The Falcon Rui turned out to be a run-down street fronted by several low-budget clothing shops, among others. In one, Quinn bought a seaman’s sweater, canvas jeans, and rough boots. He stuffed these into a canvas bag and they set off toward Schipperstraat. Above the roofs she could see the beaks of great cranes, indicating they were close to the docks.
Quinn turned off the Falcon Rui into a maze of narrow, mean streets that seemed to make up a zone of old and seedy houses between the Falcon Rui and the River Scheide. They passed several rough-looking men who appeared to be merchant seamen. There was an illuminated plate-glass window to Sam’s left. She glanced in. A hefty young woman, bursting out of a skimpy pair of briefs and a bra, lounged in an armchair.
“Jesus, Quinn, this is the red light district,” she protested.
“I know,” he said. “That’s what I asked the cabdriver for.”
He was still walking, glancing left and right at the signs above the shops. Apart from the bars and the illuminated windows where the whores sat and beckoned, there were few shops. But he found three of the sort he wanted, all within the space of two hundred yards.
“Tattooists?” she queried.
“Docks,” he said simply. “Docks mean sailors; sailors mean tattoos. They also mean bars and girls and the thugs who live off girls. We’ll come back tonight.”
Senator Bennett Hapgood rose at his appointed time on the floor of the Senate and strode to the podium. The day after the funeral of Simon Cormack both houses of Congress had once again put on the record their shock and revulsion at what had happened on a lonely roadside far away in England the previous week.
Speaker after speaker had called for action to trace the culprits and bring them to justice, American justice, no matter what the cost. The President pro tem of the Senate hammered with his gavel.
“The junior senator from Oklahoma has the floor,” he intoned.
Bennett Hapgood was not known as a heavyweight within the Senate. The session might have been thinly attended but for the matter under discussion. It was not thought the junior senator from Oklahoma would have much more to add. But he did. He uttered the habitual words of condolence to the President, revulsion at what had happened, and eagerness to see the guilty brought to justice. Then he paused and considered what he was about to say.
He knew it was a gamble, one hell of a gamble. He had been told what he had been told, but he had no proof of it. If he was wrong, his fellow senators would put him down as just another hayseed who used serious words with no serious intent. But he knew he had to go on or lose the support of his new and very impressive financial backer.
“But maybe we do not have to look too far to find out who were the culprits of this fiendish act.”
The low buzz in the chamber died away. Those in the aisles, about to depart, stopped and turned.
“I would like to ask one thing: Is it not true that the bomb which killed that young man, the only son of our President, was designed, made, and assembled wholly within the Soviet Union, and provably so? Did that device not come from Russia?”
His natural demagoguery might have carried him further. But the scene disintegrated in confusion and uproar. The media carried his question to the nation within ten minutes. For two hours the administration fenced and hedged. Then it had to concede the contents of the summary of Dr. Barnard’s report.
By nightfall the bleak and black rage against someone unknown, which had run like a growling current through the people of Nantucket the previous day, had found a target. Spontaneous crowds stormed and wrecked the offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot at 630 Fifth Avenue in New York, before the police could throw a cordon ’round the building. Its panic-stricken staff ran upstairs seeking shelter from the mob, only to be rebuffed by the office workers on the floors above them. They escaped, along with the others in the building, through the help of the Fire Department when the Aeroflot floors were set afire and the whole building evacuated.
The NYPD got reinforcements to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations at 136 East 67th Street just in time. A surging mob of New Yorkers tried to force their way into the cordoned-off street; fortunately for the Russians the blue-uniformed lines held. The New York police found themselves wrestling with a crowd intent on doing something with which many of the policemen privately sympathized.
It was the same in Washington. The capital’s police were forewarned and sealed off both the Soviet embassy and the consulate on Phelps Place just in time. Frenzied telephone appeals from the Soviet ambassador to the State Department were met with an assurance that the British report was still under examination and might prove to be false.
“We wish to see that report,” insisted Ambassador Yermakov. “It is a lie. I will be categorical. It is a lie.”
The agencies Tass and Novosti, along with every Soviet embassy in the world, issued a late-night flat denial of the findings of the Barnard report, accusing London and Washington of a vicious and deliberate calumny.
“How the hell did it get out?” demanded Michael Odell. “How the hell did that man Hapgood get to hear of it?”
There was no answer. Any major organization, let alone a government, cannot function without a host of secretaries, stenographers, clerks, messengers, any one of whom can leak a confidential document.
“One thing is certain,” mused Stannard of Defense. “After this, the Nantucket Treaty is dead as a dodo. We have to review our defense appropriations now on the basis that there will be no reductions, no limits at all.”
Quinn had begun trawling the bars in the maze of narrow streets running off Schipperstraat. He was there by ten that evening and stayed till the bars closed just before dawn, a rangy seaman who seemed half drunk, spoke slurred French, and nursed a small beer in bar after bar. It was cold outside and the thinly clad prostitutes shivered over their electric heaters behind their windows. Sometimes they came off shift, pulled on a coat, and scuttled down the pavement to one of the bars for a drink and the usual exchange of crude pleasantries with the barman and regulars.
Most of the bars had names like Las Vegas, Hollywood, California, their optimistic owners hoping that names redolent of foreign glamour would entice the wandering sailor to think that opulence lay beyond the chipped doors. By and large they were sleazy places, but warm and serving good beer.
Quinn had told Sam she would have to wait, either at the hotel or in the car parked two corners away on Falcon Rui. She chose the car, which did not prevent her receiving a fair share of propositions through the windows.
Quinn sat and drank slowly, watching the surging tide of locals and foreigners that ebbed in and out of these streets and their bars. On his left hand, picked out in India ink from the art shop, slightly smudged to give the impression of age, was the motif of the black spider’s web, the bright red spider at its center. All night he scanned other left hands but saw nothing like it.
He wandered up the Guit Straat and the Pauli Plein, took a small beer in each of the bars, then cut back into Schipperstraat and started again. The girls thought he wanted a woman but was having trouble making up his mind. The male customers ignored him, since they were always on the move themselves. A couple of barmen, on his third visit, nodded and grinned: “Back again, no luck?”
They were right, but in a different sense. He had no luck and before dawn rejoined Sam in the car. She was half asleep, the engine running to keep the heater on.
“What now?” she asked as she drove him back to the hotel.
“Eat, sleep, eat, start again tomorrow night,” he said.
She was particularly erotic through the morning they spent in bed, suspecting Quinn might have been tempted by some of the girls and their outfits on display in Schipperstraat. He was not, but saw no reason to disabuse her.
Peter Cobb saw Cyrus Miller at his own request atop the Pan-Global Building in Houston the same day.
“I want out,” he said flatly. “This has gone too far. What happened to that young boy was awful. My associ
ates feel the same. Cyrus, you said it would never come to that. You said the kidnap alone would suffice to ... to change things. We never thought the boy would die. But what those animals did to him ... that was horrible ... immoral ...”
Miller rose from behind his desk and his eyes blazed at the younger man.
“Don’t you lecture me about morality, boy. Don’t you ever do that. I didn’t want that to happen either, but we all knew it might have to. You, too, Peter Cobb, as God will be your judge—you, too. And it had to be. Unlike you I have prayed for His guidance; unlike you I have spent nights on my knees praying for that young man.
“And the Lord answered me, my friend; and the Lord said: Better that one young lamb go to the slaughter than that the whole flock perish. We are not talking about one man here, Cobb. We are talking of the safety, of the survival, of the very lives of the entire American people. And the Lord has told me: what must be, must be. That Communist in Washington must be brought down before he destroys the temple of the Lord, the temple that is this entire land of ours. Go back to your factory, Peter Cobb. Go back and turn the plowshares into the swords we must have to defend our nation and destroy the Antichrists of Moscow. And be silent, sir. Talk to me no more of morality, for this is the Lord’s work and He has spoken to me.”
Peter Cobb went back to his factory a very shaken man.
Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev also had a serious confrontation that day. Once again Western newspapers were spread over the long conference table running almost the length of the room, their pictures telling part of the story, their screaming headlines the rest. Only for the latter did he need a Russian translation. The Foreign Ministry translations were pinned to each newspaper.
On his desk were more reports that needed no translation. They were in Russian, coming from ambassadors across the world, from consuls general and the U.S.S.R.’s own foreign correspondents. Even the East European satellites had had their anti-Soviet demonstrations. Moscow’s denials had been constant and sincere, and yet ...
As a Russian, and a Party apparatchik of years of practice, Mikhail Gorbachev was no milksop in the business of realpolitik. He knew about disinformation; had not the Kremlin founded an entire department devoted to it? Was there not in the KGB a whole directorate dedicated to the sowing of anti-Western sentiment by the well-placed lie or the even more damaging half-truth? But this act of disinformation was unbelievable.
He awaited the man he had summoned with impatience. It was close to midnight and he had had to cancel a weekend of duck-shooting on the northern lakes, along with spicy Georgian food, one of his two great passions.
The man came just after midnight.
A General Secretary of the U.S.S.R., of all people, should not expect a Chairman of the KGB to be a warm, lovable fellow, but there was a cold cruelty about the face of Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov that Gorbachev found personally unlikable.
True, he had promoted the man from the post of First Deputy Chairman when he had secured the ouster of his old antagonist Chebrikov three years earlier. He had had little choice. One of the four Deputy Chairmen had to take the slot, and he had been sufficiently taken with Kryuchkov’s lawyer background to offer him the job. Since then he had begun to nurture reservations.
He recognized that he might have been swayed by his desire to turn the U.S.S.R. into a “socialist law-based state,” in which the law would be supreme, a concept formerly regarded by the Kremlin as bourgeois. It had been a pretty frantic time, those first few days of October 1988, when he had summoned a sudden extraordinary meeting of the Central Committee and inaugurated his own Night of the Long Knives against his opponents. Maybe in his hurry he had overlooked a few things. Like Kryuchkov’s background.
Kryuchkov had worked in Stalin’s Public Prosecutor office, not a job for the squeamish, and had been involved in the savage repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, joining the KGB in 1967. It was in Hungary he had met Andropov, who went on to head the KGB for fifteen years. It was Andropov who had nominated Chebrikov as his successor, and Chebrikov who had picked Kryuchkov to head up the foreign espionage arm, the First Chief Directorate. Maybe he, the General Secretary, had underestimated the old loyalties.
He looked up at the high-domed forehead, the freezing eyes, thick gray sideburns, and grim, down-turned mouth. And he realized this man might, after all, be his opponent.
Gorbachev came around the desk and shook hands; a dry, firm grip. As always when he talked, he maintained vigorous eye contact, as if seeking shiftiness or timidity. Unlike most of his predecessors, he was pleased if he found neither. He gestured at the overseas reports. The general nodded. He had seen them all, and more. He avoided Gorbachev’s eye.
“Let’s keep it short,” said Gorbachev. “We know what they are saying. It’s a lie. Our denials continue to go out. This lie must not be allowed to stick. But where does it come from? On what is it based?”
Kryuchkov tapped the massed Western reports with contempt. Though a former KGB rezident in New York, he hated America.
“Comrade General Secretary, it appears to be based on a British report by the scientists who carried out the forensic examination of the way that American died. Either the man lied, or others took his report and altered it. I suspect it is an American trick.”
Gorbachev walked back behind his desk and resumed his seat. He chose his words carefully.
“Could there ... under any circumstances ... be any part of truth in this accusation?”
Vladimir Kryuchkov was startled. Within his own organization there was a department that specifically designed, invented, and made in its laboratories the most devilish devices for the ending of life, or simply for incapacitation. But that was not the point; they had not assembled any bomb to be concealed in Simon Cormack’s belt.
“No, Comrade, no, surely not.”
Gorbachev leaned forward and tapped his blotter.
“Find out,” he ordered. “Once and for all, yes or no, find out.”
The general nodded and left. The General Secretary stared down the long room. He needed—perhaps he should say “had needed”—the Nantucket Treaty more than the Oval Office knew. Without it his country faced the specter of the invisible B-2 Stealth bomber, and he the nightmare of trying to find 300 billion rubles to rebuild the air-defense network. Until the oil ran out.
Quinn saw him on the third night. He was short and stocky, with the puffed ears and broadened nose of a pug, a knuckle-fighter. He sat alone at the end of the bar in the Montana, a grubby dive in Oude Mann Straat, the aptly named Old Man Street. There were another dozen people in the bar, but no one talked to him and he looked as if he did not wish them to.
He held his beer in his right hand, his left clutching a hand-rolled cigarette, and on the back was the black web and the spider. Quinn strolled down the length of the bar and sat down two barstools away from the man.
They both sat in silence for a while. The pug glanced at Quinn but took no other notice. Ten minutes went by. The man rolled another cigarette. Quinn gave him a light. The pug nodded but gave no verbal thanks. A surly, suspicious man, not easy to draw into conversation.
Quinn caught the barman’s eye and gestured to his glass. The barman brought another bottle. Quinn gestured to the empty glass of the man beside him and raised an eyebrow. The man shook his head, dug in his pocket, and paid for his own.
Quinn sighed inwardly. This was hard going. The man looked like a bar-brawler and a petty crook without even the brains to be a pimp, which does not need much. The chances that he spoke French were slim, and he was certainly surly enough. But his age was about right, late forties, and he had the tattoo. He would have to do.
Quinn left the bar and found Sam slumped in the car two corners away. He told her quietly what he wanted her to do.
“Are you out of your mind?” she said. “I can’t do that. I’d have you know, Mr. Quinn, I am a Rockcastle preacher’s daughter.” She was grinning as she said it.
Ten minute
s later Quinn was back on his barstool when she came in. She had hiked her skirt so high the waistband must have been under her armpits, but covered by her polo-neck sweater. She had used the entire Kleenex box from the glove compartment to fill out her already full bosom to startling proportions. She swayed over to Quinn and took the barstool between him and the pug. The pug stared at her. So did everyone else. Quinn ignored her.
She reached up and kissed his cheek, then stuck her tongue in his ear. He still ignored her. The pug returned to staring at his glass, but darted an occasional glance at the bosom that jutted over the bar. The barman came up, smiled, and looked inquiring.
“Whisky,” she said. It is an international word, and uttering it does not betray country of origin. He asked her in Flemish if she wanted ice; she did not understand, but nodded brightly. She got the ice. She toasted Quinn, who ignored her. With a shrug she turned to the pug and toasted him instead. Surprised, the bar-brawler responded.
Quite deliberately Sam opened her mouth and ran her tongue along her lower lip, bright with gloss. She was vamping the pug unashamedly. He gave her a broken-toothed grin. Without waiting for more she leaned over and kissed the pug on the mouth.
With a backward sweep Quinn swept her off the bar-stool onto the floor, got up, and leaned toward the pug.
“What the shit do you think you’re up to, messing with my broad?” he snarled in drunken French. Without waiting for an answer he hauled off a left hook that took the pug squarely on the jaw and knocked him backwards into the sawdust.
The man fell well, blinked, rolled back on his feet, and came for Quinn. Sam, as instructed, left hastily by the door. The barman reached quickly for the phone beneath the counter, dialed 101 for the police, and, when they came on the line, muttered “Bar fight” and the address of his bar.