The Negotiator (31 page)

The news out of London that an exchange was imminent, whether true or false, had galvanized a resurgence of press frenzy in Washington. Since before dawn the White House had been deluged with calls for information and once again the press secretary was at his wits’ end.

When the tape finally ran out the eight members present were silent with shock.

“The diamonds,” growled Odell. “You keep promising and promising. Where the hell are they?”

“They’re ready,” said Stannard promptly. “I apologize for my over-optimism earlier. I know nothing of such matters—I thought arranging such a consignment would take less time. But they are ready—just under twenty-five thousand mixed stones, all authentic and valued at just over two million dollars.”

“Where are they?” asked Hubert Reed.

“In the safe of the head of the Pentagon office in New York, the office that handles our East Coast systems-purchasing. For obvious reasons, it’s a very secure safe.”

“What about shipment to London?” asked Brad Johnson. “I suggest we use one of our air bases in England. We don’t need problems with the press at Heathrow, or anything like that.”

“I am meeting in one hour with a senior Air Force expert,” said Stannard. “He will advise how best to get the package there.”

“We will need a Company car to meet them on arrival and get them to Quinn at the apartment,” said Odell. “Lee, you arrange that. It’s your apartment, after all.”

“No problem,” said Lee Alexander of the CIA.

“I’ll have Lou Collins pick them up himself at the air base on touchdown.”

“By dawn tomorrow, London time,” said the Vice President. “In London, in Kensington, by dawn. We know the details of the exchange yet?”

“No,” said the Director of the FBI. “No doubt Quinn will work out the details in conjunction with our people.”

The U. S. Air Force proposed the use of a single-seat jet fighter to make the Atlantic crossing, an F-15 Eagle.

“It has the range if we fit it with FAST packs,” the Air Force general told Morton Stannard at the Pentagon. “We must have the package delivered to the Air National Guard base at Trenton, New Jersey, no later than two
P.M.
”

The pilot selected for the mission was an experienced lieutenant colonel with more than seven thousand flying hours on the F-15. Through the late morning the Eagle at Trenton was serviced as seldom before in her existence, and the FAST packs were fitted to each of the port and starboard air-intake trunks. These packs, despite their name, would not increase the Eagle’s speed; the acronym stands for “fuel and sensor tactical,” and they are really long-range extra fuel tanks.

Stripped down, the Eagle carries 23,000 pounds of fuel, giving her a ferry range of 2,878 miles; the extra 5,000 pounds in each FAST pack boost that to 3,450 miles.

In the navigation room Colonel Bowers studied his flight plan over a sandwich lunch. From Trenton to the USAF base at Upper Heyford outside the city of Oxford was 3,063 miles. The meteorology men told him the wind strengths at his chosen altitude of 50,000 feet, and he worked out that he would make it in 5.4 hours flying at Mach .95 and would still have 4,300 pounds of fuel remaining.

At 2:00
P.M.
a big KC-135 tanker lifted off from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and headed for a midair rendezvous at 45,000 feet over the eastern seaboard with the Eagle.

At Trenton there was one last holdup. Colonel Bowers was in his flying suit by three o’clock, and ready to go, when the long black limousine from the Pentagon’s New York bureau came through the main gate. A civilian official, accompanied by an Air Force general, handed over a plain flat attaché case and a slip of paper with the number of the combination lock.

Hardly had he done so when another unmarked limousine entered the base. There was a flustered conference on the tarmac between two groups of officials. Eventually the attaché case and the slip of paper were retrieved from Colonel Bowers and taken to the rear seat of one of the cars.

The attaché case was opened and its contents, a flat pack of black velvet, ten inches by twelve inches and three inches thick, was transferred to a new attaché case. This was the one that was handed to the impatient colonel.

Interceptor fighters are not accustomed to hauling freight, but a storage space had been prepared right beneath the pilot’s seat, and it was here the attaché case was slotted. The colonel lifted off at 3:31
P.M.

He climbed rapidly to 45,000 feet, called up his tanker, and topped off his fuel tanks to begin the run for England with a full load. After fueling he nosed up to 50,000 feet, turned to his compass course for Upper Hey ford, and boosted power to settle at Mach .95, just below the shudder zone that marks the sound barrier. He caught his expected westerly tailwind over Nantucket.

Three hours after the Eagle rose from the tarmac at Trenton, a scheduled airlines jumbo jet had taken off from Kennedy for London Heathrow. In the business class section was a tall and clean-cut young man who had caught the flight after connecting from Houston. He worked for a major oil corporation there called Pan-Global and felt he was privileged to be entrusted by his employer, the proprietor himself, with such a discreet mission.

Not that he had the faintest idea of the contents of the envelope he carried within the breast pocket of the jacket he declined to hand over to the stewardess. Nor did he wish to know. He only knew it must contain documents of great corporate sensitivity, since it could not be mailed or faxed or sent by commercial courier pouch.

His instructions were clear; he had repeated them many times. He was to go to a certain address on a certain day—the following day—at a certain hour. He was not to ring the bell, just drop the envelope through the letter slot, then return to Heathrow Airport and Houston. Tiring but simple. Cocktails were being served, before dinner; he did not drink alcohol, so he gazed out the window.

The sky had long turned inky black above the heaving winter wastes of the North Atlantic, but above the cloud layer the stars were hard and bright. The young man staring out of the porthole could not know that far ahead of him another jet plane was howling through the darkness towards England. Neither he nor Colonel Bowers would ever know of the other’s existence, nor that each was racing towards the British capital on different missions; and neither would ever know exactly what it was he carried.

The colonel got there first. He touched down at Upper Heyford right on schedule at 1:55
A.M
. local time, disturbing the sleep of the villagers beneath him as he made his final turn into the approach lights. The tower told him which way to taxi and he finally stopped in a bright ring of lights inside a hangar whose doors closed the moment he shut down his engines. When he opened the canopy the base commander approached with a civilian. It was the civilian who spoke.

“Colonel Bowers?”

“That’s me, sir.”

“You have a package for me?”

“I have an attaché case. Right under my seat.”

He stretched stiffly, climbed out, and clambered down the steel ladder to the hangar floor. Helluva way to see England, he thought. The civilian went up the ladder and retrieved the attaché case. He held out his hand for the combination code. Ten minutes later Lou Collins was back in his Company limousine, heading toward London. He reached the Kensington apartment at ten minutes after four. The lights still burned; no one had slept. Quinn was in the sitting room drinking coffee.

Collins laid the attaché case on the low table, consulted the slip of paper, and tumbled the rollers. From the case he took the flat, near-square, velvet-wrapped package and handed it to Quinn.

“In your hands, by dawn,” he said. Quinn hefted the pack in his hands. Just over a kilogram—about three pounds.

“You want to open it?” asked Collins.

“No need,” said Quinn. “If they are glass, or paste, or any part of them are, or any one of them, someone will probably blow away Simon Cormack’s life.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” said Collins. “No, they’re genuine all right. Do you think he’ll call?”

“Just pray he does,” said Quinn.

“And the exchange?”

“We’ll have to arrange it today.”

“How are you going to handle it, Quinn?”

“My way.”

He went off to his room to take a bath and dress. For quite a lot of people the last day of October was going to be a very rough day indeed.

The young man from Houston landed at 6:45
A.M
. London time and, with only a small suitcase of toiletries, moved quickly through customs and into the concourse of Number Three Building. He checked his watch and knew he had three hours to wait. Time to use the washroom, freshen up, have breakfast, and take a cab to the center of London’s West End.

At 9:55 he presented himself at the door of the tall and impressive apartment house a block back from Great Cumberland Place in the Marble Arch district. He was five minutes early. He had been told to be exact. From across the street a man in a parked car watched him, but he did not know that. He strolled up and down for five minutes, then, on the dot of ten, dropped the fat envelope through the letter slot of the apartment house. There was no hall porter to pick it up. It lay there on the mat inside the door. Satisfied that he had done as he had been instructed, the young American walked back down to Bayswater Road and soon hailed a cab for Heathrow.

Hardly was he around the corner than the man in the parked car climbed out, crossed the road, and let himself into the apartment house. He lived there—had done for several weeks. His sojourn in the car was simply to assure himself that the messenger responded to the given description and had not been followed.

The man picked up the fallen envelope, took the lift to the eighth floor, let himself into his apartment, and slit open the envelope. He was satisfied as he read, and his breath came in snuffles, whistling through the distorted nasal passages as he breathed. Irving Moss now had what he believed would be his final instructions.

* * *

In the Kensington apartment the morning ticked away in silence. The tension was almost tangible. In the telephone exchange, in Cork Street, in Grosvenor Square, the listeners sat hunched over their machines waiting for Quinn to say something or McCrea or Sam Somerville to open their mouths. There was silence on the speakers. Quinn had made it plain that if Zack did not call, it was over. The careful search for an abandoned house and a body would have to begin.

And Zack did not call.

At half past ten Irving Moss left his Marble Arch flat, took his rental car from its parking bay, and drove to Paddington Station. His beard, grown in Houston during the planning stages, had changed the shape of his face. His Canadian passport was beautifully forged and had brought him effortlessly into the Republic of Ireland and thence on the ferry to England. His driving license, also Canadian, had caused no problems in the renting of a compact car on long-term lease. He had lived quietly and unobtrusively for weeks behind Marble Arch, one of more than a million foreigners in the British capital.

He was a skilled enough agent to be able to drop into almost any city and disappear from view. London, in any case, he knew. He knew how things worked in London, where to go to obtain what he wanted or needed, had contacts with the underworld, was smart enough and experienced enough not to make mistakes of the kind that draw a visitor to the attention of the authorities.

His letter from Houston had been an update, filling in a range of details that it had not been possible to fit into coded messages to and from Houston in the form of price lists of market produce. There were also further instructions in the letter, but most interesting of all was the situation report from within the West Wing of the White House, notably the state of deterioration that President John Cormack had suffered these past three weeks.

Finally there was the ticket for the left-luggage office at Paddington Station, something that could only cross the Atlantic by hand. How it had got from London to Houston he did not know or want to know. He did not need to know. He knew how it had come back to London, to him, and now it was in his hand. At 11:00
A.M
. he used it.

The British Rail staffer thought nothing of it. In the course of a day hundreds of packages, grips, and suitcases were consigned to his office for safekeeping, and hundreds more withdrawn. Only after being unclaimed for three months would a package be taken off the shelves and opened, for disposal if it could not be identified. The ticket presented that morning by the silent man in the medium-gray gabardine raincoat was just another ticket. He ranged along his shelves, found the numbered item, a small fiber suitcase, and handed it over. It was prepaid anyway. He would not remember the transaction by nightfall.

Moss took the case back to his apartment, forced the cheap locks, and examined the contents. They were all there, as he had been told they would be. He checked his watch. He had three hours before he need set off.

There was a house set in a quiet road on the outskirts of a commuter town not forty miles from the center of London. At a certain time he would drive past that house, as he did every second day, and the position of his driver’s window—fully up, half lowered, or fully down—would convey to the watcher the thing he needed to know. This day, for the first time, the window would be in the fully down position. He slotted one of his locally acquired S&M videotapes—ultra hard core, but he knew where to go for his supplies—into his television and settled back to enjoy himself.

When Andy Laing left the bank he was almost in a state of shock. Few men go through the experience of seeing an entire career, worked on and nurtured through years of effort, scattered in small and irrecoverable pieces at their feet. The first reaction is incomprehension; the second, indecision.

Laing wandered aimlessly through the narrow streets and hidden courtyards that hide between the roaring traffic of the City of London, the capital’s most ancient square mile and center of the country’s commercial and banking world. He passed the walls of monasteries that once echoed to the chants of the Grey friars, the Whitefriars, and the Blackfriars, past guildhalls where merchants had convened to discuss the business of the world when Henry VIII was executing his wives down the road at the Tower, past delicate little churches designed by Wren in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666.