The Negotiator

Chapter 7

The kidnapper did not call back until six that evening. In the interim Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea stared at the flash-line telephone almost without cease, praying that whoever he was, the man would call back and not sever communication.

Quinn alone seemed to have the ability to relax. He lay on the sitting-room sofa, stretched out with his shoes off, reading a book. The Anabasis by Xenophon, Sam reported quietly from the phone in her room. He had brought it from Spain.

“Never heard of it,” grumbled Brown in the basement of the embassy.

“It’s about military tactics,” volunteered Seymour helpfully, “by a Greek general.”

Brown grunted. He knew they were members of NATO but that was about it.

The British police were far busier. Two telephone booths, one in Hitchin, a small and pretty provincial town at the northern tip of Hertfordshire, the other in the great new-town sprawl of Milton Keynes, were visited by quiet men from Scotland Yard and dusted for fingerprints. There were dozens, but though they did not know it, none belonged to the kidnapper, who had worn flesh-colored surgical gloves.

Discreet inquiries were made in the vicinity of both booths to discover if any witness might have seen the booths being used at the specific moments that the calls were made. No one had noticed, not to a matter of seconds. Both booths were in banks of three or four, all in constant use. Besides, both places had been crowded at the time. Cramer grunted.

“He’s using the daily rush hours. Morning and lunch.”

The tapes of the caller’s voice were taken to a professor of philology, an expert in speech patterns and the origins of accents, but Quinn had done most of the talking and the academic shook his head.

“He’s using several layers of paper tissue or a thin cloth over the mouthpiece of the phone,” he said. “Crude, but fairly effective. It won’t fool the speech-pattern oscillators, but I, like the machines, need more material to discern patterns.”

Commander Williams promised to bring him more material when the man phoned again. During the day, six houses went quietly under surveillance. One was in London, the other five in the Home Counties. All were rented properties, all six-month leases. By nightfall two had been cleared: a French bank official in one, married with two children, working quite legitimately for the London branch of the Société Générale; and in the other, a German professor doing research work at the British Museum.

By the end of the week the other four would also be cleared, but the property market was producing more “possibles” in a constant stream. They would all be checked out.

“If the criminals have actually bought a property,” Cramer told the COBRA committee, “or borrowed one from a bona fide homeowner, I’m afraid it becomes impossible. In the latter case there would be no trace at all; in the former the volume of house purchases in the Southeast in any one year would simply swamp our resources for months on end.”

Privately Nigel Cramer favored Quinn’s argument (which he had heard on tape) that the caller sounded more like a professional criminal than a political terrorist. Still, the run-through of both kinds of lawbreaker went on and would do so until the end of the case. Even if the abductors were underworld criminals, they might have acquired their Czech machine pistol from a terrorist group. The two worlds sometimes met and did business.

If the British police were overwhelmed with work, the problem for the American team in the basement of the embassy was idleness. Kevin Brown paced the long room like a caged lion. Four of his men were on their cots, the other four watching the light that would flash on when the single dedicated phone in the Kensington apartment, whose number the kidnapper now had, was used. The light flashed at two minutes after six.

To everyone’s amazement, Quinn let it ring four times. Then he answered, getting in the first words.

“Hi, there. Glad you called.”

“Like I said, you want Simon Cormack back alive, it’s going to cost you.” Same voice, deep, gruff, throaty, and muffled by paper tissues.

“Okay, let’s talk,” said Quinn in a friendly tone. “My name’s Quinn. Just Quinn. Can you give me a name?”

“Get stuffed.”

“Come on, not the real one. We’re not fools, either of us. Any name. Just so I can say ‘Hi there, Smith, or Jones-’ ”

“Zack,”said the voice.

“Z-A-C-K? You got it. Listen, Zack, you’ve got to keep these calls to twenty seconds, right? I’m not a magician. The spooks are listening and tracing. Call me back in a couple of hours and we’ll talk again. Okay?”

“Yeah,” said Zack, and put the phone down.

The Kensington exchange wizards had got their “lock” in seven seconds. Another public phone booth, in the town center of Great Dunmow, county of Essex, nine miles west of the M.11 motorway from London to Cambridge. Like the other two towns, north of London. A small town with a small police station. The plainclothes officer reached the bank of three booths eighty seconds after the phone was hung up. Too late. At that hour, with the shops closing and the pubs open, there was a swirl of people but no one looking furtive, or wearing a ginger wig, moustache, and tinted glasses. Zack had chosen the third daily rush hour, early evening, dusk but not yet dark, for in the dark, phone booths are illuminated inside.

In the embassy basement Kevin Brown exploded.

“Who the hell’s side does Quinn think he’s on?” he asked. “He’s treating that bastard like the flavor of the month.”

His four agents nodded in unison.

In Kensington, Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea asked much the same question. Quinn just lay back on the couch, shrugged, and returned to his book. Unlike the newcomers, he knew he had two things to do: try to get into the mind of the man on the other end of the line, and try to gain his confidence.

He suspected already that Zack was no fool. So far, at any rate, he had made few mistakes, or he would have been caught by now. So he must know his calls would be monitored and traced. Quinn had told him nothing he did not know already. Volunteering the advice that would keep Zack safe and at large would teach Zack nothing he wouldn’t be doing anyway, without instruction.

Quinn was just bridge-building, repugnant though the task was, laying down the first bricks in a relationship with a killer that, he hoped, would cause the man almost involuntarily to believe that Quinn and he shared a common goal-an exchange-and that the authorities were really the bad guys.

From his years in England, Quinn knew that to British ears the American accent can appear the friendliest tone in the world. Something about the drawl. More amiable than the clipped British voice. He had accentuated his drawl a mite beyond its usual level. It was vital not to give Zack the impression he was putting him down or making a mockery of him in any way. Also vital to let nothing slip as to how much he loathed the man who was crucifying a father and a mother three thousand miles away. He was so persuasive he fooled Kevin Brown.

But not Cramer.

“I wish he’d keep the bastard talking a while longer,” said Commander Williams. “One of our country colleagues might get a look at him, or his car.”

Cramer shook his head.

“Not yet,” he said. “Our problem is, these detective constables in the smaller county stations are not trained agents when it comes to shadowing people. Quinn will try to extend the speaking periods later and hope Zack doesn’t notice.”

Zack did not call that evening; not until the following morning.

Andy Laing took the day off and flew by an internal Saudia commuter flight to Riyadh, where he sought and was given a meeting with the general manager, Steve Pyle.

The office block of SAIB in the Saudi capital was a far cry from the Foreign Legion fort building in Jiddah. The bank had really spent some money here, constructing a tower of buff-colored marble, sandstone, and polished granite. Laing crossed the vast central atrium at ground-floor level, the only sound the clack of his heels on the marble and the splash of the cooling fountains.

Even in mid-October it was fiercely hot outside, but the atrium was like a garden in spring. After a thirty-minute wait he was shown into the office of the general manager on the top floor, a suite so lush that even the president of Rockman-Queens, on a stopover visit six months earlier, had found it more luxurious than his own New York penthouse quarters.

Steve Pyle was a big, bluff executive who prided himself on his paternal handling of his younger staff of all nationalities. His slightly flushed complexion indicated that though the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia might be “dry” down at street level, his own cocktail cabinet lacked for nothing.

He greeted Laing with geniality but some surprise.

“Mr. Al-Haroun didn’t warn me you were coming, Andy,” he said. “I’d have had a car meet you at the airport.”

Mr. Al-Haroun was the manager at Jiddah, Laing’s Saudi boss.

“I didn’t tell him, sir. I just took a day’s leave. I think we have a problem down there and I wanted to bring it to your attention.”

“Andy, Andy, my name’s Steve, right? Glad you came. So what’s the problem?”

Laing had not brought the printouts with him; if anyone at Jiddah was involved in the scam, taking them would have given the game away. But he had copious notes. He spent an hour explaining to Pyle what he had found.

“It can’t be coincidence, Steve,” he argued. “There is no way these figures can be explained except as major bank fraud.”

Steve Pyle’s geniality had dropped away as Laing explained his predicament. They had been sitting in the deep club chairs of Spanish leather that were grouped around the low beaten-brass coffee table. Pyle rose and walked to the smoked-glass wall, which gave a spectacular view over the desert for many miles around. Finally he turned and walked back to the table. His broad smile was back, his hand outstretched.

“Andy, you are a very observant young man. Very bright. And loyal. I appreciate that. I appreciate your coming to me with this… problem.” He escorted Laing to the door. “Now I want you to leave this with me. Think nothing more about it. I’ll handle this one personally. Believe me, you’re going to go a long way.”

Andy Laing left the bank building and headed back to Jiddah aglow with self-righteousness. He had done the proper thing. The GM would put a stop to the swindle.

When he had left, Steve Pyle drummed his fingers on his desk top for several minutes, then made a single phone call.

Zack’s fourth call, and second on the flash line, was at quarter to nine in the morning. It was traced to Royston, on the northern border of Hertfordshire, where that county abuts Cambridge. The police officer who got there two minutes later was ninety seconds adrift. And there were no fingerprints.

“Quinn, let’s keep it short. I want five million dollars, and fast. Small denominations, used bills.”

“Jeez, Zack, that’s a hell of a lot. You know how much that weighs?”

A pause. Zack was bemused by the unexpectedness of the reference to the money’s weight.

“That’s it, Quinn. Don’t argue. Any tricks and we can always send you a couple of fingers to straighten you out.”

In Kensington, McCrea gagged and skittered away to the bathroom. He hit a coffee table on the way.

“Who’s with you?” snarled Zack.

“A spook,” said Quinn. “You know the way it is. These assholes are not going to leave me alone, now are they?”

“I meant what I said.”

“Come on, Zack, there’s no need for that. We’re both pros. Right? Let’s keep it like that, eh? We do what we have to do, nothing more or less. Now time’s up. Get off the line.”

“Just get the money, Quinn.”

“I have to deal with the father on this one. Call me back in twenty-four hours. By the way, how is the kid?”

“Fine. So far.” Zack cut the call and left the booth. He had been on-line for thirty-one seconds. Quinn replaced the receiver. McCrea came back into the room.

“If you ever do that again,” said Quinn softly, “I will have you both out of here instantly, and screw the Agency and the Bureau.”

McCrea was so apologetic he looked ready to cry.

In the basement of the embassy Brown looked at Collins.

“Your man fouled up,” he said. “What was that bang on the line anyway?”

Without waiting for an answer he picked up the direct line from the basement to the apartment. Sam Somerville took it and explained about the threat of severed fingers, and McCrea’s knee hitting the coffee table.

When she put the phone down, Quinn asked, “Who was that?”

“Mr. Brown,” she said formally. “Mr. Kevin Brown.”

“Who’s he?” asked Quinn. Sam glanced nervously at the walls.

“The Deputy Assistant Director of the C.I. Division at the Bureau,” she said formally, knowing Brown was listening.

Quinn made a gesture of exasperation. Sam shrugged.

There was a conference at noon, in the apartment. The feeling was that Zack would not phone back until the next morning, allowing the Americans to think over his demand.

Kevin Brown came, with Collins and Seymour. So did Nigel Cramer, who brought Commander Williams. Quinn had met all but Brown and Williams.

“You can tell Zack that Washington agrees,” said Brown. “It came through twenty minutes ago. I hate it myself, but it’s been agreed. Five million dollars.”

“But I don’t agree,” said Quinn.

Brown stared at him as if unable to believe his ears.

“Oh, you don’t agree, Quinn. You don’t agree. The government of the U.S.A. agrees, but Mr. Quinn doesn’t agree. May we ask why?”

“Because it is highly dangerous to agree to a kidnapper’s first demand,” said Quinn quietly. “Do that, and he thinks he should have asked for more. A man who thinks that, thinks he has been fooled in some way. If he’s a psychopath, that makes him angry. He has no one on whom to vent that anger but the hostage.”

“You think Zack is a psychopath?” asked Seymour.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” said Quinn. “But one of his sidekicks may be. Even if Zack’s the one in charge-and he may not be-psychos can go out of control.”

“Then what do you advise?” asked Collins. Brown snorted.

“It’s still early days,” said Quinn. “Simon Cormack’s best chance of surviving unhurt lies in the kidnappers’ believing two things: that they have finally screwed out of the family the absolute maximum they can pay; and that they will see that money only if they produce Simon alive and unharmed. They won’t come to those conclusions in a few seconds. On top of that, the police may yet get a break and find them.”

“I agree with Mr. Quinn,” said Cramer. “It may take a couple of weeks. It sounds harsh, but it’s better than a rushed and botched case resulting in an error of judgment and a dead boy.”

“Any more time you can give me I’d appreciate,” said Commander Williams.

“So what do I tell Washington?” demanded Brown.

“You tell them,” said Quinn calmly, “that they asked me to negotiate Simon’s return, and I am trying to do that. If they want to pull me off the case, that’s fine. They just have to tell the President that.”

Collins coughed. Seymour stared at the floor. The meeting ended.

When Zack phoned again, Quinn was apologetic.

“Look, I tried to get through to President Cormack personally. No way. The man’s under sedation much of the time. I mean, he’s going through hell-”

“So cut it short and get me the money,” snapped Zack.

“I tried, I swear to God. Look, five million is over the top. He doesn’t have that kind of cash-it’s all tied up in blind trust funds that will take weeks to unlock. The word is, I can get you nine hundred thousand dollars, and I can get it fast-”

“Naff off,” snarled the voice on the phone. “You Yanks can get it from somewhere else. I can wait.”

“Yeah, sure, I know,” said Quinn earnestly. “You’re safe. The fuzz are getting nowhere, that’s for sure-so far. If you could just come down a bit… The boy all right?”

“Yeah.”

Quinn could tell Zack was thinking.

“I have to ask this, Zack. Those bastards in back of me are leaning real hard. Ask the boy what his pet dog’s name was-the one he had from a toddler up through the age of ten. Just so we know he’s okay. Won’t cost you anything. Helps me a lot.”

“Four million,” snapped Zack. “And that’s bloody it.”

The phone cut off. The call had come from St. Neots, a town in the south of Cambridge, just east of the county line with Bedfordshire. No one was spotted leaving the booth, one of a row outside the main post office.

“What are you doing?” asked Sam curiously.

“Putting the pressure on,” said Quinn, and would explain no more.

What Quinn had realized days before was that in this case he had one good ace not always available to negotiators. Bandits in the mountains of Sardinia or Central America could hold out for months or years if they wished. No army sweep, no police patrol would ever find them in those hills riddled with caves and undergrowth. Their only real hazard might be from helicopters, but that was it.

In the densely populated southeast corner of England, Zack and his men were in law-abiding-that is, hostile-territory. The longer they hid, the greater by the law of averages the chance of their being identified and located. So the pressure on them would be to settle and clear out. The trick would be to get them to think they had won, had got the best deal they could, and had no need to kill the hostage as they fled.

Quinn was counting on the rest of Zack’s team-the police knew from the ambush site that there were at least four in the gang-being confined to the hideout. They would get impatient, claustrophobic, eventually urging their leader to settle up and be done with it, precisely the same argument Quinn would be using. Assailed from both sides, Zack would be tempted to take what he could get and seek escape. But that would not happen until the pressure on the kidnappers had built up a lot more.

Quinn had deliberately sown two seeds in Zack’s mind: that Quinn was the good guy, trying to do his best for a fast deal and being obstructed by the Establishment-he recalled the face of Kevin Brown and wondered if that was wholly a lie-and that Zack was quite safe… so far. Meaning the opposite. The more Zack’s sleep was disturbed by nightmares of a police breakthrough, the better.

The professor of linguistics had now decided that Zack was almost certainly in his mid-forties to early fifties, and probably the leader of the gang. There was no hesitation to indicate he would have to consult someone else before agreeing to terms. He was born of working-class people, did not have a very good formal education, and almost certainly stemmed from the Birmingham area. But his native accent had been muted over the years by long periods away from Birmingham, possibly abroad.

A psychiatrist tried to build up a portrait of the man. He was certainly under strain, and it was growing as the conversations were prolonged. His animosity toward Quinn was decreasing with the passage of time. He was accustomed to violence-there had been no hesitation or qualm in his voice when he mentioned the severing of Simon Cormack’s fingers. On the other hand he was logical and shrewd, wary but not afraid. A dangerous man but not crazy. Not a psycho and not “political.”

These reports went to Nigel Cramer, who reported all to the COBRA committee. Copies went at once to Washington, straight to the White House committee. Other copies came to the Kensington apartment. Quinn read them, and when he was finished, so did Sam.

“What I don’t understand,” she said as she put down the last page, “is why they picked Simon Cormack. The President comes from a wealthy family, but there must be other rich kids walking around England.”

Quinn, who had worked that one out while sitting watching a TV screen in a bar in Spain, glanced at her but said nothing. She waited for an answer but got none. That annoyed her. It also intrigued her. She found as the days passed that she was becoming very intrigued by Quinn.

On the seventh day after the kidnap and the fourth since Zack had made his first call, the CIA and the British SIS took their penetration agents throughout the network of European terrorist organizations off the job. There had been no news of the procurement of a Skorpion machine pistol from these sources, and the view had faded that political terrorists were involved. Among groups investigated had been the I.R.A. and the INLA, both Irish, and in both of which the CIA and SIS each had sleepers whose identity they were not going to reveal to each other; the German Red Army Faction, successor to Baader-Meinhof; the Italian Red Brigades; the French Action Directe; the Spanish/Basque ETA; and the Belgian CCC. There were smaller and even weirder groups, but these had been thought too small to have mounted the Cormack operation.

The next day Zack was back. The call came from a bank of booths in a service station on the M.11 motorway just south of Cambridge and was locked and identified in eight seconds, but it took seven minutes to get a plainclothes officer there. In the swirling mass of cars and people passing through, it was a false hope that Zack would still be there.

“The dog,” he said curtly. “Its name was Mister Spot.”

“Thanks, Zack,”said Quinn. “Just keep the kid okay and we’ll conclude our business sooner than you know. And I have news: Mr. Cormack’s financial people can raise one-point-two million dollars after all, spot cash and fast. Go for it, Zack.”

“Get stuffed,” barked the voice on the phone. But he was in a hurry; time was running out. He dropped his demand to $3 million. And the phone went dead.

“Why don’t you settle for it, Quinn?” asked Sam. She was sitting on the edge of her chair; Quinn had stood up, ready to go to the bathroom. He always washed, bathed, dressed, used the bathroom, and ate just after a call from Zack. He knew there would be no further contact for a while.

“It’s not a question just of money,” said Quinn as he headed out of the room. “Zack’s not ready yet. He’d start raising the demand again, thinking he was being cheated. I want him undermined a bit more yet; I want more pressure on him.”

“What about the pressure on Simon Cormack?” Sam called down the corridor. Quinn paused and came back to the door.

“Yeah,” he said soberly, “and on his mother and father. I haven’t forgotten. But in these cases the criminals have to believe, truly believe, that the show is over. Otherwise they get angry and hurt the hostage. I’ve seen it before. It really is better slow and easy than rushing around like the cavalry. If you can’t crack it in forty-eight hours with a quick arrest, it comes to a war of attrition, the kidnapper’s nerve against the negotiator’s. If he gets nothing, he gets mad; if he gets too much too quickly, he reckons he blew it and his pals will tell him the same. So he gets mad. And that’s bad for the hostage.”

His words were heard on tape a few minutes later by Nigel Cramer, who nodded in agreement. In two cases he had been involved in, the same experience had been gone through. In one the hostage was recovered alive and well; in the other he had been liquidated by an angry and resentful psychopath.

The words were heard live in the basement beneath the American embassy.

“Crap,” said Brown. “He has a deal, for God’s sake. He should get the boy back now. Then I want to go after those sleazeballs myself.”

“If they get away, leave it to the Met.,” advised Seymour. “They’ll find ’em.”

“Yeah, and a British court will give them life in a soft pen. You know what life means over here? Fourteen years with time off. Bullshit. You hear this, mister: No one, but no one, does this to the son of my President and gets away with it. One day this is going to become a Bureau matter, the way it should have been from the start. And I’m going to handle it- Boston rules.”

Nigel Cramer came around to the apartment personally that night. His news was no news. Four hundred people had been quietly interviewed, nearly five hundred “sightings” checked out, one hundred and sixty more houses and apartments discreetly surveyed. No breakthrough.

Birmingham CID had gone back into their records for fifty years looking for criminals with a known record of violence who might have left the city long ago. Eight possibles had come up and all had been investigated and cleared; either dead, in prison, or identifiably somewhere else.

Among one of Scotland Yard’s resources, little known to the public, is the voice bank. With modern technology, human voices can be broken down to a series of peaks and lows, representing the way a speaker inhales, exhales, uses tone and pitch, forms his words, and delivers them. The trace-pattern on the oscillograph is like a fingerprint; it can be matched and, if there is a sample on file, identified.

Often unknown to themselves, many criminals have tapes of their voices in the voice bank: obscene callers, anonymous informants, and others who have been arrested and taped in the interview room. Zack’s voice simply did not show up.

The forensic leads had also fizzled out. The spent cartridge cases, lead slugs, footprints, and tire tracks lay dormant in the police laboratories and refused to give up any more secrets.

“In a radius of fifty miles outside London, including the capital, there are eight million dwelling units,” said Cramer. “Plus dry drains, warehouses, vaults, crypts, tunnels, catacombs, and abandoned buildings. We once had a murderer and rapist called the Black Panther, who practically lived in a series of abandoned mines under a national park. He took his victims down there. We got him-eventually. Sorry, Mr. Quinn. We just go on looking.”

By the eighth day the strain in the Kensington apartment was telling. It affected the younger people more; if Quinn was experiencing it, he showed little trace. He lay on his bed a lot, between calls and briefings, staring at the ceiling, trying to get inside the mind of Zack and thence to work out how to handle the next call. When should he go for a final step? How to arrange the exchange?

McCrea remained good-natured but was becoming tired. He had developed an almost doglike devotion to Quinn, always prepared to run an errand, make coffee, or do his share of chores around the flat.

On the ninth day Sam asked permission to go out shopping. Grudgingly Kevin Brown called up from Grosvenor Square and gave it. She left the apartment, her first time outside for almost a fortnight, took a cab to Knightsbridge, and spent a glorious four hours wandering through Harvey Nichols and Harrods. In Harrods she treated herself to an extravagant and handsome crocodile-skin handbag.

When she got back, both men admired it very much. She also had a present for each of them: a rolled-gold pen for McCrea and a cashmere sweater for Quinn. The young CIA operative was touchingly grateful; Quinn put on the sweater and cracked one of his rare but dazzling smiles. It was the only lighthearted moment the three of them spent in that Kensington apartment.

In Washington the same day, the crisis management committee listened grimly to Dr. Armitage. The President had made no public appearances since the kidnapping, which a sympathetic populace understood, but his behavior behind the scenes had the committee members very concerned.

“I am becoming increasingly worried about the President’s health,” Dr. Armitage told the Vice President, National Security Adviser, four Cabinet Secretaries, and the Directors of the FBI and the CIA. “There have been periods of stress in government before, and always will be. But this is personal and much deeper. The human mind, let alone the body, is not equipped to tolerate these levels of anxiety for very long.”

“How is he physically?” asked Bill Walters, the Attorney General.

“Extremely tired, needing medication to sleep at night if he sleeps at all. Aging visibly.”

“And mentally?” asked Morton Stannard.

“You have seen him trying to handle the normal affairs of state,” Armitage reminded them. They all nodded soberly. “To be blunt, he is losing his grip. His concentration is ebbing; his memory is often faulty.”

Stannard nodded sympathetically but his eyes were hooded. A decade younger than Donaldson of State or Reed of Treasury, the Defense Secretary was a former international banker from New York, a cosmopolitan operator who had developed tastes for fine food, vintage wines, and French Impressionist art. During a stint with the World Bank he had established a reputation as a smooth and efficient negotiator, a hard man to convince-as Third World countries seeking overblown credits with small chance of repayment had discovered when they went away empty-handed.

He had made his mark at the Pentagon over the previous two years as a stickler for efficiency, committed to the notion that the American taxpayer should get a dollar’s worth of defense for his tax dollar. He had made his enemies there, among the military brass and the lobbyists. But then came the Nantucket Treaty, which had changed a few allegiances across the Potomac. Stannard found himself siding with the defense contractors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in opposing the sweeping cuts.

While Michael Odell had fought against Nantucket on gut feeling, Stannard’s priorities were also concerned with the brokerage of power, and his opposition to the treaty had not been wholly on philosophical grounds. Still, when he had lost his case in the Cabinet, not a flicker of expression had crossed his face; and none did now as he listened to the account of his President’s deterioration.

Not so Hubert Reed. “Poor man. God, poor man,” he murmured.

“The added problem,” concluded the psychiatrist, “is that he is not a demonstrative, emotional man. Not on the outside. Inside… of course, we all are. All normal people, anyway. But he bottles things up, won’t scream or shout. The First Lady is different-she does not have the strains of office; she’s more willing to accept medication. Even so, I think her condition is as bad, if not worse. This is her only child. And that’s an added pressure on the President.”

He left eight very worried men behind him when he returned to the Executive Mansion.

It was curiosity more than anything else that caused Andy Laing to stay on in his office two nights later, in the Jiddah branch of the Saudi Arabian Investment Bank, and consult his computer. What it showed stunned him.

The scam was still going on. There had been four further transactions since he had spoken to the general manager, who could have stopped it with a phone call. The rogue account was bloated with money, all diverted from Saudi public funds. Laing knew that peculation was no stranger to office-holding in Saudi Arabia, but these sums were huge, enough to finance a major commercial operation, or any other kind of operation.

He realized with a start of horror that Steve Pyle, a man he had respected, had to be involved. It would not be the first time a bank official had gone on the take. But it was still a shock. And to think he had gone with his findings straight to the culprit. He spent the rest of the night back at his apartment, bent over his portable typewriter. By chance his own hiring had taken place not in New York but in London, where he had been working for another American bank when the Rockman-Queens hired him.

London was also the base for European and Mideast operations of Rockman-Queens, the bank’s biggest office outside New York, and it housed the chief Internal Accountant for Overseas Operations. Laing knew his duty; it was to this officer that he mailed his report, enclosing four printout sheets from the computer as evidence of his claim.

If he had been a bit smarter he would have sent the package by the ordinary mails. But they were slow and not always reliable. He dropped his package in the bank’s courier bag, which normally would have gone direct from Jiddah to London. Normally. But since Laing’s visit to Riyadh a week earlier, the general manager had caused all Jiddah inclusions in the bag to pass via Riyadh. The next day Steve Pyle flicked through the outgoing mail, abstracted the Laing report, sent the rest on its way, and read what Laing had to say very carefully. When he had finished, he picked up the phone and dialed a local number.

“Colonel Easterhouse, we have a problem here. I think we should meet.”

On both sides of the Atlantic the media had said everything there was to say, then said it again and again, but still the words poured out. Experts of every kind, from professors of psychiatry to mediums, had offered their analyses and their advice to the authorities. Psychics had communed with the spirit world-on camera-and received a variety of messages, all contradictory. Offers to pay the ransom, whatever it was, had poured in from private individuals and wealthy foundations. The TV preachers had worked themselves into frenzies; vigils were mounted on church and cathedral steps.

The self-seekers had had a field day. Several hundred had offered themselves in place of Simon Cormack, secure in the knowledge that the transposition would never take place. On the tenth day after Zack’s first call to Quinn in Kensington, a new note crept into some of the broadcasts being beamed to the American people.

A Texas-based evangelist, whose coffers had received a large and unexpected donation from an oil corporation, claimed he had had a vision of divine inspiration. The outrage against Simon Cormack, and thus against his father the President, and thus against the United States, had been perpetrated by the Communists. There was no doubt of it. The message from the divine was picked up by national news networks and used briefly. The first shots of Plan Crockett had been fired, the first seeds sown.

Divested of her tailored working suit, which she had not worn since the first night in the apartment, Special Agent Sam Somerville was a strikingly attractive woman. Twice in her career she had used her beauty to help close a case. On one occasion she had several times dated a senior official of the Pentagon, finally pretending to pass out from drink in his apartment. Fooled by her unconsciousness, the man had made a highly compromising phone call, which had proved he was fixing defense contracts on behalf of preferred manufacturers and taking a kickback from the profits that resulted.

On another case she had accepted a dinner date from a Mafia boss and while in his limousine secreted a bug deep in the upholstery. What the Bureau heard from the device gave them enough to arraign the man on several federal charges.

Kevin Brown had been well aware of this when he chose her as the Bureau’s agent to bird-dog the negotiator the White House insisted on sending to London. He hoped Quinn would be as impressed as several other men had been and, thus weakened, would confide to Sam Somerville any inner thoughts or intentions that the microphones could not pick up.

What he had not counted on was the reverse occurring. On the eleventh evening in the Kensington apartment, the two met in the narrow corridor leading from the bathroom to the sitting room. There was hardly room to pass. On an impulse Sam Somerville reached up, put her arms ’round Quinn’s neck, and kissed him. She had wanted to do that for a week. She was not disappointed or rebuffed, but somewhat surprised at the longing in the kiss that he returned.

The embrace lasted for several minutes, while McCrea, unaware, toiled over a frying pan in the kitchen beyond the sitting room. Quinn’s hard brown hand stroked her gleaming blond hair. She felt waves of strain and exhaustion draining out of her.

“How much longer, Quinn?” she whispered.

“Not long,” he murmured. “A few more days if all goes well-maybe a week.”

When they returned to the sitting room and McCrea summoned them to eat, he did not notice a thing.

Colonel Easterhouse limped across the deep carpet of Steve Pyle’s office and stared out of the window, the Laing report on the coffee table behind him. Pyle watched him with a worried expression.

“I fear that young man could do our country’s interests here enormous harm,” said Easterhouse softly. “Inadvertent, of course. I’m sure he’s a conscientious young man. Nevertheless…”

Privately he was more worried than he gave out. His plan to arrange the massacre and destruction of the House of Sa’ud from the top down was in mid-stage and sensitive to disruption.

The Shi’ah fundamentalist Imam was in hiding, safe from the security police, since the entire file in the central security computer had been erased, wiping out all record of the man’s known contacts, friends, supporters, and possible locations. The zealot from the Mutawain Religious Police kept up the contact. Among the Shi’ah, recruitment was progressing, the eager volunteers being told only that they were being prepared for an act of lasting glory in the service of the Imam and thus of Allah.

The new arena was being completed on schedule. Its huge doors, its windows, side exits, and ventilation system were all controlled by a central computer, programmed with a system of Easterhouse’s devising. Plans for desert maneuvers to draw most of the regular Saudi Army away from the capital on the night of the dress rehearsal were well advanced. An Egyptian major general and two Palestinian military armorers were in his pay and prepared to substitute defective ammunition for the ordinary issue to the Royal Guard on the night in question.

His American Piccolo machine pistols, with their magazines and ammunition, were due by ship early in the new year, and arrangements were in place for their storage and preparation before issue to the Shi’ah. As he had promised Cyrus Miller, he needed U.S. dollars only for external purchases. Internal accounts could be settled in riyals.

That was not the story he had told Steve Pyle. The general manager of SAIB had heard of Easterhouse and his enviable influence with the royal family, and had been flattered to be asked to dinner two months earlier. When he had seen Easterhouse’s beautifully forged CIA identification he had been massively impressed. To think that this man was no free-lance, but really worked for his own government and only he, Steve Pyle, knew it.

“There are rumors of a plan afoot to topple the royal house,” Easterhouse had told him gravely. “We found out about it, and informed King Fahd. His Majesty has agreed to a joint effort between his security forces and the Company to unmask the culprits.”

Pyle had ceased eating, his mouth open in amazement. And yet it was all perfectly feasible.

“As you know, money buys everything in this country, including information. That’s what we need, and the regular Security Police funds cannot be diverted in case there are conspirators among the police. You know Prince Abdullah?”

Pyle had nodded. The King’s cousin, Minister of Public Works.

“He is the King’s appointed liaison with me,” said the colonel. “The Prince has agreed that the fresh funds we both need to penetrate the conspiracy shall come from his own budget. Needless to say, Washington at the highest level is desperately eager that nothing should happen to this most friendly of governments.”

And thus the bank, in the form of a single and rather gullible officer, had agreed to participate in the creation of the fund. What Easterhouse had actually done was to hack into the Ministry of Public Works’ accounting computer, which he had set up, with four fresh instructions.

One was to alert his own computer terminal every time the Ministry issued a draft in settlement of an invoice from a contractor. The sum of these invoices on a monthly basis was huge; in the Jiddah area the Ministry was funding roads, schools, hospitals, deep-water ports, sports stadiums, bridges, overpasses, housing developments, and apartment blocks.

The second instruction was to add 10 percent to every settlement, but transfer that 10 percent into his own numbered account in the Jiddah branch of the SAIB. The third and fourth instructions were protective: If the Ministry ever asked for the total in its account at the SAIB, its own computer would give the total plus 10 percent. Finally, if questioned directly, it would deny all knowledge and erase its memory. So far the sum in Easterhouse’s account was 4 billion riyals.

What Laing had noticed was the weird fact that every time the SAIB, on instructions from the Ministry, made a credit transfer to a contractor, a matching transfer of precisely 10 percent of that sum went from the Ministry’s account to a numbered account in the same bank.

Easterhouse’s swindle was just a variation of the Fourth Cash Register scam, and could only be uncovered by the full annual Ministry audit the following spring. (The fraud is based on the tale of the American bar owner who, though his bar was always full, became convinced his take was 25 percent less than it ought to be. He hired the best private detective, who took the room above the bar, bored a hole in the floor, and spent a week on his belly watching the bar below. Finally he reported: I’m sorry to have to say this, but your bar staff are honest people. Every dollar and dime that crosses that bar goes into one of your four cash registers. “What do you mean, four?” asked the bar owner. “I only installed three.”)

“One does not wish any harm to this young man,” said Easterhouse, “but if he is going to do this sort of thing, if he refuses to stay quiet, would it not be wise to transfer him back to London?”

“Not so easy. Why would he go without protest?” asked Pyle.

“Surely,” said Easterhouse, “he believes this package to have reached London. If London summons him-or that is what you tell him-he will go like a lamb. All you have to tell London is that you wish him reassigned. Grounds: He is unsuitable here, has been rude to the staff and damaged the morale of his colleagues. His evidence is right here in your hands. If he makes the same allegations in London, he will merely prove your point.”

Pyle was delighted. It covered every contingency.

Quinn knew enough to know there was probably not one bug but two in his bedroom. It took him an hour to find the first, another to trace the second. The big brass table lamp had a one-millimeter hole drilled in its base. There was no need for such a hole; the cord entered at the side of the base. The hole was right underneath. He chewed for several minutes on a stick of gum-one of several given him by Vice President Odell for the transatlantic crossing-and shoved the wad firmly into the aperture.

In the basement of the embassy the duty ELINT man at the console turned around after several minutes and called over an FBI man. Soon afterward, Brown and Collins were in the listening post.

“One of the bedroom bugs just went out,” said the engineer. “The one in the base of the table lamp. Showing defective.”

“Mechanical fault?” asked Collins. Despite the makers’ claims, technology had a habit of fouling up at regular intervals.

“Could be,” said the ELINT man. “No way of knowing. It seems to be alive. But its sound-level reception is batting zero.”

“Could he have discovered it?” asked Brown. “Shoved something in it? He’s a tricky son of a bitch.”

“Could be,” said the engineer. “Want we should go down there?”

“No,” said Collins. “He never talks in the bedroom anyway. Just lies on his back and thinks. Anyway, we have the other, the one in the wall outlet.”

That night, the twelfth since Zack’s first call, Sam came to Quinn’s room, at the opposite end of the apartment from where McCrea slept. The door uttered a click as it opened.

“What was that?” asked one of the FBI men sitting through the night watch beside the engineer. The technician shrugged.

“Quinn’s bedroom. Door catch, window. Maybe he’s going to the can. Needs some fresh air. No voices, see?”

Quinn was lying on his bed, silent in the near darkness, the street-lamps of Kensington giving a low light to the room. He was quite immobile, staring up at the ceiling, naked but for the sarong wrapped around his waist. When he heard the door click he turned his head. Sam stood in the entrance without a word. She, too, knew about the bugs. She knew her own room was not tapped, but it was right next to McCrea’s.

Quinn swung his legs to the floor, knotted his sarong, and raised one finger to his lips in a gesture to keep silent. He left the bed without a sound, took his tape recorder from the bedside table, switched it on, and placed it by an electrical outlet in the baseboard six feet from the head of the bed.

Still without a sound he took the big club chair from the corner, upended it, and placed it over the tape recorder and against the wall, using pillows to stuff into the cracks where the arms of the club chair did not reach the wall.

The chair formed four sides of a hollow box, the other two sides being the floor and the wall. Inside the box was the tape recorder.

“We can talk now,” he murmured.

“Don’t want to,” whispered Sam and held out her arms.

Quinn swept her up and carried her to the bed. She sat up for a second and slipped out of her silk nightgown. Quinn lay down beside her. Ten minutes later they became lovers.

In the embassy basement the engineer and two FBI men listened idly to the sound coming from the baseboard outlet two miles away.

“He’s gone,” said the engineer. The three listened to the steady, rhythmic breathing of a man fast asleep, recorded the previous night when Quinn had left the tape recorder on his pillow. Brown and Seymour wandered into the listening post. Nothing was expected that night; Zack had phoned during the six o’clock evening rush hour- Bedford railway station, no sighting possible.

“I do not understand,” said Patrick Seymour, “how that man can sleep like that with the level of stress he’s under. Me, I’ve been catnapping for two weeks and wonder if I’ll ever sleep again. He must have piano wire for nerves.”

The engineer yawned and nodded. Normally his work for the Company in Britain and Europe did not require much night work, certainly not back-to-back like this, night after night.

“Yeah, well, I wish to hell I was doing what he’s doing.”

Brown turned without a word and returned to the office that had been converted into his quarters. He had been nearly fourteen days in this damn city, becoming more and more convinced the British police were getting nowhere and Quinn was just playing footsie with a rat who ought not to be counted among the human race. Well, Quinn and his British pals might be prepared to sit on their collective butts till hell froze over; he had run out of patience. He resolved to get his team around him in the morning and see if a little old-fashioned detective work could produce a lead. It would not be the first time a mighty police force had overlooked some tiny detail.