The Negotiator

“Yes?”

“Mr. President?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Qui

“Ah… yes, Mr. Qui

“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.

Qui

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. Qui

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 Qui

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. Qui

Qui

Out of the range of the streetlamps the darkness enveloped the figure in the black overcoat and hat. To Qui

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 Qui

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. Qui

A pale sickle moon emerged from behind the clouds. By its light Qui

Ahead of Qui

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 Qui

“Qui

“No,” said Qui

“Easy, Qui

“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 Qui

“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 Qui

“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, Qui

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 Qui

“Take it, Qui