The Negotiator

  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.”

  He wrapped the pistol and its ammunition in one of her silk scarves from the vanity case and buried it under a bush ten yards from the car, mentally marking the place in the sand where it lay. Two minutes later a red-and-white Range Rover of the Rijkspolitie, the Highway Patrol, stood above them on the hard shoulder.

  The officers were concerned, relieved to see they were unhurt, and asked for their papers. Thirty minutes later, with their luggage, they were deposited in the rear courtyard of the gray concrete-slab police headquarters in Arnhem’s Beek Straat. A sergeant showed them up to an interview room, where he took copious particulars. It was past lunch when he had finished.

  The car-rental agency representative had not had a busy day—tourists tend to become thin on the ground in mid-November—and was quite pleased to take a call in his Heuvelink Boulevard office from an American lady inquiring about an agency car. His joy faded somewhat when he learned she had just totaled one of his company’s Sierras on the A.50 at Terlet, but he recalled his firm’s admonition to try harder, and he did.

  He came around to the police station and conversed with the sergeant. Neither Quinn nor Sam could understand a word. Fortunately, both Dutchmen spoke good English.

  “The police recovery team will bring the Sierra in from where it is ... parked,” he said. “I will have it collected from here and taken to our company workshops. You are fully insured, according to your papers. It is a Dutch-hired car?”

  “No, Ostende, Belgium,” said Sam. “We were touring.”

  “Ah,” said the man. He thought: paperwork, a lot of paperwork. “You wish to rent another car?”

  “Yes, we would,” said Sam.

  “I can let you have a nice Opel Ascona, but in the morning. It is being serviced right now. You have a hotel?”

  They did not, but the helpful police sergeant made a call and they had a double room at the Rijn Hotel. The skies had clouded over again; the rain began to come down. The agency man drove them a mile up the Rijnkade embankment to the hotel, dropped them off, and promised to have the Opel at the front door at eight next day.

  The hotel was two-thirds empty and they had a large double room on the front, overlooking the river. The short afternoon was closing in; the rain lashed the windows. The great gray mass of the Rhine flowed past toward the sea. Quinn took an upright armchair by the window bay and gazed out.

  “I should call Kevin Brown,” said Sam. “Tell him what we’ve found.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Quinn.

  “He’ll be mad.”

  “Well, you can tell him we found one of the kidnappers and left him on top of a Ferris wheel with someone else’s bullet in his skull. You can tell him you’ve been carrying an illegal gun through Belgium, Germany, and Holland. You want to say all that on an open line?”

  “Yeah, okay. So I should write up some notes.”

  “You do that,” said Quinn.

  She raided the mini-bar, found a half-bottle of red wine, and brought him a glass. Then she sat at the desk and began to write on hotel notepaper.

  Three miles upstream of the hotel, dim in the deepening dusk, Quinn could make out the great black girders of the old Arnhem Bridge, the “bridge too far,” where in September 1944, Colonel John Frost and a small handful of British paratroopers had fought and died for four days, trying to hold off SS Panzers with bolt-action rifles and Sten guns while Thirty Corps vainly fought up from the south to relieve them on the northern end of the bridge. Quinn raised his glass toward the steel joists that reared into the rainy sky.

  Sam caught the gesture and walked over to the window. She looked down to the embankment.

  “See someone you know?” she asked.

  “No,” said Quinn. “They have passed by.”

  She craned to look up the street.

  “Don’t see anyone.”

  “A long time ago.”

  She frowned, puzzled. “You’re a very enigmatic man, Mr. Quinn. What is it you can see that I can’t?”

  “Not a lot,” said Quinn, rising. “And none of it very hopeful. Let’s go see what the dining room has to offer.”

  The Ascona was there promptly at eight, along with the friendly sergeant and two motorcycle police outriders.

  “Where are you heading, Mr. Quinn?” asked the sergeant.

&n
bsp; “Vlissingen, Flushing,” said Quinn, to Sam’s surprise. “To catch the ferry.”

  “Fine,” said the sergeant. “Have a good trip. My colleagues will guide you to the motorway southwest.”

  At the junction to the motorway the outriders pulled over and watched the Opel out of sight. Quinn had that Dortmund feeling again.

  General Zvi ben Shaul sat behind his desk and looked up from the report at the two men in front of him. One was the head of the Mossad department covering Saudi Arabia and the entire peninsula from the Iraqi border in the north to the shores of South Yemen. It was a territorial fiefdom. The other man’s specialty knew no borders and was ‘in its way even more important, especially for the security of Israel. He covered all Palestinians, wherever they might be. It was he who had written the report on the Director’s desk.

  Some of those Palestinians would dearly have loved to know the building where the meeting was taking place. Like many of the curious, including a number of foreign governments, the Palestinians still imagined that the Mossad’s headquarters remained in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. But since 1988 their new home had been a large modern building right in the center of Tel Aviv, around a corner from Rehov Shlomo Ha’melekh (King Solomon Street) and close to the building occupied by AMAN, the military intelligence service.

  “Can you get any more?” the general asked David Gur Arieh, the Palestinian expert. The man grinned and shrugged.

  “Always you want more, Zvi. My source is a low-level operative, a technician in the motor vehicle workshops for the Saudi Army. That’s what he’s been told. The Army’s to be marooned in the desert for three days during next April.”

  “It smells of a coup,” said the man who ran the Saudi department. “We should pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them?”

  “If someone toppled King Fahd and took over, whom would it likely be?” asked the Director. The Saudi expert shrugged.

  “Another Prince,” he said. “Not one of the brothers. More likely the younger generation. They’re greedy. However many billions they skim through the Oil Quota Commission, they want more. No, it may be they want it all. And of course the younger men tend to be more ... modern, more Westernized. It could be for the better. It is time the old men went.”

  It was not the thought of a younger man ruling in Riyadh that intrigued ben Shaul. It was what the Palestinian technician who had given the orders to Gur Arieh’s source had let slip. Next year, he had gloated, we Palestinians will have the right to become naturalized citizens here.

  If that was true, if that was what the unnamed conspirators had in mind, the perspectives were astounding. Such an offer by a new Saudi government would suck a million homeless and landless Palestinians out of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon to a new life far in the South. With the Palestinian sore cauterized, Israel, with her energy and technology, could enter into a relationship with her neighbors that could be beneficial and profitable. It had been the dream of the founders, back to Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Ben Shaul had been taught the dream as a boy, never thought to see it happen. But ...

  “You going to tell the politicians?” asked Gur Arieh.

  The Director thought of them squabbling away up in the Knesset, splitting semantic and theological hairs while his service tried to tell them on which side of the sky the sun rose. April was a long way off still. There would be a leak if he did. He closed the report.

  “Not yet,” he said. “We have too little. When we have more I will tell them.”

  Privately, he had decided to sit on it.

  Lest they fall asleep, visitors to Den Bosch are met with a quiz game devised by the town’s planners. It is called Find a Way to Drive into the Town Center. Win, and the visitor finds Market Square and a parking space. Lose, and a labyrinthine system of one-way streets dumps him back on the ring road.

  The city center is a triangle: Along the northwest runs the Dommel river; along the northeast, the Zuid-Willemsvaart canal; and along the southern third side, the city wall. Sam and Quinn beat the system at the third attempt, reached the market, and claimed their prize: a room at the Central Hotel on Market Square.

  In their room Quinn consulted the telephone directory. It listed only one Golden Lion bar, on a street called Jans Straat. They set off on foot. The hotel reception desk had provided a line-drawing map of the town center, but Jans Straat was not listed. A number of citizens around the square shook their heads in ignorance. Even the street-corner policeman had to consult his much-thumbed town plan. They found it eventually.

  It was a narrow alley, running between the St. Jans Singel, the old towpath along the Dommel, and the parallel Molenstraat. The whole area was old, most of it dating back three hundred years. Much of it had been tastefully restored and renovated, the fine old brick structures retained, along with their antique doors and windows, but fitted out with smart new apartments inside. Not so the Jans Straat.

  It was barely a car’s width wide and the buildings leaned against each other for support. There were two bars in it, for at one time the bargemen plying their trade up the Dommel and along the canals had moored here to quench their thirst.

  The Gouden Leeuw was on the south side of the street, twenty yards from the towpath, a narrow-fronted two-story building with a faded sign that announced its name. The ground floor had a single bow window whose small panes were of opaque and colored glass. Beside it was the single door giving access to the bar. It was locked. Quinn rang the bell and waited. No sound, no movement. The other bar in the street was open. Every bar in Den Bosch was open.

  “Now what?” asked Sam. Down the street a man in the window of the other bar lowered his paper, noted them, and raised the paper again. Beside the Golden Lion was a six-foot-high wooden door apparently giving access to a passage to the rear.

  “Wait here,” said Quinn. He went up and over the gate in a second and dropped into the passage. A few minutes later Sam heard the tinkling of glass, the pad of footsteps, and the bar’s front door opened from inside. Quinn stood there.

  “Get off the street,” he said. She entered and he closed the door behind her. There were no lights. The bar was gloomy, lit only by the filtered daylight through the colored bay window.

  It was a small place. The bar was L-shaped around the bay window. From the door a gangway ran along the bar, then around the corner of the L to become a larger drinking area near the back. Behind the bar was the usual array of bottles; upturned beer glasses were in rows on a towel on the bar top, along with three Delft-china beer-pump handles. At the very back was a door, through which Quinn had entered.

  The door led to a small washroom, whose window Quinn had broken to get in. Also to a set of stairs leading to an apartment upstairs.

  “Maybe he’s up there,” said Sam. He was not. It was a studio apartment, very small, just a bed-sitting room with a kitchenette in an alcove and a small bathroom/lavatory. There was a picture of a scene that could have been the Transvaal on one wall; a number of African memorabilia, a television set, an unmade bed. No books. Quinn checked every cupboard and the tiny loft above the ceiling. No Pretorius. They went downstairs.

  “Since we’ve broken into his bar, we might as well have a beer,” suggested Sam. She went behind the counter, took two glasses, and pulled one of the china pump handles. The foaming ale ran into the glasses.

  “Where’s that beer come from?” asked Quinn.

  Sam checked under the counter.

  “The tubes run straight through the floor,” she said.

  Quinn found the trapdoor under a rug at the end of the room. Wooden steps led downward, and beside them was a light switch. Unlike the bar, the cellars were spacious.

  The whole house and its neighbors were supported by the vaulted brick arches that created the cellars. The tubes that led upward to the beer pumps above them came from modern steel beer barrels, evidently lowered through the trapdoor before being connected. It had not always been so.

  At one end of the cellars was
a tall and wide steel grille. Beyond it flowed the Dieze Canal, which ran out under Molenstraat. Years before, men had poled the great beer vats in shallow boats along the canal, to roll them through the grille and into position beneath the bar. That was in the days when potboys had to scurry up and down the stairs bringing pitchers of ale to the customers above.

  There were still three of these antique barrels standing on their brick plinths in the largest hall created by the arches, each with a spigot tap at its base. Quinn idly flicked one of the spigots; a gush of sour old beer ran into the lamplight. The second was the same. He kicked the third with his toe. The liquid ran a dull yellow, then changed to pink.

  It took three heaves from Quinn to turn the beer vat on its side. When it fell, it came with a crash and the contents tumbled onto the brick floor. Some of those contents were the last two gallons of ancient beer that had never reached the bar upstairs. In a puddle of the beer lay a man, on his back, open eyes dull in the light from the single bulb, a hole through one temple and a pulped exit wound at the other. From his height and build, Quinn estimated, he could be the man behind him in the warehouse, the man with the Skorpion. If he was, he had chopped down a British sergeant and two American Secret Service men on Shotover Plain.

  The other man in the cellar pointed his gun straight at Quinn’s back and spoke in Dutch. Quinn turned. The man had come down the cellar steps, his treads masked by the crash of the falling barrel. What he actually said was: “Well done, mijnheer. You found your friend. We missed him.”

  Two others were descending the steps, both in the uniform of the Dutch Community Police. The man with the gun was in civilian clothes, a sergeant in the Recherche.

  “I wonder,” said Sam as they were marched into the police station on Tolbrug Straat, “whether there is a market for the definitive anthology of Dutch precinct houses?”

  By chance the Den Bosch police station is right across the street from the Groot Zieken Gasthaus—literally the Big Sick Guesthouse—to whose hospital morgue the body of Jan Pretorius was taken to await autopsy.