Quinn jammed his gun in his waistband and made his escape rope just ten yards ahead of the two Dobermans. He swung up the wall as they leaped after him, trod on the sensor wire—triggering a shrill peal of alarm bells from the house—and dropped to the roof of the van. He had discarded the ladder, got the van in gear, and raced off down the lane before a pursuit group could be organized.
Sam was waiting as promised in their car, all packed and checked out, opposite the Graf von Oldenburg. He abandoned the van and climbed in beside her.
“Head west,” he said. “The E.22 for Lier and Holland.”
Lenzlinger’s men were in two cars and radio-linked, with each other and to the manor house. Someone in the house phoned the city’s best hotel, the City Club, but were told Quinn was not registered there. It took the caller another ten minutes, running down the hotel list, to ascertain from the Graf von Oldenburg that Herr and Frau Quinn had checked out. But the caller got an approximate description of their car.
Sam had cleared the Ofener Strasse and reached the 293 ring road when a gray Mercedes appeared behind them. Quinn slid down and curled up until his head was below the sill. Sam turned off the ring road onto the E.22 autobahn; the Mercedes followed.
“It’s coming alongside,” she said.
“Drive normally,” mumbled Quinn from his hiding place. “Give ’em a nice bright smile and a wave.”
The Mercedes pulled up alongside. It was still dark, the interior of the Ford invisible from outside. Sam turned her head. She knew neither of them, the refrigerator-freezer or the dog handler of the previous morning.
Sam flashed a beaming smile and a little wave. The men stared, expressionless. Frightened people on the run do not smile and wave. After several seconds, the Mercedes accelerated ahead, did a U-turn at the next intersection, and went back toward town. After ten minutes Quinn emerged and sat up again.
“Herr Lenzlinger doesn’t seem to like you,” said Sam.
“Apparently not,” said Quinn sadly. “I’ve just shot his pecker off.”
Chapter 14
It is now confirmed that the Saudi jamboree to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of the declaration of the Kingdom will be on April 17th next,” Colonel Easterhouse told the Alamo Group later that morning.
They were seated in the spacious office of Cyrus Miller atop the Pan-Global Tower in downtown Houston.
“The half-billion-dollar stadium, entirely covered with a two-hundred-meter-wide acrylic dome, is complete, ahead of schedule. The other half of this billion-dollar exercise in self-glorification will be spent on food, jewelry, gifts, hospitality, extra hotels and guest mansions for the statesmen of the world, and on the pageant.
“Seven days before the actual pageant, before the expected fifty thousand international guests arrive, there will be a full dress rehearsal. The climax of the entire four-hour pageant will be the storming of a life-size replica model of the old Musmak Fortress, as it stood in 1902. The structure will be completed by Hollywood’s most skilled set designers and builders. The ‘defenders’ will be drawn from the Royal Guard and dressed in the Turkish clothes of those days. The attacking group will be composed of fifty younger princes of the House, all on horseback, and led by a young relative of the King who bears a resemblance to the Sheikh Abdal Aziz of 1902.”
“Fine,” drawled Scanlon. “Love the local color. What about the coup?”
“That’s when the coup takes place,” said the colonel. “In that vast stadium, on rehearsal night, the only audience will be the topmost six hundred of the Royal House, headed by the King himself. All will be fathers, uncles, mothers, and aunts of the participants. All will be packed into the royal enclosure. As the last participants of the previous presentation leave, I will computer-lock the exit doors. The entrance doors will open to admit the fifty riders. What is not foreseen, except by me, is that they will be followed by ten fast-driving trucks disguised as Army vehicles and parked near the entrance gates. Those gates will stay open until the last truck has passed inside, then be computer-locked. After that, no one leaves.
“The assassins will leap out of the trucks, run toward the royal enclosure, and begin firing. One group alone will stay on the floor of the arena to dispatch the fifty princes and the Royal Guard ‘defenders’ of the dummy Musmak Fortress, all armed only with blanks.
“The five hundred Royal Guards surrounding the royal enclosure will attempt to defend their charges. Their ammunition will be defective. In most cases it will detonate in the magazines, killing the man holding the gun. In other cases it will jam. The complete destruction of the Royal House will take about forty minutes. Every stage will be filmed by the video cameras and patched through to Saudi TV; from there the spectacle will be available to most of the Gulf States.”
“How you going to get the Royal Guard to agree to a reissue of ammunition?” asked Moir.
“Security in Saudi Arabia is an obsession,” replied the colonel, “and for that very reason arbitrary changes in procedure are constant. So long as the authority on the order looks genuine, they will obey orders. These will be given in a document prepared by me, over the real signature of the Minister of the Interior, which I have obtained on a blank sheet. Never mind how. Major General Al-Shakry, of Egypt, is in charge of the ordnance depot. He will provide the defective issue of bullets. Later, Egypt will have to have access to Saudi oil at a price she can afford.”
“And the regular Army?” asked Salkind. “There are fifty thousand of them.”
“Yes, but they are not all in Riyadh. The locally-based Army units will have been on maneuvers a hundred miles away, due back in Riyadh the day before the dress rehearsal. The Army’s vehicles are maintained by Palestinians, part of the huge foreign presence in the country of foreign technicians who do the jobs the Saudis cannot. They will immobilize the vehicles, marooning the nine thousand Army troops from Riyadh in the desert.”
“What’s the Palestinians’ kickback?” asked Cobb.
“A chance of naturalization,” said Easterhouse. “Although the technical infrastructure of Saudi depends on the quarter-million Palestinians employed at every level, they are always denied nationality. However loyally they serve, they can never have it. But under the post-Imam regime they could acquire it on the basis of six months’ residence. That measure alone will eventually suck a million Palestinians south from the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon, to reside in their new homeland south of the Nefud, bringing peace to the northern Middle East.”
“And after the massacre?” Cyrus Miller asked the question. He had no time for euphemisms.
“In the last stages of the firefight inside the stadium, it will catch fire,” said Colonel Easterhouse smoothly. “This has been arranged. The flames will engulf the structure fast, disposing of the remains of the Royal House and their assassins. The cameras will continue to run until meltdown, followed on screen by the Imam himself.”
“What is he going to say?” queried Moir.
“Enough to terrify the entire Middle East and the West. Unlike Khomeini, who always spoke very quietly, this man is a firebrand. When he speaks he becomes carried away, for he speaks the message of Allah and Mohammed, and wishes to be heard.”
Miller nodded understandingly. He, too, knew the conviction of being a divine mouthpiece.
“By the time he has finished threatening all the secular and Sunni orthodox regimes around Saudi’s borders with their imminent destruction; promising to use the entire four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollars-a-day income in the service of Holy Terror, and to destroy the Hasa oil fields if thwarted, every Arab kingdom, emirate, sheikhdom, and republic, from Oman in the south up north to the Turkish border, will be appealing to the West for help. That means America.”
“What about this pro-Western Saudi Prince who is going to replace him?” asked Cobb. “If he fails ...”
“He won’t,” said the colonel with certainty. “Just as the Army’s trucks and the Air Force fighter-bombers were immobilized when t
hey might have prevented the massacre, they will reenter service in time to rally to the Prince’s call. The Palestinians will see to that.
“Prince Khalidi bin Sudairi will stop by my house on his way to the dress rehearsal. He will have a drink—no doubt about that; he’s an alcoholic. The drink will be drugged. For three days he will be detained by two of my Yemenite house servants in the cellar. There he will prepare video and radio tapes announcing he is alive, the legitimate successor to his uncle, and appealing for American help to restore legitimacy. Note the phrase, gentlemen: the United States will intervene, not to conduct a countercoup, but to restore legitimacy with the full backing of the Arab world.
“I will then transfer the Prince to the safekeeping of the U.S. embassy, forcing America to become involved whether it likes it or not, since the embassy will have to defend itself against Shi’ah mobs demanding the Prince be handed over to them. The Religious Police, the Army, and the people will still need a trigger to turn on the Shi’ah usurpers and eliminate them, to a man. That trigger will be the arrival of the first U.S. airborne units.”
“What about the aftermath, Colonel?” asked Miller slowly. “Will we get what we want—the oil for America?”
“We will all get what we want, gentlemen. The Palestinians get a homeland; the Egyptians, an oil quota to feed their masses. Uncle Sam gets to control the Saudi and Kuwaiti reserves, and thus the global oil price for the benefit of all mankind. The Prince becomes the new King, a drunken sot with me at his elbow every minute of the day. Only the Saudis will be disinherited, and return to their goats.
“The Sunni Arab states will learn their lesson from such a close call. Faced with the rage of the Shi’ah at having been so near and then defeated, the secular states will have no option but to hunt down and extirpate Fundamentalism before they all fall victim. Within five years there will be a huge crescent of peace and prosperity from the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Bengal.”
The Alamo Five sat in silence. Two of them had thought to divert Saudi’s oil flow America’s way, nothing more. The other three had agreed to go along. They had just heard a plan to redraw a third of the world. It occurred to an appalled Moir and Cobb, though not to the other three, and certainly not to the colonel, that Easterhouse was a completely unbalanced egomaniac. Each realized too late that they were on a roller coaster, unable to slow down or get off.
Cyrus Miller invited Easterhouse to a private lunch in his adjacent dining room.
“No problems, Colonel?” he queried over the fresh peaches from his greenhouse. “Really, no problems?”
“There could be one, sir,” said the colonel carefully. “I have one hundred and forty days to H-hour. Long enough for a single bad leak to blow it all away. There is a young man, a former bank official ... he lives in London now. Name of Laing. I would like someone to have a word with him.”
“Tell me,” said Miller. “Tell me about Mr. Laing.”
Quinn and Sam drove into the northern Dutch town of Groningen two and a half hours after fleeing Oldenburg. The capital of the province of the same name, Groningen, like the German city across the border, dates from medieval times, with an inner heart, the Old Town, protected by a ring canal. In olden days the inhabitants could flee into the center and lift their fourteen bridges to seal themselves behind their watery ramparts.
The wisdom of the city council decreed that the Old Town should not be despoiled by the industrial sprawl and poured-concrete obsession of the late twentieth century. Instead, it has been renovated and restored, a circular half-mile of alleys, markets, streets, squares, churches, restaurants, hotels, and pedestrian malls, almost all of them cobbled. At Quinn’s direction Sam drove to the De Doelen Hotel on Grote Markt and they registered.
Modern buildings are few in the Old Town, but one is the five-story red-brick block on Rade Markt, which houses the police station.
“You know somebody here?” asked Sam as they approached the building.
“I used to,” admitted Quinn. “He may be retired. Hope not.”
He was not. The young blond officer at the reception desk confirmed that, yes, Inspector De Groot was now Chief Inspector and commanded the Cernéente Politic. Whom should he announce?
Quinn could hear the shout over the telephone when the policeman phoned upstairs. The young man grinned.
“He seems to know you, mijnheer.”
They were shown up to the office of Chief Inspector De Groot without delay. He was waiting for them, advancing across the floor to greet them, a big florid bear of a man with thinning hair, in uniform but wearing carpet slippers to favor a pair of feet that had pounded many miles of cobbled streets in thirty years.
The Dutch police has three branches: the Gemeente, or Community, Police, the criminal branch, known as the Recherche, and the highway patrol, the Rijkspolitie. De Groot looked the part, a Community Police chief whose avuncular frame and manner had long earned him among his own officers and the populace the nickname Papa De Groot.
“Quinn, good heavens alive, Quinn. It’s been a long time since Assen.”
“Fourteen years,” admitted Quinn as they shook hands, and he introduced Sam. He made no mention of her FBI status. She had no jurisdiction in the kingdom of the Netherlands, and they were there unofficially. Papa De Groot ordered coffee—it was still shortly after breakfast—and asked what brought them to his town.
“I’m looking for a man,” said Quinn. “I believe he may be living in Holland.”
“An old friend, perhaps? Someone from the old days?”
“No, I’ve never met him.”
The beam in De Groot’s twinkling eyes did not falter, but he stirred his coffee a little more slowly.
“I heard you had retired from Lloyd’s,” he said.
“True,” said Quinn. “My friend and I are just trying to do a favor for some friends.”
“Tracing missing people?” queried De Groot. “A new departure for you. Well, what’s his name and where does he live?”
De Groot owed him a favor. In May 1977, a group of South Moluccan fanatics, seeking to reestablish their old homeland in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, had sought to publicize their cause by hijacking a train and a school at nearby Assen. There were fifty-four passengers on the train and a hundred children in the school. This sort of thing was new to Holland; they had no trained hostage-recovery teams in those days.
Quinn had been in his first year with the Lloyd’s firm that specialized in such things. He was sent to advise, along with two soft-spoken sergeants from the British SAS, London’s official contribution. Assen being in next-door Drente Province, De Groot had commanded the local police; the SAS men liaised with the Dutch Army.
De Groot had listened to the lean American who seemed to understand the men of violence inside the train and the school. He suggested what would probably happen when the troops went in and the terrorists opened fire. De Groot ordered his men to do as the American suggested, and two stayed alive because of that. Both the train and the school were eventually stormed; six terrorists died, and two train passengers in the crossfire. No soldiers or policemen were killed.
“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,” said De 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.”
De Groot 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 th
at, 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 filmmakers.
“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,” said De 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 Groot stared 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 looking for a place to lunch, De Groot called his nephew in The Hague. Young Koos De Groot was a junior officer with the Binnenlandse Veiligheids Dienst, 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 from Groningen called for every day of the week.
Papa De Groot called Quinn the next morning and they met an hour later at the police station.
“He’s some fellow, your Pretorius,” said De 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 flattering bits. Others come from newspaper cuttings. Jan Pieter Pretorius, born Bloemfontein 1942—that makes him forty-nine now. Gives his profession as sign painter.”