The Negotiator

But Orsini was slowed. His other enemy was the moonlight. Qui

Then he saw Orsini’s head again, twenty yards ahead, moving across the flank of the mountain but steadily uphill. A hundred yards farther on, the sounds ceased. Orsini had gone to earth. Qui

He had hunted before, and been hunted, by night. In the dense bush by the Mekong, through the thick jungle north of Khe Sanh, in the high country with his Montagnard guides. All natives are good in their own terrain, the Viet Cong in their jungle, the Kalahari bushmen in their own desert. Orsini was on his own ground, where he had been born and brought up, slowed by a damaged knee, without his knife but almost certainly with his handgun. And Qui

For forty-five minutes of that hour neither man moved. Each listened for the other to move first. When Qui

In his back pocket he still had the residue of the fishing line he had used at Oldenburg to dangle the tape recorder over the branch of the tree. He tied one end around the tall clump of heather two feet off the ground, then retreated to where he had started, paying out the line as he went. When he was certain he was far enough away, he began to tug gently at the line.

The bush moved and rustled. He let it stop, let the sound sink in to the listening ears. Did it again, and again. Then he heard Orsini begin to crawl.

The Corsican finally came to his knees ten feet from the bush. Qui

As the echoes of the last shots died away down the mountain the Corsican sensed he had been wrong. He turned slowly, saw Qui

“Orsini…”

He was going to say: I just want to talk to you. Any man in Orsini’s position would have been crazy to try it. Or desperate. Or convinced he was dead if he did not. He pulled his torso about and fired his last round. It was hopeless. The shot went into the sky because half a second before he fired, Qui

It was not a heart-shot, but bad enough. There had been no time to take him in the shoulder, and the range was too close for half-measures. He lay on his back, staring up at the American above him. His chest cavity was filling with blood, gurgling out of the punctured lungs, filling the throat.

“They told you I had come to kill you, didn’t they?” said Qui

“They lied to you. He lied to you. And about the clothes for the boy. I came to find out his name. The fat man. The one who set it up. You owe him nothing now. No code applies. Who is he?”

Whether, in his last moments, Dominique Orsini still stuck by the code of silence, or whether it was the blood pumping up his throat, Qui

The village was still silent and dark when he padded down the alley to the main square. They must have heard the boom of the shotgun, the single roar of a handgun on the main street, the fusillade from up the mountain. But if their orders were to stay inside, they were obeying them. Yet someone, probably the youth, had become curious. Perhaps he had seen the motorcycle lying by the tractor and feared the worst. Whatever, he was lying in wait.

Qui

The buckshot hit the rear of the Ascona as it came out of the barn, a full charge that blew holes in the trunk but failed to hit the tank. Qui

Six time zones to the west it was nudging 10:00 P.M. in Washington the previous evening and the Cabinet officers whom Odell had summoned to grill the professional experts were not in an easily appeasable mood.

“What do you mean, no progress so far?” demanded the Vice President. “It’s been a month. You’ve had unlimited resources, all the manpower you asked for, and the cooperation of the Europeans. What goes on?”

The target of his inquiry was Don Edmonds, Director of the FBI, who sat next to Assistant Director (CID) Philip Kelly. Lee Alexander of the CIA had David Weintraub with him. Edmonds coughed, glanced at Kelly, and nodded.

“Gentlemen, we are a lot further forward than we were thirty days ago,” said Kelly defensively. “The Scotland Yard people are even now examining the house where, we now know, Simon Cormack was held captive. That has already yielded a mass of forensic evidence, including two sets of fingerprints which are in the process of being identified.”

“How did they find the house?” asked the Secretary of State.

Philip Kelly studied his notes.

Weintraub answered Jim Donaldson’s question: “Qui

“Great,” said Odell sarcastically. “And what other news of Qui

“He seems to have been active in several parts of Europe,” said Kelly diplomatically. “We are expecting a full report on him momentarily.”

“What do you mean, active?” asked Bill Walters, the Attorney General.

“We may have a problem with Mr. Qui

“We’ve always had a problem with Mr. Qui

“You may know that my colleague Kevin Brown has long harbored suspicions that Mr. Qui

“What adduced evidence?” asked Odell.