第 46 页

?His name is Pretorius, Janni Pretorius,? said Quinn.De Groot pursed his lips.

?A common enough name, Pretorius,? he said. ?You know which town or village he lives in　

?No. But he is not Dutch. He?s South African by birth and I suspect may never have naturalized.?

?Then you have a problem,? saidDe Groot. ?We do not have a central list of all foreign nationals living in Holland. Civil rights, you see.?

?He?s a former Congo mercenary. I?d have thought a background like that, plus being from a country Holland hardly approves of, would give him a card in some index somewhere.?

DeGroot shook his head.

?Not necessarily. If he is here illegally, then he will not be on file, or we?d have expelled him for illegal entry. If he?s here legally, there?d be a card for him when he came in, but after that, if he committed no offenses against Dutch law, he could move freely around without checks. Part of our civil rights.?

Quinn nodded. He knew about Holland?s obsession with civil rights. Though benign to the law-abiding citizen, it also made life a rose garden for the vicious and squalid. Which was why lovely old Amsterdam had become Europe?s capital for drug dealers, terrorists, and child-porn film-makers.

?How would a man like that get entry and residence permits in Holland　 he asked.

?Well, if he married a Dutch girl he?d get it. That would even give him the right to naturalization. Then he could just disappear.?

?Social security, income tax, Immigration　

?They wouldn?t tell you,? saidDe Groot. ?The man would have the right to privacy. Even to tell me, I?d have to present a criminal case against the man to justify my inquiry. Believe me, I just can?t do that.?

?No way at all you could help me　 asked Quinn.

De Grootstared out of the window.

?I have a nephew with the BVD,? he said. ?It would have to be unofficial. ... Your man might be listed with them.?

?Please ask him,? said Quinn. ?I?d be very grateful.?

While Quinn and Sam strolled up the Oosterstraat look-ing for a place to lunch,De Groot called his nephew in The Hague. Young KoosDe Groot was a junior officer with the Binnenlandse VeiligheidsDienst, Holland?s small Internal Security Service. Though he had great affection for the bearlike uncle who used to slip him ten-guilder notes when he was a boy, he needed a deal of persuading. Tapping into the BVD computer was not the sort of thing a Community cop fromGroningen called for every day of the week.

PapaDe Groot called Quinn the next morning and they met an hour later at the police station.

?He?s some fellow, your Pretorius,? saidDe Groot, studying his notes. ?It seems our BVD were interested enough when he arrived in Holland ten years ago to file his details, just in case. Some of them come from him?the flat-tering bits. Others come from newspaper cuttings. Jan Pieter Pretorius, born Bloemfontein 1942?that makes him forty-nine now. Gives his profession as sign painter.?

Quinn nodded. Someone had repainted the Ford Tran-sit, put theBARLOW?S ORCHARD PRODUCE sign on the side, and painted apple crates on the inside of the rear windows. He surmised Pretorius was also the bomb man whose device had torched the Transit in the barn. He knew it could not beZack. In the Babbidge warehouseZack had sniffed marzipan and thought it might beSemtex. Semtex is odorless.

?He returned to South Africa in 1968 after leaving Ruanda, then worked for a while as a security guard ona De Beers diamond mine in Sierra Leone.?

Yes, the man who could tell diamonds from paste, and knew about cubic zirconia.

?He had wandered as far as Paris twelve years ago; met a Dutch girl working for a French family, married her. That gave him access to Holland. His father-in-law installed him as barman?apparently the father-in-law owns two bars. The couple divorced five years ago, but Pretorius had saved enough to buy his own bar. He runs it and lives above it.?

?Where　 asked Quinn.

?A town called Den Bosch. You know it　

Quinn shook his head. ?And the bar　

?DeGouden Leeuw?the Golden Lion,? saidDe Groot.

Quinn and Sam thanked him profusely and left. When they had gone,De Groot looked down from the window and watched them cross theRade Markt and head back to their hotel. He liked Quinn, but he was worried by the inquiry. Perhaps it was all legitimate, no need to worry. But he would not want Quinn on a manhunt coming into his town to face a South African mercenary. ... He sighed and reached for the phone.

?Find it　 asked Quinn as he drove south out ofGro-ningen. Sam was studying the road map.

?Yep. Way down south, near the Belgian border. Join Quinn and see the Low Countries,? she said.

?We?re lucky,? said Quinn. ?If Pretorius was the sec-ond kidnapper inZack?s gang, we could have been heading for Bloemfontein.?

The E.35 motorway ran straight as an arrow south-southeast toZ wolle, where Quinn turned onto the A. 50 highroad due south for Apeldoorn, Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Den Bosch. At Apeldoorn, Sam took the wheel. Quinn put the backrest of the passenger seat almost horizontal and fell asleep. He was still asleep, and it was his seatbelt that saved his life, in the crash.

Just north of Arnhem and west of the highway is the gliding club of Terlet. Despite the time of year it was a bright sunny day, rare enough in Holland in November to have brought out the enthusiasts. The driver of the truck thunder-ing along in the opposite lane was so busy gazing at the glider, which wing-tilted right over the highway in front of him as it lined up to land, that he failed to notice he was drifting over to the oncoming lane.

Sam was sandwiched between the timber stakes running along the edge of the sandy moorland to her right and the bulk of the swerving juggernaut to her left. She tried to brake and almost made it. The last three feet of the swaying trailer clipped the front left fender of the Sierra and flicked it off the road, as a finger and thumb will flick a fly off a blotter. The truck driver never even noticed and drove on.

The Sierra mounted the curb as Sam tried to bring it back onto the road, and she would have made it but for the vertical stakes in a line beyond the curb. One of them mashed her right front wheel and she went out of control. The Sierra careered down the bank, almost rolled, recovered, and ended up axle-deep in the soft wet sand of the moor.

Quinn straightened his seat and looked across at her. Both were shaken but unhurt. They climbed out. Above them, cars and trucks roared on south to Arnhem. The ground all around was flat; they were in easy view of the road.

?The piece,? said Quinn.

?The what　

?The Smith & Wesson. Give it to me.?

He wrapped the pistol and its ammunition in one of her silk scarves from the vanity case and buried it under a bush ten yards from the car, mentally marking the place in the sand where it lay. Two minutes later a red-and-white Range Rover of the Rijkspolitie, the Highway Patrol, stood above them on the hard shoulder.

The officers were concerned, relieved to see they were unhurt, and asked for their papers. Thirty minutes later, with their luggage, they were deposited in the rear courtyard of the gray concrete-slab police headquarters in Arnhem?sBeek Straat. A sergeant showed them up to an interview room, where he took copious particulars. It was past lunch when he had finished.

The car-rental agency representative had not had a busy day?tourists tend to become thin on the ground in mid-November?and was quite pleased to take a call in his Heuvelink Boulevard office from an American lady inquir-ing about an agency car. His joy faded somewhat when he learned she had just totaled one of his company?s Sierras on the A.50 at Terlet, but he recalled his firm?s admonition to try harder, and he did.

He came around to the police station and conversed with the sergeant. Neither Quinn nor Sam could understand a word. Fortunately, both Dutchmen spoke good English.

?The police recovery team will bring the Sierra in from where it is ... parked,? he said. ?I will have it collected from here and taken to our company workshops. You are fully insured, according to your papers. It is a Dutch-hired car　

?No,Ostende, Belgium,? said Sam. ?We were tour-ing.?

?Ah,? said the man. He thought: paperwork, a lot of paperwork. ?You wish to rent another car　

?Yes, we would,? said Sam.

?I can let you have a nice Opel Ascona, but in the morning. It is being serviced right now. You have a hotel　

They did not, but the helpful police sergeant made a call and they had a double room at the Rijn Hotel. The skies had clouded over again; the rain began to come down. The agency man drove them a mile up the Rijnkade embankment to the hotel, dropped them off, and promised to have the Opel at the front door at eight next day.

The hotel was two-thirds empty and they had a large double room on the front, overlooking the river. The short afternoon was closing in; the rain lashed the windows. The great gray mass of the Rhine flowed past toward the sea. Quinn took an upright armchair by the window bay and gazed out.

?I should call Kevin Brown,? said Sam. ?Tell him what we?ve found.?

?I wouldn?t,? said Quinn.

?He?ll be mad.?

?Well, you can tell him we found one of the kidnappers and left him on top of a Ferris wheel with someone else?s bullet in his skull. You can tell him you?ve been carrying an illegal gun through Belgium, Germany, and Holland. You want to say all that on an open line　

?Yeah, okay. So I should write up some notes.?

?You do that,? said Quinn.

She raided the mini-bar, found a half-bottle of red wine, and brought him a glass. Then she sat at the desk and began to write on hotel notepaper.

Three miles upstream of the hotel, dim in the deepening dusk, Quinn could make out the great black girders of the old Arnhem Bridge, the ?bridge too far,? where in September 1944, Colonel John Frost and a small handful of British para-troopers had fought and died for four days, trying to hold off SS Panzers with bolt-action rifles and Sten guns while Thirty Corps vainly fought up from the south to relieve them on the northern end of the bridge. Quinn raised his glass toward the steel joists that reared into the rainy sky.

Sam caught the gesture and walked over to the window. She looked down to the embankment.

?See someone you know　 she asked.

?No,? said Quinn. ?They have passed by.?

She craned to look up the street.

?Don?t see anyone.?

?A long time ago.?

She frowned, puzzled. ?You?re a very enigmatic man, Mr. Quinn. What is it you can see that I can?t　

?Not a lot,? said Quinn, rising. ?And none of it very hopeful. Let?s go see what the dining room has to offer.?

The Ascona was there promptly at eight, along with the friendly sergeant and two motorcycle police outriders.

?Where are you heading, Mr. Quinn　 asked the ser-geant.

?Vlissingen, Flushing,? said Quinn, to Sam?s surprise. ?To catch the ferry.?

?Fine,? said the sergeant. ?Have a good trip. My col-leagues will guide you to the motorway southwest.?

At the junction to the motorway the outriders pulled over and watched the Opel out of sight. Quinn had that Dort-mund feeling again.

?

General Zvi ben Shaul sat behind his desk and looked up from the report at the two men in front of him. One was the head of the Mossad department covering Saudi Arabia and the entire peninsula from the Iraqi border in the north to the shores of South Yemen. It was a territorial fiefdom. The other man?s specialty knew no borders and was ?in its way even more important, especially for the security of Israel. He covered all Palestinians, wherever they might be. It was he who had written the report on the Director?s desk.

Some of those Palestinians would dearly have loved to know the building where the meeting was taking place. Like many of the curious, including a number of foreign govern-ments, the Palestinians still imagined that the Mossad?sheadquarters remained in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. But since 1988 their new home had been a large modern building right in the center of Tel Aviv, around a corner from Rehov Shlomo Ha?melekh (King Solomon Street) and close to the building occupied byAMAN, the military intelligence service.

?Can you get any more　 the general asked David Gur Arieh, the Palestinian expert. The man grinned and shrugged.

?Always you want more, Zvi. My source is a low-level operative, a technician in the motor vehicle workshops for the Saudi Army. That?s what he?s been told. The Army?s to be marooned in the desert for three days during next April.?

?It smells of a coup,? said the man who ran the Saudi department. ?We should pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them　

?If someone toppled King Fahd and took over, whom would it likely be　 asked the Director. The Saudi expert shrugged.

?Another Prince,? he said. ?Not one of the brothers. More likely the younger generation. They?re greedy. How-ever many billions they skim through the Oil Quota Com-mission, they want more. No, it may be they want it all. And of course the younger men tend to be more ... modern, more Westernized. It could be for the better. It is time the old men went.?

It was not the thought of a younger man ruling in Riyadh that intrigued ben Shaul. It was what the Palestinian technician who had given the orders to Gur Arieh?s source had let slip. Next year, he had gloated, we Palestinians will have the right to become naturalized citizens here.

If that was true, if that was what the unnamed conspira-tors had in mind, the perspectives were astounding. Such an offer by a new Saudi government would suck a million home-less and landless Palestinians out of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon to a new life far in the South. With the Palestinian sore cauterized, Israel, with her energy and tech-nology, could enter into a relationship with her neighbors that could be beneficial and profitable. It had been the dream of the founders, back to Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Ben Shaul had been taught the dream as a boy, never thought to see it happen. But ...

?You going to tell the politicians　 asked Gur Arieh.

The Director thought of them squabbling away up in the Knesset, splitting semantic and theological hairs while his service tried to tell them on which side of the sky the sun rose. April was a long way off still. There would be a leak if he did. He closed the report.

?Not yet,? he said. ?We have too little. When we have more I will tell them.?

Privately, he had decided to sit on it.

?

Lest they fall asleep, visitors to Den Bosch are met with a quiz game devised by the town?s planners. It is called Find a Way to Drive into the Town Center. Win, and the visitor finds Market Square and a parking space. Lose, and a labyrinthine system of one-way streets dumps him back on the ring road.

The city center is a triangle: Along the northwest runs the Dommel river; along the northeast, the Zuid-Willemsvaart canal; and along the southern third side, the city wall. Sam and Quinn beat the system at the third at-tempt, reached the market, and claimed their prize: a room at the Central Hotel on Market Square.