The Negotiator

He dived a hand under the table and dumped a canvas bag on the table. Sam’s eyes popped.

“Orsini,” said Quinn impassively. “Where is he now?”

“God knows. Probably back in Corsica. He came from there ten years ago to work in the gangs of Marseilles, Nice, and later Paris. That was all I could get out of him. Oh, and he comes from a village called Castelblanc.”

Quinn rose, took the canvas bag, and looked down at Zack.

“You’re in it, mate. Right up to your ears. I’ll talk to the authorities. They might accept your turning state’s evidence. Even that’s a long shot. But I’ll tell them there were people behind you, and probably people behind them. If they believe that, and you tell all, they might leave you alive. The others, the ones you worked for ... no chance.”

He turned to go. Sam got up to follow. As if preferring the shelter the American gave him, Zack rose also and they headed for the door. Quinn paused.

“One last thing. Why the name Zack?”

He knew that during the kidnapping, the psychiatrists and code breakers had puzzled long over the name, seeking a possible clue to the real identity of the man who had chosen it. They had worked on variations of Zachary, Zachariah, looked for relatives of known criminals who had such names or initials.

“It was really Z-A-K,” said Zack. “The letters on the number plate of the first car I ever owned.”

Quinn raised a single eyebrow. So much for psychiatry. He stepped outside. Zack came next. Sam was still in the doorway when the crash of the rifle tore apart the quiet of the side street.

Quinn did not see the car or the gunman. But he heard the distinctive “whap” of a bullet going past his face and felt the breath of cool wind it made on his cheek. The bullet missed his ear by half an inch, but not Zack. The mercenary took it in the base of the throat.

It was Quinn’s quick reflexes that saved his life. He was no stranger to that sound, which gave him an edge. Zack’s body was thrown back into the doorpost, then forward on the rebound. Quinn was back in the door arch before Zack’s knees began to buckle. For the second that the mercenary’s body was still upright, it acted as a shield between Quinn and the car parked thirty yards away.

Quinn hurled himself backwards through the door, twisting, grabbing Sam, and pulling them both down to the floor in one movement. As they hit the grubby tiles a second bullet passed through the closing door above them and tore plaster off the side wall of the café. Then the spring-loaded door closed.

Quinn went across the bar’s floor at a fast crawl, elbows and toes, dragging Sam behind him. The car moved up the alley to straighten the rifleman’s angle, and a volley of shots shattered the plate-glass window and riddled the door. The barman, presumably Hugo, was slower. He stood open-mouthed behind his bar until a shower of splinters from his disintegrating stock of bottles sent him to the floor.

The shots stopped—change of magazine. Quinn was up and racing for the rear exit, his left hand pulling Sam by the wrist, his right still clutching the bag of diamonds. The door at the back of the bar gave onto a corridor, with the toilets on each side. Straight ahead was a grubby kitchen. Quinn raced through the kitchen, kicked open the door at the end, and they found themselves in a rear yard.

Crates of beer bottles were stacked, awaiting collection. Using them as steps, Quinn and Sam went over the back wall of the yard and dropped into another backyard, which itself belonged to a butcher shop on the parallel street, the Passage de Gatbois. Three seconds later they emerged from the establishment of the astounded butcher and into the street. By good luck there was a taxi, thirty yards up. From its rear an old lady was climbing unsteadily, reaching into her bag for small change as she did so. Quinn got there first, swung the lady physically onto the pavement, and told her: “C’est payé, madame.”

He d

ived 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.

Quinn had reached across Sam to give the swinging door a hard tug. It hit some impediment, closed at the second slam. Sam leaned back in the seat, white as a sheet. Then she noticed her treasured crocodile-skin handbag from Harrods. The force of the closing door had shattered the frame near the base, splitting the stitching. She examined the damage and her brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“Quinn, what the hell’s this?”

“This” was the jutting end of a black-and-orange wafer-thin battery, of the type used to power Polaroid cameras. Quinn’s penknife slit the rest of the stitching along the base of the bag’s frame to reveal the battery was one of a linked set of three, two and a half inches wide, four inches long. The transmitter and bleeper were in a printed circuit board, also in the base, with a wire leading to a microphone in the stud that formed the bottom of the hinge. The aerial was in the shoulder strap. It was a miniature, professional, state-of-the-art device and voice-activated to save power.

Quinn looked at the components on the rear seat between them. Even if it still worked, it would now be impossible to pass disinformation through it. Sam’s exclamation would have alerted the listeners to its discovery. He emptied all her effects from the upturned handbag, asked the driver to pause by the curb, and threw the handbag and electronic bug into a garbage bin.

“Well, that accounts for Marchais and Pretorius,” said Quinn. “There must have been two of them; one staying close to us, listening to our progress, phoning forward to his friend who could get to the target before us. But why the hell didn’t they show up at this morning’s phony rendezvous?”

“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.”