The Negotiator

It was Qui

Qui

Qui

The shots stopped-change of magazine. Qui

Crates of beer bottles were stacked, awaiting collection. Using them as steps, Qui

He dived into the rear seat of the cab, still clutching Sam by the wrist, dropped the canvas bag on the seat, reached for a bundle of French banknotes, and held them under the driver’s nose.

“Let’s get out of here, fast,” he said. “My girl’s husband has just showed up with some hired muscle.”

Marcel Dupont was an old man with a walrus moustache who had driven a cab on the streets of Paris for forty-five years. Before that he had fought with the Free French. He had bailed out of a few places in his time, one step ahead of the hard squad. He was also a Frenchman and the blond girl being dragged into his cab was quite an eyeful. He was also a Parisian and knew a fat bundle of banknotes when he saw one. It had been a long time since Americans gave $10 tips. Nowadays most of them seemed to be in Paris on a $10-a-day budget. He left a stream of black rubber smoke as he went up the passage and into Avenue Daumesnil.

Qui

“Qui

“This” was the jutting end of a black-and-orange wafer-thin battery, of the type used to power Polaroid cameras. Qui

Qui

“Well, that accounts for Marchais and Pretorius,” said Qui

“I didn’t have it,” said Sam suddenly.

“Didn’t have what?”

“Didn’t have the purse with me. I was having breakfast in the bar-you wanted to talk upstairs. I forgot my purse, left it on the banquette. I had to go back for it, thought it might have been stolen. Wish to God it had been.”

“Yeah. All they heard was me telling the cabdriver to drop us on the rue de Chalón, at the corner of the street. And the word bar. There were two in that street.”

“But how the hell could they have done that to my bag?” she asked. “It’s been with me ever since I bought it.”

“That’s not your bag-that was a duplicate,” said Qui

“After you ran out? The world and his mother. There was Cramer and the Brits, Brown, Collins, Seymour, another three or four FBI men. I was up at the embassy, down at that manor house in Surrey where they kept you for a while, over to the States, back again-hell, I’ve been everywhere with it.”

And it would take five minutes to empty the old bag, put the contents in the duplicate, and effect the switch.

“Where do you want to go, mate?” asked the driver.

The Hôtel du Colisée was out; the killers would know of that. But not the garage where he had parked the Opel. He had been there alone, without Sam and her lethal handbag.

“Place de la Madeleine,” he said, “corner of Chauveau-Lagarde.”

“Qui

Qui

“Where are we going?” asked Sam when they were in the Opel and heading south across the Seine toward the Latin Quarter.

“You’re going to the airport,” said Qui

“For Washington?”

“Absolutely not for Washington. Listen, Sam, now more than ever you should not go back there unprotected. Whoever’s behind this, they’re much higher than a bunch of former mercenaries. They were just the hired hands. Everything that was happening on our side was being fed to Zack. He was forewarned of police progress, the dispositions in Scotland Yard, London, and Washington. Everything was choreographed, even the killing of Simon Cormack.

“When that kid ran along that roadside, someone had to be up in those trees with the detonator. How did he know to be there? Because Zack was told exactly what to do at every stage, including the release of both of us. The reason he didn’t kill me was because he wasn’t told to. He didn’t think he was going to kill anybody.”

“But he told us who,” protested Sam. “It was this American, the one who set it up and paid him, the one he called the fat man.”

“And who told the fat man?”

“Oh. There’s someone behind the fat man.”

“There has to be,” said Qui