The Negotiator (33 page)

They went through Mill Hill Circus just a hundred yards behind the bleeper and up the slope to Five Ways Corner. Then they realized Quinn must have changed vehicles again. They passed two motorcyclists who emitted no bleep, and two powerful motorbikes overtook them, but the D/F finder they sought was still proceeding steadily ahead of them. When the bleep turned around Five Ways Corner onto the A.1 to Hertfordshire, they saw that their target was now an open-topped Volkswagen Golf GTi whose driver wore a thick fur hat to cover his head and ears.

The first thing Cyprian Fothergill recalled about the events of that day was that as he headed toward his charming little cottage in the countryside behind Borehamwood he was suddenly overtaken by a huge black car that swerved violently in front of him, forcing him to scream to a stop in a lay-by. Within seconds three big men, he would later tell his open-mouthed friends at the club, had leaped out, surrounded his car, and were pointing enormous guns at him. Then a police car pulled in behind, then another one, and four lovely bobbies got out and told the Americans—well, they must have been Americans, and
huge
, they were—to put their guns away or be disarmed.

The next thing he knew—by this time he would have the undivided attention of the
entire
bar—one of the Americans tore his fur hat off and screamed “Okay, craphead, where is he?” while one of the bobbies reached into the open backseat and pulled out an attaché case that he had to spend an hour telling them he had never seen before.

The big gray-haired American, who seemed to be in charge of his party from the black car, grabbed the case from the bobby’s hands, flicked the locks, and looked inside. It was empty. After all that, it was empty. Such a terrifying fuss over an empty case ... Anyway, the Americans were swearing like troopers, using language that he, Cyprian, had never heard before and hoped never to hear again. Then in stepped the British sergeant, who was quite out of this world. ...

At 2:25
P.M.
Sergeant Kidd returned to his patrol car to answer the insistent calls coming through for him on the radio.

“Tango Alpha,” he began.

“Tango Alpha, this is Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cramer. Who’s that?”

“Sergeant Kidd, sir. F Division.”

“What have you got, Sergeant?”

Kidd glanced across at the cornered Volkswagen, its terrified inhabitant, the three FBI men examining the empty attaché case, two more Yankees standing back and staring hopefully at the sky, and three of his colleagues trying to take statements.

“Bit of a mess, sir.”

“Sergeant Kidd, listen carefully. Have you captured a very tall American who has just stolen two million dollars?”

“No, sir,” said Kidd. “We’ve captured a very gay hairdresser who’s just wet his pants.”

“What do you mean ... disappeared?” The cry, shout, or yell, in a variety of tones and accents, was within an hour echoing around a Kensington apartment, Scotland Yard, Whitehall, the Home Office, Downing Street, Grosvenor Square, and the West Wing of the White House. “He can’t just disappear.”

But he had.

Chapter 10

Quinn had dropped the attaché case into the open back of the Golf only thirty seconds after swerving around the corner of the street containing the apartment house. When he had opened the case as Lou Collins presented it to him before dawn, he had not seen any direction-finding device, but did not expect to. Whoever had worked on the case in the laboratory would have been smarter than to leave any traces of the implant visible. Quinn had gambled on there being something inside the case to lead police and troops to whatever rendezvous he established with Zack.

Waiting at a traffic light, he had flicked open the locks, stuffed the package of diamonds inside his zipped leather jacket, and looked around. The Golf was standing next to him. The driver, muffled in his fur hat, had not noticed a thing.

Half a mile later Quinn abandoned the motorcycle; without the legally obligatory crash helmet, he was likely to attract the attention of a policeman. Outside the Brompton Oratory he hailed a cab, directed it to Marylebone, and paid it off in George Street, completing his journey on foot.

His pockets contained all he had been able to abstract from the apartment without attracting attention: his U. S. passport and driver’s license—though these would soon be useless when the alert went out—a wad of British money from Sam’s purse, his multibladed penknife, and a pair of pliers from the fuse cupboard. A chemist’s shop in Marylebone High Street had yielded a pair of plain-glass spectacles with heavy horn rims; and a men’s outfitters, a tweed hat and Burberry.

He made a number of further purchases at a confectioner’s, a hardware shop, and a luggage store. He checked his watch: fifty-five minutes from the time he had replaced the phone in Mr. Patel’s fruit store. He turned into Blandford Street and found the call box he sought on the corner of Chiltern Street, one of a bank of two. He took the second, whose number he had memorized three weeks earlier and dictated to Zack an hour before. It rang right on time.

Zack was wary, uncomprehending, and angry. “All right, you bastard, what the hell are you up to?”

In a few short sentences Quinn explained what he had done. Zack listened in silence.

“Are you leveling?” he asked. “ ’Cos if you ain’t, that kid is still going to end up in a body bag.”

“Look, Zack, I frankly don’t give a shit whether they capture you or not. I have one concern and one only: to get that kid back to his family alive and well. And I have inside my jacket two million dollars’ worth of raw diamonds I figure interest you. Now, I’ve thrown the bloodhounds off because they wouldn’t stop interfering, trying to be smart. So, do you want to set up an exchange or not?”

“Time’s up,” said Zack. “I’m moving.”

“This happens to be a public phone in Marylebone,” said Quinn, “but you’re right not to trust it. Call me, same number, this evening with the details. I’ll come, alone, unarmed, with the stones, wherever. Because I’m on the lam, make it after dark. Say, eight o’clock.”

“All right,” growled Zack. “Be there.”

It was the moment Sergeant Kidd took his car’s radio mike to talk to Nigel Cramer. Minutes later every police station in the metropolitan area was receiving a description of a man and instructions for every beat officer to keep an eye open, to spot but not approach, to radio back to the police station, and tail the suspect but not intervene. There was no name appended to the all-points, nor a reason why the man was wanted.

Leaving the phone booth, Quinn walked back into Blandford Street and down to Blackwood’s Hotel. It was one of those old established inns tucked away into the side streets of London that have somehow avoided being bought and sanitized by the big chains, an ivy-covered twenty-room place with paneling and bay windows and a fire blazing in the brick hearth of a reception area furnished in rugs over uneven boards. Quinn approached the pleasant-looking girl behind the desk.

“Hi, there,” he said, with his widest grin.

She looked up and smiled back. Tall, stooping, tweed hat, Burberry, and calfskin grip—an all-American tourist.

“Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”

“Well, now, I hope so, miss. Yes, I surely do. You see, I just flew in from the States and I took your British Airways—my all-time favorite airline—and you know what they did? They lost my luggage. Yes, ma’am, sent it all the way to Frankfurt by mistake.”

Her face puckered with concern.

“Now, see here, they’re going to get it back for me, twenty-four hours tops. Only my problem is, all my package-tour details were in my small suitcase, and would you believe it, I cannot for the life of me recall where I am checked in. Spent an hour with that lady from the airline going over names of hotels in London—you know how many there are?—but no way can I recall it, not till my suitcase reaches me. So the bottom line is, I took a cab into town and the driver said this was a real nice place ... er ... would you by any chance have a room I could take for the night? By the way, I’m Harry Russell.”

She was quite entranced. The tall man looked so bereft at the loss of his luggage, his inability to recall where he was supposed to be staying. She watched a lot of movies and thought he looked a bit like that gentleman who was always asking people to make his day, but he talked like the man with the funny bird-feather in his hat from
Dallas
. It never occurred to her not to believe him, or even to ask for identification. Blackwood’s did not normally take guests with neither luggage nor reservation, but losing one’s luggage,
and
forgetting one’s hotel, and because of a British airline ... She scanned the vacancy sheet; most of their guests were regulars up from the provinces, and a few permanent residents.

“There’s just the one, Mr. Russell—a small one at the back, I’m afraid ...”

“That will suit me just fine, young lady. Oh, I can pay cash—changed me some dollars right in the airport.”

“Tomorrow morning, Mr. Russell.” She reached for an old brass key. “Up the stairs, on the second floor.”

Quinn went up the stairs with their uneven treads, found Number Eleven, and let himself in. Small, clean, and comfortable. More than adequate. He stripped to his shorts, set the alarm clock he had bought in the hardware store for 6:00
P.M.
, and slept.

“Well, what on earth did he do it for?” asked the Home Secretary, Sir Harry Marriott. He had just heard the full story from Nigel Cramer in his office atop the Home Office building. He had had ten minutes on the telephone with Downing Street, and the lady resident there was not very pleased.

“I suspect he did not feel he could trust someone,” said Cramer delicately.

“Not us, I hope,” said the Minister. “We’ve done everything we can.”

“No, not us,” said Cramer. “He was moving close to an exchange with this man Zack. In a kidnap case, that is always the most dangerous phase. It has to be handled with extreme delicacy. After those two leaks of privy information on radio programs, one French and one British, he seems to feel he’d prefer to handle it himself. We can’t allow that, of course. We have to find him, Home Secretary.”

Cramer still smarted from having the primacy in the handling of the negotiation process removed from his control at all, and being confined to the investigation.

“Can’t think how he escaped in the first place,” complained the Home Secretary.

“If I’d had two of my men inside that apartment, he wouldn’t have done,” Cramer reminded him.

“Yes, well, that’s water over the dam. Find the man, but quietly, discreetly.”

The Home Secretary’s private views were that if this Quinn fellow could recover Simon Cormack alone, well and good. Britain could ship them both home to America as quickly as possible. But if the Americans were going to make a mess of it, let it be their mess, not his.

At the same hour, Irving Moss received a telephone call from Houston. He jotted down the list of produce prices on offer from the vegetable gardens of Texas, put down the phone, and decoded the message. Then he whistled in amazement. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that only a slight change would need to be made to his own plans.

After the fiasco on the road outside Mill Hill, Kevin Brown had descended on the Kensington apartment in high temper. Patrick Seymour and Lou Collins came with him. Together the three senior men debriefed their two junior colleagues for several hours.

Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea explained at length what had happened that morning, how it had happened, and why they had not foreseen it. McCrea, as ever, was disarmingly apologetic.

“If he has reestablished phone contact with Zack, he’s totally out of control,” said Brown. “If they’re using a phone-booth-to-phone-booth system, there’s no way the British can get a tap on it. We don’t know what they’re up to.”

“Maybe they’re arranging to exchange Simon Cormack for the diamonds,” said Seymour.

Brown growled.

“When this thing’s over, I’m going to have that smartass.”

“If he returns with Simon Cormack,” Collins pointed out, “we’re all going to be happy to carry his bags to the airport.”

It was agreed that Somerville and McCrea would stay on at the apartment in case Quinn called in. The three phone lines would remain open to take his call, and tapped. The senior men returned to the embassy, Seymour to liaise with Scotland Yard on progress on what had now become two searches instead of one, the others to wait and listen.

Quinn woke at six, washed and shaved with the new toiletries he had bought in the High Street the previous day, had a light supper, and chanced the two-hundred-yard walk back to the phone booth in Chiltern Street at ten to eight. There was an old lady in it, but she left at five to eight. Quinn stood in the booth facing away from the street pretending to consult the telephone directories until the machine rang at two minutes after eight.

“Quinn?”

“Yeah.”

“You may be on the level about having quit them, or maybe not. If it’s a trick, you’ll pay for it.”

“No trick. Tell me where and when to show up.”

“Ten tomorrow morning. I’ll call you on this number at nine and tell you where. You’ll have just enough time to get there by ten. My men will have had the place staked out since dawn. If the fuzz shows up, or the SAS; if there’s any movement around the place at all, we’ll spot it and pull out. Simon Cormack will die a phone call later. You’ll never see us; we’ll see you, or anyone else that shows up. If you’re trying to trick me, tell your pals that. They might get one of us, or two, but it’ll be too late for the boy.”

“You got it, Zack. I come alone. No tricks.”

“No electronic devices, no direction finders, no microphones. We’ll check you out. If you’re wired up, the boy gets it.”

“Just what I said, no tricks. Just me and the diamonds.”

“Be there in that phone box at nine.”

There was a click and the line buzzed. Quinn left the booth and walked back to his hotel. He watched television for a while, then emptied his grip and worked for two hours on his purchases of that afternoon. It was two in the morning when he was satisfied.