The Negotiator

  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 mi
st 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.