Frederick Forsyth
The Negotiator
Cast Of Characters
The Americans
JOHN J. CORMACK President of the United States
MICHAEL ODELL Vice President of the United States
JAMES DONALDSON Secretary of State
MORTON STANNARD Secretary of Defense
WILLIAM WALTERS Attorney General
HUBERT REED Secretary of the Treasury
BRAD JOHNSON National Security Adviser
DONALD EDMONDS Director, FBI
PHILIP KELLY Assistant Director, Criminal Investigations Division, FBI
KEVIN BROWN Deputy Assistant Director, CID, FBI
LEE ALEXANDER Director, CIA
DAVID WEINTRAUB Deputy Director (Operations), CIA
QUINN The negotiator
DUNCAN MCCREA Junior field agent, CIA
IRVING MOSS Discharged CIA agent
SAM SOMERVILLE Field agent, FBI
CYRUS V. MILLER Oil tycoon
MELVILLE SCANLON Shipping tycoon
PETER COBB Armaments industrialist
BEN SALKIND Armaments industrialist
LIONEL MOIR Armaments industrialist
CREIGHTON BURBANK Director, Secret Service
ROBERT EASTERHOUSE Free-lance security consultant and Saudi expert
ANDREW LAING Bank official, Saudi Arabian Investment Bank
SIMON American student at Balliol College, Oxford
PATRICK SEYMOUR Legal counselor and FBI agent, American embassy, London
LOU COLLINS Liaison officer, CIA, London
The British
MARGARET THATCHERPrime Minister
SIR HARRY MARRIOTT Home Secretary
SIR PETER IMBERT Commissioner, Metropolitan Police
NIGEL CRAMER Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Specialist Operations Department, Metropolitan Police
JULIAN HAYMAN Free-lance security company chairman
COMMANDER PETER WILLIAMS Investigation officer, Specialist Operations Department, Metropolitan Police
The Russians
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV General Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union
GENERAL VLADIMIR KRYUCHKOV Chairman, KGB MAJOR
PAVEL KERKORIAN KGB rezident in Belgrade
GENERAL VADIM KIRPICHENKO Deputy Head, First Chief Directorate, KGB
IVAN KOZLOV Marshal of the U.S.S.R. MAJOR GENERAL
ZEMSKOV Chief planner, Soviet General Staff
ANDREI Field agent, KGB
The Europeans
KUYPER Belgian thug
BERTIE VAN EYCK Director, Walibi Theme Park, Belgium
DIETER LUTZ Hamburg journalist
HANS MORITZ Dortmund brewer
HORST LENZLINGER Oldenburg arms dealer
WERNER BERNHARDT Former Congo mercenary
PAPA DE GROOT Dutch provincial police chief
CHIEF INSPECTOR DYKSTRA Dutch provincial detective
Prologue
The dream came again, just before the rain. He did not hear the rain. In his sleep the dream possessed him.
There was the clearing again, in the forest in Sicily, high above Taormina. He emerged from the forest and walked slowly toward the center of the space, as agreed. The attaché case was in his right hand. In the middle of the clearing he stopped, placed the case on the ground, went back six paces, and dropped to his knees. As agreed. The case contained a billion lire.
It had taken six weeks to negotiate the child’s release, quick by most precedents. Sometimes these cases went on for months. For six weeks he had sat beside the expert from the carabinieri’s Rome office-another Sicilian but on the side of the angels-and had advised on tactics. The carabinieri officer did all the talking. Finally the release of the daughter of the Milan jeweler, snatched from the family’s summer home near Cefalù beach, had been arranged. A ransom of close to a million U.S. dollars, after a start-off demand for five times that sum, but finally the Mafia had agreed.
From the other side of the clearing a man emerged, unshaven, rough-looking, masked, with a Lupara shotgun slung over his shoulder. He held the ten-year-old girl by one hand. She was barefoot, frightened, pale, but she looked unharmed. Physically, at least. The pair walked toward him; he could see the bandit’s eyes staring at him through the mask, then flickering across the forest behind him.
The Mafioso stopped at the case, growled at the girl to stand still. She obeyed. But she stared across at her rescuer with huge dark eyes. Not long now, kid. Hang in there, baby.
The bandit flicked through the rolls of bills in the case until satisfied he had not been cheated. The tall man and the girl looked at each other. He winked; she gave a small flicker of a smile. The bandit closed the case and began to retreat, facing forward, to his side of the clearing. He had reached the trees when it happened.
It was not the carabinieri man from Rome; it was the local fool. There was a clatter of rifle fire; the bandit with the case stumbled and fell. Of course his friends were strung out through the pine trees behind him, in cover. They fired back. In a second the clearing was torn by chains of flying bullets. He screamed, “Down!” in Italian but she did not hear, or panicked and tried to run toward him. He came off his knees and hurled himself across the twenty feet between them.
He almost made it. He could see her there, just beyond his fingertips, inches beyond the hard right hand that would drag her down to safety in the long grass. He could see the fright in her huge eyes, the little white teeth in her screaming mouth… and then the bright crimson rose that bloomed on the front of her thin cotton dress. She went down then as if punched in the back and he recalled lying over her, covering her with his body until the firing stopped and the Mafiosi escaped through the forest. He remembered sitting there holding her, cradling the tiny limp body in his arms, weeping and shouting at the uncomprehending and too-late-apologetic local police: “No, no, sweet Jesus, not again…”
Chapter 1
Winter had come early that year. Already by the end of the month the first forward scouts, borne on a bitter wind out of the northeastern steppes, were racing across the rooftops to probe Moscow ’s defenses.
The Soviet General Staff headquarters building stands at 19, Frunze Street, a gray stone edifice from the 1930s facing its much more modern eight-story high-rise annex across the street. At his window on the top floor of the old block the Soviet Chief of Staff stood, staring out at the icy flurries, and his mood was as bleak as the coming winter.
Marshal Ivan K. Kozlov was sixty-seven, two years older than the statutory retirement age, but in the Soviet Union, as everywhere else, those who made the rules never deemed they should apply to them. At the beginning of the year he had succeeded the veteran Marshal Akhromeyev, to the surprise of most in the military hierarchy. The two men were as unlike as chalk and cheese. Where Akhromeyev had been a small, stick-thin intellectual, Kozlov was a big, bluff, white-haired giant, a soldier’s soldier, son, grandson, and nephew of soldiers. Although only the third-ranking First Deputy Chief before his promotion, he had jumped the two men ahead of him, who had slipped quietly into retirement. No one had any doubts as to why he had gone to the top; from 1987 to 1989 he had quietly and expertly supervised the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, an exercise that had been achieved without any scandals, major defeats, or (most important of all) publicized loss of national face, even though the wolves of Allah had been snapping at the Russian heels all the way to the Salang Pass. The operation had brought him great credit in Moscow, bringing him to the personal attention of the General Secretary himself.
But while he had done his duty, and earned his marshal’s baton, he had also made himself a private vow: Never again would he lead his beloved Soviet Army in retreat-and despite the fulsome PR exercise, Afghanistan had been a defeat. It was the prospect of another looming defeat that caused the bleakness of his mood as he stared out through the double glass at the horizontal drifts of tiny ice particles that snapped periodically past the window.