The Negotiator

Chapter 8

Quinn and Sam spent almost three hours in each other’s arms, alternately making love and talking in low whispers. She did most of the talking, of herself and her career in the Bureau. She also warned Quinn of the abrasive Kevin Brown, who had chosen her for this mission and had established himself in London with a team of eight to “keep an eye on things.”

She had fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep, the first time in a fortnight she had slept so well, when Quinn nudged her awake.

“It’s only a three-hour tape,” he whispered. “It’s going to run out in fifteen minutes.”

She kissed him again, slipped into her nightgown, and tiptoed back to her room. Quinn eased the armchair away from the wall, grunted a few times for the benefit of the wall microphone, switched off the tape recorder, rolled onto the bed, and genuinely went to sleep. The sounds recorded in Grosvenor Square were of a sleeping man shifting position, rolling over, and resuming his slumbers. The engineer and two FBI men glanced at the console, then back to their cards.

Zack called at half past nine. He seemed more brusque and hostile than on the previous day-a man whose nerves were beginning to fray, a man on whom the pressure was mounting and who had decided to exert some pressure of his own.

“All right, you bastard, now listen. No more sweet talk. I’ve had enough. I’ll settle for your bloody two million dollars but that’s the lot. You ask for one more thing and I’ll send you a couple of fingers. I’ll take a hammer and chisel to the little prick’s right hand-see if Washington likes you after that.”

“Zack, cool it,” pleaded Quinn earnestly. “You’ve got it. You win. Last night I told them over there to screw it up to two million dollars or I’m out. Jesus, you think you’re tired? I don’t even sleep at all, in case you call.”

Zack seemed pacified by the thought that there was someone with nerves more ragged than his own.

“One more thing,” he growled. “Not money. Not in cash. You bastards would try to bug the suitcase. Diamonds. This is how…”

He talked for ten more seconds, then hung up. Quinn took no notes. He did not need to. It was all on tape. The call had been traced to one of a bank of three public booths in Saffron Waiden, a market town in western Essex, just off the M.11 motorway from London to Cambridge. It took three minutes for a plainclothes policeman to wander past the booths, but all were empty. The caller had been swallowed in the crowds.

At the time, Andy Laing was having lunch in the executive canteen of the Jiddah branch of the SAIB. His companion was his friend and colleague the Pakistani operations manager, Mr. Amin.

“I am being very puzzled, my friend,” said the young Pakistani. “What is going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Laing. “You tell me.”

“You know the daily mail bag from here to London? I had an urgent letter for London, with some documents included. I need a quick reply. When will I get it? I ask myself. Why has it not come? I asked the mailroom why there is no reply. They tell me something very strange.”

Laing put down his knife and fork.

“What is that, old pal?”

“They tell me all is delayed. All packages from here for London are being diverted to the Riyadh office for a day before they go forward.”

Laing lost his appetite. There was a feeling in the pit of his stomach and it was not hunger.

“How long did they say this has been going on?”

“Since one week, I do believe.”

Laing left the canteen for his office. There was a message on his desk from the branch manager, Mr. Al-Haroun. Mr. Pyle would like to see him in Riyadh without delay.

He made the mid-afternoon Saudia commuter flight. On the journey he could have kicked himself. Hindsight is all very well, but if only he had sent his London package by regular mail… He had addressed it to the chief accountant personally, and a letter so addressed, in his distinctive handwriting, would stand out a mile when the letters were spread across Steve Pyle’s desk. He was shown into Steve Pyle’s office just after the bank closed its doors for public business.

Nigel Cramer came around to see Quinn during the lunch hour, London time.

“You’ve closed your exchange at two million dollars,” he said. Quinn nodded.

“My congratulations,” said Cramer. “Thirteen days is fast for this sort of thing. By the way, my tame shrink has listened to this morning’s call. He takes the view the man is serious, under a lot of pressure to get out.”

“He’ll have to take a few more days,” said Quinn. “We all will. You heard him ask for diamonds instead of cash. They’ll take time to put together. Any leads on their hideout?”

Cramer shook his head.

“I’m afraid not. Every last conceivable property rental has been checked out. Either they’re not in residential quarters at all, or they’ve bought the damn thing. Or borrowed it.”

“No chance of checking outright purchases?” asked Quinn.

“I’m afraid not. The volume of properties being bought and sold in southeast England is enormous. There are thousands and thousands owned by foreigners, foreign corporations, or companies whose nominees-lawyers, banks, et cetera-acted for them in the sale. Like this place, for example.”

He got in a dig at Lou Collins and the CIA, who were listening.

“By the way, I talked with one of our men in the Hatton Garden district. He spoke to a contact in diamond trading. Whoever he is, your man knows his diamonds. Or one of his colleagues does. What he asked for is easily purchasable and easily disposable. And light. About a kilogram, perhaps a bit more. Have you thought about the exchange?”

“Of course,” said Quinn. “I’d like to handle it myself. But I want no concealed bugs-they’ll probably think of that. I don’t think they’ll bring Simon to the rendezvous, so he could still die if there were any tricks.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Quinn. We’d obviously like to try and grab them, but I take your point. There’ll be no tricks from us, no heroics.”

“Thank you,” said Quinn. He shook hands with the Scotland Yard man, who left to report progress to the one o’clock COBRA committee.

Kevin Brown had spent the morning secluded in his office beneath the embassy. When the stores opened he had sent out two of his men to buy him a list of items he needed: a very large-scale map of the area north of London, extending fifty miles in all directions; a matching sheet of clear plastic; map pins; wax pencils in different colors. He assembled his team of detectives and spread the plastic across the map.

“Okay, let’s just look at these phone booths the rat has been using. Chuck, read them out one by one.”

Chuck Moxon studied his list. “First call, Hitchin, county of Hertfordshire.”

“Okay, we have Hitchin right… here.” A pin was stuck in Hitchin.

Zack had made eight calls in thirteen days; the ninth was about to come in. One by one, pins were stuck in the site of each call. Just before ten o’clock one of the two FBI men in the listening post stuck his head around the door.

“He just called again. Threatening to cut off Simon’s fingers with a chisel.”

“Hot damn,” swore Brown. “That fool Quinn’s going to blow it away. I knew he would. Where’d the call come from?”

“Place called Saffron Waiden,”said the young man.

When the nine pins were in place, Brown joined up the perimeter of the area they bounded. It was a jagged shape, involving pieces of five counties. Then he took a ruler and joined the extremities to their opposites on the other side of the pattern. In the approximate center a web of crisscross lines appeared. To the southeast the extremity was Great Dunmow, Essex; to the north was St. Neots, Cambridgeshire; and to the west, Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire.

“The densest area of the crossed lines lies right here,” Brown pointed out with his fingertip, “just east of Biggleswade, county of Bedfordshire. No calls from that area at all. Why?”

“Too close to base?” ventured one of the men.

“Could be, boy, could be. Look, I want you to take these two country towns, Biggleswade and Sandy, the two closest to the geographic center of the web. Get up there and visit all the realtors who have offices in those towns. Make like you are prospective clients, looking to rent a secluded house to write a book or something. Listen to what they say-maybe some place that’ll be free soon, maybe some place they could have let you have three months back but it went to someone else. You got it?”

They all nodded.

“Should we let Mr. Seymour know we’re on our way?” asked Moxon. “I mean, maybe Scotland Yard has been in that area.”

“You leave Mr. Seymour to me,” said Brown reassuringly. “We get along just fine. And the bobbies may have been up there and they may just have overlooked something. Maybe so, maybe not. Let’s just check it out.”

Steve Pyle greeted Laing with an attempt at his usual geniality.

“I… ah… called you up here, Andy, because I just got a request from London that you go visit with them. Seems this could be the start of a career move for you.”

“Sure,” said Laing. “Would this request from London have anything to do with the package and report I sent them, which never arrived because it was intercepted right here in this office?”

Pyle dropped all semblance of bonhomie.

“All right. You’re smart, maybe too smart. But you’ve been dabbling in things that don’t concern you. I tried to warn you off, but no, you had to go playing private detective. Okay, now I’ll level with you. I’m transferring you back to London. You don’t fit in down here, Laing. I’m not happy with your work. You’re going back. That’s it. You have seven days to put your desk in order. Your ticket’s been booked. Seven days from now.”

Had he been older, more mature, Andy Laing would probably have played his cards more coolly. But he was angry that a man of Pyle’s eminence in the bank could be ripping off client money for his own enrichment. And he had the naïveté of the young and eager, the conviction that Right would triumph. He turned at the door.

“Seven days? Time enough for you to fix things with London? No way. I’m going back all right, but I’m going back tomorrow.”

He was in time for the last flight of the night back to Jiddah. When he got there he went straight to the bank. He kept his passport in the top drawer of his desk, along with any other valuable papers-burglaries of European-owned apartments in Jiddah are not unheard-of, and the bank was safer. At least, it was supposed to be. The passport was missing.

That night there was a stand-up row among the four kidnappers.

“Keep your bloody voices down,” hissed Zack on several occasions. “Baissez les voix, merde.”

He knew his men were running to the limit of their patience. It was always a risk, using this kind of human material. After the screaming adrenaline of the snatch outside Oxford, they had been penned up day and night in a single house, drinking beer from cans he had bought at a supermarket, keeping out of sight all the time, hearing callers at the door ring and ring before finally going away without an answer. The nervous strain had been bad, and these were not men with the mental resources to immerse themselves in books or thought. The Corsican listened to his French-language pop programs all day, interspersed with news flashes. The South African whistled tunelessly for hours on end, and always the same tune, “Marie Marais.” The Belgian watched the television, of which he could not understand a word. He liked the cartoons best.

The argument was over Zack’s decision to close with the negotiator called Quinn and have done with the whole thing at $2 million ransom.

The Corsican objected, and because they both spoke French, the Belgian tended to agree with him. The South African was fed up, wanted to get home, and agreed with Zack. The main argument from the Corsican was that they could hold out forever. Zack knew this was not true, but he was aware he could have a very dangerous situation on his hands if he told them they were beginning to show cracks, and could not take more than another six days of numbing boredom and inactivity.

So he appeased them, placated them, told them they had done brilliantly and would all be very rich men in just a few more days. The thought of all that money calmed them down and they subsided. Zack was relieved it had ended without blows. Unlike the three men in the house, his problem was not boredom but stress. Every time he drove the big Volvo along the crowded motorways he knew that one random police check, one brush with another car, one moment of inattention, would have a blue-capped officer leaning in his window, wondering why he wore a wig and false moustache. His disguise would pass in a crowded street, but not at six inches’ range.

Every time he went into one of those phone booths, he had a mental image of something going wrong, of a faster-than-usual trace, of a plainclothes policeman being only a few yards away, taking the alarm on his personal radio and walking up to the phone booth. Zack carried a gun, and knew he would use it to get away. If he did, he would have to abandon the Volvo, always parked a few hundred yards away, and escape on foot. Some idiot member of the public might even try to tackle him. It was getting to the point that whenever he saw a policeman sauntering along the crowded streets he chose for his phone calls, his stomach turned over.

“Go give the kid his supper,” he told the South African.

Simon Cormack had been fifteen days in his underground cell, and thirteen since he had answered the question about Aunt Emily and known that his father was trying to get him out. He realized now what solitary confinement must be like and wondered how people could survive months, even years of it. At least in the prisons he had heard of, inmates in solitary had writing materials, books, sometimes television, something to occupy the mind. He had nothing. But he was a tough boy and he determined not to go to pieces.

He exercised regularly, forcing himself to overcome the prisoner’s lethargy, doing his push-ups ten times a day, jogging in place a dozen times. He still wore his same running shoes, socks, shorts, and T-shirt, and was aware he must smell awful. He used the toilet bucket carefully, so as not to soil the floor, and was grateful it was removed every second day.

The food was boring, mainly fried or cold, but it was enough. He had no razor, of course, so he sported a straggly beard and moustache. His hair had grown; he tried to comb it with his fingers. He had asked for, and eventually been given, a plastic bucket of cold water and a sponge. He never realized how grateful a man could be for the chance to wash. He had stripped naked, running his shorts halfway up the ankle-chain to keep them dry, and sponged himself from head to foot, scouring his skin with the sponge to try to keep clean. After it he felt transformed. But he tried no escape maneuvers. The chain was impossible to break; the door solid and bolted from the outside.

Between exercises he tried to keep his mind occupied in a number of ways: reciting every poem he could remember, pretending to dictate his autobiography to an invisible stenographer so that he could go over everything that had ever happened to him in his twenty-one years. And he thought of home, of New Haven and Nantucket and Yale and the White House. He thought of his mom and dad and how they were; he hoped they weren’t worried about him, but expected they were. If only he could tell them he was all right, in good shape, considering…

There were three loud knocks on the cellar door. He reached for his black hood and put it on. Supper time-or was it breakfast…?

That same evening, but after Simon Cormack had fallen asleep, and Sam Somerville lay in Quinn’s arms while the tape recorder breathed into the wall outlet, five time zones farther west, the White House committee met in the late evening. Apart from the usual Cabinet members and department heads, Philip Kelly of the FBI and David Weintraub of the CIA also attended.

They heard the tapes of Zack on the phone to Quinn, the rasping tones of the British criminal and the reassuring drawl of the American trying to appease him, as they had done almost every day for two weeks.

When Zack had finished, Hubert Reed was pale with shock.

“My God,” he said, “cold chisel and hammer. The man’s an animal.”

“We know that,” said Odell. “But at least now we have an agreed ransom. Two million dollars. In diamonds. Any objections?”

“Of course not,” said Jim Donaldson. “This country will pay that easily, for the President’s son. I’m just surprised it’s taken two weeks.”

“Actually, that’s pretty fast, or so I’m told,” said Bill Walters. Don Edmonds of the FBI nodded his agreement.

“We want to rehear the rest, the tapes from the apartment?” asked the Vice President.

No one needed to.

“Mr. Edmonds, what about what Mr. Cramer, the Scotland Yard man, told Quinn? Any comments from your people?”

Edmonds cast a sidelong glance at Philip Kelly, but answered for the Bureau.

“Our people at Quantico agree with their British colleagues,” he said. “This Zack is at the end of his tether, wants to close it down, make an exchange. The strain in his voice is coming through, hence the threats most probably. They also agree with the analysts over there on another thing. Which is that Quinn appears to have established some kind of wary empathy with this animal Zack. It seems his efforts-which are what has taken two weeks”-he glanced at Jim Donaldson as he spoke-“to portray himself as the guy trying to help Zack, and all the rest of us here and there as the bad guys making problems, has worked. Zack has an element of trust for Quinn, but for no one else. That may prove crucial at the safe-handover process. At least, that’s what the voice analysts and behavioral psychologists are saying.”

“Lord, what a job, having to sweet-talk scum like that,” observed Jim Donaldson with distaste.

David Weintraub, who had been staring at the ceiling, cast an eye toward the Secretary of State. To keep these amateurs in their high office, he might have said but did not, he and his people sometimes had to deal with creatures just as nasty as Zack.

“Okay, gentlemen,” said Odell, “we go with the deal. At last the ball is back with us in America, so let’s make it fast. Personally I think this Quinn has done a pretty good job. If he can get the boy back safe and sound, we owe him. Now, diamonds. Where do we get them?”

“ New York,” said Weintraub, “diamond center of the country.”

“Morton, you’re from New York. Have you got any discreet contacts you could tap into fast?” Odell asked the ex-banker.

“Certainly,” Stannard said. “When I was with Rockman-Queens we had a number of clients who were high in the diamond trade. Very discreet-they have to be. You want me to handle it? How about the money?”

“The President has insisted he will personally pay the ransom, won’t have it any other way,” said Odell. “But I don’t see why he should be troubled by these details. Hubert, could the Treasury make a personal loan until the President can liquidate trust funds?”

“No problem,” said Hubert Reed. “You’ll have your money, Morton.”

The committee rose. Odell had to see the President over at the Executive Mansion.

“Fast as you can, Morton,” he said. “We want to be talking here in two to three days. Tops.”

In fact, it would take another seven.

It was not until morning that Andy Laing could secure an interview with Mr. Al-Haroun, the branch manager. But he did not waste the night.

Mr. Al-Haroun, when confronted, was as gently apologetic as only a well-bred Arab can be when confronted by an angry Occidental. The matter gave him enormous regret, no doubt an unhappy situation whose solution lay in the lap of the all-merciful Allah; nothing would give him greater pleasure than to return to Mr. Laing his passport, which he had taken into nightly safekeeping only at the specific request of Mr. Pyle. He went to his safe and, with slim brown fingers, withdrew the blue United States passport and handed it back.

Laing was mollified, thanked him with the more formal and gracious “Ashkurak,” and withdrew. Only when he had returned to his own office did it occur to him to flick through the passport’s pages.

In Saudi Arabia, foreigners not only need an entry visa, but an exit visa as well. His own, formerly valid without limit of time, had been canceled. The stamp of the Jiddah Immigration Control office was perfectly genuine. No doubt, he mused bitterly, Mr. Al-Haroun had a friend in that bureau. It was, after all, the local way of doing things.

Aware there was no going back, Andy Laing determined to scrap it out. He recalled something the Operations manager had once told him.

“Amin, my friend, did you not mention once that you had a relative in the Immigration Service here?” he asked him. Amin saw no trap in the question.

“Yes, indeed. A cousin.”

“In which office is he based?”

“Ah, not here, my friend. He is in Dhahran.”

Dhahran was not near Jiddah, on the Red Sea, but right across the country in the extreme east, on the Persian Gulf. In the late morning Andy Laing made a phone call to Mr. Zulfiqar Amin at his desk in Dhahran.

“This is Mr. Steven Pyle, General Manager of the Saudi Arabian Investment Bank,” he said. “I have one of my officers conducting business in Dhahran at this moment. He will need to fly on urgent matters to Bahrein tonight. Unfortunately he tells me his exit visa is time-expired. You know how long these things can take through normal channels… I was wondering, in view of your cousin being in such high esteem with us… You will find Mr. Laing a most generous man…”

Using the lunch hour, Andy Laing returned to his apartment, packed his bags, and caught the 3:00 P.M. Saudia airline flight to Dhahran. Mr. Zulfiqar Amin was expecting him. The reissue of an exit visa took two hours and a thousand riyals.

Mr. Al-Haroun noticed the absence of the Credit and Marketing Manager around the time he took off for Dhahran. He checked the Jiddah airport, but only the international departures office. No trace of a Mr. Laing. Puzzled, he called Riyadh. Pyle asked if a block could be put on Laing’s boarding any flight at all, even internal.

“I’m afraid, dear colleague, that cannot be arranged,” said Mr. Al-Haroun, who hated to disappoint. “But I can ask my friend if he has left by any internal flight.”

Laing was traced into Dhahran just at the moment he crossed the frontier on the causeway to the neighboring Emirate of Bahrein. From there he easily caught a British Airways flight on a stopover from Mauritius to London.

Unaware that Laing had obtained a new exit visa, Pyle waited till the following morning, then asked his bank staff in the Dhahran office to check around the city and find out what Laing was doing there. It took them three days and they came up with nothing.

Three days after the Secretary of Defense was charged by the Washington committee with obtaining the package of diamonds demanded by Zack, he reported back that the task was taking longer than foreseen. The money had been made available; that was not the problem.

“Look,” he told his colleagues, “I know nothing about diamonds. But my contacts in the trade-I am using three, all very discreet and understanding men-tell me the number of stones involved is very substantial.

“This kidnapper has asked for uncut, rough melees-mixtures-of one fifth of a carat to half a carat, and of medium quality. Such stones, I am told, are worth between two hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars a carat. To be on the safe side they are calculating the base price of two-fifty. We are talking here about some eight thousand carats.”

“And what’s the problem?” asked Odell.

“Time,” said Morton Stannard. “At a fifth of a carat per stone, that would be forty thousand stones. At half a carat, sixteen thousand stones. With a mixture of different weights, let’s say twenty-five thousand stones. It’s a lot to put together this fast. Three men are buying furiously, and trying not to make waves.”

“What’s the bottom line?” asked Brad Johnson. “When can they be ready for shipment?”

“Another day, maybe two,” said the Defense Secretary.

“Stay on top of it, Morton,” Odell ordered. “We have the deal. We can’t keep this boy and his father waiting much longer.”

“The moment they’re in a bag, weighed and authenticated, you’ll have them,” said Stannard.

The following morning Kevin Brown took a private call in the embassy from one of his men.

“We may have hit pay dirt, Chief,” said the agent tersely.

“No more on an open line, boy. Get your ass in here fast. Tell me to my face.”

The agent was in London by noon. What he had to say was more than interesting.

East of the towns of Biggleswade and Sandy, both of which lie on the A.1 highway from London to the north, the county of Bedfordshire butts up against Cambridgeshire. The area is intersected only by minor B-class roads and country lanes, contains no large towns, and is largely given over to agriculture. The county border area contains only a few villages, with old English names like Potton, Tadlow, Wrestlingworth, and Gamlingay.

Between two of these villages, off the beaten path, lay an old farmhouse, partly ruined by fire but with one wing still furnished and habitable, in a shallow valley and approached by a single track.

Two months earlier, the agent had discovered, the place had been rented by a small group of supposed “rustic freaks,” who claimed they wanted to return to nature, live simply, and create artifacts in pottery and basket-weaving.

“The thing is,” said the agent, “they had the money for the rental in cash. They don’t seem to sell much pottery, but they can run two off-road Jeeps, which are parked undercover in the barns. And they mix with no one.”

“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brown.

“Green Meadow Farm.”

“Okay, we have enough time if we don’t hang around. Let’s go take a look at Green Meadow Farm.”

There were two hours of daylight left when Kevin Brown and the agent parked their car at the entrance to a farm lane and made the rest on foot. Guided by the agent, the pair approached with extreme caution, using the trees for cover, until they emerged from the tree line above the valley. From there they crawled the last ten yards to the edge of a rise and looked down into the valley. The farmhouse lay below them, its fire-gutted wing black in the autumn afternoon, a low gleam as from an oil lamp coming from one window of the other wing.

As they watched, a burly man came out of the farmhouse and crossed to one of the three barns. He spent ten minutes there, then returned to the house. Brown scanned the complex of farm buildings with powerful binoculars. Down the track to their left came a powerful Japanese off-road four-wheel-drive. It parked in front of the farm and a man climbed out. He gazed carefully around him, scanning the rim of the valley for movement. There was none.

“Damn,” said Brown. “Ginger hair, eyeglasses.”

The driver went into the farmhouse and emerged a few seconds later with the burly man. This time they had a big Rottweiler with them. The pair went to the same barn, spent ten minutes, and returned. The burly man drove the Jeep into another barn and closed the doors.

“Rustic pottery, my ass,” said Brown. “There’s something or someone in that damn barn. Five will get you ten it’s a young man.”

They wriggled back into the line of trees. Dusk was descending.

“Take the blanket from the trunk,” said Brown. “And stay here. Stake it out all night. I’ll be back with the team before sunup-if there ever is any sun in this damn country.”

Across the valley, stretched out along a branch in a giant oak, a man in camouflage uniform lay motionless. He, too, had powerful binoculars, with which he had noted the movements among the trees on the opposite side from his own position. As Kevin Brown and his agent slithered off the rim of the high ground and into the woodland, he drew a small radio from his pocket and spoke quietly and urgently for several seconds. It was October 28, nineteen days since Simon Cormack had been kidnapped and seventeen since Zack’s first call to the Kensington apartment.

Zack called again that evening, burying himself in the hurrying crowds in the center of Luton.

“What the hell’s going on, Quinn? It’s been three bloody days.”

“Hey, take it easy, Zack. It’s the diamonds. You caught us by surprise, ole buddy. That kind of package takes a while to put together. I laid it on them over there in Washington -I mean, but hard. They’re working on it as fast as they can, but hell, Zack, twenty-five thousand stones, all good, all untraceable-that takes a bit-”

“Yeah, well, just tell them they got two more days and then they get their boy back in a bag. Just tell ’em.”

He hung up. The experts would later say his nerves were badly shot. He was reaching the point where he might be tempted to hurt the boy out of frustration or because he thought he was being tricked in some way.

Kevin Brown and his team were good and they were armed. They came in four pairs, from the only four directions from which the farm could be assailed. Two skirted the track, darting from cover to cover. The other three pairs came from the trees and down the sloping fields in complete silence. It was that hour just before dawn when the light is at its trickiest, when the spirits of the quarry are at their lowest, the hour of the hunter.

The surprise was total. Chuck Moxon and his partner took the suspect barn. Moxon snipped off the padlock; his partner went in on the roll, coming to his feet on the dusty floor inside the barn with his sidearm drawn. Apart from a petrol generator, something that looked like a kiln, and a bench with an array of chemistry glassware, there was no one there.

The six men, plus Brown, who took the farmhouse, fared better. Two pairs went in through windows, taking the glass and the frames as they went, came to their feet without a pause, and headed straight upstairs to the bedrooms.

Brown and the remaining pair went through the front door. The lock shattered with a single blow of the sledgehammer and they were in.

By the embers of the fire in the grate of the long kitchen, the burly man had been asleep in a chair. It was his job to keep watch through the night, but boredom and tiredness had taken over. At the crash from the front door he came out of his chair and reached for a.12-bore shotgun that lay on the pine table. He almost made it. The shout of “Freeze!” from the door and the sight of the big crew-cut man crouched over a Colt.45 aimed straight at his chest caused the burly one to stop. He spat and slowly raised both hands.

Upstairs the red-haired man was in bed with the only woman in the group. They both awoke as the windows and doors crashed in downstairs. The woman screamed. The man went for the bedroom door and met the first FBI man on the landing. The fighting was too close for firearms; the two men went down together in the darkness and wrestled until another American could discern which was which and hit the redhead hard with the butt of his Colt.

The fourth member of the farmhouse group was led blinking out of his bedroom a few seconds later, a thin, scrawny young man with lank hair. The FBI team all had flashlights in their belts. It took two more minutes to examine all the other bedrooms and establish that four people was the limit. Kevin Brown had them all brought to the kitchen, where lamps were lit. He surveyed them with loathing.

“Okay, where’s the kid?” he asked. One of his men looked out the window.

“Chief, we have company.”

About fifty men were descending into the valley and toward the farmhouse on all sides, all in kneeboots, all in blue, a dozen with Alsatians straining at the leash. In an outhouse the Rottweiler roared his rage at the intrusion. A white Range Rover with blue markings jolted up the track to stop ten yards from the broken door. A middle-aged man in blue, aglitter with silver buttons and insignia, descended, a braided peaked cap on his head. He walked into the lobby without a word, entered the kitchen, and gazed at the four prisoners.

“Okay, we hand it over to you now,” said Brown. “He’s here somewhere. And those sleazeballs know where,”

“Exactly,” asked the man in blue, “who are you?”

“Yes, of course.” Kevin Brown produced his Bureau identification. The Englishman looked at it carefully and handed it back.

“See here,” said Brown, “what we’ve done-”

“What you’ve done, Mr. Brown,” said the Chief Constable of Bedfordshire with icy rage, “is to blow away the biggest drug bust this county was ever likely to have and now, I fear, never will have. These people are low-level minders and a chemist. The big fish and their consignment were expected any day. Now, would you please return to London?”

At that hour Steve Pyle was with Mr. Al-Haroun in the latter’s office in Jiddah, having flown to the coast following a disturbing phone call.

“What exactly did he take?” he asked for the fourth time. Mr. Al-Haroun shrugged. These Americans were even worse than the Europeans, always in a hurry.

“Alas, I am not an expert in these machines,” he said, “but my night watchman here reports…”

He turned to the Saudi night watchman, and rattled off a stream of Arabic. The man replied, holding out his arms to signify the extent of something.

“He says that the night I returned Mr. Laing his passport, duly altered, the young man spent most of the night in the computer room, and left before dawn with a large amount of computer printout. He returned for work at the normal hour without it.”

Steve Pyle went back to Riyadh a very worried man. Helping his government and his country was one thing, but in an internal accounting inquiry, that would not show up. He asked for an urgent meeting with Colonel Easterhouse.

The Arabist listened to him calmly and nodded several times.

“You think he has reached London?” he asked.

“I don’t know how he could have done it, but where the hell else could he be?”

“Mmmm. Could I have access to your central computer for a while?”

It took the colonel four hours at the console of the master computer in Riyadh. The job was not difficult, since he had all the access codes. By the time he had finished, all the computerized records had been erased and a new record created.

Nigel Cramer got a first telephone report from Bedford in mid-morning, long before the written record arrived. When he called Patrick Seymour at the embassy he was incandescent with anger. Brown and his team were still on the road south.

“Patrick, we’ve always had a damn good relationship, but this is outrageous. Who the hell does he think he is? Where the hell does he think he is?”

Seymour was in an impossible position. He had spent three years building on the excellent cooperation between the Bureau and the Yard which he had inherited from his predecessor, Darrell Mills. He had attended courses in England and arranged visits by senior Metropolitan officers to the Hoover Building to form those one-on-one relationships that in a crisis can cut through miles of red tape.

“What exactly was going on at the farm?” he asked. Cramer calmed down and told him. The Yard had had a tip months before that a big drug ring was setting up a new and major operation in England. After patient investigation the farm had been identified as the base. Covert Squad men from his own S.O. Department had mounted surveillance week after week, in liaison with the Bedford police. The man they wanted was a New Zealand-born heroin czar, sought in a dozen countries but slippery as an eel. The good news was, he was expected to show up with a large coke consignment for processing, cutting, and distributing; the bad news was, he would now not come near the place.

“I’m sorry, Patrick, but I’m going to have to ask the Home Secretary to have Washington send for him.”

“Well, if you must, you must,” said Seymour. As he put the phone down he thought: You go right ahead.

Cramer also had another task, even more urgent. That was to stop the story appearing in any publication, or on radio or TV. That morning he had to call on a lot of good will from the proprietors and editors of the media.

The Washington committee got Seymour ’s report at their first-7:00 A.M.-meeting of the day.

“Look, he got a first-class lead and he followed it up,” protested Philip Kelly. Don Edmonds shot him a warning glance.

“He should have cooperated with Scotland Yard,” said the Secretary of State. “What we don’t need is to foul relations with the British authorities at this point. What the hell am I to say to Sir Harry Marriott when he asks for Brown’s ouster?”

“Look,” said Treasury Secretary Reed, “why not propose a compromise? Brown was overzealous and we’re sorry. But we believe Quinn and the British will secure Simon Cormack’s release momentarily. When that happens, we need a strong group to escort the boy home. Brown and his team should be given a few days’ extension to accomplish that. Say, end of the week?”

Jim Donaldson nodded.

“Yes, Sir Harry might accept that. By the way, how is the President?”

“Bucking up,” said Odell. “Almost optimistic. I told him an hour ago Quinn had secured further proof Simon was alive and apparently well-the sixth time Quinn’s got the kidnappers to prove that. How about the diamonds, Morton?”

“Ready by sundown,” said Stannard.

“Get a fast bird standing by and ready,” said Vice President Odell. Stannard nodded and made a note.

Andy Laing finally got his interview with the internal accountant just after lunch that day. The man was a fellow-American and had been on a tour of European branches for the previous three days.

He listened soberly and with growing dismay to what the young bank officer from Jiddah had to say, and scanned the computer printouts across his desk with a practiced eye. When he had finished he leaned back in his chair, puffed out his cheeks, and exhaled noisily.

“Dear God, these are very serious accusations indeed. And yes, they appear to be substantiated. Where are you staying in London?”

“I still have an apartment in Chelsea,” said Laing. “I’ve been there since I arrived. Luckily my tenants moved out two weeks back.”

The accountant noted its address and phone number.

“I’m going to have to consult with the general manager here, maybe the president in New York. Before we face Steve Pyle with this. Stay close to the phone for a couple of days.”

What neither of them knew was that the morning pouch from Riyadh contained a confidential letter from Steve Pyle to the London-based general manager for Overseas Operations.

The British press was as good as its word, but Radio Luxembourg is based in Paris and for French listeners the story of a first-class row between their Anglo-Saxon neighbors to the west is too good to miss.

Where the tip-off really came from could never be later established, except that it was a phone-in and anonymous. But the London office checked it out and confirmed that the sheer secrecy of the Bedford police gave credence to the story. It was a thin day and they ran it on the four o’clock news.

Hardly anybody in England heard it, but the Corsican did. He whistled in amazement and went to find Zack. The Englishman listened carefully, asked several supplementary questions in French, and went pale with anger.

Quinn knew already, and that was a saving grace because he had time to prepare an answer in the event Zack called. He did, just after 7:00 P.M.and in a towering rage.

“You lying bastard. You said there’d be no cowboy antics from the police or anyone else. You bloody lied to me-”

Quinn protested that he did not know what Zack was talking about-it would have been too phony to know all the details without a reminder. Zack told him in three angry sentences.

“But that was nothing to do with you,” Quinn shouted back. “The Frogs got it wrong, as usual. It was a DEA drug-bust that went wrong. You know these Rambos from the Drug Enforcement Agency-they did it. They weren’t looking for you-they were looking for cocaine. I had a Scotland Yard man here an hour ago and he was puking about it. For chrissake, Zack, you know the media. If you believe them, Simon’s been sighted eight hundred different places and you’ve been caught fifty times.”

It was plausible. Quinn counted on Zack’s having spent three weeks reading miles of inaccurate nonsense in the tabloid papers and having a healthy contempt for the press. In a booth in Linslade bus depot, he calmed down. His phone time was running out.

“Better not be true, Quinn. Just better not,” he said, and hung up.

Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea were pale with fear by the time the call ended.

“Where are those damn diamonds?” asked Sam.

There was worse to come. Like most countries, Britain has a range of breakfast-hour radio programs, a mix of mindless chitchat from the show host, pop music, news flashes, and phone-in trivia. The news is up-to-the-minute snippets torn from the wire service printers, hastily rewritten by junior subeditors, and thrust under the disc jockey’s nose. The pace of the programs is such that the careful checking and rechecking practiced by the investigative reporters of the Sunday “heavies” just does not take place.

When an American voice rang the busy news desk of City Radio’s Good Morning show, the call was taken by a girl trainee who later tearfully admitted she had not thought to query the claim that the speaker was the press counselor from the U.S. embassy with a genuine news bulletin. It went on the air in the excited tones of the D.J. seventy seconds later.

Nigel Cramer did not hear it but his teenage daughter did.

“Dad,” she called from the kitchen, “you going to catch them today?”

“Catch who?” said her father, pulling on his coat in the hall. His official car was at the curb.

“The kidnappers-you know.”

“I doubt it. Why do you ask?”

“Says so on the radio.”

Something hit Cramer hard in the stomach. He turned back from the door and into the kitchen. His daughter was buttering toast.

“What, exactly, did it say on the radio?” he asked in a very tight voice. She told him. That an exchange of the ransom for Simon Cormack would be set up within the day, and that the authorities were confident all the kidnappers would be caught in the process. Cramer ran out to his car, took the handset from the dashboard, and began to make a series of frantic calls as the car rolled.

It was too late. Zack had not heard the program, but the South African had.