The Negotiator

Chapter 9

The call from Zack was later than usual-10:20 A.M. If he had been angry the previous day over the matter of the raid on the Bedfordshire farm, he was by now almost hysterical with rage.

Nigel Cramer had had time to warn Quinn, speaking from his car as it sped toward Scotland Yard. When Quinn put down the phone, it was the first time Sam had seen him appear visibly shaken. He paced the apartment in silence; the other two sat and watched in fear. They had heard the gist of Cramer’s call and sensed that it was all going to fail, somehow, somewhere.

Just waiting for the flash line to ring, not even knowing whether the kidnappers would have heard the radio show at all, or how they would react if they had, made Sam nauseous from stress. When the phone finally rang, Quinn answered it with his usual calm good humor. Zack did not even bother with preambles.

“Right, this time you’ve bloody blown it, you Yankee bastard. You take me for some kind of fool, do you? Well, you’re the fool, mate. ’Cos you’re going to look a right fool when you bury Simon Cormack’s body.”

Quinn’s shock and amazement were convincingly feigned.

“Zack, what the hell are you talking about? What’s gone wrong?”

“Don’t give me that,” screamed the kidnapper, his gruff voice rising. “If you didn’t hear the news, then ask your police mates about it. And don’t pretend it was a lie-it came from your own sodding embassy.”

Quinn persuaded Zack to tell him what he had heard, even though he knew. The telling caused Zack to calm down slightly; and his time was running out.

“Zack, it’s a lie, a phony. Any exchange would be just you and me, pal. Alone and unarmed. No direction-finder devices, no tricks, no police, no soldiers. Your terms, your place, your time. That’s the only way I’d have it.”

“Yeah, well, it’s too late. Your people want a body, that’s what they’re going to get.”

He was about to hang up. For the last time. Quinn knew if that happened it would be over. Days, weeks later, someone somewhere would enter a house or a flat, a cleaner, a caretaker, a real estate agent, and there he’d be. The President’s only son, shot through the head, or strangled, half decomposed…

“Zack, please, stay there just a few more seconds.”

Sweat was running off Quinn’s face, the first time he had ever shown the massive strain inside himself these past twenty days. He knew just how close it was to disaster.

In the Kensington exchange a group of Telecom engineers and police officers stared at the monitors and listened to the rage coming down the line; at Cork Street, beneath the pavements of smart Mayfair, four men from MI-5 were rooted in their chairs, motionless as the anger poured out of the speaker into the room and the tape deck wound silently around and around.

Below the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square there were two ELINT engineers and three FBI agents, plus Lou Collins of the CIA and FBI representative Patrick Seymour. The news of the morning broadcast had brought them all to this place, anticipating something like what they were now hearing-which did not make it any better.

The fact that all the nation’s radio stations, including City Radio, had spent two hours denouncing the hoax call of the breakfast hour was irrelevant. They all knew that; leaks can be repudiated for the rest of time-it changes nothing. As Hitler said, the big lie is the one they believe.

“Please, Zack, let me get on to President Cormack personally. Just twenty-four hours more. After all this time, don’t throw it away now. The President’s got the authority to tell these assholes to get out of here and leave it to you and me. Just the two of us-we’re the only ones who can be trusted to get it right. All I ask, after twenty days, is just one more. Twenty-four hours, Zack, give me just that.”

There was a pause on the line. Somewhere along the streets of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, a young detective constable was moving casually toward the bank of phone booths.

“This time tomorrow,” said Zack finally, and put the phone down. He quit the booth and had just turned the corner when the plainclothes policeman emerged from an alley and glanced at the bank of phone booths. All were empty. He had missed spotting Zack by eight seconds.

Quinn replaced the phone, walked to the long couch, lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, and stared at the ceiling.

“Mr. Quinn,” said McCrea hesitantly. Despite repeated assurances that he could drop the “Mister,” the shy young CIA man insisted on treating Quinn like his grade-school teacher.

“Shut up,” said Quinn clearly. The crestfallen McCrea, who had been about to ask if Quinn wanted coffee, went to the kitchen and made it anyway. The third, the “ordinary,” telephone rang. It was Cramer.

“Well, we all heard that,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Beat,” said Quinn. “Any news on the source of the broadcast?”

“Not yet,” said Cramer. “The girl subeditor who took the call is still at Holborn police station. She swears it was an American voice, but what would she know? She swears the man made it sound convincingly official, knew what to say. You want a transcript of the broadcast?”

“Bit late now,” said Quinn.

“What are you going to do?” asked Cramer.

“Pray a bit. I’ll think of something.”

“Good luck. I have to go ’round to Whitehall now. I’ll stay in touch.”

The embassy came next. Seymour. Congratulations on the way Quinn had handled it… If there’s anything we can do… That’s the trouble, thought Quinn. Someone is doing too damn much. But he did not say it.

He was halfway through his coffee when he swung his legs off the couch and picked up the phone to the embassy. It was answered at once in the basement. Seymour again.

“I want a patch-through on a secure line to Vice President Odell,” he said, “and I want it now.”

“Er, look, Quinn, Washington is being alerted about what just happened here. They’ll have the tapes themselves momentarily. I figure we should let them hear what happened and discuss-”

“I speak with Michael Odell inside ten minutes, or I raise him on the open line,” said Quinn carefully.

Seymour thought it over. The open line was insecure. NSA would pick up the call with their satellites; the British GCHQ would get it. So would the Russians…

“I’ll get to him and ask him to take your call,” said Seymour.

Ten minutes later Michael Odell came on the line. It was 6:15 A.M. in Washington; he was still at his residence at the Naval Observatory. But he had been awakened half an hour earlier.

“Quinn, what the hell’s going on over there? I just heard some horse shit about a hoax call to a radio show-”

“Mr. Vice President,” said Quinn levelly, “have you a mirror nearby?”

There was a stunned pause.

“Yes, I guess so.”

“If you look in it, you will see the nose on your face, right?”

“Look, what is this? Yeah, okay, I can see the nose on my face.”

“As surely as what you are looking at, Simon Cormack is going to be murdered in twenty-four hours…”

He let the words sink in to the shocked man sitting on the edge of his bed in Washington.

“… unless…”

“Okay, Quinn, lay it on the line.”

“Unless I have that package of diamonds, market value two million dollars, here in my hands by sunrise, London time, tomorrow. This call has been taped, for the record. Good day, Mr. Vice President.”

He put the phone down. At the other end, for several minutes the Vice President of the United States of America used language that would have lost him the votes of the Moral Majority, had those good citizens had the opportunity to hear him. When he was done, he called the telephone operator.

“Get me Morton Stannard,” he said. “At his home, wherever. Just get him!”

Andy Laing was surprised to be summoned back to the bank so quickly. The appointment was for 11:00 A.M. and he was there ten minutes early. When he was shown up, it was not to the office of the internal accountant, but to that of the general manager. The accountant was by the GM’s side. The senior officer gestured Laing to a seat opposite his desk without a word. The man then rose, walked to the window, stared out for a while over the pinnacles of the City, turned and spoke. His tone was grave and frosty.

“Yesterday, Mr. Laing, you came to see my colleague here, having quit Saudi Arabia by whatever means you were able, and made serious allegations concerning the integrity of Mr. Steven Pyle.”

Laing was worried. Mr. Laing? Where was “Andy”? They always first-named each other in the bank, part of the family atmosphere New York insisted on.

“And I brought a mass of computer printout to back up what I had found,” he said carefully, but his stomach was churning. Something was wrong. The general manager waved dismissively at the mention of Laing’s evidence.

“Yesterday I also received a long letter from Steve Pyle. Today I had a lengthy phone call. It is perfectly clear to me, and to the internal accountant here, that you are a rogue, Laing, and an embezzler.”

Laing could not believe his ears. He shot a glance for support at the accountant. The man stared at the ceiling.

“I have the story,” said the GM. “The full story. The real story.”

In case Laing was unfamiliar with it, he told the young man what he now knew to be true. Laing had been embezzling money from a client’s account, the Ministry of Public Works. Not a large amount in Saudi terms, but enough; one percent of every invoice paid out to contractors by the Ministry. Mr. Amin had unfortunately missed spotting the figures but Mr. Al-Haroun had seen the flaws and alerted Mr. Pyle.

The general manager at Riyadh, in an excess of loyalty, had tried to protect Laing’s career by only insisting that every riyal be returned to the Ministry’s account, something that had now been done.

Laing’s response to this extraordinary solidarity from a colleague, and in outrage at losing his money, had been to spend the night in the Jiddah Branch falsifying the records to “prove” that a much larger sum had been embezzled with the cooperation of Steve Pyle himself.

“But the tape I brought back-” protested Laing.

“Forgeries, of course. We have the real records here. This morning I ordered our central computer here to hack into the Riyadh computer and do a check. The real records now lie there, on my desk. They show quite clearly what happened. The one percent you stole has been replaced. No other money is missing. The bank’s reputation in Saudi Arabia has been saved, thank God-or, rather, thank Steve Pyle.”

“But it’s not true,” protested Laing, too shrilly. “The skim Pyle and his unknown associate were perpetrating was ten percent of the Ministry accounts.”

The GM looked stonily at Laing and then at the evidence fresh in from Riyadh.

“Al,” he asked, “do you see any record of ten percent being skimmed?”

The accountant shook his head.

“That would be preposterous in any case,” he said. “With such sums washing around, one percent might be hidden in a big Ministry in those parts. But never ten percent. The annual audit, due in April, would have uncovered the swindle. Then where would you have been? In a filthy Saudi jail cell forever. We do assume, do we not, that the Saudi Government will still be there next April?”

The GM gave a wintry smile. That was too obvious.

“No. I’m afraid,” concluded the accountant, “that it’s an open-and-shut case. Steve Pyle has not only done us all a favor, he has done you one, Mr. Laing. He’s saved you from a long prison term.”

“Which I believe you probably deserve,” said the GM. “We can’t inflict that in any case. And we don’t relish the scandal. We supply contract officers to many Third World banks, and a scandal we do not need. But you, Mr. Laing, no longer constitute one of those bank officers. Your dismissal letter is in front of you. There will, of course, be no severance pay, and a reference is out of the question. Now please go.”

Laing knew it was a sentence: never to work in banking ever again, anywhere in the world. Sixty seconds later he was on the pavement of Lombard Street.

In Washington, Morton Stannard had listened to the rage of Zack as the spools unwound on the conference table in the Situation Room.

The news out of London that an exchange was imminent, whether true or false, had galvanized a resurgence of press frenzy in Washington. Since before dawn the White House had been deluged with calls for information and once again the press secretary was at his wits’ end.

When the tape finally ran out the eight members present were silent with shock.

“The diamonds,” growled Odell. “You keep promising and promising. Where the hell are they?”

“They’re ready,” said Stannard promptly. “I apologize for my over-optimism earlier. I know nothing of such matters-I thought arranging such a consignment would take less time. But they are ready-just under twenty-five thousand mixed stones, all authentic and valued at just over two million dollars.”

“Where are they?” asked Hubert Reed.

“In the safe of the head of the Pentagon office in New York, the office that handles our East Coast systems-purchasing. For obvious reasons, it’s a very secure safe.”

“What about shipment to London?” asked Brad Johnson. “I suggest we use one of our air bases in England. We don’t need problems with the press at Heathrow, or anything like that.”

“I am meeting in one hour with a senior Air Force expert,” said Stannard. “He will advise how best to get the package there.”

“We will need a Company car to meet them on arrival and get them to Quinn at the apartment,” said Odell. “Lee, you arrange that. It’s your apartment, after all.”

“No problem,” said Lee Alexander of the CIA.

“I’ll have Lou Collins pick them up himself at the air base on touchdown.”

“By dawn tomorrow, London time,” said the Vice President. “In London, in Kensington, by dawn. We know the details of the exchange yet?”

“No,” said the Director of the FBI. “No doubt Quinn will work out the details in conjunction with our people.”

The U. S. Air Force proposed the use of a single-seat jet fighter to make the Atlantic crossing, an F-15 Eagle.

“It has the range if we fit it with FAST packs,” the Air Force general told Morton Stannard at the Pentagon. “We must have the package delivered to the Air National Guard base at Trenton, New Jersey, no later than two P.M.”

The pilot selected for the mission was an experienced lieutenant colonel with more than seven thousand flying hours on the F-15. Through the late morning the Eagle at Trenton was serviced as seldom before in her existence, and the FAST packs were fitted to each of the port and starboard air-intake trunks. These packs, despite their name, would not increase the Eagle’s speed; the acronym stands for “fuel and sensor tactical,” and they are really long-range extra fuel tanks.

Stripped down, the Eagle carries 23,000 pounds of fuel, giving her a ferry range of 2,878 miles; the extra 5,000 pounds in each FAST pack boost that to 3,450 miles.

In the navigation room Colonel Bowers studied his flight plan over a sandwich lunch. From Trenton to the USAF base at Upper Heyford outside the city of Oxford was 3,063 miles. The meteorology men told him the wind strengths at his chosen altitude of 50,000 feet, and he worked out that he would make it in 5.4 hours flying at Mach.95 and would still have 4,300 pounds of fuel remaining.

At 2:00 P.M. a big KC-135 tanker lifted off from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and headed for a midair rendezvous at 45,000 feet over the eastern seaboard with the Eagle.

At Trenton there was one last holdup. Colonel Bowers was in his flying suit by three o’clock, and ready to go, when the long black limousine from the Pentagon’s New York bureau came through the main gate. A civilian official, accompanied by an Air Force general, handed over a plain flat attaché case and a slip of paper with the number of the combination lock.

Hardly had he done so when another unmarked limousine entered the base. There was a flustered conference on the tarmac between two groups of officials. Eventually the attaché case and the slip of paper were retrieved from Colonel Bowers and taken to the rear seat of one of the cars.

The attaché case was opened and its contents, a flat pack of black velvet, ten inches by twelve inches and three inches thick, was transferred to a new attaché case. This was the one that was handed to the impatient colonel.

Interceptor fighters are not accustomed to hauling freight, but a storage space had been prepared right beneath the pilot’s seat, and it was here the attaché case was slotted. The colonel lifted off at 3:31 P.M.

He climbed rapidly to 45,000 feet, called up his tanker, and topped off his fuel tanks to begin the run for England with a full load. After fueling he nosed up to 50,000 feet, turned to his compass course for Upper Hey ford, and boosted power to settle at Mach.95, just below the shudder zone that marks the sound barrier. He caught his expected westerly tailwind over Nantucket.

Three hours after the Eagle rose from the tarmac at Trenton, a scheduled airlines jumbo jet had taken off from Kennedy for London Heathrow. In the business class section was a tall and clean-cut young man who had caught the flight after connecting from Houston. He worked for a major oil corporation there called Pan-Global and felt he was privileged to be entrusted by his employer, the proprietor himself, with such a discreet mission.

Not that he had the faintest idea of the contents of the envelope he carried within the breast pocket of the jacket he declined to hand over to the stewardess. Nor did he wish to know. He only knew it must contain documents of great corporate sensitivity, since it could not be mailed or faxed or sent by commercial courier pouch.

His instructions were clear; he had repeated them many times. He was to go to a certain address on a certain day-the following day-at a certain hour. He was not to ring the bell, just drop the envelope through the letter slot, then return to Heathrow Airport and Houston. Tiring but simple. Cocktails were being served, before dinner; he did not drink alcohol, so he gazed out the window.

The sky had long turned inky black above the heaving winter wastes of the North Atlantic, but above the cloud layer the stars were hard and bright. The young man staring out of the porthole could not know that far ahead of him another jet plane was howling through the darkness towards England. Neither he nor Colonel Bowers would ever know of the other’s existence, nor that each was racing towards the British capital on different missions; and neither would ever know exactly what it was he carried.

The colonel got there first. He touched down at Upper Heyford right on schedule at 1:55 A.M. local time, disturbing the sleep of the villagers beneath him as he made his final turn into the approach lights. The tower told him which way to taxi and he finally stopped in a bright ring of lights inside a hangar whose doors closed the moment he shut down his engines. When he opened the canopy the base commander approached with a civilian. It was the civilian who spoke.

“Colonel Bowers?”

“That’s me, sir.”

“You have a package for me?”

“I have an attaché case. Right under my seat.”

He stretched stiffly, climbed out, and clambered down the steel ladder to the hangar floor. Helluva way to see England, he thought. The civilian went up the ladder and retrieved the attaché case. He held out his hand for the combination code. Ten minutes later Lou Collins was back in his Company limousine, heading toward London. He reached the Kensington apartment at ten minutes after four. The lights still burned; no one had slept. Quinn was in the sitting room drinking coffee.

Collins laid the attaché case on the low table, consulted the slip of paper, and tumbled the rollers. From the case he took the flat, near-square, velvet-wrapped package and handed it to Quinn.

“In your hands, by dawn,” he said. Quinn hefted the pack in his hands. Just over a kilogram-about three pounds.

“You want to open it?” asked Collins.

“No need,” said Quinn. “If they are glass, or paste, or any part of them are, or any one of them, someone will probably blow away Simon Cormack’s life.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” said Collins. “No, they’re genuine all right. Do you think he’ll call?”

“Just pray he does,” said Quinn.

“And the exchange?”

“We’ll have to arrange it today.”

“How are you going to handle it, Quinn?”

“My way.”

He went off to his room to take a bath and dress. For quite a lot of people the last day of October was going to be a very rough day indeed.

The young man from Houston landed at 6:45 A.M. London time and, with only a small suitcase of toiletries, moved quickly through customs and into the concourse of Number Three Building. He checked his watch and knew he had three hours to wait. Time to use the washroom, freshen up, have breakfast, and take a cab to the center of London ’s West End.

At 9:55 he presented himself at the door of the tall and impressive apartment house a block back from Great Cumberland Place in the Marble Arch district. He was five minutes early. He had been told to be exact. From across the street a man in a parked car watched him, but he did not know that. He strolled up and down for five minutes, then, on the dot of ten, dropped the fat envelope through the letter slot of the apartment house. There was no hall porter to pick it up. It lay there on the mat inside the door. Satisfied that he had done as he had been instructed, the young American walked back down to Bayswater Road and soon hailed a cab for Heathrow.

Hardly was he around the corner than the man in the parked car climbed out, crossed the road, and let himself into the apartment house. He lived there-had done for several weeks. His sojourn in the car was simply to assure himself that the messenger responded to the given description and had not been followed.

The man picked up the fallen envelope, took the lift to the eighth floor, let himself into his apartment, and slit open the envelope. He was satisfied as he read, and his breath came in snuffles, whistling through the distorted nasal passages as he breathed. Irving Moss now had what he believed would be his final instructions.

In the Kensington apartment the morning ticked away in silence. The tension was almost tangible. In the telephone exchange, in Cork Street, in Grosvenor Square, the listeners sat hunched over their machines waiting for Quinn to say something or McCrea or Sam Somerville to open their mouths. There was silence on the speakers. Quinn had made it plain that if Zack did not call, it was over. The careful search for an abandoned house and a body would have to begin.

And Zack did not call.

At half past ten Irving Moss left his Marble Arch flat, took his rental car from its parking bay, and drove to Paddington Station. His beard, grown in Houston during the planning stages, had changed the shape of his face. His Canadian passport was beautifully forged and had brought him effortlessly into the Republic of Ireland and thence on the ferry to England. His driving license, also Canadian, had caused no problems in the renting of a compact car on long-term lease. He had lived quietly and unobtrusively for weeks behind Marble Arch, one of more than a million foreigners in the British capital.

He was a skilled enough agent to be able to drop into almost any city and disappear from view. London, in any case, he knew. He knew how things worked in London, where to go to obtain what he wanted or needed, had contacts with the underworld, was smart enough and experienced enough not to make mistakes of the kind that draw a visitor to the attention of the authorities.

His letter from Houston had been an update, filling in a range of details that it had not been possible to fit into coded messages to and from Houston in the form of price lists of market produce. There were also further instructions in the letter, but most interesting of all was the situation report from within the West Wing of the White House, notably the state of deterioration that President John Cormack had suffered these past three weeks.

Finally there was the ticket for the left-luggage office at Paddington Station, something that could only cross the Atlantic by hand. How it had got from London to Houston he did not know or want to know. He did not need to know. He knew how it had come back to London, to him, and now it was in his hand. At 11:00 A.M. he used it.

The British Rail staffer thought nothing of it. In the course of a day hundreds of packages, grips, and suitcases were consigned to his office for safekeeping, and hundreds more withdrawn. Only after being unclaimed for three months would a package be taken off the shelves and opened, for disposal if it could not be identified. The ticket presented that morning by the silent man in the medium-gray gabardine raincoat was just another ticket. He ranged along his shelves, found the numbered item, a small fiber suitcase, and handed it over. It was prepaid anyway. He would not remember the transaction by nightfall.

Moss took the case back to his apartment, forced the cheap locks, and examined the contents. They were all there, as he had been told they would be. He checked his watch. He had three hours before he need set off.

There was a house set in a quiet road on the outskirts of a commuter town not forty miles from the center of London. At a certain time he would drive past that house, as he did every second day, and the position of his driver’s window-fully up, half lowered, or fully down-would convey to the watcher the thing he needed to know. This day, for the first time, the window would be in the fully down position. He slotted one of his locally acquired S &M videotapes-ultra hard core, but he knew where to go for his supplies-into his television and settled back to enjoy himself.

When Andy Laing left the bank he was almost in a state of shock. Few men go through the experience of seeing an entire career, worked on and nurtured through years of effort, scattered in small and irrecoverable pieces at their feet. The first reaction is incomprehension; the second, indecision.

Laing wandered aimlessly through the narrow streets and hidden courtyards that hide between the roaring traffic of the City of London, the capital’s most ancient square mile and center of the country’s commercial and banking world. He passed the walls of monasteries that once echoed to the chants of the Grey friars, the Whitefriars, and the Blackfriars, past guildhalls where merchants had convened to discuss the business of the world when Henry VIII was executing his wives down the road at the Tower, past delicate little churches designed by Wren in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666.

The men who scurried past him, and the increasingly large number of attractive young women, were thinking of commodity prices, buying long or short, or a flicker of movement in the money markets that might be a trend or just a flicker. They used computers instead of quill pens, but the outcome of their labors was still what it had been for centuries: trade, the buying and selling of things that other people made. It was a world that had captured Andy Laing’s imagination ten years before, when he was just finishing school, and it was a world he would never enter again.

He had a light lunch in a small sandwich bar off the street called Crutched Friars, where monks once hobbled with one leg bound behind them to cause pain for the greater glory of God, and he made up his mind what he would do.

He finished his coffee and took the underground back to his studio apartment in Beaufort Street, Chelsea, where he had prudently stored photocopies of the evidence he had brought out of Jiddah. When a man has nothing more to lose, he can become very dangerous. Laing decided to write it all down, from start to finish, to include copies of his printouts, which he knew to be genuine, and to send a copy to every member of the bank’s board of directors in New York. The membership of the board was public knowledge; their business addresses would be in the American Who’s Who.

He saw no reason why he should suffer in silence. Let Steve Pyle do some worrying for a change, he thought. So he sent the general manager in Riyadh a personal letter telling him what he was going to do.

Zack finally rang at 1:20 P.M., the height of the lunchtime rush hour, while Laing was finishing his coffee, and Moss was entranced by a new child-abuse movie fresh in from Amsterdam. Zack was in one of a bank of four public booths set into the rear wall of Dunstable post office-as always, north of London.

Quinn had been dressed and ready since sunup, and that day there really was a sun to see, shining brightly out of a blue sky with only a hint of cool in the air. Whether he was feeling the cold neither McCrea nor Sam had thought to ask, but he had put on jeans, his new cashmere sweater over his shirt, and a zip-up leather jacket.

“Quinn, this is the last call-”

“Zack, old buddy, I am staring at a fruit bowl, a big bowl, and you know what? It’s full to the damn brim with diamonds, glittering and gleaming away like they were alive. Let’s deal, Zack. Let’s deal now.”

The mental image he had drawn stopped Zack in his tracks.

“Right,” said the voice on the phone. “These are the instructions-”

“No, Zack. We do this my way or it all gets blown to kingdom come…”

In the Kensington exchange, in Cork Street and Grosvenor Square, there was stunned silence among the listeners. Either Quinn knew just what he was doing or he was going to provoke the kidnapper into putting down the phone. Quinn’s voice went on without a pause.

“I may be a bastard, Zack, but I’m the only bastard in this whole damn mess you can trust and you’re going to have to trust me. Got a pencil?”

“Yeah. Now listen, Quinn-”

“You listen, buddy. I want you to move to another booth and call me in forty seconds on this number. Three-seven-oh; one-two-oh-four. Now GO!”

The last word was a shout. Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea would later tell the inquiry that they were as stunned as those listening on the line. Quinn slammed down the phone, grabbed the attaché case-the diamonds were still inside it, not in a fruit bowl-and ran out the sitting-room door. He turned as he went and roared, “Stay there!”

The surprise, the shout, the authority in his command, kept them pinned in their chairs for a vital five seconds. When they reached the apartment’s front door they heard the key turn in the lock on the far side. Apparently it had been placed there in the predawn.

Quinn avoided the elevator and hit the stairs about the time McCrea’s first shout came through the door, followed by a hefty kick at the lock. Among the listeners there was already a nascent chaos that would soon grow to pandemonium.

“What the hell’s he doing?” whispered one policeman to another at the Kensington exchange, to be met by a shrug. Quinn was racing down the three flights of stairs to the lobby level. The inquiry would show that the American at the listening post in the basement apartment did not move because it was not his job to move. His job was to keep the stream of voices from inside the apartment above him recorded, encoded, radioed to Grosvenor Square for decoding and digestion by the listeners in the basement. So he stayed where he was.

Quinn crossed the lobby fifteen seconds after slamming down the phone. The British porter in his booth looked up, nodded, and went back to his copy of the Daily Mirror. Quinn pushed open the street door, which opened outward, closed it behind him, dropped a wooden wedge-which he had carved in the privacy of the toilet-under the sill and gave it a hard kick. Then he ran across the road, dodging the traffic.

“What do they mean, he’s gone?” shouted Kevin Brown in the listening post at Grosvenor Square. He had been sitting there all morning, waiting, as they all were, British and Americans alike, for Zack’s latest and maybe last call. At first the sounds coming from Kensington had been merely confusing; they heard the phone cut off, heard Quinn shout “Stay there!” at someone, dien a series of bangs, confused shouts and cries from McCrea and Somerville, then a series of regular bangs, as if someone was kicking a door.

Sam Somerville had come back into the room, shouting at the bugs: “He’s gone! Quinn’s gone!” Brown’s question could be heard in the listening post but not by Somerville. Frantically Brown scrambled for the phone that would connect him with his special agent in Kensington.

“Agent Somerville,” he boomed when he heard her on the line, “get after him.”

At that moment McCrea’s fifth kick broke the lock on the apartment door. He raced for the stairs, followed by Sam. Both were in bedroom slippers.

The greengrocer’s shop and delicatessen across the street from the apartment, whose number Quinn had obtained from the London telephone directory in the sitting-room cabinet, was called Bradshaw, after the man who had started it, but was now owned by an Indian gentleman called Mr. Patel. Quinn had watched him from across the street, tending his exterior fruit display or disappearing inside to attend to a customer.

Quinn hit the opposite pavement thirty-three seconds after ending his call from Zack. He dodged two pedestrians and came through the doorway into the food shop like a tornado. The telephone was on the cash desk, next to the register, behind which stood Mr. Patel.

“Those kids are stealing your oranges,” said Quinn without ceremony. At that moment the phone rang. Torn between a telephone call and stolen oranges, Mr. Patel reacted like a good Gujarati and ran outside. Quinn picked up the receiver.

The Kensington exchange had reacted fast, and the inquiry would show they had done their best. But they lost several of the forty seconds through sheer surprise, then had a technical problem. Their lock was on the flash line in the apartment. Whenever a call came into that number, their electronic exchange could run back up the line to establish the source of the call. The number it came from would then be revealed by the computer to be such-and-such a booth in a certain place. Between six and ten seconds.

They already had a lock on the number Zack had used first, but when he changed booths, even though the kiosks were side by side in Dunstable, they lost him. Worse, he was now ringing another London number into which they were not tapped. The only saving grace was that the number Quinn had dictated on the line to Zack was still on the Kensington exchange. Still, the tracers had to start at the beginning, their call-finder mechanism racing frantically through the twenty thousand numbers on the exchange. They tapped into Mr. Patel’s phone fifty-eight seconds after Quinn had dictated the number, then got a lock on the second number in Dunstable.

“Take this number, Zack,”said Quinn without preamble.

“What the hell’s going on?” snarled Zack.

“Nine-three-five; three-two-one-five,” said Quinn remorselessly. “Got it?”

There was a pause as Zack scribbled.

“Now we’ll do it ourselves, Zack. I’ve walked out on the lot of them. Just you and me; the diamonds against the boy. No tricks-my word on it. Call me on that number in sixty minutes, and ninety minutes if there’s no reply first time. It’s not on trace.”

He put the phone down. In the exchange the listeners heard the words “… minutes, and ninety minutes if there’s no reply first time. It’s not on trace.”

“Bastard’s given him another number,” said the engineer in Kensington to the two Metropolitan officers with him. One of them was already on the phone to the Yard.

Quinn came out of the shop to see Duncan McCrea across the road trying to push his way through the jammed street door. Sam was behind him, waving and gesticulating. The porter joined them, scratching his thinning hair. Two cars went down the street on the opposite side; on Quinn’s side a motorcyclist was approaching. Quinn stepped into the road, right in the man’s path, his arms raised, attaché case swinging from his left hand. The motorcyclist braked, swerved, skidded, and slithered to a stop.

“ ’Ere, wot on erf…”

Quinn gave him a disarming smile as he ducked around the handlebars. The short, hard kidney punch completed the job. As the youth in the crash helmet doubled over, Quinn hoisted him off his machine, swung his own right leg over it, engaged gear, and gunned the engine. He went off down the street just as McCrea’s flailing hand missed his jacket by six inches.

McCrea stood in the street, dejected. Sam joined him. They looked at each other, then ran back into the apartment building. The fastest way to talk to Grosvenor Square was to get back to the third floor.

“Right, that’s it,” said Brown five minutes later, after listening to both McCrea and Somerville on the line from Kensington. “We find that bastard. That’s the job.”

Another phone rang. It was Nigel Cramer from Scotland Yard.

“Your negotiator has done a bunk,” he said flatly. “Can you tell me how? I’ve tried the apartment-the usual number is engaged.”

Brown told him in thirty seconds. Cramer grunted. He still resented the Green Meadow Farm affair, and always would, but events had now overtaken his desire to see Brown and the FBI team off his patch.

“Did your people get the number of that motorcycle?” he asked. “I can put out an all-points on it.”

“Better than that,” said Brown with satisfaction. “That attaché case he’s carrying. It contains a direction finder.”

“It what?”

“Built in, undetectable, state-of-the-art,” said Brown. “We had it fitted out in the States, changed it for the case provided by the Pentagon just before takeoff last night.”

“I see,” said Cramer thoughtfully. “And the receiver?”

“Right here,” said Brown. “Came in on the morning commercial flight at dawn. One of my boys went out to Heathrow to pick it up. Range two miles, so we have to move. I mean right now.”

“This time, Mr. Brown, will you please stay in touch with the Met.’s squad cars? You do not make arrests in this City. I do. Your car has radio?”

“Sure.”

“Stay on open line, please. We’ll patch in on you and join you if you tell us where you are.”

“No problem. You have my word on it.”

The embassy limousine swept out of Grosvenor Square sixty seconds later. Chuck Moxon drove; his colleague beside him operated the D/F receiver, a small box like a miniature television set, save that on the screen in place of a picture was a single glowing dot. When the antenna now clipped to the metal rim above the passenger door heard the blip emitted from the D/F transmitter in Quinn’s attaché case, a line would race out from the glowing dot to the perimeter of the screen. The car’s driver would have to maneuver so that the line on the screen pointed dead ahead of his car’s nose. He would then be following the direction finder. The device in the attaché case would be activated by remote control from inside the limousine.

They drove fast down Park Lane, through Knightsbridge, and into Kensington.

“Activate,” said Brown. The operator depressed a switch. The screen did not respond.

“Keep activating every thirty seconds until we get lock-on,” said Brown. “Chuck, start to sweep around Kensington.”

Moxon took the Cromwell Road, then headed south down Gloucester Road toward Old Brompton Road. The antenna got a lock.

“He’s behind us, heading north,” said Moxon’s colleague. “Range, about a mile and a quarter.”

Thirty seconds later Moxon was back across the Cromwell Road, heading north up Exhibition Road toward Hyde Park.

“Dead ahead, running north,” said the operator.

“Tell the boys in blue we have him,” said Brown. Moxon informed the embassy by radio, and halfway up Edgware Road a Metropolitan Police Rover closed up behind them.

In the back with Brown were Collins and Seymour.

“Should have known,” said Collins regretfully. “Should have spotted the time gap.”

“What time gap?” asked Seymour.

“You recall that snarl-up in the Winfield House driveway three weeks back? Quinn set off fifteen minutes before me but arrived in Kensington three minutes ahead. I can’t beat a London cabbie in rush-hour traffic. He paused somewhere, made some preparations.”

“He couldn’t have planned this three weeks ago,” objected Seymour. “He didn’t know how things would pan out.”

“Didn’t have to,” said Collins. “You’ve read his file. Been in combat long enough to know about fallback positions in case things go wrong.”

“He’s pulled a right into St. John’s Wood,” said the operator.

At Lord’s roundabout the police car came alongside, its window down.

“He’s heading north up there,” said Moxon, pointing up the Finchley Road. The two cars were joined by another squad car and headed north through Swiss Cottage, Hendon, and Mill Hill. The range decreased to three hundred yards and they scanned the traffic ahead for a tall man wearing no crash helmet, on a small motorcycle.

They went through Mill Hill Circus just a hundred yards behind the bleeper and up the slope to Five Ways Corner. Then they realized Quinn must have changed vehicles again. They passed two motorcyclists who emitted no bleep, and two powerful motorbikes overtook them, but the D/F finder they sought was still proceeding steadily ahead of them. When the bleep turned around Five Ways Corner onto the A.1 to Hertfordshire, they saw that their target was now an open-topped Volkswagen Golf GTi whose driver wore a thick fur hat to cover his head and ears.

The first thing Cyprian Fothergill recalled about the events of that day was that as he headed toward his charming little cottage in the countryside behind Borehamwood he was suddenly overtaken by a huge black car that swerved violently in front of him, forcing him to scream to a stop in a lay-by. Within seconds three big men, he would later tell his open-mouthed friends at the club, had leaped out, surrounded his car, and were pointing enormous guns at him. Then a police car pulled in behind, then another one, and four lovely bobbies got out and told the Americans-well, they must have been Americans, and huge, they were-to put their guns away or be disarmed.

The next thing he knew-by this time he would have the undivided attention of the entire bar-one of the Americans tore his fur hat off and screamed “Okay, craphead, where is he?” while one of the bobbies reached into the open backseat and pulled out an attaché case that he had to spend an hour telling them he had never seen before.

The big gray-haired American, who seemed to be in charge of his party from the black car, grabbed the case from the bobby’s hands, flicked the locks, and looked inside. It was empty. After all that, it was empty. Such a terrifying fuss over an empty case… Anyway, the Americans were swearing like troopers, using language that he, Cyprian, had never heard before and hoped never to hear again. Then in stepped the British sergeant, who was quite out of this world…

At 2:25 P.M. Sergeant Kidd returned to his patrol car to answer the insistent calls coming through for him on the radio.

“Tango Alpha,” he began.

“Tango Alpha, this is Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cramer. Who’s that?”

“Sergeant Kidd, sir. F Division.”

“What have you got, Sergeant?”

Kidd glanced across at the cornered Volkswagen, its terrified inhabitant, the three FBI men examining the empty attaché case, two more Yankees standing back and staring hopefully at the sky, and three of his colleagues trying to take statements.

“Bit of a mess, sir.”

“Sergeant Kidd, listen carefully. Have you captured a very tall American who has just stolen two million dollars?”

“No, sir,” said Kidd. “We’ve captured a very gay hairdresser who’s just wet his pants.”

“What do you mean… disappeared?” The cry, shout, or yell, in a variety of tones and accents, was within an hour echoing around a Kensington apartment, Scotland Yard, Whitehall, the Home Office, Downing Street, Grosvenor Square, and the West Wing of the White House. “He can’t just disappear.”

But he had.