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 the Chemin 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 the Domaine 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 seconds 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, brushing 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 excellent. 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 to Marchais 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 pass Liège and cross the German frontier at Aachen. She turned north through the dense industrial sprawl of the Ruhr past Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen, to emerge finally 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 at a 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 comfortable 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 following 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 telling them, was risky. If it went wrong, badly wrong, his career 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 puzzled 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 proceed.
“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 military. 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 importance 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 General, 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 Western 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 puzzlement.
“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 extremely 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 possible interrogation by visiting our soil.”
“But they came?” asked Gorbachev. “Covertly, by military 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 Azerbaijan?”
“Baku, Comrade General Secretary, is the headquarters 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 serious 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 computer 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 sanction by the Royal House. And half the money has gone, disbursed 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.
“Calm yourself, Steve,” he said reassuringly. “You know whom I represent here. The matter will be taken care of. I assure you.”
Pyle saw him out but was not calmed. Even the CIA fouled up sometimes, he reminded himself too late. Had he known more, and read less fiction, he would have known that a senior officer of the Company could not have the rank of colonel. Langley does not take ex-Army officers. But he did not know. He just worried.
On his way down, Easterhouse realized he was going to have to return to the States for consultations. It was time, anyway. All was in place, ticking like a patient time bomb. He was even ahead of schedule. He ought to give his patrons a situation report. While there he would mention Andy Laing. Surely the man could be bought off, persuaded to hold his fire, at least until April?
He was unaware how wrong he was.
“Dieter, you owe me, and I’m calling in the marker.”
Quinn sat with his contact in a bar two blocks away from the office where the man worked. Sam listened and the contact looked worried.
“But, Quinn, please try to understand. It is not a question of house rules. Federal law itself forbids non-employees to have access to the morgue.”
Dieter Lutz was a decade younger than Quinn, but far more prosperous. He had the gloss of a flourishing career. He was in fact a senior staff reporter with Der Spiegel, Germany’s biggest and most prestigious current affairs magazine.
It had not always been so. Once he had been a freelancer, scratching a living, trying to be one step ahead of the opposition when the big stories broke. In those days there had been a kidnapping that had made every German headline day after day. At the most delicate point of the negotiations with the kidnappers Lutz had inadvertently leaked something that almost destroyed the deal.
The angry police had wanted to know where the leak had come from. The kidnap victim was a big industrialist, a party benefactor, and Bonn had been leaning on the police heavily. Quinn had known who the guilty party was, but had kept silent. The damage was done, had to be repaired, and the breaking of a young reporter with too much enthusiasm and too little wisdom was not going to help matters.
“I don’t need to break in,” said Quinn patiently. “You’re on the staff. You have the right to go and get the material, if it’s there.”
The head offices of Der Spiegel are at 19 Brandstwiete, a short street running between the Dovenfleet canal and the Ost-West-Strasse. Beneath the modern eleven-story building slumbers the biggest newspaper morgue in Europe. More than 18 million documents are filed in it. Computerizing the files had been going on for a decade before Quinn and Lutz took their beer that November afternoon in the Dom-Strasse bar. Lutz sighed.
“All right,” he said. “What is his name?”
“Paul Marchais,” said Quinn. “Belgian mercenary. Fought in the Congo 1964 to 1968. And any general background on the events of that period.”
Julian Hayman’s files in London might have had something on Marchais, but Quinn had not then been able to give him a name. Lutz was back an hour later with a file.
“These must not pass out of my possession,” he said. “And they must be back by nightfall.”
“Crap,” said Quinn amiably. “Go back to work. Return in four hours. I’ll be here. You can have it then.”
Lutz left. Sam had not understood the talk in German, but now she leaned over to see what Quinn had got.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“I want to see if the bastard had any pals, any really close friends,” said Quinn. He began to read.
The first piece was from an Antwerp newspaper of 1965, a general review of local men who had signed on to fight in the Congo. For Belgium it was a highly emotional issue in those days—the stories of the Simba rebels raping, torturing, and slaughtering priests, nuns, planters, missionaries, women, and children, many of them Belgian, had endowed the mercenaries who put down the Simba revolt with a kind of glamour. The article was in Flemish, with a German translation attached.
Marchais, Paul: born in Liège 1943, son of a Walloon father and Flemish mother—that would account for the French-sounding name of a boy who grew up in Antwerp. Father killed in the liberation of Belgium in 1944/45. Mother returned to her native Antwerp.
Slum boyhood, spent around the docks. In trouble with the police from early teens. A string of minor convictions to spring 1964. Turned up in the Congo with Jacques Schramme’s Leopard Group. There was no mention of the rape charge; perhaps the Antwerp police were keeping quiet in the hope he would show up again and be arrested.
The second piece was a passing mention. In 1966 he had apparently quit Schramme and joined the Fifth Commando, by then headed by John Peters, who had succeeded Mike Hoare. Principally manned by South Africans—Peters had quickly ousted most of Hoare’s British. So Marchais’s Flemish could have enabled him to survive among Afrikaners, since Afrikaans and Flemish are fairly similar.
The other two pieces mentioned Marchais, or simply a giant Belgian called Big Paul, staying on after the disbanding of the Fifth Commando and the departure of Peters, and rejoining Schramme in time for the 1967 Stanleyville mutiny and the long march to Bukavu.
Finally Lutz had included five photocopies of sheets extracted from Anthony Modeler’s classic, Histoire des Mercenaires, from which Quinn could fill in the events of Marchais’s last months in the Congo.
In late July 1967, unable to hold Stanleyville, Schramme’s group set off for the border and cut a swath clean through all opposition until they reached Bukavu, once a delightful watering hole for Belgians, a cool resort on the edge of a lake. Here they holed up.
They held out for three months until they finally ran out of ammunition. Then they m
arched over the bridge across the lake into the neighboring republic of Ruanda.
Quinn had heard the rest. Though out of ammunition they terrified the Ruandan government, which thought they might, if not appeased, simply terrorize the entire country. The Belgian consul was overwhelmed. Many of the Belgian mercenaries had lost their identity papers, accidentally or on purpose. The harassed consul issued temporary Belgian ID cards according to the name he was given. That would be where Marchais became Paul Lefort. It would not be beyond the wit of man to convert those papers into permanent ones at a later date, especially if a Paul Lefort had once existed and died down there.
On April 23, 1968, two Red Cross airplanes finally repatriated the mercenaries. One plane flew direct to Brussels with all the Belgians on board. All except one. The Belgian public was prepared to hail their mercenaries as heroes; not so the police. They checked everyone descending from the plane against their own wanted lists. Marchais must have taken the other DC-6, the one that dropped off human cargoes at Pisa, Zurich, and Paris. Between them the two planes carried 123 mixed European and South African mercenaries back to Europe.
Quinn was convinced Marchais had been on the second plane, that he had disappeared into twenty-three years of dead-end jobs on fairgrounds until being recruited for his last foreign assignment. What Quinn wanted was the name of one other who had been with him on that last assignment. There was nothing in the papers to give a clue. Lutz returned.
“One last thing,” said Quinn.
“I can’t,” protested Lutz. “There’s already talk that I’m writing a background piece on mercenaries. I’m not—I’m on the Common Market meeting of agriculture Ministers.”
“Broaden your horizons,” suggested Quinn. “How many German mercenaries were in the Stanleyville mutiny, the march to Bukavu, the siege of Bukavu, and the internment camp in Ruanda.”