The Negotiator

Chapter 15

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

“Won’t he play?”

“Mmmm?”

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

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

She was stunned.

“Zack? What does he want?”

“A meeting.”

“How the hell did he find you?”

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

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

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

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

Quinn laughed shortly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quinn grunted and concentrated on not hitting the tail-lights of the car in front of him, whose driver was also gawping at the accident. Seconds later the road cleared and Quinn gunned the Opel over the bridge across the Thames, leaving behind him the dead body of a man he had never heard of and never would: the body of Andy Laing.

“Where are we going?” asked Sam.

“Paris,” said Quinn.

Coming back to Paris for Quinn was like coming home. Though he had spent a longer time based in London, Paris held a special place in his life.

He had wooed and won Jeannette there, had married her there. For two blissful years they had lived in a small flat just off the rue de Grenelle; their daughter had been born at the American Hospital in Neuilly.

He knew bars in Paris, dozens of bars, where after the death of Jeannette and their baby Sophie on the Orléans highway he had tried to obliterate the pain with drink. He had been happy in Paris, been in heaven in Paris, known hell in Paris, waked up in gutters in Paris. He knew the place.

They spent the night at a motel just outside Ashford and caught the 9:00 A.M. Hovercraft from Folkestone to Calais, arriving in Paris in time for lunch.

Quinn checked them into a small hotel just off the Champs-Elysées and disappeared with the car to find a place to park it. The Eighth Arrondissement of Paris has many charms, but ample parking is not one of them. To have parked outside the Hôtel du Colisée in the street of the same name would have been to invite a wheel-clamp. Instead he used the twenty-four-hour underground parking lot in rue Chauveau-Lagarde, just behind the Madeleine, and took a cab back to the hotel. He intended to use cabs anyway. While in the area of the Madeleine he noted two other items he might need.

After lunch Quinn and Sam took a cab to the offices of the International Herald Tribune at 181 Avenue Charles-de-Gaulle in Neuilly.

“I’m afraid we can’t get it in tomorrow’s edition,” said the girl at the front desk. “It will have to be the day after. Insertions are only for the following day if entered by eleven-thirty A.M.”

“That’ll be fine,” said Quinn and paid cash. He took a complimentary copy of the paper and read it in the taxi back to the Champs-Elysées.

This time he did not miss the story, datelined out of Moscow, whose headline read: GEN. KRYUCHKOV OUSTER. There was a sub-headline: KGB CHIEF FIRED IN BIG SECURITY SHAKE-UP. He read the story out of interest but it signified nothing to him.

The agency correspondent reported that the Soviet Politburo had received “with regret” the resignation and retirement of KGB Chairman General Vladimir Kryuchkov. A deputy chairman would head the Committee pro tem, until the Politburo appointed a successor.

The report surmised that the changes appeared to have been in response to Politburo dissatisfaction, particularly with the performance of the First Chief Directorate, of which Kryuchkov himself had been a former head. The reporter finished his piece with the suggestion that the Politburo-a thinly veiled reference to Gorbachev himself- wished to see newer and younger blood moving into the top slot of the U.S.S.R.’s overseas espionage service.

That evening and through the following day, Quinn gave Sam, who had never seen Paris before, the tourist’s menu. They took in the Louvre, the Tuileries Gardens in the rain, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower, rounding off their free day at the Lido cabaret.

The ad appeared the following morning. Quinn rose early and bought a copy from a vendor on the Champs-Elysées at seven to make sure it was in. It said simply: “Z. I’m here. Call me on… Q.” He had given the hotel number, and warned the operator in the small lobby that he expected a call. He waited for it in his room. It came at nine-thirty.

“Quinn?” The voice was unmistakable.

“Zack, before we go any further, this is a hotel. I don’t like hotel phones. Call me at this public booth in thirty minutes.”

He dictated the number of a phone booth just off the Place de la Madeleine. He left Sam behind, still in her nightgown, calling, “I’ll be back in an hour.”

The phone in the booth rang at exactly ten.

“Quinn, I want to talk to you.”

“We are talking, Zack.”

“I mean face-to-face.”

“Sure, no problem. You say when and where.”

“No tricks, Quinn. Unarmed, no backup.”

“You got it.”

Zack dictated the time and the place. Quinn made no notes-there was no need. He returned to the hotel. He found Sam in the lounge-cum-bar, with croissants and milky coffee before her. She looked up eagerly.

“What did he want?”

“A meeting, face-to-face.”

“Quinn, darling, be careful. He’s a killer. When and where?”

“Not here,” he said. There were other tourists having a late breakfast. “In our room.”

“It’s a hotel room,” he told her when they were upstairs. “Tomorrow at eight in the morning. His room at the Hôtel Roblin. Reserved in the name of-would you believe it?-Smith.”

“I have to be there, Quinn. I don’t like the sound of it. Don’t forget I’m weapon-trained too. And you are definitely carrying the Smith & Wesson.”

“Sure,” said Quinn.

Several minutes later Sam made an excuse and went down to the bar. She was back after ten minutes. Quinn recalled that there was a phone on the end of the bar.

She was asleep when he left at midnight, the bedside alarm clock set for six in the morning. He moved through the bedroom like a shadow, picking up his shoes, socks, trousers, shorts, sweater, jacket, and gun as he went. There was no one in the corridor. He dressed there, stuck the pistol in his belt, adjusted the windbreaker to cover it, and went silently downstairs.

He found a cab on the Champs-Elysées and was at the Hôtel Roblin ten minutes later.

“La chambre de Monsieur Smith, s’il vous plaît,” he told the night porter. The man checked a list and gave him the key. Number 10. Second floor. He mounted the stairs and let himself in.

The bathroom was the best place for the ambush. The door was in the corner of the bedroom and from it he could cover every angle, especially the door to the corridor. He removed the bulb from the main light in the bedroom, took an upright chair and placed it inside the bathroom. With the bathroom door open just enough to give him a two-inch crack, he began his vigil. When his night-sight came he could clearly make out the empty bedroom, dimly lit by the light from the street coming through the windows, whose curtains he had left open.

By six no one had come; he had heard no footsteps in the corridor. At half past six the night porter brought coffee to an early riser down the corridor; he heard the footsteps passing the door, then returning to the stairs to the lobby. No one came in; no one tried to come in.

At eight he felt the sense of relief washing over him. At twenty past the hour he left, paid his bill, and took a cab back to the Hôtel du Colisée. She was in the bedroom and nearly frantic.

“Quinn, where the hell have you been? I’ve been desperate with worry. I woke at five… you weren’t there… For God’s sake, we’ve missed the rendezvous.”

He could have lied, but he was genuinely remorseful. He told her what he had done. She looked as if he had hit her in the face.

“You thought it was me?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he admitted. After Marchais and Pretorius he had become obsessed with the idea that someone was tipping off the killer or killers; how else could they twice get to the vanished mercenaries before he and Sam did? She swallowed hard, composed herself, hid the hurt inside her.

“Okay, so when is the real rendezvous, may I ask? That is, if you trust me enough now.”

“It’s in an hour, at ten o’clock,” he said. “A bar off the rue de Chalón, right behind the Gare de Lyon. It’s a long haul-let’s go now.”

It was another cab ride. Sam sat silently reproachful as they rode down the quays along the north bank of the Seine from the northwest to the southeast of the city. Quinn dismissed the taxi on the corner of the rue de Chalón and the Passage de Gatbois. He decided to walk the rest.

The rue de Chalón ran parallel to the railway tracks heading out of the station toward the south of France. From beyond the wall they could hear the clang of trains moving over the numerous points outside the terminus. It was a dingy street.

Off the rue de Chalón a number of narrow streets, each called Passage, connected up to the bustling Avenue Daumesnil. One block down from where he had paid off the cab Quinn found the street he sought, the Passage de Vautrin. He turned into it.

“It’s a hell of a dingy place,” remarked Sam.

“Yeah, well, he picked it. The meeting is in a bar.”

There were two bars in the street and neither was any threat to the Ritz.

Chez Hugo was the second one, across the street and fifty yards up from the first. Quinn pushed open the door. The bar counter was to his left; to his right, two tables near the street window, which was masked by thick lace curtains. Both tables were empty. The whole bar was empty except for the unshaven proprietor, who tended his espresso machine behind the counter. With the open door behind him and Sam standing there, Quinn was visible, and he knew it. Anyone in the dark recesses at the rear would be hard to see. Then he saw the bar’s only customer. Right at the back, alone at a table, a coffee in front of him, staring at Quinn.

Quinn walked the length of the room, followed by Sam. The man made no move. His eyes never left Quinn, except to flicker once over Sam. Eventually Quinn stood above him. He wore a corduroy jacket and open-necked shirt. Thinning sandy hair, late forties, a thin, mean face, badly pockmarked.

“Zack?”said Quinn.

“Yeah. Siddown. Who’s she?”

“My partner. I stay, she stays. You wanted this. Let’s talk.”

He sat down opposite Zack, hands on the table. No tricks. The man stared at him malevolently. Quinn knew he had seen the face before, thought back to Hayman’s files, and those of Hamburg. Then he got it. Sidney Fielding, one of John Peters’s section commanders in the Fifth Commando at Paulis, ex-Belgian Congo. The man trembled with a barely controlled emotion. After several seconds Quinn realized it was rage, but mixed with something else. Quinn had seen the look in the eyes many times, in Vietnam and elsewhere. The man was afraid, bitter and angry but also very badly frightened. Zack could contain himself no longer.

“Quinn, you’re a bastard. You and your people are lying bastards. You promised no manhunt, said we’d just have to disappear and after a couple of weeks the heat would be off. Some shit. Now I hear Big Paul’s gone missing and Janni’s in a morgue in Holland. No manhunt, hell. We’re being wasted.”

“Hey, ease up, Zack. I’m not one of the ones who told you that. I’m on the other side. Why don’t we start at the beginning? Why did you kidnap Simon Cormack?”

Zack looked at Quinn as if he had just asked if the sun was hot or cold.

“Because we was paid to,” he said.

“You were paid up front? Not for the ransom?”

“No, that was extra. Half a million dollars was the fee. I took two hundred for me, one hundred each for the other three. We was told the ransom was extra-we could get as much as we could, and keep it.”

“All right. Who paid you to do it? I swear I wasn’t one of them. I was called in the day after the snatch, to try and get the kid back. Who set it up?”

“I dunno his name. Never did. He was American, that’s all I know. Short, fat man. Contacted me here. God knows how he found me-must have had contacts. We always met in hotel rooms. I’d come there and he would always be masked. But the money was up front and in cash.”

“What about expenses? Kidnappings come expensive.”

“On top of the fee. In cash. Another hundred thousand dollars I had to spend.”

“Did that include the house you hid in?”

“No, that was provided. We met in London a month before the job. He gave me the keys, told me where it was, told me to get it ready as a bunk-hole.”

“Give me the address.”

Zack gave it to him. Quinn noted it. Nigel Cramer and the forensic scientists from the labs of the Metropolitan Police would later visit the place and take it apart in their search for clues. Records would show it was not rented at all. It had been bought quite legitimately for £200,000 through a firm of British lawyers acting for a Luxembourg-registered company.

The company would prove to be a bearer-share shell corporation represented quite legally by a Luxembourg bank acting as nominee, and who had never met the owner of the shell company. The money used to buy the house had come to Luxembourg in the form of a draft issued by a Swiss bank. The Swiss would declare that the draft had been bought for cash in U.S. dollars at their Geneva branch, but no one could recall the buyer.

The house, moreover, was not north of London at all; it was in Sussex to the south, near East Grinstead. Zack had simply been motoring around the orbital M.25 to make his phone calls from the northern side of the capital.

Cramer’s men would scour the place from top to bottom; despite the cleaning-up efforts by the four mercenaries, there were some overlooked fingerprints, but they belonged to Marchais and Pretorius.

“What about the Volvo?” asked Quinn. “You paid for that?”

“Yeah, and the van, and most of the other gear. Only the Skorpion was given us by the fat man. In London.”

Unknown to Quinn, the Volvo had already been found outside London. It had overstayed its time in a multistory parking lot at London’s Heathrow Airport. The mercenaries, after driving through Buckingham on the morning of the murder, had turned south again and back to London. From Heathrow they had taken the airport shuttle bus to London’s other air terminus at Gatwick, ignored the airport, and boarded the train for Hastings and the coast. Separate taxis had brought them to Newhaven to catch the noon ferry to Dieppe. Once in France they had split up and gone to earth.

The Volvo, examined by the Heathrow Airport police, was seen to have breathing holes punctured in the floor of the trunk, and a lingering smell of almonds. Scotland Yard was called in, the original owner traced. But it had been bought for cash, the change-of-owner documentation had never been completed, and the description of the buyer matched that of the ginger-haired man who had bought the Ford Transit.

“It was the fat man who was giving you all the inside information?” asked Quinn.

“What inside information?” said Sam suddenly.

“How did you know about that?” asked Zack suspiciously. He evidently still suspected that Quinn might be one of his employers-turned-persecutors.

“You were too good,” said Quinn. “You knew to wait until I was in place, then ask for the negotiator in person. I’ve never known that before. You knew when to throw a rage and when to back off. You changed from dollars to diamonds, knowing it would cause a delay when we were ready to exchange.”

Zack nodded. “Yeah, I was briefed before the kidnap on what to do, when and how to do it. While we were hiding, I had to make another series of phone calls. Always while out of the house, always from one phone booth to another, according to an arranged list. It was the fat man; I knew his voice by then. He occasionally made changes-fine-tuning, he called it. I just did what I was told.”

“All right,” said Quinn. “And the fat man told you there’d be no problem getting away afterward. Just a manhunt for a month or so, but with no clues to go on, it would all die down and you could live happily ever after. You really believed that? You really thought you could kidnap and kill the son of an American President and get away? Then why did you kill the kid? You didn’t have to.”

Zack’s facial muscles worked in something like a frenzy. His eyes bulged with anger.

“That’s the point, you shit. We didn’t kill him. We dumped him on the road like we was told. He was alive and well-we hadn’t hurt him at all. And we drove on. First we knew he was dead was when it was made public the next day. I couldn’t believe it. It was a lie. We didn’t do it.”

Outside in the street a car cruised around the corner from the rue de Chalón. One man drove; the other was in back, cradling the rifle. The car came up the street as if looking for someone, paused outside the first bar, advanced almost to the door of Chez Hugo, then backed up to come to rest halfway between the two. The engine was kept idling.

“The kid was killed by a bomb planted in the leather belt he wore around his waist,” said Quinn. “He wasn’t wearing that when he was snatched on Shotover Plain. You gave it to him to wear.”

“I didn’t,” shouted Zack. “I bloody didn’t. It was Orsini.”

“Okay, tell me about Orsini.”

“Corsican, a hit man. Younger than us. When the three of us left to meet you in the warehouse, the kid was wearing what he had always worn. When we got back he was in new clothes. I tore Orsini off a hell of a strip over that. The silly bastard had left the house, against orders, and gone and bought them.”

Quinn recalled the shouting row he had heard above his head when the mercenaries had retired to examine their diamonds. He had thought it was about the gems.

“Why did he do it?” asked Quinn.

“He said the kid had complained he was cold. Said he thought it would do no harm, so he walked into East Grin-stead, went to a camping shop, and bought the gear. I was angry because he speaks no English and would stand out like a sore thumb, the way he looks.”

“The clothes were almost certainly delivered in your absence,” said Quinn. “All right, what does he look like, this Orsini?”

“About thirty-three, a pro, but never been in combat. Very dark chin, black eyes, knife scar down one cheek.”

“Why did you hire him?”

“I didn’t. I contacted Big Paul and Janni ’cos I knew them from the old days and we’d stayed in touch. The Corsican was sicked on me by the fat man. Now I hear Janni’s dead and Big Paul has vanished.”

“And what do you want with this meeting?” asked Quinn. “What am I supposed to do for you?”

Zack leaned forward and gripped Quinn’s forearm.

“I want out,” he said. “If you’re with the people who set me up, tell ’em there’s no way they need to come after me. I’d never, never talk. Not to the fuzz anyway. So they’re safe.”

“But I’m not with them,” said Quinn.

“Then tell your people I never killed the kid,” said Zack. “That was never part of the deal. I swear on my life I never intended that boy to die.”

Quinn mused that if Nigel Cramer or Kevin Brown ever got their hands on Zack, “life” was exactly what he would be serving, as a guest either of Her Majesty or of Uncle Sam.

“A few last points, Zack. The diamonds. If you want to make a play for clemency, they’d better have the ransom back for starters. Have you spent them?”

“No,” said Zack abruptly. “No chance. They’re here. Every single bloody one.”

He dived a hand under the table and dumped a canvas bag on the table. Sam’s eyes popped.

“Orsini,” said Quinn impassively. “Where is he now?”

“God knows. Probably back in Corsica. He came from there ten years ago to work in the gangs of Marseilles, Nice, and later Paris. That was all I could get out of him. Oh, and he comes from a village called Castelblanc.”

Quinn rose, took the canvas bag, and looked down at Zack.

“You’re in it, mate. Right up to your ears. I’ll talk to the authorities. They might accept your turning state’s evidence. Even that’s a long shot. But I’ll tell them there were people behind you, and probably people behind them. If they believe that, and you tell all, they might leave you alive. The others, the ones you worked for… no chance.”

He turned to go. Sam got up to follow. As if preferring the shelter the American gave him, Zack rose also and they headed for the door. Quinn paused.

“One last thing. Why the name Zack?”

He knew that during the kidnapping, the psychiatrists and code breakers had puzzled long over the name, seeking a possible clue to the real identity of the man who had chosen it. They had worked on variations of Zachary, Zachariah, looked for relatives of known criminals who had such names or initials.

“It was really Z-A-K,” said Zack. “The letters on the number plate of the first car I ever owned.”

Quinn raised a single eyebrow. So much for psychiatry. He stepped outside. Zack came next. Sam was still in the doorway when the crash of the rifle tore apart the quiet of the side street.

Quinn did not see the car or the gunman. But he heard the distinctive “whap” of a bullet going past his face and felt the breath of cool wind it made on his cheek. The bullet missed his ear by half an inch, but not Zack. The mercenary took it in the base of the throat.

It was Quinn’s quick reflexes that saved his life. He was no stranger to that sound, which gave him an edge. Zack’s body was thrown back into the doorpost, then forward on the rebound. Quinn was back in the door arch before Zack’s knees began to buckle. For the second that the mercenary’s body was still upright, it acted as a shield between Quinn and the car parked thirty yards away.

Quinn hurled himself backwards through the door, twisting, grabbing Sam, and pulling them both down to the floor in one movement. As they hit the grubby tiles a second bullet passed through the closing door above them and tore plaster off the side wall of the café. Then the spring-loaded door closed.

Quinn went across the bar’s floor at a fast crawl, elbows and toes, dragging Sam behind him. The car moved up the alley to straighten the rifleman’s angle, and a volley of shots shattered the plate-glass window and riddled the door. The barman, presumably Hugo, was slower. He stood open-mouthed behind his bar until a shower of splinters from his disintegrating stock of bottles sent him to the floor.

The shots stopped-change of magazine. Quinn was up and racing for the rear exit, his left hand pulling Sam by the wrist, his right still clutching the bag of diamonds. The door at the back of the bar gave onto a corridor, with the toilets on each side. Straight ahead was a grubby kitchen. Quinn raced through the kitchen, kicked open the door at the end, and they found themselves in a rear yard.

Crates of beer bottles were stacked, awaiting collection. Using them as steps, Quinn and Sam went over the back wall of the yard and dropped into another backyard, which itself belonged to a butcher shop on the parallel street, the Passage de Gatbois. Three seconds later they emerged from the establishment of the astounded butcher and into the street. By good luck there was a taxi, thirty yards up. From its rear an old lady was climbing unsteadily, reaching into her bag for small change as she did so. Quinn got there first, swung the lady physically onto the pavement, and told her: “C’est payé, madame.”

He dived into the rear seat of the cab, still clutching Sam by the wrist, dropped the canvas bag on the seat, reached for a bundle of French banknotes, and held them under the driver’s nose.

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

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

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

“Quinn, what the hell’s this?”

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

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

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

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

“Didn’t have what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For Washington?”

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

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

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

“And who told the fat man?”

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

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

“So where do we go from here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Forget them. If the hoods are not staking out the hotel by now, they’re stupid. And they’re not. You have your passport?”

“Yep. Always carry it on me.”

“Same here. And your credit cards?”

“Sure. Same thing.”

“Go over to that bank and get as much money as your credit card account can stand.”

While Sam was at the bank, Quinn used the last of his cash to buy her a single ticket from Paris to Málaga. She had missed the 12:45 flight but there was another at 5:35 P.M.

“Your friend has five hours to wait,” said the ticket-counter agent. “Coaches leave from Gate J every twelve minutes for Orly South terminal.”

Quinn thanked her, crossed the floor to the bank, and gave Sam her ticket. She had drawn $5,000, and Quinn took $4,000.

“I’m taking you to the bus right now,” said Quinn. “It’ll be safer at Orly than right here, just in case they’re checking flight departures. When you get there, go straight through passport control into the duty-free area. Harder to get at. Get yourself a new handbag, a suitcase, some clothes-you know what you’ll need. Then wait for the flight and don’t miss it. I’ll have people at Málaga to meet you.”

“Quinn, I don’t even speak Spanish.”

“Don’t worry. These people all speak English.”

At the steps of the bus Sam reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Quinn, I’m sorry. You’d have done better alone.”

“Not your fault, baby.” Quinn turned her face up and kissed her. A common enough scene at terminals-no one took any notice. “Besides, without you I wouldn’t have the Smith *amp; Wesson. I think I may need that.”

“Take care of yourself,” she whispered. A chill wind blew down the Boulevard de Vaugirard. The last heavy luggage was stacked underneath the bus and the last passengers boarded. Sam shivered in his arms. He smoothed the shining blond hair.

“I’ll be okay. Trust me. I’ll be in touch by phone in a couple of days. By then, either way, we’ll be able to go home in safety.”

He watched the bus head down the boulevard, waved at the small hand in the rear window. Then it turned the corner and was gone.

Two hundred yards from the terminus and across Vaugirard is a large post office. Quinn bought sheet cardboard and wrapping paper in a stationery shop and entered the post office. With penknife and gummed tape, paper and string, he made up a stout parcel of the diamonds and mailed it by registered post, express rate, to Ambassador Fairweather in London.

From the bank of international telephone booths he called Scotland Yard and left a message for Nigel Cramer. It consisted of an address near East Grinstead, Sussex. Finally he called a bar in Estepona. The man he spoke to was not Spanish, but a London Cockney.

“Yeah, all right, mate,” said the voice on the phone. “We’ll take care of the little lady for you.”

With his last loose ends tied up, Quinn retrieved his car, filled the tank to the brim at the nearest gasoline station, and headed through the lunchtime traffic for the orbital ring road. Sixty minutes after making his phone call to Spain he was on the A.6 autoroute heading south for Marseilles.

He broke for dinner at Beaune, then put his head back in the rear seat of the car and caught up on some missing sleep. It was three in the morning when he resumed his journey south.

While he slept a man sat quietly in the San Marco restaurant across the road from the Hôtel du Colisée and kept watch on the hotel’s front door. He had been there since midday, to the surprise and eventual annoyance of the staff. He had ordered lunch, sat through the afternoon, and then ordered dinner. To the waiters he appeared to be reading quietly in the window seat.

At eleven the restaurant wished to close. The man left and went next door to the Royal Hôtel. Explaining that he was waiting for a friend, he took a seat at the window of the lobby and continued his vigil. At two in the morning he finally gave up.

He drove to the twenty-four-hour-a-day post office in the rue du Louvre, went up to the first-floor bank of telephones, and placed a person-to-person call. He stayed in the booth until the operator rang back.

“Allô, monsieur,” she said. “I have your call. On the line. Go ahead, Castelblanc.”