The Negotiator

Chapter 16

The Costa del Sol has long been the favored place of retirement of sought-after members of the British underworld. Several dozen such villains, having contrived to separate banks or armored cars from their contents or investors from their savings, having skipped the land of their fathers one inch ahead of the grasping fingers of Scotland Yard sought refuge in the sun of the South of Spain, there to enjoy their newfound affluence. A wit once said that on a clear day in Estepona you can see more Category A men than in Her Majesty’s Prison, Parkhurst, during roll call.

That evening four of their number were waiting at Málaga airport as a result of a phone call from Paris. There were Ronnie and Bernie and Arthur, pronounced Arfur, who were all mature men, and the youngster Terry, known as Tel. Apart from Tel they all wore pale suits and panama hats, and despite the fact that it was long after dark, sunglasses. They checked the arrivals board, noted that the Paris plane had just landed, and stood discreetly to one side of the exit door from the customs area.

Sam emerged among the first three passengers. She had no luggage but her new, Orly-bought handbag and a small leather suitcase, also new, with a collection of toiletries and overnight clothes. Otherwise she had only the two-piece outfit in which she had attended the morning’s meeting at Chez Hugo.

Ronnie had a description of her but it had failed to do her justice. Like Bernie and Arfur he was married, and like the others his old lady was a peroxide blonde, bleached even whiter by constant sun-worshipping, with the lizardlike skin that is the heritage of too much ultraviolet radiation. Ronnie appraised the pale northern skin and hourglass figure of the newcomer with approval.

“Gorblimey,” muttered Bernie.

“Tasty,” said Tel. It was his favorite, if not only, adjective. Anything that surprised or pleased him he designated “tasty.”

Ronnie moved forward.

“Miss Somerville?”

“Yes.”

“Evening. I’m Ronnie. This is Bernie and Arfur and Tel. Quinn asked us to look after you. The car’s right over here.”

Quinn drove into Marseilles in a cold and rainy dawn, the last day of November. He had the choice of flying to Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica, from Marignane Airport, and arriving the same day, or of taking the evening ferry and his car with him.

He elected the ferry. For one thing he would not have to rent a car in Ajaccio; for another, he could safely take the Smith & Wesson, still stuck in his waistband; and for a third, he felt he ought as a precaution to make some small purchases for the stay in Corsica.

The signs to the ferry port on the Quai de la Joliette were clear enough. The port was almost empty. The morning’s ferry from Ajaccio was docked, its passengers gone an hour before. The SNCM ticket office on the Boulevard des Dames was still closed. He parked and enjoyed breakfast while he waited.

At nine he bought himself a crossing on the ferry Napoléon for the coming night, due to leave at 8:00 P.M. and arrive at 7:00 the morning after. With his ticket he could lodge the Ascona in the passengers’ parking lot close to the J4 quai, from which the ferry would leave. This done, he walked back into the city to make his purchases.

The canvas holdall was easy enough to find, and a pharmacy yielded the washing things and shaving tackle to replace what he had abandoned at the Hôtel du Colisée in Paris. The search for a specialist men’s outfitters caused a number of shaken heads, but he eventually found it in the pedestrians-only rue St.-Ferréol just north of the Old Port.

The young salesman was helpful and the purchase of boots, jeans, belt, shirt, and hat posed no problem. When Quinn mentioned his last request, the young man’s eyebrows went up.

“You want what, m’sieur?”

Quinn repeated his need.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think such a thing could be for sale.”

He eyed the two large-denomination notes moving seductively through Quinn’s fingers.

“Perhaps in the storeroom? An old one of no further use?” suggested Quinn.

The young man glanced around.

“I will see, sir. May I take the holdall?”

He was in the storeroom at the rear for ten minutes. When he returned he opened the holdall for Quinn to peer inside.

“Marvelous,” said Quinn. “Just what I needed.”

He settled up, tipped the young man as promised, and left. The skies cleared and he lunched at an open café in the Old Port, spending an hour over coffee studying a large-scale map of Corsica. The only thing the attached gazetteer would say of Castelblanc was that it was in the Ospédale Range in the deep south of the island.

At eight the Napoléon eased herself out of the Gare Maritime and headed backwards into the roads. Quinn was enjoying a glass of wine in the Bar des Aigles, almost empty at that season of the year. As the ferry swung to bring her nose to the sea, the lights of Marseilles passed in review before the window, to be replaced by the old prison fortress of Château d’If, drifting past half a cable’s length away.

Fifteen minutes later she cleared Cap Croisette and was enveloped by the darkness and the open sea. Quinn went to dine in the Malmaison, returned to his cabin on D Deck, and turned in before eleven, his bedside clock set for six.

At about that hour Sam sat with her hosts in a small and isolated former farmhouse high in the hills behind Estepona. None of them lived in the house; it was used for storage and the occasional moment when one of their friends needed a little “privacy” from marauding detectives waving extradition warrants.

The five of them sat in a closed and shuttered room, now blue with cigarette smoke, playing poker. It had been Ronnie’s suggestion. They had been at it for three hours; only Ronnie and Sam remained in the game. Tel did not play; he served beer-drunk straight from the bottle and with an ample supply available in the crates along one wall. The other walls were also stacked, but with bales of an exotic leaf fresh in from Morocco and destined for export to countries farther north.

Arfur and Bernie had been cleaned out and sat glumly watching the last two players at the table. The “pot” of 1,000-peseta notes in the center of the table contained all they had brought with them, plus half of what Ronnie had and half the dollars in Sam’s possession, exchanged at the going dollar/peseta rate.

Sam eyed Ronnie’s remaining stash, pushed most of her own banknotes to the center, and raised him. He grinned, matched her raise, and asked to see her cards. She turned four of her cards face-up. Two kings, two tens. Ronnie grinned and up-faced his own hand: full house, three queens and two jacks. He reached for the pile of notes containing all he had, plus all Bernie and Arfur had brought, plus nine tenths of Sam’s thousand dollars. Sam flicked over her fifth card. The third king.

“Bloody ’ell,” he said and leaned back. Sam scooped the notes into a pile.

“S’truth,” said Bernie.

“ ’Ere, what you do for a living, Sam?” asked Arfur.

“Didn’t Quinn tell you?” she asked. “I’m a special agent with the FBI.”

“Gorblimey,” said Ronnie.

“Tasty,” said Tel.

The Napoléon docked on the dot of seven at the Gare Maritime of Ajaccio, halfway between the jetties Capucins and Citadelle. Ten minutes later Quinn joined the few other vehicles emerging from her hold and drove down the ramp into the ancient capital of this wildly beautiful and secretive island.

His map had made clear enough the route he should take, due south out of town, down the Boulevard Sampiero to the airport, there to take a left into the mountains on the N. 196. Ten minutes after he took the turnoff, the land began to climb, as it always will in Corsica, which is almost entirely covered by mountains. The road swerved and switch-backed up past Cauro to the Col St. Georges, from which for a second he could look back and down to the narrow coastal plain far behind and below. Then the mountains enfolded him again, dizzying slopes and cliffs, clothed in these low-lying hills with forests of oak, olive, and beech. After Bicchisano the road wound down again, back toward the coast at Propriano. There was no way of avoiding the dogleg route to the Ospédale-a straight line would lead clear across the valley of the Baraci, a region so wild no roadmakers could penetrate it.

After Propriano he followed the coastal plain again for a few miles before the D.268 allowed him to turn toward the mountains of Ospédale. He was now off the N (national) roads and onto D (departmental) roads, little more than narrow lanes, yet broad highways compared to the tracks high in the mountains to come.

He passed tiny perched villages of local gray stone houses, sitting on hills and escarpments from which the views were vertiginous, and he wondered how these farmers could make a living from their tiny meadows and orchards.

Always the road climbed, twisting and turning, dipping to cross a fold in the ground but always climbing again after the respite. Beyond Ste. Lucie de Tallano the tree line ended and the hills were covered with that thick, thigh-high cover of heather and myrtle that they call the maquis. During the Second World War, fleeing from one’s home into the mountains to avoid arrest by the Gestapo was called “taking to the maquis”; thus the French underground resistance became known as the maquisards, or just “the Maquis.”

Corsica is as old as her mountains, and men have lived in these hills since prehistoric times. Like Sardinia and Sicily, Corsica has been fought over more times than she can remember, and always the strangers came as conquerors, invaders, and tax-gatherers, to rule and to take, never to give. With so little to live on for themselves, the Corsicans reacted by turning to their hills, the natural ramparts and sanctuaries. Generations of rebels and bandits, guerrillas and partisans have taken to the hills to avoid the authorities marching up from the coast to levy taxes and imposts from people ill able to pay.

Out of these centuries of experience the mountain folk developed their philosophy: clannish and secretive. Authority represented injustice and Paris gathered taxes just as harshly as any other conqueror. Though Corsica is part of France, and gave France Napoléon Bonaparte and a thousand other notables, for the mountain people the foreigner is still the foreigner, harbinger of injustice and the tax levy, whether from France or anywhere else. Corsica might send her sons by the tens of thousands to mainland France to work, but if ever such a son were in trouble, the old mountains would still offer sanctuary.

It was the mountains and the poverty and the perceived persecution that gave rise to the rocklike solidarity, and to the Corsican Union, deemed by some to be more secretive and dangerous than the Mafia. It was into this world, which no twentieth century had managed to change with its Common Markets and European Parliaments, that Quinn drove in the last month of 1991.

Just before the town of Levie there was a sign pointing to Carbini, along a small road called the D.59. The road ran due south and, after four miles, crossed the Fiumicicoli, by now a small stream tumbling out of the Ospédale Range. At Carbini, a one-street village where old men in blue smocks sat outside their stone cottages and a few chickens scratched the dust, Quinn’s gazetteer ran out of steam. Two lanes left the village; the D. 148 ran back west, the way he had come, but along the south flank of the valley.

Straight ahead ran the D.59 toward Orone and, much farther south, to Sotta. He could see the jutting peak of Mount Cagna to the southwest, the silent mass of the Ospédale Range to his left, topped by one of Corsica’s highest peaks, the Punta di la Vacca Morta, so called because from a certain angle it seems to resemble a dead cow. He chose to drive straight on.

Just after Orone the mountains were closer to his left, and the turning for Castelblanc was two miles beyond Orone. It was no more than a track, and since no road led through the Ospédale, it had to be a cul-de-sac. He could see from the road the great pale-gray rock set in the flank of the range that had once caused someone to think he was looking at a white castle, a mistake that had given the hamlet its name long ago. Quinn drove slowly up the track. Three miles farther on, high above the D.59, he entered Castelblanc.

The road ended at the village square, which lay at the end of the village, back to the mountain. The narrow street that led to the square was flanked by low stone houses, all closed and shuttered. No chickens scratched the dirt. No old men sat on their stoops. The place was silent. He drove into the square, stopped, climbed out, and stretched. Down the main street a tractor engine started. The tractor emerged from between two houses, rolled to the center of the road, and stopped. The driver removed the ignition keys, dropped to the ground, and disappeared between the houses. There was enough space between the rear of the tractor and the wall for a motorcycle, but no car could drive back down that street until the tractor was removed.

Quinn looked around. The square had three sides, apart from the road. To the right were four cottages; ahead, a small gray stone church. To his left was what must be the center of life in Castelblanc, a low tavern of two floors under a tiled roof and an alley leading to what else there was of Castelblanc that was not on the road-a cluster of cottages, barns, and yards that terminated in the flank of the mountain.

From the church door a small and very old priest emerged, failed to see Quinn, and turned to lock the door behind him.

“Bonjour, mon père,” Quinn called cheerfully. The man of God jumped like a shot rabbit, glanced at Quinn in near panic, and scuttled across the square to disappear down the alley beside the tavern. As he did so he crossed himself.

Quinn’s appearance would have surprised any Corsican priest, for the specialist menswear shop in Marseilles had done him proud. He had tooled Western boots, pale-blue jeans, a bright-red plaid shirt, fringed buckskin jacket, and a tall Stetson hat. If he wished to look like a caricature off a dude ranch, he had succeeded. He took his ignition keys and his canvas bag and strolled into the bar.

It was dark inside. The proprietor was behind the bar, earnestly polishing glasses-something of a novelty, Quinn surmised. Otherwise there were four plain oak tables, each surrounded by four chairs. Only one was occupied; four men sat studying hands of cards.

Quinn went to the bar and set down his bag, but kept his tall hat on. The barman looked up.

“Monsieur?”

No curiosity, no surprise. Quinn pretended not to notice, flashed a beaming smile.

“A glass of red wine, if you please,” he said formally. The wine was local, rough but good. Quinn sipped appreciatively. From behind the bar the landlord’s plump wife appeared, deposited several dishes of olives, cheese, and bread, cast not a glance at Quinn and, at a short word in the local dialect from her husband, disappeared back into the kitchen. The men playing cards refused to look at him either. Quinn addressed the barman.

“I am looking,” he said, “for a gentleman I believe lives here. Name of Orsini. Do you know him?”

The barman glanced at the card players as if for a prompt. None came.

“Would that be Monsieur Dominique Orsini?” asked the barman. Quinn looked thoughtful. They had blocked the road, admitted Orsini existed. For both reasons they wished him to stay. Until when? He glanced behind him. The sky outside the windows was pale-blue in the wintry sun. Until dark perhaps. Quinn turned back to the bar and drew a fingertip down his cheek.

“Man with a knife scar? Dominique Orsini?”

The barman nodded.

“Can you tell me where I can find his house?”

Again the barman looked urgently at the card players for a prompt. This time it came. One of the men, the only one in a formal suit, looked up from his cards and spoke.

“Monsieur Orsini is away today, monsieur. He will return tomorrow. If you wait, you will meet him.”

“Well, thank you, friend. That’s real neighborly of you.” To the barman he said, “Could I take a room here for the night?”

The man just nodded. Ten minutes later Quinn had his room, shown him by the proprietor’s wife, who still refused to meet his gaze. When she left, Quinn examined the room. It was at the back, overlooking a yard surrounded by lean-to open-fronted barns. The mattress on the bed was thin, stuffed with lumpy horsehair, but adequate for his purpose. With his penknife he eased up two floorboards under the bed and secreted one of the items contained in his bag. The rest he left for inspection. He closed the bag, left it on the bed, took a hair from his head, and stuck it with saliva across the zip.

Back in the bar he made a good lunch of goat cheese, fresh crusty bread, local pork pâté, and juicy olives, washed down with wine. Then he took a walk around the village. He knew he was safe until sundown; his hosts had received and understood their orders.

There was not a lot to see. No people came to the street to greet him. He saw one small child hastily pulled back into a doorway by a pair of hard-worked female hands. The tractor on the main street had its big rear wheels just clear of the alley from which it had emerged, leaving a two-foot gap. Its front was up against a timber barn.

A chill came into the air about five o’clock. Quinn retired to the bar, where a cheerful fire of olive logs crackled in the hearth. He went to his room for a book, satisfied himself that his bag had been searched, nothing taken, and the floorboards beneath the bed had not been discovered.

He spent two hours in the bar reading, still refusing to remove his hat, then ate again, a tasty ragout of pork, beans, and mountain herbs, with lentils, bread, apple tart, and coffee. He took water instead of wine. At nine he retired to his room. An hour later the last light in the village was extinguished. No one watched television in the bar that night, though it boasted one of only three sets in the village. No one played cards. By ten the village was in darkness, save only for the single bulb in Quinn’s room.

It was a low-power bulb, unshaded and hanging from a dusty cord in the middle of the room. The best light it gave was directly beneath, and that was where the figure in the tall Stetson hat sat reading in the upright armchair.

The moon rose at half past one, climbed from behind the Ospédale Range, and bathed Castelblanc in an eerie white light thirty minutes later. The lean, silent figure moved through the street by its dim illumination as one who knows exactly where he is going. The figure slid down two narrow alleys and into the complex of barns and yards behind the tavern.

Without a sound the shape leaped onto a hay wain parked in one of the yards and from there to the top of a wall. It ran effortlessly along the top of the wall and jumped another alley to land nimbly on the lean-to roof of the barn directly opposite Quinn’s window.

The curtains were half-drawn-they reached only halfway across the window at full stretch. In the twelve-inch gap Quinn could be plainly seen, book on lap, head tilted slightly forward to read the print in the dim light, the shoulders in the red-plaid shirt visible above the window sill, the tan Stetson on his head.

The young man on the roof grinned; such foolishness would prevent his having to come through the bedroom windowto do what had to be done. He unslung the Lupara shotgun on the leather strap across his shoulders, flicked the catch off safety, and took aim. Forty feet away the hatted head filled the space above the twin barrels; the triggers were wired together to detonate both barrels simultaneously. When he fired, the roar would have waked the entire village, but no lights went on. The heavy buckshot from both barrels vaporized the panes in the window and shredded the thin cotton curtains. Beyond the window, the head of the sitting man seemed to explode. The gunman saw the pale Stetson whipped away by the blast. The skull fragmented and a great spray of brilliant-red blood flew in all directions. Without a head, the red-plaid torso toppled sideways to the floor and out of vision.

Satisfied, the young cousin of the Orsini clan, who had just made his bones for the family, ran back off the roof, along the wall, down to the hay cart, to the ground, and into the alley from which he had come. Unhurried, and safe in his triumph, the youth walked through the village to the cottage on the fringes of the hamlet where the man he idolized awaited him. He did not see or hear the quieter and taller man who eased himself out of a darkened doorway and followed him.

The devastation in the room above the bar would later be cleared up by the owner’s wife. Her mattress was beyond salvation, slit from end to end, its springy stuffing used to fill the plaid shirt, the torso, and the arms, until it was stiff enough to sit unaided in the upright chair. She would find long strips of clear gummed tape that had held the dummy torso in the upright position, and the remains of the Stetson hat and the book.

She would pick up, piece by piece, the remnants of the polystyrene head of the store dummy that Quinn had persuaded the Marseilles attendant to filch from the stockroom and sell him. Of the two condoms, bloated with ketchup from the ferry’s dining room, which had once hung inside the dummy head, she would find little trace-just the red splotches all over her room, but these would come off with a damp cloth.

The landlord would wonder why he had not seen the head of the store dummy when he searched the American’s luggage, and would eventually find the loose planks beneath the bed where it had been hidden by Quinn as soon as he arrived.

Finally the angry man in the dark suit who had been playing cards in the bar the previous afternoon would be shown the abandoned tooled cowboy boots, the jeans, the fringed buckskin jacket, and the landlord would inform the local capu that the American must now be dressed in his other set of clothes: dark trousers, black zip-up windbreaker, crepe-soled desert boots, and polo-neck sweater. They would all examine the canvas holdall and find nothing else left in it. This would happen in the hour before dawn.

When the youth reached the cottage he sought, he tapped gently on the door. Quinn slipped into a shadowed doorway fifty yards behind him. There must have been a command to enter, for the youth flipped the door latch and went inside. As the door closed, Quinn moved closer, circled the house, and found a shuttered window with a crack in the timbers large enough to peer through.

Dominique Orsini sat at a rough wooden table, and cut slices off a fat salami sausage with a razor-sharp knife. The teenager with the Lupara stood in front of him. They were talking in the Corsican language, nothing like French, incomprehensible to a foreigner. The boy was describing the events of the last thirty minutes; Orsini nodded several times.

When the boy had finished, Orsini rose, came around the table, and embraced him. The younger man glowed with pride. As Orsini turned, the lamplight caught the livid scar running down one cheek from the point of the bone to the jaw. He took a wad of notes from his pocket; the boy shook his head and protested. Orsini stuffed the wad in the youth’s top pocket, patted him on the back, and dismissed him. The boy disappeared from view.

To have killed the Corsican hit man would have been easy. Quinn wanted him alive, in the back of his car, and in a cell in Ajaccio police headquarters by sunup. He had noticed the powerful motorcycle parked in the lean-to log store.

Thirty minutes later, in the deep shadow cast by the wooden barn and the parked tractor, Quinn heard the rumble of the motorcycle’s engine starting. Orsini turned the motorcycle slowly out of a side passage and into the main square, then headed down the track out of town. There was enough room for him to pass between the rear of the tractor and the nearest house wall. He passed through a bright patch of moonlight and Quinn stepped out of the shadows, drew a bead, and fired once. The motorcycle’s front tire shredded; the machine slewed violently and went out of control. It fell to its side, threw the rider, and rolled to a stop.

Orsini was hurled by his own momentum into the side of the tractor, but he came back up with remarkable speed. Quinn stood ten yards away, the Smith & Wesson pointing at the Corsican’s chest. Orsini was breathing deeply, in pain, favoring one leg as he leaned against the tractor’s high rear wheel. Quinn could see the glittering black eyes, the dark stubble around the chin. Slowly Orsini raised his hands.

“Orsini,” said Quinn quietly. “Je m’appelle Quinn. Je veux te parler.”

Orsini’s reaction was to put pressure on his damaged leg, gasp in pain, and lower his left hand to his knee. He was good. The left hand moved slowly to massage the knee, taking Quinn’s attention with it for a second. The right hand moved much faster, sweeping down and letting go of the sleeve-knife in the same second. Quinn caught the flicker of steel in the moonlight and jerked sideways… The blade missed his throat, twitched the shoulder of his leather jacket, and dug deep into the planks of the barn behind him.

It took Quinn only a second to grab the bone haft and jerk it out of the wood to release his jacket. But it was enough for Orsini. He was behind the tractor and running down the alley behind the vehicle like a cat. But a wounded cat.

Had he been unhurt Quinn would have lost him. Fit though the American was, when a Corsican hits the maquis there are very few who can keep up with him. The tough strands of heather, up to waist height, cling and drag at the clothes like a thousand fingers. The sensation is of wading through water. Within two hundred meters the energy is sapped away; the legs feel like lead. A man can drop to the ground anywhere in that sea of maquis and vanish, invisible at ten feet.

But Orsini was slowed. His other enemy was the moonlight. Quinn saw his shadow reach the end of the alley, which marked the last houses of the hamlet, and then move out into the heather of the hillside. Quinn went after him, down the alley, which became a track, and then into the maquis. He could hear the swish of branches ahead and guided himself by the noise.

Then he saw Orsini’s head again, twenty yards ahead, moving across the flank of the mountain but steadily uphill. A hundred yards farther on, the sounds ceased. Orsini had gone to earth. Quinn stopped and did the same. To go forward with the moon behind him would be madness.

He had hunted before, and been hunted, by night. In the dense bush by the Mekong, through the thick jungle north of Khe Sanh, in the high country with his Montagnard guides. All natives are good in their own terrain, the Viet Cong in their jungle, the Kalahari bushmen in their own desert. Orsini was on his own ground, where he had been born and brought up, slowed by a damaged knee, without his knife but almost certainly with his handgun. And Quinn needed him alive. So both men crouched in the heather and listened to the sounds of the night, to discern that one sound that was not a cicada or coney or fluttering bird, but could only be made by a man. Quinn glanced at the moon; an hour to set. After that he would see nothing until dawn, when help would come for the Corsican from his own village a quarter-mile down the mountain.

For forty-five minutes of that hour neither man moved. Each listened for the other to move first. When Quinn heard the scrape he knew it was the sound of metal against rock. Trying to ease the pain in his knee, Orsini had let his gun touch rock. There was only one rock; fifteen yards to Quinn’s right, and Orsini behind it. Quinn began to crawl slowly through the heather at ground level. Not toward the rock-that would have been to take a bullet in the face. But to a larger clump of heather ten yards in front of the rock.

In his back pocket he still had the residue of the fishing line he had used at Oldenburg to dangle the tape recorder over the branch of the tree. He tied one end around the tall clump of heather two feet off the ground, then retreated to where he had started, paying out the line as he went. When he was certain he was far enough away, he began to tug gently at the line.

The bush moved and rustled. He let it stop, let the sound sink in to the listening ears. Did it again, and again. Then he heard Orsini begin to crawl.

The Corsican finally came to his knees ten feet from the bush. Quinn saw the back of his head, gave the twine one last sharp tug. The bush jerked, Orsini raised his gun, double-handed, and put seven bullets one after the other into the ground around the base of the bush. When he stopped, Quinn was behind him, upright, the Smith & Wesson pointing at Orsini’s back.

As the echoes of the last shots died away down the mountain the Corsican sensed he had been wrong. He turned slowly, saw Quinn.

“Orsini…”

He was going to say: I just want to talk to you. Any man in Orsini’s position would have been crazy to try it. Or desperate. Or convinced he was dead if he did not. He pulled his torso about and fired his last round. It was hopeless. The shot went into the sky because half a second before he fired, Quinn did the same. He had no choice. His bullet took the Corsican full in the chest and tossed him backwards, faceup in the maquis.

It was not a heart-shot, but bad enough. There had been no time to take him in the shoulder, and the range was too close for half-measures. He lay on his back, staring up at the American above him. His chest cavity was filling with blood, gurgling out of the punctured lungs, filling the throat.

“They told you I had come to kill you, didn’t they?” said Quinn. The Corsican nodded slowly.

“They lied to you. He lied to you. And about the clothes for the boy. I came to find out his name. The fat man. The one who set it up. You owe him nothing now. No code applies. Who is he?”

Whether, in his last moments, Dominique Orsini still stuck by the code of silence, or whether it was the blood pumping up his throat, Quinn would never know. The man on his back opened his mouth in what might have been an effort to speak or might have been a mocking grin. He gave a low cough instead, and a stream of bright-pink frothing blood filled his mouth and ran onto his chest. Quinn heard the sound he had heard before and knew too well; the low clatter of the lungs emptying for the last time. Orsini rolled his head sideways and Quinn saw the hard bright glitter fade from the black eyes.

The village was still silent and dark when he padded down the alley to the main square. They must have heard the boom of the shotgun, the single roar of a handgun on the main street, the fusillade from up the mountain. But if their orders were to stay inside, they were obeying them. Yet someone, probably the youth, had become curious. Perhaps he had seen the motorcycle lying by the tractor and feared the worst. Whatever, he was lying in wait.

Quinn got into his Opel in the main square. No one had touched it. He strapped himself in tightly, turned to face the street, and gunned the engine. When he hit the side of the timber barn, just in front of the tractor’s wheels, the old planks shattered. There was a thump as he collided with several bales of hay inside the barn and another crash of splintering woodwork as the Ascona demolished the farther wall.

The buckshot hit the rear of the Ascona as it came out of the barn, a full charge that blew holes in the trunk but failed to hit the tank. Quinn tore down the track in a hail of pieces of wood and tufts of flying straw, corrected the steering, and headed down toward the road for Orone and Carbini. It was just short of four in the morning and he had a three-hour drive to Ajaccio airport.

Six time zones to the west it was nudging 10:00 P.M. in Washington the previous evening and the Cabinet officers whom Odell had summoned to grill the professional experts were not in an easily appeasable mood.

“What do you mean, no progress so far?” demanded the Vice President. “It’s been a month. You’ve had unlimited resources, all the manpower you asked for, and the cooperation of the Europeans. What goes on?”

The target of his inquiry was Don Edmonds, Director of the FBI, who sat next to Assistant Director (CID) Philip Kelly. Lee Alexander of the CIA had David Weintraub with him. Edmonds coughed, glanced at Kelly, and nodded.

“Gentlemen, we are a lot further forward than we were thirty days ago,” said Kelly defensively. “The Scotland Yard people are even now examining the house where, we now know, Simon Cormack was held captive. That has already yielded a mass of forensic evidence, including two sets of fingerprints which are in the process of being identified.”

“How did they find the house?” asked the Secretary of State.

Philip Kelly studied his notes.

Weintraub answered Jim Donaldson’s question: “Quinn called them up from Paris and told them.”

“Great,” said Odell sarcastically. “And what other news of Quinn?”

“He seems to have been active in several parts of Europe,” said Kelly diplomatically. “We are expecting a full report on him momentarily.”

“What do you mean, active?” asked Bill Walters, the Attorney General.

“We may have a problem with Mr. Quinn,” said Kelly.

“We’ve always had a problem with Mr. Quinn,” observed Morton Stannard of Defense. “What’s the new one?”

“You may know that my colleague Kevin Brown has long harbored suspicions that Mr. Quinn knew more about this thing from the start than he was letting on; could even have been involved at some stage. Now it appears adduced evidence may support that theory.”

“What adduced evidence?” asked Odell.

“Well, since he was released, on this committee’s instructions, to pursue his own investigations into the identities of the kidnappers, he has been located in a number of European situations and then vanished again. He was detained in Holland at the scene of a murder, then released by the Dutch police for lack of evidence…”

“He was released,” said Weintraub quietly, “because he could prove he was miles away when the crime was committed.”

“Yeah, but the dead man was a former Congo mercenary whose fingerprints have now been found in the house where Simon Cormack was detained,” said Kelly. “We regard that as suspicious.”

“Any other evidence on Quinn?” asked Hubert Reed.

“Yes, sir. The Belgian police have just reported finding a body with a bullet hole in the head, stuck on top of a Ferris wheel. Time of death, three weeks ago. A couple answering the description of Quinn and Agent Somerville were asking the dead man’s whereabouts from his employer around the same time the man disappeared.

“Then in Paris another mercenary was shot dead on a sidewalk. A cabdriver reported two Americans answering the same description fleeing from the scene in his cab at the time.”

“Marvelous,” said Stannard. “Wonderful. We let him go to pursue inquiries and he leaves a trail of bodies all over northern Europe. We have, or used to have, allies over there.”

“Three bodies in three countries,” observed Donaldson acidly. “Anything else we should know about?”

“There’s a German businessman recovering from remedial surgery in Bremen General Hospital; claims it was because of Quinn,” said Kelly.

“What did he do to him?” asked Walters.

Kelly told him.

“Good God, the man’s a maniac,” exclaimed Stannard.

“Okay, we know what Quinn’s been doing,” said Odell. “He’s wiping out the gang before they can talk. Or maybe he makes them talk to him first. What has the FBI been doing?”

“Gentlemen,” said Kelly, “Mr. Brown has been pursuing the best lead we have-the diamonds. Every diamond dealer and manufacturing jeweler in Europe and Israel, not to mention right here in the States, is now on the lookout for those stones. Small though they are, we are confident we will be on top of the seller the instant they show up.”

“Damn it, Kelly, they have shown up,” shouted Odell. With a dramatic gesture he pulled a canvas bag from the floor near his feet and turned it upside down over the conference table. A river of stones clattered out and flowed across the mahogany. There was a stunned silence.

“Mailed to Ambassador Fairweather in London two days ago. From Paris. Handwriting identified as Quinn’s. Now what the hell is going on over there? We want you to get Quinn back over here to Washington to tell us what happened to Simon Cormack, who did it, and why. We figure he seems about the only one who knows anything. Right, gentlemen?”

There was a concerted series of nods from the Cabinet members.

“You got it, Mr. Vice President,” said Kelly. “We… er… may have a bit of a problem there.”

“And what is that?” asked Reed sardonically.

“He’s vanished again,” said Kelly. “We know he was in Paris. We know he rented an Opel in Holland. We’ll ask the French police to trace the Opel, put a port watch all over Europe in the morning. His car or his passport will show up in twenty-four hours. Then we’ll extradite him back here.”

“Why can’t you telephone Agent Somerville?” asked Odell suspiciously. “She’s with him. She’s our bird dog.”

Kelly coughed defensively.

“We have a slight problem there, too, sir…”

“You haven’t lost her as well?” asked Stannard in disbelief.

“Europe’s a big place, sir. She seems to be temporarily out of contact. The French confirmed earlier today she had left Paris for the South of Spain. Quinn has a place there; the Spanish police checked it out. She didn’t show. Probably in a hotel. They’re checking them too.”

“Now look,” said Odell. “You find Quinn and you get his ass back over here. Fast. And Miss Somerville. We want to talk to Miss Somerville.”

The meeting broke up.

“They’re not the only ones,” growled Kelly as he escorted a less-than-pleased Director out to their limousines.

Quinn was in a despondent mood as he drove the last fifteen miles from Cauro down to the coastal plain. He knew that with Orsini dead the trail was at last well and truly cold. There had been only four men in the gang, now all dead. The fat man, whoever he was, and the men behind him if there were any other paymasters, could bury themselves forever, their identities secure. What really happened to the President’s only son, why, how, and who did it, would remain in history like the Kennedy killing and the Marie Celeste. There would be the official record to close the file, and there would be the theories to try to explain the ambiguities… forever.

Southeast of the Ajaccio airport, where the road from the mountains joins the coast highway, Quinn crossed the Prunelli River, then in spate as the winter rains tumbled out of the hills to the sea. The Smith & Wesson had served him well at Oldenburg and Castelblanc, but he could not wait for the ferry and would have to fly-without luggage. He bade the FBI-issue weapon farewell and tossed it far into the river, creating another bureaucratic headache for the Hoover Building. Then he drove the last four miles to the airport.

It is a low, wide modern building, light and airy, divided into two tunnel-linked parts, dedicated to arrivals and departures. He parked the Opel Ascona in the lot and walked into the departures terminal. The place was just opening up. Half-right, just after the magazine shop, he found the Flight Information desk and inquired about the first flight out. Nothing to France for the next two hours, but he could do better. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Sundays there is a 9:00 A.M. Air France flight direct to London.

He was going there anyway, to make a full report to Kevin Brown and Nigel Cramer; he thought Scotland Yard had as much right as the FBI to know what had happened through October and November, half of it in Britain and half in Europe. He bought himself a single ticket to Heathrow and asked for the phone booths. They were in a row beyond the information desk. He needed coins and went to change a bank note at the magazine shop. It was just after seven; he had two hours to wait.

Changing his money and heading back to the telephones, he failed to notice the British businessman who entered the terminal from the direction of the forecourt. The man appeared not to notice him either. He brushed several drops of rain off the shoulders of his beautifully cut three-piece dark suit, folded his charcoal-gray Crombie overcoat across one arm, hung his still-furled umbrella in the crook of the same elbow, and went to study the magazines. After several minutes he bought one, looked around, and selected one of the eight circular banquettes that surround the eight pillars supporting the roof.

The one he selected gave him a view of the main entrance doors, the passenger check-in desk, the row of phone booths, and the embarkation doors leading to the departure lounge. The man crossed his elegantly suited legs and began to read his magazine.

Quinn checked the directory and made his first call to the rental company. The agent was in early. He, too, tried harder.

“Certainly, monsieur. At the airport? The keys under the driver’s foot mat? We can collect it from there. Now about payment… By the way, what car is it?”

“An Opel Ascona,” said Quinn. There was a doubtful pause.

“Monsieur, we do not have any Opel Asconas. Are you sure you rented it from us?”

“Certainly, but not here in Ajaccio.”

“Ah, perhaps you went to our branch in Bastía? Or Calvi?”

“No, Arnhem.”

By now the man was trying very hard indeed.

“Where is Arnhem, monsieur?”

“In Holland,” said Quinn.

At this point the man just stopped trying.

“How the hell am I going to get a Dutch-registered Opel back there from Ajaccio airport?”

“You could drive it,” said Quinn reasonably. “It will be fine after it’s been fixed up.”

There was a long pause.

“Fixed up? What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, the front end’s been through a barn and the rear end’s got a dozen bullet holes.”

“What about payment for all this?” whispered the agent.

“Just send the bill to the American ambassador in Paris,” said Quinn. After that he hung up. It seemed the kindest thing to do.

He called the bar in Estepona and spoke to Ronnie, who gave him the number of the mountain villa where Bernie and Arfur were keeping an eye on Sam but making a point of not playing poker with her. He rang the new number and Arfur called her to the phone.

“Quinn, darling, are you all right?” Her voice was faint but clear.

“I’m fine. Listen, honey, it’s over. You can take a plane from Málaga to Madrid and on to Washington. They’ll want to talk to you; probably that fancy committee will want to hear the story. You’ll be safe. Tell ’em this: Orsini died without talking. Never said a word. Whoever the fat man Zack mentioned may be, or his backers, no one can ever get to them now. I have to run. Bye now.”

He hung up, cutting off her stream of questions.

Drifting silently in space, a National Security Agency satellite heard the phone call, along with a million others that morning, and beamed the words down to the computers at Fort Meade. It took time to process them, work out what to keep and what to throw away, but Sam’s use of the name Quinn ensured that this message was filed. It was studied in the early afternoon, Washington time, and passed to Langley.

Passengers for the London flight were being called when the truck drew up in the forecourt of the departures building. The four men who descended and marched through the front doors did not look like passengers for London, but no one took any notice. Except the elegant businessman. He looked up, folded his magazine, stood with his coat over his arm and his umbrella in his other hand, and watched them.

The leader of the four, in the black suit with open-necked shirt, had been playing cards the previous afternoon in a bar in Castelblanc. The other three were in the blue shirts and trousers of men who worked the vineyards and olive groves. The shirts were worn outside the trousers, a detail that was not lost on the businessman. They looked around the concourse, ignored the businessman, studied the other passengers filing through the embarkation doors. Quinn was out of sight in the men’s washroom. The public address system repeated the final call for boarding. Quinn emerged.

He turned sharp right, toward the doors, pulling his ticket from his breast pocket, failing to see the four from Castelblanc. They began to move toward Quinn’s back. A porter pushing a long line of interlinked baggage carts began to traverse the floor of the hall.

The businessman crossed to the porter and eased him to one side. He paused until the moment was right and gave the column of carts an almighty shove. On the smooth marble floor the column gathered speed and momentum and bore down on the four walking men. One saw them in time, threw himself to one side, tripped, and sprawled. The column hit the second man in the hip, knocked him over, split into several sections, and rattled in three directions. The black-suited capu collected a section of eight trolleys in the midriff and doubled over. The fourth man went to his help. They recovered and regrouped, in time to see Quinn’s back disappearing into the departure lounge.

The four men from the village ran to the glass door. The waiting hostess gave her professional smile and suggested there could be no more fond farewells-departure had been called long since. Through the glass they could see the tall American go through passport control and onto the tarmac. A polite hand eased them aside.

“I say, excuse me, old boy,” said the businessman, and he passed through as well.

On the flight he sat in the smoking section, ten rows behind Quinn, took orange juice and coffee for breakfast, and smoked two filter kings through a silver holder. Like Quinn, he had no luggage. At Heathrow he was four passengers behind Quinn at passport control and ten paces behind as they crossed the customs hall where others waited for their suitcases. He watched Quinn take a cab as his turn came, then nodded to a long black car across the road. He climbed in it on the move, and as they entered the tunnel from the airport to the M.4 motorway and London, the limousine was three vehicles behind Quinn’s cab.

When Philip Kelly said he would ask the British for a port watch on Quinn’s passport in the morning, he meant a Washington morning. Because of the time difference, the British received the request at 11:00 A.M. London time. Half an hour later the port-watch notice was brought by a colleague to the passport officer at Heathrow who had seen Quinn pass in front of him-half an hour earlier. He handed over his post to the colleague and told his superior.

Two Special Branch officers, on duty behind the immigration desk, queried the men in the customs hall. One customs man in the “Green” channel recalled a tall American whom he had briefly stopped because he had no luggage at all. Shown a photograph, he identified it.

Out on the taxi rank the traffic wardens who allocate taxis to prevent line-crashing did the same. But they had not noted the number of the cab he took.

Cabdrivers are sometimes sources of vital information to the police, and as the cabbies are a law-abiding breed, save for an occasional lapse in the declaring of income tax, which does not concern the Met., relations are good and kept that way. Moreover, the cabbies plying the lucrative Heathrow run do so according to a strict and jealously guarded rotation system. It took another hour to trace and contact the one who had carried Quinn, but he too recognized his passenger.

“Yerse,” he said. “I took him to Blackwood’s Hotel in Marylebone.”

In fact he dropped Quinn at the base of the hotel steps at twenty to one. Neither noticed the black limousine that drew up behind. Quinn paid off the cab and mounted the steps. By this time a dark-suited London businessman was beside him. They reached the revolving doors at the same time. It was a question of who should pass first. Quinn’s eyes narrowed when he saw the man beside him. The businessman preempted him.

“I say, weren’t you the chap on the plane from Corsica this morning? By Jove, so was I. Small world, what? After you, m’dear fellow.”

He gestured to Quinn to pass ahead of him. The needle tip jutting from the ferrule of the umbrella was already bared. Quinn hardly felt the sting of the jab as it entered the calf of his left leg. It remained for half a second and was withdrawn. Then Quinn was inside the revolving doors. They jammed when he was halfway through; trapped in the segment between the portico and the lobby. He was stuck there for only five seconds. As he emerged he had the impression of feeling slightly dizzy. The heat, no doubt.

The Englishman was beside him, still chattering.

“Damn door, never did like them. I say, old boy, are you feeling all right?”

Quinn’s vision blurred again and he swayed. A uniformed porter approached, concern on his face.

“You all right, sir?”

The businessman took over with smooth efficiency. He leaned toward the porter, holding Quinn under one armpit with a grip of surprising strength, and slipped a £10 note into the porter’s hand.

“Touch of the pre-lunch martinis, I’m afraid. That and jet lag. Look, my car’s outside… If you’d be so kind… Come on, Clive. Let’s get you home, old son.”

Quinn tried to resist but his limbs seemed to be made of Jell-O. The porter knew his duty to his hotel, and a real gentleman when he saw one. The real gentleman took Quinn at one side, the porter at the other. They eased him through the baggage door, which did not revolve, and down the three steps to the curb. There, two of the real gentleman’s colleagues climbed out of the car and helped Quinn into the rear seat. The businessman nodded his thanks to the porter, who turned to attend to other arriving guests, and the limousine drew away.

As it did so, two police cars came around the corner of Blandford Street and headed for the hotel. Quinn leaned back against the upholstery of the car, his mind still aware but his body helpless and his tongue a soggy lump. Then the blackness swam up and over him in waves and he passed out.