The Negotiator (48 page)

“What about this pro-Western Saudi Prince who is going to replace him?” asked Cobb. “If he fails ...”

“He won’t,” said the colonel with certainty. “Just as the Army’s trucks and the Air Force fighter-bombers were immobilized when they might have prevented the massacre, they will reenter service in time to rally to the Prince’s call. The Palestinians will see to that.

“Prince Khalidi bin Sudairi will stop by my house on his way to the dress rehearsal. He will have a drink—no doubt about that; he’s an alcoholic. The drink will be drugged. For three days he will be detained by two of my Yemenite house servants in the cellar. There he will prepare video and radio tapes announcing he is alive, the legitimate successor to his uncle, and appealing for American help to restore legitimacy. Note the phrase, gentlemen: the United States will intervene, not to conduct a countercoup, but to restore legitimacy with the full backing of the Arab world.

“I will then transfer the Prince to the safekeeping of the U.S. embassy, forcing America to become involved whether it likes it or not, since the embassy will have to defend itself against Shi’ah mobs demanding the Prince be handed over to them. The Religious Police, the Army, and the people will still need a trigger to turn on the Shi’ah usurpers and eliminate them, to a man. That trigger will be the arrival of the first U.S. airborne units.”

“What about the aftermath, Colonel?” asked Miller slowly. “Will we get what we want—the oil for America?”

“We will all get what we want, gentlemen. The Palestinians get a homeland; the Egyptians, an oil quota to feed their masses. Uncle Sam gets to control the Saudi and Kuwaiti reserves, and thus the global oil price for the benefit of all mankind. The Prince becomes the new King, a drunken sot with me at his elbow every minute of the day. Only the Saudis will be disinherited, and return to their goats.

“The Sunni Arab states will learn their lesson from such a close call. Faced with the rage of the Shi’ah at having been so near and then defeated, the secular states will have no option but to hunt down and extirpate Fundamentalism before they all fall victim. Within five years there will be a huge crescent of peace and prosperity from the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Bengal.”

The Alamo Five sat in silence. Two of them had thought to divert Saudi’s oil flow America’s way, nothing more. The other three had agreed to go along. They had just heard a plan to redraw a third of the world. It occurred to an appalled Moir and Cobb, though not to the other three, and certainly not to the colonel, that Easterhouse was a completely unbalanced egomaniac. Each realized too late that they were on a roller coaster, unable to slow down or get off.

Cyrus Miller invited Easterhouse to a private lunch in his adjacent dining room.

“No problems, Colonel?” he queried over the fresh peaches from his greenhouse. “Really, no problems?”

“There could be one, sir,” said the colonel carefully. “I have one hundred and forty days to H-hour. Long enough for a single bad leak to blow it all away. There is a young man, a former bank official ... he lives in London now. Name of Laing. I would like someone to have a word with him.”

“Tell me,” said Miller. “Tell me about Mr. Laing.”

Quinn and Sam drove into the northern Dutch town of Groningen two and a half hours after fleeing Oldenburg. The capital of the province of the same name, Groningen, like the German city across the border, dates from medieval times, with an inner heart, the Old Town, protected by a ring canal. In olden days the inhabitants could flee into the center and lift their fourteen bridges to seal themselves behind their watery ramparts.

The wisdom of the city council decreed that the Old Town should not be despoiled by the industrial sprawl and poured-concrete obsession of the late twentieth century. Instead, it has been renovated and restored, a circular half-mile of alleys, markets, streets, squares, churches, restaurants, hotels, and pedestrian malls, almost all of them cobbled. At Quinn’s direction Sam drove to the De Doelen Hotel on Grote Markt and they registered.

Modern buildings are few in the Old Town, but one is the five-story red-brick block on Rade Markt, which houses the police station.

“You know somebody here?” asked Sam as they approached the building.

“I used to,” admitted Quinn. “He may be retired. Hope not.”

He was not. The young blond officer at the reception desk confirmed that, yes, Inspector De Groot was now Chief Inspector and commanded the Cernéente Politic. Whom should he announce?

Quinn could hear the shout over the telephone when the policeman phoned upstairs. The young man grinned.

“He seems to know you,
mijnheer
.”

They were shown up to the office of Chief Inspector De Groot without delay. He was waiting for them, advancing across the floor to greet them, a big florid bear of a man with thinning hair, in uniform but wearing carpet slippers to favor a pair of feet that had pounded many miles of cobbled streets in thirty years.

The Dutch police has three branches: the Gemeente, or Community, Police, the criminal branch, known as the Recherche, and the highway patrol, the Rijkspolitie. De Groot looked the part, a Community Police chief whose avuncular frame and manner had long earned him among his own officers and the populace the nickname Papa De Groot.

“Quinn, good heavens alive, Quinn. It’s been a long time since Assen.”

“Fourteen years,” admitted Quinn as they shook hands, and he introduced Sam. He made no mention of her FBI status. She had no jurisdiction in the kingdom of the Netherlands, and they were there unofficially. Papa De Groot ordered coffee—it was still shortly after breakfast—and asked what brought them to his town.

“I’m looking for a man,” said Quinn. “I believe he may be living in Holland.”

“An old friend, perhaps? Someone from the old days?”

“No, I’ve never met him.”

The beam in De Groot’s twinkling eyes did not falter, but he stirred his coffee a little more slowly.

“I heard you had retired from Lloyd’s,” he said.

“True,” said Quinn. “My friend and I are just trying to do a favor for some friends.”

“Tracing missing people?” queried De Groot. “A new departure for you. Well, what’s his name and where does he live?”

De Groot owed him a favor. In May 1977, a group of South Moluccan fanatics, seeking to reestablish their old homeland in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, had sought to publicize their cause by hijacking a train and a school at nearby Assen. There were fifty-four passengers on the train and a hundred children in the school. This sort of thing was new to Holland; they had no trained hostage-recovery teams in those days.

Quinn had been in his first year with the Lloyd’s firm that specialized in such things. He was sent to advise, along with two soft-spoken sergeants from the British SAS, London’s official contribution. Assen being in next-door Drente Province, De Groot had commanded the local police; the SAS men liaised with the Dutch Army.

De Groot had listened to the lean American who seemed to understand the men of violence inside the train and the school. He suggested what would probably happen when the troops went in and the terrorists opened fire. De Groot ordered his men to do as the American suggested, and two stayed alive because of that. Both the train and the school were eventually stormed; six terrorists died, and two train passengers in the crossfire. No soldiers or policemen were killed.

“His name is Pretorius, Janni Pretorius,” said Quinn. De Groot pursed his lips.

“A common enough name, Pretorius,” he said. “You know which town or village he lives in?”

“No. But he is not Dutch. He’s South African by birth and I suspect may never have naturalized.”

“Then you have a problem,” said De Groot. “We do not have a central list of all foreign nationals living in Holland. Civil rights, you see.”

“He’s a former Congo mercenary. I’d have thought a background like that, plus being from a country Holland hardly approves of, would give him a card in some index somewhere.”

De Groot shook his head.

“Not necessarily. If he is here illegally, then he will not be on file, or we’d have expelled him for illegal entry. If he’s here legally, there’d be a card for him when he came in, but after that, if he committed no offenses against Dutch law, he could move freely around without checks. Part of our civil rights.”

Quinn nodded. He knew about Holland’s obsession with civil rights. Though benign to the law-abiding citizen, it also made life a rose garden for the vicious and squalid. Which was why lovely old Amsterdam had become Europe’s capital for drug dealers, terrorists, and child-porn filmmakers.

“How would a man like that get entry and residence permits in Holland?” he asked.

“Well, if he married a Dutch girl he’d get it. That would even give him the right to naturalization. Then he could just disappear.”

“Social security, income tax, Immigration?”

“They wouldn’t tell you,” said De Groot. “The man would have the right to privacy. Even to tell me, I’d have to present a criminal case against the man to justify my inquiry. Believe me, I just can’t do that.”

“No way at all you could help me?” asked Quinn.

De Groot stared out of the window.

“I have a nephew with the BVD,” he said. “It would have to be unofficial. ... Your man might be listed with them.”

“Please ask him,” said Quinn. “I’d be very grateful.”

While Quinn and Sam strolled up the Oosterstraat looking for a place to lunch, De Groot called his nephew in The Hague. Young Koos De Groot was a junior officer with the Binnenlandse Veiligheids Dienst, Holland’s small Internal Security Service. Though he had great affection for the bearlike uncle who used to slip him ten-guilder notes when he was a boy, he needed a deal of persuading. Tapping into the BVD computer was not the sort of thing a Community cop from Groningen called for every day of the week.

Papa De Groot called Quinn the next morning and they met an hour later at the police station.

“He’s some fellow, your Pretorius,” said De Groot, studying his notes. “It seems our BVD were interested enough when he arrived in Holland ten years ago to file his details, just in case. Some of them come from him—the flattering bits. Others come from newspaper cuttings. Jan Pieter Pretorius, born Bloemfontein 1942—that makes him forty-nine now. Gives his profession as sign painter.”

Quinn nodded. Someone had repainted the Ford Transit, put the
BARLOW’S ORCHARD PRODUCE
sign on the side, and painted apple crates on the inside of the rear windows. He surmised Pretorius was also the bomb man whose device had torched the Transit in the barn. He knew it could not be Zack. In the Babbidge warehouse Zack had sniffed marzipan and thought it might be Semtex. Semtex is odorless.

“He returned to South Africa in 1968 after leaving Ruanda, then worked for a while as a security guard on a De Beers diamond mine in Sierra Leone.”

Yes, the man who could tell diamonds from paste, and knew about cubic zirconia.

“He had wandered as far as Paris twelve years ago; met a Dutch girl working for a French family, married her. That gave him access to Holland. His father-in-law installed him as barman—apparently the father-in-law owns two bars. The couple divorced five years ago, but Pretorius had saved enough to buy his own bar. He runs it and lives above it.”

“Where?” asked Quinn.

“A town called Den Bosch. You know it?”

Quinn shook his head. “And the bar?”

“De Gouden Leeuw—the Golden Lion,” said De Groot.

Quinn and Sam thanked him profusely and left. When they had gone, De Groot looked down from the window and watched them cross the Rade Markt and head back to their hotel. He liked Quinn, but he was worried by the inquiry. Perhaps it was all legitimate, no need to worry. But he would not want Quinn on a manhunt coming into
his
town to face a South African mercenary. ... He sighed and reached for the phone.

“Find it?” asked Quinn as he drove south out of Groningen. Sam was studying the road map.

“Yep. Way down south, near the Belgian border. Join Quinn and see the Low Countries,” she said.

“We’re lucky,” said Quinn. “If Pretorius
was
the second kidnapper in Zack’s gang, we could have been heading for Bloemfontein.”

The E.35 motorway ran straight as an arrow south-southeast to Z wolle, where Quinn turned onto the A. 50 highroad due south for Apeldoorn, Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Den Bosch. At Apeldoorn, Sam took the wheel. Quinn put the backrest of the passenger seat almost horizontal and fell asleep. He was still asleep, and it was his seatbelt that saved his life, in the crash.

Just north of Arnhem and west of the highway is the gliding club of Terlet. Despite the time of year it was a bright sunny day, rare enough in Holland in November to have brought out the enthusiasts. The driver of the truck thundering along in the opposite lane was so busy gazing at the glider, which wing-tilted right over the highway in front of him as it lined up to land, that he failed to notice he was drifting over to the oncoming lane.

Sam was sandwiched between the timber stakes running along the edge of the sandy moorland to her right and the bulk of the swerving juggernaut to her left. She tried to brake and almost made it. The last three feet of the swaying trailer clipped the front left fender of the Sierra and flicked it off the road, as a finger and thumb will flick a fly off a blotter. The truck driver never even noticed and drove on.

The Sierra mounted the curb as Sam tried to bring it back onto the road, and she would have made it but for the vertical stakes in a line beyond the curb. One of them mashed her right front wheel and she went out of control. The Sierra careered down the bank, almost rolled, recovered, and ended up axle-deep in the soft wet sand of the moor.

Quinn straightened his seat and looked across at her. Both were shaken but unhurt. They climbed out. Above them, cars and trucks roared on south to Arnhem. The ground all around was flat; they were in easy view of the road.

“The piece,” said Quinn.

“The what?”

“The Smith
&
Wesson. Give it to me.”