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“Quinn, he’s going to try to kill you. He’s wiped out two of his own men already. With them gone he gets to keep all the ransom for himself; with you out of the way the hunt dies. He obviously reckons you’re more likely to trace him than the FBI.”
Quinn laughed shortly.
“If only he knew. I haven’t the faintest idea who he is or where he is.”
He decided not to tell her he no longer believed Zack was the killer of Marchais and Pretorius. Not that a man like Zack would balk at eliminating his own kind if the price was right. Back in the Congo several mercenaries had been wasted by their own kind. It was the coincidence of the timing that worried him.
He and Sam had got to Marchais a few hours after his death; fortunately for them, there were no police about. But for a fluke crash outside Arnhem they would have been in Pretorius’s bar with a loaded gun an hour after he died. They would have remained in detention for weeks while the Den Bosch police investigated the case.
He turned left off King’s Road into Beaufort Street, heading for Battersea Bridge, and ran straight into a traffic jam. London traffic is no stranger to snarls, but at that hour on a winter’s night the run south through London should have been clear enough.
The line of cars he was in edged forward and he saw a uniformed London policeman directing them around a series of cones that blocked off the nearside lane. Turn and turn about the cars heading north and those heading south had to use the single remaining lane in the street.
When they came abreast of the obstruction Quinn and Sam saw two police cars, the blue lights on their roofs flashing as they turned. The police cars hemmed in an ambulance, parked with its doors open. Two attendants were climbing out of the rear with a stretcher, and approached a shapeless mass on the pavement, hidden under a blanket.
The traffic control policeman impatiently waved them on. Sam squinted up at the face of the building outside which the form on the pavement lay. The windows on the top floor were open and she saw a policeman’s head poking out as he gazed down.
“Someone seems to have fallen eight floors,” she remarked. “The police are looking out the open window up there.”
Quinn grunted and concentrated on not hitting the tail-lights of the car in front of him, whose driver was also gawping at the accident. Seconds later the road cleared and Quinn gunned the Opel over the bridge across the Thames, leaving behind him the dead body of a man he had never heard of and never would: the body of Andy Laing.
“Where are we going?” asked Sam.
“Paris,” said Quinn.
Coming back to Paris for Quinn was like coming home. Though he had spent a longer time based in London, Paris held a special place in his life.
He had wooed and won Jeannette there, had married her there. For two blissful years they had lived in a small flat just off the rue de Grenelle; their daughter had been born at the American Hospital in Neuilly.
He knew bars in Paris, dozens of bars, where after the death of Jeannette and their baby Sophie on the Orléans highway he had tried to obliterate the pain with drink. He had been happy in Paris, been in heaven in Paris, known hell in Paris, waked up in gutters in Paris. He knew the place.
They spent the night at a motel just outside Ashford and caught the 9:00 A.M. Hovercraft from Folkestone to Calais, arriving in Paris in time for lunch.
Quinn checked them into a small hotel just off the Champs-Elysées and disappeared with the car to find a place to park it. The Eighth Arrondissement of Paris has many charms, but ample parking is not one of them. To have parked outside the Hôtel du Colisée in the street of the same name would have been to invite a wheel-clamp. Instead he used the twenty-four-hour underground parking lot in rue Chauveau-Lagarde, just behind the Madeleine, and took a cab back to the hotel. He intended to use cabs anyway. While in the area of the Madeleine he noted two other items he might need.
After lunch Quinn and Sam took a cab to the offices of the International Herald Tribune at 181 Avenue Charles-de-Gaulle in Neuilly.
“I’m afraid we can’t get it in tomorrow’s edition,” said the girl at the front desk. “It will have to be the day after. Insertions are only for the following day if entered by eleven-thirty A.M.”
“That’ll be fine,” said Quinn and paid cash. He took a complimentary copy of the paper and read it in the taxi back to the Champs-Elysées.
This time he did not miss the story, datelined out of Moscow, whose headline read: GEN. KRYUCHKOV OUSTER. There was a sub-headline: KGB CHIEF FIRED IN BIG SECURITY SHAKE-UP. He read the story out of interest but it signified nothing to him.
The agency correspondent reported that the Soviet Politburo had received “with regret” the resignation and retirement of KGB Chairman General Vladimir Kryuchkov. A deputy chairman would head the Committee pro tem, until the Politburo appointed a successor.
The report surmised that the changes appeared to have been in response to Politburo dissatisfaction, particularly with the performance of the First Chief Directorate, of which Kryuchkov himself had been a former head. The reporter finished his piece with the suggestion that the Politburo—a thinly veiled reference to Gorbachev himself— wished to see newer and younger blood moving into the top slot of the U.S.S.R.’s overseas espionage service.
That evening and through the following day, Quinn gave Sam, who had never seen Paris before, the tourist’s menu. They took in the Louvre, the Tuileries Gardens in the rain, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower, rounding off their free day at the Lido cabaret.
The ad appeared the following morning. Quinn rose early and bought a copy from a vendor on the Champs-Elysées at seven to make sure it was in. It said simply: “Z. I’m here. Call me on ... Q.” He had given the hotel number, and warned the operator in the small lobby that he expected a call. He waited for it in his room. It came at nine-thirty.
“Quinn?” The voice was unmistakable.
“Zack, before we go any further, this is a hotel. I don’t like hotel phones. Call me at this public booth in thirty minutes.”
He dictated the number of a phone booth just off the Place de la Madeleine. He left Sam behind, still in her nightgown, calling, “I’ll be back in an hour.”
The phone in the booth rang at exactly ten.
