The Sierra mounted the curb as Sam tried to bring it back onto the road, and she would have made it but for the vertical stakes in a line beyond the curb. One of them mashed her right front wheel and she went out of control. The Sierra careered down the bank, almost rolled, recovered, and ended up axle-deep in the soft wet sand of the moor.

Quinn straightened his seat and looked across at her. Both were shaken but unhurt. They climbed out. Above them, cars and trucks roared on south to Arnhem. The ground all around was flat; they were in easy view of the road.

“The piece,” said Quinn.

“The what?”

“The Smith & Wesson. Give it to me.”

He wrapped the pistol and its ammunition in one of her silk scarves from the vanity case and buried it under a bush ten yards from the car, mentally marking the place in the sand where it lay. Two minutes later a red-and-white Range Rover of the Rijkspolitie, the Highway Patrol, stood above them on the hard shoulder.

The officers were concerned, relieved to see they were unhurt, and asked for their papers. Thirty minutes later, with their luggage, they were deposited in the rear courtyard of the gray concrete-slab police headquarters in Arnhem’s Beek Straat. A sergeant showed them up to an interview room, where he took copious particulars. It was past lunch when he had finished.

The car-rental agency representative had not had a busy day-tourists tend to become thin on the ground in mid-November-and was quite pleased to take a call in his Heuvelink Boulevard office from an American lady inquiring about an agency car. His joy faded somewhat when he learned she had just totaled one of his company’s Sierras on the A.50 at Terlet, but he recalled his firm’s admonition to try harder, and he did.

He came around to the police station and conversed with the sergeant. Neither Quinn nor Sam could understand a word. Fortunately, both Dutchmen spoke good English.

“The police recovery team will bring the Sierra in from where it is… parked,” he said. “I will have it collected from here and taken to our company workshops. You are fully insured, according to your papers. It is a Dutch-hired car?”

“No, Ostende, Belgium,” said Sam. “We were touring.”

“Ah,” said the man. He thought: paperwork, a lot of paperwork. “You wish to rent another car?”

“Yes, we would,” said Sam.

“I can let you have a nice Opel Ascona, but in the morning. It is being serviced right now. You have a hotel?”

They did not, but the helpful police sergeant made a call and they had a double room at the Rijn Hotel. The skies had clouded over again; the rain began to come down. The agency man drove them a mile up the Rijnkade embankment to the hotel, dropped them off, and promised to have the Opel at the front door at eight next day.

The hotel was two-thirds empty and they had a large double room on the front, overlooking the river. The short afternoon was closing in; the rain lashed the windows. The great gray mass of the Rhine flowed past toward the sea. Quinn took an upright armchair by the window bay and gazed out.

“I should call Kevin Brown,” said Sam. “Tell him what we’ve found.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Quinn.

“He’ll be mad.”

“Well, you can tell him we found one of the kidnappers and left him on top of a Ferris wheel with someone else’s bullet in his skull. You can tell him you’ve been carrying an illegal gun through Belgium, Germany, and Holland. You want to say all that on an open line?”

“Yeah, okay. So I should write up some notes.”

“You do that,” said Quinn.

She raided the mini-bar, found a half-bottle of red wine, and brought him a glass. Then she sat at the desk and began to write on hotel notepaper.

Three miles upstream of the hotel, dim in the deepening dusk, Quinn could make out the great black girders of the old Arnhem Bridge, the “bridge too far,” where in September 1944, Colonel John Frost and a small handful of British paratroopers had fought and died for four days, trying to hold off SS Panzers with bolt-action rifles and Sten guns while Thirty Corps vainly fought up from the south to relieve them on the northern end of the bridge. Quinn raised his glass toward the steel joists that reared into the rainy sky.

Sam caught the gesture and walked over to the window. She looked down to the embankment.

“See someone you know?” she asked.

“No,” said Quinn. “They have passed by.”

She craned to look up the street.

“Don’t see anyone.”

“A long time ago.”

She frowned, puzzled. “You’re a very enigmatic man, Mr. Quinn. What is it you can see that I can’t?”

“Not a lot,” said Quinn, rising. “And none of it very hopeful. Let’s go see what the dining room has to offer.”

The Ascona was there promptly at eight, along with the friendly sergeant and two motorcycle police outriders.

“Where are you heading, Mr. Quinn?” asked the sergeant.

“Vlissingen, Flushing,” said Quinn, to Sam’s surprise. “To catch the ferry.”

“Fine,” said the sergeant. “Have a good trip. My colleagues will guide you to the motorway southwest.”

At the junction to the motorway the outriders pulled over and watched the Opel out of sight. Quinn had that Dortmund feeling again.

General Zvi ben Shaul sat behind his desk and looked up from the report at the two men in front of him. One was the head of the Mossad department covering Saudi Arabia and the entire peninsula from the Iraqi border in the north to the shores of South Yemen. It was a territorial fiefdom. The other man’s specialty knew no borders and was ‘in its way even more important, especially for the security of Israel. He covered all Palestinians, wherever they might be. It was he who had written the report on the Director’s desk.

Some of those Palestinians would dearly have loved to know the building where the meeting was taking place. Like many of the curious, including a number of foreign governments, the Palestinians still imagined that the Mossad’s headquarters remained in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. But since 1988 their new home had been a large modern building right in the center of Tel Aviv, around a corner from Rehov Shlomo Ha’melekh (King Solomon Street) and close to the building occupied by AMAN, the military intelligence service.

“Can you get any more?” the general asked David Gur Arieh, the Palestinian expert. The man grinned and shrugged.

“Always you want more, Zvi. My source is a low-level operative, a technician in the motor vehicle workshops for the Saudi Army. That’s what he’s been told. The Army’s to be marooned in the desert for three days during next April.”

“It smells of a coup,” said the man who ran the Saudi department. “We should pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them?”

“If someone toppled King Fahd and took over, whom would it likely be?” asked the Director. The Saudi expert shrugged.

“Another Prince,” he said. “Not one of the brothers. More likely the younger generation. They’re greedy. However many billions they skim through the Oil Quota Commission, they want more. No, it may be they want it all. And of course the younger men tend to be more… modern, more Westernized. It could be for the better. It is time the old men went.”

It was not the thought of a younger man ruling in Riyadh that intrigued ben Shaul. It was what the Palestinian technician who had given the orders to Gur Arieh’s source had let slip. Next year, he had gloated, we Palestinians will have the right to become naturalized citizens here.

If that was true, if that was what the unnamed conspirators had in mind, the perspectives were astounding. Such an offer by a new Saudi government would suck a million homeless and landless Palestinians out of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon to a new life far in the South. With the Palestinian sore cauterized, Israel, with her energy and technology, could enter into a relationship with her neighbors that could be beneficial and profitable. It had been the dream of the founders, back to Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Ben Shaul had been taught the dream as a boy, never thought to see it happen. But…