Free The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth

hillsides around the villages. Which was why José Francisco, called Pablo, was lurching happily along the track past the house of the tall foreigner, feeling no pain save a slight bursting of the bladder. Finding he could go no farther without relief, he turned to the rubble wall of the yard in which was parked the battered SEAT Terra mini-jeep, unzipped his fly, and devoted himself to enjoyment of man’s second greatest single pleasure.
    Above his head the tall man slept, and again he dreamed the awful dream that had brought him to these parts. He was drenched in sweat as he went through it all for the hundredth time. Still asleep, he opened his mouth and screamed, “ No ... o ... o ... o !”
    Down below, Pablo leaped a foot clear in the air and fell back in the road, soaking his Sunday-best trousers. Then he was up and running, his urine sloshing down his legs, his zipper still undone, his organ receiving an unaccustomed breath of fresh air. If the big, rangy foreigner was going to get violent, then he, José Francisco Echevarría, by the grace of God, was not going to stick around. He was polite, all right, and spoke good Spanish, but there was something strange about that man.
     
    In the middle of the following January a young freshman came cycling down St. Giles Street in the ancient British city of Oxford, bent upon meeting his new tutor and enjoying his first full day at Balliol College. He wore thick corduroy trousers and a down parka against the cold, but over it he had insisted on wearing the black academic gown of an undergraduate at Oxford University. It flapped in the wind. Later he would learn that most undergraduates did not wear them unless eating in hall, but as a newcomer he was very proud of it. He would have preferred to live in college, but his family had rented him a large house just off the Woodstock Road. He passed the Martyrs’ Memorial and entered Magdalen Street.
    Behind him, unperceived, a plain sedan came to a halt. There were three men in it, two in the front and one in the back. The third man leaned forward.
    “Magdalen Street is restricted access. Not for cars. You’ll have to continue on foot.”
    The man in the front passenger seat swore softly and slipped to the pavement. At a fast walk he glided through the crowd, intent on the cycling figure ahead of him. Directed by the man in the back, the car swerved right into Beaumont Street, then left into Gloucester Street and another left down George Street. It stopped, having reached the bottom end of Magdalen, just as the cyclist emerged. The freshman dismounted a few yards into Broad Street, across the junction, so the car did not move. The third man came out of Magdalen, flushed from the icy wind, glanced around, spotted the car, and rejoined them.
    “Damn city,” he remarked. “All one-way streets and no-entry areas.”
    The man in the back chuckled.
    “That’s why the students use bicycles. Maybe we should.”
    “Just keep watching,” said the driver without humor. The man beside him fell silent and adjusted the gun under his left arm.
    The student had dismounted and was staring down at a cross made of cobblestones in the middle of Broad Street. He had learned from his guidebook that on this spot in 1555 two bishops, Latimer and Ridley, had been burned alive on the orders of Catholic Queen Mary. As the flames took hold, Bishop Latimer called across to his fellow martyr: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.”
    He meant the candle of the Protestant faith, but what Bishop Ridley replied is not recorded, since he was burning brightly at the time. A year later, on the same spot in 1556, Archbishop Cranmer followed them to death. The flames from the pyre had scorched the door of Balliol College a few yards away. Later that door was taken down and rehung at the entrance to the Inner Quadrangle, where the scorch marks