The Negotiator (21 page)

“
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. Somerville thought 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.