not understand, but nodded brightly. She got the ice. She toasted Quinn, who ignored her. With a shrug she turned to the pug and toasted him instead. Surprised, the bar-brawler responded.

Quite deliberately Sam opened her mouth and ran her tongue along her lower lip, bright with gloss. She was vamping the pug unashamedly. He gave her a broken-toothed grin. Without waiting for more she leaned over and kissed the pug on the mouth.

With a backward sweep Quinn swept her off the bar-stool onto the floor, got up, and leaned toward the pug.

“What the shit do you think you’re up to, messing with my broad?” he snarled in drunken French. Without waiting for an answer he hauled off a left hook that took the pug squarely on the jaw and knocked him backwards into the sawdust.

The man fell well, blinked, rolled back on his feet, and came for Quinn. Sam, as instructed, left hastily by the door. The barman reached quickly for the phone beneath the counter, dialed 101 for the police, and, when they came on the line, muttered “Bar fight” and the address of his bar.

There are always prowl cars cruising that district, especially at night, and the first white Sierra with the word POLITIE along the side in blue was there in four minutes. It disgorged two uniformed officers, closely followed by two more from a second car twenty seconds afterward.

Still, it is surprising how much damage two good fighters can do to a bar in four minutes. Quinn knew he could outpace the pug, who was slowed by drink and cigarettes, and outpunch him. But he let the man land a couple of blows in the ribs, just for encouragement, then put a hard left hook under his heart to slow him a mite. When it looked as if the pug might call it a day, Quinn closed with him to help him a bit.

In a double bear hug the two men flattened most of the bar furniture, rolling through the sawdust in a melee of chair legs, tabletops, glasses, and bottles.

When the police arrived, the two brawlers were arrested on the spot. The police HQ for that area is Zone West P/1 and the nearest precinct house is in the Blindenstraat. The two squad cars deposited them there separately two minutes later and delivered them into the care of Duty Sergeant Van Maes. The barman totted up his damage and made a statement from behind his bar. No need to detain the man-he had a business to run. The officers divided his damage estimate by two and made him sign it.

Fighting prisoners are always separated at Blindenstraat. Sergeant Van Maes slung the pug, whom he knew well from previous encounters, into the bare and stained wachtkamer behind his desk; Quinn was made to sit on a hard bench in the reception area while his passport was examined.

“American, eh?” said Van Maes. “You should not get involved in fights, Mr. Quinn. This Kuyper we know; he is always in trouble. This time he does down. He hit you first, no?”

Quinn shook his head.

“Actually, I slugged him.”

Van Maes studied the barman’s statement.

“Hmm. Ja, the barman says you were both to blame. Pity. I must hold you both now. In the morning you go to the Magistraat. Because of the damage to the bar.”

The Magistraat would mean paperwork. When at 5:00 A.M. a very smart American lady in a severe business suit came into the precinct house with a roll of money to pay for the damage to the Montana, Sergeant Van Maes was relieved.

“You pay for the half this American caused, ja?” he asked.

“Pay the lot,” said Quinn from his bench.

“You pay Kuyper’s share, too, Mr. Quinn? He is a thug, in and out of here since he was a boy. A long record, always small things.”

“Pay for him too,” said Quinn to Sam. She did so. “Since there’s now nothing owing, do you want to press charges, Sergeant?”

“Not really. You can leave.”

“Can he come too?” Quinn gestured to the wachtkamer and the snoring form of Kuyper, which could be seen through the door.

“You want him?”

“Sure, we’re buddies.”

The sergeant raised an eyebrow, shook Kuyper awake, told him the stranger had paid his damages for him, and just as well or Kuyper would see a week inside jail, again. As it was, he could go. When Sergeant Van Maes looked up, the lady had gone. The American draped an arm around Kuyper and together they staggered down the steps of the precinct house. Much to the sergeant’s relief.

In London the two quiet men met during the lunch hour in a discreet restaurant whose waiters left them alone once their food had arrived. The men knew each other by sight, or more properly by photograph. Each knew what the other did for a living. A curious inquirer, had he had the impudence to ask, might have learned that the Englishman was a civil servant in the Foreign Office and the other the Assistant Cultural Attaché at the Soviet embassy.

He would never have learned, no matter how many records he checked, that the Foreign Office official was Deputy Head of Soviet Section at Century House, headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service; nor that the man who purported to arrange visits of the Georgian State Choir was the Deputy Rezident of the KGB within the mission. Both men knew they were there with the approval of their respective governments, that the meeting had been at the request of the Russians, and that the Chief of the SIS had reflected deeply before permitting it. The British had a fair idea what the Russian request would be.

As the remains of the lamb cutlets were cleared away and the waiter headed off for their coffee, the Russian asked his question.

“I’m afraid it is, Vitali Ivanovich,” replied the Englishman gravely. He spoke for several minutes, summarizing the findings of the Barnard forensic report. The Russian looked shaken.

“This is impossible,” said the Russian at last. “My government’s denials are wholly truthful.”

The British intelligence man was silent. He might have said that if you tell enough lies, when you finally tell the truth it is hard to keep an audience. But he did not. From his breast pocket he withdrew a photograph. The Russian studied it.

It was blown up many times from its original paper-clip size. In the photograph it was four inches long. A mini-det from Baikonur.

“This was found in the body?”

The Englishman nodded.

“Embedded in a fragment of bone, driven into the spleen.”

“I am not technically qualified,” said the Russian. “May I keep this?”

“That’s why I brought it,” said the SIS man.

For answer the Russian sighed and produced a sheet of paper of his own. The Englishman glanced at it and raised an eyebrow. It was an address in London. The Russian shrugged.

“A small gesture,” he said. “Something that came to our notice.”

The men settled up and parted company. Four hours later the Special Branch and the Anti-Terrorist squad jointly raided a semidetached house in Mill Hill, arresting all four members of an I.R. A. Active Service Unit and taking possession of enough bomb-making equipment to have created a dozen major attacks in the capital.

Quinn proposed to Kuyper that they find a bar still open and have a drink to celebrate their release. This time there was no objection. Kuyper bore no grudge for the fight in the bar; in fact he had been bored and the scrap had lifted his spirits. Having his fine paid for him was an added bonus. Moreover, his hangover needed the solace of a further beer or two, and if the tall man was paying…

Kuyper’s French was slow but passable. He seemed to understand more of the language than he could speak. Quinn introduced himself as Jacques Degueldre, a French national of Belgian parentage, departed these many years to work on ships in the French Merchant Navy.

By the second beer Kuyper noticed the tattoo on the back of Quinn’s hand, and proudly offered his own for comparison.

“Those were the days, eh?” Quinn grinned. Kuyper cackled at the memory.

“Broke a few heads in those days,” he recalled with satisfaction. “Where did you join?”

“Congo, 1962,” said Quinn.

Kuyper’s brow furrowed as he tried to work out how one could join the Spider organization in the Congo. Quinn leaned forward conspiràtorially.

“Fought there from ’62 to ’67,” he said. “With Schramme and Wauthier. They were all Belgians in those days down there. Mostly Flemings. Best fighters in the world.”

That pleased Kuyper. He nodded somberly at the truth of it all.

“Taught those black bastards a lesson, I can tell you.”

Kuyper liked that even more.

“I nearly went,” he said regretfully. He had evidently missed a major opportunity to kill a lot of Africans. “Only I was in jail.”

Quinn poured another beer, their seventh.

“My best mate down there came from here,” said Quinn. “There were four with the Spider tattoo. But he was the best. One night we all went into town, found a tattooist, and they initiated me, seeing as I’d already passed the tests, like. You might remember him from here. Big Paul.”

Kuyper let the name sink in slowly, thought for a while, furrowed his brow, and shook his head. “Paul who?”

“Damned if I can remember. We were both twenty then. Long time ago. We just called him Big Paul. Huge chap, over six feet six. Wide as a truck. Must have weighed two hundred fifty pounds. Damn… what was his last name…?”

Kuyper’s brow lightened.

“I remember him,” he said. “Yeah, useful puncher. He had to get out, you know. One step ahead of the fuzz. That’s why he went to Africa. The bastards wanted him on a rape charge. Hold on… Marchais. That was it, Paul Marchais.”

“Of course,” said Quinn. “Good old Paul.”

Steve Pyle, General Manager of the SAIB in Riyadh, got the letter from Andy Laing ten days after it was posted. He read it in the privacy of his office and when he put it down his hand was shaking. This whole thing was becoming a nightmare.

He knew the new records in the bank computer would stand up to electronic check-the colonel’s work at erasing one set and substituting another had been at near-genius level-but… Supposing anything happened to the Minister, Prince Abdul? Suppose the Ministry did their April audit and the Prince declined to admit he had sanctioned the fund-raising? And he, Steve Pyle, had only the colonel’s word…

He tried to reach Colonel Easterhouse by phone, but the man was away, unknown to Pyle, up in the mountainous North near Ha’il making plans with a Shi’ah Imam who believed that the hand of Allah was upon him and the shoes of the Prophet on his feet. It would be three days before Pyle could reach the colonel.

Quinn plied Kuyper with beer until mid-afternoon. He had to be careful. Too little and the man’s tongue would not be loosed enough to overcome his natural wariness and surliness; too much and he would simply pass out. He was that sort of drinker.

“I lost sight of him in ’67,” said Quinn, of their missing and mutual buddy Paul Marchais. “I got out when it all turned nasty for us mercs. I bet he never got out. Probably ended up dead in some rain ditch.”

Kuyper chortled, looked around, and tapped the side of his nose in the gesture of the foolish who think they know something special.

“He came back,” he said with glee. “He got out. Came back here.”

“To Belgium?”

“Yup-1968, must have been. I’d just got out of the nick. Saw him myself.”

Twenty-three years, thought Quinn. He could be anywhere. “Wouldn’t mind having a beer with Big Paul, for old times’ sake,” he mused.

Kuyper shook his head. “No chance,” he said drunkenly. “He’s disappeared. Had to, didn’t he, with the police thing and all that. Last I heard, he was working on a fun fair somewhere in the South.”

Five minutes later he was asleep. Quinn returned to the hotel, somewhat unsteadily. He, too, felt the need to sleep.

“Time to earn your keep,” he told Sam. “Go to the tourist information office and ask about fun fairs, theme parks, whatever. In the South of the country.”

It was 6:00 P.M.He slept for twelve hours.

“There are two,” Sam told him as they had breakfast in their room. “There’s Bellewaerde. That’s outside the town of Ieper in the extreme West, up near the coast and the French border. Or there’s Walibi outside Wavre. That’s south of Brussels. I’ve got the brochures.”

“I don’t suppose the brochures announce they might have an ex-Congo mercenary working there,” said Quinn. “That cretin said ‘South.’ We’ll try Walibi first. Plot a route and let’s check out.”

Just before ten he hoisted their luggage into the car. Once they picked up the motorway system it was another fast run, due south past Mechelen, around Brussels on the orbital ring road, and south again on the E.40 to Wavre. After that the theme park was signposted.

It was closed, of course. All fun fairs look sad in the grim chill of winter, with the dodgem cars huddled in canvas shrouds, the pavilions cold and empty, the gray rain tumbling off the girders of the roller coaster, and the wind running wet brown leaves into Ali Baba’s cave. Because of the rain, even maintenance work was suspended. There was no one in the administration office either. They repaired to a café farther down the road.

“What now?” asked Sam.

“Mr. Van Eyck, at his home,” said Quinn and asked for the local telephone directory.

The jovial face of the theme park’s director, Bertie Van Eyck, beamed out of the title page of the brochure, above his written welcome to all visitors. Being a Flemish name, and Wavre being deep in French-speaking country, there were only three Van Eycks listed. One was listed as Albert. Bertie. An address out of town. They lunched and drove out there, Quinn asking for directions several times.

It was a pleasant detached house on a long country road called the Chemin des Charrons. Mrs. Van Eyck answered the door and called for her husband, who soon appeared in cardigan and carpet slippers. From behind him came the sound of a sports program on the television.

Though Flemish-born, Bertie Van Eyck was in the tourist business and so was bilingual in French and Flemish. His English was also perfect. He summed up his visitors as Americans at a glance and said, “Yes, I am Van Eyck. Can I help you?”

“I sure hope you can, sir. Yes, I surely do,” said Quinn. He had dropped into his pose of folksy American innocence, which had fooled the receptionist at Blackwood’s Hotel. “Me and my lady wife here, we’re over in Belgium trying to look up relatives from the old country. See, my grandpa on my mother’s side, he came from Belgium, so I have cousins in these parts and I thought maybe if I could find one or two, that would be real nice to tell the family back Stateside…”

There was a roar from the television. Van Eyck looked visibly worried. The Belgian league leaders Tournai were playing French champions Sainte Étienne, a real needle match not to be missed by a football buff.

“I fear I am not related to any Americans,” he began.

“No, sir, you do not understand. I’ve been told up in Antwerp my mother’s nephew could be working in these parts, in a fun fair. Paul Marchais?”

Van Eyck’s brow furrowed and he shook his head.

“I know all my staff. We have no one of that name.”

“Great big guy. Big Paul, they call him. Six feet six, wide as this, tattoo on his left hand…”

“Ja, ja, but he is not Marchais. Paul Lefort, you mean.”

“Well now, maybe I do mean that,” said Quinn. “I seem to recall his ma, my mom’s sister, did marry twice, so probably his name was changed. Would you by any chance know where he lives?”

“Wait, please,”

Bertie Van Eyck was back in two minutes with a slip of paper. Then he fled back to his football match. Tournai had scored and he had missed it.

“I have never,” said Sam as they drove back into Wavre town, “heard such an appalling caricature of an American meathead on a visit to Europe.”

Quinn grinned.

“Worked, didn’t it?”

They found the boardinghouse of Madame Garnier behind the railway station. It was already getting dark. She was a desiccated little widow who began by telling Quinn that she had no rooms vacant, but relented when he told her he sought none, but simply a chance to talk to his old friend Paul Lefort. His French was so fluent she took him for a Frenchman.

“But he is out, monsieur. He has gone to work.”

“At the Walibi?” asked Quinn.

“But of course. The Big Wheel. He overhauls the engine for the winter months.”

Quinn made a Gallic gesture of frustration.

“Always I miss my friend,” he complained. “Early last month I came by the fair, and he was on vacation.”

“Ah, not vacation, monsieur. His poor mother died. A long illness. He nursed her to the end. In Antwerp.”

So that was what he had told them. For the second half of September and all of October he had been away from his dwelling and his workplace. I bet he was, thought Quinn, but he beamed and thanked Madame Gamier, and they drove back the four kilometers to the fun fair.

It was as abandoned as it had been six hours earlier, but now in the darkness it seemed like a ghost town. Quinn scaled the outer fence and helped Sam over after him. Against the deep velvet of the night sky he could see the inky girders of the Ferris wheel, the highest structure in the park.

They walked past the dismantled carrousel, whose antique wooden horses would now be in storage, the shuttered hot-dog stand. The Ferris wheel towered above them in the night.

“Stay here,” murmured Quinn. Leaving Sam in the shadows, he walked forward to the base of the machine.

“Lefort,” he called softly. There was no reply.

The double seats, hanging on their steel bars, were canvas-shrouded to protect the interiors. There was no one in or under the bottommost seats. Perhaps the man was crouching in the shadows waiting for them. Quinn glanced behind him.

To one side of the structure was the machine house, a big green steel shed housing the electric motor, and on top of it the control cabin in yellow. The doors of both opened to the touch. There was not a sound from the generator. Quinn touched it lightly. The machine contained a residual warmth.

He climbed to the control booth, flicked on a pilot light above the console, studied the levers, and depressed a switch. Beneath him the engine purred into life. He engaged the gears and moved the forward lever to “slow.” Ahead of him the giant wheel began to turn through the darkness. He found a floodlight control, touched it, and the area around the base of the wheel was bathed in white light.

Quinn descended and stood by the boarding ramp as the bucket seats swung silently by him. Sam joined him.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“There was a spare canvas seat-cover in the engine house,” he said. To their right, the booth that had once been at the zenith of the wheel began to appear. The man in it was not enjoying the ride.

He lay on his back across the double seat, his huge frame filling most of the space destined for two passengers. The hand with the tattoo lay limply across his belly, his head lolled back against the seat, sightless eyes staring up at the girders and the sky. He passed slowly in front of them, a few feet away. His mouth was half open, the nicotine-stained teeth glinting wetly in the floodlight. In the center of his forehead was a drilled round hole, its edges darkened by scorch marks. He passed and began his climb back into the night sky.

Quinn returned to the control booth and stopped the Ferris wheel where it had been, the single occupied booth at the very top out of sight in the darkness. He closed down the motor, switched off the lights, and locked both doors; took the ignition key and both door keys and hurled them far into the ornamental lake. The spare canvas seat-cover was locked inside the engine room. He was very thoughtful; Sam, when he glanced at her, looked pale and shaken.

On the road out of Wavre and back to the motorway they passed down the Chemin des Charrons again, past the house of the fun-fair director who had just lost a worker. It began to rain again.

Half a mile farther on they spotted the Domaine des Champs hotel, its lights beaming a welcome through the wet darkness.

When they had checked in, Quinn suggested Sam take her bath first. She made no objection. While she was in the tub he went through her luggage. The garment bag was no problem; the suitcase was soft-sided and took him thirty seconds to check out.

The square, hard-framed vanity case was heavy. He tipped out the collection of hair spray, shampoo, perfume, makeup kit, mirrors, brushes, and combs. It was still heavy. He measured its depth from rim to base on the outside and again on the inside. There are reasons why people hate to fly, and X-ray machines can be one of them. There was a two-inch difference in height. Quinn took his penknife and found the crack in the interior floor of the case.

Sam came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, brushing her wet hair. She was about to say something when she saw what lay on the bed, and stopped. Her face crumpled.

It was not what tradition calls a lady’s weapon. It was a Smith & Wesson long-barreled.38 revolver, and the shells laid on the coverlet beside it were hollow-point. A man-stopper.