The Negotiator

Chapter 4

In the wake of the dying American Secret Service man’s radio call many things began to happen exceedingly fast and at a rising tempo. The snatch of the President’s only son had taken place at 7:05 A.M. The radio call was logged at 7:07. Although the caller was using a dedicated waveband, he was speaking in clear. It was fortunate no unauthorized person was listening to police frequencies at that hour. The call was heard in three places.

At the rented house off the Woodstock Road were the other ten men of the Secret Service team tasked to guard the President’s son during his year at Oxford. Eight were still abed, but two were up, including the night-watch officer, who was listening on the dedicated frequency.

The Director of the Secret Service, Creighton Burbank, had from the outset protested that the President’s son should not be studying abroad at all during the incumbency. He had been overruled by President Cormack, who saw no good reason to deprive his son of his longed-for chance to spend a year at Oxford. Swallowing his objections, Burbank had asked for a fifty-man team at Oxford.

Again, John Cormack had yielded to his son’s pleading-“Give me a break, Dad, I’ll look like an exhibit at a cattle show with fifty goons all around me”-and they had settled on a team of twelve. The American embassy in London had rented a large detached villa in north Oxford, collaborated for months with the British authorities, and engaged three thoroughly vetted British staff: a male gardener, a cook, and a woman for the cleaning and laundry. The aim had been to give Simon Cormack a chance at a perfectly normal enjoyment of his student days.

The team had always had a minimum of eight men on duty, four on weekend furlough. The duty men had made four pairs: three shifts to cover the twenty-four-hour day at the house, and two men to escort Simon everywhere when away from Woodstock Road. The men had threatened to resign if they were not allowed their weapons, and the British had a standing rule that no foreigners carried sidearms on British soil. A typical compromise was evolved: Out of the house, an armed British sergeant of the Special Branch would be in the car. Technically the Americans would be operating under his auspices and could have guns. It was a fiction, but the Special Branch men, being local to Oxfordshire, were useful guides, and relations had become very friendly. It was the British sergeant who had come out of the rear seat of the ambushed car and tried to use his two-inch Smith & Wesson before being gunned down on Shotover Plain.

Within seconds of receiving the dying man’s call at the Woodstock Road house, the rest of the team threw themselves into two other cars and raced toward Shotover Plain. The route of the run was clearly marked and they all knew it. The night-watch officer remained behind in the house with one other man, and he made two fast telephone calls. One was to Creighton Burbank in Washington, fast asleep at that hour of the morning, five hours behind London; the other was to the legal counselor at the U.S. embassy in London, caught shaving at his St. John’s Wood home.

The legal counselor at an American embassy is always the FBI representative, and in London that is an important post. The liaison between the law enforcement agencies of the two countries is constant. Patrick Seymour had taken over from Darrell Mills two years earlier, got on well with the British, and enjoyed the job. His immediate reaction was to go very pale and put in a scrambled call to Donald Edmonds, Director of the FBI, catching him fast asleep at his Chevy Chase residence.

The second listener to the radio call was a patrol car of the Thames Valley Police, the force covering the old counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire. Although the American team with their Special Branch escort were always in close on Simon Cormack, the TVP made a policy of having one of their cars no more than a mile away on a “first call” basis. The patrol car was tuned to the dedicated frequency, was cruising through Headington at the time, and covered the missing mile in fifty seconds. Some would later say the sergeant and driver in it should have passed the ambush site and tried to overtake the escaping van. Hindsight; with three bodies on the Shotover track, they stopped to see if they could render assistance and/or get some kind of a description. It was too late for either.

The third listening post was the Thames Valley Police headquarters in the village of Kidlington. Woman Police Constable Janet Wren was due to go off duty after the night shift at 7:30 and was yawning when the croaking voice with the American accent crackled into her headset. She was so stunned she thought for a fleeting second it might be a joke. Then she consulted a checklist and hit a series of keys on the computer to her left. At once her screen flashed up a series of instructions, which the badly frightened woman began to follow to the letter.

After lengthy collaboration a year earlier between the Thames Valley Police Authority, Scotland Yard, the British Home Office, the U.S. embassy, and the Secret Service, the joint protection operation around Simon Cormack had been tagged Operation Yankee Doodle. The routines had been computerized, as had the procedures to be followed in any of a variety of contingencies-such as the President’s son being in a bar brawl, a street fight, a road accident, a political demonstration, being taken ill, or wishing to spend time away from Oxford in another country. WPC Wren had activated the Kidnap code and the computer was answering back.

Within minutes the duty officer of the watch was by her side, pale with worry and starting a series of phone calls. One was to the Chief Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) who took it on himself to bring in his colleague, the Superintendent heading TVP’s Special Branch (SB). The man at Kidlington also called the Assistant Chief Constable (Operations), who was attacking two boiled eggs when the call came to his home. He listened intently and rapped out a series of orders and questions.

“Where, exactly?”

“Shotover Plain, sir,” said Kidlington. “Delta Bravo is at the scene. They’ve turned back a private car coming from Wheatley, two other runners, and a lady with a dog from the Oxford end. Both the Americans are dead; so is Sergeant Dunn.”

“Jesus,” breathed the ACC Ops. This was going to be the biggest flap of his career, and as head of Operations, the sharp end of police work, it was up to him to get it right. No near misses. Not acceptable. He went into overdrive.

“Get a minimum fifty uniformed men there fast. Posts, mallets, and ribbons. I want it sealed off-now. Every SOCO we’ve got. And roadblocks. That’s a two-ended track, isn’t it? Did they get away through the Oxford end?”

“Delta Bravo says not,” replied the man at headquarters. “We don’t know the time lapse between the attack and the American’s call. But if it was short, Delta Bravo was on the road at Headington and says no one passed them coming from Shotover. The tire tracks will tell us-it’s muddy there.”

“Concentrate the roadblocks north through south on the eastern side,” said the ACC. “Leave the Chief Constable to me. My car’s on its way?”

“Should be outside now,” said Kidlington.

It was. The ACC glanced through his sitting-room window and saw his car, normally due forty minutes later, pulling up. “Who’s already on their way?” he asked.

“CID, SB, SOCOs, and now uniformed,” said Kidlington.

“Get every detective off every case and put them on the knocker,” said the ACC. “I’ll go straight to Shotover.”

“Range of roadblocks?” queried the watch officer at headquarters. The ACC thought. Roadblocks are easier said than done. The Home Counties, all very historic and heavily populated, have a maze of country lanes, secondary roads, and tracks running between the towns, villages, and hamlets that make up the countryside. Cast the net too wide and the number of minor roads would multiply to hundreds; cast it too narrow and the distance the kidnappers had to cover to escape the net would shrink.

“Edge of Oxfordshire,” snapped the ACC. He hung up, then called his ultimate superior, the Chief Constable. In any British county force the day-to-day anti-crime policing goes to the ACC Ops. The Chief Constable may or may not have a background in police work, but his task concerns policy, morale, the public image, and liaison with London. The ACC glanced at his watch as he made the call: 7:31 A.M.

The Chief Constable of the Thames Valley lived in a handsome converted rectory in the village of Bletchingdon. He strode from his breakfast room to the study, wiping marmalade from his mouth, to take the call. When he heard the news he forgot about breakfast. There were going to be many disturbed mornings that ninth day of October.

“I see,” he said as the details so far sank in. “Yes, carry on. I’ll… call London.”

On his study desk were several telephones. One was a designated and very private line to the office of the Assistant Secretary of the F.4 Division in the Home Office, Britain ’s Interior Ministry, which rules the Metropolitan and County Police forces. At that hour the civil servant was not at his office, but the call was patched through to his home in Fulham, London. The bureaucrat let out an unwonted oath, made two phone calls, and headed straight for the big white building in Queen Anne’s Gate, running off Victoria Street, that housed his ministry.

One of his calls was to the duty officer at F.4 Division, requiring his desk to be cleared of all other matters and his entire staff to be brought in from their homes at once. He did not say why. He still did not know how many people were aware of the Shotover Plain massacre, but as a good civil servant he was not about to add to that number if he could help it.

The other call he could not help. It was to the Permanent Undersecretary, senior civil servant for the entire Home Office. Fortunately both men lived inside London, rather than miles away in the outer suburbs, and met at the ministry building at 7:51. Sir Harry Marriott, the Conservative government’s Home Secretary and their Minister, joined them at 8:04 and was briefed. His immediate reaction was to put in a call to 10 Downing Street and insist on speaking to Mrs. Thatcher herself.

The call was taken by her private secretary-there are innumerable “secretaries” in Whitehall, the seat of the British administration: Some are really Ministers; some, senior civil servants; some, personal aides; and a few do secretarial work. Charles Powell was in the second-last group. He knew that his Prime Minister, in her adjacent private study, had been working for an hour already, polishing off reams of paperwork before most of her colleagues were out of pajamas. It was her custom. Powell also knew that Sir Harry was one of her closest colleagues and intimates. He checked with her briefly and she took the call without delay.

“Prime Minister, I have to see you. Now. I have to come ’round without delay.”

Margaret Thatcher frowned. The hour and the tone were unusual.

“Then come, Harry,” she said.

“Three minutes,” said the voice on the phone. Sir Harry Marriott replaced the receiver. Down below, his car was waiting for the five-hundred-yard drive. It was 8:11 A.M.

The kidnappers were four in number. The gunman, who now sat in the passenger seat, stuffed the Skorpion down between his feet and pulled off his woolen ski mask. Beneath it he still wore a wig and a moustache. He pulled on a pair of heavy-framed spectacles with no glass in them. Beside him was the driver, the leader of the team; he, too, had a wig, and a false beard as well. Both disguises were temporary, because they had to drive several miles looking natural.

In the rear the other two subdued a violently fighting Simon Cormack. Not a problem. One of the men was huge and simply smothered the young American in a bear hug while the lean and wiry one applied an ether pad. The van bounced off the track from the reservoir and settled down as it found the blacktop lane toward Wheatley, and the sounds from the rear ceased as the U.S. President’s son slumped unconscious.

It was downhill through Littleworth, with its scattering of cottages, and then straight into Wheatley. They passed an electric milk van delivering the traditional breakfast pint of fresh milk, and a hundred yards later the van driver had a brief image of a newspaper delivery boy glancing at them. Out of Wheatley they joined the main A.40 highway into Oxford, turned back toward the city for five hundred yards, then turned right onto the B.4027 minor road through the villages of Forest Hill and Stanton St. John.

The van drove at normal speed through both villages, over the crossroads by New Inn Farm, and on toward Islip. But a mile after New Inn, just beyond Fox Covert, it pulled toward a farm gate on the left. The man beside the driver leaped out, used a key to undo the padlock on the gate-they had replaced the farmer’s padlock with their own ten hours earlier-and the van rolled into the track. Within ten yards it had reached the semi-ruined timber barn behind its stand of trees which the kidnappers had reconnoitered two weeks earlier. It was 7:16 A.M.

The daylight was brightening and the four men worked fast. The gunman hauled open the barn doors and drove out the big Volvo sedan that had been parked there only since midnight. The green van drove in and the driver descended, bringing with him the Skorpion and two woolen masks. He checked the front of the van to make sure nothing was left, then slammed the door. The other two men bailed out of the rear doors, hefted the form of Simon Cormack, and placed it in the Volvo’s capacious trunk, already fitted with ample air holes. All four men stripped off their oversized black track suits to reveal respectable business suits, shirts, and ties. They retained their wigs, moustaches, and glasses. The bundled clothing went into the trunk with Simon, the Skorpion on the floor of the Volvo’s backseat under a blanket.

The van driver and team leader took the wheel of the Volvo and waited. The lean man from the back placed the charges in the van and the giant closed the barn doors. Both got into the back of the Volvo, which now cruised to the gate leading to the road. The gunman closed it behind the car, recovered the padlock, and replaced the farmer’s rusted chain. It had been cut through but now hung realistically enough. The Volvo had left tracks in the mud, but that could not be helped. They were standard tires and would soon be changed. The gunman climbed in beside the driver, and the Volvo headed north. It was 7:22 A.M. The ACC Ops was just saying “Jesus.”

The kidnappers drove northwest straight through Islip village and cut into the arrow-straight A.421, taking a ninety-degree right turn toward Bicester. They drove through this pleasant market town in northeast Oxfordshire at a steady pace and along the A.421 toward the county town of Buckingham. Just outside Bicester a big police Range Rover loomed up behind them. One of the men in the back muttered a warning and reached down for the Skorpion. The driver snapped at him to sit still and continued at a legal speed. A hundred yards on, a sign said WELCOME TO BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. The county line. At the sign the Range Rover slowed, slewed across the road, and began unloading steel barriers. The Volvo kept motoring and soon disappeared. It was 8:05. In London, Sir Harry Marriott was picking up the phone to Downing Street.

The British Prime Minister happens to be an extremely humane person, much more so than her five immediate male predecessors. Although able to stay cooler than any of them under extreme pressure, she is far from immune to tears. Sir Harry would later tell his wife that when he broke the news her eyes filled; she covered her face with her hands and whispered, “Oh, dear God. Poor man.”

“Here we were,” Sir Harry would tell Debbie, “facing the biggest bloody crisis with the Yanks since Suez, and her first thought was for the father. Not the son, mind you-the father.”

Sir Harry had no children and had not been in office in January 1982, so, unlike the retired Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, who would not have been surprised, he had not witnessed Margaret Thatcher’s anguish when her son Mark had gone missing on the Dakar Rally in the Algerian desert. Then, in the privacy of the night, she had cried from that pure and very special pain felt by a parent whose child is in danger. Mark Thatcher had been found alive by a patrol after six days.

When she raised her head she had recovered; she pressed a button on her intercom.

“Charlie, I want you to put through a personal call to President Cormack. From me. Tell the White House it is urgent and cannot wait. Yes, of course I know what time it is in Washington.”

“There is the American ambassador, via the Foreign Secretary,” ventured Sir Harry Marriott. “He could… perhaps…”

“No, I will do it myself,” insisted the Prime Minister. “You will please form the COBRA, Harry. Reports every hour on the hour, please.”

There is nothing particularly hot about the so-called hotline between Downing Street and the White House. It is in fact a dedicated telephone link, via satellite, but with unbreakable scramblers fitted at both ends to ensure privacy. A hotline link normally takes about five minutes to set up. Margaret Thatcher pushed her papers to one side, stared out of the bulletproof windows of her private office, and waited.

Shotover Plain was crawling, literally, with activity. The two men of the patrol car Delta Bravo knew enough to keep everyone else off the area and to walk extremely carefully even as they examined the three bodies for signs of life. When they saw none, they left the bodies alone. Investigations can all too easily be ruined at the outset because someone walked all over evidence that would have been treasures to the forensic people, or a big foot pushed a spent cartridge into the mud, wiping off any fingerprints it might still have contained.

The uniformed men had cordoned off the area, the whole track from Littleworth down the hill to the east along to the steel bridge crossing the Ring Road between Shotover and Oxford City. Within this area the SOCOs, scene-of-crime officers, looked for anything and everything. They found that the British SB sergeant had fired twice; a metal detector got one slug out of the mud in front of him-he had slumped forward on his knees, firing as he went down. They could not find the other slug. It might have hit one of the kidnappers, they would report. (It hadn’t, but they did not know that.)

There were the spent cases from the Skorpion, twenty-eight of them, all in the same pool; each was photographed where it lay, picked up with tweezers, and bagged for the lab boys. One American was still slumped behind the wheel of the car; the other lay where he had died beside the passenger door, his bloodied hands over the three holes in his belly, the hand mike swinging free. Everything was photographed from every angle before anything was moved. The bodies went to the Radcliffe Infirmary while a Home Office pathologist sped down from London.

The tracks in the mud were of special interest: the smear where Simon Cormack had crashed down with two men on top of him, the prints of the kidnappers’ shoes-they would turn out to be from ultracommon running shoes and untraceable-and the tire tracks from the getaway vehicle, quickly identified as some kind of van. And there was the jack, brand-new and purchasable from any of the Unipart chain of stores. Like the Skorpion 9mm cartridges, it would turn out to bear no prints.

There were thirty detectives seeking witnesses- wearisome but vital work that yielded some first descriptions. Two hundred yards east of the reservoir on the lane into Littleworth were two cottages. The lady in one, brewing up tea, had heard “some popping noises” down the lane about seven o’clock but had seen nothing. A man in Littleworth had seen a green van go by just after seven, heading toward Wheatley. The detectives would find the newspaper delivery boy and the milk-van driver just before nine, the boy at school, the milkman having breakfast.

He was the best witness. Medium-green, battered Ford Transit with the Barlow’s logo on the side. The marketing manager at Barlow confirmed they had had no vans in that area at that hour. All were accounted for. The police had their getaway vehicle; an all-points alert went out. No reason; just find it. No one connected it with a burning barn on the Islip road-yet.

Other detectives were around the house in Summer-town, knocking on doors in Woodstock Road and its vicinity. Had anyone seen parked cars, vans, other vehicles? Anyone seen observing the house down the street? They followed the route of Simon’s run right into the center of Oxford and out the other side. About twenty people reported they had seen the young runner being tailed by men in a car, but it always turned out to be the Secret Service car.

By nine o’clock the ACC Ops was getting the familiar feeling: There would be no rapid windup now, no lucky breaks, no quick catch. They were away, whoever they were. The Chief Constable, in full uniform, joined him at Shotover Plain and watched the teams at work.

“ London seems to want to take over,” said the Chief Constable.

The ACC grunted. It was a snub, but also the removal of a hellish responsibility. The inquiry into the past would be tough enough, but to fail in the future…

“ Whitehall seems to feel they may have quit our patch, don’t you see. The powers might want the Met. to be in charge. Any press?”

The ACC shook his head. “Not yet, sir. But it won’t stay quiet for long. Too big.”

He did not know that the lady walking her dog who had been shooed away from the scene by the men of Delta Bravo at 7:16 had seen two of the three bodies, had run home badly frightened, and told her husband. Or that he was a printer on the Oxford Mail. Although a technician, he thought he ought to mention it to the duty editor when he arrived.

The call from Downing Street was taken by the senior duty officer in the Communications Center of the White House, situated in the subground level of the West Wing, right next to the Situation Room. It was logged at 3:34 A.M. Washington time. Hearing who it was, the SDO bravely agreed to call the senior ranking Secret Service agent of the shift, at his post over in the Mansion.

The Secret Service man was patrolling the Center Hall at the time, quite close to the family quarters on the second floor. He responded when the phone at his desk opposite the First Family’s gilded elevator trilled discreetly.

“She wants what?” he whispered into the receiver. “Do those Brits know what time it is over here?”

He listened a while longer. He could not recall when last someone had awakened a President at that hour. Must have happened, he thought, in case of war, say. Maybe that was what this was about. He could be in for one bad time from Burbank if he got it wrong. On the other hand… the British Prime Minister herself…

“I’ll hang up now, call you back,” he told the Communications Room. London was told the President was being roused; they should hang on. They did.

The Secret Service guard, whose name was Lepinsky, went through the double doors into the West Sitting Hall and faced the door to the Cormacks’ bedroom on his left. He paused, took a deep breath, and knocked gently. No reply. He tried the handle. Unlocked. With, as he saw it, his career up for grabs, he entered. In the large double bed he could make out two sleeping forms, guessed the President would be nearer the window. He tiptoed around the bed, identified the maroon cotton pajama top, and shook the President’s shoulder.

“Mr. President, sir. Would you wake up, sir, please?”

John Cormack came awake, identified the man standing timorously over him, glanced at his wife, and did not put on the light.

“What time is it, Mr. Lepinsky?”

“Just after half past three, sir. I’m sorry about this… Er, Mr. President, the British Prime Minister is on the line. She says it cannot wait. I’m sorry about this, sir.”

John Cormack thought for a moment, then swung his legs out of the bed-gently, so as not to wake Myra. Lepinsky handed him a nearby robe. After nearly three years in power Cormack knew the British Prime Minister well enough. He had twice seen her in England -the second time on a two-hour stopover on his return from Vnukovo-and she had been twice to the States. They were both decisive people; they got on well. If it was she, it had to be important. He would catch up on sleep later.

“Return to the Center Hall, Mr. Lepinsky,” he whispered. “Don’t worry. You have done well. I’ll take the call in my study.”

The President’s study is sandwiched between the master bedroom and the Yellow Oval Room, which is under the central rotunda. Like the bedroom, its windows look out over the lawn toward Pennsylvania Avenue. He closed the communicating door, put on the light, blinked several times, seated himself at his desk, and lifted the phone. She was on the line in ten seconds.

“Has anyone else been in touch with you yet?”

Something seemed to punch him in the stomach.

“No… no one. Why?”

“I believe Mr. Edmonds and Mr. Burbank must know by now,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to be the first…”

Then she told him. He held the phone very tightly and stared at the curtains, not seeing them. His mouth went dry and he could not swallow. He heard the phrases: everything, but everything being done… Scotland Yard’s best teams… no escape… He said yes, and thank you, and put the phone down. It was like being punched hard in the chest. He thought of Myra, still asleep. He would have to tell her. It would hit her very hard.

“Oh, Simon,” he whispered. “Simon, my boy.”

He knew he could not handle this himself. He needed a friend who could step in while he looked after Myra. After several minutes he called the operator, kept his voice very steady.

“Get me Vice President Odell, please. Yes, now.”

In his residence at the Naval Observatory, Michael Odell was roused the same way, by a Secret Service man. The telephoned summons was unequivocal and unexplained. Please come straight to the Executive Mansion. Second floor. The study. Now, Michael, now, please.

Odell heard the phone go dead, replaced his own, scratched his head, and peeled the wrapper off a stick of spearmint gum. It helped him concentrate. He called for his car and went to the closet for his clothes. A widower, Odell slept alone, so there was no one to disturb. Ten minutes later, in slacks, shoes, and a sweater over his shirt, he was in the back of the stretch limousine, staring at the clipped back of the Navy driver’s head or the lights of nighttime Washington until the illuminated mass of the White House came into view. He avoided the South Portico and the South Entrance and entered the ground-floor corridor by the door at its western end. He told his driver to wait; he would not be long. He was wrong. The time was 4:07 A.M.

Crisis management at the top level in Britain falls to a hastily convened committee whose membership varies according to the nature of the crisis. But its place of meeting rarely changes. The chosen conference hall is almost always the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, a quiet air-conditioned chamber two floors below ground level, under the Cabinet Office adjacent to Downing Street. From the initials these committees are known as COBRA.

It had taken Sir Harry Marriott and his staff just over an hour to get the “bodies,” as he called his cast list, out of their homes, off their commuter trains, or from their scattered offices and into the Cabinet Office. He took the chair at 9:56 A.M.

The kidnapping was clearly a crime and a matter for the police, which came under the Home Office. But in this case there were many further ramifications. Apart from the Home Office, there was a Minister of State from the Foreign Office, which would try to maintain relationships with the State Department in Washington and thus the White House. Furthermore, if Simon Cormack had been spirited to Europe, their involvement would be vital at a political level. Answering to the Foreign Office was the Secret Intelligence Service, MI-6-“the Firm”-and their input would concern the possibility of foreign terrorist groups being involved. Their man had come across the river from Century House and would report back to the Chief.

Also coming under the Home Office, separate from the police, was the Security Service, MI-5, the counterintelligence arm with more than a passing interest in terrorism as it affected Britain internally. Their man had come from Curzon Street in Mayfair, where files on likely candidates were already being vetted by the score and a number of “sleepers” contacted to answer a particularly burning question: who?

There was a senior civil servant from the Defense Ministry, in charge of the Special Air Service regiment at Hereford. In the event that Simon Cormack and his abductors were located quickly and a siege situation developed, the SAS might well be needed for hostage recovery, one of their arcane specialties. No one needed to be told that already the troop on permanent half-hour standby-in this case, according to the rotation, Seven Troop, the free-fall men of B Squadron-had quietly moved up to Amber Alert, ten minutes, and their backup moved from two-hour standby to sixty minutes.

There was a man from the Ministry of Transport, controlling Britain ’s ports and airports. Liaising with the Coastguards and Customs, his department would operate a blanket port-watch, for a prime concern now was to keep Simon Cormack inside the country in case the kidnappers had other ideas. He had already spoken to the Department of Trade and Industry, who had made plain that to examine every single sealed and bonded freight container heading out of the country was quite literally impossible. Still, any privateairplane, yacht or cruiser, fishing smack, camper, or motor home heading out with a large crate on board, or someone on a stretcher or simply drugged and insensible, would find a Customs officer or Coastguard taking more than a passing interest.

The key man, however, sat at Sir Harry’s right: Nigel Cramer.

Unlike Britain ’s provincial county constabularies and police authorities, London ’s police force-the Metropolitan Police, known as “the Met.”-is headed not by a chief constable but by a commissioner and is the largest force in the country. The commissioner, in this case Sir Peter Imbert, is assisted in his task by four assistant commissioners, each in charge of one of the four departments. Second of these is Specialist Operations, or S.O.

S.O. Department has thirteen branches, One through Fourteen, excluding Five, which, for no known reason, does not exist. Among the thirteen are the Covert Squad, Serious Crimes Squad, Flying Squad, Fraud Squad, and Regional Crimes Squad. And the Special Branch (counterintelligence), the Criminal Intelligence Branch (S.O. 11), and the Anti-Terrorist Branch (S.O. 13).

The man designated by Sir Peter Imbert to represent the Met. on the COBRA committee was the Deputy Assistant Commissioner, S.O. Department, Nigel Cramer. Cramer would report in two directions: upward, to his Assistant Commissioner and the Commissioner himself; sideways, to the COBRA committee. Toward him would flow the input from the official investigating officer, the I.O., who in turn would be using all the branches and squads of the department, as appropriate.

It takes a political decision to superimpose the Met. on a provincial force, but the Prime Minister had already taken that decision, justified by the suspicion that Simon Cormack might well by now be out of the Thames Valley area; and Sir Harry Marriott had just informed the Chief Constable of that decision. Cramer’s men were already on the outskirts of Oxford.

There were two non-British invited to sit with the COBRA. One was Patrick Seymour, the FBI man at the American embassy; the other was Lou Collins, the London-based liaison officer of the CIA. Their inclusion was more than just courtesy; they were there so they could keep their own organizations aware of the level of effort being put in at London to solve the outrage, and maybe to contribute any nuggets their own people might unearth.

Sir Harry opened the meeting with a brief report of what was known so far. The abduction was just three hours old. At this point he felt it necessary to make two assumptions. One was that Simon Cormack had been driven away from Shotover Plain and was by now sequestered in a secret place; the second was that the perpetrators were terrorists of some kind who had not yet made any form of contact with the authorities.

The man from Secret Intelligence volunteered that his people were trying to contact a variety of penetration agents inside known European terrorist groups in an attempt to identify the group behind the snatch. It would take some days.

“These penetration agents lead very dangerous lives,” he added. “We can’t just ring them up and ask for Jimmy. Covert meetings will take place in various places over the next week to see if we can get a lead.”

The Security Service man added that his department was doing the same with home-grown groups who might be involved, or know something. He doubted that the perpetrators were local. Apart from the I.R.A. and the INLA-both Irish-the British Isles had its fair share of weirdos, but the level of ruthless professionalism shown at Shotover Plain seemed to exclude the usual noisy malcontents. Still, his own penetration agents would also be activated.

Nigel Cramer reported that the first clues were likely to come from forensic examination or a chance witness not yet interviewed.

“We know the van used,” he said. “A green-painted, far-from-new Ford Transit, bearing on both sides the familiar logo-in Oxfordshire-of the Barlow fruit company. It was seen heading east through Wheatley, away from the scene of the crime, about five minutes after the attack. And it was not a Barlow van-that is confirmed. The witness did not note the registration number. Obviously, a major search is on for anyone else who saw that van, its direction of travel, or the men in the front seat. Apparently there were two-just vague shadows behind the glass-but the milkman believes one had a beard.

“On forensics, we have a car jack, perfect tire prints from the van-the Thames Valley people established exactly where it stood-and a collection of spent brass casings, apparently from a submachine carbine. They are going to the Army experts at Fort Halstead. Ditto the slugs when they come out of the bodies of the two Secret Service men and Sergeant Dunn of the Oxford Special Branch. Fort Halstead will tell us exactly, but at first glance they look like Warsaw Pact ordnance. Almost every European terrorist group except the I.R.A. uses East Bloc weaponry.

“The forensic people at Oxford are good, but I’m still bringing every piece of evidence back to our own labs at Fulham. Thames Valley will continue to look for witnesses.

“So, gentlemen, we have four lines of enquiry. The getaway van, witnesses at or near the scene, the evidence they left behind, and-another for the Thames Valley people-a search for anyone seen observing the house off the Woodstock Road. Apparently”-he glanced at the two Americans-“Simon Cormack made the same run over the same ground each morning at the same hour for several days.”

At that point the phone rang. It was for Cramer. He took the call, asked several questions, listened for some minutes, then came back to the table.

“I’ve appointed Commander Peter Williams, head of S.O. 13, the Anti-Terrorist Branch, the official investigating officer. That was he. We think we have the van.”

The owner of Whitehill Farm, close to Fox Covert on the Islip road, had called the fire brigade at 8:10 after seeing smoke and flames rising from a near-derelict timber barn he owned. It was situated in a meadow close to the road but five hundred yards from his farmhouse and he seldom visited it. The Oxford Fire Brigade had responded, but too late to save the barn. The farmer had been standing helplessly by and had watched the flames consume the timber structure, bringing down first the roof and then the walls.

As the firemen were damping down the debris, they observed what appeared to be the gutted wreck of a van underneath the charred timbers. That was at 8:41. The farmer was adamant there had not been a vehicle stored in the barn. Fearing there might have been people-gypsies, tinkers, even campers-inside the van, the firemen stayed on to pull the timbers away. They peered inside the van when they could get near to it, but saw no evidence of bodies. But it was definitely the wreck of a Ford Transit.

On returning to the Brigade headquarters, a smart leading officer heard on the radio that the Thames Valley Police were looking for a Transit, believed to have participated in “an offense involving firearms” earlier that morning. He had rung Kidlington.

“I’m afraid it’s gutted,” said Cramer. “Tires probably burnt out, fingerprints erased. Still, engine block and chassis numbers will not be affected. My Vehicles Section people are on their way. If there’s anything-and I do mean anything-left, we’ll get it.”

Vehicles Section at Scotland Yard comes under the Serious Crimes Squad, part of S.O. Department.

The COBRA stayed in session, but some of its leading participants left to get on with other matters, handing over to subordinates who would report if there was a break. The chair was taken by a junior Minister from the Home Office.

In a perfect world, which it never is, Nigel Cramer would have preferred to keep the press out of things, for a while at least. By 11:00 A.M. Clive Empson of the Oxford Mail was at Kidlington asking about reports of a shooting and killing on Shotover Plain just about sunrise. Three things then surprised him. One was that he was soon taken to a detective chief superintendent, who asked him where he had got this report. He refused to say. The second was that there was an air of genuine fear among the junior officers at the Thames Valley Police headquarters. The third was that he was given no help at all. For a double shooting-the print technician’s wife had seen only two bodies-the police would normally be asking for press cooperation and issuing a statement, not to mention holding a press conference.

Driving back to Oxford, Empson mulled things over. A “natural causes” would go to the city morgue. But a shooting would mean the more sophisticated facilities of the Radcliffe Infirmary. By chance he was having a rather agreeable affair with a nurse at the Radcliffe; she was not in the “bodies” section, but she might know someone who was.

By the lunch hour he had been told there was a big flap going on at the Radcliffe. There were three bodies in the morgue; two were apparently American and one was a British policeman. There was a forensic pathologist all the way from London, and someone from the American embassy. That puzzled him.

Servicemen from nearby Upper Heyford base would bring uniformed USAF to the Infirmary; American tourists on a slab might bring someone from the embassy; but why would Kidlington not say so? He thought of Simon Cormack, widely known to be a student these past nine months, and went to Balliol College. Here he met a pretty Welsh student called Jenny.

She confirmed that Simon Cormack had not come to tutorials that day but took it lightly. He was probably knocking himself out with all that cross-country running. Running? “Yes, he’s the main hope to beat Cambridge in December. Goes for brutal training runs every morning. Usually on Shotover Plain.”

Clive Empson thought he had been kicked in the belly. Accustomed to the idea of spending his life covering affairs for the Oxford Mail, he suddenly saw the bright lights of Fleet Street, London, beckoning. He almost got it right, but he assumed Simon Cormack had been shot. That was the report he filed to a major London newspaper in the late afternoon. It had the effect of forcing the government to make a statement.

Washington insiders will sometimes, in complete privacy, admit to British friends that they would give their right arms for the British governmental system.

The British system is fairly simple. The Queen is the head of state and she stays in place. The head of government is the Prime Minister, who is always the leader of the party that wins the general election. This has two advantages. The nation’s chief executive cannot be at loggerheads with a majority from the opposing political party in Parliament (which facilitates necessary, though not always popular, legislation) and the incoming Prime Minister after an election victory is almost always a skilled and experienced politician at the national level, and probably a former Cabinet Minister in a previous administration. The experience, the know-how, the awareness of how things happen and how to make them happen, are always there.

In London there is a third advantage. Behind the politicians stands an array of senior civil servants who probably served the previous administration, the one before that, and the one before that. With a hundred years of experience at the top between a dozen of them, these “mandarins” are of vital help to the new winners. They know what happened last time and why; they keep the records; they know where the land mines are situated.

In Washington the outgoing incumbent takes almost everything with him-the experience, the advisers, and the records-or, at any rate, those that some congenial colonel has not shredded. The incoming man starts cold, often with experience in government only at the state level, bringing his own team of advisers, who may come in “cold turkey,” just as he does, not quite sure which are the footballs and which the land mines. It accounts for quite a few Washington reputations soon walking around with a permanent limp.

Thus when a stunned Vice President Odell left the Mansion and crossed to the West Wing at 5:05 that October morning, he realized that he was not entirely certain what to do or whom to ask.

“I cannot handle this thing alone, Michael,” the President had told him. “I will try to carry on the duties of the President. I retain the Oval Office. But I cannot chair the Crisis Management Committee. I am too involved, in any case… Get him back for me, Michael. Get my son back for me.”

Odell was a much more emotional man than John Cormack. He had never seen his wry, dry, academic friend so distraught, nor ever thought to. He had embraced his President and sworn it would be done. Cormack had returned to the bedroom where the White House physician was administering sedation to a weeping First Lady.

Odell now sat in the center chair at the Cabinet Room table, ordered coffee, and started to make phone calls himself. The snatch had taken place in Britain; that was abroad; he would need the Secretary of State. He called Jim Donaldson and woke him up. He did not tell him why, just to come straight to the Cabinet Room. Donaldson protested. He would be there at nine.

“Jim, get your butt in here now. It’s an emergency. And don’t call the President to check. He can’t take your call, and he’s asked me to handle it.”

While he had been governor of Texas, Michael Odell had always considered foreign affairs a closed book. But he had been in Washington, and Vice President, long enough to have had numberless briefings on foreign affairs issues and to have learned a lot. Those who fell for the deliberately folksy image he liked to cultivate did Odell an injustice, often to their later regret. Michael Odell had not gained the trust and respect of a man like John Cormack because he was a fool. In fact, he was very smart indeed.

He called Bill Walters, the Attorney General, political chief of the FBI. Walters was up and dressed, having taken a call from Don Edmonds, Director of the Bureau. Walters knew already.

“I’m on my way, Michael,” he said. “I want Don Edmonds on hand as well. We’re going to need the Bureau’s expertise here. Also, Don’s man in London is keeping him posted on an hourly basis. We need up-to-date reports. Okay?”

“That’s great,” said Odell with relief. “Bring Edmonds.”

When the full group was present by 6:00 A.M., it also included Hubert Reed of Treasury (responsible for the Secret Service); Morton Stannard of Defense; Brad Johnson, the National Security Adviser; and Lee Alexander, Director of Central Intelligence. Waiting and available in addition to Don Edmonds were Creighton Burbank of the Secret Service, and the Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA.

Lee Alexander was aware that although he was DCI, he was a political appointee, not a career intelligence officer. The man who headed up the entire operational area of the Agency was the DDO, David Weintraub. He waited outside with the others.

Don Edmonds had also brought one of his top men. Under the Director of the FBI come three executive assistant directors, heading respectively Law Enforcement Services, Administration, and Investigations. Within Investigations were three divisions-Intelligence, International Liaison (from which came Patrick Seymour in London), and Criminal Investigations Division. The EAD for Investigations, Buck Revell, was away sick, so Edmonds had brought the assistant director in charge of the CID, Philip Kelly.

“We’d better have them all in,” suggested Brad Johnson. “As of now, they know more than we do.”

Everyone concurred. Later the experts would form the Crisis Management Group, meeting in the Situation Room downstairs, next to the Communications Center, for convenience and privacy. Later still, the Cabinet men would join them there, when the telephoto lenses on the press cameras began to peer through the windows of the Cabinet Room and across the Rose Garden.

First they heard from Creighton Burbank, an angry man who blamed the British squarely for the disaster. He gave them everything he had learned from his own team in Summertown, a report that covered everything up to the runner’s departure from Woodstock Road that morning, and what his men had later seen and learned at Shotover Plain.

“I’ve got two men dead,” he snapped, “two widows and three orphans to see. And all because those bastards can’t run a security operation. Iwish it to go on record, gentlemen, that my service repeatedly asked that Simon Cormack not spend a year abroad, and that we needed fifty men in there, not a dozen.”

“Okay, you were right,” said Odell placatingly.

Don Edmonds had just taken a long call from the FBI man in London, Patrick Seymour. He filled them in on everything else he had learned right up to the close of the first COBRA meeting under the Cabinet Office, which had just ended.

“Just what happens in a kidnap case?” asked Hubert Reed mildly.

Of all President Cormack’s senior advisers in the room, Reed was the one generally deemed to be least likely to cope with the tough political infighting habitually associated with power in Washington.

He was a short man whose air of diffidence, even defenselessness, was accentuated by owllike eyeglasses. He had inherited wealth, and had started on Wall Street as a pension-fund manager with a major brokerage house. A sound nose for investments had made him a leading financier by his early fifties, and he had in previous years managed the Cormack family trusts-which was how the two men met and became friends.

It was Reed’s genius for finance that had caused John Cormack to invite him to Washington, where, at Treasury, he had managed to hold America ’s spiraling budget deficit within some limits. So long as the matter at hand was finance, Hubert Reed was at home; only when he was made privy to some of the “hard” operations of the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Secret Service, both subagencies of the Treasury Department, did he become thoroughly uncomfortable.

Don Edmonds glanced at Philip Kelly for an answer to Reed’s question. Kelly was the crime expert in the room.

“Normally, unless the abductors and their hideout can be quickly established, you wait until they make contact and demand a ransom. After that, you try to negotiate the return of the victim. Investigations continue, of course, to try to locate the whereabouts of the criminals. If that fails, it’s down to negotiation.”

“In this case, by whom?” asked Stannard.

There was silence. America has some of the most sophisticated alarm systems in the world. Her scientists have developed infrared sensors that can detect body heat from several miles above the earth’s surface; there are noise sensors that can hear a mouse breathe at a mile; there are movement and light sensors to pick up a cigarette stub from inner space. But no system in the entire arsenal can match the CYA sensor system that operates in Washington. It had already been in action for two hours and now was headed for peak performance.

“We need a presence over there,” urged Walters. “We can’t just leave this entirely to the British. We have to be seen to be doing something, something positive, something to get that boy back.”

“Hell, yes,” exploded Odell. “We can say they lost the boy, even though the Secret Service insisted that the British police take a backseat.” Burbank glared at him. “We have the leverage. We can insist we participate in their investigation.”

“We can hardly send a Washington Police Department team in to take over from Scotland Yard on their real estate,” Attorney General Walters pointed out.

“Well, what about the negotiation, then?” asked Brad Johnson. There was still silence from the professionals. By his insistence, Johnson was blatantly infringing the rules of Cover Your Ass.

Odell spoke, to mask the hesitation of them all. “If it comes to negotiation,” he asked, “who is the best hostage-recovery negotiator in the world?”

“Out at Quantico,” ventured Kelly, “we have the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Group. They handle our kidnap negotiations here in America. They’re the best we have over here.”

“I said, who’s the best in the world?” repeated the Vice President.

“The most consistently successful hostage-recovery negotiator in the world,” remarked Weintraub quietly, “is a man called Quinn. I know him-knew him once, at any rate.”

Ten pairs of eyes swiveled toward the CIA man.

“Background him,” commanded Odell.

“He’s American,” said Weintraub. “After leaving the Army he joined an insurance company in Hartford. After two years they sent him to head their Paris operation, covering all their clients in Europe. He married, had a daughter. His French wife and child were killed in an expressway accident outside Orléans. He hit the bottle, Hartford fired him, he pulled himself back together, and he went to work for a firm of Lloyd’s underwriters in London, a firm specializing in personal security and, thus, hostage negotiation.

“So far as I recall, he spent ten years with them-1978 through ’88. Then he retired. Till then he had handled personally-or, where there was a language problem, advised on-over a dozen successful hostage recoveries all over Europe. As you know, Europe is the kidnap capital of the developed world. I believe he speaks three languages outside of English, and he knows Britain and Europe like the back of his hand.”

“Is he the man for us?” asked Odell. “Could he handle this for the U.S.?”

Weintraub shrugged. “You asked who was the best in the world, Mr. Vice President,” he pointed out. There were nods of relief around the table.

“Where is he now?” asked Odell.

“I believe he retired to the South of Spain, sir. We’ll have it all on file back at Langley.”

“Go get him, Mr. Weintraub,” said Odell. “Get him back here, this Mr. Quinn. No matter what it takes.”

At 7:00 P.M. that evening the first news hit the TV screens like an exploding bomb. On TVE a gabbling newscaster told a stunned Spanish public of the events of that morning outside the city of Oxford. The men around the bar at Antonio’s in Alcántara del Rio watched in silence. Antonio brought the tall man a complimentary glass of the house wine.

“Mala cosa,” he said sympathetically. The tall man did not take his eyes from the screen.

“No es mi asunto,” he said, puzzlingly. It is not my affair.

David Weintraub took off from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington at 10:00 A.M. Washington time in a USAF VC20A, the military version of the Gulfstream Three. She crossed the Atlantic direct, cruising at 43,000 feet and making 483 mph, in seven and a half hours, with a helpful tail wind.

With six hours’ time difference, it was 11:30 P.M. when the DDO, CIA, landed at Rota, the U.S. Navy air base across the bay from Cádiz, Andalusia. He transferred at once to a waiting Navy SH2F Sea Sprite helicopter, which lifted away toward the east before he was even seated. The rendezvous was the wide, flat beach called Casares, and here the young staffer who had driven down from Madrid was waiting for him with a car from the Madrid Station. Sneed was a brash, bright young man fresh out of CIA training school at Camp Peary, Virginia, and seeking to impress the DDO. Weintraub sighed.

They drove carefully through Manilva, operative Sneed twice asking directions, and found Alcántara del Rio just after midnight. The whitewashed casita out of town was harder, but a helpful peasant pointed the way.

The limousine eased to a halt and Sneed killed the engine. They got out, surveyed the darkened cottage, and Sneed tried the door. It was on the latch. They walked straight into the wide, cool ground-floor sitting area. By the moonlight Weintraub could make out a man’s room: cowhide rugs over quarry tiles, easy chairs, an old refectory table of Spanish oak, a wall of books.

Sneed began poking about looking for a light switch. Weintraub noticed the three oil lamps and knew he was wasting his time. There would be a diesel generator out back to give electricity for cooking and bathing, probably shut off at sundown. Sneed was still clattering about. Weintraub took a step forward. He felt the needle tip of the knife just below the lobe of his right ear, and froze. The man had come down the tiled stair from the bedroom without a sound.

“Been a long time since Son Tay, Quinn,” said Weintraub in a low voice. The knife point moved away from his jugular.

“What’s that, sir?” asked Sneed cheerfully from the other end of the room. A shadow moved over the tiles, a match flared, and the oil lamp on the table gave a warm glow to the room. Sneed jumped a foot. Major Kerkorian in Belgrade would have loved him.

“Tiring journey,” said Weintraub. “Mind if I sit?”

Quinn was in a cotton wraparound from the waist down, like a sarong from the Orient. Bare to the waist, lean, work-hardened. Sneed’s mouth fell open at the scars.

“I’m out of it, David,” said Quinn. He seated himself at the refectory table, at the opposite end from the DDO. “I’m retired.”

He pushed a tumbler and the earthenware pitcher of red wine toward Weintraub, who poured a glass, drank, and nodded with appreciation. A rough red wine. It would never see the tables of the rich. A peasant’s and a soldier’s wine.

“Please, Quinn.”

Sneed was amazed. DDOs did not say “please.” They gave orders.

“I’m not coming,” said Quinn. Sneed came into the light glow, his jacket hanging free. He allowed it to swing to show the butt of the piece he carried in a hip holster. Quinn did not even look at him. He stared at Weintraub.

“Who is this asshole?” he inquired mildly.

“Sneed,” said Weintraub firmly, “go check the tires.”

Sneed went outside. Weintraub sighed.

“Quinn, the business at Taormina. The little girl. We know. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Can’t you understand? I’m out. It’s over. No more. You’ve wasted your journey. Get someone else.”

“There is no one else. The Brits have people, good people. Washington says we need an American. In-house, we don’t have anyone to match you when it comes to Europe.”

“ Washington wants to protect its ass,” snapped Quinn. “They always do. They need a fall guy in case it goes wrong.”

“Yeah, maybe,” admitted Weintraub. “But one last time, Quinn. Not for Washington, not for the Establishment, not even for the boy. For the parents. They need the best. I told the committee you’re it.”

Quinn stared around the room, studying his few but treasured possessions as if he might not see them again.

“I have a price,” he said at last.

“Name it,” said the DDO simply.

“Bring my grapes in. Bring in the harvest.”

They walked outside ten minutes later, Quinn hefting a gunnysack, dressed in dark trousers, sneakers on bare feet, a shirt. Sneed held open the car door. Quinn took the front passenger seat; Weintraub, the wheel.

“You stay here,” he said to Sneed. “Bring in his grapes.”

“Do what?” Sneed gasped.

“You heard. Go down to the village in the morning, rent some labor, and bring in the man’s grape harvest. I’ll tell Madrid Head of Station it’s okay.”

He used a hand communicator to summon the Sea Sprite, which was hovering over Casares beach when they arrived. They climbed aboard and wheeled away through the velvety darkness toward Rota and Washington.