The Negotiator

Chapter 11

Dr. Barnard declined to use the services of the hundred young police constables offered by the Thames Valley Police in the search for clues on the road and the verges. He took the view that mass searches were fine for discovering the hidden body of a murdered child, or even a murder weapon like a knife, gun, or bludgeon.

But for this work, skill, patience, and extreme delicacy were needed. He used only his trained specialists from Fulham.

They taped off an area one hundred yards in diameter ’round the scene of the explosion; it turned out to be overkill. All the evidence was eventually found inside a circle of thirty yards’ diameter. Literally on hands and knees, his men crawled over every inch of the designated area with plastic bags and tweezers.

Every tiny fragment of fiber, denim, and leather was picked up and dropped in the bags. Some had hair, tissue, or other matter attached to them. Smeared grass stems were included. Ultrafine-tuned metal detectors covered every square centimeter of the road, the ditches, and the surrounding fields, yielding inevitably a collection of nails, tin cans, rusty screws, nuts, bolts, and a corroded plowshare.

The sorting and separation would come later. Eight big plastic garbage cans were filled with clear plastic bags and flown to London. The oval area from where Simon Cormack had been standing when he died to the point where he stopped rolling, at the heart of the larger circle, was treated with special care. It was four hours before the body could be removed.

First it was photographed from every conceivable angle, in long-shot, mid-shot, and extreme close-up. Only when every part of the grass verge around the body had been scoured, and only the piece of turf actually under the body remained to be examined, would Dr. Barnard allow human feet to walk on the ground to approach the body.

Then a body bag was laid beside the corpse, and what remained of Simon Cormack was gently lifted from where it lay and placed on the spread-out plastic. The bag was folded over him and zipped up, then placed on a stretcher, into a pannier beneath a helicopter, and flown to the post-mortem laboratory.

The death had taken place in the countryside of Buckinghamshire, one of the three counties comprising the Thames Valley Police area. So it was that in death Simon Cormack returned to Oxford, to the Radcliffe Infirmary, whose facilities are a match even for Guy’s Hospital, London.

From Guy’s came a friend and colleague of Dr. Barnard, a man who had worked with the Chief Explosives Officer of the Metropolitan on many cases and had formed a close professional relationship with him. Indeed, they were often regarded as a team, though they followed different disciplines. Dr. Ian Macdonald was a senior consultant pathologist at the great London hospital and also a retained Home Office pathologist, and was usually asked for by Scotland Yard if he was available. It was he who received the body of Simon Cormack at the Radcliffe.

Throughout the day, as the men crawled over the grass by the side of the A.421, continuous consultation took place between London and Washington regarding the release of the news to the media and the world. It was agreed that the statement should come from the White House, with immediate confirmation in London. The statement would simply say that an exchange had been arranged in conditions of total secrecy, as demanded by the kidnappers, an unspecified ransom had been paid, and that they had broken their word. The British authorities, responding to an anonymous phone call, had gone to a roadside in Buckinghamshire and there found Simon Cormack dead.

Needless to say, the condolences of the British monarch, government, and people to the President and to the American people were without limit of sincerity or depth, and a search of unparalleled vigor was now in progress to identify, find, and arrest the culprits.

Sir Harry Marriott was adamant that the phrase referring to the arrangement of the exchange should include an extra seven words: “between the American authorities and the kidnappers.” The White House, albeit reluctantly, agreed to this.

“The media are going to have our hides,” growled Odell.

“Well, you wanted Quinn,” said Philip Kelly.

“Actually, you wanted Quinn,” snapped Odell at Lee Alexander and David Weintraub, who sat with them in the Situation Room. “By the way, where is he now?”

“Being detained,” said Weintraub. “The British refused to allow him to be lodged on sovereign U.S. territory inside the embassy. Their MI-5 people have lent us a country house in Surrey. He’s there.”

“Well, he has a hell of a lot of explaining to do,” said Hubert Reed. “The diamonds are gone, the kidnappers are gone, and that poor boy is dead. How exactly did he die?”

“The Brits are trying to find that out,” said Brad Johnson. “Kevin Brown says it was almost as if he was hit by a bazooka, right in front of them, but they saw nothing like a bazooka. Or he stepped on a land mine of some sort.”

“On a roadside in the middle of nowhere?” asked Stannard.

“As I told you, the post-mortem will indicate what happened.”

“When the British have finished interviewing him, we have to have him back over here,” said Kelly. “We need to talk to him.”

“The Deputy Assistant Director of your Division is doing that already,” said Weintraub.

“If he refuses to come, can we force him to return?” asked Bill Walters.

“Yes, Mr. Attorney General, we can,” said Kelly. “Kevin Brown believes he may have been involved in some way. We don’t know how… yet. But if we issued a material-witness warrant, I believe the British would put him on the plane.”

“We’ll give it another twenty-four hours, see what the British come up with,” said Odell finally.

The Washington statement was issued at 5:00 P.M.local time and rocked the United States as little had done since the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The media went into a furor, not helped by Press Secretary Craig Lipton’s refusal to answer the two hundred supplementary questions they had to ask. Who had arranged the ransom, how much was it, in what form, how had it been handed over, by whom, why had no attempt been made to arrest the kidnappers at the handover, was the package or packet of ransom money bugged, had the kidnappers been tracked too clumsily and killed the boy as they fled, what level of negligence had been shown by the authorities, did the White House blame Scotland Yard, if not why not, why did the U.S. not leave it to Scotland Yard in the first place, had any descriptions of the kidnappers been obtained, were the British police closing in on them…? The questions went on and on. Craig Lipton definitely decided to resign before he was lynched.

The time in London was five hours later than Washington’s but the reaction was similar: Late TV shows were interrupted by news flashes that left the nation stunned. The switchboards at Scotland Yard, the Home Office, Downing Street, and the American embassy were jammed. Teams of journalists just about to go home around 10:00 P.M. were told to work through the night as fresh editions were prepared for issue as late as 5:00 A.M. By dawn they were staking out the Radcliffe Infirmary, Grosvenor Square, Downing Street, and Scotland Yard. In chartered helicopters they hovered over the empty stretch of road between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham to photograph, at first light, the bare tarmac and the last few barriers and police cars parked there.

Few slept. Impelled by a personal plea for haste from Sir Harry Marriott himself, Dr. Barnard and his team worked through the night. The forensic scientist had finally quit the road as night fell, certain it had nothing more to yield. Ten hours of scouring had left the thirty-yard circle cleaner than any piece of ground in England. What that ground had yielded now reposed in a series of gray plastic drums along the wall of his laboratory. For him and his team it was the night of the microscopes.

Nigel Cramer spent the night in a plain, bare room in a Tudor grange, screened from the nearest road by a belt of trees, in the heart of Surrey. Despite its elegant exterior aspect, the old house was well equipped for interrogation. The British Security Service used its ancient cellars as a training school for such delicate matters.

Brown, Collins, and Seymour were present, at their own insistence. Cramer did not object-his brief from Sir Harry Marriott was to cooperate with the Americans wherever and whenever possible. Any information Quinn had would go to both governments anyway. A relay of tapes filled themselves in the machines on the table beside them.

Quinn had a long and livid bruise on the side of his jaw, a lump and a Band-Aid on the back of his head. He was still in his shirt, now filthy, and slacks. Shoes had been removed, along with belt and tie. He was unshaven and looked exhausted. But he answered the questions calmly and clearly.

Cramer started at the beginning: Why had he quit the flat in Kensington? Quinn explained. Brown glowered at him.

“Did you have any reason, Mr. Quinn, to believe that a person or persons unknown might have attempted to interfere in the ransom exchange, to the effect of endangering the safety of Simon Cormack?” Nigel Cramer was phrasing it by the book.

“Instinct,” said Quinn.

“Just instinct, Mr. Quinn?”

“May I ask you a question, Mr. Cramer?”

“I don’t promise to answer it.”

“The attaché case with the diamonds in it. It was bugged, wasn’t it?”

He got his answer from the four faces in the room.

“If I had shown up at any exchange with that case,” said Quinn, “they’d have spotted it and killed the boy.”

“They did that anyway, smartass,” Brown grunted.

“Yes, they did,” said Quinn grimly. “I admit I did not think they would do that.”

Cramer took him back to the moment he left the flat. He told them about Marylebone, the night at the hotel, the terms Zack had laid down for the rendezvous, and how he had just made the deadline. For Cramer the meat was in the head-to-head in the abandoned factory. Quinn gave him the car, a Volvo sedan, and its registration number; both men surmised, rightly, that the plates would have been changed for that meeting, then changed back again. Ditto the road-tax disc stuck in the windshield. These men had shown they were careful.

He could describe the men only as he had seen them, masked, in shapeless track suits. One he had not seen at all, the fourth, who had stayed at the hideout ready to kill Simon Cormack at a phone call or a no-show by his colleagues by a certain time. He described the physiques of the two men he had seen upright, Zack and the gunman. Medium height, medium build. Sorry.

He identified the Skorpion submachine gun, and of course the Babbidge warehouse. Cramer left the room to make a phone call. A second team of forensic men from Fulham visited the warehouse before dawn and spent the morning there. It yielded nothing but a small ball of marzipan and a set of perfect tire tracks in the dust. These would eventually identify the abandoned Volvo, but not for two weeks.

The house used by the kidnappers was of particular interest. A gravel drive-Quinn had heard the crunching of the gravel-about ten yards from front gate to garage doors; automatic door-opening system, attached garage; a house with a concrete cellar beneath it-the real estate agents could help there. But direction from London-nothing. Quinn had been in the trunk the first time, and masked on the floor of the backseat the second. Driving time, one and a half hours the first time, two hours the second. If they drove by an indirect route, that could be anywhere; right in the heart of London or up to fifty miles in any direction.

“There’s nothing we can charge him with, Home Secretary,” Cramer reported to the Minister early next morning. “We can’t even detain him any longer. And frankly, I don’t think we should. I don’t believe he was criminally involved in the death.”

“Well, he seems to have made a complete balls of it,” said Sir Harry. The pressure from Downing Street for some new lead was becoming intense.

“So it would seem,” said the police officer. “But if those criminals were determined to kill the boy, and it seems with hindsight that they were, they could have done it any time, before or after receiving the diamonds, in the cellar, on the road, or on some lonely Yorkshire moorland. And Quinn with him. The mystery is why they let Quinn live, and why they first released the boy and then killed him. It’s almost as if they were looking to make themselves the most hated and hunted men on earth.”

“Very well,” sighed the Home Secretary. “We have no further interest in Mr. Quinn. Are the Americans still holding him?”

“Technically, he’s their voluntary guest,” said Cramer carefully.

“Well, they can let him go back to Spain when they wish.”

While they were talking, Sam Somerville was pleading with Kevin Brown. Collins and Seymour were present, in the manor’s elegant drawing room.

“What the hell do you want to see him for?” asked Brown. “He failed. He’s a busted flush.”

“Look,” she said, “in those three weeks I got closer to him than anybody. If he’s holding out at all, on anything, maybe I could get it out of him, sir.”

Brown seemed undecided.

“Couldn’t do any harm,” said Seymour.

Brown nodded. “He’s downstairs. Thirty minutes.”

That afternoon Sam Somerville took the regular flight from Heathrow to Washington, landing just after dark.

When Sam Somerville took off from Heathrow, Dr. Barnard was sitting in his laboratory at Fulham staring at a small collection of pieces of debris spread on a crisp white sheet of paper across a tabletop. He was very tired. Since the urgent call to his small London house just after dawn the previous day, he had not stopped working. Much of that work was a strain on the eyes, peering through magnifying glasses and into microscopes. But if he rubbed his eyes that late afternoon, it was more from surprise than exhaustion.

He now knew what had happened, how it had happened, and what had been the effect. Stains on fabric and leather had yielded to chemical analysis to reveal the exact chemical components of the explosive; the extent of burn- and impact-deterioration had shown him how much was used, where it had been placed, and how it had been triggered. There were some pieces missing, of course. Some would never appear, vaporized, lost forever, having ceased to exist. Others would emerge from the ruin of the body itself, and he had been in constant contact with Ian Macdonald, who was still at work in Oxford. The yield from Oxford would arrive shortly. But he knew what he was looking at, though to the untrained eye it was just a pile of minuscule fragments.

Some of them made up the remnants of a tiny battery, source identified. Others were tiny pieces of polyvinyl-chloride insulated plastic covering, source identified. Strands of copper wire, source identified. And a mess of twisted brass bonded with what had once been a small but efficient pulse-receiver. No detonator. He was 100 percent sure, but he wanted to be 200 percent. He might have to go back to the road and start again. One of his assistants poked his head around the door.

“Dr. Macdonald on the line from the Radcliffe.”

The pathologist had also been working since the previous afternoon, at a task many would find horribly gruesome but which to him was more full of detective fascination than any other he could imagine. He lived for his profession, so much so that instead of limiting himself to examining the remains of bomb-blast victims, he attended the courses and lectures available only to a very few on bomb-making and disarming offered at Fort Halstead. He wished to know not simply that he was looking for something, but what it was and what it looked like.

He had begun by studying the photographs for two hours before he even touched the cadaver itself. Then he carefully removed the clothes, not relying on an assistant but doing it himself. The running shoes came first, then the ankle socks. The rest was snipped off, using fine scissors. Each item was bagged and sent direct to Barnard in London. The yield from the clothes had reached Fulham by sunrise.

When the body was naked, it was X-rayed from top to toe. Macdonald studied the prints for an hour and identified forty nonhuman particles. Then he swabbed the body down with a sticky powder, which removed a dozen infinitely small particles stuck to the skin. Some were crumbs of grass and mud; some were not. A second police car took this grim harvest to Dr. Barnard in Fulham.

He did an external autopsy, dictating into a recorder in his measured Scottish lilt. He only began to cut just before dawn. The first task was to excise from the cadaver all the “relevant tissue.” This happened to be all of the middle section of the body, which had lost almost everything from and including the bottom two ribs down to the top of the pelvis. Within the excised matter were the small particles that remained of eight inches of lower spine, which had come straight through the body and the ventral wall to lodge in the front of the jeans.

The autopsy-establishment of cause of death-was no problem. It was massive explosive injury to spine and abdomen. The full post-mortem needed more. Dr. Macdonald had the excised matter X-rayed again, in much finer grain. There were things in there, all right, some so small they would defy tweezers. The excised flesh and bone was finally “digested” in a brew of enzymes to create a thick soup of dissolved human tissue, bone included. It was the centrifuge that yielded the last cull, a final ounce of bits of metal.

When this ounce was available for examination Dr. Macdonald selected the largest piece, the one he had spotted in the second X-ray, deeply impacted into a piece of bone and buried inside the young man’s spleen. He studied it for a while, whistled, and rang Fulham.

Barnard came on the line. “Ian, glad you called. Anything else for me?”

“Aye. There’s something here you have got to see. If I’m right, it’s something I’ve never seen before. I think I know what it is, but I can hardly believe it.”

“Use a squad car. Send it now,” said Barnard grimly.

Two hours later the men were speaking again. It was Barnard who called this time.

“If you were thinking what I believe you were thinking, you were right,” he said. Barnard had his 200 percent.

“It couldn’t come from anywhere else?” asked Macdonald.

“Nope. There’s no way one of these gets into anybody’s hands but the manufacturer’s.”

“Bloody hell,” said the pathologist quietly.

“Mum’s the word, matey,” said Barnard. “Ours but to do or die, right? I’m having my report with the Home Secretary in the morning. Can you do the same?”

Macdonald glanced at his watch. Thirty-six hours since he had been roused. Another twelve to go.

“Sleep no more. Barnard does murder sleep,” he parodied Macbeth. “All right, on his desk by breakfast.”

That evening he released the body, or both parts of it, to the coroner’s officer. In the morning the Oxford coroner would open and adjourn the inquest, enabling him to release the body to the next of kin, in this case Ambassador Fairweather in person, representing President John Cormack.

As the two British scientists wrote their reports through the night, Sam Somerville was received, at her own request, by the committee in the Situation Room beneath the West Wing. She had appealed right up to the Director of the Bureau, and after she had telephoned Vice President Odell, he had agreed to bring her along.

When she entered the room they were all already seated. Only David Weintraub was missing, away in Tokyo talking to his opposite number there. She felt intimidated; these men were the most powerful in the land, men you only saw on television or in the press. She took a deep breath, held her head up, and walked forward to the end of the table. Vice President Odell gestured to a chair.

“Sit down, young lady.”

“We understand you wanted to ask us to let Mr. Quinn go free,” said Attorney General Bill Walters. “May we ask why?”

Sam took a deep breath. “Gentlemen, I know some may suspect Mr. Quinn was in some way involved in the death of Simon Cormack. I ask you to believe me. I have been in close contact with him in that apartment for three weeks and I’m convinced he genuinely tried to secure that young man’s release safe and unharmed.”

“Then why did he run?” asked Philip Kelly. He did not appreciate having his junior agents brought to the committee to speak for themselves.

“Because there were two freak news leaks in the forty-eight hours before he went. Because he had spent three weeks trying to gain that animal’s trust and he had done it. Because he was convinced Zack was about to scuttle and run, if he couldn’t get to him alone and unarmed, without a shadow from either the British or American authorities.”

No one failed to grasp that by “American authorities” she meant Kevin Brown. Kelly scowled.

“There remains a suspicion he could have been involved in some way,” he said. “We don’t know how, but it needs to be checked out.”

“He couldn’t, sir,” said Sam. “If he had proposed himself as the negotiator, maybe. But the choice to ask him was made right here. He told me he didn’t even want to come. And from the moment Mr. Weintraub saw him in Spain he has been in someone’s company twenty-four hours a day. Every word he spoke to the kidnappers, you listened to.”

“Except those missing forty-eight hours before he showed up on a roadside,” said Morton Stannard.

“But why should he make a deal with the kidnappers during that time?” she asked. “Except for the return of Simon Cormack.”

“Because two million dollars is a lot of money to a poor man,” suggested Hubert Reed.

“But if he had wanted to disappear with the diamonds,” she persisted, “we’d still be looking for him now.”

“Well,” said Odell unexpectedly, “he did go to the kidnappers alone and unarmed-except for some goddam marzipan. If he didn’t know them already, that takes grit.”

“And yet Mr. Brown’s suspicions may not be entirely unfounded,” said Jim Donaldson. “He could have made his contact, struck a deal. They kill the boy, leave Quinn alive, take the stones. Later they meet up and split the booty.”

“Why should they?” asked Sam, bolder now, with the Vice President apparently on her side. “They had the diamonds. They could have killed him too. Even if they didn’t, why should they split with him? Would you trust them?”

None of them would trust such men an inch. There was silence as they thought it over.

“If he’s allowed to go, what has he in mind? Back to his vineyard in Spain?” asked Reed.

“No, sir. He wants to go after them. He wants to hunt them down.”

“Hey, hold on, Agent Somerville,” said Kelly indignantly. “That’s Bureau work. Gentlemen, we have no need of discretion to protect the life of Simon Cormack anymore. He’s been murdered, and that murder is indictable under our laws, just like that murder on the cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. We’re putting teams into Britain and Europe with the cooperation of all the national police authorities. We want them and we’re going to get them. Mr. Brown controls the operations out of London.”

Sam Somerville played her last card.

“But, gentlemen, if Quinn was not involved, he got closer than anyone to them, saw them, spoke to them. If he was involved, then he will know where to go. That could be our best lead.”

“You mean, let him run and tail him?” asked Walters.

“No, sir. I mean let me go with him.”

“Young lady”-Michael Odell leaned forward to see her better-“do you know what you’re saying? This man has killed before-okay, in combat. If he’s involved, you could end up very dead.”

“I know that, Mr. Vice President. That’s the point. I believe he’s innocent and I’m prepared to take the risk.”

“Mmmmm. All right. Stay in town, Miss Somerville. We’ll let you know. We need to discuss this-in private,” said Odell.

Home Secretary Marriott spent a disturbed morning reading the reports of Drs. Barnard and Macdonald. Then he took them both to Downing Street. He was back in the Home Office by lunchtime. Nigel Cramer was waiting for him.

“You’ve seen these?” asked Sir Harry.

“I’ve read copies, Home Secretary.”

“This is appalling, utterly dismaying. If this ever gets out… Do you know where Ambassador Fairweather is?”

“Yes. He’s at Oxford. The coroner released the body to him an hour ago. I believe Air Force One is standing by at Upper Heyford to fly the casket back to the States. The Ambassador will see it depart, then return to London.”

“Mmm. I’ll have to ask the Foreign Office to set up an interview. I want no copies of this to anybody. Ghastly business. Any news on the manhunt?”

“Not a lot, sir. Quinn made plain that none of the other two kidnappers he saw uttered a word. It could be they were foreigners. We’re concentrating the hunt for the Volvo at major ports and airports connecting to Europe. I fear they may have slipped away. Of course, the hunt for the house goes on. No further need for discretion-I’m having a public appeal issued this evening, if you agree. A detached house with an attached garage, a cellar, and a Volvo of that color-someone must have seen something.”

“Yes, by all means. Keep me posted,” said the Home Secretary.

That evening in Washington, a very tense Sam Somerville was summoned from her apartment in Alexandria to the Hoover Building. She was shown to the office of Philip Kelly, her ultimate departmental boss, to hear the White House decision.

“All right, Agent Somerville, you’ve got it. The powers-that-be say you get to return to England and release Mr. Quinn. But this time, you stay with him, right with him, all the time. And you let Mr. Brown know what he’s doing and where he’s going.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

She was just in time to catch the overnight red-eye for Heathrow. There was a slight delay in the departure of her scheduled plane out of Dulles International. A few miles away, at Andrews, Air Force One was landing with the casket of Simon Cormack. At that hour, right across America, all airports ceased traffic for two minutes’ silence.

She landed at Heathrow at dawn. It was the dawn of the fourth day since the murder.

Irving Moss was awakened early that morning by the sound of the ringing phone. It could only be one source-the only one that had his number here. He checked his watch: 4:00 A.M., 10:00 the previous evening in Houston. He took down the lengthy list of produce prices, all in U.S. dollars and cents, eradicated the zeros or “nulls”-which indicated a space in the message-and according to the day of the month set the lines of figures against prepared lines of letters. When he had finished decoding, he sucked in his cheeks. Something extra, something not foreseen, something else he would have to take care of. Without delay.

Aloysius Fairweather, Jr., United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, had received the message conveyed by the British Foreign Office the previous evening on his return from the Upper Hey ford U.S. Air Force Base. It had been a bad, sad day: receiving permission from Oxford’s coroner to take charge of the body of his President’s son, collecting the casket from the local morticians, who had done their best with little chance of success, and dispatching the tragic cargo back to Washington on Air Force One.

He had been in this post almost three years, the appointee of the new administration, and he knew he had done well, even though he had to succeed the incomparable Charles Price of the Reagan years. But these past four weeks had been a nightmare no ambassador should have to live through.

The Foreign Office request puzzled him, for it was not to see the Foreign Secretary, with whom he normally dealt, but the Home Secretary, Sir Harry Marriott. He knew Sir Harry, as he knew most of the British Ministers, well enough to drop titles in private and revert to first names. But to be called to the Home Office itself, and at the breakfast hour, was unusual, and the Foreign Office message had lacked explanation. His long black Cadillac swept into Victoria Street at five to nine.

“My dear Al.” Marriott was all charm, albeit backed by the gravity the circumstances demanded. “I hope I don’t need to tell you the level of shock that the last few days have brought to this entire country.”

Fairweather nodded. He had no doubt the reaction of the British government and people was totally genuine. For days the queue to sign the condolence book in the embassy lobby had stretched twice around Grosvenor Square. Near the top of the first page was the simple inscription “Elizabeth R,” followed by the entire Cabinet, the two archbishops, the leaders of all the other churches, and thousands of names of the high and the obscure. Sir Harry pushed two manila-bound reports across the desk at him.

“I wanted you to see these first, in private, and I suggest now. There may be matters we should discuss before you leave.”

Dr. Macdonald’s report was the shorter; Fairweather took it first. Simon Cormack had died of massive explosive damage to spine and abdomen, caused by a detonation of small but concentrated effect near the base of his back. At the time he died he was carrying the bomb on his person. There was more, but it was technical jargon about his physique, state of health, last known meal, and so on.

Dr. Barnard had more to say. The bomb Simon Cormack had been carrying on his person was concealed in the broad leather belt he wore around his waist and which had been given him by his abductors to hold up the denim jeans they had also provided him.

The belt had been three inches wide and made of two strips of cowhide sewn together along their edges. At the front it was secured by a heavy and ornate brass buckle, four inches long and slightly wider than the belt itself, decorated at its front by the embossed image of a longhorn steer’s head. It was the sort of belt sold widely in shops specializing in Western or camping equipment. Although appearing solid, the buckle had in fact been hollow.

The explosive had been a two-ounce wafer of Semtex, composed of 45 percent penta tetro ether nitrate (or PETN), 45 percent RDX, and 10 percent plasticizer. The wafer had been three inches long and one-and-a-half inches wide, and had been inserted between the two strands of leather precisely against the young man’s backbone.

Buried within the plastic explosive had been a miniature detonator, or mini-del, later extracted from within a fragment of vertebra that had itself been buried in the spleen. It was distorted but still recognizable-and identifiable.

From the explosive and detonator, a wire ran around the belt to the side, where it connected with a lithium battery similar to and no larger than the sort used to power digital watches. This had been inside a hollow, sculpted within the thickness of the double leather. The same wire then ran on to the pulse-receiver hidden inside the buckle. From the receiver a further wire, the aerial, ran right around the belt, between the layers of leather.

The pulse receiver would have been no larger than a small matchbox, probably receiving, on something like 72.15 megahertz, a signal sent from a small transmitter. This was not, of course, found at the scene, but it was probably a flat plastic box pack, smaller than a crush-proof cigarette pack, with a single flush button depressed by the ball of the thumb to effect detonation. Range: something over three hundred yards.

Al Fairweather was visibly shaken. “God, Harry, this is… satanic.”

“And complex technology,” agreed the Home Secretary. “The sting is in the tail. Read the summary.”

“But why?” asked the ambassador when he looked up at last. “In God’s name, why, Harry? And how did they do it?”

“As to how, there’s only one explanation. Those animals pretended to let Simon Cormack go free. They must have driven on awhile, circled back, and approached the stretch of road from the direction of the fields on foot. Probably hidden in one of those clumps of trees standing two hundred yards away from the road across the fields. That would be within range. We have men scouring the woods now for possible footprints.

“As to why, I don’t know, Al. We none of us know. But the scientists are adamant. They have not got it wrong. For the moment I would suggest that report remain extremely confidential. Until we know more. We are trying to find out. I’m sure your own people will want to try also, before anything goes public.”

Fairweather rose, taking his copies of the reports.

“I’m not sending these by courier,” he said. “I’m flying home with them this afternoon.”

The Home Secretary escorted him down to the ground level.

“You do realize what this could do if it gets out?” he asked.

“No need to underline it,” said Fairweather. “There’d be riots. I have to take this to Jim Donaldson and maybe Michael Odell. They’ll have to tell the President. God, what a thing.”

Sam Somerville’s rental car had been where she left it in the short-stay parking lot at Heathrow. She drove straight to the manor house in Surrey. Kevin Brown read the letter she brought and glowered.

“You’re making a mistake, Agent Somerville,” he said. “Director Edmonds is making a mistake. That man down there knows more than he lets on-always has, always will. Letting him run sticks in my craw. He should be on a flight Stateside-in handcuffs.”

But the signature on the letter was clear. Brown sent Moxon down to the cellars to bring Quinn up. He was still in cuffs; they had to remove those. And unwashed, unshaven, and hungry. The FBI team began to clear out and hand the building back to their hosts. At the door Brown turned to Quinn.

“I don’t want to see you again, Quinn. Except behind a row of steel bars. And I think one day I will.”

On the drive back to London, Quinn was silent as Sam told him the outcome of her trip to Washington and the decision of the White House to let him have his head so long as she went with him.

“Quinn, just be careful. Those men have to be animals. What they did to that boy was savage.”

“It was worse,” said Quinn. “It was illogical. That’s what I can’t get over. It doesn’t make sense. They had it all. They were away clean and clear. Why come back to kill him?”

“Because they were sadists,” said Sam. “You know these people-you’ve dealt with their type for years. They have no mercy, no pity. They relish inflicting pain. They intended to kill him from the start.”

“Then why not in the cellar? Why not me too? Why not with a gun, knife, or rope? Why at all?”

“We’ll never know. Unless they can be found. And they’ve got the whole world to disappear into. Where do you want to go?”

“The apartment,” said Quinn. “I have my things there.”

“Me too,” said Sam. “I went to Washington with only the clothes on my back.”

She was driving north up Warwick Road.

“You’ve gone too far,” said Quinn, who knew London like a cabdriver. “Take a right at Cromwell Road, the next intersection.”

The lights were red. Across in front of them cruised a long black Cadillac bearing the fluttering pennant of the Stars and Stripes. Ambassador Fairweather was in the back, studying a report, heading for the airport. He looked up, glanced at the pair of them without recognition, and went on his way.

Duncan McCrea was still in residence, as if overlooked in the mayhem of the past few days. He greeted Quinn like a Labrador puppy reunited with his master.

Earlier that day, he reported, Lou Collins had sent in the cleaners. These were not men who wielded feather dusters. They had cleaned out the bugs and wiretaps. The apartment was “burned” as far as the Company was concerned and they had no further use for it. McCrea had been told to stay on, pack, tidy up, and return the keys to the landlord when he left the next morning. He was about to pack Sam’s and Quinn’s clothes when they arrived.

“Well, Duncan, it’s here or a hotel. Mind if we stay one last night?”

“Oh, of course, no problem. Be the Agency’s guest. I’m awfully sorry, but in the morning we have to vacate.”

“The morning will do fine,” said Quinn. He was tempted to ruffle the younger man’s hair in a paternal gesture. McCrea’s smile was infectious. “I need a bath, shave, food, and about ten hours’ sleep.”

McCrea went out to Mr. Patel’s across the road and came back with two large grocery bags. He made steak, fries, and salad, with two bottles of red wine. Quinn was touched to note he had picked a Spanish Rioja-not from Andalusia, but the nearest he could get.

Sam saw no need for further secrecy over her affair with Quinn. She came to his room as soon as he turned in, and if young McCrea heard them making love, so what? After the second time she fell asleep, on her front, her face against his chest. He placed one hand on the nape of her neck and she murmured at the touch.

But despite his tiredness he could not sleep. He lay on his back, as on so many previous nights, and stared at the ceiling and thought. There was something about those men in the warehouse, something he had missed. It came to him in the small hours. The man behind him, holding the Skorpion with practiced casualness, not the careful tension of one unused to handguns; balanced, relaxed, self-confident, knowing he could bring the machine pistol to aim, and fire in a fraction of a second. His stance, his poise-Quinn had seen it before.

“He was a soldier,” he said quietly into the darkness. Sam murmured “Mmmmm” but went on sleeping. Something else, something as he passed the door of the Volvo to climb into the trunk. It eluded him and he fell asleep at last.

In the morning Sam rose first and went back to her own room to dress. Duncan McCrea may have seen her leave Quinn’s room but he made no mention. He was more concerned that his guests should have a good breakfast.

“Last night… I forgot eggs,” he called, and scampered off down the stairs to get some from an early dairy around the corner.

Sam brought Quinn his breakfast in bed. He was lost in thought. She had become accustomed to his reveries, and left him. Lou Collins’s cleaners had certainly not done any proper cleaning, she thought. The rooms were dusty after four weeks without attention.

Quinn was not concerned with the dust. He was watching a spider in the top far corner of his room. Laboriously the little creature laced up the last two strands of an otherwise perfect web, checked to see that every strand was in place, then scuttled to the center and sat there waiting. It was that last movement by the spider that recalled to Quinn the tiny detail that had eluded him last night.

The White House committee had the full reports of Drs. Barnard and Macdonald in front of them. It was the former they were studying. One by one they finished the summary and sat back.

“Goddam bastards,” said Michael Odell with feeling. He spoke for all of them. Ambassador Fairweather sat at the end of the table.

“Is there any possibility,” Secretary of State Donaldson asked, “that the British scientists could have gotten it wrong? About the origins?”

“They say no,” answered the ambassador. “They’ve invited us to send anyone we like over to double-check, but they’re good. I’m afraid they’ve got it right.”

As Sir Harry Marriott had said, the sting was in the tail, the summary. Every single component, Dr. Barnard had said with the full concurrence of his military colleagues at Fort Halstead-the copper wires, their plastic covering, the Semtex, the pulse-receiver, the battery, the brass, and the leather stitching-was of Soviet manufacture.

He conceded it was possible for such items, though manufactured in the Soviet Union, to fall into the hands of others outside the U.S.S.R. But the clincher was the mini-del. No larger than a paper clip, these miniature detonators are used, and only used, within the Soviet space program at Baikonur. They are employed to give infinitesimal steering changes to the Salyut and Soyuz vehicles as they maneuver to dock in space.

“But it doesn’t make sense,” protested Donaldson. “Why should they?”

“A whole lot in this mess doesn’t make sense,” said Odell. “If this is true, I don’t see how Quinn could have known about it. It looks like they duped him all along, duped all of us.”

“The question is, what do we do about it?” asked Reed of Treasury.

“The funeral’s tomorrow,” said Odell. “We’ll get that over with first. Then we’ll decide how we handle our Russian friends.”

Over four weeks Michael Odell had found that the authority of acting-President was sitting more and more lightly on him. The men around this table had come to accept his leadership also, more and more, he realized, as if he were the President.

“How is the President,” asked Walters, “since… the news?”

“According to the doctor, bad,” said Odell. “Very bad. If the kidnapping was bad enough, the death of his son, and done that way, has been like a bullet in his gut.”

At the word bullet each man around the table thought the same thought. No one dared say it.

Julian Hayman was the same age as Quinn and they had known each other when Quinn lived in London and worked for the underwriting firm affiliated with Lloyd’s, specializing in protection and hostage release. Their worlds had overlapped, for Hayman, a former major in the SAS, ran a company dedicated to the provision of anticrime alarm systems and personal protection, including bodyguards. His clientele was exclusive, wealthy, and careful. They were people who had reason to be suspicious, or they would not have paid so highly for Hayman’s services.

The office in Victoria, to which Quinn guided Sam in the middle of the morning after leaving the flat and saying a final goodbye to Duncan McCrea, was as well-protected as it was discreet.

Quinn told Sam to sit in the window of a café down the street and wait for him.

“Why can’t I come with you?” she asked.

“Because he wouldn’t receive you. He may not even see me. But I hope he will-we go back a long way. Strangers he doesn’t like, unless they are paying heavily, and we aren’t. When it comes to women from the FBI, he’d be like shy game.”

Quinn announced himself through the door phone, aware he was being scanned by the overhead video camera. When the door clicked he walked right through to the back, past two secretaries who did not even look up. Julian Hayman was in his office at the far end of the ground floor. The room was as elegant as its occupant. It had no windows; neither did Hayman.

“Well, well, well,” he drawled. “Long time, soldier.” He held out a languid hand. “What brings you to my humble shop?”

“Information,” said Quinn. He told Hayman what he wanted.

“In earlier times, dear boy, no problem. But things change, don’t you see? Fact is, the word’s out on you, Quinn. Persona non grata, they’re saying at the club. Not the flavor of the month exactly, especially with your own people. Sorry, old boy, you’re bad news. Can’t help.”

Quinn lifted the phone off the desk and hit several buttons. It began to ring at the other end.

“What are you doing?” asked Hayman. The drawl had gone.

“No one saw me come in here, but half Fleet Street’s going to see me leave,” said Quinn.

“Daily Mail,” said a voice on the phone. Hayman reached forward and killed the call. Many of his best-paying clients were American corporations in Europe, the sort to whom he would prefer to avoid making laborious explanations.

“You’re a bastard, Quinn,” he said thinly. “Always were. All right, a couple of hours in the files, but I lock you in. Nothing is to be missing.”

“Would I do that to you?” asked Quinn amiably. Hayman led him downstairs to the basement archive.

Partly in the course of his business, partly out of a personal interest, Julian Hayman had amassed over the years a remarkably comprehensive archive of criminals of every kind. Murderers, bank robbers, gangsters, swindlers, dope peddlers, arms traffickers, terrorists, kidnappers, shifty bankers, accountants, lawyers, politicians, and policemen; dead, alive, in jail, or simply missing-if they had appeared in print, and often if they had not, he had them filed. The archive ran right under the building.

“Any particular section?” asked Hayman as he switched on the lights. The file cabinets ran in all directions, and these were only the cards and the photographs. The main data was on computer.

“Mercenaries,” said Quinn.

“As in Congo?” asked Hayman.

“As in Congo, Yemen, South Sudan, Biafra, Rhodesia.”

“From here to here,” said Hayman, gesturing to ten yards of chin-high steel filing cabinets. “The table’s at the end.”

It took Quinn four hours, but no one disturbed him. The photograph showed four men, all white. They were grouped around the front end of a Jeep, on a thin and dusty road edged by the bush vegetation of what looked like Africa. Several black soldiers could be discerned behind them. They were all in camouflage combat uniform and calf boots. Three had bush hats. All carried Belgian FLN automatic rifles. Their camouflage was of the leopard-spot type favored by Europeans rather than the streaked variety used by the British and Americans.

Quinn took the photo to the table, put it under the spot lamp, and found a powerful magnifying glass in the drawer. Under its gaze, the design on the hand of one of the men showed up more clearly, despite the sepia tint of the old photo. A spider’s web motif, on the back of the left hand, the spider crouching at the center of the web.

He went on through the files but found nothing else of interest. Nothing that rang a bell. He pressed the buzzer to be let out.

In his office Julian Hayman held out his hand for the photograph.

“Who?” said Quinn. Hayman studied the rear of the picture. Like every other card entry and photo in his collection, it bore a seven-figure number on the back. He tapped the number into the console of his desk-top computer. The full file flashed up on the screen.

“Hmm, you have picked some charmers, old boy.” He read off the screen. “Picture almost certainly taken in Maniema Province, eastern Congo, now Zaire, some time in the winter of 1964. The man on the left is Jacques Schramme, Black Jack Schramme, the Belgian mercenary.”

He warmed to his narration. It was his specialty.

“Schramme was one of the first. He fought against the United Nations troops in the attempted Katangan secession of 1960 to ’62. When they lost he had to quit and took refuge in neighboring Angola, which was then Portuguese and ultra-right wing. Returned on invitation in the autumn of 1964 to help put down the Simba revolt. Reconstituted his old Leopard Group and set about pacifying Maniema Province. That’s him all right. Any more?”

“The others,” said Quinn.

“Mmmm. The one on the extreme right is another Belgian, Commandant Wauthier. At the time he commanded a contingent of Katangan levies and about twenty white mercenaries at Watsa. Must have been on a visit. You interested in Belgians?”

“Maybe.” Quinn thought back to the Volvo in the warehouse. He was passing the open door, caught the odor of cigarette smoke. Not Marlboro, not Dunhill. More like French Gauloises. Or Bastos, the Belgian brand. Zack did not smoke; he had smelt his breath.

“The one without the hat in the middle is Roger Lagaillarde, also Belgian. Killed in a Simba ambush on the Punia road. No doubt about that.”

“And the big one?” said Quinn. “The giant?”

“Yes, he is big,” agreed Hayman. “Must be six feet six at least. Built like a barn door. Early twenties, by the look of him. Pity he’s turned his head away. With the shadow of his bush hat you can’t see much of his face. Probably why there’s no name for him. Just a nickname. Big Paul. That’s all it says.”

He flicked off the screen. Quinn had been doodling on a pad. He pushed his drawing across to Hayman.

“Ever seen that before?”

Hayman looked at the design of the spider’s web, the spider at its center. He shrugged.

“A tattoo? Worn by young hooligans, punks, football thugs. Quite common.”

“Think back,” said Quinn. “Belgium, say thirty years ago.”

“Ah, wait a minute. What the hell did they call it? Araignée-that was it. Can’t recall the Flemish word for spider, just the French.”

He tapped at his keys for several seconds.

“Black web, red spider at the center, worn on the back of the left hand?”

Quinn tried to recall. He was passing the open passenger door of the Volvo, on his way to climb into the trunk. Zack behind him. The man in the driver’s seat had leaned across to watch him through the hood slits. A big man, almost touched the roof in the sitting position. Leaning sideways, left hand supporting his weight. And in order to smoke he had removed his left glove.

“Yeah,” said Quinn. “That’s it.”

“Insignificant bunch,” said Hayman dismissively, reading from his screen. “Extreme right-wing organization formed in Belgium in the late fifties, early sixties. Opposed to decolonization of Belgium’s only colony, the Congo. Anti-black, of course, anti-Semitic-what else is new? Recruited young tearaways and hooligans, street thugs and riffraff. Specialized in throwing rocks through Jewish shop windows, heckling leftist speakers, beat up a couple of Liberal members of Parliament. Died out eventually. Of course, the dissolution of the colonial empires threw up all sorts of these groups.”

“Flemish movement or Walloon?” asked Quinn. He was referring to the two cultural groups within Belgium: the Flemings, mainly in the northern half near Holland, who speak Flemish, and the Walloons from the south, nearer France, who speak French. Belgium is a two-language country.

“Both, really,” said Hayman after consulting his screen. “But it says here it started and was always strongest in the city of Antwerp. So, Flemish, I suppose.”

Quinn left him and returned to the café. Any other woman would have been spitting angry at being kept waiting for four and a half hours. Fortunately for Quinn, Sam was a trained agent, and had been through her apprenticeship in stakeout duties, than which nothing is more boring. She was nursing her fifth cup of awful coffee.

“When do you check your car in?” he asked.

“Due tonight. I could extend it.”

“Can you hand it back at the airport?”

“Sure. Why?”

“We’re flying to Brussels.”

She looked unhappy.

“Please, Quinn, do we have to fly? I do it if I really have to, but if I can avoid it I chicken out, and I’ve had too much flying lately.”

“Okay,” he said. “Check the car in London. We’ll take the train and the hovercraft. We’ll have to rent a Belgian car anyway. Might as well be Ostende. And we’ll need money. I have no credit cards.”

“You what?” She had never heard anyone say that.

“I don’t need them in Alcántara del Rio.”

“Okay, we’ll go to the bank. I’ll use a check and hope I have enough in the account back home.”

On the way to the bank she turned on the radio. The music was somber. It was four on a London afternoon and getting dark. Far away across the Atlantic, the Cormack family was burying their son.