They did not, but the helpful police sergeant made a call and they had a double room at the Rijn Hotel. The skies had clouded over again; the rain began to come down. The agency man drove them a mile up the Rijnkade embankment to the hotel, dropped them off, and promised to have the Opel at the front door at eight next day.
The hotel was two-thirds empty and they had a large double room on the front, overlooking the river. The short afternoon was closing in; the rain lashed the windows. The great gray mass of the Rhine flowed past toward the sea. Quinn took an upright armchair by the window bay and gazed out.
“I should call Kevin Brown,” said Sam. “Tell him what we’ve found.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Quinn.
“He’ll be mad.”
“Well, you can tell him we found one of the kidnappers and left him on top of a Ferris wheel with someone else’s bullet in his skull. You can tell him you’ve been carrying an illegal gun through Belgium, Germany, and Holland. You want to say all that on an open line?”
“Yeah, okay. So I should write up some notes.”
“You do that,” said Quinn.
She raided the mini-bar, found a half-bottle of red wine, and brought him a glass. Then she sat at the desk and began to write on hotel notepaper.
Three miles upstream of the hotel, dim in the deepening dusk, Quinn could make out the great black girders of the old Arnhem Bridge, the “bridge too far,” where in September 1944, Colonel John Frost and a small handful of British paratroopers had fought and died for four days, trying to hold off SS Panzers with bolt-action rifles and Sten guns while Thirty Corps vainly fought up from the south to relieve them on the northern end of the bridge. Quinn raised his glass toward the steel joists that reared into the rainy sky.
Sam caught the gesture and walked over to the window. She looked down to the embankment.
“See someone you know?” she asked.
“No,” said Quinn. “They have passed by.”
She craned to look up the street.
“Don’t see anyone.”
“A long time ago.”
She frowned, puzzled. “You’re a very enigmatic man, Mr. Quinn. What is it you can see that I can’t?”
“Not a lot,” said Quinn, rising. “And none of it very hopeful. Let’s go see what the dining room has to offer.”
The Ascona was there promptly at eight, along with the friendly sergeant and two motorcycle police outriders.
“Where are you heading, Mr. Quinn?” asked the sergeant.
&n
bsp; “Vlissingen, Flushing,” said Quinn, to Sam’s surprise. “To catch the ferry.”
“Fine,” said the sergeant. “Have a good trip. My colleagues will guide you to the motorway southwest.”
At the junction to the motorway the outriders pulled over and watched the Opel out of sight. Quinn had that Dortmund feeling again.
General Zvi ben Shaul sat behind his desk and looked up from the report at the two men in front of him. One was the head of the Mossad department covering Saudi Arabia and the entire peninsula from the Iraqi border in the north to the shores of South Yemen. It was a territorial fiefdom. The other man’s specialty knew no borders and was ‘in its way even more important, especially for the security of Israel. He covered all Palestinians, wherever they might be. It was he who had written the report on the Director’s desk.
Some of those Palestinians would dearly have loved to know the building where the meeting was taking place. Like many of the curious, including a number of foreign governments, the Palestinians still imagined that the Mossad’s headquarters remained in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. But since 1988 their new home had been a large modern building right in the center of Tel Aviv, around a corner from Rehov Shlomo Ha’melekh (King Solomon Street) and close to the building occupied by AMAN, the military intelligence service.
“Can you get any more?” the general asked David Gur Arieh, the Palestinian expert. The man grinned and shrugged.
“Always you want more, Zvi. My source is a low-level operative, a technician in the motor vehicle workshops for the Saudi Army. That’s what he’s been told. The Army’s to be marooned in the desert for three days during next April.”
“It smells of a coup,” said the man who ran the Saudi department. “We should pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them?”
“If someone toppled King Fahd and took over, whom would it likely be?” asked the Director. The Saudi expert shrugged.