Free The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth Page B

billions off the defense appropriations. Both sides of the Iron Curtain. There’s talk of forty percent—bilateral, of course.”
    “Are there many more who think like you?” asked Miller.
    Cobb was too drunk to follow the line of the questioning. “Just about the whole defense industry,” he snarled. “We’re looking at wholesale closings and total personal and corporate losses here.”
    “Mmmm. It’s too bad Michael Odell is not our President,” mused Miller. The man from Zodiac, Inc., gave a harsh laugh.
    “Oh, what a dream. Yes, he’ll be opposed to cutbacks. But that won’t help us much. He’ll stay Veep and Cormack will stay President.”
    “Will he now?” asked Miller quietly.
     
    In the last week of the month, Cobb, Moir, and Salkind met Scanlon and Miller for a private dinner at Miller’s invitation in a suite of cloistered luxury at the Remington Hotel in Houston. Over brandy and coffee Miller guided their thoughts to the notion of John Cormack’s continued occupation of the Oval Office.
    “He has to go,” Miller intoned. The others nodded agreement.
    “I’ll have no truck with assassination,” said Salkind hurriedly. “In any case, remember Kennedy. The effect of his death was to push through Congress every piece of civil rights legislation he couldn’t get through himself. Totally counterproductive, if that was the point of the hit. And it was Johnson, of all people, who got it all into law.”
    “I agree,” said Miller. “That course of action is inconceivable. But there must be a way of forcing his resignation.”
    “Name one,” challenged Moir. “How the hell can anyone bring that about? The man’s fireproof. There are no scandals in back of him. The caucus assured themselves of that before they asked him to step in.”
    “There must be something,” said Miller. “Some Achilles’ heel. We have the determination; we have the contacts; we have the financing. We need a planner.”
    “What about your man, the colonel?” asked Scanlon.
    Miller shook his head. “He would still regard any U.S. President as his Commander in Chief. No, another man ... out there somewhere ...”
    What he was thinking of, and what he intended to hunt down, was a renegade, subtle, ruthless, intelligent, and loyal only to money.

Chapter 3
    March 1991
    Thirty miles west of Oklahoma City lies the federal penitentiary called El Reno, more officially known as a “federal corrections institution.” Less formally, it is one of the toughest prisons in America—in criminal slang, a hard pen. At dawn on a chill morning in the middle of March a small door opened in the frame of its forbidding main gate and a man emerged.
    He was of medium height, overweight, prison-pale, broke, and very bitter. He stared about him, saw little (there was little to see), turned toward the city, and began to walk. Above his head, unseen eyes in the guard towers watched him with small interest, then looked away. Other eyes from a parked car watched him far more intently. The stretch limousine was parked a discreet distance from the main gate, far enough for its license plate to be out of vision. The man staring through the rear window of the car put down his binoculars and muttered, “He’s heading this way.”
    Ten minutes later the fat man passed the car, glanced at it, and walked on. But he was a pro, and already his alarm antennae were activated. He was a hundred yards beyond the car when its engine purred into life and it drew up beside him. A young man got out, clean-cut, athletic, pleasant-looking.
    “Mr. Moss?”
    “Who wants to know?”
    “My employer, sir. He wishes to offer you an interview.”
    “No name, I suppose,” said the fat man.
    The other smiled. “Not yet. But we do have a warm car, a private airplane, and mean you no harm. Let’s face it, Mr. Moss, do you have any place else to go?”
    Moss thought. The car and the man did not smell of the Company—the CIA—or of the Bureau—the FBI—his sworn