The Negotiator

Chapter 10

Quinn had dropped the attaché case into the open back of the Golf only thirty seconds after swerving around the corner of the street containing the apartment house. When he had opened the case as Lou Collins presented it to him before dawn, he had not seen any direction-finding device, but did not expect to. Whoever had worked on the case in the laboratory would have been smarter than to leave any traces of the implant visible. Quinn had gambled on there being something inside the case to lead police and troops to whatever rendezvous he established with Zack.

Waiting at a traffic light, he had flicked open the locks, stuffed the package of diamonds inside his zipped leather jacket, and looked around. The Golf was standing next to him. The driver, muffled in his fur hat, had not noticed a thing.

Half a mile later Quinn abandoned the motorcycle; without the legally obligatory crash helmet, he was likely to attract the attention of a policeman. Outside the Brompton Oratory he hailed a cab, directed it to Marylebone, and paid it off in George Street, completing his journey on foot.

His pockets contained all he had been able to abstract from the apartment without attracting attention: his U. S. passport and driver’s license-though these would soon be useless when the alert went out-a wad of British money from Sam’s purse, his multibladed penknife, and a pair of pliers from the fuse cupboard. A chemist’s shop in Marylebone High Street had yielded a pair of plain-glass spectacles with heavy horn rims; and a men’s outfitters, a tweed hat and Burberry.

He made a number of further purchases at a confectioner’s, a hardware shop, and a luggage store. He checked his watch: fifty-five minutes from the time he had replaced the phone in Mr. Patel’s fruit store. He turned into Blandford Street and found the call box he sought on the corner of Chiltern Street, one of a bank of two. He took the second, whose number he had memorized three weeks earlier and dictated to Zack an hour before. It rang right on time.

Zack was wary, uncomprehending, and angry. “All right, you bastard, what the hell are you up to?”

In a few short sentences Quinn explained what he had done. Zack listened in silence.

“Are you leveling?” he asked. “ ’Cos if you ain’t, that kid is still going to end up in a body bag.”

“Look, Zack, I frankly don’t give a shit whether they capture you or not. I have one concern and one only: to get that kid back to his family alive and well. And I have inside my jacket two million dollars’ worth of raw diamonds I figure interest you. Now, I’ve thrown the bloodhounds off because they wouldn’t stop interfering, trying to be smart. So, do you want to set up an exchange or not?”

“Time’s up,” said Zack. “I’m moving.”

“This happens to be a public phone in Marylebone,” said Quinn, “but you’re right not to trust it. Call me, same number, this evening with the details. I’ll come, alone, unarmed, with the stones, wherever. Because I’m on the lam, make it after dark. Say, eight o’clock.”

“All right,” growled Zack. “Be there.”

It was the moment Sergeant Kidd took his car’s radio mike to talk to Nigel Cramer. Minutes later every police station in the metropolitan area was receiving a description of a man and instructions for every beat officer to keep an eye open, to spot but not approach, to radio back to the police station, and tail the suspect but not intervene. There was no name appended to the all-points, nor a reason why the man was wanted.

Leaving the phone booth, Quinn walked back into Blandford Street and down to Blackwood’s Hotel. It was one of those old established inns tucked away into the side streets of London that have somehow avoided being bought and sanitized by the big chains, an ivy-covered twenty-room place with paneling and bay windows and a fire blazing in the brick hearth of a reception area furnished in rugs over uneven boards. Quinn approached the pleasant-looking girl behind the desk.

“Hi, there,” he said, with his widest grin.

She looked up and smiled back. Tall, stooping, tweed hat, Burberry, and calfskin grip-an all-American tourist.

“Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”

“Well, now, I hope so, miss. Yes, I surely do. You see, I just flew in from the States and I took your British Airways-my all-time favorite airline-and you know what they did? They lost my luggage. Yes, ma’am, sent it all the way to Frankfurt by mistake.”

Her face puckered with concern.

“Now, see here, they’re going to get it back for me, twenty-four hours tops. Only my problem is, all my package-tour details were in my small suitcase, and would you believe it, I cannot for the life of me recall where I am checked in. Spent an hour with that lady from the airline going over names of hotels in London -you know how many there are?-but no way can I recall it, not till my suitcase reaches me. So the bottom line is, I took a cab into town and the driver said this was a real nice place… er… would you by any chance have a room I could take for the night? By the way, I’m Harry Russell.”

She was quite entranced. The tall man looked so bereft at the loss of his luggage, his inability to recall where he was supposed to be staying. She watched a lot of movies and thought he looked a bit like that gentleman who was always asking people to make his day, but he talked like the man with the funny bird-feather in his hat from Dallas. It never occurred to her not to believe him, or even to ask for identification. Blackwood’s did not normally take guests with neither luggage nor reservation, but losing one’s luggage, and forgetting one’s hotel, and because of a British airline… She scanned the vacancy sheet; most of their guests were regulars up from the provinces, and a few permanent residents.

“There’s just the one, Mr. Russell-a small one at the back, I’m afraid…”

“That will suit me just fine, young lady. Oh, I can pay cash-changed me some dollars right in the airport.”

“Tomorrow morning, Mr. Russell.” She reached for an old brass key. “Up the stairs, on the second floor.”

Quinn went up the stairs with their uneven treads, found Number Eleven, and let himself in. Small, clean, and comfortable. More than adequate. He stripped to his shorts, set the alarm clock he had bought in the hardware store for 6:00 P.M., and slept.

“Well, what on earth did he do it for?” asked the Home Secretary, Sir Harry Marriott. He had just heard the full story from Nigel Cramer in his office atop the Home Office building. He had had ten minutes on the telephone with Downing Street, and the lady resident there was not very pleased.

“I suspect he did not feel he could trust someone,” said Cramer delicately.

“Not us, I hope,” said the Minister. “We’ve done everything we can.”

“No, not us,” said Cramer. “He was moving close to an exchange with this man Zack. In a kidnap case, that is always the most dangerous phase. It has to be handled with extreme delicacy. After those two leaks of privy information on radio programs, one French and one British, he seems to feel he’d prefer to handle it himself. We can’t allow that, of course. We have to find him, Home Secretary.”

Cramer still smarted from having the primacy in the handling of the negotiation process removed from his control at all, and being confined to the investigation.

“Can’t think how he escaped in the first place,” complained the Home Secretary.

“If I’d had two of my men inside that apartment, he wouldn’t have done,” Cramer reminded him.

“Yes, well, that’s water over the dam. Find the man, but quietly, discreetly.”

The Home Secretary’s private views were that if this Quinn fellow could recover Simon Cormack alone, well and good. Britain could ship them both home to America as quickly as possible. But if the Americans were going to make a mess of it, let it be their mess, not his.

At the same hour, Irving Moss received a telephone call from Houston. He jotted down the list of produce prices on offer from the vegetable gardens of Texas, put down the phone, and decoded the message. Then he whistled in amazement. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that only a slight change would need to be made to his own plans.

After the fiasco on the road outside Mill Hill, Kevin Brown had descended on the Kensington apartment in high temper. Patrick Seymour and Lou Collins came with him. Together the three senior men debriefed their two junior colleagues for several hours.

Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea explained at length what had happened that morning, how it had happened, and why they had not foreseen it. McCrea, as ever, was disarmingly apologetic.

“If he has reestablished phone contact with Zack, he’s totally out of control,” said Brown. “If they’re using a phone-booth-to-phone-booth system, there’s no way the British can get a tap on it. We don’t know what they’re up to.”

“Maybe they’re arranging to exchange Simon Cormack for the diamonds,” said Seymour.

Brown growled.

“When this thing’s over, I’m going to have that smartass.”

“If he returns with Simon Cormack,” Collins pointed out, “we’re all going to be happy to carry his bags to the airport.”

It was agreed that Somerville and McCrea would stay on at the apartment in case Quinn called in. The three phone lines would remain open to take his call, and tapped. The senior men returned to the embassy, Seymour to liaise with Scotland Yard on progress on what had now become two searches instead of one, the others to wait and listen.

Quinn woke at six, washed and shaved with the new toiletries he had bought in the High Street the previous day, had a light supper, and chanced the two-hundred-yard walk back to the phone booth in Chiltern Street at ten to eight. There was an old lady in it, but she left at five to eight. Quinn stood in the booth facing away from the street pretending to consult the telephone directories until the machine rang at two minutes after eight.

“Quinn?”

“Yeah.”

“You may be on the level about having quit them, or maybe not. If it’s a trick, you’ll pay for it.”

“No trick. Tell me where and when to show up.”

“Ten tomorrow morning. I’ll call you on this number at nine and tell you where. You’ll have just enough time to get there by ten. My men will have had the place staked out since dawn. If the fuzz shows up, or the SAS; if there’s any movement around the place at all, we’ll spot it and pull out. Simon Cormack will die a phone call later. You’ll never see us; we’ll see you, or anyone else that shows up. If you’re trying to trick me, tell your pals that. They might get one of us, or two, but it’ll be too late for the boy.”

“You got it, Zack. I come alone. No tricks.”

“No electronic devices, no direction finders, no microphones. We’ll check you out. If you’re wired up, the boy gets it.”

“Just what I said, no tricks. Just me and the diamonds.”

“Be there in that phone box at nine.”

There was a click and the line buzzed. Quinn left the booth and walked back to his hotel. He watched television for a while, then emptied his grip and worked for two hours on his purchases of that afternoon. It was two in the morning when he was satisfied.

He showered again to get rid of the telltale smell, set the clock, then lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, quite immobile, thinking. He never slept much before combat; that was why he had caught three hours’ rest during the afternoon. He catnapped just before dawn and rose when the alarm went off at seven.

The charming receptionist was on duty when he approached the desk at half past eight. He was dressed in his heavy-rimmed eyeglasses and tweed hat, and the Burberry was buttoned to the throat. He explained he had to go to Heathrow to collect his luggage, and he would like to settle up and check out.

At quarter to nine he sauntered up the street to the phone booth. There could be no old ladies this time. He stood in it for fifteen minutes, until it rang on the dot of nine. Zack’s voice was husky with his own tension.

“ Jamaica Road, Rotherhithe,” he said.

Quinn did not know the area, but he knew of it. The old docks, partly converted to smart new houses and flats for the Yuppies who worked in the City, but with areas still near-derelict, abandoned wharves and warehouses.

“Go on.”

Zack gave the directions. Off Jamaica Road down a street leading to the Thames.

“It’s a single-story steel warehouse, open at both ends. The name Babbidge still written over the doors. Pay off the cab at the top of the street. Walk down alone. Go in the south entrance. Walk to the center of the floor and wait. Anyone follows, we don’t show.”

The phone went dead. Quinn left the booth and dropped his empty calfskin grip into a trash can. He looked around for a cab. Nothing, the morning rush hour. He caught one ten minutes later in Marylebone High Street and was dropped at Marble Arch underground station. At that hour a cab would be ages getting through the twisting streets of the old City and across the Thames to Rotherhithe.

He took the underground due east to the Bank, then the Northern Line under the Thames to London Bridge. It was a main-line railway station; there were cabs waiting in front. He was in Jamaica Road fifty-five minutes after Zack had hung up.

The street he had been told to walk down was narrow, dirty, and empty. To one side, derelict tea warehouses, ripe for development, fronted the river. To the other, abandoned factories and steel sheds. He knew he was being watched from somewhere. He walked along the center of the street. The steel hangar with the faded painted name of Babbidge above one door was at the end. He turned inside.

Two hundred feet long, eighty wide. Rusted chains hung from roof girders; the floor was concrete, fouled by the windswept detritus of years of abandonment. The door he had entered by would take a pedestrian but not a vehicle; the one at the far end was wide enough and high enough to take a truck. He walked to the middle of the floor and stopped. He took off the phony eyeglasses and tweed hat and stuffed them in his pocket. He would not need them again. Either he walked out of here with a deal for Simon Cormack, or he would need a police escort anyway.

He waited an hour, quite immobile. At eleven o’clock the big Volvo appeared at the far end of the hangar and drove slowly toward him, coming to a stop with its engine running forty feet away. There were two men in the front, both masked so that only their eyes showed through the slits.

He sensed more than heard the scuffle of running shoes on concrete behind him and threw a casual glance over his shoulder. A third man stood there; black track suit without insignia, ski mask covering the head. He was alert, poised on the balls of his feet, with the submachine carbine held easily, at the port but ready for use if need be.

The passenger door of the Volvo opened and a man got out. Medium height, medium build.

He called: “Quinn?”

Zack’s voice. Unmistakable.

“You got the diamonds?”

“Right here.”

“Hand them over.”

“You got the kid, Zack?”

“Don’t be a fool. Trade him for a sack of glass pebbles? We examine the stones first. Takes time. One piece of glass, one piece of paste-you’ve blown it. If they’re okay, then you get the boy.”

“That’s what I figured. Won’t work.”

“Don’t play games with me, Quinn.”

“No games, Zack. I have to see the kid. You could get pieces of glass-you won’t, but you want to be sure. I could get a corpse.”

“You won’t.”

“I need to be sure. That’s why I have to go with you.”

Behind the mask Zack stared at Quinn in disbelief. He gave a grating laugh.

“See that man behind you? One word and he blows you away. Then we take the stones anyway.”

“You could try,” admitted Quinn. “Ever seen one of these?”

He opened his raincoat all the way down, took something that hung free from near his waist and held it up.

Zack studied Quinn and the assembly strapped to his chest over his shirt, and swore softly but violently.

From below his sternum to his waist, Quinn’s front was occupied by the flat wooden box of what had once contained liqueur chocolates. The bonbons were gone, along with the box’s lid. The tray of the box formed a flat container strapped with surgical tape across his chest.

In the center was the velour package of diamonds, framed on each side by a half-pound block of tacky beige substance. Jammed into one of the blocks was a bright-green electrical wire, the other end of which ran to one of the spring-controlled jaws of the wooden clothespin Quinn held aloft in his left hand. It went through a tiny hole bored in the wood, to emerge inside the jaws of the peg.

Also in the chocolate box was a PP3 nine-volt battery, wired to another bright green cord. In one direction the green cord linked both blocks of beige substance to the battery; in the other direction the wire ran to the opposite jaw of the clothespin. The jaws of the pin were held apart by a stub of pencil. Quinn flexed the fingers of his hand; the stub of pencil fell to the floor.

“Phony,” said Zack without conviction. “That’s not real.”

With his right hand Quinn twisted off a blob of the light-brown substance, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it across the floor to Zack. The criminal stooped, picked it up, and sniffed. The odor of marzipan filled his nostrils.

“Semtex,” he said.

“That’s Czech,” said Quinn. “I prefer RDX.”

Zack knew enough to know all explosive gelatins both look and smell like the harmless confection marzipan. There the difference ends. If his man opened fire now they would all die. There was enough plastic explosive in that box to clear the floor of the warehouse clean, lift off the roof, and scatter the diamonds on the other side of the Thames.

“Knew you were a bastard,” said Zack. “What do you want?”

“I pick up the pencil, put it back, climb into the trunk of the car, and you drive me to see the boy. No one followed me. No one will. I can’t recognize you, now or ever. You’re safe enough. When I see the kid alive, I dismantle this and give you the stones. You check them through; when you’re satisfied, you leave. The kid and I stay imprisoned. Twenty-four hours later you make an anonymous phone call. The fuzz comes to release us. It’s clean, it’s simple, and you get away.”

Zack seemed undecided. It was not his plan, but he’d been outmaneuvered and he knew it. He reached into the side pocket of his track suit and pulled out a flat black box.

“Keep your hand up and those jaws open. I’m going to check you out for wiretaps.”

He approached and ran the circuit detector over Quinn’s body from head to foot. Any live electrical circuit, of the kind contained in an emitting direction finder or wiretap, would have caused the detector to give out a shrill whoop. The battery in the bomb Quinn wore was dormant. The original briefcase would have triggered the detector.

“All right,” said Zack. He stood back, a yard away. Quinn could smell the man’s sweat. “You’re clean. Put that pencil back, and climb in the trunk.”

Quinn did as he was bid. The last light he saw was before the large rectangular lid of the trunk came down on him. Air holes had already been punched in the floor to accommodate Simon Cormack three weeks earlier. It was stuffy but bearable and, despite his length, large enough, provided he remained crouched in fetal position-which meant he nearly gagged from the smell of almonds.

Though he could not see it, the car swung in a U-turn, and the gunman ran forward and climbed into the backseat. All three men removed their masks and track-suit tops, revealing shirts, ties, and jackets. The track-suit tops went into the back, on top of the Skorpion machine pistol. When they were ready, the car glided out of the warehouse, Zack himself now back behind the wheel, and headed toward their hideaway.

It took an hour and a half to reach the attached garage of the house forty miles out of London. Zack drove always at the proper speed, his companions upright and silent in their seats. For both these men it had been their first time out of the house in three weeks.

When the garage door was closed, all three men pulled on their track suits and masks, and one went into the house to warn the fourth. Only when they were ready did Zack open the trunk of the Volvo. Quinn was stiff, and blinked in the electric light of the garage. He had removed the pencil from the jaws of the clothespin and held it in his teeth.

“All right, all right,” said Zack. “No need for that. We’re going to show you the kid. But when you go through the house you wear this.”

He held up a cowled hood. Quinn nodded. Zack pulled it over Quinn’s head. There was a chance they would try to rush him, but it would take only a fraction of a second to release his grip on the open clothespin. They led him, left hand aloft, through into the house, down a short passage and then some cellar steps. He heard three loud knocks on a door of some kind, then a pause. He heard a door creak open and he was pushed into a room. He stood there alone, hearing the rasp of bolts.

“You can take the hood off,” said Zack’s voice. He was speaking through the peephole in the cellar door. Quinn used his right hand to remove his hood. He was in a bare cellar: concrete floor, concrete walls, perhaps a wine cellar converted to a new purpose. On a steel-frame bed against the far wall sat a lanky figure, his head and shoulders covered by another black hood. There were two knocks on the door. As if on command the figure on the bed tugged off his hood.

Simon Cormack stared in amazement at the tall man near the door, his raincoat half open, holding up a clothespin in his left hand. Quinn looked back at the President’s son.

“Hi there, Simon. You okay, kid?” A voice from home.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“Well, the negotiator. We’ve been worried about you. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m… fine.”

There were three knocks on the door. The young man pulled on his hood. The door opened. Zack stood there. Masked. Armed.

“Well, there he is. Now, the diamonds.”

“Sure,” said Quinn. “You kept your deal. I keep mine.”

He replaced the pencil in the jaws of the clothespin, and let it hang from its wires to his waist. He slipped off the raincoat and ripped the wooden box from his chest. From the center he took the flat velour package of gems and held them out. Zack took them and passed them to a man in the passage behind him. His gun was still on Quinn.

“I’ll take the bomb, too,” he said. “You’re not blowing your way out of here with it.”

Quinn folded the wires and clothespin into the space left in the open box, pulled the wires out of the beige substance. The wires had no detonators attached to the ends of them. Quinn twisted a piece of the substance off one of the blocks and tasted it.

“Never could develop a taste for marzipan,” he said. “Too sweet for me.”

Zack stared at the assembly of household items lying in the box in his free hand.

“Marzipan?”

“The best that Marylebone High Street can offer.”

“I should bloody kill you, Quinn.”

“You could, but I hope you won’t. No need, Zack. You got what you want. Like I said, pros kill when they have to. Examine the diamonds in peace, make your escape, let the kid and me stay here till you phone the police.”

Zack closed the door and bolted it behind him. He spoke through the peephole.

“I’ll say this for you, Yank. You got balls.”

Then the peephole closed. Quinn turned to the figure on the bed and pulled off his hood for him. He sat down beside the boy.

“Now, I’d better bring you up to date a bit. A few more hours, if all goes well, and we should be out of here and heading for home. By the way, your mom and dad send their love.”

He ruffled the young man’s tangled hair. Simon Cormack’s eyes filled with tears and he began to cry uncontrollably. He tried to wipe them away on the sleeve of his plaid shirt, but it was no good. Quinn wrapped one arm around the thin shoulders and remembered a day long ago in the jungles along the Mekong; the first time he was ever in combat, and how he survived while others died, and how afterward the sheer relief caused the tears to come and he could not stop them.

When Simon stopped and began to bombard him with questions about home, Quinn had a chance to have a look at the youth. Bearded, moustached, dirty, but otherwise in good shape. They’d fed him and had the decency to give him fresh clothes: the plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a broad leather belt with an embossed brass buckle to hold them up-camping-shop gear but adequate against the chill of November.

There seemed to be some kind of a row going on upstairs. Quinn could vaguely hear raised voices, principal among them Zack’s. The sounds were too indistinct for him to hear the words, but the tone was clear enough. The man was angry. Quinn’s brow furrowed; he had not checked the stones himself-he had not the skill to tell real diamonds from good forgeries-but now prayed no one had been foolish enough to insert a proportion of paste among the gems.

In fact that was not the reason for the dispute. After several minutes it calmed down. In an upstairs bedroom-the kidnappers tended to avoid the downstairs rooms during daylight hours, despite the thick net curtains that screened them-the South African was seated at a table brought up there for the purpose. The table was covered by a bed sheet, the slit velvet packet lay empty on the bed, and all four men gazed in awe at a small mountain of uncut diamonds.

Using a spatula, the South African began to divide the pile into smaller ones, then smaller again, until he had separated the mountain into twenty-five small hillocks. He gestured to Zack to choose one mound. Zack shrugged, picked one in the middle-approximately a thousand stones out of the twenty-five thousand on the table.

Without a word the South African began to scoop up the other twenty-four piles and tip them one by one into a stout canvas bag with a drawstring at the top. When the selected pile alone remained, he switched on a powerful reading lamp above the table, took a jeweler’s loupe from his pocket, a pair of tweezers in his right hand, and held up the first stone to the light.

After several seconds he grunted and nodded, dropping the diamond into the open-topped canvas bag. It would take six hours to examine all thousand stones.

The kidnappers had chosen well. Top quality diamonds, even small ones, are normally “sourced” with a certificate when released to the trade by the Central Selling Organization, which dominates the world diamond trade, handling over 85 percent of stones passing from the mines to the trade. Even the U.S.S.R. with its Siberian extractions is smart enough not to break this lucrative cartel. Large stones of lesser quality are also usually sold with a certificate of provenance.

But in picking melees of medium quality gems between a fifth- and a half-carat, the kidnappers had gone for an area of the trade that is almost uncontrollable. These stones are the bread and butter of the manufacturing and retailing jewelers around the world, changing hands in packages of several hundred at a time without certification. Any manufacturing jeweler would honestly be able to take over a consignment of several hundred stones, especially if he was offered a 10 or 15 percent discount off the market price. Transferred into the settings around larger stones, they would simply disappear into the trade.

If they were genuine. Uncut diamonds do not glitter and gleam like the cut and polished article that appears at the end of the process. They look like dull pieces of glass, with a milky, opaque surface. But they cannot be confused with glass by an examiner of moderate skill and experience.

Real diamonds have a quite distinctive, soapy texture to the surface and are immune from water. If a piece of glass is dipped in water, the drops of liquid stay on the surface for several seconds; with a diamond they run off instantly, leaving the gem dry as a bone.

Moreover, under a magnifying loupe, diamonds have a perceivable triangular crystallography on the surface. The South African was looking for this patterning, to ensure they had not been foisted off with sand-blasted bottle glass or the other principal substitute, cubic zirconia.

As this scrutiny was going on, Senator Bennett R. Hapgood rose to his feet on the podium erected for the purpose in the sweeping grounds of the open-air Hancock Center in the heart of Austin and surveyed the crowd with satisfaction.

Straight ahead of him he could see the dome of the Texas State Capitol, second largest in the nation after the Capitol in Washington, gleaming in the late morning sun. The crowd might have been larger, considering the massive paid-for publicity that had presaged this important launch, but the media-local, state, and national-were well in attendance and this pleased him.

He raised his hands in a boxer’s victory salute to acknowledge the roar of applause from the cheerleaders that began as soon as the encomium that announced him had ended. As the chants of the high-kicking girls continued and the crowd felt obliged to join in, he shook his head in well-simulated disbelief at such honor and held his hands high, palms outward, in a gesture to indicate there was no need to afford an insignificant junior senator from Oklahoma such an ovation.

When the cheering died down he took the microphone and began his speech. He used no notes; he had rehearsed his words many times since receiving the invitation to inaugurate and become president of the new movement that would soon sweep America.

“My friends, my fellow Americans, everywhere.”

Though his present audience was overwhelmingly composed of Texans, he was aiming through the lens of the television camera at a much larger audience.

“We may come from different parts of this great nation of ours. We may have different backgrounds, inhabit different walks of life, possess different hopes, fears, and aspirations. But one thing we share, wherever we may be, whatever we may do-we are all, men, women, and children, patriots of this great land…”

The statement was undeniable and the cheering testified to that.

“This above all we share: We want our nation to be strong…” More cheering. “… and proud…” Ecstasy.

He talked for an hour. The evening newscasts across the United States would use between thirty seconds and one minute, according to taste. When he had finished and sat down, the breeze scarcely ruffling his snow-white, blow-dried, and spray-fixed hair above the cattleman’s suntan, the Citizens for a Strong America movement was well and truly launched.

Dedicated, in broad terms, to the regeneration of national pride and honor through strength-the notion that it had never perceivably degenerated was overlooked-the CSA would specifically oppose the Nantucket Treaty root and branch, and demand its repudiation in Congress.

The enemy to pride and honor through strength had been clearly and incontrovertibly identified; it was Communism, meaning socialism, which ran from Medicaid through welfare checks to tax increases. Those fellow travelers of Communism who sought to dupe the American people into arms control at lower levels were not identified, but implied. The campaign would be conducted at every level-regional offices, media-oriented information kits, lobbying at the national and constituency levels, and public appearances by true patriots who would speak against the treaty and its progenitor-an oblique reference to the stricken man in the White House.

By the time the crowd was invited to sample the barbecues scattered around the periphery of the park, and made available by the generosity of a local philanthropist and patriot, Plan Crockett, the second campaign to destabilize John Cormack to the point of resignation, was on the road.

Quinn and the President’s son spent a fitful night in the cellar. The boy took the bed, at Quinn’s insistence, but could not sleep. Quinn sat on the floor, his back against the hard wall, and would have dozed but for the questions from Simon.

“Mr. Quinn?”

“It’s Quinn. Just Quinn.”

“Did you see my dad? Personally?”

“Sure. He told me about Aunt Emily… and Mr. Spot.”

“How was he?”

“Fine. Worried of course. It was just after the kidnap.”

“Did you see Mom?”

“No, she was with the White House doctor. Worried but okay.”

“Do they know I’m okay?”

“As of two days ago, I told them you were still alive. Try and get some sleep.”

“Okay… When do you figure we’ll get out of here?”

“Depends. In the morning, I hope, they’ll quit and run. If they make a phone call twelve hours later, the British police should be here minutes afterward. It depends on Zack.”

“Zack? He’s the leader?”

“Yep.”

At two in the morning the overstrung youth finally ran out of questions and dozed. Quinn stayed awake, straining to identify the muffled sounds from upstairs. It was almost 4:00 A.M. when the three loud knocks came at the door.

Simon swung his legs off the bed and whispered, “The hoods.” Both men pulled oft the cowled hoods to prevent their seeing the abductors. When they were blindfolded, Zack entered the cellar with two men behind him. Each carried a pair of handcuffs. He nodded toward the two captives. They were turned around and their wrists cuffed behind their backs.

What they did not know was that the examination of the diamonds had finished before midnight, to the complete satisfaction of Zack and his accomplices. The four men had spent the night scouring their living quarters from top to bottom. Every surface that might have had a fingerprint was wiped; every trace they could think of, expunged. They did not bother to dismantle the cellar of its bolted-down bed or the length of chain that had tethered Simon to it for over three weeks. Their concern was not that others might come here one day and identify the place as having been the kidnappers’ hideout; rather, that those examiners would never discover who the kidnappers had been.

Simon Cormack was detached from his ankle chain and both men were led upstairs, through the house, and into the garage. The Volvo awaited. Its trunk was stuffed with the carryalls of the kidnappers and had no room left. Quinn was forced into the backseat and down to the floor, then covered with a blanket. He was uncomfortable but optimistic.

If the kidnappers had intended to kill them both, the cellar would have been the place. He had proposed they be left in the cellar, to be liberated later by the police following a phone call from abroad. That was evidently not to be. He guessed, rightly, that the kidnappers did not want their hideout discovered, at least not yet. So he lay hunched on the floor of the car and breathed as best he could through the thick hood.

He felt the depression of the seat cushions above him as Simon Cormack was made to lie along the backseat. He, too, was covered by a blanket. The two smallest men climbed in the back, sitting on the edge of the seat with the slim body of Simon behind their backs, their feet on Quinn. The giant climbed into the passenger seat; Zack took the wheel.

At his command all four took off their masks and track-suit tops and threw them through the windows onto the garage floor. Zack started the engine and operated the door-opener. He backed out into the driveway, closed the garage door, reversed into the street, and drove off. No one saw the car. It was still dark, with another two and a half hours to dawn.

The car ran steadily for about two hours. Quinn had no idea where he was or where he was going. Eventually (it would later be established it must have been within a few minutes of six-thirty), the car slowed to a halt. No one had spoken during the drive. They all sat bolt upright in their seats, in business suits and ties, and remained silent. When they stopped, Quinn heard the rear near-side door open and the two sets of feet on his body were removed. Someone dragged him out of the car by the feet. He felt wet grass under his cuffed hands, knew he was on the grassy edge of a road somewhere. He scrambled to his knees, then his feet, and stood up. He heard two men reentering the rear of the car and the slamming of the door.

“Zack,”he called. “What about the boy?”

Zack was standing on the road by the driver’s open door, looking at him across the roof of the car.

“Ten miles up the road,” he said, “by the roadside, same as you.”

There was the purr of a powerful engine and the crunch of gravel under wheels. Then the car was gone. Quinn felt the chill of a November morning on his shirt-sleeved torso. The moment the car was gone, he got to work.

Hard labor in the vineyards had kept him in shape. His hips were narrow, like those of a man fifteen years his junior, and his arms were long. When the handcuffs went on he had braced the sinews of his wrists to secure the maximum space when he relaxed. Tugging the cuffs down over his hands as far as they would go, he worked his cuffed wrists down his back and around his behind. Then he sat in the grass, brought his wrists up under his knees, kicked off his shoes, and worked his legs through his locked arms, one after the other. With his wrists now in front of him he tore off the hood.

The road was long, narrow, straight, and utterly deserted in the predawn half-light. He sucked in lungsful of the cool fresh air and looked around for human habitation. There was none. He pulled on his shoes, rose, and began to jog along the road in the direction the car had taken.

After two miles he came to a garage on the left, a small affair with old-style hand-operated pumps and a little office. Three kicks brought the door down and he found the telephone on a shelf behind the pump attendant’s chair. He lifted the receiver two-handed, leaned his ear against it to make sure he had a dial tone, laid it down, dialed 01 for London, and then the flash line in the Kensington apartment.

In London the chaos took three seconds to get into full gear. A British engineer in the Kensington exchange came jolting out of his chair and began to search for a lock on the transmitting number. He got it in nine seconds.

In the basement of the U.S. embassy the duty ELINT man gave a yell as his warning light blazed red in his face and the sound of a phone ringing came into his headset. Kevin Brown, Patrick Seymour, and Lou Collins ran into the listening post from the cots where they had been dozing.

“Throw sound onto the wall speaker,” snapped Seymour.

In the apartment Sam Somerville had been dozing on the couch, once so favored by Quinn because it was right next to the flash phone. McCrea was asleep in one of the armchairs. It was their second night like this.

When the phone rang, Sam jolted awake but for two seconds did not register which phone was ringing. The pulsing red bulb on the flash line told her. She picked it up at the third ring.

“Yes?”

“Sam?”

There was no mistaking the deep voice at the other end.

“Oh, Quinn!” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Screw Quinn. What about the boy?” fumed Brown, unheard beneath the embassy.

“Fine. I’ve been released. Simon’s due for release about now, maybe already. But farther up the road.”

“Quinn, where are you?”

“I don’t know. In a beat-up garage on a long stretch of road-the number on this phone is unreadable.”

“Bletchley number,” said the engineer in the Kensington exchange. “Here we are… got it. Seven-four-five-oh-one.”

His colleague was already talking to Nigel Cramer, who had spent the night at Scotland Yard.

“Where the hell is it?” he hissed.

“Hang about… here, Tubbs Cross Garage, on the A.421 between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham.”

At the same time Quinn saw an invoice pad belonging to the garage. It bore the address of the garage also, and he relayed it to Sam. Seconds later the line was dead. Sam and Duncan McCrea raced down to the street, where Lou Collins had left a CIA car should the listeners in the apartment need transport. Then they were off, McCrea driving and Sam map-reading.

From Scotland Yard, Nigel Cramer and six officers set off in two patrol cars, their sirens howling up Whitehall and down the Mall to pick up Park Lane and the road north out of London. Two big limousines sped out of Grosvenor Square at the same time, bearing Kevin Brown, Lou Collins, Patrick Seymour, and six of Brown’s Washington-based FBI men.

The A.421 between Fenny Stratford and the county town of Buckingham twelve miles farther west is a long, almost straight road devoid of towns or villages, running through largely flat agricultural country studded by the occasional clump of trees. Quinn jogged steadily west, the direction taken by the car. The first light of day began to filter through gray clouds above, giving visibility that rose steadily to three hundred yards. That was when he saw the thin figure jogging toward him in the gloom, and heard the roar of engines coming up fast behind him. He turned his head: a British police car, one of two, two black American limousines just ahead of them, and an unmarked Company car behind them. The leading car saw him and started to slow; due to the narrowness of the road the ones behind slowed as well.

No one in the cars had seen the tottering figure farther down the road. Simon Cormack had also worked his wrists around to the front of his body, and had covered five miles to Quinn’s four and a half. But he had made no phone call. Weakened by his captivity, dazed by his release, he was running slowly, rolling from side to side. The lead car from the embassy was beside Quinn.

“Where’s the boy?” roared Brown from the front seat.

Nigel Cramer leaped from the red-and-white squad car and shouted the same question. Quinn stopped, sucked air into his lungs, and nodded forward along the road.

“There,” he gasped.

That was when they saw him. Already out from their cars and on the road, the group of Americans and the British police officers began to run toward the figure two hundred yards away. Behind Quinn the car of McCrea and Sam Somervilleswerved to a stop.

Quinn had stopped; there was nothing more he could do. He felt Sam run up behind him and grab his arm. She said something but he could never later recall what it was.

Simon Cormack, seeing his rescuers approaching him, slowed until he was hardly jogging at all. Just under a hundred yards separated him from the police officers of two nations when he died.

The witnesses would say later that the searingly brilliant white flash seemed to last for several seconds. The scientists would tell them it actually lasted for three milliseconds, but the human retina retains such a flash for some seconds afterward. The fireball that came with the flash lasted for half a second and enveloped the whole stumbling figure.

Four of the watchers, experienced men, not easy to shock, later had to undergo therapy. They described how the figure of the youth was picked up and hurled twenty yards toward them, like a rag doll, first flying, then bouncing and rolling in a twisted assembly of disjointed limbs. They all felt the blast wave.

Most would agree, with hindsight, that everything seemed to happen in slow motion, during and after the murder. Recollections came in bits and pieces, and the patient interrogators would listen, and note down the bits and pieces until they had a sequence, usually overlapping in parts.

There was Nigel Cramer, rock-still, pale as a sheet, repeating “Oh, God, oh, my God” over and over again. A Mormon FBI man dropped to his knees at the roadside and began to pray. Sam Somerville screamed once, buried her face in Quinn’s back, and began to cry. There was Duncan McCrea, behind both of them, on his knees, head down over a ditch, hands deep in the water supporting his weight, retching up his guts.

Quinn, they would say, was standing still, having been overtaken by the main group but able to see what had happened up the road, shaking his head in disbelief and murmuring, “No… no… no.”

It was a gray-haired British sergeant who was the first to break the spell of immobility and shock, moving forward toward the tangled body sixty yards away. He was followed by several FBI men, among them Kevin Brown, pale and shaking, then Nigel Cramer and three more men from the Yard. They looked at the body in silence. Then background and training took over.

“Clear the area, please,” said Nigel Cramer. It was in a tone no one was prepared to argue. “Tread very carefully.”

They all walked back toward the cars.

“Sergeant, get on to the Yard. I want the CEO up here, by chopper, within the hour. Photographs, forensics, the best team Fulham have got. You”-to the men in the second car-“get up and down the road. Block it off. Raise the local boys-I want barriers beyond the garage that way and up to Buckingham that way. No one enters this stretch of road until further notice except those I authorize.”

The officers designated to take the stretch of road beyond the body had to walk, crossing into the fields for a while to avoid treading on fragments, then running up the road to head off approaching cars. The second squad car went east toward Tubbs Cross Garage to block the road in the other direction. The first squad car was used for its radio.

Within sixty minutes police out of Buckingham to the west and Bletchley to the east would seal the road completely with steel barriers. A screen of local officers would fan out across the fields to fend off the curious seeking to approach cross-country. At least this time there would be no press for a while. They could put the road closing down to a burst water main-enough to deter the local small-town reporters.

Within fifty minutes the first Metropolitan Police helicopter swung in across the fields, guided by the radio of the squad car, to deposit on the road behind the cars a small, birdlike man called Dr. Barnard, the Chief Explosives Officer of the Met., a man who, thanks to the bomb outrages of the I.R.A. in mainland Britain, had examined more explosion scenes than he would have wished. He brought with him, apart from his “bag of tricks,” as he liked to call it, an awesome reputation.

They said of Dr. Barnard that from fragments so minuscule as almost to deceive a magnifying glass, he could reconstitute a bomb to the point of identifying the factory that had made its components and the man who had assembled it. He listened to “Nigel Cramer for several minutes, nodded, and gave his own orders to the dozen men who had clambered out of the second and third helicopters-the team from the Fulham forensic laboratories.

Impassively they set about their work, and the machinery of post-crime science rolled into action.

Long before any of this, Kevin Brown had returned from looking at the corpse of Simon Cormack to the point where Quinn still stood. He was gray with shock and rage.

“You bastard,” he grated. Both tall men, they were eyeball to eyeball. “This is your fault. One way or another you caused this, and I’m going to make you pay for it.”

The punch, when it came, surprised the two younger FBI men by Brown’s side, who took his arms and tried to calm him down. Quinn may have seen the punch coming. Whatever, he made no attempt to dodge it. Still with his hands cuffed in front of him, he took it full on the jaw. It was enough to knock him backwards; then his head caught the edge of the roof of the car behind him, and he went down unconscious.

“Put him in the car,” growled Brown when he had recovered his self-control.

There was no way Cramer could hold the American group. Seymour and Collins had diplomatic immunity; he let them all depart back to London in their two cars fifteen minutes later, warning them that he would want Quinn, for whom there was no diplomatic status, available for the taking of lengthy statements in London. Seymour gave his word Quinn would be available. When they had gone, Cramer used the phone in the garage to put through a call to Sir Harry Marriott at his home and give him the news; the phone was more secure than a police radio band.

The politician was shocked to his core. But he was still a politician.

“Mr. Cramer, were we, in the form of the British authorities, in any way involved in all this?”

“No, Home Secretary. From the time Quinn ran out of that apartment, this was wholly his affair. He handled it the way he wanted to, without involving us or his own people. He chose to play a lone hand, and it has failed.”

“I see,” said the Home Secretary. “I shall have to inform the Prime Minister at once. Of all aspects.” He meant that the British authorities had had no hand in the affair at all. “Keep the media out of it at all costs for the moment. At worst we will have to say that Simon Cormack has been found murdered. But not yet. And, of course, keep me in touch on every development, no matter how small.”

This time the news reached Washington from its own sources in London. Patrick Seymour telephoned Vice President Odell personally, on a secure line. Thinking he was taking a call from the FBI liaison man in London to announce Simon Cormack’s release, Michael Odell did not mind the hour-5:00 A.M. in Washington. When he heard what Seymour had to tell him, he went white.

“But how? Why? In God’s name, why?”

“We don’t know, sir,” said the voice from London. “The boy had been released safe and sound. He was running toward us, ninety yards away, when it happened. We don’t even know what ‘it’ was. But he’s dead, Mr. Vice President.”

The committee was convened within the hour. Every member felt ill with shock when told the news. The question was, who should tell the President. As chairman of the committee, the man saddled with the task of “Get my son back for me” twenty-four days earlier, it fell to Michael Odell. With a heavy heart he walked from the West Wing to the White House living quarters.

President Cormack did not need to be awakened. He had slept little these past three and a half weeks, often waking of his own accord in the predawn darkness, and walking through to his personal study to attempt to concentrate on papers of state. Hearing the Vice President was downstairs and wished to see him, President Cormack went into the Yellow Oval Room and said he would greet Odell there.

The Yellow Oval Room, on the second floor, is a spacious reception room between the study and the Treaty Room. Beyond its windows, looking over the South Lawn, is the Truman Balcony. Both are at the geometric center of the White House, beneath the cupola and right above the South Portico.

Odel entered. President Cormack was in the center of the room, facing him. Odell was silent. He could not bring himself to say it. The air of expectancy on the President’s face drained away.

“Well, Michael?” he said dully.

“He… Simon… has been found. I’m afraid he is dead.”

President Cormack did not move, not a muscle. His voice when it came was flat; clear but emotionless.

“Leave me, please.”

Odell turned and left, moving into the Center Hall. He closed the door and turned toward the stairs. From behind him he heard a single cry, like that of a wounded animal in mortal pain. He shuddered and walked on.

Secret Service agent Lepinsky was at the end of the hall, by a desk against the wall, a raised phone in his hand.

“It’s the British Prime Minister, Mr. Vice President,” he said.

“I’ll take it. Hello, this is Michael Odell. Yes, Prime Minister, I’ve just told him. No, ma’am, he’s not taking any calls right now. Any calls.”

There was a pause on the line.

“I understand,” she said quietly. Then: “Do you have a pencil and paper?”

Odell gestured to Lepinsky, who produced his duty notebook. Odell scribbled what he was asked.

President Cormack got the slip of paper at the hour most Washingtonians, unaware of what had happened, were drinking their first cup of coffee. He was still in a silk robe, in his office, staring dully at the gray morning beyond the windows. His wife slept on; she would wake and hear it later. He nodded as the servant left and flicked open the folded sheet from Lepinsky’s notebook.

It said just: Second Samuel XVIII 33.

After several minutes he rose and walked to the shelf where he kept some personal books, among them the family Bible, bearing the signatures of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather. He found the verse toward the end of the Second Book of Samuel.

“And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”