The Negotiator (28 page)

So he appeased them, placated them, told them they had done brilliantly and would all be very rich men in just a few more days. The thought of all that money calmed them down and they subsided. Zack was relieved it had ended without blows. Unlike the three men in the house, his problem was not boredom but stress. Every time he drove the big Volvo along the crowded motorways he knew that one random police check, one brush with another car, one moment of inattention, would have a blue-capped officer leaning in his window, wondering why he wore a wig and false moustache. His disguise would pass in a crowded street, but not at six inches’ range.

Every time he went into one of those phone booths, he had a mental image of something going wrong, of a faster-than-usual trace, of a plainclothes policeman being only a few yards away, taking the alarm on his personal radio and walking up to the phone booth. Zack carried a gun, and knew he would use it to get away. If he did, he would have to abandon the Volvo, always parked a few hundred yards away, and escape on foot. Some idiot member of the public might even try to tackle him. It was getting to the point that whenever he saw a policeman sauntering along the crowded streets he chose for his phone calls, his stomach turned over.

“Go give the kid his supper,” he told the South African.

Simon Cormack had been fifteen days in his underground cell, and thirteen since he had answered the question about Aunt Emily and known that his father was trying to get him out. He realized now what solitary confinement must be like and wondered how people could survive months, even years of it. At least in the prisons he had heard of, inmates in solitary had writing materials, books, sometimes television, something to occupy the mind. He had nothing. But he was a tough boy and he determined not to go to pieces.

He exercised regularly, forcing himself to overcome the prisoner’s lethargy, doing his push-ups ten times a day, jogging in place a dozen times. He still wore his same running shoes, socks, shorts, and T-shirt, and was aware he must smell awful. He used the toilet bucket carefully, so as not to soil the floor, and was grateful it was removed every second day.

The food was boring, mainly fried or cold, but it was enough. He had no razor, of course, so he sported a straggly beard and moustache. His hair had grown; he tried to comb it with his fingers. He had asked for, and eventually been given, a plastic bucket of cold water and a sponge. He never realized how grateful a man could be for the chance to wash. He had stripped naked, running his shorts halfway up the ankle-chain to keep them dry, and sponged himself from head to foot, scouring his skin with the sponge to try to keep clean. After it he felt transformed. But he tried no escape maneuvers. The chain was impossible to break; the door solid and bolted from the outside.

Between exercises he tried to keep his mind occupied in a number of ways: reciting every poem he could remember, pretending to dictate his autobiography to an invisible stenographer so that he could go over everything that had ever happened to him in his twenty-one years. And he thought of home, of New Haven and Nantucket and Yale and the White House. He thought of his mom and dad and how they were; he hoped they weren’t worried about him, but expected they were. If only he could tell them he was all right, in good shape, considering ...

There were three loud knocks on the cellar door. He reached for his black hood and put it on. Supper time—or was it breakfast ...?

That same evening, but after Simon Cormack had fallen asleep, and Sam Somerville lay in Quinn’s arms while the tape recorder breathed into the wall outlet, five time zones farther west, the White House committee met in the late evening. Apart from the usual Cabinet members and department heads, Philip Kelly of the FBI and David Weintraub of the CIA also attended.

They heard the tapes of Zack on the phone to Quinn, the rasping tones of the British criminal and the reassuring drawl of the American trying to appease him, as they had done almost every day for two weeks.

When Zack had finished, Hubert Reed was pale with shock.

“My God,” he said, “cold chisel and hammer. The man’s an animal.”

“We know that,” said Odell. “But at least now we have an agreed ransom. Two million dollars. In diamonds. Any objections?”

“Of course not,” said Jim Donaldson. “This country will pay that easily, for the President’s son. I’m just surprised it’s taken two weeks.”

“Actually, that’s pretty fast, or so I’m told,” said Bill Walters. Don Edmonds of the FBI nodded his agreement.

“We want to rehear the rest, the tapes from the apartment?” asked the Vice President.

No one needed to.

“Mr. Edmonds, what about what Mr. Cramer, the Scotland Yard man, told Quinn? Any comments from your people?”

Edmonds cast a sidelong glance at Philip Kelly, but answered for the Bureau.

“Our people at Quantico agree with their British colleagues,” he said. “This Zack is at the end of his tether, wants to close it down, make an exchange. The strain in his voice is coming through, hence the threats most probably. They also agree with the analysts over there on another thing. Which is that Quinn appears to have established some kind of wary empathy with this animal Zack. It seems his efforts—which are what has taken two weeks”—he glanced at Jim Donaldson as he spoke—“to portray himself as the guy trying to help Zack, and all the rest of us here and there as the bad guys making problems, has worked. Zack has an element of trust for Quinn, but for no one else. That may prove crucial at the safe-handover process. At least, that’s what the voice analysts and behavioral psychologists are saying.”

“Lord, what a job, having to sweet-talk scum like that,” observed Jim Donaldson with distaste.

David Weintraub, who had been staring at the ceiling, cast an eye toward the Secretary of State. To keep these amateurs in their high office, he might have said but did not, he and his people sometimes had to deal with creatures just as nasty as Zack.

“Okay, gentlemen,” said Odell, “we go with the deal. At last the ball is back with us in America, so let’s make it fast. Personally I think this Quinn has done a pretty good job. If he can get the boy back safe and sound, we owe him. Now, diamonds. Where do we get them?”

“New York,” said Weintraub, “diamond center of the country.”

“Morton, you’re from New York. Have you got any discreet contacts you could tap into fast?” Odell asked the ex-banker.

“Certainly,” Stannard said. “When I was with Rockman-Queens we had a number of clients who were high in the diamond trade. Very discreet—they have to be. You want me to handle it? How about the money?”

“The President has insisted he will personally pay the ransom, won’t have it any other way,” said Odell. “But I don’t see why he should be troubled by these details. Hubert, could the Treasury make a personal loan until the President can liquidate trust funds?”

“No problem,” said Hubert Reed. “You’ll have your money, Morton.”

The committee rose. Odell had to see the President over at the Executive Mansion.

“Fast as you can, Morton,” he said. “We want to be talking here in two to three days. Tops.”

In fact, it would take another seven.

It was not until morning that Andy Laing could secure an interview with Mr. Al-Haroun, the branch manager. But he did not waste the night.

Mr. Al-Haroun, when confronted, was as gently apologetic as only a well-bred Arab can be when confronted by an angry Occidental. The matter gave him enormous regret, no doubt an unhappy situation whose solution lay in the lap of the all-merciful Allah; nothing would give him greater pleasure than to return to Mr. Laing his passport, which he had taken into nightly safekeeping only at the specific request of Mr. Pyle. He went to his safe and, with slim brown fingers, withdrew the blue United States passport and handed it back.

Laing was mollified, thanked him with the more formal and gracious “
Ashkurak
,” and withdrew. Only when he had returned to his own office did it occur to him to flick through the passport’s pages.

In Saudi Arabia, foreigners not only need an entry visa, but an exit visa as well. His own, formerly valid without limit of time, had been canceled. The stamp of the Jiddah Immigration Control office was perfectly genuine. No doubt, he mused bitterly, Mr. Al-Haroun had a friend in that bureau. It was, after all, the local way of doing things.

Aware there was no going back, Andy Laing determined to scrap it out. He recalled something the Operations manager had once told him.

“Amin, my friend, did you not mention once that you had a relative in the Immigration Service here?” he asked him. Amin saw no trap in the question.

“Yes, indeed. A cousin.”

“In which office is he based?”

“Ah, not here, my friend. He is in Dhahran.”

Dhahran was not near Jiddah, on the Red Sea, but right across the country in the extreme east, on the Persian Gulf. In the late morning Andy Laing made a phone call to Mr. Zulfiqar Amin at his desk in Dhahran.

“This is Mr. Steven Pyle, General Manager of the Saudi Arabian Investment Bank,” he said. “I have one of my officers conducting business in Dhahran at this moment. He will need to fly on urgent matters to Bahrein tonight. Unfortunately he tells me his exit visa is time-expired. You know how long these things can take through normal channels. ... I was wondering, in view of your cousin being in such high esteem with us ... You will find Mr. Laing a most generous man. ...”

Using the lunch hour, Andy Laing returned to his apartment, packed his bags, and caught the 3:00
P.M.
Saudia airline flight to Dhahran. Mr. Zulfiqar Amin was expecting him. The reissue of an exit visa took two hours and a thousand riyals.

Mr. Al-Haroun noticed the absence of the Credit and Marketing Manager around the time he took off for Dhahran. He checked the Jiddah airport, but only the international departures office. No trace of a Mr. Laing. Puzzled, he called Riyadh. Pyle asked if a block could be put on Laing’s boarding any flight at all, even internal.

“I’m afraid, dear colleague, that cannot be arranged,” said Mr. Al-Haroun, who hated to disappoint. “But I can ask my friend if he has left by any internal flight.”

Laing was traced into Dhahran just at the moment he crossed the frontier on the causeway to the neighboring Emirate of Bahrein. From there he easily caught a British Airways flight on a stopover from Mauritius to London.

Unaware that Laing had obtained a new exit visa, Pyle waited till the following morning, then asked his bank staff in the Dhahran office to check around the city and find out what Laing was doing there. It took them three days and they came up with nothing.

Three days after the Secretary of Defense was charged by the Washington committee with obtaining the package of diamonds demanded by Zack, he reported back that the task was taking longer than foreseen. The money had been made available; that was not the problem.

“Look,” he told his colleagues, “I know nothing about diamonds. But my contacts in the trade—I am using three, all very discreet and understanding men—tell me the number of stones involved is very substantial.

“This kidnapper has asked for uncut, rough melees—mixtures—of one fifth of a carat to half a carat, and of medium quality. Such stones, I am told, are worth between two hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars a carat. To be on the safe side they are calculating the base price of two-fifty. We are talking here about some eight thousand carats.”

“And what’s the problem?” asked Odell.

“Time,” said Morton Stannard. “At a fifth of a carat per stone, that would be forty thousand stones. At half a carat, sixteen thousand stones. With a mixture of different weights, let’s say twenty-five thousand stones. It’s a lot to put together this fast. Three men are buying furiously, and trying not to make waves.”

“What’s the bottom line?” asked Brad Johnson. “When can they be ready for shipment?”

“Another day, maybe two,” said the Defense Secretary.

“Stay on top of it, Morton,” Odell ordered. “We have the deal. We can’t keep this boy and his father waiting much longer.”

“The moment they’re in a bag, weighed and authenticated, you’ll have them,” said Stannard.

The following morning Kevin Brown took a private call in the embassy from one of his men.

“We may have hit pay dirt, Chief,” said the agent tersely.

“No more on an open line, boy. Get your ass in here fast. Tell me to my face.”

The agent was in London by noon. What he had to say was more than interesting.

East of the towns of Biggleswade and Sandy, both of which lie on the A.1 highway from London to the north, the county of Bedfordshire butts up against Cambridgeshire. The area is intersected only by minor B-class roads and country lanes, contains no large towns, and is largely given over to agriculture. The county border area contains only a few villages, with old English names like Potton, Tadlow, Wrestlingworth, and Gamlingay.

Between two of these villages, off the beaten path, lay an old farmhouse, partly ruined by fire but with one wing still furnished and habitable, in a shallow valley and approached by a single track.

Two months earlier, the agent had discovered, the place had been rented by a small group of supposed “rustic freaks,” who claimed they wanted to return to nature, live simply, and create artifacts in pottery and basket-weaving.

“The thing is,” said the agent, “they had the money for the rental in cash. They don’t seem to sell much pottery, but they can run two off-road Jeeps, which are parked undercover in the barns. And they mix with no one.”

“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brown.

“Green Meadow Farm.”

“Okay, we have enough time if we don’t hang around. Let’s go take a look at Green Meadow Farm.”

There were two hours of daylight left when Kevin Brown and the agent parked their car at the entrance to a farm lane and made the rest on foot. Guided by the agent, the pair approached with extreme caution, using the trees for cover, until they emerged from the tree line above the valley. From there they crawled the last ten yards to the edge of a rise and looked down into the valley. The farmhouse lay below them, its fire-gutted wing black in the autumn afternoon, a low gleam as from an oil lamp coming from one window of the other wing.