The Negotiator

“I’m afraid it was taken while you were drugged,” said the general. “But then, aren’t they all? The passport is quite genuine, one of our better efforts. You will need clothes with Canadian maker’s labels, luggage—that sort of thing. Andrei has them all ready for you. And, of course, these.”

He put three credit cards, a valid Canadian driver’s license, and a wad of 20,000 Canadian dollars on the desk top. The passport, license, and credit cards were all in the name of Roger Lefevre. A French-Canadian; the accent for an American who spoke French would be no problem.

“I suggest Andrei drive you to Birmingham for the first morning flight to Dublin. From there you can connect to Toronto. In a rented car the border crossing into America should present no problem. Are you ready to go, Mr. Quinn?”

“General, I don’t seem to be making myself clear. Orsini never said a word before he died. If he knew who the fat man was, and I think he did, he never let it out. I don’t know where to start. The trail’s cold. The fat man is safe, and the paymasters behind him, and the renegade I believe is somewhere high in the Establishment—the information source. They’re all safe because Orsini stayed silent. I have no aces, no kings, queens, or jacks. I have nothing in my hand.”

“Ah, the analogy of cards. Always you Americans refer to aces of spades. Do you play chess, Mr. Quinn?”

“A bit, not well,” said Quinn. The Soviet general walked to a shelf of books on one wall and ran his finger along the row, as if looking for a particular one.

“You should,” he said. “Like my profession, it is a game of cunning and guile, not brute force. All the pieces are visible, and yet ... there is more deception in chess than in poker. Ah, here we are.”

He offered the book to Quinn. The author was Russian, the text in English. A translation, private edition. The Great Grand Masters: A Study.

“You are in check, Mr. Quinn, but perhaps not yet checkmate. Go back to America, Mr. Quinn. Read the book on the flight. May I recommend you pay particular attention to the chapter on Tigran Petrosian. An Armenian, long dead now, but perhaps the greatest chess tactician who ever lived. Good luck, Mr. Quinn.”

General Kirpichenko summoned his operative Andrei and issued a stream of orders in Russian. Then Andrei took Quinn to another room and fitted him out with a suitcase of new clothes, all Canadian; plus luggage and airline tickets. They drove together to Birmingham and Quinn caught the first British Midland flight of the day to Dublin. Andrei saw him off, then drove back to London.

Quinn connected out of Dublin to Shannon, waited several hours, and caught the Air Canada flight to Toronto.

As promised, he read the book in the departure lounge in Shannon and again on the flight across the Atlantic. He read the chapter on Petrosian six times. Before he touched down at Toronto he realized why so many rueful opponents had dubbed the wily Armenian grandmaster the Great Deceiver.

At Toronto his passport was no more queried than it had been at Birmingham or Dublin or Shannon. He took his luggage off the carrousel in the customs hall and passed through with a cursory check. There was no reason why he should notice the quiet man who observed him emerge from the customs hall, followed him to the main railway station, and joined him on the train northeast to Montreal.

At a used-car lot in Quebec’s first city, Quinn bought a used Jeep Renegade with heavy-duty winter tires and, from a camping store nearby, the boots, trousers, and down parka needed for the time of year in that climate. When the Jeep was tanked up he drove southeast, through St. Jean to Bedford, then due south for the American border.

At the border post on the shores of Lake Champlain, where State Highway 89 passes from Canada into Vermont, Quinn crossed into the United States.

There is a land in the northern fringes of the state of Vermont known to locals simply as the Northeast Kingdom. It takes in most of Essex County, with pieces of Orleans and Caledonia, a wild, mountainous place of lakes and rivers, hills and gorges, with here and there a bumpy track and a small village. In winter a cold descends on the Northeast Kingdom so terrible it is as if the land had been subjected to a state of freeze-frame—literally. The lakes become ice, the trees rigid with frost; the ground crackles beneath the feet. In winter nothing lives up there, save in hibernation, apart from the occasional lonely elk moving through the creaking forest. Wits from the South say there are only two seasons in the Kingdom—August and winter. Those who know the place say this is nonsense; it is August 15th and winter.

Quinn drove his Jeep south past Swanton and St. Albans to the town of Burlington, then turned away from Lake Champlain to follow Route 89 to the state capital, Montpelier. Here he quit the main highway to take Route 2 up through East Montpelier, following the valley of the Winooski past Plainfield and Marshfield to West Danville.

Winter had come early to the Northeast Kingdom and the hills closed in, huddled against the cold; the occasional vehicle coming the other way was another anonymous bubble of warmth, with heater full on, containing a human being surviving with technology a cold that would kill the unprotected body in minutes.

The road narrowed again after West Danville, banked high with snow on both sides. After passing through the shuttered community of Danville itself, Quinn put the Jeep in four-wheel drive for the final stage to St. Johnsbury.

The little town on the Passumpsic River was like an oasis in the freezing mountains, with shops and bars and lights and warmth. Quinn found a real estate agent on Main Street and put his request. It was not the man’s busiest ti

me of year. He considered the request with puzzlement.

“A cabin? Well, sure, we rent out cabins in the summer. Mostly the owners want to spend a month, maybe six weeks in their cabins, then rent out for the rest of the season. But now?”

“Now,” said Quinn.

“Anywhere special?” asked the man.

“In the Kingdom.”

“You really want to get lost, mister.”

But the man checked his list and scratched his head.

“There might be a place,” he said. “Belongs to a dentist from Barre, down in the warm country.”

The warm country was at that time of year only fifteen below zero, as opposed to twenty. The realtor rang the dentist, who agreed to a one-month rental. He peered out at the Jeep.

“You got snow chains on that Renegade, mister?”