The Negotiator (29 page)

As they watched, a burly man came out of the farmhouse and crossed to one of the three barns. He spent ten minutes there, then returned to the house. Brown scanned the complex of farm buildings with powerful binoculars. Down the track to their left came a powerful Japanese off-road four-wheel-drive. It parked in front of the farm and a man climbed out. He gazed carefully around him, scanning the rim of the valley for movement. There was none.

“Damn,” said Brown. “Ginger hair, eyeglasses.”

The driver went into the farmhouse and emerged a few seconds later with the burly man. This time they had a big Rottweiler with them. The pair went to the same barn, spent ten minutes, and returned. The burly man drove the Jeep into another barn and closed the doors.

“Rustic pottery, my ass,” said Brown. “There’s something or someone in that damn barn. Five will get you ten it’s a young man.”

They wriggled back into the line of trees. Dusk was descending.

“Take the blanket from the trunk,” said Brown. “And stay here. Stake it out all night. I’ll be back with the team before sunup—if there ever is any sun in this damn country.”

Across the valley, stretched out along a branch in a giant oak, a man in camouflage uniform lay motionless. He, too, had powerful binoculars, with which he had noted the movements among the trees on the opposite side from his own position. As Kevin Brown and his agent slithered off the rim of the high ground and into the woodland, he drew a small radio from his pocket and spoke quietly and urgently for several seconds. It was October 28, nineteen days since Simon Cormack had been kidnapped and seventeen since Zack’s first call to the Kensington apartment.

Zack called again that evening, burying himself in the hurrying crowds in the center of Luton.

“What the hell’s going on, Quinn? It’s been three bloody days.”

“Hey, take it easy, Zack. It’s the diamonds. You caught us by surprise, ole buddy. That kind of package takes a while to put together. I laid it on them over there in Washington—I mean, but hard. They’re working on it as fast as they can, but hell, Zack, twenty-five thousand stones, all good, all untraceable—that takes a bit—”

“Yeah, well, just tell them they got two more days and then they get their boy back in a bag. Just tell ’em.”

He hung up. The experts would later say his nerves were badly shot. He was reaching the point where he might be tempted to hurt the boy out of frustration or because he thought he was being tricked in some way.

Kevin Brown and his team were good and they were armed. They came in four pairs, from the only four directions from which the farm could be assailed. Two skirted the track, darting from cover to cover. The other three pairs came from the trees and down the sloping fields in complete silence. It was that hour just before dawn when the light is at its trickiest, when the spirits of the quarry are at their lowest, the hour of the hunter.

The surprise was total. Chuck Moxon and his partner took the suspect barn. Moxon snipped off the padlock; his partner went in on the roll, coming to his feet on the dusty floor inside the barn with his sidearm drawn. Apart from a petrol generator, something that looked like a kiln, and a bench with an array of chemistry glassware, there was no one there.

The six men, plus Brown, who took the farmhouse, fared better. Two pairs went in through windows, taking the glass and the frames as they went, came to their feet without a pause, and headed straight upstairs to the bedrooms.

Brown and the remaining pair went through the front door. The lock shattered with a single blow of the sledgehammer and they were in.

By the embers of the fire in the grate of the long kitchen, the burly man had been asleep in a chair. It was his job to keep watch through the night, but boredom and tiredness had taken over. At the crash from the front door he came out of his chair and reached for a .12-bore shotgun that lay on the pine table. He almost made it. The shout of “Freeze!” from the door and the sight of the big crew-cut man crouched over a Colt .45 aimed straight at his chest caused the burly one to stop. He spat and slowly raised both hands.

Upstairs the red-haired man was in bed with the only woman in the group. They both awoke as the windows and doors crashed in downstairs. The woman screamed. The man went for the bedroom door and met the first FBI man on the landing. The fighting was too close for firearms; the two men went down together in the darkness and wrestled until another American could discern which was which and hit the redhead hard with the butt of his Colt.

The fourth member of the farmhouse group was led blinking out of his bedroom a few seconds later, a thin, scrawny young man with lank hair. The FBI team all had flashlights in their belts. It took two more minutes to examine all the other bedrooms and establish that four people was the limit. Kevin Brown had them all brought to the kitchen, where lamps were lit. He surveyed them with loathing.

“Okay, where’s the kid?” he asked. One of his men looked out the window.

“Chief, we have company.”

About fifty men were descending into the valley and toward the farmhouse on all sides, all in kneeboots, all in blue, a dozen with Alsatians straining at the leash. In an outhouse the Rottweiler roared his rage at the intrusion. A white Range Rover with blue markings jolted up the track to stop ten yards from the broken door. A middle-aged man in blue, aglitter with silver buttons and insignia, descended, a braided peaked cap on his head. He walked into the lobby without a word, entered the kitchen, and gazed at the four prisoners.

“Okay, we hand it over to you now,” said Brown. “He’s here somewhere. And those sleazeballs know where,”

“Exactly,” asked the man in blue, “who are you?”

“Yes, of course.” Kevin Brown produced his Bureau identification. The Englishman looked at it carefully and handed it back.

“See here,” said Brown, “what we’ve done—”

“What you’ve done, Mr. Brown,” said the Chief Constable of Bedfordshire with icy rage, “is to blow away the biggest drug bust this county was ever likely to have and now, I fear, never will have. These people are low-level minders and a chemist. The big fish and their consignment were expected any day. Now, would you please return to London?”

At that hour Steve Pyle was with Mr. Al-Haroun in the latter’s office in Jiddah, having flown to the coast following a disturbing phone call.

“What exactly did he take?” he asked for the fourth time. Mr. Al-Haroun shrugged. These Americans were even worse than the Europeans, always in a hurry.

“Alas, I am not an expert in these machines,” he said, “but my night watchman here reports ...”

He turned to the Saudi night watchman, and rattled off a stream of Arabic. The man replied, holding out his arms to signify the extent of something.

“He says that the night I returned Mr. Laing his passport, duly altered, the young man spent most of the night in the computer room, and left before dawn with a large amount of computer printout. He returned for work at the normal hour without it.”

Steve Pyle went back to Riyadh a very worried man. Helping his government and his country was one thing, but in an internal accounting inquiry, that would not show up. He asked for an urgent meeting with Colonel Easterhouse.

The Arabist listened to him calmly and nodded several times.

“You think he has reached London?” he asked.

“I don’t know how he could have done it, but where the hell else could he be?”

“Mmmm. Could I have access to your central computer for a while?”

It took the colonel four hours at the console of the master computer in Riyadh. The job was not difficult, since he had all the access codes. By the time he had finished, all the computerized records had been erased and a new record created.

Nigel Cramer got a first telephone report from Bedford in mid-morning, long before the written record arrived. When he called Patrick Seymour at the embassy he was incandescent with anger. Brown and his team were still on the road south.

“Patrick, we’ve always had a damn good relationship, but this is outrageous. Who the hell does he think he is? Where the hell does he think he is?”

Seymour was in an impossible position. He had spent three years building on the excellent cooperation between the Bureau and the Yard which he had inherited from his predecessor, Darrell Mills. He had attended courses in England and arranged visits by senior Metropolitan officers to the Hoover Building to form those one-on-one relationships that in a crisis can cut through miles of red tape.

“What exactly was going on at the farm?” he asked. Cramer calmed down and told him. The Yard had had a tip months before that a big drug ring was setting up a new and major operation in England. After patient investigation the farm had been identified as the base. Covert Squad men from his own S.O. Department had mounted surveillance week after week, in liaison with the Bedford police. The man they wanted was a New Zealand-born heroin czar, sought in a dozen countries but slippery as an eel. The good news was, he was expected to show up with a large coke consignment for processing, cutting, and distributing; the bad news was, he would now not come near the place.

“I’m sorry, Patrick, but I’m going to have to ask the Home Secretary to have Washington send for him.”

“Well, if you must, you must,” said Seymour. As he put the phone down he thought: You go right ahead.

Cramer also had another task, even more urgent. That was to stop the story appearing in any publication, or on radio or TV. That morning he had to call on a lot of good will from the proprietors and editors of the media.

The Washington committee got Seymour’s report at their first—7:00
A.M
.—meeting of the day.

“Look, he got a first-class lead and he followed it up,” protested Philip Kelly. Don Edmonds shot him a warning glance.

“He should have cooperated with Scotland Yard,” said the Secretary of State. “What we don’t need is to foul relations with the British authorities at this point. What the hell am I to say to Sir Harry Marriott when he asks for Brown’s ouster?”

“Look,” said Treasury Secretary Reed, “why not propose a compromise? Brown was overzealous and we’re sorry. But we believe Quinn and the British will secure Simon Cormack’s release momentarily. When that happens, we need a strong group to escort the boy home. Brown and his team should be given a few days’ extension to accomplish that. Say, end of the week?”

Jim Donaldson nodded.

“Yes, Sir Harry might accept that. By the way, how is the President?”

“Bucking up,” said Odell. “Almost optimistic. I told him an hour ago Quinn had secured further proof Simon was alive and apparently well—the sixth time Quinn’s got the kidnappers to prove that. How about the diamonds, Morton?”

“Ready by sundown,” said Stannard.

“Get a fast bird standing by and ready,” said Vice President Odell. Stannard nodded and made a note.

* * *

Andy Laing finally got his interview with the internal accountant just after lunch that day. The man was a fellow-American and had been on a tour of European branches for the previous three days.

He listened soberly and with growing dismay to what the young bank officer from Jiddah had to say, and scanned the computer printouts across his desk with a practiced eye. When he had finished he leaned back in his chair, puffed out his cheeks, and exhaled noisily.

“Dear God, these are very serious accusations indeed. And yes, they appear to be substantiated. Where are you staying in London?”

“I still have an apartment in Chelsea,” said Laing. “I’ve been there since I arrived. Luckily my tenants moved out two weeks back.”

The accountant noted its address and phone number.

“I’m going to have to consult with the general manager here, maybe the president in New York. Before we face Steve Pyle with this. Stay close to the phone for a couple of days.”

What neither of them knew was that the morning pouch from Riyadh contained a confidential letter from Steve Pyle to the London-based general manager for Overseas Operations.

The British press was as good as its word, but Radio Luxembourg is based in Paris and for French listeners the story of a first-class row between their Anglo-Saxon neighbors to the west is too good to miss.

Where the tip-off really came from could never be later established, except that it was a phone-in and anonymous. But the London office checked it out and confirmed that the sheer secrecy of the Bedford police gave credence to the story. It was a thin day and they ran it on the four o’clock news.

Hardly anybody in England heard it, but the Corsican did. He whistled in amazement and went to find Zack. The Englishman listened carefully, asked several supplementary questions in French, and went pale with anger.

Quinn knew already, and that was a saving grace because he had time to prepare an answer in the event Zack called. He did, just after 7:00
P.M.
and in a towering rage.

“You lying bastard. You said there’d be no cowboy antics from the police or anyone else. You bloody lied to me—”

Quinn protested that he did not know what Zack was talking about—it would have been too phony to know all the details without a reminder. Zack told him in three angry sentences.

“But that was nothing to do with you,” Quinn shouted back. “The Frogs got it wrong, as usual. It was a DEA drug-bust that went wrong. You know these Rambos from the Drug Enforcement Agency—they did it. They weren’t looking for you—they were looking for cocaine. I had a Scotland Yard man here an hour ago and he was puking about it. For chrissake, Zack, you know the media. If you believe them, Simon’s been sighted eight hundred different places and you’ve been caught fifty times.”

It was plausible. Quinn counted on Zack’s having spent three weeks reading miles of inaccurate nonsense in the tabloid papers and having a healthy contempt for the press. In a booth in Linslade bus depot, he calmed down. His phone time was running out.

“Better not be true, Quinn. Just better not,” he said, and hung up.

Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea were pale with fear by the time the call ended.