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  The Master of the Thriller Is Back!

  “QUINN IS ONE OF FORSYTH’S MOST ENGAGING HEROES ... A COMPLETELY SATISFYING TANGLE.” —The Wall Street Journal

  “FORSYTH IS A SUPERB STORYTELLER AND ENTERTAINER ... THE NEGOTIATOR IS A TYPICALLY SEAMLESS PRESENTATION SET IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, WILL NOT DISAPPOINT HIS MANY FANS.” —Toronto Star

  “THROUGH EVERY ZIGZAG OF THE PLOT, FORSYTH IS DETERMINED TO DELIVER SUSPENSE ... AND HE ADMIRABLY SUCCEEDS. ... THERE IS REAL TENSION AS QUINN BEGINS TO ESTABLISH A TENTATIVE RAPPORT WITH THE KIDNAPPERS—AND IS THWARTED BY TRAITORS WITHIN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AND BY A REMARKABLY INCOMPETENT FBI. ... FORSYTH IS AS VIVID WITH THE SNOWBOUND LANDSCAPE OF NORTHERN VERMONT AS WITH THE SEAMY RED-LIGHT DISTRICT OF ANTWERP.” —Newsweek

  “FREDERICK FORSYTH’S NEW NOVEL IS PROBABLY HIS MOST GRIPPING SINCE THE DAY OF THE JACKAL.” —The Ottawa Sun

  “THIS IS THRILLER-WRITING OF THE HIGHEST QUALITY, A MASTERLY BLEND OF EXCITEMENT AND TENSION WHICH TAKES THE GENRE BY THE SCRUFF OF THE NECK AND PROPELS IT INTO THE NEXT DECADE.” —The Sunday Telegraph

  “QUINN [IS] AN ACTION MAN TO MAKE JAMES BOND SEEM SHY AND FEARFUL. A PROBLEM SOLVER OF ... UNERRING EFFECTIVENESS.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A CLIFFHANGER OF A CONCLUSION ... FORSYTH KEEPS A FEW SURPRISES UP HIS SLEEVE AND WRITES ACTION SCENES MORE CRISPLY, AND WITH LESS GORE, THAN LUDLUM.” —Publishers Weekly

  “FORSYTH IS A MASTER OF HIS CRAFT.” —Winnipeg Free Press

  Bantam Books by Frederick Forsyth

  THE DAY OF THE JACKAL

  THE ODESSA FILE

  THE DOGS OF WAR

  THE DEVIL’S ALTERNATIVE

  NO COMEBACKS

  THE FOURTH PROTOCOL

  THE NEGOTIATOR

  THE DECEIVER

  THE FIST OF GOD

  THE NEGOTIATOR

  A Bantam Book

  Bantam hardcover edition / May 1989

  Bantam paperback edition / April 1990

  Bantam reissue / August 1995

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1989 by Frederick Forsyth.

  Cover art copyright © 1995 by Bantam Books.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-43346.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  ISBN 0-553-28393-6

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Double-day Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  OPM 17 16 15 14

  Contents

  Cast Of Characters

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  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 THATCHER Prime 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 clear
ing 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

  November 1989

  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.

  The key to his mood lay in a report lying on his desk, a report he had commissioned himself from one of the brightest of his own protégés, a young major general whom he had brought to the General Staff with him from Kabul. Kaminsky was an academic, a deep thinker who was also a genius at organization, and the marshal had given him the second-top slot in the logistics field. Like all experienced combat men, Kozlov knew better than most that battles are not won by courage or sacrifice or even clever generals; they are won by having the right gear in the right place at the right time and plenty of it.

  He still recalled with bitterness how, as an eighteen-year-old trooper, he had watched the superbly equipped German blitzkrieg roll through the defenses of the Motherland as the Red Army, bled white by Stalin’s purges of 1938 and equipped with antiques, had tried to stem the tide. His own father had died trying to hold an impossible position at Smolensk, fighting back with bolt-action rifles against Guderian’s growling panzer regiments. Next time, he swore, they would have the right equipment and plenty of it. He had devoted much of his military career to that concept and now he headed the five services of the U.S.S.R.: the Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces, and Air Defense of the Homeland. And they all faced possible future defeat because of a three-hundred-page report lying on his desk.

  He had read it twice, through the night in his spartan apartment off Kutuzovsky Prospekt and again this morning in his office, where he had arrived at 7:00 A.M. and taken the phone off the hook. Now he turned from the window, strode back to his great desk at the head of the T-shaped conference table, and turned to the last few pages of the report again.

  SUMMARY. The point therefore is not that the planet is forecast to run out of oil in the next twenty to thirty years; it is that the Soviet Union definitely will run out of oil in the next seven or eight. The key to this fact lies in the table of Proved Reserves earlier in the report and particularly in the column of figures called the R/P ratio. The Reserves-to-Production ratio is achieved by taking the annual production of an oil-producing nation and dividing that figure into the known reserves of that nation, usually expressed in billions of barrels.

  Figures at the end of 1985—Western figures, I am afraid, because we still have to rely on Western information to find out just what is going on in Siberia, despite my intimate contacts with our oil industry—show that in that year we produced 4.4 billion barrels of crude, giving us fourteen years of extractable reserves—assuming production at the same figure over the period. But that is optimistic, since our production and therefore use-up of reserves has been forced to increase since that time. Today our reserves stand at between seven and eight years.

  The reason for the increase in demand lies in two areas. One is the increase in industrial production, mainly in the area of consumer goods, demanded by the Politburo since the introduction of the new economic reforms; the other lies in the gas-guzzling inefficiency of those industries, not only the traditional ones but even the new ones. Our manufacturing industry overall is hugely energy-inefficient and in many areas the use of obsolete machinery has an add-on effect. For example, a Russian car weighs three times as much as its American equivalent—not, as published, because of our bitter winters, but because our steel plants cannot produce sufficiently fine-gauge sheet metal. Thus more oil-produced electrical energy is needed for the production of the car than in the West, and it uses more gasoline when it hits the road.

  ALTERNATIVES. Nuclear reactors used to produce 11 percent of the U.S.S.R.’s electricity, and our planners had counted on nuclear plants producing 20 percent or more by the year 2000. Until Chernobyl. Unfortunately, 40 percent of our nuclear capacity was generated by plants using the same design as Chernobyl. Since then, most have been shut down for “modifications”—it is extremely unlikely they will in fact reopen—and others scheduled for construction have been decommissioned. As a result, our nuclear production in percentage terms, instead of being in double figures, is down to 7 and dropping.


  We have the largest reserves of natural gas in the world, but the problem is that the gas is mainly located in the extremity of Siberia, and simply to get it out of the ground is not enough. We need, and do not have, a vast infrastructure of pipelines and grids to get it from Siberia to our cities, factories, and generating stations.

  You may recall that in the early seventies, when oil prices after the Yom Kippur war were hiked sky-high, we offered to supply Western Europe with long-term natural gas by pipeline. This would have enabled us to afford the supply grid we needed through the front-end financing the Europeans were ready to put up. But because America would not be benefiting, the U.S.A. killed the initiative by threatening a wide range of commercial sanctions on anyone who cooperated with us, and the project died. Today, since the so-called “thaw,” such a scheme would probably be politically acceptable, but at the moment oil prices in the West are low and they have no need of our gas. By the time the global run-out of oil has hiked the Western price back to a level where they could use our gas, it will be far too late for the U.S.S.R.

  Thus neither of the feasible alternatives will work in practice. Natural gas and nuclear energy will not come to our rescue. The overwhelming majority of our industries and those of our partners who rely on us for energy are indissolubly tied to oil-based fuels and feedstocks.

  THE ALLIES. A brief aside to mention our allies in Central Europe, the states Western propagandists refer to as our “satellites.” Although their joint production—mainly from the small Romanian field at Ploesti—amounts to 168 million barrels a year, this is a drop in the ocean compared to their needs. The rest comes from us, and is one of the ties that holds them in our camp. To relieve the demands on us we have, it is true, sanctioned a few barter deals between them and the Middle East. But if they were ever to achieve total independence from us in oil, and thus dependence on the West, it would surely be a matter of time, and a short time, before East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and even Romania slipped into the grasp of the capitalist camp. Not to mention Cuba.