The Negotiator

Chapter 6

Simon Cormack spent the first twenty-four hours of his captivity in total isolation. Experts would know this was part of the softening-up process, a long opportunity for the hostage to dwell upon his isolation and his helplessness. Also a chance for hunger and tiredness to set in. A hostage full of pep, prepared to argue and complain, or even plan some kind of escape, simply makes problems for his abductors. A victim reduced to hopelessness and pathetic gratitude for small mercies is much easier to handle.

At 10:00 A.M. of the second day, about the time Quinn strode into the Cabinet Room in Washington, Simon was in a fitful doze when he heard the click of the peephole in the cellar door. Looking at it, he could make out a single eye watching him; his bed was exactly opposite the door and even when his ten-foot chain was fully extended he could never be out of view from the peephole.

After several seconds he heard the rasp of two bolts being drawn back. The door opened three inches and a black-gloved hand came around the edge. It gripped a white card with a message written with a marker pen in block capitals:

YOU HEAR THREE KNOCKS YOU PUT ON THE HOOD.

UNDERSTAND? ACKNOWLEDGE.

He waited for several seconds, unsure what to do. The card waggled impatiently.

“Yes,” he said, “I understand. Three knocks on that door and I put on the hood.”

The card was withdrawn and replaced by another. The second card said:

TWO KNOCKS YOU CAN TAKE THE HOOD OFF AGAIN.

ANY TRICKS-YOU DIE.

“I understand that,” he called toward the door. The card was withdrawn. The door closed. After several seconds there were three loud knocks. Obediently the youth reached for the thick black cowl hood, which lay on the end of his bed. He pulled it over his head and even down to his shoulders, placed his hands on his knees, and waited, trembling. Through the thickness of the material he heard nothing, just sensed that someone in soft shoes had entered the cellar.

In fact the kidnapper who came in was still dressed in black from head to foot, complete with ski mask, only his eyes visible, despite Simon Cormack’s inability to see a thing. These were the leader’s instructions. The man placed something near the bed and withdrew. Under his hood Simon heard the door close, the rasp of bolts, then two clear knocks. Slowly he pulled off the hood. On the floor lay a plastic tray. It bore a plastic plate, knife, fork, and tumbler. On the plate were sausages, baked beans, bacon, and a hunk of bread. The tumbler held water.

He was ravenous, having eaten nothing since the dinner of the night before his run, and without thinking called “Thank you” at the door. As he said it he could have kicked himself. He should not be thanking these bastards. He did not realize in his innocence that the Stockholm syndrome was beginning to take effect: that strange empathy that builds up from a victim to his persecutors, so that the victim turns his rage against the authorities who allowed it all to happen, rather than against the abductors.

He ate every last scrap of food, drank the water slowly and with deep satisfaction, and fell asleep. An hour later the signals were repeated, the process was reversed, and the tray disappeared. Simon used the bucket for the fourth time, then lay back on the bed and thought of home, and what they might be doing for him.

As he lay there Commander Williams returned from Leicester to London and reported to Deputy A.C. Cramer at the latter’s office in New Scotland Yard. Conveniently, the Yard, headquarters of the Met., is only four hundred yards from the Cabinet Office.

The former owner of the Ford Transit had been in Leicester police station under guard, a frightened and, as it turned out, innocent man. He protested that his Transit van had been neither stolen nor sold; it had been written off in a crash two months earlier. As he was moving to a new home at the time, he had forgotten to inform the Licensing Center at Swansea.

Step by step Commander Williams had checked out the story. The man, a jobbing builder, had been picking up two marble fireplaces from a dealer in south London. Swerving around a corner near the demolition site from which the fireplaces had been stripped, he had an argument with a steam shovel. The steam shovel won. The Transit van, then still its original blue, had to be written off completely. Although visible damage had been small, and mainly concentrated in the radiator area, the chassis had been twisted out of alignment.

He had returned to Nottingham alone. His insurance company had examined the Transit in the yard of a local recovery firm, pronounced it unmendable, but declined to pay him because his coverage was not comprehensive and he was at fault for hitting the steam shovel. Much aggrieved, he had accepted £20 for the wreck, by telephone from the recovery firm, and had never returned to London.

“Someone put it back on the road,” said Williams.

“Good,” said Cramer. “That means they’re ‘bent.’ It checks. The lab boys said someone had worked on the chassis with a welder. Also the green paint had been laid over the maker’s blue cellulose finish. A rough spray job. Find out who did it and whom they sold it to.”

“I’m going down to Balham,” said Williams. “The crash-recovery firm is based there.”

Cramer went back to his work. He had a mountain of it, coming in from a dozen different teams. The forensic reports were almost all in and were brilliant as far as they went. The trouble was, that was not far enough. The slugs taken from the bodies matched the bullet cases from the Skorpion, not surprisingly. No further witnesses had come forward from the Oxford area. The abductors had left no fingerprints, or any other traces except car tire tracks. The van tracks were useless-they had the van, albeit fire-gutted. No one had seen anyone near the barn. The sedan tire tracks leading from the barn had been identified by make and model, but would fit half a million sedans.

A dozen county forces were quietly checking with real estate agents for a property leased over the past six months with enough space and privacy to suit the kidnappers. The Met. was doing the same inside London, in case the criminals were holed up right in the capital itself. That meant thousands of house rentals to be checked out. Cash deals were top of the list, and there were still hundreds of those. Already a dozen discreet little love nests, two rented by national celebrities, had come to light.

Underworld informants, the “grasses,” were being leaned on to see if they had heard whispers of a team of known villains, preparing a big one, or of “slags” and “faces” (slang for known criminals) suddenly disappearing from their haunts. The underworld was being turned over in a big way but had come up with nothing so far.

Cramer had a pile of reports of “sightings” of Simon Cormack which ranged from the plausible through the possible to the lunatic, and they were all being checked out. There was another pile of transcripts of phoned-in messages from people claiming to be holding the U.S. President’s son. Again, some were crazy, and some sounded promising. Each of the latter callers had been treated seriously and begged to stay in touch. But Cramer had a gut feeling that the real kidnappers were still maintaining silence, allowing the authorities to sweat. It would be the skillful thing to do.

A special room in the basement was already set aside and a skilled team of men from the Criminal Intelligence Branch, the negotiators used in British kidnappings, sat waiting for the big one, meanwhile talking patiently and calmly to the hoaxers. Several of the latter had already been caught and would be charged in due course.

Nigel Cramer walked to the window and looked down. The sidewalk on Victoria Street was awash with reporters- he had to avoid them every time he left for Whitehall by driving straight through, sealed into his car with windows firmly closed. And still they howled through the glass for a tidbit of information. The Met.’s press office was being driven crazy.

He checked his watch and sighed. If the kidnappers held on a few more hours, the American, Quinn, would presumably take over. He did not like having been overruled on that one. He had read the Quinn file, loaned to him by Lou Collins of the CIA, and he had had two hours with the Chief Executive Officer of the Lloyd’s underwriting firm that had employed Quinn and his strange but effective talents for ten years. What he had learned left him with mixed feelings. The man was good, but unorthodox. No police force likes to work with a maverick, however talented. He would not be going out to Heathrow to meet Quinn, he decided. He would see him later and introduce him to the two chief inspectors who would sit at his side and advise him throughout the negotiation-if there ever was one. It was time to go back to Whitehall and brief the COBRA-on precious little. No, this was definitely not going to be a “quickie.”

The Concorde had picked up a jetstream at 60,000 feet and rode into London fifteen minutes ahead of schedule at 6:00 P.M. Quinn hefted his small valise and headed down the tunnel toward the arrivals area with Somerville and McCrea in tow. A few yards into the tunnel two quiet gray men in gray suits waited patiently. One stepped forward.

“Mr. Quinn?” he said quietly. Quinn nodded. The man did not flash an identity card, American-style; he just assumed that his manner and bearing would indicate he represented the authorities. “We were expecting you, sir. If you would just care to come with me… My colleague will carry your case.”

Without waiting for objections he glided down the tunnel, turned away from the stream of passengers at the entrance to the main corridor and soon into a small office that bore simply a number on the door. The bigger man, with ex-NCO stamped all over him, nodded amiably at Quinn and took his valise. In the office the quiet man flipped quickly through Quinn’s passport, and those of “your assistants,” produced a stamp from his side pocket, stamped all three, and said, “Welcome to London, Mr. Quinn.”

They left the office by another door, down some steps to a waiting car. But if Quinn thought he was going straight into London, he was wrong. They drove to the VIP suite. Quinn stepped inside and stared bleakly about him. Low-profile, he had said. No-profile. There were representatives from the American embassy, the British Home Office, Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office, the CIA, the FBI, and, for all he knew, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. It took twenty minutes.

The motorcade into London was worse. He rode up front in an American limousine half a block long with a pennant on the nose. Two motorcycle outriders cleared a path through the early evening traffic. Behind came Lou Collins, giving a ride-and a briefing-to his CIA colleague Duncan McCrea. Two cars back was Patrick Seymour, doing the same for Sam Somerville. The British in their Rovers, Jaguars, and Granadas tagged along.

They swept along the M.4 motorway toward London, pulled onto the North Circular, and down the Finchley Road. Just after Lords roundabout, the lead car swerved into Regent’s Park, followed the Outer Circle for a while, and swept into a formal entrance, past two security guards who saluted.

Quinn had spent the drive gazing out at the lights of a city he knew as well as any in the world, better than most, and maintained silence until at last even the self-important Minister/counselor lapsed into quiet. As the cars headed toward the illuminated portico of a palatial mansion, Quinn spoke. Snapped, really. He leaned forward-it was a long way-and barked into the driver’s ear.

“Stop the car.”

The driver, an American Marine, was so surprised he did exactly that, fast. The car behind was not so smart. There was a tinkling of glass from taillights and headlights. Farther down the line the Home Office driver, to avoid a collision, drove into the rhododendron bushes. The cavalcade made like a concertina and stopped. Quinn stepped out and stared at the mansion. A man was standing on the top step of the portico.

“Where are we?” asked Quinn. He knew perfectly well. The diplomat scuttled out of the rear seat behind him. They had warned him about Quinn. He had not believed them. Other figures from down the column were moving up to join them.

“Winfield House, Mr. Quinn. That’s Ambassador Fairweather waiting to greet you. It’s all set up: You have a suite of rooms-it’s all been arranged.”

“Unarrange it,” said Quinn. He opened the trunk of the limousine, grabbed his valise, and started to walk down the driveway.

“Where are you going, Mr. Quinn?” wailed the diplomat.

“Back to Spain,” called Quinn.

Lou Collins was in front of him. He had spoken with David Weintraub on the enciphered link while the Concorde was airborne.

“He’s a strange bastard,” the DDO had said, “but give him what he wants.”

“We have an apartment,” Collins said quietly. “Very private, very discreet. We sometimes use it for first debriefing Soviet bloc defectors. Other times for visiting guys from Langley. The DDO stays there.”

“Address,” said Quinn. Collins gave it to him. A back street in Kensington. Quinn nodded his thanks and kept walking. On the Outer Circle a taxi was cruising by. Quinn hailed it, gave instructions, and disappeared.

It took fifteen minutes to sort out the tangle in the driveway. Eventually Lou Collins took McCrea and Somerville in his own car and drove them to Kensington.

Quinn paid off the cab and surveyed the apartment block. They were going to bug him anyway; at least with a Company flat the hardware would be installed, saving a lot of lame excuses and redecorating. The number he needed was on the third floor. When he rang the bell it was answered by a burly, low-level Company man. The caretaker.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m in,” said Quinn, walking past him. “You’re out.” He walked through the apartment, checking the sitting room, the master bedroom, and the two smaller ones. The caretaker was frantically on the phone; they patched him through to Lou Collins in his car, and the man subsided. Grumpily he packed his things. Collins and the two bird dogs arrived three minutes after Quinn, who had selected the principal bedroom as his own. Patrick Seymour followed Collins. Quinn surveyed the four of them.

“These two have to live with me?” he asked, nodding at Special Agent Somerville and GS-12 McCrea.

“Look, be reasonable, Quinn,” said Collins. “This is the President’s son we’re trying to recover. Everyone wants to know what’s going on. They just won’t be satisfied with less. The powers-that-be just aren’t going to let you live here like a monk, telling them nothing.”

Quinn thought it over.

“All right. What can you two do apart from snooping?”

“We could be useful, Mr. Quinn,” said McCrea pleadingly. “Go and fetch things-help out.”

With his floppy hair, constant shy smile, and air of diffidence, he seemed much younger than his thirty-four years, more like a college kid than a CIA operative. Sam Somerville took up the theme.

“I’m a good cook,” she said. “Now that you’ve deep-sixed the Residence and all its staff, you’re going to have to have someone who can cook. Being where we are, it would be a spook anyway.”

For the first time since they had met him, Quinn grinned. Somervillethought it transformed his otherwise enigmatic face.

“All right,” he said to Collins and Seymour. “You’re going to bug every room and phone call anyway. You two take the remaining bedrooms.”

The young agents went down the hall.

“But that’s it,” he told Collins and Seymour. “No more guests. I need to speak to the British police. Who’s in charge?”

“Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cramer. Nigel Cramer. Number two man in Specialist Operations Department. Know him?”

“Rings a bell,” said Quinn.

At that moment a bell did ring-the telephone. Collins took it, listened, and covered the mouthpiece.

“This is Cramer,” he said. “At Winfield House. He went there to liaise with you, just heard the news. Wants to come here. Okay?”

Quinn nodded. Collins spoke to Cramer and asked him to come ’round. He arrived in an unmarked police car twenty minutes later.

“Mr. Quinn? Nigel Cramer. We met once, briefly.”

He stepped into the apartment warily. He had not known about its existence as a Company safe-house, but he did now. He also knew the CIA would vacate it when this affair was over and take another one.

Quinn recalled Cramer when he saw the face.

“ Ireland, years back. The Don Tidey affair. You were head of Anti-Terrorist Branch then.”

“S.O. 13, yes. You’ve a good memory, Mr. Quinn. I think we need to talk.”

Quinn led Cramer into the sitting room, sat him down, took a chair opposite, and gestured around the room with his hand to indicate it was certainly bugged. Lou Collins might be a nice guy, but no spook is ever that nice. The British policeman nodded gravely. He realized he was effectively on American territory, in the heart of his own capital city, but what he had to say would be fully reported by him to the COBRA.

“Let me, as you say in America, level with you, Mr. Quinn. The Metropolitan Police have been granted full primacy in the investigation into this crime. Your government has agreed to that. So far we have not had a big break, but it’s early days and we are working flat-out.”

Quinn nodded. He had worked in bugged rooms before, many times, and spoken on tapped phone lines. It was always an effort to keep conversation normal. He realized Cramer was speaking for the record, hence the pedantry.

“We asked for primacy in the negotiation process and were overruled at Washington ’s request. I have to accept that. I don’t have to like it. I have also been instructed to give you every cooperation the Met. and the entire range of our government’s departments can offer. And that you will get. You have my word on it.”

“I’m very grateful for that, Mr. Cramer,” said Quinn. He knew it sounded terribly stilted, but somewhere the spools were turning.

“What exactly is it you want?”

“Background first. The last update I read was in Washington…” Quinn checked his watch-8:00 P.M. in London. “Over seven hours ago. Have the kidnappers made contact yet?”

“So far as we are aware, no,” said Cramer. “There have been calls, of course. Some obvious hoaxes, some not so obvious, a dozen really plausible. To the last, we asked for some element of proof they were really holding Simon Cormack-”

“How?” asked Quinn.

“A question to be answered. Something from his nine months at Oxford that it would be hard to discover. No one called back with a right answer.”

“Forty-eight hours is not unusual waiting time for the first contact,” said Quinn.

“Agreed,” said Cramer. “They may communicate by mail, with a letter or a tape recording, in which case the package may be on its way. Or by phone. If it’s the former, we’ll bring them ’round here, though I will want our forensic people to have first crack at the paper, envelope, wrappings, and letter for any prints, saliva, or other traces. Fair, I think? You have no laboratory facilities here.”

“Perfectly fair,” said Quinn.

“But if the first contact is by phone, how do you want to handle it, Mr. Quinn?”

Quinn spelled out his requirements. A public announcement on the News at Ten program, requiring anyone holding Simon Cormack to contact the American embassy and only the embassy on any of a series of given numbers. A line of switchboard operators in the embassy basement to filter out the obvious phonies and patch the serious possibilities through to him at the apartment.

Cramer looked up at Collins and Seymour, who nodded. They would set up the embassy first-filter multiline switchboard within the next hour and a half, in time for the newscast. Quinn went on.

“Your Telecom people can trace every call as it comes into the embassy, maybe make a few arrests of hoaxers stupid enough not to use a public phone booth or who stay on the line too long. I don’t think the real kidnappers will be that dumb.”

“Agreed,” said Cramer. “So far, they’re smarter than that.”

“The patch-through must be without a cutoff, and just to one of the phones in this flat. There are three, right?”

Collins nodded. One was a direct line to his office, which was in the embassy building anyway.

“Use that one,” said Quinn. “When I’ve established contact with the real kidnappers, assuming I do, I want to give them a new number, a designated line that reaches me and only me.”

“I’ll get you a flash line within ninety minutes,” said Cramer, “a number that has never been used before. We’ll have to tap it, of course, but you won’t hear a sound on the line. Finally, I’d like to have two detective chief inspectors living in here with you, Mr. Quinn. They’re good and experienced. One man can’t stay awake twenty-four hours a day.”

“I’m sorry, no,” said Quinn.

“They could be of great help,” Cramer persisted. “If the kidnappers are British, there will be the question of regional accents, slang words, hints of strain or desperation in the voice at the other end, tiny traces only another Britisher could spot. They wouldn’t say anything, just listen.”

“They can listen at the exchange,” said Quinn. “You will be recording everything anyway. Run it past the speech experts, add your own comments on how lousily I’m doing, and come knock on the door here with the results. But I work alone.”

Cramer’s mouth tightened slightly. But he had his orders. He rose to leave. Quinn rose too.

“Let me see you to your car,” he said. They all knew what that meant-the stairs were not bugged. At the door Quinn jerked his head at Seymour and Collins to stay behind. Reluctantly they did so. On the stairs he murmured in Cramer’s ear.

“I know you don’t like it this way. I’m not very happy about it myself. Try to trust me. I’m not about to lose this boy if I can help it. You’ll hear every damn syllable on the phone. My own people will even hear me on the can. It’s like a Radio Shack in there.”

“All right, Mr. Quinn. You’ll get everything I can offer you. That’s a promise.”

“One last thing…” They had reached the pavement; the police car waited. “Don’t spook them. If they phone, or stay on the line a mite too long, no squad cars roaring up to the phone booth…”

“We do know that, Mr. Quinn. But we’ll have to have plainclothes men heading for the source of the phone call. They’ll be very discreet, just about invisible. But if we just spot the car number… get a physical description… that could shorten the whole thing to a couple of days.”

“Don’t get seen,” warned Quinn. “The man in the phone booth will be under horrendous pressure. Neither of us wants contact to cease. That would probably mean they’ve cut and run for the tall timber, leaving a body behind them.”

Cramer nodded, shook hands, and climbed into his car.

Thirty minutes later the engineers arrived, none in Telecom uniform, all offering Telecom identification cards. Quinn nodded amiably, knowing they came from MI-5, the Security Service, and they set to work. They were good and they were fast. Most of the work was being done in the Kensington exchange, anyway.

One of the engineers, with the base off the sitting-room telephone, raised an eyebrow a fraction. Quinn pretended not to notice. Trying to insert a bug, the man had found one in there already. Orders are orders; he slotted his own in beside the American one, establishing a new and miniature Anglo-American relationship. By 9:30 P.M. Quinn had his flash line, the ultraprivate line to which he would pass the real kidnapper if he ever spoke to the man. The second line was patched through permanently to the embassy switchboard, for incoming “possibles.” The third was left for outgoing calls.

More work was going on in the basement at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Ten lines already existed and they were all taken over. Ten young women, some American, some British, sat and waited.

The third operation was in the Kensington exchange, where the police set up an office to monitor incoming calls heading for Quinn’s flash line. As Kensington was one of the new electronic exchanges, tracing would be fast, eight to ten seconds. On their way out of the exchange, the flash-line calls would have two more taps, one to the MI-5 communications center in Cork Street, Mayfair, the other to the U.S. embassy basement which, after the isolation of the kidnappers, would change from a switchboard to a listening post.

Thirty seconds after the British group left, Lou Collins’s American engineer arrived to remove all the newly installed British bugs and tune their own. Thus, when Quinn spoke other than on the telephone, only his fellow Americans would be listening. “Nice try,” remarked Seymour to his MI-5 colleague a week later over a drink in Brooks’s Club.

At 10:00 P.M. ITN newscaster Sandy Gall stared into the camera as the booming chimes of the Big Ben theme died away, and made the announcement to the kidnappers. The numbers to call stayed on the screen throughout the update on the Simon Cormack kidnapping, which had little to say but said it anyway.

In the sitting room of a quiet house forty miles from London, four silent and tense men watched the broadcast. The leader rapidly translated into French for two of them. In fact one was Belgian, the other Corsican. The fourth needed no translation. His spoken English was good but heavily accented with the Afrikaner tones of his native South Africa.

The two from Europe spoke no English at all, and the leader had forbidden all of them to stray from the house until the affair was over. He alone left and returned, always out of the attached garage, always in the Volvo sedan, which now had new tires and license plates-the original and legitimate plates. He never left without his wig, beard, moustache, and tinted glasses. During his absences the others were instructed to stay out of sight, not even appearing at the windows and certainly not answering the door.

As the newscast changed to the Middle East situation, one of the Europeans asked a question. The leader shook his head.

“Demain,” he replied, “tomorrow morning.”

More than two hundred calls came to the embassy basement that night. Each was handled carefully and courteously, but only seven were passed through to Quinn, He took each with a cheerful friendliness, addressing the caller as “friend” or “pal,” explaining that regretfully “his people” simply had to go through the tiresome formality of establishing that the caller really had Simon Cormack, and carefully asking them to get the answer to a simple question and call him back. No one called back. In a break between 3:00 A.M. and sunrise he catnapped for four hours.

Through the night, Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea stayed with him. Sam commented on his laid-back performance on the phone.

“It hasn’t even begun yet,” he said quietly. But the strain had. The two younger people were feeling it already.

Just after midnight, having caught the noon plane from Washington, Kevin Brown and a picked team of eight FBI agents flew into Heathrow. Forewarned, an exasperated Patrick Seymour was there to greet them. He gave the senior officer an update on the situation to 11:00 P.M., when he had left for the airport. That included the installation of Quinn in his chosen aerie as opposed to Winfield House, and the telephone-intercept situation.

“Knew he was a smartass,” growled Brown when told of the tangle in the Winfield House driveway. “We’ve got to sit on this bastard or he’ll be into every kind of trick. Let’s get to the embassy. We’ll sleep on cots right there in the basement. If that yo-yo farts, I want to hear it, loud and clear.”

Inwardly, Seymour groaned. He had heard of Kevin Brown and could have done without the visit. Now, he thought, it was going to be worse than he had feared. When they reached the embassy at 1:30 A.M., the 106th phony call was coming in.

Other people were getting little sleep that night. Two of them were Commander Williams of S.O. 13 and a man called Sidney Sykes. They spent the hours of darkness confronting each other in the interview room of Wandsworth police station in south London. A second officer present was the head of the Vehicles Section of the Serious Crimes Squad, whose men had traced Sykes.

As far as a small-time crook like Sykes was concerned, the two men across the plain table were very heavy pressure indeed and by the end of the first hour he was a badly frightened man. After that things got worse.

The Vehicles Section, following a description given by the jobbing builder in Leicester, had traced the recovery firm that had removed the wrecked Transit from its lethal embrace with the steam shovel. Once it was established that the vehicle had a twisted chassis and was a write-off, the recovery company offered it back to its owner. As the charge for bringing it on a flat-bed to Leicester was greater than its value, he had declined. The recovery team had sold it to Sykes as scrap, for he ran a car-wrecking yard in Wandsworth. The Vehicles Section rummage crews had spent the day turning over that yard.

They found a barrel three-quarters full of dirty black sump oil, whose murky depths had yielded twenty-four car license plates, twelve perfectly matched pairs, all made up in the Sykes yard and all as genuine as a three-pound note. A recess beneath the floorboards of Sykes’s shabby office had given up a wad of thirty vehicle registration documents, all pertaining to cars and vans that had ceased to exist except on paper.

Sykes’s racket was to acquire crash vehicles written off by their insurers, tell the owner that he, Sykes, would inform Swansea the vehicle had ceased to exist except as a mass of scrap, and then inform Swansea of exactly the opposite-that he had bought the vehicle from its previous owner. The Swansea computer would then log that “fact.” If the car really was a write-off, Sykes was simply buying the legitimate paperwork, which could then be applied to a working vehicle of similar make and type, the working vehicle having been stolen from some parking lot by one of Sykes’s light-fingered associates. With new plates to match the registration document of the write-off, the stolen car could then be resold. The final touch was to abrade the original chassis and engine block numbers, etch in new ones, and smear on enough grease and dirt to fool the ordinary customer. Of course this would not fool the police, but as all such deals were in cash, Sykes could later deny he had ever seen the offending car, let alone sold it.

A variation on the racket was to take a van like the Transit, in good shape apart from its twisted chassis, cut out the distorted section, bridge the gap with a length of girder, and put it back on the road. Illegal and dangerous, but such cars and vans could probably run for several thousand more miles before falling apart.

Confronted by the statements of the Leicester builder, the recovery firm that had sold him the Transit as scrap for £20, and the imprints of the old, real chassis and engine numbers; and informed what deed the truck had been used for, Sykes realized he was in very deep trouble indeed, and came clean.

The man who had bought the Transit, he recalled after racking his memory, had been wandering around the yard one day six weeks back, and on being questioned had said he was looking for a low-priced van. By chance, Sykes had just finished recycling the chassis of the blue Transit and spraying it green. It had left his yard within the hour for £300 cash. He had never seen the man again. The fifteen £20 notes were long gone.

“Description?” asked Commander Williams.

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” pleaded Sykes.

“Do that,” said Williams. “It will make the rest of your life so much easier.”

Medium height, medium build. Late forties. Rough face and manner. Not a posh voice, and not a Londoner by birth. Ginger hair-could have been a wig, but a good one. Anyway, he wore a hat, despite the heat of late August. Moustache, darker than the hair-could have been a stick-on, but a good one. And tinted glasses. Not sunglasses, just blue-tinted, with horn frames.

The three men spent two more hours with the police artist. Commander Williams brought the picture back to Scotland Yard just before the breakfast hour and showed it to Nigel Cramer. He took it to the COBRA committee at nine that morning. The trouble was, the picture could have been anyone. And there the trail ran out.

“We know the van was worked on by another and better mechanic after Sykes,” Cramer told the committee. “And a sign painter created the Barlow fruit company logo on each side. It must have been stored somewhere, a garage with welding facilities. But if we issue a public appeal, the kidnappers will see it and could lose their nerve, cut and run, and leave Simon Cormack dead.”

It was agreed to issue the description to every police station in the country, but not to bring in the press and the public.

Andrew “Andy” Laing spent the night poring over the records of bank transactions, becoming more and more puzzled, until just before dawn his bemusement gave way to the growing certainty that he was right and there was no other explanation.

Andy Laing was the head of the Credit and Marketing team in the Jiddah branch of the Saudi Arabian Investment Bank, an institution established by the Saudi government to handle most of the astronomical sums of money that washed around those parts.

Although Saudi-owned and with a mainly Saudi board of directors, the SAIB was principally staffed by foreign contract officers, and the biggest single contributor of staff was New York’s Rockman-Queens Bank, from which Laing had been seconded.

He was young, keen, conscientious, and ambitious, eager to make a good career in banking and enjoying his term in Saudi Arabia. The pay was better than in New York, he had an attractive apartment, several girlfriends among the large expatriate community in Jiddah, was not worried by the no-liquor restrictions, and got on with his colleagues.

Although the Riyadh branch was the head office of SAIB, the busiest branch was in Jiddah, the business and commercial capital of Saudi Arabia. Normally, Laing would have left the crenellated white building-looking more like a Foreign Legion fort than a bank-and walked up the street to the Hyatt Regency for a drink before six o’clock the previous evening. But he had two more files to close, and rather than leave them till the next morning, he stayed on for an extra hour.

So he was still at his desk when the old Arab messenger wheeled ’round the cart stacked with printout sheets torn from the bank’s computer, leaving the appropriate sheets in each executive’s office for attention the next day. These sheets bore the records of the day’s transactions undertaken by the bank’s several departments. Patiently the old man placed a sheaf of printouts on Laing’s desk, bobbed his head, and withdrew. Laing called a cheerful “Shukran” after him-he prided himself on being courteous to the Saudi menial staff-and went on working.

When he had finished he glanced at the papers by his side and uttered a sound of annoyance. He had been given the wrong papers. The ones beside him were the in-and-out records of deposits and withdrawals from all the major accounts lodged with the bank. These were the business of the Operations manager, not Credit and Marketing. He took them and strolled down the corridor to the empty office of the Ops manager, Mr. Amin, his colleague from Pakistan.

As he did so he glanced at the sheets and something caught his attention. He stopped, turned back, and began to go through the records page by page. On each the same pattern emerged. He switched on his computer and asked it to go back into the records of two client accounts. Always the same pattern.

By the small hours of the morning he was certain there could be no doubt. What he was looking at had to be a major fraud. The coincidences were just too bizarre. He replaced the printouts on the desk of Mr. Amin and resolved to fly to Riyadh at the first opportunity for a personal interview with his fellow American, the general manager, Steve Pyle.

As Laing was going home through the darkened streets of Jiddah, eight time zones to the west the White House committee was listening to Dr. Nicholas Armitage, an experienced psychiatrist who had just come across to the West Wing from the Executive Mansion.

“Gentlemen, so far I have to tell you that the shock has affected the First Lady to a greater degree than the President. She is still taking medication under the supervision of her physician. The President has, no doubt, the tougher temperament, though I’m afraid the strain is already beginning to become noticeable, and the telltale signs of post-abduction parental trauma are beginning to show in him too.”

“What signs, Doctor?” asked Odell without ceremony. The psychiatrist-who did not like to be interrupted, and never was when he lectured students-cleared his throat.

“You have to understand that in these cases the mother acceptably has the release of tears, even hysteria. The male parent often suffers in a greater way, experiencing, apart from the normal anxiety for the abducted child, a profound sense of guilt, of self-blame, of conviction that he was responsible in some way, should have done more, should have taken more precautions, should have been more careful.”

“That’s not logical,” protested Morton Stannard.

“We’re not talking about logic here,” said the doctor. “We’re talking about the symptoms of trauma, made worse by the fact the President was-is-extremely close to his son, loves him very deeply indeed. Add to that the feeling of helplessness, the inability to do anything. So far, of course, with no contact from the kidnappers, he does not even know if the boy is alive or dead. It’s still early, of course, but it won’t get better.”

“These kidnappings can go on for weeks,” said Jim Donaldson. “This man is our Chief Executive. What changes can we expect?”

“The strain will be eased slightly when and if the first contact is made and proof obtained that Simon is still alive,” said Dr. Armitage. “But the relief will not last long. As time drags on, the deterioration will deepen. There will be stress at a very high level, leading to irritability. There will be insomnia-that can be helped with medication. Finally there will be listlessness in matters concerning the father’s profession-”

“In this case running the damn country,” said Odell.

“… and lack of concentration, loss of memory in matters of government. In a word, gentlemen, half or more of the President’s mind until further notice will be devoted to thinking about his son, and a further part to concern for his wife. In some cases, even after the successful release of a child kidnap victim, it has been the parents who needed months, even years, of post-trauma therapy.”

“In other words,” said Attorney General Bill Walters, “we have half a President, maybe less.”

“Oh, come now,” Treasury Secretary Reed interjected. “This country has had Presidents on the operating table, wholly incapacitated in the hospital, before now. We must just take over, run things as he would wish, disturb our friend as little as possible.”

His optimism evoked little matching response. Brad Johnson rose.

“Why the hell won’t those bastards get in touch?” he asked. “It’s been nearly forty-eight hours.”

“At least we have our negotiator set up and waiting for their first call,” said Reed.

“And we have a strong presence in London,” added Walters. “Mr. Brown and his team from the Bureau arrived two hours ago.”

“What the hell are the British police doing?” muttered Stannard. “Why can’t they find those bastards?”

“We have to remember it’s been only forty-eight hours-not even,” observed Secretary of State Donaldson. “ Britain ’s not as big as the U.S., but with fifty-four million people there are a lot of places to hide. You recall how long the Symbionese Liberation Army kept Patty Hearst, with the whole FBI hunting them? Months.”

“Let’s face it, gentlemen,” drawled Odell, “the problem is, there’s nothing more we can do.”

That was the problem; there was nothing anybody could do.

The boy they were talking about was getting through his second night of captivity. Though he did not know it, there was someone on duty in the corridor outside his cell throughout the night. The cellar of the suburban house might be made of poured concrete, but if he decided to scream and shout, the abductors were quite prepared to subdue him and gag him. He made no such mistake. Resolving to quell his fear and behave with as much dignity as possible, he did two dozen push-ups and toe-touching calisthenics, while a skeptical eye watched through the peephole. He had no wristwatch-he had been running without one on-and was losing track of time. The light burned constantly but at what he judged to be around midnight-he was two hours off-he curled up on the bed, drew the thin blanket over his head to shut out most of the light, and slept. As he did so, the last dozen of the hoax calls were coming in at his country’s embassy forty miles away in Grosvenor Square.

Kevin Brown and his eight-strong team did not feel like sleep. Jet-lagged from the flight across the Atlantic, their body clocks were still on Washington time, five hours earlier than London.

Brown insisted that Seymour and Collins show him around the basement telephone exchange and listening post at the embassy, where in an office at the end of the complex, American engineers-the British had not been given access-had set up wall speakers to bring in the sounds recorded by the various bugs in the Kensington apartment.

“There are two taps in the sitting room,” explained Collins reluctantly. He saw no reason why he should explain Company techniques to the man from the Bureau, but he had his orders, and the Kensington apartment was “burned” from an operational point of view anyway.

“If a senior officer from Langley was using the place as a base, they would of course be deactivated. But if we were debriefing a Soviet there, we find invisible bugs less inhibiting than having a tape recorder turning away on the table. The sitting room would be the main debriefing area. But there are two more in the master bedroom-Quinn’s sleeping in there, but not at the moment, as you will hear-and others in the remaining two bedrooms and the kitchen.

“Out of respect for Miss Somerville and our own man McCrea, we have deactivated the two smaller bedrooms. But if Quinn went into one of them to talk confidentially, we could reactivate them by switching here and here.”

Collins indicated two switches on the master console.

Brown asked, “In any case, if he talked to either of them out of range of any speakers, we would expect them to report back to us, right?”

Collins and Seymour nodded.

“That’s what they’re there for,” added Seymour.

“Then we have three telephones in there,” Collins went on. “One is the new flash line. Quinn will use that only when he is convinced he is talking to the genuine abductors, and for no other purpose at all. All conversations on that line will be intercepted in the Kensington exchange by the British and piped through on this speaker here. Second, he has a direct patch-through from this room, which he is using now to talk to one of the callers we believe to be a hoaxer, but maybe not. That connection also passes through the Kensington exchange. And there is the third line, an ordinary outgoing and incoming line, also on intercept but probably not to be used unless he wants to call out.”

“You mean the British are listening to all this as well?” asked Brown dourly.

“Only the phone lines,” said Seymour. “We have to have their cooperation on telephones-they own the exchanges. Besides, they could have a good input on voice patterns, speech defects, regional accents. And of course the call-tracing has got to be done by them, right out of the Kensington exchange. We don’t have an untappable line from the apartment to this basement.”

Collins coughed.

“Yes, we do,” he said, “but it only works for the room bugs. We have two apartments in that building. All the stuff on all the room bugs is fed on internal wires down to our second and smaller apartment in the basement. I have a man down there now. In the basement the speech is scrambled, transmitted on ultrashort-wave radio up here, received, descrambled, and piped down here.”

“You radio it for just a mile?” asked Brown.

“Sir, my Agency gets on very well with the British. But no secret service in the world will ever pipe classified information through the land lines running under a city they do not control.”

Brown enjoyed that. “So the Brits can hear the phone conversations but not the room talk.”

He was wrong, actually. Once MI-5 knew of the Kensington apartment, that the two Metropolitan chief inspectors were not being allowed to live in, and that their own bugs had been removed, they calculated there must be a second American apartment in there to relay Soviet debriefings to CIA Control somewhere else. Within an hour the apartment-building records had pinpointed the small bed-sitter in the basement. By midnight a team of plumbers had found the connecter wires running through the central heating system, and did an intercept from a ground-floor apartment, whose tenant was courteously urged to take a brief vacation and thus assist Her Majesty. By sunrise everyone was listening to everyone.

Collins’s ELINT-electronic intelligence-man at the console lifted the headset off his ears.

“Quinn’s just finished with the caller,” he said. “Now they’ll talk among themselves. You want to hear, sir?”

“Sure,” said Brown.

The engineer threw the conversation in the sitting room in Kensington from headset to wall mike. Quinn’s voice came through the speaker.

“… would be fine. Thanks, Sam. Milk and sugar.”

“Do you think he’ll call back, Mr. Quinn?” That was McCrea.

“Nope. Plausible, but he didn’t smell right.” Quinn.

The men in the embassy basement turned to go. Cots had been set up in a number of nearby offices. Brown intended to stay on the job at all times. He designated two of his eight men to take the night watch. It was 2:30 A.M.

The same conversations, on the phone and in the sitting room, had been heard and logged in the MI-5 communications center in Cork Street. In the Kensington telephone exchange the police heard only the telephone call, traced it within eight seconds to a phone booth in nearby Paddington, and dispatched a plainclothes officer from Paddington Green police station, two hundred yards from the booth. He arrested an old man with a history of mental illness.

At 9:00 A.M. on the third day, one of the women in Grosvenor Square took another call. The voice was English, rough, curt.

“Put me through to the negotiator.”

The girl went pale. No one had used that word before. She kept her voice honeyed.

“Putting you through, sir.”

Quinn had the receiver in his hand at half a ring. The girl’s voice was a rapid whisper.

“Someone asking for the negotiator. Just that.”

Half a second later the connection was made. Quinn’s deep, reassuring voice came through the speakers.

“Hi there, pal. You wanted to speak to me?”

“You want Simon Cormack back, it’s going to cost you. A lot. Now listen to me-”

“No, friend, you listen to me. I’ve had a dozen hoax calls already today. You can understand how many crazies there are in this world, right? So do me a favor-just a simple question…”

In Kensington the tracers got a “lock” in eight seconds, Hitchin, Hertfordshire… a public booth in… the railway station. Cramer got it at the Yard ten seconds later; Hitchin police station was slower to get in gear. Their man set off in a car thirty seconds later, was dropped two corners from the station a minute thereafter, and came ambling around the corner toward the booths 141 seconds after the call began. Too late. The man had spent thirty seconds on the line and was by then three streets away, lost in the morning throng.

McCrea stared at Quinn in amazement.

“You hung up on him,” he said.

“Had to,” said Quinn laconically. “By the time I had finished we were out of time.”

“If you’d kept him on the line,” said Sam Somerville, “the police might have caught him.”

“If he’s the man, I want to give him confidence, not a bad fright-yet,” said Quinn, and lapsed into silence. He seemed completely relaxed; his two companions were strung out with tension, staring at the phone as if it might ring again. Quinn knew the man could not possibly get back to another phone booth for a couple of hours. He had learned long ago in combat: If you cannot do anything but wait, relax.

In Grosvenor Square, Kevin Brown had been awakened by one of his men and hustled into the listening post in time to hear the end of Quinn’s conversation.

“… is the name of that book? You answer me that and call me right back. I’ll be waiting, pal. Bye now.”

Collins and Seymour joined him, and all three listened to the playback.

Then they switched to wall speaker and heard Sam Somerville make her point.

“Right,” growled Brown.

They heard Quinn’s reply.

“Asshole,” said Brown. “Another couple of minutes and they could have caught that bastard.”

“They get one,” pointed out Seymour. “The others still have the boy.”

“So get the one and persuade him to reveal the hideout,” said Brown. He smacked one beefy fist into the palm of his other hand.

“They probably have a deadline. It’s something we use if a member of one of our networks gets taken. If he doesn’t show back at the hideout in, say, ninety minutes, allowing for traffic, the others know he’s been taken. They waste the kid and vaporize.”

“Look, sir, these men have nothing to lose,” added Seymour, to Brown’s irritation. “Even if they walk in and hand Simon back, they’re going to do life anyway. They killed two Secret Service men and a British cop.”

“That Quinn just better know what he’s doing,” said Brown as he walked out.

There were three loud knocks on the door of Simon Cormack’s cellar prison at 10:15. He pulled on his hood. When he took it off, a card was propped against the wall by the door.

WHEN YOU WERE A KID ON HOLIDAY AT NANTUCKET,

YOUR AUNT EMILY USED TO READ TO YOU FROM HER

FAVOURITE BOOK. WHICH BOOK WAS IT?

He stared at the card. A wave of relief swept over him. Someone was in contact. Someone had spoken to his father in Washington. Someone was out there trying to get him back. He tried to fight back the tears, but they kept welling up into his eyes. Someone was watching through the peephole. He snuffled; he had no handkerchief. He thought back to Aunt Emily, his father’s elder sister, prim in her high-necked cotton dresses, taking him for walks along the beach, sitting him on a tussock and reading about little animals who talked and acted like humans. He sniffed again and shouted the answer at the peephole. It closed. The door opened a fraction; a black-gloved hand came around the corner and withdrew the card.

The man with the gruff voice came through again at 1:30 P.M. The patch-through from the embassy was immediate. The call was traced in eleven seconds-to a booth in a shopping mall at Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. By the time a plainclothes officer from the Milton Keynes force reached the booth and looked around, the caller had been gone for ninety seconds. On the line he had wasted no time.

“The book,” he rasped. “Called The Wind in the Willows.”

“Okay, friend, you’re the man I’ve been waiting to speak to. Now take this number, get off the line, and call me from a fresh booth. It’s a line that reaches me, and me only. Three-seven-oh; zero-zero-four-zero. Please stay in touch. Bye now.”

Again he replaced the receiver. This time he raised his head and addressed the wall.

“Collins, you can tell Washington we have our man. Simon is alive. They want to talk. You can dismantle the telephone exchange in the embassy.”

They heard it all right. They all heard it. Collins used his encoded flash line to Weintraub in Langley, and he told Odell, who told the President. Within minutes the switchboard operators in Grosvenor Square were being sent away. There was one last call, a plaintive, whining voice.

“We are the Proletarian Liberation Army. We are holding Simon Cormack. Unless America destroys all her nuclear weapons-”

The switchboard girl’s voice was like running molasses.

“Honeychild,” she said, “go screw yourself.”

“You did it again,” said McCrea. “You hung up on him.”

“He has a point,” said Sam. “These people can be unbalanced. Couldn’t that kind of treatment annoy him to the point of hurting Simon Cormack?”

“Possible,” said Quinn. “But I hope I’m right, and I think I am. Doesn’t sound like political terrorists. I’m praying he’s just a professional killer.”

They were aghast.

“What’s so good about a professional killer?” asked Sam.

“Not a lot,” admitted Quinn, who seemed strangely relieved. “But a professional only works for money. And so far he doesn’t have any.”