The Negotiator

Chapter 18

Sam Somerville arrived at Montpelier airport the following evening. She was accompanied by Duncan McCrea, the young CIA man who had first approached her with the Deputy Director of Operations’ request for a meeting with her.

They arrived on the PBA Beechcraft 1900 shuttle from Boston, rented an off-road Dodge Ram right at the airport, and checked into a motel on the outskirts of the state capital. Both had brought the warmest clothing Washington had to offer, at Quinn’s suggestion.

The DDO of the CIA, pleading a high-level planning meeting at Langley that he could not afford to miss, was due the next morning, well in time for the roadside rendezvous with Quinn.

He landed at 7:00 A.M. in a ten-seater executive jet whose logo Sam did not recognize. McCrea explained it was a Company communications plane, and that the charter company listed on its fuselage was a CIA front.

He greeted them briefly but cordially as he came down the steps of the jet onto the tarmac, dressed in heavy snow boots, thick trousers, and quilted parka. He carried his suitcase in his hand. He climbed straight into the back of the Ram and they set off. McCrea drove, Sam directing him from her road map.

Out of Montpelier they took Route 2, up through the small township of East Montpelier and onto the road for Plainfield. Just after Plainmont Cemetery, but before the gates of Goddard College, there is a place where the Winooski River leaves the roadside to make a sweep to the south. In this half-moon of land between the road and the river is a stand of tall trees, at that time of year silent and caked with snow. Among the trees stand several picnic tables provided for summer vacationers, and a pull-off and parking area for camper vehicles. This was where Quinn had said he would be at 8:00 A.M.

Sam saw him first. He emerged from behind a tree twenty yards away as the Ram crunched to a halt. Without waiting for her companions she jumped down, ran to him, and threw her arms ’round his neck.

“You all right, kid?”

“I’m fine. Oh, Quinn, thank God you’re safe.”

Quinn was staring beyond her, over the top of her head. She felt him stiffen.

“Who did you bring?” he asked quietly.

“Oh, silly of me…” She turned. “You remember Duncan McCrea? He was the one who got me to Mr. Weintraub.”

McCrea was standing ten yards away, having approached from the truck. He wore his shy smile.

“Hello, Mr. Quinn.” The greeting was diffident, deferential as always. There was nothing diffident about the Colt.45 automatic in his right hand. It pointed unwaveringly at Sam and Quinn.

From the side door of the Ram the second man descended. He carried the folding-stock rifle he had taken from his suitcase, just after passing McCrea the Colt.

“Who’s he?” asked Quinn.

Sam’s voice was very small and very frightened.

“David Weintraub,” she said. “Oh, God, Quinn, what have I done?”

“You’ve been tricked, darling.”

It was his own fault, he realized. He could have kicked himself. Talking to her on the phone, it had not occurred to him to ask whether she had ever seen the Deputy Director of Operations of the CIA. She had twice been summoned to the White House committee to report. He assumed David Weintraub had been present on both, or at least one, of those occasions. In fact the secretive DDO, doing one of the most covert jobs in America, disliked coming into Washington very often and had been away on both occasions. In combat, as Quinn well knew, assuming things can present a serious hazard to health.

The short, chunky man with the rifle, made to look even plumper by his heavy clothes, walked up to take his place beside McCrea.

“So, Sergeant Quinn, we meet again. Remember me?”

Quinn shook his head. The man tapped the bridge of his flattened nose.

“You gave me this, you bastard. Now that’s going to cost you, Quinn.”

Quinn squinted in recollection, saw once again a clearing in Vietnam, a long time ago: a Vietnamese peasant, or what was left of him, still alive, pegged to the ground.

“I remember,” he said.

“Good,” said Moss. “Now, let’s get moving. Where you been living?”

“Log cabin, up in the hills.”

“Writing a little manuscript, I understand. That, I think, we have to have a look at. No tricks, Quinn. Duncan’s handgun might miss you, but then the girl gets it. And as for you, you’ll never outrun this.”

He jerked the barrel of the rifle to indicate there was no chance of making ten yards toward the trees before being cut down.

“Go screw yourself,” said Quinn. In answer Moss chuckled, his breath wheezing through the distorted nose.

“Cold must have frozen your brain, Quinn. Tell you what I have in mind. We take you and the girl down to the riverbank. No one to disturb us-no one within miles. You, we tie to a tree, and you watch, Quinn, you watch. I swear it will take two hours for that girl to die, and every second of it she’ll be praying for death. Now, you want to drive?”

Quinn thought of the clearing in the jungle, the peasant with wrist, elbow, knee, and ankle joints shattered by the soft lead slugs, whimpering that he was just a peasant, knew nothing. It was when Quinn realized that the dumpy interrogator knew that already, had known it for hours, that he had turned and knocked him into the orthopedic ward.

Alone, he would have tried to fight it out, against all the odds, died cleanly with a bullet in the heart. But with Sam… He nodded.

McCrea separated them, handcuffed Quinn’s wrists behind his back, Sam’s also. McCrea drove the Renegade with Quinn beside him. Moss followed behind in the Ram, Sam lying in the back.

In West Danville, people were stirring but no one thought anything of two off-road vehicles heading toward St. Johnsbury. One man raised a hand in greeting, the salutation of fellow survivors of the bitter cold. McCrea responded, flashing his friendly grin, and turned north at Danville toward Lost Ridge. At Pope Cemetery, Quinn signaled another left turn, in the direction of Bear Mountain. Behind them the Ram, without snow chains, was having trouble.

Where the paved road ran out, Moss abandoned the Ram and clambered into the back of the Renegade, pushing Sam ahead of him. She was white-faced and shaking with fear.

“You sure wanted to get lost,” said Moss when they arrived at the log cabin.

Outside, it was thirty below zero, but the interior of the cabin was still snug and warm, as Quinn had left it. He and Sam were forced to sit several feet apart on a bunk bed at one end of the open-plan living area that formed the principal room of the cabin. McCrea still kept them covered while Moss made a quick check of the other rooms to ensure they were alone.

“Nice,” he said at last and with satisfaction. “Nice and private. You couldn’t have done it better for me, Quinn.”

Quinn’s manuscript was stacked in a drawer of the writing desk. Moss stripped off his parka, seated himself in an armchair, and began to read. McCrea, despite the fact that his prisoners were manacled, sat in an upright chair facing Sam and Quinn. He still wore his boy-next-door grin. Too late Quinn realized it was a mask, something the younger man had developed over the years to cover his inner self.

“You’ve won out,” said Quinn after a while. “I’d still be interested to know how you did it.”

“No problem,” said Moss, still reading. “It’s not going to change anything, either way.”

Quinn started with a small and unimportant question. “How did McCrea get picked for the job in London?”

“That was a lucky break,” said Moss. “Just a fluke. I never thought I’d have my boy in there to help me. A bonus, courtesy of the goddam Company.”

“How did you two get together?”

Moss looked up.

“Central America,” he said simply. “I spent years down there. Duncan was raised in those parts. Met him when he was just a kid. Realized we shared the same tastes. Dammit, I recruited him into the Company.”

“Same tastes?” queried Quinn. He knew what Moss’s tastes were. He wanted to keep them talking. Psychopaths love to talk about themselves when they feel they are safe.

“Well, almost,” said Moss. “Except Duncan here prefers the ladies and I don’t. Of course, he likes to mess ’em around a bit first-don’t you, boy?”

He resumed reading. McCrea flashed a happy grin.

“Sure do, Mr. Moss. You know, these two were balling during those days in London? Thought I hadn’t heard. Guess I’ve got some catching up to do.”

“Whatever you say, boy,” said Moss. “But Quinn is mine. You’re going to go slow, Quinn. I’m going to have me some fun.”

He went on reading. Sam suddenly leaned her head forward and retched. Nothing came up. Quinn had seen recruits in ’Nam do that. The fear generated a flood of acid in the stomach which irritated the sensitive membranes and produced dry retching.

“How did you stay in touch in London?” he asked.

“No problem,” said Moss. “Duncan used to go out to buy things, food and so forth. Remember? We used to meet in the food stores. If you’d been smarter, Quinn, you’d have noticed he always went food-shopping at the same hour.”

“And Simon’s clothing, the booby-trapped belt?”

“Took it all to the house in Sussex while you were with the other three at the warehouse. Gave it to Orsini, by appointment. Good man, Orsini. I used him a couple of times in Europe, when I was with the Company. And afterwards.”

Moss put the manuscript down; his tongue loosened.

“You spooked me, running out of the apartment like that. I’d have had you wasted then, but I couldn’t get Orsini to do it. Said the other three would have stopped him. So I let it go, figured when the boy died you’d come under suspicion anyway. But I was really surprised those yo-yos in the Bureau let you go afterwards. Thought they’d put you in the pen, just on suspicion alone.”

“That was when you needed to bug Sam’s handbag?”

“Sure. Duncan told me about it. I bought a duplicate, fixed it up. Gave it to Duncan the morning you left Kensington for the last time. Remember he went out for breakfast eggs? Brought it back with him, did the switch while you were eating in the kitchen.”

“Why not just waste the four mercenaries at a prearranged rendezvous?” asked Quinn. “Save you the trouble of trailing us all over.”

“Because three of them panicked,” said Moss with disgust. “They were supposed to show up in Europe for their bonuses. Orsini was going to take care of them, all three. I’d have silenced Orsini. But when they heard the boy was dead they split and disappeared. Happily, you were around to find them for me.”

“You couldn’t have handled it alone,” said Quinn. “McCrea had to be helping you.”

“Right. I was up ahead. Duncan was close to you all the time, even slept in the car. Didn’t like that, did you, Duncan? When he heard you pin down Marchais and Pretorius he called me on the car phone, gave me a few hours’ start.”

Quinn still had a couple more questions. Moss had resumed reading, his face becoming angrier and angrier.

“The kid, Simon Cormack. Who blew him away? It was you, McCrea, wasn’t it?”

“Sure. Carried the transmitter in my jacket pocket for two days.”

Quinn recalled the scene by the Buckinghamshire roadside-the Scotland Yard men, the FBI group, Brown, Collins, Seymour near the car, Sam with her face pressed to his back after the explosion; recalled McCrea, on his knees over a ditch, pretending to gag, in actuality pushing the transmitter ten inches deep into the mud beneath the water.

“Okay,” he said. “So you had Orsini keeping you abreast of what was going on inside the hideaway, baby Duncan here telling you about the Kensington end. What about the man in Washington?”

Sam looked up and stared at him in disbelief. Even McCrea looked startled. Moss glanced over and surveyed Quinn with curiosity.

On the drive up to the cabin Quinn had realized that Moss had taken a tremendous risk in approaching Sam and pretending to be David Weintraub. Or had he? There was only one way Moss could have known Sam had never actually seen the DDO.

Moss lifted the manuscript and dropped it in rage all over the floor.

“You’re a bastard, Quinn,” he said with quiet venom. “There’s nothing new in here. The word in Washington is, this whole thing was a Communist operation mounted by the KGB. Despite what that shit Zack said. You were supposed to have something new, something to disprove that. Names, dates, places… proof, goddammit. And you know what you’ve got here? Nothing. Orsini never said a word, did he?”

He rose in his anger and paced up and down the cabin. He had wasted a lot of time and effort, a lot of worry. All for nothing.

“That Corsican should have wasted you, the way I asked him to. Even alive, you had nothing. That letter you sent the bitch here, it was a lie. Who put you up to this?”

“Petrosian,” said Quinn.

“Who?”

“Tigran Petrosian. An Armenian. He’s dead now.”

“Good. And that’s where you’re going, Quinn.”

“Another stage-managed scenario?”

“Yep. Seeing as it’ll do you no good, I’ll enjoy telling you. Sweat a little. That Dodge Ram we drove up in-it was rented by your lady friend here. The car-rental agent never saw Duncan at all. The police will find the cabin, after it’s been burned down, and her inside it. The Ram will give them a name; dental records will prove who the corpse was. Your Renegade will be driven back and dumped at the airport. Within a week there’ll be a murder rap on you, and the last ends will be tied up.

“Only the police will never find you. This terrain is great. There must be crevasses in these mountains where a man could disappear forever. Come the spring you’ll be a skeleton; by summer, covered over and lost forever. Not that the police will be looking around here-they’ll be checking for a man who flew out of Montpelier airport.”

He picked up his rifle, jerked the barrel toward Quinn.

“Come on, asshole, walk. Duncan, have fun, I’ll be back in an hour, maybe less. You have till then.”

The bitter cold outside hit like a slap in the face. His hands cuffed behind him, Quinn was prodded through the snow behind the cabin, farther and farther up Bear Mountain. He could hear the wheezing of Moss, knew the man was out of shape. But with manacled hands there was no way he could outrun a rifle. And Moss was smart enough not to get too close, run the risk of taking a disabling kick from the former Green Beret.

It was only ten minutes until Moss found what he sought. At the edge of a clearing in the mountain’s cloak of spruce and fir, the ground dropped away into a precipitous crevasse, barely ten feet across at the rim, vanishing to a narrow crack fifty feet down.

The depths were choked with soft snow into which a body would sink another three or four feet. Fresh snow through the last two weeks of December, plus January, February, March, and April, would fill the gully. In the spring thaw, all would melt, the crevasse become a freezing brook. The freshwater shrimp and crayfish would do the rest. When the crevasse choked up with summer growth, any remains far below would be covered for another season, and another and another.

Quinn had no illusions he would die with one clean shot through the head or heart. He had recognized Moss’s face, recalled his name now. Knew his warped pleasures. He wondered if he could take the pain and not give Moss the satisfaction of crying out. And he thought of Sam, and what she would go through before she died.

“Kneel down,” said Moss. His breath was coming in short wheezes and snorts. Quinn knelt. He wondered where the first slug would take him. He heard the bolt of the rifle ten yards behind him clatter in the freezing dry air. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited.

The crash, when it came, seemed to fill the clearing and echo off the mountain. But the snow muffled it so quickly that no one on the road far below would have heard it, let alone the village ten miles away.

Quinn’s first sensation was bewilderment. How could a man miss at that range? Then he realized it was all part of Moss’s game. He turned his head. Moss was standing pointing the rifle at him.

“Get on with it, sleazeball,” said Quinn. Moss gave a half-smile and began to lower the rifle. He dropped to his knees, reached forward, and placed both his hands in the snow in front of him.

It seemed longer in retrospect, but it was only two seconds that Moss stared at Quinn, on his knees with his hands in the snow, before he leaned his head forward, opened his mouth, and brought up a long bright stream of glittering blood. Then he gave a sigh and rolled quietly sideways into the snow.

It took several more seconds for Quinn to see the man, so good was his camouflage. He stood at the far side of the clearing between two trees, quite motionless. The country was wrong for skis, but the man wore snowshoes, like oversized tennis rackets, on each foot. His locally bought arctic clothing was caked with snow, but both the quilted trousers and parka were in the palest blue, the nearest the store had to the color white.

Stiff hoarfrost had clotted on the strands of fur that stuck out from his parka hood, and on his eyebrows and beard. Between the facial hair the skin was caked with grease and charcoal, the arctic soldier’s protection against temperatures of thirty degrees below zero. He held his rifle easily across his chest, aware he would not need a second shot.

Quinn wondered how he could have survived up here, bivouacking in some ice hole in the hill behind the cabin. He supposed that if you could take a winter in Siberia you could take Vermont.

He braced his arms and pulled and tugged until his cuffed hands came under his backside, then squeezed one leg after another through his arms. When he had his hands in front of him he fumbled in Moss’s parka until he found the key, then released his hands. He picked up Moss’s rifle and rose to his feet. The man across the clearing watched impassively.

Quinn called across to him: “As they say in your country-spasibo.”

The man’s half-frozen face gave a flicker of a smile. When he spoke, Andrei the Cossack still used the tones of London’s clubland.

“As they say in your country, old boy-Have a nice day.”

There was a swish from the snowshoes, then another, and he was gone. Quinn realized that after dumping him at Birmingham, the Russian must have driven to London Heathrow, caught a direct flight to Toronto, and tailed him up into these mountains. He knew a bit about insurance. So, apparently, did the KGB. He turned and began to slog through the knee-deep snow back to the cabin.

He paused outside to peer through the small round hole in the mist that covered the living-room window. No one there. With the rifle pointed straight ahead, he eased open the latch and gave the front door a gentle kick. There was a whimper from the bedroom. He crossed the open floor of the living room and stood in the bedroom door.

Sam was naked, facedown on the bed, spread-eagled, her hands and feet knotted with ropes to the four corners. McCrea was in his shorts, his back to the door, two thin lengths of electric cord dangling from his right hand.

He was smiling still. Quinn caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above the chest of drawers. McCrea heard the footfall and turned. The bullet took him in the stomach, an inch above the navel. It went on through and destroyed the spine. As he went down, he stopped smiling.

For two days Quinn nursed Sam like a child. The paralyzing fear she had experienced caused her to shiver and weep alternately, while Quinn held her in his arms and rocked her to and fro. Otherwise she slept, and that great healer had its benign effect.

When he felt he could leave her, Quinn drove to St. Johnsbury, phoning the FBI personnel officer to claim he was her father in Rockcastle. He told the unsuspecting officer she was visiting him and had caught a heavy cold. She would be back at her desk in three or four days.

At night, while she slept, he wrote the second and real manuscript of the events of the past seventy days. He could tell the tale from his own point of view, omitting nothing, not even the mistakes he had made. To this he could add the story from the Soviet side, as told him by the KGB general in London. The sheets Moss had read made no mention of this; he had not reached that point in the story when Sam had told him the DDO wanted a meeting.

He could add the story from the mercenaries’ point of view, as told by Zack just before he died, and finally he could incorporate the answers given him by Moss himself. He had it all-almost.

At the center of the web was Moss; behind him, the five paymasters. Feeding into Moss had been the informants: Orsini from inside the kidnappers’ hideout, McCrea from the Kensington apartment. But there was one more, he knew; someone who had to have known everything the authorities in Britain and America had known, someone who had monitored the progress of Nigel Cramer for Scotland Yard and Kevin Brown for the FBI, someone who knew the deliberations of the British COBRA committee and the White House group. It was the one question Moss had not answered.

He dragged the body of Moss back from the wilderness and laid him alongside McCrea in the unheated lean-to where the firewood was stored, where both bodies quickly became as rigid as the cords of pine among which they lay. He rifled the pockets of both men and surveyed the haul. Nothing was of value to him, save possibly the private phone book that came from Moss’s inside breast pocket.

Moss had been a secretive man, created by years of training and of surviving on the run. The small book contained more than 120 telephone numbers, but each was referred to only by initials or a single first name.

On the third morning Sam came out of the bedroom after ten hours of unbroken sleep and no nightmares.

She curled up on his lap and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“How you feeling?” he asked her.

“I’m fine now. Quinn, it’s okay. I’m all right. Where do we go now?”

“We have to go back to Washington,” he said. “The last chapter will be written there. I need your help.”

“Whatever,” she said.

That afternoon he let the fire go out in the stove, shut everything down, cleaned and locked the cabin. He left Moss’s rifle and the Colt.45 that McCrea had brandished. But he took the notebook.

On the way down the mountain he hitched the abandoned Dodge Ram behind the Jeep Renegade and towed it into St. Johnsbury. Here the local garage was happy to get it started again and he left them the Jeep with its Canadian plates to sell as best they could.

They drove the Ram to Montpelier airport, turned it in, and flew to Boston and then to Washington National. Sam had her own car parked there.

“I can’t stay with you,” he told her. “Your place is still tapped.”

They found a modest rooming house a mile from her apartment in Alexandria where the landlady was glad to rent her upper front room to the tourist from Canada. Late that night Sam took Moss’s phone book with her, let herself back into her own place and, for the benefit of the phone tap, called the Bureau to say she would be at her desk in the morning.

They met again at a diner on the second evening. Sam had brought along the phone book and began to go through it with him. She had highlighted the numbers in fluorescent pen, colored according to the country, state, or city of the phone numbers listed in it.

“This guy really got around,” she said. “The numbers highlighted in yellow are foreign.”

“Forget them,” said Quinn. “The man I want lives right here, or close. District of Columbia, Virginia, or Maryland. He has to be close to Washington itself.”

“Right. The red highlights mean territorial United States, but outside this area. In the District and the two states there are forty-one numbers. I checked them all. By the ink analysis, most go back years, probably to when he was with the Company. They include banks, lobbyists, several CIA staffers at their private homes, a brokerage firm. I had to call in a big favor with a guy I know in the lab to get this stuff.”

“What did your technician say about the dates of the entries?”

“All over seven years old.”

“Before Moss was busted. No, this has to be a more recent entry.”

“I said ‘most,’ ” she reminded him. “There are four that were written in the past twelve months. A travel agency, two airline ticket offices, and a cab-call number.”

“Damn.”

“There’s one other number, entered about three to six months ago. Problem is, it doesn’t exist.”

“Disconnected? Out of service?”

“No, I mean it never did exist. The area code is two-oh-two for Washington, but the remaining seven figures don’t form a telephone number and never did.”

Quinn took the number home with him and worked on it for two days and nights. If it was coded, there could be enough variations to give a computer headaches, let alone the human brain. It would depend how secretive Moss had wanted to be, how safe he thought his contacts book would stay. He began to run through the easier codes, writing the new numbers yielded by the process in a column for Sam to check out later.

He started with the obvious, the children’s code; just reversing the order of the numbers from front to back. Then he transposed the first and last figures, the second-first and second-last, and third-from-first and third-from-last, leaving the middle number of the seven in place. He ran through ten variations of transposition. Then he moved into additions and subtractions.

He deducted one from every figure, then two, and so forth. Then one from the first figure, two from the second, three from the third, down the line to the seventh. Then repeated the process by adding numbers. After the first night he sat back and looked at his columns. Moss, he realized, could have added or subtracted his own birth date, or even his mother’s birth date, his car registration number or his inseam measurement. When he had a list of 107 of the most obvious possibilities, he gave his list to Sam. She called him back in the late afternoon of the next day, sounding tired. The Bureau’s phone bill must have gone up a smidgen.

“Okay, forty-one of the numbers still don’t exist. The remaining sixty-six include laundromats, a senior citizens’ center, a massage parlor, four restaurants, a hamburger joint, two hookers, and a military air base. Add to that fifty private citizens who seem to have nothing to do with anything. But there is one that might be paydirt. Number forty-four on your list.”

He glanced at his own copy. Forty-four. He had reached it by reversing the order of the phone number, then subtracting 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, in that order.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a private unlisted number carrying a classified tag,” she said. “I had to call in a few favors to get it identified. It belongs to a large town house in Georgetown. Guess who it belongs to?”

She told him. Quinn let out a deep breath. It could be a coincidence. Play around with a seven-figure number long enough and it is possible to come up with the private number of a very important person just by fluke.

“Thanks, Sam. It’s all I have. I’ll try it-let you know.”

At half past eight that evening Senator Bennett Hapgood sat in the makeup room of a major television station in New York as a pretty girl dabbed a bit more ocher makeup onto his face. He lifted his chin to draw in a mite more of the sag beneath the jawbone.

“Just a little more hair spray here, honey,” he told her, pointing out a strand of the blow-dried white locks that hung boyishly over one side of his forehead, but which might slip out of place if not attended to.

She had done a good job. The fine tracery of veins around the nose had vanished; the blue eyes glittered from the drops that had been applied; the cattleman’s suntan, acquired in long hours toiling under a sunlamp, glowed with rugged health. An assistant stage manager popped her head around the door, clipboard like an insignia.

“We’re ready for you, Senator,” she said.

Bennett Hapgood rose, stood while the makeup girl removed the bib and dusted any last specks of powder off the pearl-gray suit, and followed the stage manager down the corridor to the studio. He was seated to the left of the host of the show, and a soundman expertly clipped a button-sized microphone to his lapel. The host, anchoring one of the country’s most important prime-time current affairs programs, was busy going down his running order; the monitor showed a dog-food commercial. He looked up and flashed a pearly grin at Hapgood.

“Good to see you, Senator.”

Hapgood responded with the obligatory yard-wide smile.

“Good to be here, Tom.”

“We have just two more messages after this. Then we’re on.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll just follow your lead.”

Will you, hell, thought the anchorman, who came from the East Coast liberal tradition of journalism and thought the Oklahoma senator a menace to society. The dog food was replaced by a pickup truck and then a breakfast cereal. As the last image faded of a deliriously happy family tucking into a product that looked and tasted like straw, the stage manager pointed a finger directly at Tom. The red light above camera one lit up and the host gazed into the lens, his face etched with public concern.

“Despite repeated denials from White House Press Secretary Craig Lipton, reports continue to reach this program that the health of President Cormack still gives rise to deep concern. And this just two weeks before the project most closely identified with his name and his incumbency, the Nantucket Treaty, is due to go before the Senate for ratification.

“One of those who has most consistently opposed the treaty is the chairman of the Citizens for a Strong America movement, Senator Bennett Hapgood.”

On the word Senator, the light of camera two went on, sending the image of the seated senator into 30 million homes. Camera three gave viewers a two-shot of both men as the host swung toward Hapgood.

“Senator, how do you rate the chances of ratification in January?”

“What can I say, Tom? They can’t be good. Not after what has happened these past few weeks. But even those events apart, the treaty should not pass. Like millions of my fellow Americans, I can see no justification at this point in time for trusting the Russians-and that’s what it comes down to.”

“But surely, Senator, the issue of trust does not arise. There are verification procedures built into that treaty which give our military specialists unprecedented access to the Soviet weapons-destruction program…”

“Maybe so, Tom, maybe so. Fact is, Russia is a huge place. We have to trust them not to build other, newer weapons deep in the interior. For me, it’s simple: I want to see America strong, and that means keeping every piece of hardware we have-”

“And deploying more, Senator?”

“If we have to, if we have to.”

“But these defense budgets are starting to cripple our economy. The deficits are becoming unmanageable.”

“You say so, Tom. There are others who think the damage to our economy is caused by too many welfare checks, too many foreign imports, too many federal foreign aid programs. We seem to spend more looking after foreign critics than our military. Believe me, Tom, it’s not a question of money for the defense industries, not at all.”

Tom Granger switched topics.

“Senator, apart from opposing U.S. help to the hungry of the Third World and backing protectionist trade tariffs, you have also called for the resignation of John Cormack. Can you justify that?”

Hapgood could cheerfully have strangled the newsman. Granger’s use of the words hungry and protectionist indicated where he stood on these issues. Instead, Hapgood kept his concerned expression in place and nodded soberly but regretfully.

“Tom, I just want to say this: I have opposed several issues espoused by President Cormack. That is my right in this free country. But…”

He turned away from the host, found the camera he wanted with its on-light dark, and stared at it for the half-second it took the director in the control booth to switch cameras and give him a personal close-up shot.

“… I yield to no man in my respect for the integrity and courage in adversity of John Cormack. And it is precisely because of this that I say…”

His bronzed face would have oozed sincerity from every pore had they not been clogged with pancake makeup.

“ ‘… John, you have taken more than any man should have to take. For the sake of the nation, but above all for the sake of yourself and Myra, lay down this intolerable burden of office, I beg you.’ ”

In his private study in the White House, President Cormack depressed a button on his remote control and switched off the TV screen across the room. He knew and disliked Hapgood, even though they were members of the same party; knew the man would never have dared call him “John” to his face.

And yet… He knew the man was right. He knew he could not go on much longer, was no longer capable of leadership. His misery was so great he had no further lust for the job he did, no further lust for life itself.

Though he did not know it, Dr. Armitage had noticed symptoms these past two weeks that had caused him profound concern. Once the psychiatrist, probably looking for what he found, had caught the President in the underground garage, descending from his car after one of his rare forays outside the White House grounds. He intercepted the Chief Executive staring at the exhaust pipe of the limousine, as if at an old friend to whom he might now turn to dull his pain.

John Cormack turned to the book he had been reading before the TV show. It was a book of poetry, something he had once taught his students at Yale. There was a verse he recalled. Something John Keats had written. The little English poet, dead at twenty-six, had known melancholy as few others had, and expressed it like no one else. He found the passage he sought: “Ode to a Nightingale.”

… and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain…

He left the book open and leaned back, stared at the rich scrollwork around the cornices of the private study of the most powerful man in the world. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. How tempting, he thought. How very tempting…

Quinn chose half past ten that evening, an hour when most people were back home but not yet in bed asleep for the night. He was in a phone booth in a good hotel, the sort of place where the booths still have doors to give the caller privacy. He heard the number ring three times; then the phone was lifted.

“Yes?”

He had heard the man speak before, but that one word was not enough to identify the voice.

Quinn spoke in the quiet, almost whispering voice of Moss, the words punctuated by the occasional whistle of breath through the damaged nose.

“It’s Moss,” he said.

There was a pause.

“You should never call me here, except in an emergency. I told you that.”

Pay dirt. Quinn let out a deep sigh.

“It is,” he said softly. “Quinn has been taken care of. The girl too. And McCrea, he’s been… terminated.”

“I don’t think I want to know these things,” said the voice.

“You should,” said Quinn before the man could cut the connection. “He left a manuscript behind. Quinn. I have it now, right here.”

“Manuscript?”

“That’s right. I don’t know where he got the details, how he worked them out, but it’s all here. The five names-you know, the men in back. Me, McCrea, Orsini, Zack, Marchais, Pretorius. Everything. Names, dates, places, times. What happened and why… and who.”

There was a long pause.

“That include me?” asked the voice.

“I said, everything.”

Quinn could hear the breathing.

“How many copies?”

“Just the one. He was in a cabin up in northern Vermont. No Xerox machines up there. I have the only copy right here.”

“I see. Where are you?”

“In Washington.”

“I think you had better hand it over to me.”

“Sure,” said Quinn. “No problem. It names me too. I’d destroy it myself, except…”

“Except what, Mr. Moss?”

“Except they still owe me.”

There was another long pause. The man at the other end of the line was swallowing saliva, several times.

“I understand you have been handsomely rewarded,” he said. “If there is more due you, it will be provided.”

“No good,” said Quinn. “There was a whole mess of things I had to clear up that were not foreseen. Those three guys in Europe, Quinn, the girl… All that caused a deal of extra… work.”

“What do you want, Mr. Moss?”

“I figure I ought to get what was offered to me originally, all over again. And doubled.”

Quinn could hear the intake of breath. Doubtless the man was learning the hard way that if you mess with killers, you may end up being blackmailed.

“I will have to consult on this,” said the man in Georgetown. “If… er… paperwork has to be prepared, it will take time. Don’t do anything rash. I’m sure things can be worked out.”

“Twenty-four hours,” said Quinn. “I call you back this time tomorrow. Tell those five down there you had better be ready. I get my fee-you get the manuscript. Then I’ll be gone, and you’ll all be safe… forever.”

He hung up the phone, leaving the other man to calculate the choice of paying up or facing ruin.

For transportation Quinn rented a motorcycle, and bought himself a chunky sheepskin bomber jacket to keep out the cold.

His call the next evening was picked up at the first ring.

“Well?” Quinn snuffled.

“Your… terms, excessive though they are, have been accepted,” said the owner of the Georgetown house.

“You have the paperwork?” asked Quinn.

“I do. In my hand. You have the manuscript?”

“In mine. Let’s swap and get it over with.”

“I agree. Not here. The usual place, two in the morning.”

“Alone. Unarmed. You get some hired muscle to try and jump me, you end up in a box.”

“No tricks-you have my word on it. Since we are prepared to pay, there’s no need. And none from your side either. A straight commercial deal, please.”

“Suits me. I just want the money,” said Quinn.

The other man cut off the call.

At five minutes to eleven John Cormack sat at his desk and surveyed the handwritten letter to the American people. It was gracious and regretful. Others would have to read it aloud, reproduce it in their newspapers and magazines, on their radio programs and TV shows. After he was gone. It was eight days to Christmas. But this year another man would celebrate the festive season in the Mansion. A good man, a man he trusted. Michael Odell, forty-first President of the United States. The phone rang. He glanced at it with some irritation. It was his personal and private number, the one he gave only to close and trusted friends who might call him without introduction at any hour.

“Yes?”

“Mr. President?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Quinn. The negotiator.”

“Ah… yes, Mr. Quinn.”

“I don’t know what you think of me, Mr. President. It matters little now. I failed to get your son back to you. But I have discovered why. And who killed him. Please, sir, just listen. I have little time.

“At five tomorrow morning a motorcyclist will stop at the Secret Service post at the public entrance to the White House on Alexander Hamilton Place. He will hand over a package, a flat cardboard box. It will contain a manuscript. It is for your eyes and yours only. There are no copies. Please give orders for it to be brought to you personally when it arrives. When you have read it, you will make the dispositions you see fit. Trust me, Mr. President. This one last time. Good night, sir.”

John Cormack stared at the buzzing phone. Still perplexed, he put it down, lifted another, and gave the order to the Secret Service duty officer.

Quinn had a small problem. He did not know “the usual place,” and to have admitted that would have blown away his chances of the meeting. At midnight he found the Georgetown address Sam had given him, parked the big Honda down the street, and took up his station in the deep shadow of a gap between two other houses across the street and twenty yards up.

The house he watched was an elegant five-story redbrick mansion at the western end of N Street, a quiet avenue that terminates there with the campus of Georgetown University. Quinn calculated such a place would have to cost over $2 million.

Beside the house were the electronically operated doors of a double garage. Lights burned in the house on three floors. Just after midnight those in the topmost floor, the staff quarters, went out. At one o’clock only one floor remained illuminated. Someone was still awake.

At twenty past one the last lights above the ground floor went out; others downstairs came on. Ten minutes later a crack of yellow appeared behind the garage doors-someone was getting into a car. The light went out and the doors began to rise. A long black Cadillac limousine emerged, turned slowly into the street, and the doors closed. As the car headed away from the university Quinn saw there was just one man at the wheel, driving carefully. He walked unobtrusively to his Honda, started up, and cruised down the street in the wake of the limousine.

It turned south on Wisconsin Avenue. The usually bustling heart of Georgetown, with its bars, bistros, and late shops, was quiet at that hour of a deep mid-December night. Quinn stayed back as far as he dared, watching the taillights of the Cadillac swing east onto M Street and then right on Pennsylvania Avenue. He followed it around the Washington Circle and then due south on Twenty-third Street, until it turned left into Constitution Avenue and pulled to a halt by the curb under the trees just beyond Henry Bacon Drive.

Quinn slewed quickly off the avenue, over the curb, and into a clump of bushes, killing his engine and lights as he did so. He watched the taillights die on the Cadillac and the driver climb out. The man glanced around him, watched a taxi cruise past looking forlornly for a fare, noticed nothing else, and began to walk. Instead of coming down the pavement he stepped over the railing bordering the greensward of West Potomac Park and began to cross the grass in the direction of the Reflecting Pool.

Out of the range of the streetlamps the darkness enveloped the figure in the black overcoat and hat. To Quinn’s right the bright illumination of the Lincoln Memorial lit the bottom end of Twenty-third Street, but the light hardly reached across the grass and into the trees of the park. Quinn was able to close up to fifty yards and keep the moving shadow in vision.

The man skirted the western end of the Vietnam Memorial, then cut half-left to slant away toward the high ground, heavily studded with trees, between the Constitution Gardens lake and the bank of the Reflecting Pool.

Far to Quinn’s left he could make out the glimmer of light from the two bivouacs where veterans kept vigil for the Missing in Action of that sad and distant war. His quarry was using a diagonal route to avoid passing too close to this single sign of life in the park at that hour.

The Memorial is a long wall of black marble, ankle-high at each end but seven feet deep at the center, recessed into the ground of the Mall and shaped like a very shallow chevron. Quinn stepped over the wall in the path of his quarry at the point where it was only a foot high, then crouched low in the shadow of the stone as the man ahead of him turned, as if hearing some scrape of shoe on gravel. With his head above the level of the surrounding lawn, Quinn could see him scan the park and the Mall before moving on.

A pale sickle moon emerged from behind the clouds. By its light Quinn could see the length of the marble wall incised with the names of the fifty-eight thousand men who died in Vietnam. He stooped briefly to kiss the icy marble and moved on, crossing the further stretch of lawn to the grove of towering oaks where stand the life-size bronze statues of veterans of the war.

Ahead of Quinn, the man in the black coat stopped and turned again to survey the ground behind him. He saw nothing; the moonlight picked out the oaks, bare of leaf and stark against the glow from the now-distant Lincoln Memorial, and glinted on the figures of the four bronze soldiers.

Had he known or cared more, the man in the coat would have known there are only three soldiers on the plinth. As he turned to walk on, the fourth detached himself and followed.

Finally the man reached “the usual place.” At the height of the knoll between the lake in the gardens and the Reflecting Pool itself, surrounded by discreet trees, stands a public toilet, illuminated by a single lamp, still burning at that hour. The man in the black coat took up his station near the lamp and waited. Two minutes later Quinn emerged from the trees. The man looked at him. He probably went pale-it was too dim to see. But his hands shook; Quinn could see that. They looked at each other. The man in front of Quinn was fighting back a rising tide of panic.

“Quinn,” said the man. “You’re dead.”

“No,” said Quinn reasonably. “Moss is dead. And McCrea. And Orsini, Zack, Marchais, and Pretorius. And Simon Cormack-oh, yes, he’s dead. And you know why.”

“Easy, Quinn. Let’s behave like reasonable people. He had to go. He was going to ruin us all. Surely you can see that.” He knew he was talking for his life now.

“Simon? A college student?”

The surprise of the man in the dark coat overcame his nervousness. He had sat in the White House, heard the details of what Quinn could do.

“Not the boy. The father. He has to go.”

“The Nantucket Treaty?”

“Of course. Those terms will ruin thousands of men, hundreds of corporations.”

“But why you? From what I know, you’re an extremely wealthy man. Your private fortune is enormous.”

The man Quinn faced laughed shortly.

“So far,” he said. “When I inherited my family wealth I used my talents as a broker in New York to place the estate in a variety of stock portfolios. Good stocks, high-growth, high-yield portfolios. It’s still in them. The trustees of my blind trust haven’t moved them.”

“In the armaments industry.”

“Look, Quinn, I brought this for Moss. Now it could be for you. Have you ever seen one before?”

He brought a slip of paper out of his breast pocket and held it out. By the light of the single lantern and the moon Quinn looked at it. A bank draft, drawn on a Swiss bank of unimpeachable reputation, payable to the bearer. In the sum of 5 million U.S. dollars.

“Take it, Quinn. You’ve never seen money like that before. Never will again. Think what you can do with it, the life you can lead with it. Comfort, luxury even, for the rest of your life. Just the manuscript, and it’s yours.”

“It really was about money all along, wasn’t it?” said Quinn thoughtfully. He toyed with the check, thinking things over.

“Of course. Money and power. Same thing.”

“But you were his friend. He trusted you.”

“Please, Quinn, don’t be naïve. It always comes down to money. This entire nation is about money. No one can change that. Always has been, always will. We worship the almighty dollar. Everything and everyone in this land can be bought-bought and paid for.”

Quinn nodded. He thought of the fifty-eight thousand names on the black marble four hundred yards behind him. Bought and paid for. He sighed and reached inside his sheepskin bomber jacket. The smaller man jumped back, startled.

“No need for that, Quinn. You said, no guns.”

But when Quinn’s hand emerged it clutched two hundred sheets of white typescript. He held out the manuscript. The other man relaxed, took the sheaf.

“You won’t regret it, Quinn. The money is yours. Enjoy it.”

Quinn nodded again. “There is just one thing…”

“Anything.”

“I paid off my cab on Constitution Avenue. Could you give me a ride back to the Circle?”

For the first time the other man smiled. With relief.

“No problem,” he said.