第 41 页

There was a roar from the television. Van Eyck looked visibly worried. The Belgian league leadersTournai were playing French championsSainte ?tienne, a real needle match not to be missed by a football buff.

?I fear I am not related to any Americans,? he began.

?No, sir, you do not understand. I?ve been told up in Antwerp my mother?s nephew could be working in these parts, in a fun fair. PaulMarchais　

Van Eyck?s brow furrowed and he shook his head.

?I know all my staff. We have no one of that name.?

?Great big guy. Big Paul, they call him. Six feet six, wide as this, tattoo on his left hand ...?

? Ja, ja,but he is notMarchais. Paul Lefort, you mean.?

?Well now, maybe I do mean that,? said Quinn. ?I seem to recall his ma, my mom?s sister, did marry twice, so proba-bly his name was changed. Would you by any chance know where he lives　

?Wait, please,?

Bertie Van Eyck was back in two minutes with a slip of paper. Then he fled back to his football match.Tournai had scored and he had missed it.

?I have never,? said Sam as they drove back into Wavre town, ?heard such an appalling caricature of an American meathead on a visit to Europe.?

Quinn grinned.

?Worked, didn?t it　

They found the boardinghouse of Madame Garnier be-hind the railway station. It was already getting dark. She was a desiccated little widow who began by telling Quinn that she had no rooms vacant, but relented when he told her he sought none, but simply a chance to talk to his old friend Paul Lefort. His French was so fluent she took him for a Frenchman.

?But he is out, monsieur. He has gone to work.?

?At the Walibi　 asked Quinn.

?But of course. The Big Wheel. He overhauls the en-gine for the winter months.?

Quinn made a Gallic gesture of frustration.

?Always I miss my friend,? he complained. ?Early last month I came by the fair, and he was on vacation.?

?Ah, not vacation, monsieur. His poor mother died. A long illness. He nursed her to the end. In Antwerp.?

So that was what he had told them. For the second half of September and all of October he had been away from his dwelling and his workplace. I bet he was, thought Quinn, but he beamed and thanked Madame Gamier, and they drove back the four kilometers to the fun fair.

It was as abandoned as it had been six hours earlier, but now in the darkness it seemed like a ghost town. Quinn scaled the outer fence and helped Sam over after him. Against the deep velvet of the night sky he could see the inky girders of the Ferris wheel, the highest structure in the park.

They walked past the dismantled carrousel, whose an-tique wooden horses would now be in storage, the shuttered hot-dog stand. The Ferris wheel towered above them in the night.

?Stay here,? murmured Quinn. Leaving Sam in the shadows, he walked forward to the base of the machine.

?Lefort,? he called softly. There was no reply.

The double seats, hanging on their steel bars, were canvas-shrouded to protect the interiors. There was no one in or under the bottommost seats. Perhaps the man was crouching in the shadows waiting for them. Quinn glanced behind him.

To one side of the structure was the machine house, a big green steel shed housing the electric motor, and on top of it the control cabin in yellow. The doors of both opened to the touch. There was not a sound from the generator. Quinn touched it lightly. The machine contained a residual warmth.

He climbed to the control booth, flicked on a pilot light above the console, studied the levers, and depressed a switch. Beneath him the engine purred into life. He engaged the gears and moved the forward lever to ?slow.? Ahead of him the giant wheel began to turn through the darkness. He found a floodlight control, touched it, and the area around the base of the wheel was bathed in white light.

Quinn descended and stood by the boarding ramp as the bucket seats swung silently by him. Sam joined him.

?What are you doing　 she whispered.

?There was a spare canvas seat-cover in the engine house,? he said. To their right, the booth that had once been at the zenith of the wheel began to appear. The man in it was not enjoying the ride.

He lay on his back across the double seat, his huge frame filling most of the space destined for two passengers. The hand with the tattoo lay limply across his belly, his head lolled back against the seat, sightless eyes staring up at the girders and the sky. He passed slowly in front of them, a few feet away. His mouth was half open, the nicotine-stained teeth glinting wetly in the floodlight. In the center of his forehead was a drilled round hole, its edges darkened by scorch marks. He passed and began his climb back into the night sky.

Quinn returned to the control booth and stopped the Ferris wheel where it had been, the single occupied booth at the very top out of sight in the darkness. He closed down the motor, switched off the lights, and locked both doors; took the ignition key and both door keys and hurled them far into the ornamental lake. The spare canvas seat-cover was locked inside the engine room. He was very thoughtful; Sam, when he glanced at her, looked pale and shaken.

On the road out of Wavre and back to the motorway they passed down theChemin des Charrons again, past the house of the fun-fair director who had just lost a worker. It began to rain again.

Half a mile farther on they spotted theDomaine des Champs hotel, its lights beaming a welcome through the wet darkness.

When they had checked in, Quinn suggested Sam take her bath first. She made no objection. While she was in the tub he went through her luggage. The garment bag was no problem; the suitcase was soft-sided and took him thirty sec-onds to check out.

The square, hard-framed vanity case was heavy. He tipped out the collection of hair spray, shampoo, perfume, makeup kit, mirrors, brushes, and combs. It was still heavy. He measured its depth from rim to base on the outside and again on the inside. There are reasons why people hate to fly, and X-ray machines can be one of them. There was a two-inch difference in height. Quinn took his penknife and found the crack in the interior floor of the case.

Sam came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, brush-ing her wet hair. She was about to say something when she saw what lay on the bed, and stopped. Her face crumpled.

It was not what tradition calls a lady?s weapon. It was a Smith & Wesson long-barreled .38 revolver, and the shells laid on the coverlet beside it were hollow-point. A man-stopper.

Chapter 13

?Quinn,? said Sam, ?I swear to God, Brown sicked that piece onto me before he?d agree to let me come with you. In case things got rough, he said.?

Quinn nodded and toyed with his food, which was ex-cellent. But he had lost his appetite.

?Look, you know it hasn?t been fired. And I haven?t been out of your sight since Antwerp.?

She was right, of course. Though he had slept for twelve hours the previous night, long enough for someone to motor from Antwerp to Wavre and back with time to spare, Madame Gamier had said her lodger left for work on the Ferris wheel that morning after breakfast. Sam had been in bed with Quinn when he woke at six.

But there are telephones in Belgium.

Sam had not got toMarchais before him; but someone had. Brown and his FBI hunters? Quinn knew they, too, were out in Europe, with the full backing of the national police forces behind them. But Brown would want his man alive, able to talk, able to identify the accomplices. Maybe. He pushed his plate away.

?Been a long day,? he said. ?Let?s go sleep.?

But he lay in the darkness and stared at the ceiling. At midnight he slept; he had decided to believe her.

They left in the morning after breakfast. Sam took the wheel.

?Where to,O Master　

?Hamburg,? said Quinn.

?Hamburg? What?s with Hamburg　

?I know a man in Hamburg? was all he would say.

They took the motorways again, south to cut into the E.41 north of Namur, then the long die-straight highway due east, to passLi?ge and cross the German frontier at Aachen. She turned north through the dense industrial sprawl of the Ruhr pastD?sseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen, to emerge fi-nally into the agricultural plains of Lower Saxony.

Quinn spelled her at the wheel after three hours, and after two more they paused for fuel and a lunch of meaty Westphalian sausages and potato salad ata Gasthaus, one of the myriad that appear every two or three miles along the major German routes. It was already getting dark when they joined the columns of traffic moving through the southern suburbs of Hamburg.

The old Hanseatic port city on the Elbe was much as Quinn recalled it. They found a small, anonymous, but com-fortable hotel behind the Steindammtor and checked in.

?I didn?t know you spoke German too,? said Sam when they reached their room.

?You never asked,? said Quinn. In fact he had taught himself the language years before, because in the days when the Baader-Meinhof gang was on the rampage, and then its successor, the Red Army Faction, was in business, kidnaps had been frequent in Germany, and often very bloody. Three times in the late seventies he had worked on cases in the Federal Republic.

He made two phone calls, but learned the man he wanted to speak to would not be in his office until the follow-ing morning.

?

General Vadim Vassilievich Kirpichenko stood in the outer office and waited. Despite his impassive exterior he felt a twinge of nervousness. Not that the man he wished to see was unapproachable; his reputation was the opposite and they had met several times, though always formally and in public. His qualms stemmed from another factor: To go over the heads of his superiors in the KGB, to ask for a personal and private meeting with the General Secretary without tell-ing them, was risky. If it went wrong, badly wrong, his ca-reer would be on the line.

A secretary came to the door of the private office and stood there.

?The General Secretary will see you now, Comrade General,? he said.

The Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, senior professional intelligence officer of the espionage arm, walked straight down the long room toward the man who sat behind his desk at the end. If Mikhail Gorbachev was puz-zled by the request for the meeting, he did not show it. He greeted the KGB general in comradely fashion, calling him by his first name and patronymic, and waited for him to pro-ceed.

?You have received the report from our London station regarding the so-called evidence extracted by the British from the corpse of Simon Cormack.?

It was a statement, not a question. Kirpichenko knew the General Secretary must have seen it. He had demanded the results of the London meeting as soon as they came in. Gorbachev nodded shortly.

?And you will know, Comrade General Secretary, that our colleagues in the military deny the photograph was of a piece of their equipment.?

The rocket programs of Baikonur come under the mili-tary. Another nod. Kirpichenko bit the bullet.

?Four months ago I submitted a report received from my resident in Belgrade which I believed to be of such im-portance that I marked it for passing on by the Comrade Chairman to this office.?

Gorbachev stiffened. The matter was out. The officer in front of him, though a very senior man, was going behind Kryuchkov?s back. It had better be serious, Comrade Gen-eral, he thought. His face remained impassive.

?I expected to receive instructions to investigate the matter further. None came. It occurred to me to wonder if you ever saw the August report?it is, after all, the vacation month. ...?

Gorbachev recalled his broken vacation. Those Jewish refuseniks being hammered right in front of the whole West-ern media on a Moscow street.

?You have a copy of that report with you, Comrade General　 he asked quietly. Kirpichenko took two folded sheets from his inner jacket pocket. He always wore civilian clothes, hated uniforms.

?There may be no linkage at all, General Secretary. I hope not. But I do not like coincidences. I am trained not to like them.?

Mikhail Gorbachev studied the report from Major Kerkorian in Belgrade, and his brow furrowed in puzzle-ment.

?Who are these men　 he asked.

?Five American industrialists. The man Miller we have tagged as an extreme right-winger, a man who loathes our country. The man Scanlon is an entrepreneur, what the Americans call a hustler. The other three manufacture ex-tremely sophisticated weaponry for the Pentagon. With the technical details that they carry in their heads alone, they should never have exposed themselves to the danger of possi-ble interrogation by visiting our soil.?

?But they came　 asked Gorbachev. ?Covertly, by mil-itary transport? To land at Odessa　

?That?s the coincidence,? said the spy chief. ?I checked with the Air Force traffic control people. As the Antonov left Romanian air space to enter Odessa control area, it varied its own flight plan, overflew Odessa, and touched down at Baku.?

?Azerbaijan? What the hell were they doing in Azer-baijan　

?Baku, Comrade General Secretary, is the headquar-ters of High Command South.?

?But that?s a top-secret military base. What did they do there　

?I don?t know. They disappeared when they landed, spent sixteen hours inside the base, and flew back to the same Yugoslav air base in the same plane. Then they went back to America. No boar-hunting, no vacation.?

?Anything else　

?One last coincidence. On that day, Marshal Kozlov was on an inspection visit of the Baku headquarters. Just routine. So it says.?

When he had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev stopped all calls and reflected on what he had learned. It was bad, all bad, almost all. There was one recompense. His adversary, the diehard general who ran the KGB, had made a very seri-ous mistake.

?

The bad news was not confined to New Square, Moscow. It pervaded the lush top-floor office of Steve Pyle in Riyadh. Colonel Easterhouse put down the letter from Andy Laing.

?I see,? he said.

?Christ, that little shit could still land us all in deep trouble,? protested Pyle. ?Maybe the records in the com-puter do show something different from what he says. But if he goes on saying it, maybe the Ministry accountants will want to have a look, a real look. Before April. I mean, I know this is all sanctioned by Prince Abdul himself, and for a good cause, but hell, you know these people. Supposing he withdraws his protection, says he knows nothing of it ... They can do that, you know. Look, maybe you should just replace that money, find the funds someplace else. ...?

Easterhouse continued to stare out over the desert with his pale-blue eyes. It?s worse than that, my friend, he thought. There is no connivance by Prince Abdul, no sanc-tion by the Royal House. And half the money has gone, dis-bursed to bankroll the preparations for a coup that would one day bring order and discipline, his order and discipline, to the crazed economics and unbalanced political structures of the entire Middle East. He doubted the House of Sa?ud would see it that way; or the State Department.