The Negotiator (novel)

"The Negotiator" is a crime novel by Frederick Forsyth first published in 1989. The story includes a number of threads that are slowly woven together. The central thread concerns a kidnapping and the negotiator's attempts to solve the crime.

ynopsis

Late 1989: Texan oil tycoon Cyrus V. Miller reads a report he had commissioned into dwindling oil supplies in the free world and concludes that the oil fields of the Middle East must be brought under American control. Separately, a high-ranking General in the Soviet Army comes to a similarly depressing conclusion about oil access and plans a covert mission to invade Iran and take over the massive oil supplies there. Meanwhile, the President of the United States, John Cormack, meets with his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev to draw up plans for a $100 billion arms reduction bill - the Nantucket Treaty.

With the help of a disaffected Arabist, Colonel Robert Easterhouse, Miller and his shipping tycoon counterpart Melvyn Scanlon devise a plan to inspire Islamic fundamentalists to massacre the six hundred ruling members of the Saudi royal family during jamboree celebrations; after that, American forces will go into Saudi Arabia to restore the only surviving royal - a Westernized puppet named Prince Abdullah - to power and thus secure the oil for the United States - and for Miller and Scanlon's companies. However, Easterhouse warns that Cormack won't be prepared to jeopardize the Nantucket Treaty by sending troops into the Middle East; he must be ousted from power and replaced by his vice-president, Michael Odell, who opposes the treaty. Miller teams up with three disgruntled arms manufacturers who will be ruined financially by the treaty and hires a recently released from prison, hardcore sex criminal and ex-CIA-officer-turned-mercenary Irving Moss to devise a plan to destroy the President and therefore the treaty.

The plan begins when the President's son, Simon Cormack, is kidnapped while spending a year studying abroad at Oxford University. Cormack puts Odell in charge of the kidnapping case. Odell wants Quinn, the world's most successful hostage negotiator, to handle the case, but he has retired to Spain and is not interested in working for the government. His old CIA friend David Weintraub coaxes him out of retirement, and Green Beret Quinn agrees to come to London if they allow him to handle the negotiations his way. He is joined, against his wishes, in his designated London flat by female FBI agent Sam Somerville and CIA officer Duncan McCrea.

The leader of the kidnappers, Zack, makes contact and demands a $5 million ransom for Simon's safe return. Quinn refuses, telling the police and FBI it is dangerous to agree to a kidnapper's first demand. After two weeks of negotiation, they agree on a $2 million ransom, in diamonds. Meanwhile, a maverick FBI agent does his own investigations and leads a raid on a house where he believes the President's son is held; but it turns out that all he has done is ruin an attempt by the British police to arrest a top international drug smuggler.

A fake news report that the police are closing in spooks the kidnappers; Quinn decides to steal the diamonds, evade the police and FBI and set up the ransom drop himself. He and Simon are released at different points of a deserted road. As Simon runs towards Quinn and the police, he is killed in an explosion.

President Cormack is devastated when he learns of his son's death. The possibility of the president being removed under the terms of the 25th Amendment is brought up. A postmortem shows that Simon was killed by a bomb hidden in the belt given to him by his kidnappers. The bomb was set off by a miniature detonator - minidet - found, and only found, in the Soviet space programme. The Russians are blamed and the Nantucket Treaty is effectively finished.

Quinn is arrested by the police but let go for lack of evidence. He decides to go after the kidnappers himself, and Sam - who has become Quinn's lover - is sent by the FBI to follow him. Quinn thinks one of the kidnappers was a Belgian mercenary, due to his ease with a gun and the smell of his Bastos cigarettes. He identifies him as “Big” Paul Marchais and finds him with a bullet in the head at a fairground in Belgium. He finds his partner, South African mercenary Jan Pretorius in bar in the Netherlands, also with a bullet in his head. Returning to London, Quinn is contacted by Zack who arranges a meeting at a cafe in Paris. He tells Quinn he was paid $500,000 to kidnap Simon - the ransom was a bonus. The man who hired him was a fat American who always stayed in darkness so he couldn't be identified. Zack brought in Marchais and Pretorius and was forced to take on a fourth man, Corsican Dominique Orsini. It was Orsini who gave Simon the belt that killed him. After that, he fled to Europe. Zack hands over the diamonds but is killed in a drive-by shooting which Quinn and Sam only narrowly escapes from.

Quinn sends Sam to his home in Spain while he travels to Corsica. He confronts Orsini but is forced to kill him in self-defense. He flies back to London where he is drugged and kidnapped by a Russian agent, Andrei the Cossack. He is taken to the Russian embassy where KGB chief General Kirpicenko shows Quinn photos of Miller, Scanlon and the three arms manufactures who had been identified after paying an unexpected trip to a Russian air base. It is believed they met with General Koslov, head of Soviet Southern High Command, and he gave them the minidet. Kirpicenko tells Quinn to return to Washington, D.C. to flush out the conspirators.

Sam flies back to Washington and Quinn sends her a letter, knowing that the White House has her phones tapped and her mail on intercept. Quinn by then is in Vermont, after entering the U.S. via Canada with help of forged travel documents, and renting a secluded cabin in the wilderness. In the intercepted letter to Sam, the White House committee read that Quinn knows who Simon's killers were and is holed up some place safe writing it all down. One of the members of the committee, in cahoots with Miller from the start, panics. Quinn soon finds Sam and tells her to be on the lookout. Sam soon tells Quinn that David Weintraub has been in touch, and Quinn agrees to meet him.

The 'David Weintraub' who appears is actually Irving Moss impersonating him. He has brought with him Duncan McCrea, who turns out to be a fellow sadist and a former protege of Moss. Moss also has a score to settle with Quinn, who responded to one of Moss' gruesome torture interrogations in Vietnam by caving in the front of Moss' face with a single punch. It was McCrea who pushed the remote control that set off the bomb that killed Simon. Quinn and Sam are taken at gunpoint back to Quinn's cabin where Moss reads Quinn's report. He tells Quinn that he and Duncan followed Quinn and Sam across Europe, spying on them (for a time) via a bug in Sam's handbag, and killing the mercenaries before Quinn could reach them. Moss, finding out that the report is fake, takes Quinn outside to shoot him, but Andrei, who has been bivouacking in the snow for several days observing Quinn, shoots him before he could execute Quinn. Quinn then takes Moss's gun, returns to the cabin and shoots McCrea as he is about to rape/torture Sam.

Searching the corpses reveals Moss's address book, which eventually yielded a coded telephone number which Quinn identifies (with Sam's help) as belonging to a very senior politician. Mimicking Moss's voice, he demands a bonus payment for all the 'unforeseen trouble' he had to deal with, and arranges a meeting with the man at the 'usual place', which turns out to be near the Vietnam War Memorial. It turns out to Hubert Reed, the Secretary of the Treasury, who publicly supported the Nantucket Treaty, but secretly opposed it as he had invested his fortune in armament companies. He offers Quinn the $5 million check he had brought for Moss, and Quinn hands over the report he has written. But the real report is sent to the President, who then chooses not to resign and tells the world in a special broadcast the next evening what really happened to his son and why. By then, Quinn flies off to Spain with Sam. A newspaper he briefly reads, made redundant earlier by the President's speech, mentions a $5 million anonymous donation to the Vietnam Veterans Paraplegic Hospital, and the “accidental” death of Treasury Secretary Reed,by drowning.