The Negotiator (23 page)

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.”

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.