The Negotiator

Chapter 5

David Weintraub was away from Washington for just twenty hours. On the eight-hour flight from Rota to Andrews, he gained six hours in time zones, landing at the Maryland headquarters of the 89th Military Airlift Wing at 4:00 A.M. In the intervening period two governments, in Washington and London, had been virtually under siege.

There are few more awesome sights than the combined forces of the world’s media when they have completely lost any last vestige of restraint. The appetite is insatiable; the methodology, brutal.

Airplanes bound out of the United States for London, or any British airport, were choked from the flight-deck doors to the toilets, as every American news outlet worth the name sent a team to the British capital. On arrival they went berserk; there were minute-by-minute deadlines to meet and nothing to say. London had agreed with the White House to stick with the original terse statement. Of course it was nowhere near enough.

Reporters and TV teams staked out the detached house off the Woodstock Road as if its doors might open to reveal the missing youth. The doors remained firmly closed as the Secret Service team, on orders from Creighton Burbank, packed every last item and prepared to leave.

The Oxford city coroner, using his powers under Section Twenty of the Coroners Amendment Act, released the bodies of the two dead Secret Service agents as soon as the Home Office pathologist had finished with them. Technically they were released to Ambassador Aloysius Fairweather on behalf of next of kin; in fact they were escorted by a senior member of the embassy staff to the USAF base at nearby Upper Heyford, where an honor guard saw the caskets aboard a transport for Andrews Air Force Base, accompanied by the other ten agents, who had nearly been mobbed for statements when they left the house in Summertown.

They returned to the States, to be met by Creighton Burbank and to begin the long inquiry into what had gone wrong. There was nothing left for them to do in England.

Even when the Oxford house had been closed down, a small and forlorn group of reporters waited outside it lest something, anything, happen there. Others pursued, throughout the university city, anyone who had ever known Simon Cormack-tutors, fellow students, college staff, barmen, athletes. Two other American students at Oxford, albeit at different colleges, had to go into hiding. The mother of one, traced in America, was kind enough to say she was bringing her boy home at once to the safety of downtown Miami. It made a paragraph and got her a spot on a local quiz show.

The body of Sergeant Dunn was released to his family, and the Thames Valley Police prepared for a funeral with full honors.

All the forensic evidence was brought east to London. The military hardware went to the Royal Armoured Research and Development Establishment at Fort Halstead, outside Sevenoaks in Kent, where the ammunition from the Skorpion was quickly identified, underlining the chance of European terrorists’ being involved. This was not made public.

The other evidence went to the Metropolitan Police laboratory in Fulham, London. That meant blades of crumpled grass with blood smears on them, pieces of mud, casts of tire tracks, the jack, footprints, the slugs taken from the three dead bodies, and the fragments of glass from the shattered windshield of the shadowing car. Before nightfall of the first day, Shotover Plain looked as if it had been vacuum-cleaned.

The car itself went on a flatbed truck to the Vehicles Section of the Serious Crimes Squad, but of much more interest was the Ford Transit van recovered from the torched barn. Experts crawled all over the charred timbers of the barn until they emerged as black as the soot. The farmer’s rusted and severed chain was removed from the gate as if it were made of eggshell, but the only outcome was a report that it had been sheared by a standard bolt-cutter. A bigger clue was the track of the sedan that had driven out of the field after the switch-over.

The gutted Transit van came to London in a crate and was slowly taken to pieces. Its license plates were false but the criminals had taken pains; the plates would have belonged to a van of that year of manufacture.

The van had been worked on-serviced and tuned by a skilled mechanic; that at least they could tell. Someone had tried to abrade the chassis and engine numbers, using a tungsten-carbide angle-grinder, obtainable from tool stores anywhere and slotted into a power drill. Not good enough. These numbers are die-stamped into the metal, so spectroscopic examination brought out the numbers from the deeper imprint inside the metal.

The central vehicle computer at Swansea came up with the original registration number and the last known owner. The computer said he lived in Nottingham. The address was visited; he had moved. No forwarding address. An all-points went out for the man-very quietly.

Nigel Cramer reported to the COBRA committee every hour on the hour and his listeners reported back to their various departments. Langley authorized Lou Collins, their man in London, to admit they, too, were raising all and any penetration agents they might have inside the European terrorist groups. There were quite a few. Counterintelligence and antiterrorist services in each of the countries hosting such groups were also offering any help they could. The hunt was becoming very heavy indeed, but there was no big break-yet.

And the abductors had not been in contact. From the time of the first news break, phone lines had been jammed; to Kidlington, to Scotland Yard, the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, any government office. Extra telephone staff had to be drafted. One had to say that for them-the British public was really trying to help. Every call was checked out; almost all other criminal investigations went on the back burner. Among the thousands of calls came the freaks, the weirdos, the hoaxers, the optimists, the hopeful, the helpful, and the simply certifiable.

The first filter was the line of switchboard operators; then the thousands of police constables who listened carefully and agreed the cigar-shaped object in the sky might be very important and would be drawn to the attention of the Prime Minister herself. The final cull came from the senior police officers who interviewed the real “possibles.” These included two more early morning drivers who had seen the green van between Wheatley and Stanton St. John. But it all ran out at the barn.

Nigel Cramer had cracked a few cases in his time; he had come up from beat constable, switched to detective work, and been in it thirty years. He knew that criminals left tracks; every time you touch something, you leave a tiny trace behind. A good copper could find that trace, especially with modern technology, if he looked hard enough. It just took time, which was what he did not have. He had known some high-pressure cases, but nothing like this.

He also knew that despite all the technology in the world the successful detective was usually the lucky detective. There was almost always one break in a case that was due to luck-good luck for the detective, bad for the criminal. If it went the other way, the criminal could still get away. Still, you could make your own luck, and he told his scattered teams to overlook nothing, absolutely nothing, however crazy or futile it might seem. But after twenty-four hours he began to think, like his Thames Valley colleague, that this was not going to be a quickie. They had got away clean, and to find them would be just plain slog.

And there was the other factor-the hostage. That he was the President’s son was a political matter, not a police one. The gardener’s boy was still a human life. Hunting men with a sack of stolen money, or a murder behind them, you just went for the target. In a hostage case the chase had to be very quiet. Spook the kidnappers badly enough, and despite their investment of time and money in the crime, they could still cut and run, leaving a dead hostage behind them. This he reported to a somber committee just before midnight, London time. An hour later in Spain, David Weintraub was taking a glass of wine with Quinn. Cramer, the British cop, knew nothing of this. Yet.

Scotland Yard will admit in private that it has better relations with Britain ’s press than sometimes appears. On small matters they often irritate each other, but when the issue is really serious the editors and proprietors, in the face of a serious plea, usually accede and use restraint. Serious means where human life or national security is in jeopardy. That is why some kidnap cases have been handled with no publicity at all, even though the editors have known most of the details.

In this case, because of a sharp-nosed young reporter in Oxford, the fox was already out and running; there was little the British press could do to exercise restraint. But Sir Peter Imbert, the Commissioner, personally met eight proprietors, twenty editors, and the chiefs of the two television networks and twelve radio stations. He argued that whatever the foreign press might print or say, there was a good chance the kidnappers, holed up somewhere in Britain, would be listening to British radio, watching British TV, and reading British newspapers. He asked for no crazy stories to the effect that the police were closing in on them and that a storming of their fortress was imminent. That was exactly the sort of story to panic them into killing their hostage and fleeing. He got his agreement.

It was the small hours of the morning in London. Far to the south a VC20A was gliding over the darkened Azores, destination Washington.

In fact the kidnappers were holed up. Passing through Buckingham the previous morning, the Volvo had intersected the M.1 motorway east of Milton Keynes and turned south toward London, joining at that hour the great torrent of steel rolling toward the capital, becoming lost among the juggernaut trucks and the commuters heading south from their Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and Hertfordshire homes. North of London the Volvo had pulled onto the M.25, the great orbital motorway that rings the capital at a range of about twenty-five miles from the city center. From the M.25 the arterial routes linking the provinces to London spread out like the spokes of a wheel.

The Volvo had eventually taken one of these spokes and, before 10:00 A.M., slid into the garage of a detached house on a tree-lined avenue a mile from the center of a small town not forty miles in a direct line from Scotland Yard. The house was well chosen; not so isolated as to excite interest in its purchase, not too close to prying neighbors. Two miles before the Volvo reached it, the team leader ordered the other three to slide down and crouch out of sight below window level. The two in the back, one on top of the other, pulled a blanket over themselves. Anyone watching would have seen a single man in a business suit and a beard driving through his gate and into his garage.

The garage opened with an automatic garage-door opener operated from the car and closed the same way. Only when it was closed did the leader allow his henchmen to surface and climb out. The garage was joined to the house, reached through a communicating door.

All four men changed back to their black track suits and black woolen ski masks before they opened the trunk. Simon Cormack was groggy, with unfocused vision, and he screwed his eyes tight against the flashlight that blinded him. Before he could adjust, a hood of black serge was thrown over his head. He saw nothing of his abductors.

He was led through the door into the house and down the stairs to the basement. It had been prepared; clean, white, concrete floor, recessed ceiling light behind shatterproof glass, a steel-frame bed screwed to the floor, toilet bucket with plastic lid. There was a peephole in the door; the shutter was on the outside, as were two steel bolts.

The men were not brutal; they just hefted the youth onto the bed and the giant held him still while one of the others slipped a steel handcuff around one ankle, not tight enough to cause gangrene but so as to ensure that no foot would ever slip through it. The other cuff was locked tight. Through it went a ten-foot steel chain, which was then padlocked to itself. The other end of the chain was already padlocked around one leg of the bed. Then they left him. They never said a word to him and never would.

He waited half an hour before he dared take the hood off. He did not know if they were still there, though he had heard a door close and the rasp of sliding bolts. His hands were free, but he took the hood off very slowly. There were no blows, no shouts. At last it was off. He blinked against the light, then adjusted and stared around. His memory was hazy. He recalled running on soft springy grass, a green van, a man changing a tire; two black-clad figures coming at him, a searing roar of gunfire, the impact, the feeling of weight on top of him, and grass in his mouth.

He remembered the open van doors, trying to shout, flailing limbs, the mattresses inside the van, the big man holding him down, something sweet and aromatic across his mouth, and then nothing. Until now. Until this. Then it hit him. With the realization came the fear. And the loneliness, the utter isolation.

He tried to be brave, but tears of fear welled up and trickled down.

“Oh, Dad,” he whispered. “Dad, I’m sorry. Help me.”

If Whitehall was having problems from the tidal wave of telephone calls and press inquiries, the pressure on the White House was trebled. The first statement on the affair out of London had been issued at 7:00 P.M.London time and the White House had been warned an hour before that it would have to come. But that was only 2:00 P.M. Washington time, and the American media reaction had been frenzied.

Craig Lipton; the White House press secretary, had spent an hour in the Cabinet Room with the committee, being briefed on what to say. The trouble was, there was so little. The fact of the abduction could be confirmed, along with the death of two accompanying Secret Service men. Plus the fact that the President’s son was a fine athlete, specializing in cross-country running, and had been on a training run at the time.

It would not help, of course. There is no hindsight as brilliantly perceptive as that of an outraged journalist. Creighton Burbank, while agreeing he would not actually criticize the President nor blame Simon himself, made plain he was not having his Secret Service crucified for falling down on protection when he had specifically asked for more men. A compromise was worked out that would fool no one.

Jim Donaldson pointed out that, as Secretary of State, he still had to maintain relations with London and in any case angry friction between the two capitals would not help and might do real harm; he insisted Lipton stress that a British police sergeant had been murdered as well. This was agreed, though the White House press corps eventually took little notice.

Lipton faced a baying press just after 4:00 P.M. and made his statement. He was on live TV and radio. The moment he finished, the uproar started. He pleaded he could answer no further questions. A victim in the Roman Coliseum might as well have told the lions he was really only a very thin Christian. The uproar increased. Many questions were drowned out but some came through to 100 million Americans, sowing the seeds. Did the White House blame the British? Er, well, no… Why not? Were they not in charge of security over there? Well, yes, but… Did the White House blame the Secret Service then? Not exactly… Why were there only two men guarding the son of the President? What was he doing running almost alone in an isolated area? Was it true Creighton Burbank had offered his resignation? Had the kidnappers communicated yet? To that one he could gratefully answer no, but he was already being goaded into exceeding his brief. That was the point. Reporters can smell a spokesman-on-the-run like a Limburger cheese.

Lipton finally retreated behind the scene, bathed in sweat and determined to go back to Grand Rapids. The glamour of work in the White House was wearing off fast. The newscasters and editorial writers would say what they wanted, regardless of his answers to questions. By nightfall the press tone was becoming markedly hostile to Britain.

Up at the British embassy on Massachusetts Avenue the press attaché, who had also heard of CYA, made a statement. While expressing his country’s dismay and shock at what had happened, he slipped in two points. That the Thames Valley Police had taken a very low-profile role specifically at American request, and that Sergeant Dunn was the only one who had got off two shots at the abductors, giving his life in doing so. It was not what was wanted, but it made a paragraph. It also made a watching Creighton Burbank snarl with anger. Both men knew that the low-profile request, indeed insistence, had come from Simon Cormack via his father, but could not say so.

The Crisis Management Group, the professionals, met through the day in the basement Situation Room, monitoring the information flow out of COBRA in London and reporting upstairs as and when necessary. The National Security Agency had stepped up its monitoring of all telephone communications into and out of Britain in case the kidnappers made a call via satellite. The FBI’s behavioral scientists at Quantico had come up with a list of psycho-portraits of previous kidnappers and a menu of things the Cormack kidnappers might or might not do, along with lists of do’s and don’ts for the Anglo-American authorities. Quantico firmly expected to be called in and flown to London en masse, and were perplexed at the delay, although none of them had ever operated in Europe.

In the Cabinet Room the committee was living on nerves, coffee, and antacid tablets. This was the first major crisis of the incumbency and the middle-aged politicians were learning the hard way the first rule of crisis management: It is going to cost a lot of sleep, so get what you can while you can. Having risen at 4:00 A.M., the Cabinet members were still awake at midnight.

At that hour the VC20A was over the Atlantic, well west of the Azores, three and a half hours short of landfall and four hours short of touchdown. In the spacious rear compartment the two veterans, Weintraub and Quinn, were catching some sleep. Also sleeping, farther back, was the three-man crew who had flown the jet to Spain; the “slip” crew brought her home.

The men in the Cabinet Room browsed over the dossier on the man called Quinn, gouged out of the files at Langley, with additions from the Pentagon. Born on a farm in Delaware, it said; lost his mother at age ten; now aged forty-six. Joined the infantry at age eighteen in 1963, transferred two years later to the Special Forces and went to Vietnam four months after. Spent five years there.

“He never seems to use his first name,” complained Hubert Reed. “Says here even his intimates call him Quinn. Just Quinn. Odd.”

“He is odd,” observed Bill Walters, who had read further along. “It also says here he hates violence.”

“Nothing odd about that,” replied Jim Donaldson. “I hate violence.”

Unlike his predecessor at State, George Shultz, who had occasionally been known to give vent to a four-letter word, Jim Donaldson was a man of unrelieved primness, a characteristic that had often made him the unappreciative butt of Michael Odell’s leg-pulling jokes.

Thin and angular, even taller than John Cormack, he resembled a flamingo en route to a funeral, and was never seen without his three-piece charcoal-gray suit, gold-fob watch chain, and stiff white collar. Odell deliberately made mention of bodily functions whenever he wished to twit the astringent New Hampshire lawyer, and at each mention Donaldson’s narrow nose would wrinkle in distaste. His attitude to violence was similar to his distaste for crudeness.

“Yes,” rejoined Walters, “but you haven’t read page eighteen.”

Donaldson did so, as did Michael Odell. The Vice President whistled.

“He did that?” he queried. “They should have given the guy the Congressional Medal.”

“You need witnesses for the Congressional Medal,” Walters pointed out. “As you see, only two men survived that encounter on the Mekong, and Quinn brought the other one forty miles on his back. Then the man died of wounds at Danang USMC Military Hospital.”

“Still,” said Hubert Reed cheerfully, “he managed a Silver Star, two Bronze, and five Purple Hearts.” As if getting wounded was fun if they gave you more ribbons.

“With the campaign medals, that guy must have four rows,” mused Odell. “It doesn’t say how he and Weintraub met.”

It didn’t. Weintraub was now fifty-four, eight years older than Quinn. He had joined the CIA at age twenty-four, just out of college in 1961, gone through his training at the Farm-the nickname for Camp Peary on the York River in Virginia-and gone to Vietnam as a GS-12 provincial officer in 1965, about the time the young Green Beret called Quinn arrived from Fort Bragg.

Through 1961 and 1962 ten A-teams of the U.S. Special Forces had been deployed in Darlac Province, building strategic and fortified villages with the peasants, using the “oil-spot” theory developed by the British in beating the Communist guerrillas in Malaya: to deny the terrorists local support, supplies, food, safe-houses, information, and money. The Americans called it the hearts-and-minds policy. Under the Special Forces guidance, it was working.

In 1963, Lyndon Johnson came to power. The Army argued that Special Forces should be returned from CIA control to theirs. They won. It marked the end of hearts-and-minds, though it took another two years to collapse. Weintraub and Quinn met in those two years. The CIA man was concerned with gathering information on the Viet Cong, which he did by skill and cunning, abhorring the methods of men like Irving Moss (whom he did not encounter, since they were in different parts of Vietnam), even though he knew such methods were sometimes used in the Phoenix program, of which he was a part.

The Special Forces were increasingly taken away from their village program to be sent on search-and-destroy missions in the deepest jungle. The two men met in a bar over a beer; Quinn was twenty-one and had been out there a year; Weintraub was twenty-nine and also had a year in ’ Nam behind him. They found common cause in a shared belief that the Army High Command was not going to win that kind of war just by throwing ordnance at it. Weintraub found he very much liked the fearless young soldier. Self-educated he might be; he had a first-rate brain and had taught himself fluent Vietnamese, a rarity among the military. They stayed in touch. The last time Weintraub had seen Quinn was during the run up to Son Tay.

“Says here the guy was at Son Tay,” said Michael Odell. “Son of a gun.”

“With a record like that, I wonder why he never made officer,” said Morton Stannard. “The Pentagon has some people with the same kind of decorations out of ’ Nam, but they got themselves commissioned at the first opportunity.”

David Weintraub could have told them, but he was still sixty minutes short of touchdown. After taking back control of the Special Forces, the orthodox military-who hated S.F. because they could not understand it-slowly ran down the S.F. role over the six years to 1970, handing over more and more of the hearts-and-minds program, as well as the search-and-destroy missions, to the South Vietnamese ARVN-with dire results.

Still, the Green Berets kept going, trying to bring the fight to the Viet Cong through stealth and guile rather than mass bombing and defoliation, which simply fed the VC with recruits. There were projects like Omega, Sigma, Delta, and Blackjack. Quinn was in Delta, commanded by “Charging Charlie” Beckwith who would later, in 1977, set up the Delta Force at Fort Bragg and plead with Quinn to return from Paris to the Army.

The trouble with Quinn was that he thought orders were requests. Sometimes he did not agree with them. And he preferred to operate alone. Neither behavior constituted a good recommendation for a commission. He made corporal after six months, sergeant after ten. Then back to private, then sergeant, then private… His career was like a yo-yo.

“I figure we have the answer to your question, Morton,” said Odell, “right here. The business after Son Tay.” He chuckled. “The guy busted a general’s jaw.”

The 5th Special Forces Group finally pulled out of Vietnam on December 31, 1970, three years before the full-scale military withdrawal that included Colonel Easterhouse, and five years before the embarrassing evacuation, via the embassy roof, of the last Americans in the country. Son Tay was in November 1970.

Reports had come in of a number of American prisoners of war being located at the Son Tay prison, twenty-four miles from Hanoi. It was decided the Special Forces should go in and bring them out. It was an operation of complexity and daring. The fifty-eight volunteers came from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, via Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, for jungle training. All save one: they needed a fluent Vietnamese speaker. Weintraub, who was in the affair on the intelligence side, said he knew one. Quinn joined the rest of the group in Thailand, and they flew in together.

The operation was commanded by Colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons, but the spearhead group that went right into the prison compound came under Captain Dick Meadows. Quinn was with them. He established from a stunned North Vietnamese guard within seconds of landing that the Americans had been moved-two weeks earlier. The S.F. soldiers came out intact, with a few flesh wounds.

Back at base, Quinn berated Weintraub for the lousy intelligence. The CIA man protested that the spooks knew the Americans had been taken away, and had told the commanding general so. Quinn walked into the officers’ club, strode up to the bar, and broke the general’s jaw. It was hushed up, of course. A good defense lawyer can make such a mess of a career over a thing like that. Quinn was busted to private-again-and flew home with the rest. He resigned a week later and went into insurance.

“The man’s a rebel,” said the Secretary of State with distaste as he closed the file. “He’s a loner, a maverick, and a violent one at that. I think we may have made a mistake here.”

“He also has an unmatched record of hostage negotiation,” pointed out the Attorney General. “It says he can use skill and subtlety when dealing with kidnappers. Fourteen successful recoveries in Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Italy. Either done by him, or with him advising.”

“All we want,” said Odell, “is for him to get Simon Cormack back home in one piece. It doesn’t matter to me if he punches generals or screws sheep.”

“Please,” begged Donaldson. “By the way, I’ve forgotten. Why did he quit?”

“He retired,” said Brad Johnson. “Something about a little girl being killed in Sicily three years back. Took his severance pay, cashed in his life insurance policies, and bought himself a spread in the South of Spain.”

An aide from the Communications Center put his head around the door. It was 4:00 A.M., twenty-four hours since they had all been roused.

“The DDO and his companion have just landed at Andrews,” he said.

“Get them in here without delay,” ordered Odell, “and get the DCI, the Director of the FBI, and Mr. Kelly up here as well, by the time they arrive.”

Quinn still wore the clothes in which he had left Spain. Because of the cold he had pulled on a sweater from his gunnysack. His near-black trousers, part of his only suit, were adequate for attending mass in Alcántara del Rio, for in the villages of Andalusia, people still wear black for mass. But they were badly rumpled. The sweater had seen better days and he wore three days of stubble.

Despite their lack of sleep, the committee members looked in better shape. Relays of fresh laundry, pressed shirts, and suits had been ferried in from their distant homes; washroom facilities were right next door. Weintraub had not stopped the car between Andrews and the White House; Quinn looked like a reject from the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

Weintraub walked in first, stood aside for Quinn, and closed the door. The Washington officials stared at Quinn in silence.

The tall man walked without a word to the chair at the end of the table, sat down without invitation, and said, “I’m Quinn.”

Vice President Odell cleared his throat.

“Mr. Quinn, we have asked you here because we are considering asking you to take on the task of negotiating the safe return of Simon Cormack.”

Quinn nodded. He assumed he had not been brought this distance to discuss football.

“You have an update on the situation in London?” he asked.

It was a relief to the committee to have a practical matter brought up so early. Brad Johnson pushed a teletype printout down the table to Quinn, who studied it in silence.

“Coffee, Mr. Quinn?” asked Hubert Reed. Treasury Secretaries did not normally serve coffee, but he rose and went to the urn that now stood on a table against the wall. A lot of coffee had been drunk.

“Black,” said Quinn, reading. “They haven’t been in touch yet?”

There was no need to ask who “they” were.

“No,” said Odell. “Total silence. Of course there have been hundreds of hoax calls. Some in Britain. We’ve logged seventeen hundred in Washington alone. The crazies are having a field day.”

Quinn went on reading. On the flight, Weintraub had given him the entire background. He was just coming up to date with developments since. There were precious few.

“Mr. Quinn, would you have any idea who might have done this?” asked Donaldson.

Quinn looked up.

“Gentlemen, there are four kinds of kidnapper. Only four. The best from our point of view would be amateurs. They plan badly. If they succeed in the snatch, they leave traces. They can usually be located. They have little nerve, which can be dangerous. Usually the hostage-recovery teams move in, outwit them, and get the hostage back unharmed. But these weren’t amateurs.”

There was no argument. He had their attention.

“Worst of all are the maniacs-people like the Manson gang. Unapproachable, illogical. They want nothing material; they kill for fun. The good news is, these people don’t smell like maniacs. The preparations were meticulous, the training precise.”

“And the other two kinds?” asked Bill Walters.

“Of the other two, the worse are the fanatics, political or religious. Their demands are sometimes impossible to meet-literally. They seek glory, publicity-that above all. They have a Cause. Some will die for it; all will kill for it. We may think their Cause is lunatic. They don’t. And they are not stupid-just filled with hate for the Establishment and therefore their victim, who comes from it. They kill as a gesture, not in self-defense.”

“Who is the fourth type?” asked Morton Stannard.

“The professional criminal,” said Quinn without hesitation. “They want money-that’s the easy part. They have made a big investment, now locked up in the hostage. They won’t easily destroy that investment.”

“And these people?” asked Odell.

“Whoever they are, they suffer from one great disadvantage, which may work out to be good or bad for us. The guerrillas of Central and South America, the Mafia in Sicily, the Camorra in Calabria, the mountain men of Sardinia, or the Hezb’Allah in South Beirut -all operate within a safe, native environment. They don’t have to kill because they are not in a hurry. They can hold out forever. These people are holed up in Britain of all places; a very hostile environment-for them. So the strain is on them already. They will want to make their deal quickly and get away, which is good. But they may be spooked by the fear of imminent discovery, and cut and run. Leaving a body behind them, which is bad.”

“Would you negotiate with them?” asked Reed.

“If possible. If they get in touch, someone has to.”

“It sticks in my craw to pay money to scum like these,” said Philip Kelly of the FBI’s Criminal Investigations Division. People come to the Bureau from a variety of backgrounds; Kelly’s route was via the New York Police Department.

“Do professional criminals show more mercy than fanatics?” asked Brad Johnson.

“No kidnappers show mercy,” said Quinn shortly. “It’s the filthiest crime in the book. Just hope for greed.”

Michael Odell looked around at his colleagues. There was a series of slow nods.

“Mr. Quinn, will you attempt to negotiate this boy’s release?”

“Assuming the abductors get in touch, yes. There are conditions.”

“Of course. Name them.”

“I don’t work for the U.S. government. I have its cooperation in all things, but I work for the parents. Just them.”

“Agreed.”

“I operate out of London, not here. It’s too far away. I have no profile at all, no publicity, nothing. I get my own apartment, the phone lines I need. And I get primacy in the negotiation process-that needs clearing with London. I don’t need a feud with Scotland Yard.”

Odell glanced at the Secretary of State.

“I think we can prevail on the British government to concede that,” said Donaldson. “They have primacy in the criminal investigation, which will continue in parallel with any direct negotiation. Anything else?”

“I operate my own way, make my own decisions how to handle these people. There may have to be money exchanged. It’s made available. My job is to get the boy returned. That’s all. After he’s free you can hunt them down to the ends of the earth.”

“Oh, we will,” said Kelly with quiet menace.

“Money is not the problem,” said Hubert Reed. “You may understand there is no financial limit to what we’ll pay.”

Quinn kept silent, though he realized that telling the kidnappers that would be the worst route to go.

“I want no crowding, no bird-dogging, no private initiatives. And before I leave, I want to see President Cormack. In private.”

“This is the President of the United States you’re talking about,” said Lee Alexander of the CIA.

“He’s also the father of the hostage,” said Quinn. “There are things I need to know about Simon Cormack that only he can tell me.”

“He’s terribly distressed,” said Odell. “Can’t you spare him that?”

“My experience is that fathers often want to talk to someone, even a stranger. Maybe especially a stranger. Trust me.”

Even as he said it, Quinn knew there was no hope of that. Odell sighed.

“I’ll see what I can do. Jim, would you clear it with London? Tell them Quinn is coming. Tell them this is what we want. Someone has to get him some fresh clothes. Mr. Quinn, would you care to use the washroom down the hall to freshen up? I’ll call the President. What’s the fastest way to London?”

“The Concorde out of Dulles in three hours,” said Weintraub without hesitation.

“Hold space on it,” said Odell, and rose. They all did.

Nigel Cramer had news for the COBRA committee under Whitehall at 10:00 A.M. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Center in Swansea had come up with a lead. A man with the same name as the missing former owner of the Transit van had purchased and registered another van, a Sherpa, a month earlier. There was now an address, in Leicester. Commander Williams, the head of S.O. 13 and the official investigating officer, was on his way there by police helicopter. If the man no longer owned it, he must have sold it to somebody. It had never been reported stolen.

After the conference Sir Harry Marriott took Cramer to one side.

“ Washington wants to handle the negotiations, if there are any,” he said. “They’re sending their own man over.”

“Home Secretary, I must insist that the Met. has primacy in all areas,” said Cramer. “I want to use two men from Criminal Intelligence Branch as negotiators. This is not American territory.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sir Harry. “I have to overrule you on this one. I’ve cleared it with Downing Street. If they want it that way, the view is we have to let them have it.”

Cramer was affronted, but he had made his protest. The loss of his primacy in negotiation simply made him more determined than ever to end the abduction by finding the kidnappers through police detective work.

“May I ask who their man is, Home Secretary?”

“Apparently he’s called Quinn.”

“Quinn?”

“Yes. Have you heard of him?”

“Certainly, Home Secretary. He used to work for a firm in Lloyd’s. I thought he’d retired.”

“Well, Washington tells us he’s back. Is he any good?”

“Extremely good. Excellent record in five countries, including Ireland years ago. I met him on that one. The victim was a British citizen, a businessman snatched by some renegade I.R.A. men.”

Privately, Cramer was relieved. He had feared some behavioral theorist who would be amazed to find that the British drove on the left.

“Splendid,” said Sir Harry. “Then I think we should concede the point with good grace. Our complete cooperation, all right?”

The Home Secretary, who had also heard of CYA-though he would have pronounced and spelled the last word “arse”-was not displeased by Washington ’s demand. After all, if anything went wrong…

Quinn was shown into the private study on the second floor of the Executive Mansion an hour after leaving the Cabinet Room. Odell had led him personally, not via the holly and box hedges of the Rose Garden, but through the basement corridor that emerged to a set of stairs giving onto the Mansion’s ground-floor corridor. Long Tom cameras were now ranged on the garden from half a mile away.

President Cormack was fully dressed in a dark suit, but he looked pale and tired, the lines of strain showing around his mouth, smudges of insomnia beneath his eyes. He shook hands and nodded at the Vice President, who withdrew.

Gesturing Quinn to a chair, he took his own seat behind his desk. A defense mechanism, creating a barrier, not wanting to unbend. He was about to speak when Quinn got in first.

“How is Mrs. Cormack?”

Not “the First Lady.” Just Mrs. Cormack, his wife. He was startled.

“Oh, she’s sleeping. It has been a terrible shock. She’s under sedation.” He paused. “You have been through this before, Mr. Quinn.”

“Many times, sir.”

“Well, as you see, behind the pomp and the circumstance is just a man, a very worried man.”

“Yes, sir. I know. Tell me about Simon, please.”

“Simon? What about him?”

“What he is like. How he will react to… to this. Why did you have him so late in life?”

There was no one in the White House who would have dared ask that. John Cormack looked across the desk. He was tall himself, but this man matched him at six feet two inches. Neat gray suit, striped tie, white shirt-all borrowed, though he did not know that. Clean-shaven, deeply suntanned. A craggy face, calm gray eyes, an impression of strength and patience.

“So late? Well, I don’t know. I married when I was thirty; Myra was twenty-one. I was a young professor then. We thought we would start a family in two or three years. But it didn’t happen. We waited. The doctors said there was no reason… Then, after ten years of marriage, Simon came. I was forty by then, Myra thirty-one. There was only ever the one child… just Simon.”

“You love him very much, don’t you?”

President Cormack stared at Quinn in surprise. The question was so unexpected. He knew Odell was completely estranged from his own two grown-up offspring, but it had never occurred to him how much he loved his only son. He rose, came around the desk, and seated himself on the edge of an upright chair, much closer to Quinn.

“Mr. Quinn, he is the sun and the moon to me-to us both. Get him back for us.”

“Tell me about his childhood, when he was very young.”

The President jumped up.

“I have a picture,” he said triumphantly. He walked to a cabinet and returned with a framed snapshot. It showed a sturdy toddler of four or five, in swim trunks on a beach, holding a pail and shovel. A proud father was crouched behind him, grinning.

“That was taken at Nantucket in ’75. I had just been elected congressman from New Haven.”

“Tell me about Nantucket,” said Quinn gently.

President Cormack talked for an hour. It seemed to help him. When Quinn rose to leave, Cormack scribbled a number on a pad and handed it to Quinn.

“This is my private number. Very few people have it. It will reach me directly, night or day.” He held out his hand. “Good luck, Mr. Quinn. God go with you.” He was trying to control himself. Quinn nodded and left quickly. He had seen it before, the effect, the dreadful effect.

While Quinn was still in the washroom, Philip Kelly had driven back to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, where he knew his Deputy Assistant Director, CID, would be waiting for him. He and Kevin Brown had a lot in common, which was why he had pressed for Brown’s appointment.

When he entered his office his deputy was there, reading Quinn’s file. Kelly nodded toward it as he took his seat.

“So, that’s our hotshot. What do you think?”

“He was brave enough in combat,” conceded Brown. “Otherwise a smartass. About the only thing I like about the guy is his name.”

“Well,” said Kelly, “they’ve put him in there over the Bureau’s head. Don Edmonds didn’t object. Maybe he figures if it all turns out badly… Still and all, the sleazeballs who did this thing have contravened at least three U.S. statutes. The Bureau still has jurisdiction, even though it happened on British territory. And I don’t want this yo-yo operating out on his own with no supervision, no matter who says so.”

“Right,” agreed Brown.

“The Bureau’s man in London, Patrick Seymour-do you know him?”

“Know of him,” grunted Brown. “Hear he’s very pally with the Brits. Maybe too much so.”

Kevin Brown had come out of the Boston police force, an Irishman like Kelly, whose admiration for Britain and the British could be written on the back of a postage stamp with room left over. Not that he was soft on the I.R.A.; he had pulled in two arms dealers trading with the I.R.A., who would have gone to jail but for the courts.

He was an old-style law-enforcement officer who had no truck with criminals of any ilk. He also remembered as a small boy in the slums of Boston listening wide-eyed to his grandmother’s tales of people dying with mouths green from grass-eating during the famine of 1848, and of the hangings and the shootings of 1916. He thought of Ireland, a place he had never visited, as a land of mists and gentle green hills, enlivened by the fiddle and the chaunter, where poets like Yeats and O’Faolain wandered and composed. He knew Dublin was full of friendly bars where peaceable folk sat over a stout in front of peat fires, immersed in the works of Joyce and O’Casey.

He had been told that Dublin had the worst teenage drug problem in Europe but knew it was just London ’s propaganda. He had heard Irish Prime Ministers on American soil pleading for no more money to be sent to the I.R.A. Well, people were entitled to their views. And he had his. Being a crime-buster did not require him to like the people he saw as the timeless persecutors of the land of his forefathers. Across the desk, Kelly came to a decision.

“ Seymour is close to Buck Revell, but Revell’s away sick. The Director has put me in charge of this from the Bureau’s point of view. And I don’t want this Quinn getting out of hand. I want you to get together a good team and take the midday flight and get over there. You’ll be behind the Concorde by a few hours, but no matter. Base yourself at the embassy-I’ll tell Seymour you’re in charge, just for the emergency.”

Brown rose, pleased.

“One more thing, Kevin. I want one special agent in close on Quinn. All the time, day and night. If that guy burps, we want to know.”

“I know just the one,” said Brown grimly. “A good operative, tenacious and clever. Also personable. Agent Sam Somerville. I’ll do the briefing myself. Now.”

Out at Langley, David Weintraub was wondering when he would ever sleep again. During his absence the work had piled up in a mountain. Much of it had to do with the files on all the known terrorist groups in Europe-latest updates, penetration agents inside the groups, known locations of the leading members, possible incursions into Britain over the previous forty days… the list of headings alone was almost endless. So it was the Chief of the European Section who briefed Duncan McCrea.

“You’ll meet Lou Collins from our embassy,” he said, “but he’ll be keeping us posted from outside the inner circle. We have to have somebody close in on this man Quinn. We need to identify those abductors and I wouldn’t be displeased if we could do it before the Brits. And especially before the Bureau. Okay, the British are pals, but I’d like this one for the Agency. If the abductors are foreigners, that gives us an edge; we have better files on foreigners than the Bureau, maybe than the Brits. If Quinn gets any smell, any instinct about them, and lets anything slip, you pass it on to us.”

Operative McCrea was awestruck. A GS-12 with ten years in the Agency since recruitment abroad-his father had been a businessman in Central America-he had had two foreign postings but never London. The responsibility was enormous, but matched by the opportunity.

“You can rely on m-m-me, sir.”

Quinn had insisted that no one known to the media accompany him to Dulles International Airport. He had left the White House in a plain compact car, driven by his escort, an officer of the Secret Service in plain clothes. Quinn had ducked into the backseat, down near the floor, as they passed the knot of press grouped at Alexander Hamilton Place at the extreme east end of the White House complex and farthest away from the West Wing. The press glanced at the car, saw nothing of importance, and took no notice.

At Dulles, Quinn checked in with his escort, who refused to leave him until he actually walked onto the Concorde and who raised eyebrows by flashing his White House ID card to get past passport control. He did at least serve one purpose; Quinn went to the duty-free shop and bought a number of items: toiletries, shirts, ties, underwear, socks, shoes, a raincoat, a valise, and a small tape recorder with a dozen batteries and spools. When the time came to pay he jerked a thumb at the Secret Service man.

“My friend here will pay by credit card,” he said.

The limpet detached himself at the door of the Concorde. The British stewardess showed Quinn to his seat near the front, giving him no more attention than anyone else. He settled into his aisle seat. A few moments later someone took the aisle seat across the way. He glanced across. Blond, short shining hair, about thirty-five, a good, strong face. The heels were a smidgen too flat, the suit a mite too severe for the figure beneath.

The Concorde swung into line, paused, trembled, and then hurled herself down the runway. The bird-of-prey nose lifted, the claws of the rear wheels lost contact, the ground below tilted forty-five degrees, and Washington dropped quickly away.

There was something else. Two tiny holes in her lapel, the sort of holes that might be made by a safety pin. The sort of safety pin that might hold an ID card. He leaned across.

“Which department are you from?”

She looked startled. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Bureau. Which department in the Bureau are you from?”

She had the grace to blush. She bit her lip and thought it over. Well, it had to come sooner or later.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Quinn. My name’s Somerville. Agent Sam Somerville. I’ve been told…”

“It’s all right, Miss Sam Somerville. I know what you’ve been told.”

The no-smoking lights flicked off. The addicts in the rear lit up. A stewardess approached, dispensing glasses of champagne. The businessman in the window seat to Quinn’s left took the last one. She turned to go. Quinn stopped her, apologized, took her silver salver, whipped away the doily that covered it, and held up the tray. In the reflection he surveyed the rows behind him. It took seven seconds. Then he thanked the puzzled stewardess and gave her back the tray.

“When the seat-belt lights go off, you’d better tell that young sprig from Langley in Row Twenty-one to get his butt up here,” he said to Agent Somerville. Five minutes later she returned with the young man from the rear. He was flushed and apologetic, pushing back his floppy blond hair and managing a boy-next-door grin.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Quinn. I didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just that they told me…”

“Yes, I know. Take a seat.” Quinn gestured to a vacant seat one row forward. “Someone as badly troubled by cigarette smoke stands out, sitting back there.”

“Oh.” The young man was subdued, did as he was told.

Quinn glanced out. The Concorde wheeled over the New England coast, preparing to go supersonic. Not yet out of America and the promises were being broken already. It was 10:15 Eastern Daylight time and 3:15 P.M.in London, and three hours to Heathrow.