The Negotiator

It was as abandoned as it had been six hours earlier, but now in the darkness it seemed like a ghost town. Qui

They walked past the dismantled carrousel, whose antique wooden horses would now be in storage, the shuttered hot-dog stand. The Ferris wheel towered above them in the night.

“Stay here,” murmured Qui

“Lefort,” he called softly. There was no reply.

The double seats, hanging on their steel bars, were canvas-shrouded to protect the interiors. There was no one in or under the bottommost seats. Perhaps the man was crouching in the shadows waiting for them. Qui

To one side of the structure was the machine house, a big green steel shed housing the electric motor, and on top of it the control cabin in yellow. The doors of both opened to the touch. There was not a sound from the generator. Qui

He climbed to the control booth, flicked on a pilot light above the console, studied the levers, and depressed a switch. Beneath him the engine purred into life. He engaged the gears and moved the forward lever to “slow.” Ahead of him the giant wheel began to turn through the darkness. He found a floodlight control, touched it, and the area around the base of the wheel was bathed in white light.

Qui

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“There was a spare canvas seat-cover in the engine house,” he said. To their right, the booth that had once been at the zenith of the wheel began to appear. The man in it was not enjoying the ride.

He lay on his back across the double seat, his huge frame filling most of the space destined for two passengers. The hand with the tattoo lay limply across his belly, his head lolled back against the seat, sightless eyes staring up at the girders and the sky. He passed slowly in front of them, a few feet away. His mouth was half open, the nicotine-stained teeth glinting wetly in the floodlight. In the center of his forehead was a drilled round hole, its edges darkened by scorch marks. He passed and began his climb back into the night sky.

Qui

On the road out of Wavre and back to the motorway they passed down the Chemin des Charrons again, past the house of the fun-fair director who had just lost a worker. It began to rain again.

Half a mile farther on they spotted the Domaine des Champs hotel, its lights beaming a welcome through the wet darkness.

When they had checked in, Qui

The square, hard-framed vanity case was heavy. He tipped out the collection of hair spray, shampoo, perfume, makeup kit, mirrors, brushes, and combs. It was still heavy. He measured its depth from rim to base on the outside and again on the inside. There are reasons why people hate to fly, and X-ray machines can be one of them. There was a two-inch difference in height. Qui

Sam came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, brushing her wet hair. She was about to say something when she saw what lay on the bed, and stopped. Her face crumpled.

It was not what tradition calls a lady’s weapon. It was a Smith & Wesson long-barreled.38 revolver, and the shells laid on the coverlet beside it were hollow-point. A man-stopper.

Chapter 13

“Qui

Qui

“Look, you know it hasn’t been fired. And I haven’t been out of your sight since Antwerp.”

She was right, of course. Though he had slept for twelve hours the previous night, long enough for someone to motor from Antwerp to Wavre and back with time to spare, Madame Gamier had said her lodger left for work on the Ferris wheel that morning after breakfast. Sam had been in bed with Qui

But there are telephones in Belgium.

Sam had not got to Marchais before him; but someone had. Brown and his FBI hunters? Qui

“Been a long day,” he said. “Let’s go sleep.”

But he lay in the darkness and stared at the ceiling. At midnight he slept; he had decided to believe her.

They left in the morning after breakfast. Sam took the wheel.

“Where to, O Master?”

“Hamburg,” said Qui

“Hamburg? What’s with Hamburg?”

“I know a man in Hamburg” was all he would say.

They took the motorways again, south to cut into the E.41 north of Namur, then the long die-straight highway due east, to pass Liège and cross the German frontier at Aachen. She turned north through the dense industrial sprawl of the Ruhr past Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen, to emerge finally into the agricultural plains of Lower Saxony.

Qui

The old Hanseatic port city on the Elbe was much as Qui

“I didn’t know you spoke German too,” said Sam when they reached their room.

“You never asked,” said Qui

He made two phone calls, but learned the man he wanted to speak to would not be in his office until the following morning.

General Vadim Vassilievich Kirpichenko stood in the outer office and waited. Despite his impassive exterior he felt a twinge of nervousness. Not that the man he wished to see was unapproachable; his reputation was the opposite and they had met several times, though always formally and in public. His qualms stemmed from another factor: To go over the heads of his superiors in the KGB, to ask for a personal and private meeting with the General Secretary without telling them, was risky. If it went wrong, badly wrong, his career would be on the line.

A secretary came to the door of the private office and stood there.