The Negotiator

Chapter 13

“Quinn,” said Sam, “I swear to God, Brown sicked that piece onto me before he’d agree to let me come with you. In case things got rough, he said.”

Quinn nodded and toyed with his food, which was excellent. But he had lost his appetite.

“Look, you know it hasn’t been fired. And I haven’t been out of your sight since Antwerp.”

She was right, of course. Though he had slept for twelve hours the previous night, long enough for someone to motor from Antwerp to Wavre and back with time to spare, Madame Gamier had said her lodger left for work on the Ferris wheel that morning after breakfast. Sam had been in bed with Quinn when he woke at six.

But there are telephones in Belgium.

Sam had not got to Marchais before him; but someone had. Brown and his FBI hunters? Quinn knew they, too, were out in Europe, with the full backing of the national police forces behind them. But Brown would want his man alive, able to talk, able to identify the accomplices. Maybe. He pushed his plate away.

“Been a long day,” he said. “Let’s go sleep.”

But he lay in the darkness and stared at the ceiling. At midnight he slept; he had decided to believe her.

They left in the morning after breakfast. Sam took the wheel.

“Where to, O Master?”

“Hamburg,” said Quinn.

“Hamburg? What’s with Hamburg?”

“I know a man in Hamburg” was all he would say.

They took the motorways again, south to cut into the E.41 north of Namur, then the long die-straight highway due east, to pass Liège and cross the German frontier at Aachen. She turned north through the dense industrial sprawl of the Ruhr past Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen, to emerge finally into the agricultural plains of Lower Saxony.

Quinn spelled her at the wheel after three hours, and after two more they paused for fuel and a lunch of meaty Westphalian sausages and potato salad at a Gasthaus, one of the myriad that appear every two or three miles along the major German routes. It was already getting dark when they joined the columns of traffic moving through the southern suburbs of Hamburg.

The old Hanseatic port city on the Elbe was much as Quinn recalled it. They found a small, anonymous, but comfortable hotel behind the Steindammtor and checked in.

“I didn’t know you spoke German too,” said Sam when they reached their room.

“You never asked,” said Quinn. In fact he had taught himself the language years before, because in the days when the Baader-Meinhof gang was on the rampage, and then its successor, the Red Army Faction, was in business, kidnaps had been frequent in Germany, and often very bloody. Three times in the late seventies he had worked on cases in the Federal Republic.

He made two phone calls, but learned the man he wanted to speak to would not be in his office until the following morning.

General Vadim Vassilievich Kirpichenko stood in the outer office and waited. Despite his impassive exterior he felt a twinge of nervousness. Not that the man he wished to see was unapproachable; his reputation was the opposite and they had met several times, though always formally and in public. His qualms stemmed from another factor: To go over the heads of his superiors in the KGB, to ask for a personal and private meeting with the General Secretary without telling them, was risky. If it went wrong, badly wrong, his career would be on the line.

A secretary came to the door of the private office and stood there.

“The General Secretary will see you now, Comrade General,” he said.

The Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, senior professional intelligence officer of the espionage arm, walked straight down the long room toward the man who sat behind his desk at the end. If Mikhail Gorbachev was puzzled by the request for the meeting, he did not show it. He greeted the KGB general in comradely fashion, calling him by his first name and patronymic, and waited for him to proceed.

“You have received the report from our London station regarding the so-called evidence extracted by the British from the corpse of Simon Cormack.”

It was a statement, not a question. Kirpichenko knew the General Secretary must have seen it. He had demanded the results of the London meeting as soon as they came in. Gorbachev nodded shortly.

“And you will know, Comrade General Secretary, that our colleagues in the military deny the photograph was of a piece of their equipment.”

The rocket programs of Baikonur come under the military. Another nod. Kirpichenko bit the bullet.

“Four months ago I submitted a report received from my resident in Belgrade which I believed to be of such importance that I marked it for passing on by the Comrade Chairman to this office.”

Gorbachev stiffened. The matter was out. The officer in front of him, though a very senior man, was going behind Kryuchkov’s back. It had better be serious, Comrade General, he thought. His face remained impassive.

“I expected to receive instructions to investigate the matter further. None came. It occurred to me to wonder if you ever saw the August report-it is, after all, the vacation month…”

Gorbachev recalled his broken vacation. Those Jewish refuseniks being hammered right in front of the whole Western media on a Moscow street.

“You have a copy of that report with you, Comrade General?” he asked quietly. Kirpichenko took two folded sheets from his inner jacket pocket. He always wore civilian clothes, hated uniforms.

“There may be no linkage at all, General Secretary. I hope not. But I do not like coincidences. I am trained not to like them.”

Mikhail Gorbachev studied the report from Major Kerkorian in Belgrade, and his brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“Who are these men?” he asked.

“Five American industrialists. The man Miller we have tagged as an extreme right-winger, a man who loathes our country. The man Scanlon is an entrepreneur, what the Americans call a hustler. The other three manufacture extremely sophisticated weaponry for the Pentagon. With the technical details that they carry in their heads alone, they should never have exposed themselves to the danger of possible interrogation by visiting our soil.”

“But they came?” asked Gorbachev. “Covertly, by military transport? To land at Odessa?”

“That’s the coincidence,” said the spy chief. “I checked with the Air Force traffic control people. As the Antonov left Romanian air space to enter Odessa control area, it varied its own flight plan, overflew Odessa, and touched down at Baku.”

“Azerbaijan? What the hell were they doing in Azerbaijan?”

“Baku, Comrade General Secretary, is the headquarters of High Command South.”

“But that’s a top-secret military base. What did they do there?”

“I don’t know. They disappeared when they landed, spent sixteen hours inside the base, and flew back to the same Yugoslav air base in the same plane. Then they went back to America. No boar-hunting, no vacation.”

“Anything else?”

“One last coincidence. On that day, Marshal Kozlov was on an inspection visit of the Baku headquarters. Just routine. So it says.”

When he had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev stopped all calls and reflected on what he had learned. It was bad, all bad, almost all. There was one recompense. His adversary, the diehard general who ran the KGB, had made a very serious mistake.

The bad news was not confined to New Square, Moscow. It pervaded the lush top-floor office of Steve Pyle in Riyadh. Colonel Easterhouse put down the letter from Andy Laing.

“I see,” he said.

“Christ, that little shit could still land us all in deep trouble,” protested Pyle. “Maybe the records in the computer do show something different from what he says. But if he goes on saying it, maybe the Ministry accountants will want to have a look, a real look. Before April. I mean, I know this is all sanctioned by Prince Abdul himself, and for a good cause, but hell, you know these people. Supposing he withdraws his protection, says he knows nothing of it… They can do that, you know. Look, maybe you should just replace that money, find the funds someplace else…”

Easterhouse continued to stare out over the desert with his pale-blue eyes. It’s worse than that, my friend, he thought. There is no connivance by Prince Abdul, no sanction by the Royal House. And half the money has gone, disbursed to bankroll the preparations for a coup that would one day bring order and discipline, his order and discipline, to the crazed economics and unbalanced political structures of the entire Middle East. He doubted the House of Sa’ud would see it that way; or the State Department.

“Calm yourself, Steve,” he said reassuringly. “You know whom I represent here. The matter will be taken care of. I assure you.”

Pyle saw him out but was not calmed. Even the CIA fouled up sometimes, he reminded himself too late. Had he known more, and read less fiction, he would have known that a senior officer of the Company could not have the rank of colonel. Langley does not take ex-Army officers. But he did not know. He just worried.

On his way down, Easterhouse realized he was going to have to return to the States for consultations. It was time, anyway. All was in place, ticking like a patient time bomb. He was even ahead of schedule. He ought to give his patrons a situation report. While there he would mention Andy Laing. Surely the man could be bought off, persuaded to hold his fire, at least until April?

He was unaware how wrong he was.

“Dieter, you owe me, and I’m calling in the marker.”

Quinn sat with his contact in a bar two blocks away from the office where the man worked. Sam listened and the contact looked worried.

“But, Quinn, please try to understand. It is not a question of house rules. Federal law itself forbids non-employees to have access to the morgue.”

Dieter Lutz was a decade younger than Quinn, but far more prosperous. He had the gloss of a flourishing career. He was in fact a senior staff reporter with Der Spiegel, Germany’s biggest and most prestigious current affairs magazine.

It had not always been so. Once he had been a freelancer, scratching a living, trying to be one step ahead of the opposition when the big stories broke. In those days there had been a kidnapping that had made every German headline day after day. At the most delicate point of the negotiations with the kidnappers Lutz had inadvertently leaked something that almost destroyed the deal.

The angry police had wanted to know where the leak had come from. The kidnap victim was a big industrialist, a party benefactor, and Bonn had been leaning on the police heavily. Quinn had known who the guilty party was, but had kept silent. The damage was done, had to be repaired, and the breaking of a young reporter with too much enthusiasm and too little wisdom was not going to help matters.

“I don’t need to break in,” said Quinn patiently. “You’re on the staff. You have the right to go and get the material, if it’s there.”

The head offices of Der Spiegel are at 19 Brandstwiete, a short street running between the Dovenfleet canal and the Ost-West-Strasse. Beneath the modern eleven-story building slumbers the biggest newspaper morgue in Europe. More than 18 million documents are filed in it. Computerizing the files had been going on for a decade before Quinn and Lutz took their beer that November afternoon in the Dom-Strasse bar. Lutz sighed.

“All right,” he said. “What is his name?”

“Paul Marchais,” said Quinn. “Belgian mercenary. Fought in the Congo 1964 to 1968. And any general background on the events of that period.”

Julian Hayman’s files in London might have had something on Marchais, but Quinn had not then been able to give him a name. Lutz was back an hour later with a file.

“These must not pass out of my possession,” he said. “And they must be back by nightfall.”

“Crap,” said Quinn amiably. “Go back to work. Return in four hours. I’ll be here. You can have it then.”

Lutz left. Sam had not understood the talk in German, but now she leaned over to see what Quinn had got.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“I want to see if the bastard had any pals, any really close friends,” said Quinn. He began to read.

The first piece was from an Antwerp newspaper of 1965, a general review of local men who had signed on to fight in the Congo. For Belgium it was a highly emotional issue in those days-the stories of the Simba rebels raping, torturing, and slaughtering priests, nuns, planters, missionaries, women, and children, many of them Belgian, had endowed the mercenaries who put down the Simba revolt with a kind of glamour. The article was in Flemish, with a German translation attached.

Marchais, Paul: born in Liège 1943, son of a Walloon father and Flemish mother-that would account for the French-sounding name of a boy who grew up in Antwerp. Father killed in the liberation of Belgium in 1944/45. Mother returned to her native Antwerp.

Slum boyhood, spent around the docks. In trouble with the police from early teens. A string of minor convictions to spring 1964. Turned up in the Congo with Jacques Schramme’s Leopard Group. There was no mention of the rape charge; perhaps the Antwerp police were keeping quiet in the hope he would show up again and be arrested.

The second piece was a passing mention. In 1966 he had apparently quit Schramme and joined the Fifth Commando, by then headed by John Peters, who had succeeded Mike Hoare. Principally manned by South Africans-Peters had quickly ousted most of Hoare’s British. So Marchais’s Flemish could have enabled him to survive among Afrikaners, since Afrikaans and Flemish are fairly similar.

The other two pieces mentioned Marchais, or simply a giant Belgian called Big Paul, staying on after the disbanding of the Fifth Commando and the departure of Peters, and rejoining Schramme in time for the 1967 Stanleyville mutiny and the long march to Bukavu.

Finally Lutz had included five photocopies of sheets extracted from Anthony Modeler’s classic, Histoire des Mercenaires, from which Quinn could fill in the events of Marchais’s last months in the Congo.

In late July 1967, unable to hold Stanleyville, Schramme’s group set off for the border and cut a swath clean through all opposition until they reached Bukavu, once a delightful watering hole for Belgians, a cool resort on the edge of a lake. Here they holed up.

They held out for three months until they finally ran out of ammunition. Then they marched over the bridge across the lake into the neighboring republic of Ruanda.

Quinn had heard the rest. Though out of ammunition they terrified the Ruandan government, which thought they might, if not appeased, simply terrorize the entire country. The Belgian consul was overwhelmed. Many of the Belgian mercenaries had lost their identity papers, accidentally or on purpose. The harassed consul issued temporary Belgian ID cards according to the name he was given. That would be where Marchais became Paul Lefort. It would not be beyond the wit of man to convert those papers into permanent ones at a later date, especially if a Paul Lefort had once existed and died down there.

On April 23, 1968, two Red Cross airplanes finally repatriated the mercenaries. One plane flew direct to Brussels with all the Belgians on board. All except one. The Belgian public was prepared to hail their mercenaries as heroes; not so the police. They checked everyone descending from the plane against their own wanted lists. Marchais must have taken the other DC-6, the one that dropped off human cargoes at Pisa, Zurich, and Paris. Between them the two planes carried 123 mixed European and South African mercenaries back to Europe.

Quinn was convinced Marchais had been on the second plane, that he had disappeared into twenty-three years of dead-end jobs on fairgrounds until being recruited for his last foreign assignment. What Quinn wanted was the name of one other who had been with him on that last assignment. There was nothing in the papers to give a clue. Lutz returned.

“One last thing,” said Quinn.

“I can’t,” protested Lutz. “There’s already talk that I’m writing a background piece on mercenaries. I’m not-I’m on the Common Market meeting of agriculture Ministers.”

“Broaden your horizons,” suggested Quinn. “How many German mercenaries were in the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, the siege of Bukavu, and the internment camp in Ruanda.”

Lutz took notes.

“I have a wife and kids to go home to, you know.”

“Then you’re a lucky man,” said Quinn.

The area of information he had asked for was narrower, and Lutz was back from the morgue in twenty minutes. This time he stayed while Quinn read.

What Lutz had brought him was the entire file on German mercenaries from 1960 onward. A dozen at least. Wilhelm had been in the Congo, at Watsa. Dead of wounds on the Paulis road ambush. Rolf Steiner had been in Biafra; still living in Munich, but was never in the Congo. Quinn turned the page. Siegfried “Congo” Muller had been through the Congo from start to finish; died in South Africa in 1983.

There were two other Germans, both living in Nuremberg, addresses given, but both had left Africa in the spring of 1967. That left one.

Werner Bernhardt had been with the Fifth Commando but skipped to join Schramme when it was disbanded. He had been in the mutiny, on the march to Bukavu, and in the siege of the lakeside resort. There was no address for him.

“Where would he be now?” asked Quinn.

“If it’s not listed, he disappeared,” said Lutz. “That was 1968, you know. This is 1991. He could be dead. Or anywhere. People like that… you know… Central or South America, South Africa…”

“Or here in Germany,” suggested Quinn.

For answer, Lutz borrowed the bar’s telephone directory. There were four columns of Bernhardts. And that was just for Hamburg. There are ten states in the Federal Republic, and they all have several such directories. “If he’s listed at all,” said Lutz.

“Criminal records?” asked Quinn.

“Unless it’s federal, there are ten separate police authorities to go through,” said Lutz. “You know that, since the war, when the Allies were kind enough to write our constitution for us, everything is decentralized. So we can never have another Hitler. Makes tracking someone down enormous fun. I know-it’s part of my job. But a man like this… very little chance. If he wants to disappear, he disappears. This one does, or he’d have given some interview in twenty-three years, appeared in the papers. But, nothing. If he had, he’d be in our files.”

Quinn had one last question. Where had he originally come from, this Bernhardt? Lutz scanned the sheets.

“Dortmund,” he said. “He was born and raised in Dortmund. Maybe the police there know something. But they won’t tell you. Civil rights, you see-we’re very keen on civil rights in Germany.”

Quinn thanked him and let him go. He and Sam wandered down the street looking for a promising restaurant.

“Where do we go next?” she asked.

“Dortmund,” he said. “I know a man in Dortmund.”

“Darling,” she said, “you know a man everywhere.”

In the middle of November, Michael Odell faced President Cormack alone in the Oval Office. The Vice President was shocked by the change in his old friend. Far from having recovered since the funeral, John Cormack seemed to have shrunk.

It was not simply the physical appearance that worried Odell; the former power of concentration was gone, the old incisiveness dissipated. He tried to draw the President’s attention to the appointments diary.

“Ah, yes,” said Cormack, with an attempt at revival. “Let’s have a look.”

He studied the page for Monday.

“John, it’s Tuesday,” said Odell gently.

As the pages turned Odell saw broad red lines through canceled appointments. There was a NATO Head of State in town. The President should greet him on the White House lawn; not negotiate with him-the European would understand that-but just greet him.

Besides, the issue was not whether the European leader would understand; the problem was whether the American media would understand if the President failed to show. Odell feared they might understand only too well.

“Stand in for me, Michael,” pleaded Cormack.

The Vice President nodded. “Sure,” he said gloomily. It was the tenth canceled appointment in a week. The paperwork could be handled in-house; there was a good team at the White House nowadays. Cormack had chosen well. But the American people invest a lot of power in that one man who is President, Head of State, Chief Executive, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Under certain conditions. One is that they have the right to see him in action-often. It was the Attorney General who articulated Odell’s worries an hour later in the Situation Room.

“He can’t just sit there forever,” said Walters.

Odell had reported to them all on the state in which he had found the President. There were just the inner six of them present-Odell, Stannard, Walters, Donaldson, Reed, and Johnson-plus Dr. Armitage, who had been asked to join them as an adviser.

“The man’s a husk, a shadow of what he once was. Dammit, only five weeks ago,” said Odell. His listeners were gloomy and depressed.

Dr. Armitage explained that President Cormack was suffering from deep postshock trauma, from which he seemed unable to recover.

“What does that mean, minus the jargon?” snapped Odell.

What it meant, said Armitage patiently, was that the Chief Executive was stricken by a personal grief so profound that it was depriving him of the will to continue.

In the aftermath of the kidnapping, the psychiatrist reported, there had been a similar trauma, but not so profound. Then the problem had been the stress and anxiety stemming from ignorance and worry-not knowing what was happening to his son, whether the boy was alive or dead, in good shape or maltreated, or when or if he would be freed.

During the kidnap the load had lightened slightly. He had learned indirectly from Quinn that at least his son was alive. As the exchange neared, he had recovered somewhat.

But the death of his only son, and the savagely brutal manner of it, had been like a body blow. Too introverted a man to share easily, too inhibited to express his grief, he had settled into an abiding melancholy that was sapping his mental and moral strength, those qualities humans call the will.

The committee listened morosely. They relied on the psychiatrist to tell them what was in their President’s mind. On the few occasions when they saw him, they needed no doctor to tell them what they were seeing. A man lackluster and distraught; tired to the point of deep exhaustion, old before his time, devoid of energy or interest. There had been Presidents before who had been ill in office; the machinery of state could cope. But nothing like this. Even without the growing media questioning, several present were also beginning to ask themselves whether John Cormack could, or should, continue much longer in office.

Bill Walters listened to the psychiatrist with an expressionless face. At forty-four he was the youngest man in the Cabinet, a tough and brilliant corporate lawyer from California. John Cormack had brought him to Washington as Attorney General to use his talents against organized crime, much of it now hiding behind corporate façades. Those who admired him admitted he could be ruthless, albeit in pursuit of the supremacy of the law; those who were his enemies, and he had made a few, feared his relentlessness.

He was personable to look at, sometimes almost boyish, with his youthful clothes and blow-dried, carefully barbered hair. But behind the charm there could be a coldness, an impassivity that hid the inner man. Those who had negotiated with him noticed that the only sign he was homing in was that he ceased to blink. Then his stare could be unnerving. When Dr. Armitage had left the room Walters broke the grim silence.

“It may be, gentlemen, we will have to look seriously at the Twenty-fifth.”

They all knew about it, but he had been the first to invoke its availability. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet may together, in writing, communicate to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their view that the President is no longer able to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, to be precise.

“No doubt you’ve memorized it, Bill,” snapped Odell.

“Easy, Michael,” said Jim Donaldson. “Bill just mentioned it.”

“He would resign before that,” said Odell.

“Yes,” said Walters soothingly. “On health grounds, with absolute justification, and with the sympathy and gratitude of the nation. We just might have to put it to him. That’s all.”

“Not yet, surely,” protested Stannard.

“Hear, hear. There is time,” said Reed. “The grief will pass, surely. He will recover. Become his old self.”

“And if not?” asked Walters. His unblinking stare went across the face of every man in the room. Michael Odell rose abruptly. He had been in some political fights in his time, but there was a coldness about Walters he had never liked. The man did not drink, and by the look of his wife he probably made love by the book.

“Okay, we’ll keep an eye on it,” he said. “Now, however, we’ll defer decision on that. Right, gentlemen?”

Everyone else nodded and rose. They would defer consideration of the Twenty-fifth. For now.

It was a combination of the rich wheat and barley lands of Lower Saxony and Westphalia to the north and east, plus the crystal-clear water trickling out of the nearby hills, that first made Dortmund a beer town. That was in 1293, when King Adolf of Nassau gave the citizens of the small town in the southern tip of Westphalia the right to brew.

Steel, insurance, banking, and trade came later, much later. Beer was the foundation, and for centuries the Dortmunders drank most of it themselves. The industrial revolution of the middle and late nineteenth century provided the third ingredient for the grain and the water-the thirsty workers of the factories that mushroomed along the valley of the Ruhr. At the head of the valley, with views southwest as far as the towering chimneys of Essen, Duisburg, and Düsseldorf, the city stood between the grain prairies and the customers. The city fathers took advantage; Dortmund became the beer capital of Europe.

Seven giant breweries ruled the trade: Brinkhoff, Kronen, DAB, Stifts, Ritter, Thier, and Moritz. Hans Moritz was head of the second-smallest brewery and head of the dynasty that went back eight generations. But he was the last individual to own and control his empire personally, and that made him very seriously rich. It was partly his wealth and partly the fame of his name that had caused the savages of the Baader-Meinhof gang to snatch his daughter Renata ten years before.

Quinn and Sam checked into the Roemischer Kaiser Hotel in the center of the city and Quinn tried the telephone directory with little hope. The home number, of course, was not listed. He wrote a personal letter on the hotel stationery, called a cab, and had it delivered to the brewery’s head office.

“Do you think your friend will still be here?” asked Sam.

“He’ll be here, all right,” said Quinn. “Unless he’s away abroad, or at any of his six homes.”

“He likes to move around a lot,” observed Sam.

“Yeah. He feels safer that way. The French Riviera, the Caribbean, the ski chalet, the yacht…”

He was right in supposing that the villa on Lake Constanz had long been sold; that was where the snatch had taken place.

He was also in luck. They were eating dinner when Quinn was called to the phone.

“Herr Quinn?”

He recognized the voice, deep and cultured. The man spoke four languages, could have been a concert pianist. Maybe should have been.

“Herr Moritz. Are you in town?”

“You remember my house? You should. You spent two weeks in it, once.”

“Yes, sir. I remember it. I didn’t know whether you still retained it.”

“Still the same. Renata loves it, wouldn’t let me change it. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to see you.”

“Tomorrow morning. Coffee at ten-thirty.”

“I’ll be there.”

They drove out of Dortmund due south along the Ruhrwald Strasse until the industrial and commercial sprawl dropped away behind and they entered the outer suburb of Syburg. The hills began, rolling and forested, and the estates situated within the forests contained the homes of the wealthy.

The Moritz mansion was set in four acres of parkland down a lane off the Hohensyburg Strasse. Across the valley the Syburger monument stared down the Ruhr toward the spires of Sauerland.

The place was a fortress. Chain-link fencing surrounded the entire plot and the gates were high-tensile steel, remote-controlled and with a TV camera discreetly attached to a pine tree nearby. Someone watched Quinn climb out of the car and announce himself through the steel grille beside the gates. Two seconds later the gates swung open on electric motors. When the car passed through they closed again.

“Herr Moritz enjoys his privacy,” said Sam.

“He has reason to,” said Quinn.

He parked on the tan gravel in front of the white stucco house and a uniformed steward let them in. Hans Moritz received them in the elegant sitting room, where coffee waited in a sterling-silver pot. His hair was whiter than Quinn recalled, his face more lined, but the handshake was as firm and the smile as grave.

They had hardly sat down when the door opened and a young woman stood there hesitantly. Moritz’s face lit up. Quinn turned to look.

She was pretty in a vacuous sort of way, shy to the point of self-effacement. Both her little fingers ended in stumps. She must be twenty-five now, Quinn thought.

“Renata, kitten, this is Mr. Quinn. You remember Mr. Quinn? No, of course not.”

Moritz rose, crossed to his daughter, murmured a few words in her ear, kissed the top of her head. She turned and left. Moritz resumed his seat. His face was impassive, but the twisting of his fingers revealed his inner turmoil.

“She… um… never really recovered, you know. The therapy goes on. She prefers to stay inside, seldom goes out. She will not marry… after what those animals did…”

There was a photograph on the Steinbeck grand; of a laughing, mischievous fourteen-year-old on skis. That was a year before the kidnapping. A year afterward Moritz had found his wife in the garage, the exhaust gases pumping down the rubber tube into the closed car. Quinn had been told in London.

Moritz made an effort. “I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”

“I’m trying to find a man. One who came from Dortmund long ago. He may still be here, or in Germany, or dead, or abroad. I don’t know.”

“Well, there are agencies, specialists. Of course, I can engage…”

Quinn realized that Moritz thought he needed money to engage private investigators.

“Or you could ask through the Einwohnermeldeant.”

Quinn shook his head.

“I doubt if they would know. He almost certainly does not willingly cooperate with the authorities. But I believe the police might keep surveillance on him.”

Technically speaking, German citizens who move to a new home within the country are required by law to notify the Inhabitants Registration Office of changes of address, both where from and where to the move took place. Like most bureaucratic systems, this works better in theory than in practice. The ones the police and/or the income tax authorities would like to contact are often those who decline to oblige.

Quinn sketched in the background of the man Werner Bernhardt.

“If he is still in Germany, he would be of an age to be in employment,” said Quinn. “Unless he has changed his name, that will mean he has a social security card, pays income tax-or someone pays it for him. Because of his background he might have been in trouble with the law.”

Moritz thought it over.

“If he is a law-abiding citizen-and even a former mercenary might never have committed an offense inside Germany-he would not have a police record,” he said. “As for the income tax and social security people, they would regard this as privileged information, not to be divulged to an inquiry from you, or even me.”

“They would respond to a police inquiry,” said Quinn. “I thought you might perhaps have a friend or two in the city or state police.”

“Ah,” said Moritz. Only he would ever know just how much he had donated to the police charities of the city of Dortmund and the state of Westphalia. As in any country in the world, money is power and both buy information. “Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll phone you.”

He was true to his word, but his tone when he called the Roemischer Kaiser the following morning after breakfast was distant, as if someone had given him a warning along with the information.

“Werner Richard Bernhardt,”he said as if reading from notes, “aged forty-eight, former Congo mercenary. Yes, he’s alive, here in Germany. He works on the personal staff of Horst Lenzlinger, the arms dealer.”

“Thank you. Where would I find Herr Lenzlinger?”

“Not easily. He has an office in Bremen but lives outside Oldenburg, in Ammerland County. Like me, a very private man. There the resemblance ends. Be careful of Lenzlinger, Herr Quinn. My sources tell me that despite the respectable veneer he is still a gangster.”

He gave Quinn both addresses.

“Thank you,” said Quinn as he noted them. There was an embarrassed pause on the line.

“One last thing. I am sorry. A message from the Dortmund police. Please leave Dortmund. Do not come back. That is all.”

The word of Quinn’s role in what had happened on the side of a Buckinghamshire road was spreading. Soon doors would start to close in many places.

“Feel like driving?” he asked Sam when they were packed and checked out.

“Sure. Where to?”

“Bremen.” She studied the map.

“Good God, it’s halfway back to Hamburg.”

“Two thirds, actually. Take the E.37 for Osnabrück and follow the signs. You’ll love it.”

That evening Colonel Robert Easterhouse flew out of Jiddah for London, changed planes, and flew on directly to Houston. On the flight across the Atlantic he had access to the whole range of American newspapers and magazines.

Three of them carried articles on the same theme, and the reasoning of all the writers was remarkably similar. The presidential election of November 1992 was now just twelve months away. In the normal course of events the Republican party choice would be no choice at all. President Cormack would secure the nomination unopposed for a second term of office.

But the course of events these past six weeks had not been normal, the scribes told their readers-as if they needed to be told. They went on to describe the effect on President Cormack of the loss of his son as traumatic and disabling.

All three writers listed a chronicle of lapses of concentration, canceled speaking engagements, and abandoned public appearances in the previous fortnight since the funeral on Nantucket island. “The Invisible Man,” one of them called the Chief Executive.

The summary of each was also similar. Would it not be better, they wrote, if the President stepped down in favor of Vice President Odell, giving Odell a clear twelve months in office to prepare for reelection in November ’92?

After all, reasoned Time, the main plank of Cormack’s foreign, defense, and economic policy, the shaving of $100 billion off the defense budget with a matching reduction by the U.S.S.R., was already dead in the water.

“Belly up” was how Newsweek described the chances of the treaty’s ratification by the Senate after the Christmas recess.

Easterhouse landed at Houston close to midnight, after twelve hours in the air and two in London. The headlines on the newsstands in the Houston airport were more overt: Michael Odell was a Texan and would be the first Texan President since Lyndon Johnson if he stepped into Cormack’s shoes.

The conference with the Alamo Group was scheduled in two days’ time in the Pan-Global Building. A company limousine took Easterhouse to the Remington, where a suite had been reserved for him. Before turning in, he caught a late news summary. Again, the question was being asked.

The colonel had not been informed of Plan Travis. He did not need to know. But he did know that a change of Chief Executive would remove the last stumbling block to the fruition of all his endeavors-the securing of Riyadh and the Hasa oil fields by an American Rapid Deployment Force sent in by a President prepared to do it.

Fortuitous, he thought as he drifted into sleep. Very fortuitous.

The small brass plaque on the wall of the converted warehouse beside the paneled teak door said simply: THOR SPEDITION AG. Lenzlinger apparently hid the true nature of his business behind the façade of a trucking company, though there were no rigs to be seen and the smell of diesel had never penetrated the carpeted privacy of the fourth-floor suite of offices to which Quinn mounted.

There was an intercom to seek admittance from street level, and another with closed-circuit TV camera at the end of the corridor on the fourth floor. The conversion of the warehouse in a side street off the old docks-where the river Weser pauses on its way to the North Sea to provide the reason for old Bremen’s existence-had not been cheap.

The secretary, when he met her in the outer office, seemed typecast. Had Lenzlinger had any trucks, she could easily have kick-started them.

“Ja, bitte?”she asked, though her gaze made plain it was he, not she, who was the supplicant.

“I would like the opportunity of speaking with Herr Lenzlinger,” said Quinn.

She took his name and vanished into the private sanctum, closing the door behind her. Quinn had the impression that the mirror set into the partition wall was one-way. She returned after thirty seconds.

“And your business, please, Herr Quinn.”

“I would like the chance to meet an employee of Herr Lenzlinger, a certain Werner Bernhardt,”he said.

She went backstage again. This time she was gone more than a minute. When she returned she closed the door firmly on whoever sat within.

“I regret, Herr Lenzlinger is not available to speak with you,” she said. It sounded final.

“I’ll wait,” said Quinn.

She gave him a look that regretted she had been too young to run a labor camp with him in it, and disappeared a third time. When she returned to her desk she ignored him and began to type with concentrated venom.

Another door into the reception area opened and a man came out. The sort who might well have been a truck driver; a walking refrigerator-freezer. The pale-gray suit was well enough cut almost to conceal the masses of beefy muscle beneath; the short, blow-dried hairstyle, aftershave, and veneer of civility were not cheap. Under all that he was pure knuckle-fighter.

“Herr Quinn,” he said quietly, “Herr Lenzlinger is not available to see you or answer your questions.”

“Now, no,” agreed Quinn.

“Not now, not ever, Mr. Quinn. Please go.”

Quinn had the impression the interview was over. He descended to the street and crossed the cobbles to where Sam waited in the car.

“He’s not available in working hours,” said Quinn. “I’ll have to see him at his home. Let’s get to Oldenburg.”

Another very old city, its inland port trading for centuries on the Hunte River, it was once the seat of the Counts of Oldenburg. The inner core, the Old Town, is still girdled by sections of the former city wall and a moat made up of a series of linked canals.

Quinn found the sort of hotel he preferred, a quiet inn with a walled courtyard called the Graf von Oldenburg, in Holy Ghost Street.

Before the shops closed he had time to visit a hardware store and a camping shop; from a kiosk he bought the largest-scale map of the surrounding area he could find. After dinner he puzzled Sam by spending an hour in their room, tying knots every twenty inches down the length of the fifty feet of rope he had bought from the hardware shop, finally tying a three-prong grapnel to the end.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I suspect, up a tree” was all he would say. He left her still asleep in the predawn darkness.

He found the Lenzlinger domain an hour later, due west of the city, south of the great Bad Zwischenahn Lake, between the villages of Portsloge and Janstrat. It was all flat country, running without a mountain due west across the Ems to become northern Holland sixty miles farther on.

Intersected by myriad rivers and canals, draining the wet plain toward the sea, the country between Oldenburg and the border is studded with forests of beech, oak, and conifers. Lenzlinger’s estate lay between two forests, a former fortified manor now set in its own five-acre park, the whole bounded by an eight-foot wall.

Quinn, dressed from head to toe in camouflage green, his face masked with scrim netting, spent the morning lying along the branch of a mighty oak in the woods across the road from the estate. His high-definition binoculars showed him all he needed to know.

The gray stone manor and its outbuildings formed an L shape. The shorter arm was the main house, with two stories plus attics. The longer arm had once been the stables, now converted to self-contained apartments for the staff. Quinn counted four domestic staff: a butler/steward, a male cook, and two cleaning women. It was the security arrangements that held his attention. They were numerous and expensive.

Lenzlinger had started as a young hustler in the late fifties, selling penny packets of war surplus weaponry to all comers. Without a license, his end-user certificates were forged and his questions nil. It was the age of the anticolonial wars and Third World revolutions. But operating on the fringe, he had made a living, not much more.

His big break came with the Nigerian civil war. He swindled the Biafrans of more than half a million dollars; they paid for bazookas but received cast-iron rain pipes. He was right in supposing they were too busy fighting for their lives to come north to settle accounts.

In the early seventies he got a license to trade-how much that cost him Quinn could only guess-which enabled him to supply half a dozen African, Central American, and Middle Eastern war groups, and still have time to conclude the occasional illegal deal (much more lucrative) with the E.T.A., the I.R.A., and a few others. He bought from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and North Korea, all needing hard currency, and sold to the desperate. By 1985 he was parlaying new North Korean hardware to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war. Even some governmental intelligence agencies had used his stocks when they wanted no-source weaponry for arm’s-length revolutions.

This career had made him very wealthy. It had also made him a lot of enemies. He intended to enjoy the former and frustrate the latter.

All the windows, up and down, were electronically protected. Though he could not see the devices, Quinn knew that the doors would be, as well. That was the inner ring. The outer ring was the wall. It ran right around the estate without a break, topped with two strands of razor-wire, the trees inside the park lopped back to prevent any overhanging branches. Something else, glinting in the occasional ray of wintry sunshine. A tight wire, like piano wire, running along the top of the wall, supported by ceramic studs; electrified, linked to the alarm system, sensitive to the touch.

Between the wall and the house was open ground-fifty yards of it at the closest point, swept by cameras, patrolled by dogs. He watched the two Dobermans, muzzled and leashed, being given their morning constitutional. The dog handler was too young to be Bernhardt.

Quinn observed the black-windowed Mercedes 600 leave for Bremen at five to nine. The walking refrigerator-freezer ushered a muffled, fur-hatted figure into the rear seat, took the front passenger seat for himself, and the chauffeur swept them out through the steel gates and onto the road. They passed just below the branch where Quinn lay.

Quinn reckoned on four bodyguards, maybe five. The chauffeur looked like one; the refrigerator-freezer, definitely. That left the dog handler and probably another inside the house. Bernhardt?

The security nerve center seemed to be a ground-floor room where the staff wing joined the main house. The dog handler came and went to it several times, using a small door that gave directly onto the lawns. Quinn surmised that the night guard could probably control the floodlights, the TV monitors, and the dogs from within. By noon Quinn had his plan. He descended from his tree, and returned to Oldenburg.

He and Sam spent the afternoon shopping, he for a rental van and a variety of tools, she to complete a list he had given her.

“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I could wait outside.”

“No. One vehicle on that country lane in the middle of the night is bad enough. Two is a traffic jam.”

He told her what he wanted her to do.

“Just be there when I arrive,” he said. “I suspect I may be in a hurry.”

He was outside the stone wall, parked in the lane, at 2:00 A.M. His high-roofed panel van was driven close enough to the wall for him to be able to see over it clearly when he stood on the van’s roof. The side of the van, in case of inquiry, bore the logo, created in masking tape, of a TV aerial installer. That would also account for the telescoping aluminum ladder fixed to the roof rack.

When his head came over the wall he could see by the light of the moon the leaf-bare trees of the park, the lawns running up to the house, and the dim light from the window of the guard’s control room.

The spot he had chosen for the diversion was where a single tree inside the park grew only eight feet from the wall. He stood on the roof of the van and swung the small plastic box on the end of the fishing line gently ’round and ’round. When it had enough momentum he let go the line. The plastic case curved out in a gentle parabola, went into the branches of the tree, and fell toward the ground. The fishing line jerked it up short. Quinn paid out enough line to leave the box swinging from the tree just eight feet above the turf of the park, then tied off the line.

He started the engine and ran the van quietly down the wall a hundred yards, to a point opposite the guard’s control house. The van now had steel brackets bolted to its sides, something that would perplex the rental company in the morning. Quinn slotted the ladder into them so that the aluminum structure jutted high above the wall. From its topmost rung he could jump forward and down into the park, avoiding the razor-wire and sensor cord. He climbed the ladder, attached his escape rope to the topmost rung, and waited. He saw the loping shape of a Doberman cross a patch of moonlight inside the park.

The sounds, when they came, were too low for him to hear, but the dogs heard them. He saw one stop, pause, listen, and then race off toward the spot where the black box swung from its nylon line among the trees. The other followed seconds later. Two cameras on the house wall swiveled to follow them. They did not return.

After five minutes the narrow door opened and a man stood there. Not the morning’s dog handler, the night guard.

“Lothar, Wotan, was ist denn los?” he called softly. Now he and Quinn could hear the Dobermans growling, snarling with rage, somewhere in the tree line. The man went back, studied his monitors, but could see nothing. He emerged with a flashlight, drew a handgun, and went after the dogs. Leaving the door unlocked.

Quinn came off the top of the ladder like a shadow, forward and out, then twelve feet down. He took the landing in a paratroop roll, came up and ran through the trees, across the lawn, and into the control house, turning and locking the door from the inside.

A glance at the TV monitors told him the guard was still trying to retrieve his Dobermans a hundred yards up along the wall. Eventually the man would see the tape recorder hanging from its twine eight feet above the ground, the dogs leaping in rage to try to attack it as the recorder uttered its endless stream of growls and snarls at them. It had taken Quinn an hour in the hotel room to prepare that tape, to the consternation of the other guests. By the time the guard realized he had been tricked, it would be too late.

There was a door inside the control room, communicating with the main house. Quinn took the stairs to the bedroom floor. Six carved-oak doors, all probably to bedrooms. But the lights Quinn had seen at dawn that morning indicated the master bedroom must be at the end. It was.

Horst Lenzlinger awoke to the sensation of something hard and painful being jabbed into his left ear. Then the bedside light went on. He squealed once in outrage, then stared silently at the face above him. His lower lip wobbled. It was the man who had come to his office; he had not liked the look of him then. He liked him now even less, but most of all he disliked the barrel of the pistol stuck half an inch into his earhole.

“Bernhardt,”said the man in the camouflage combat suit. “I want to speak to Werner Bernhardt. Use the phone. Bring him here. Now.”

Lenzlinger scrabbled for the house phone on his night table, dialed an extension, and got a bleary response.

“Werner,” he squeaked, “get your arse up here. Now. Yes, my bedroom. Hurry.”

While they waited, Lenzlinger looked at Quinn with a mixture of fear and malevolence. On the black silk sheets beside him the bought-in-Vietnam child whimpered in her sleep, stick-thin, a tarnished doll. Bernhardt arrived, polo-neck sweater over his pajamas. He took in the scene and stared in amazement.

He was the right age, late forties. A mean, sallow face, sandy hair going gray at the sides, gray-pebble eyes.

“Was ist denn hier, Herr Lenzlinger?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” said Quinn in German. “Tell him to answer them, truthfully and fast. Or you’ll need a spoon to get your brains off the lampshade. No problem, sleazebag. Just tell him.”

Lenzlinger told him. Bernhardt nodded.

“You were in the Fifth Commando under John Peters?”

“Ja.”

“Stayed on for the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, and the siege?”

“Ja.”

“Did you ever know a big Belgian called Paul Marchais? Big Paul, they called him.”

“Yes, I remember him. Came to us from the Twelfth Commando, Schramme’s crowd. So what?”

“Tell me about Marchais.”

“What about him?”

“Everything. What was he like?”

“Big, huge, six feet six or more, good fighter, a former motor mechanic.”

Yeah, thought Quinn, someone had to put that Ford Transit van back in shape, someone who knew motors and welding. So the Belgian was the mechanic.

“Who was his closest buddy, from start to finish?”

Quinn knew that combat soldiers, like policemen on the beat, usually form partnerships; trust and rely on one man more than any other when the going gets really rough. Bernhardt furrowed his brow in concentration.

“Yes, there was one. They were always together. They palled up during Marchais’s time in the Fifth. A South African. They could speak the same language, see? Flemish or Afrikaans.”

“Name?”

“Pretorius-Janni Pretorius.”

Quinn’s heart sank. South Africa was a long way off, and Pretorius a very common name.

“What happened to him? Back in South Africa? Dead?”

“No, the last I heard he had settled in Holland. It’s been a bloody long time. Look, I don’t know where he is now. That’s the truth, Herr Lenzlinger. It’s just something I heard ten years back.”

“He doesn’t know,” protested Lenzlinger. “Now get that thing out of my ear.”

Quinn knew he would get no more from Bernhardt. He grabbed the front of Lenzlinger’s silk nightshirt and swung him off the bed.

“We walk to the front door,” said Quinn. “Slow and easy. Bernhardt, hands on top of the head. You go first. One move and your boss gets a second navel.”

In single file they went down the darkened stairs. At the front door they heard a hammering from outside-the dog handler trying to get back in.

“The back way,” said Quinn. They were halfway through the passage to the control house when Quinn hit an unseen oak chair and stumbled. He lost his grip on Lenzlinger. In a flash the tubby little man was off toward the main hall, screaming his head off for his bodyguards. Quinn flattened Bernhardt with a swipe from the gun and ran on to the control room and its door to the park.

He was halfway across the grass when the screaming Lenzlinger appeared in the door behind him, yelling for the dogs to come around from the front. Quinn turned, drew a bead, squeezed once, turned and ran on. There was a shriek of pain from the arms dealer and he vanished back inside the house.

Quinn jammed his gun in his waistband and made his escape rope just ten yards ahead of the two Dobermans. He swung up the wall as they leaped after him, trod on the sensor wire-triggering a shrill peal of alarm bells from the house-and dropped to the roof of the van. He had discarded the ladder, got the van in gear, and raced off down the lane before a pursuit group could be organized.

Sam was waiting as promised in their car, all packed and checked out, opposite the Graf von Oldenburg. He abandoned the van and climbed in beside her.

“Head west,” he said. “The E.22 for Lier and Holland.”

Lenzlinger’s men were in two cars and radio-linked, with each other and to the manor house. Someone in the house phoned the city’s best hotel, the City Club, but were told Quinn was not registered there. It took the caller another ten minutes, running down the hotel list, to ascertain from the Graf von Oldenburg that Herr and Frau Quinn had checked out. But the caller got an approximate description of their car.

Sam had cleared the Ofener Strasse and reached the 293 ring road when a gray Mercedes appeared behind them. Quinn slid down and curled up until his head was below the sill. Sam turned off the ring road onto the E.22 autobahn; the Mercedes followed.

“It’s coming alongside,” she said.

“Drive normally,” mumbled Quinn from his hiding place. “Give ’em a nice bright smile and a wave.”

The Mercedes pulled up alongside. It was still dark, the interior of the Ford invisible from outside. Sam turned her head. She knew neither of them, the refrigerator-freezer or the dog handler of the previous morning.

Sam flashed a beaming smile and a little wave. The men stared, expressionless. Frightened people on the run do not smile and wave. After several seconds, the Mercedes accelerated ahead, did a U-turn at the next intersection, and went back toward town. After ten minutes Quinn emerged and sat up again.

“Herr Lenzlinger doesn’t seem to like you,” said Sam.

“Apparently not,” said Quinn sadly. “I’ve just shot his pecker off.”