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. Quinn stopped and did the same. To go forward with the moon behind him would be madness.
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 Quinn needed him alive. So both men crouched in the heather and listened to the sounds of the night, to discern that one sound that was not a cicada or coney or fluttering bird, but could only be made by a man. Quinn glanced at the moon; an hour to set. After that he would see nothing until dawn, when help would come for the Corsican from his own village a quarter-mile down the mountain.
For forty-five minutes of that hour neither man moved. Each listened for the other to move first. When Quinn heard the scrape he knew it was the sound of metal against rock. Trying to ease the pain in his knee, Orsini had let his gun touch rock. There was only one rock; fifteen yards to Quinn’s right, and Orsini behind it. Quinn began to crawl slowly through the heather at ground level. Not toward the rock—that would have been to take a bullet in the face. But to a larger clump of heather ten yards in front of the rock.
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. Quinn saw the back of his head, gave the twine one last sharp tug. The bush jerked, Orsini raised his gun, double-handed, and put seven bullets one after the other into the ground around the base of the bush. When he stopped, Quinn was behind him, upright, the Smith & Wesson pointing at Orsini’s back.
As the echoes of the last shots died away down the mountain the Corsican sensed he had been wrong. He turned slowly, saw Quinn.
“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, Quinn did the same. He had no choice. His bullet took the Corsican full in the chest and tossed him backwards, faceup in the maquis.
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 Quinn. The Corsican nodded slowly.
“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, Quinn would never know. The man on his back opened his mouth in what might have been an effort to speak or might have been a mocking grin. He gave a low cough instead, and a stream of bright-pink frothing blood filled his mouth and ran onto his chest. Quinn heard the sound he had heard before and knew too well; the low clatter of the lungs emptying for the last time. Orsini rolled his head sideways and Quinn saw the hard bright glitter fade from the black eyes.
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.
Quinn got into his Opel in the main square. No one had touched it. He strapped himself in tightly, turned to face the street, and gunned the engine. When he hit the side of the timber barn, just in front of the tractor’s wheels, the old planks shattered. There was a thump as he collided with several bales of hay inside the barn and another crash of splintering woodwork as the Ascona demolished the farther wall.
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. Quinn tore down the track in a hail of pieces of wood and tufts of flying straw, corrected the steering, and headed down toward the road for Orone and Carbini. It was just short of four in the morning and he had a three-hour drive to Ajaccio airport.
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: “Quinn called them up from Paris and told them.”
“Great,” said Odell sarcastically. “And what other news of Quinn?”
“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. Quinn,” said Kelly.
“We’ve always had a problem with Mr. Quinn,” observed Morton Stannard of Defense. “What’s the new one?”
“You may know that my colleague Kevin Brown has long harbored suspicions that Mr. Quinn knew more about this thing from the start than he was letting on; could even have been involved at some stage. Now it appears adduced evidence may support that theory.”
“What adduced evidence?” asked Odell.