“Quinn, you’re a bastard. You and your people are lying bastards. You promised no manhunt, said we’d just have to disappear and after a couple of weeks the heat would be off. Some shit. Now I hear Big Paul’s gone missing and Janni’s in a morgue in Holland. No manhunt, hell. We’re being wasted.”
“Hey, ease up, Zack. I’m not one of the ones who told you that. I’m on the other side. Why don’t we start at the beginning? Why did you kidnap Simon Cormack?”
Zack looked at Quinn as if he had just asked if the sun was hot or cold.
“Because we was paid to,” he said.
“You were paid up front? Not for the ransom?”
“No, that was extra. Half a million dollars was the fee. I took two hundred for me, one hundred each for the other three. We was told the ransom was extra-we could get as much as we could, and keep it.”
“All right. Who paid you to do it? I swear I wasn’t one of them. I was called in the day after the snatch, to try and get the kid back. Who set it up?”
“I dunno his name. Never did. He was American, that’s all I know. Short, fat man. Contacted me here. God knows how he found me-must have had contacts. We always met in hotel rooms. I’d come there and he would always be masked. But the money was up front and in cash.”
“What about expenses? Kidnappings come expensive.”
“On top of the fee. In cash. Another hundred thousand dollars I had to spend.”
“Did that include the house you hid in?”
“No, that was provided. We met in London a month before the job. He gave me the keys, told me where it was, told me to get it ready as a bunk-hole.”
“Give me the address.”
Zack gave it to him. Quinn noted it. Nigel Cramer and the forensic scientists from the labs of the Metropolitan Police would later visit the place and take it apart in their search for clues. Records would show it was not rented at all. It had been bought quite legitimately for £200,000 through a firm of British lawyers acting for a Luxembourg-registered company.
The company would prove to be a bearer-share shell corporation represented quite legally by a Luxembourg bank acting as nominee, and who had never met the owner of the shell company. The money used to buy the house had come to Luxembourg in the form of a draft issued by a Swiss bank. The Swiss would declare that the draft had been bought for cash in U.S. dollars at their Geneva branch, but no one could recall the buyer.
The house, moreover, was not north of London at all; it was in Sussex to the south, near East Grinstead. Zack had simply been motoring around the orbital M.25 to make his phone calls from the northern side of the capital.
Cramer’s men would scour the place from top to bottom; despite the cleaning-up efforts by the four mercenaries, there were some overlooked fingerprints, but they belonged to Marchais and Pretorius.
“What about the Volvo?” asked Quinn. “You paid for that?”
“Yeah, and the van, and most of the other gear. Only the Skorpion was given us by the fat man. In London.”
Unknown to Quinn, the Volvo had already been found outside London. It had overstayed its time in a multistory parking lot at London’s Heathrow Airport. The mercenaries, after driving through Buckingham on the morning of the murder, had turned south again and back to London. From Heathrow they had taken the airport shuttle bus to London’s other air terminus at Gatwick, ignored the airport, and boarded the train for Hastings and the coast. Separate taxis had brought them to Newhaven to catch the noon ferry to Dieppe. Once in France they had split up and gone to earth.
The Volvo, examined by the Heathrow Airport police, was seen to have breathing holes punctured in the floor of the trunk, and a lingering smell of almonds. Scotland Yard was called in, the original owner traced. But it had been bought for cash, the change-of-owner documentation had never been completed, and the description of the buyer matched that of the ginger-haired man who had bought the Ford Transit.
“It was the fat man who was giving you all the inside information?” asked Quinn.
“What inside information?” said Sam suddenly.
“How did you know about that?” asked Zack suspiciously. He evidently still suspected that Quinn might be one of his employers-turned-persecutors.
“You were too good,” said Quinn. “You knew to wait until I was in place, then ask for the negotiator in person. I’ve never known that before. You knew when to throw a rage and when to back off. You changed from dollars to diamonds, knowing it would cause a delay when we were ready to exchange.”
Zack nodded. “Yeah, I was briefed before the kidnap on what to do, when and how to do it. While we were hiding, I had to make another series of phone calls. Always while out of the house, always from one phone booth to another, according to an arranged list. It was the fat man; I knew his voice by then. He occasionally made changes-fine-tuning, he called it. I just did what I was told.”
“All right,” said Quinn. “And the fat man told you there’d be no problem getting away afterward. Just a manhunt for a month or so, but with no clues to go on, it would all die down and you could live happily ever after. You really believed that? You really thought you could kidnap and kill the son of an American President and get away? Then why did you kill the kid? You didn’t have to.”
Zack’s facial muscles worked in something like a frenzy. His eyes bulged with anger.
“That’s the point, you shit. We didn’t kill him. We dumped him on the road like we was told. He was alive and well-we hadn’t hurt him at all. And we drove on. First we knew he was dead was when it was made public the next day. I couldn’t believe it. It was a lie. We didn’t do it.”
Outside in the street a car cruised around the corner from the rue de Chalón. One man drove; the other was in back, cradling the rifle. The car came up the street as if looking for someone, paused outside the first bar, advanced almost to the door of Chez Hugo, then backed up to come to rest halfway between the two. The engine was kept idling.
“The kid was killed by a bomb planted in the leather belt he wore around his waist,” said Quinn. “He wasn’t wearing that when he was snatched on Shotover Plain. You gave it to him to wear.”
“I didn’t,” shouted Zack. “I bloody didn’t. It was Orsini.”
“Okay, tell me about Orsini.”
“Corsican, a hit man. Younger than us. When the three of us left to meet you in the warehouse, the kid was wearing what he had always worn. When we got back he was in new clothes. I tore Orsini off a hell of a strip over that. The silly bastard had left the house, against orders, and gone and bought them.”
Quinn recalled the shouting row he had heard above his head when the mercenaries had retired to examine their diamonds. He had thought it was about the gems.
“Why did he do it?” asked Quinn.
“He said the kid had complained he was cold. Said he thought it would do no harm, so he walked into East Grin-stead, went to a camping shop, and bought the gear. I was angry because he speaks no English and would stand out like a sore thumb, the way he looks.”
“The clothes were almost certainly delivered in your absence,” said Quinn. “All right, what does he look like, this Orsini?”
“About thirty-three, a pro, but never been in combat. Very dark chin, black eyes, knife scar down one cheek.”
“Why did you hire him?”
“I didn’t. I contacted Big Paul and Janni ’cos I knew them from the old days and we’d stayed in touch. The Corsican was sicked on me by the fat man. Now I hear Janni’s dead and Big Paul has vanished.”