The Negotiator (53 page)

While Sam was at the bank, Quinn used the last of his cash to buy her a single ticket from Paris to Málaga. She had missed the 12:45 flight but there was another at 5:35
P.M.

“Your friend has five hours to wait,” said the ticket-counter agent. “Coaches leave from Gate J every twelve minutes for Orly South terminal.”

Quinn thanked her, crossed the floor to the bank, and gave Sam her ticket. She had drawn $5,000, and Quinn took $4,000.

“I’m taking you to the bus right now,” said Quinn. “It’ll be safer at Orly than right here, just in case they’re checking flight departures. When you get there, go straight through passport control into the duty-free area. Harder to get at. Get yourself a new handbag, a suitcase, some clothes—you know what you’ll need. Then wait for the flight and don’t miss it. I’ll have people at Málaga to meet you.”

“Quinn, I don’t even speak Spanish.”

“Don’t worry. These people all speak English.”

At the steps of the bus Sam reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Quinn, I’m sorry. You’d have done better alone.”

“Not your fault, baby.” Quinn turned her face up and kissed her. A common enough scene at terminals—no one took any notice. “Besides, without you I wouldn’t have the Smith & Wesson. I think I may need that.”

“Take care of yourself,” she whispered. A chill wind blew down the Boulevard de Vaugirard. The last heavy luggage was stacked underneath the bus and the last passengers boarded. Sam shivered in his arms. He smoothed the shining blond hair.

“I’ll be okay. Trust me. I’ll be in touch by phone in a couple of days. By then, either way, we’ll be able to go home in safety.”

He watched the bus head down the boulevard, waved at the small hand in the rear window. Then it turned the corner and was gone.

Two hundred yards from the terminus and across Vaugirard is a large post office. Quinn bought sheet cardboard and wrapping paper in a stationery shop and entered the post office. With penknife and gummed tape, paper and string, he made up a stout parcel of the diamonds and mailed it by registered post, express rate, to Ambassador Fairweather in London.

From the bank of international telephone booths he called Scotland Yard and left a message for Nigel Cramer. It consisted of an address near East Grinstead, Sussex. Finally he called a bar in Estepona. The man he spoke to was not Spanish, but a London Cockney.

“Yeah, all right, mate,” said the voice on the phone. “We’ll take care of the little lady for you.”

With his last loose ends tied up, Quinn retrieved his car, filled the tank to the brim at the nearest gasoline station, and headed through the lunchtime traffic for the orbital ring road. Sixty minutes after making his phone call to Spain he was on the A.6 autoroute heading south for Marseilles.

He broke for dinner at Beaune, then put his head back in the rear seat of the car and caught up on some missing sleep. It was three in the morning when he resumed his journey south.

While he slept a man sat quietly in the San Marco restaurant across the road from the Hôtel du Colisée and kept watch on the hotel’s front door. He had been there since midday, to the surprise and eventual annoyance of the staff. He had ordered lunch, sat through the afternoon, and then ordered dinner. To the waiters he appeared to be reading quietly in the window seat.

At eleven the restaurant wished to close. The man left and went next door to the Royal Hôtel. Explaining that he was waiting for a friend, he took a seat at the window of the lobby and continued his vigil. At two in the morning he finally gave up.

He drove to the twenty-four-hour-a-day post office in the rue du Louvre, went up to the first-floor bank of telephones, and placed a person-to-person call. He stayed in the booth until the operator rang back.

“
Allô, monsieur
,” she said. “I have your call. On the line. Go ahead, Castelblanc.”

Chapter 16

The Costa del Sol has long been the favored place of retirement of sought-after members of the British underworld. Several dozen such villains, having contrived to separate banks or armored cars from their contents or investors from their savings, having skipped the land of their fathers one inch ahead of the grasping fingers of Scotland Yard sought refuge in the sun of the South of Spain, there to enjoy their newfound affluence. A wit once said that on a clear day in Estepona you can see more Category A men than in Her Majesty’s Prison, Parkhurst, during roll call.

That evening four of their number were waiting at Málaga airport as a result of a phone call from Paris. There were Ronnie and Bernie and Arthur, pronounced Arfur, who were all mature men, and the youngster Terry, known as Tel. Apart from Tel they all wore pale suits and panama hats, and despite the fact that it was long after dark, sunglasses. They checked the arrivals board, noted that the Paris plane had just landed, and stood discreetly to one side of the exit door from the customs area.

Sam emerged among the first three passengers. She had no luggage but her new, Orly-bought handbag and a small leather suitcase, also new, with a collection of toiletries and overnight clothes. Otherwise she had only the two-piece outfit in which she had attended the morning’s meeting at Chez Hugo.

Ronnie had a description of her but it had failed to do her justice. Like Bernie and Arfur he was married, and like the others his old lady was a peroxide blonde, bleached even whiter by constant sun-worshipping, with the lizardlike skin that is the heritage of too much ultraviolet radiation. Ronnie appraised the pale northern skin and hourglass figure of the newcomer with approval.

“Gorblimey,” muttered Bernie.

“Tasty,” said Tel. It was his favorite, if not only, adjective. Anything that surprised or pleased him he designated “tasty.”

Ronnie moved forward.

“Miss Somerville?”

“Yes.”

“Evening. I’m Ronnie. This is Bernie and Arfur and Tel. Quinn asked us to look after you. The car’s right over here.”

Quinn drove into Marseilles in a cold and rainy dawn, the last day of November. He had the choice of flying to Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica, from Marignane Airport, and arriving the same day, or of taking the evening ferry and his car with him.

He elected the ferry. For one thing he would not have to rent a car in Ajaccio; for another, he could safely take the Smith & Wesson, still stuck in his waistband; and for a third, he felt he ought as a precaution to make some small purchases for the stay in Corsica.

The signs to the ferry port on the Quai de la Joliette were clear enough. The port was almost empty. The morning’s ferry from Ajaccio was docked, its passengers gone an hour before. The SNCM ticket office on the Boulevard des Dames was still closed. He parked and enjoyed breakfast while he waited.

At nine he bought himself a crossing on the ferry
Napoléon
for the coming night, due to leave at 8:00
P.M.
and arrive at 7:00 the morning after. With his ticket he could lodge the Ascona in the passengers’ parking lot close to the J4
quai
, from which the ferry would leave. This done, he walked back into the city to make his purchases.

The canvas holdall was easy enough to find, and a pharmacy yielded the washing things and shaving tackle to replace what he had abandoned at the Hôtel du Colisée in Paris. The search for a specialist men’s outfitters caused a number of shaken heads, but he eventually found it in the pedestrians-only rue St.-Ferréol just north of the Old Port.

The young salesman was helpful and the purchase of boots, jeans, belt, shirt, and hat posed no problem. When Quinn mentioned his last request, the young man’s eyebrows went up.

“You want
what
, m’sieur?”

Quinn repeated his need.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think such a thing could be for sale.”

He eyed the two large-denomination notes moving seductively through Quinn’s fingers.

“Perhaps in the storeroom? An old one of no further use?” suggested Quinn.

The young man glanced around.

“I will see, sir. May I take the holdall?”

He was in the storeroom at the rear for ten minutes. When he returned he opened the holdall for Quinn to peer inside.

“Marvelous,” said Quinn. “Just what I needed.”

He settled up, tipped the young man as promised, and left. The skies cleared and he lunched at an open café in the Old Port, spending an hour over coffee studying a large-scale map of Corsica. The only thing the attached gazetteer would say of Castelblanc was that it was in the Ospédale Range in the deep south of the island.

At eight the
Napoléon
eased herself out of the Gare Maritime and headed backwards into the roads. Quinn was enjoying a glass of wine in the Bar des Aigles, almost empty at that season of the year. As the ferry swung to bring her nose to the sea, the lights of Marseilles passed in review before the window, to be replaced by the old prison fortress of Château d’If, drifting past half a cable’s length away.

Fifteen minutes later she cleared Cap Croisette and was enveloped by the darkness and the open sea. Quinn went to dine in the Malmaison, returned to his cabin on D Deck, and turned in before eleven, his bedside clock set for six.

At about that hour Sam sat with her hosts in a small and isolated former farmhouse high in the hills behind Estepona. None of them lived in the house; it was used for storage and the occasional moment when one of their friends needed a little “privacy” from marauding detectives waving extradition warrants.

The five of them sat in a closed and shuttered room, now blue with cigarette smoke, playing poker. It had been Ronnie’s suggestion. They had been at it for three hours; only Ronnie and Sam remained in the game. Tel did not play; he served beer—drunk straight from the bottle and with an ample supply available in the crates along one wall. The other walls were also stacked, but with bales of an exotic leaf fresh in from Morocco and destined for export to countries farther north.

Arfur and Bernie had been cleaned out and sat glumly watching the last two players at the table. The “pot” of 1,000-peseta notes in the center of the table contained all they had brought with them, plus half of what Ronnie had and half the dollars in Sam’s possession, exchanged at the going dollar/peseta rate.

Sam eyed Ronnie’s remaining stash, pushed most of her own banknotes to the center, and raised him. He grinned, matched her raise, and asked to see her cards. She turned four of her cards face-up. Two kings, two tens. Ronnie grinned and up-faced his own hand: full house, three queens and two jacks. He reached for the pile of notes containing all he had, plus all Bernie and Arfur had brought, plus nine tenths of Sam’s thousand dollars. Sam flicked over her fifth card. The third king.

“Bloody ’ell,” he said and leaned back. Sam scooped the notes into a pile.

“S’truth,” said Bernie.

“ ’Ere, what you do for a living, Sam?” asked Arfur.

“Didn’t Quinn tell you?” she asked. “I’m a special agent with the FBI.”

“Gorblimey,” said Ronnie.

“Tasty,” said Tel.

The
Napoléon
docked on the dot of seven at the Gare Maritime of Ajaccio, halfway between the jetties Capucins and Citadelle. Ten minutes later Quinn joined the few other vehicles emerging from her hold and drove down the ramp into the ancient capital of this wildly beautiful and secretive island.

His map had made clear enough the route he should take, due south out of town, down the Boulevard Sampiero to the airport, there to take a left into the mountains on the N. 196. Ten minutes after he took the turnoff, the land began to climb, as it always will in Corsica, which is almost entirely covered by mountains. The road swerved and switch-backed up past Cauro to the Col St. Georges, from which for a second he could look back and down to the narrow coastal plain far behind and below. Then the mountains enfolded him again, dizzying slopes and cliffs, clothed in these low-lying hills with forests of oak, olive, and beech. After Bicchisano the road wound down again, back toward the coast at Propriano. There was no way of avoiding the dogleg route to the Ospédale—a straight line would lead clear across the valley of the Baraci, a region so wild no roadmakers could penetrate it.

After Propriano he followed the coastal plain again for a few miles before the D.268 allowed him to turn toward the mountains of Ospédale. He was now off the N (national) roads and onto D (departmental) roads, little more than narrow lanes, yet broad highways compared to the tracks high in the mountains to come.

He passed tiny perched villages of local gray stone houses, sitting on hills and escarpments from which the views were vertiginous, and he wondered how these farmers could make a living from their tiny meadows and orchards.

Always the road climbed, twisting and turning, dipping to cross a fold in the ground but always climbing again after the respite. Beyond Ste. Lucie de Tallano the tree line ended and the hills were covered with that thick, thigh-high cover of heather and myrtle that they call the
maquis
. During the Second World War, fleeing from one’s home into the mountains to avoid arrest by the Gestapo was called “taking to the
maquis
”; thus the French underground resistance became known as the
maquisards
, or just “the Maquis.”

Corsica is as old as her mountains, and men have lived in these hills since prehistoric times. Like Sardinia and Sicily, Corsica has been fought over more times than she can remember, and always the strangers came as conquerors, invaders, and tax-gatherers, to rule and to take, never to give. With so little to live on for themselves, the Corsicans reacted by turning to their hills, the natural ramparts and sanctuaries. Generations of rebels and bandits, guerrillas and partisans have taken to the hills to avoid the authorities marching up from the coast to levy taxes and imposts from people ill able to pay.

Out of these centuries of experience the mountain folk developed their philosophy: clannish and secretive. Authority represented injustice and Paris gathered taxes just as harshly as any other conqueror. Though Corsica is part of France, and gave France Napoléon Bonaparte and a thousand other notables, for the mountain people the foreigner is still the foreigner, harbinger of injustice and the tax levy, whether from France or anywhere else. Corsica might send her sons by the tens of thousands to mainland France to work, but if ever such a son were in trouble, the old mountains would still offer sanctuary.