The Negotiator (55 page)

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.