The man skirted the western end of the Vietnam Memorial, then cut half-left to slant away toward the high ground, heavily studded with trees, between the Constitution Gardens lake and the bank of the Reflecting Pool.
Far to Quinn’s left he could make out the glimmer of light from the two bivouacs where veterans kept vigil for the Missing in Action of that sad and distant war. His quarry was using a diagonal route to avoid passing too close to this single sign of life in the park at that hour.
The Memorial is a long wall of black marble, ankle-high at each end but seven feet deep at the center, recessed into the ground of the Mall and shaped like a very shallow chevron. Quinn stepped over the wall in the path of his quarry at the point where it was only a foot high, then crouched low in the shadow of the stone as the man ahead of him turned, as if hearing some scrape of shoe on gravel. With his head above the level of the surrounding lawn, Quinn could see him scan the park and the Mall before moving on.
A pale sickle moon emerged from behind the clouds. By its light Quinn could see the length of the marble wall incised with the names of the fifty-eight thousand men who died in Vietnam. He stooped briefly to kiss the icy marble and moved on, crossing the further stretch of lawn to the grove of towering oaks where stand the life-size bronze statues of veterans of the war.
Ahead of Quinn, the man in the black coat stopped and turned again to survey the ground behind him. He saw nothing; the moonlight picked out the oaks, bare of leaf and stark against the glow from the now-distant Lincoln Memorial, and glinted on the figures of the four bronze soldiers.
Had he known or cared more, the man in the coat would have known there are only three soldiers on the plinth. As he turned to walk on, the fourth detached himself and followed.
Finally the man reached “the usual place.” At the height of the knoll between the lake in the gardens and the Reflecting Pool itself, surrounded by discreet trees, stands a public toilet, illuminated by a single lamp, still burning at that hour. The man in the black coat took up his station near the lamp and waited. Two minutes later Quinn emerged from the trees. The man looked at him. He probably went pale-it was too dim to see. But his hands shook; Quinn could see that. They looked at each other. The man in front of Quinn was fighting back a rising tide of panic.
“Quinn,” said the man. “You’re dead.”
“No,” said Quinn reasonably. “Moss is dead. And McCrea. And Orsini, Zack, Marchais, and Pretorius. And Simon Cormack-oh, yes, he’s dead. And you know why.”
“Easy, Quinn. Let’s behave like reasonable people. He had to go. He was going to ruin us all. Surely you can see that.” He knew he was talking for his life now.
“Simon? A college student?”
The surprise of the man in the dark coat overcame his nervousness. He had sat in the White House, heard the details of what Quinn could do.
“Not the boy. The father. He has to go.”
“The Nantucket Treaty?”
“Of course. Those terms will ruin thousands of men, hundreds of corporations.”
“But why you? From what I know, you’re an extremely wealthy man. Your private fortune is enormous.”
The man Quinn faced laughed shortly.
“So far,” he said. “When I inherited my family wealth I used my talents as a broker in New York to place the estate in a variety of stock portfolios. Good stocks, high-growth, high-yield portfolios. It’s still in them. The trustees of my blind trust haven’t moved them.”
“In the armaments industry.”
“Look, Quinn, I brought this for Moss. Now it could be for you. Have you ever seen one before?”
He brought a slip of paper out of his breast pocket and held it out. By the light of the single lantern and the moon Quinn looked at it. A bank draft, drawn on a Swiss bank of unimpeachable reputation, payable to the bearer. In the sum of 5 million U.S. dollars.
“Take it, Quinn. You’ve never seen money like that before. Never will again. Think what you can do with it, the life you can lead with it. Comfort, luxury even, for the rest of your life. Just the manuscript, and it’s yours.”
“It really was about money all along, wasn’t it?” said Quinn thoughtfully. He toyed with the check, thinking things over.
“Of course. Money and power. Same thing.”
“But you were his friend. He trusted you.”
“Please, Quinn, don’t be naïve. It always comes down to money. This entire nation is about money. No one can change that. Always has been, always will. We worship the almighty dollar. Everything and everyone in this land can be bought-bought and paid for.”
Quinn nodded. He thought of the fifty-eight thousand names on the black marble four hundred yards behind him. Bought and paid for. He sighed and reached inside his sheepskin bomber jacket. The smaller man jumped back, startled.
“No need for that, Quinn. You said, no guns.”
But when Quinn’s hand emerged it clutched two hundred sheets of white typescript. He held out the manuscript. The other man relaxed, took the sheaf.
“You won’t regret it, Quinn. The money is yours. Enjoy it.”
Quinn nodded again. “There is just one thing…”
“Anything.”
“I paid off my cab on Constitution Avenue. Could you give me a ride back to the Circle?”
For the first time the other man smiled. With relief.
“No problem,” he said.
Chapter 19
The men in the long leather coatsdecided to discharge their duties during the weekend. There were fewer people about, and their instructions were to be very discreet. They had observers up the street from the Moscow office building who told them by radio when the quarry left the city that Friday evening.
The arrest party waited patiently on the long, narrow road by the curve of the Moskva River, just a mile short of the turning into Peredelkino village where the senior members of the Central Committee, the most prestigious academicians, and the military chiefs have their weekend dachas.
When the car they were awaiting came in sight, the lead vehicle of the arresting party pulled across the road, blocking it completely. The speeding Chaika slowed, then came to a halt. The driver and bodyguard, both men from the CRU and with Spetsnaz training, had no chance. Men with machine pistols came from both sides of the road, and the two soldiers found themselves staring through the glass straight into the muzzles.
The senior plainclothes officer approached the rear passenger door, jerked it open, and looked inside. The man within glanced up with indifference, a touch of testiness, from the dossier he was reading.
“Marshal Kozlov?” the leather-coated KGB man asked.
“Yes.”
“Please dismount. Make no attempt at resistance. Order your soldiers to do the same. You are under arrest.”
The burly marshal muttered an order to his driver and bodyguard and climbed out. His breath frosted in the icy air. He wondered when he would breathe the crisp air of winter again. If he was afraid he gave no sign.
“If you have no authority for this, you will answer to the Politburo, Chekistl.” He used the contemptuous Russian word for a secret policeman.
“We act on the Politburo’s orders,” said the KGB man with satisfaction. He was a full colonel of the Second Chief Directorate. That was when the old marshal knew he had just run out of ammunition for the last time.
Two days later the Saudi security police quietly surrounded a modest private house in Riyadh in the deep darkness before dawn. Not quietly enough. One of them kicked over a tin can and a dog barked. A Yemeni house servant, already awake to brew the first strong dark coffee of the day, looked out and went to inform his master.