The Negotiator (59 page)

“I’ll take it,” said Quinn.

“You’ll need oil for the lamps, butane bottles for cooking, an axe to split down the logs for the stove,” said the agent. “And food. And spare gasoline. No use running out of anything up here. And the right clothing. What you’re wearing’s a bit thin. Be sure and cover your face or you’ll get frostbite. No telephone. You
sure
you want it?”

“I’ll take it,” said Quinn again.

They drove back to St. Johnsbury. Quinn gave his name and nationality, and paid in advance.

The agent was either too courteous or too incurious to ask why a Quebecer should want to find sanctuary in Vermont when Quebec had so many tranquil places of her own.

Quinn located several public phone booths that he could use day or night, and spent the night in a local hotel. In the morning he stocked his Jeep with all he would need and set off back into the mountains.

Once, pausing on the road out of North Danville to check his bearings, he thought he heard the snarl of an engine down the mountain behind him, but deduced it must be a sound from the village or even his own echo.

He lit the stove and slowly the cabin thawed out. The stove was efficient, roaring behind its steel doors, and when he opened them it was like facing a blast furnace. The water tank defrosted and heated up, warming the radiators in the cabin’s four rooms and the secondary tank for washing and bathing. By midday he was down to his shirt sleeves and feeling the heat. After lunch he took his axe and cut a week’s supply of split timber from the cords of pine stacked in the back.

He had bought a transistor radio, but there was no television and no phone. When he was equipped with a week’s supplies, he sat down with his new portable typewriter and began to type. The next day he drove to Montpelier and flew to Boston and on to Washington.

His destination was Union Station, on Massachusetts Avenue at Second Street, one of the most elegant railway stations in America, still gleaming from its recent refurbishment. Some of the layout had been changed from what he remembered from years ago. But the tracks were still there, running out of the basement departure concourse below the main hall.

He found what he wanted opposite the Amtrak boarding gates H and J. Between the door of the Amtrak Police office and the ladies’ room was a row of eight public phone booths. All their numbers began with the 789 prefix; he noted all eight, mailed his letter, and left.

As his cab took him back across the Potomac to Washington National Airport it turned down 14th Street, and to his right he caught a glimpse of the White House. He wondered how fared the man who lived in the Mansion, the man who had said, “Get him back for us,” and whom he had failed.

In the month since the burial of their son a change had come over the Cormacks, and their relationship to each other, which only a psychiatrist would be able to rationalize or explain.

During the kidnapping the President, though he had deteriorated through stress, worry, anxiety, and insomnia, had still managed to retain control of himself. Toward the end of the abduction of his son, when reports from London seemed to indicate an exchange was near, he had even seemed to recover. It was his wife, less intellectual and without administrative responsibilities to distract her mind, who had abandoned herself to grief and sedation.

But since that awful day at Nantucket when they had consigned their only son to the cold ground, the roles of the parents had subtly reversed. Myra Cormack had wept against the chest of the Secret Service man by the graveside, and on the flight back to Washington. But as the days went by she seemed to recover. It might be she recognized that, having lost one dependent child, she had inherited another, the husband who had never been dependent on her before.

Her maternal and protective instincts seemed to have given her an inner strength denied to the man whose intelligence and willpower she had never before doubted. As Quinn’s cab passed the White House that winter afternoon, John Cormack was sitting at his desk in his private study between the Yellow Oval Room and the bedroom. Myra Cormack stood at his side. She cradled the head of her devastated husband against her body and rocked him slowly and gently.

She knew her man was mortally stricken, unable to carry on for much longer. She knew that what had destroyed him as much as, if not more than, the actual death of his son was the bewilderment of not knowing who had done it, or why. Had the boy died in a car crash, she believed, John Cormack could have accepted the logic even of the illogic of death. It was the manner of his death that had destroyed the father as surely as if that demonic bomb had exploded against his own body.

She believed there would never be an answer now, and that her husband could not go on like this. She had come to hate the White House, and the job she had once been so proud to see her husband hold. All she wanted now was for him to lay down the burden of that office and retire with her, back to New Haven, so that she could nurse him.

The letter Quinn had mailed to Sam Somerville at her Alexandria condominium address was duly intercepted before she saw it and brought in triumph to the White House committee, which convened to hear it and discuss its implications. Philip Kelly and Kevin Brown bore it to their superiors’ attention like a trophy.

“I have to admit, gentlemen,” said Kelly, “that it was with the gravest reservations that I asked for one of my own trusted agents to be put under this kind of surveillance. But I think you will agree, it paid dividends.”

He placed the letter on the table in front of him.

“This letter, gentlemen, was mailed yesterday, right here in Washington. That does not necessarily prove Quinn is here in the city, or even in the States; it would be possible for someone else to have mailed it on his behalf. But I take the view that Quinn is a loner, has no accomplices. How he disappeared from London and showed up here, we do not know. Yet my colleagues and I are of the opinion he mailed this letter himself.”

“Read it,” commanded Odell.

“It’s ... er ... fairly dramatic,” said Kelly. He adjusted his glasses and began to read.

“ ‘My darling Sam ...’ This form of address would seem to indicate that my colleague Kevin Brown was right—there was a relationship beyond the professional one required, between Miss Somerville and Quinn.”

“So your hound dog fell in love with the wolf,” said Odell. “Well done, very smart. What does he say?”

Kelly resumed.

“ ‘Here I am at last, back in the United States. I would very much love to see you again, but am afraid that for the moment it would not be safe.

“ ‘The point of my writing is to set the record straight over what really took place in Corsica. The fact is, when I called you out of Ajaccio airport, I lied to you. I decided that if I told you what really happened down there, you might not feel it would be safe for you to return. But the more I think about it, the more I feel you have the right to know. Make me only one promise: whatever you read in this letter you keep to yourself. No one else must know, at least not yet. Not until I have finished what I am doing.

“ ‘The truth is, Orsini and I fought it out. I had no choice; someone had called him and said I was on my way to Corsica to kill him, when I only wanted to talk to him. He did take a bullet from my gun—yours, actually—but it did not kill him. When he learned he had been tricked, he realized his code of the vow of silence no longer bound him. He told me everything he knew, and it turned out to be a lot.

“ ‘First, it was not the Russians who were behind this thing—at least, not the Soviet government. The conspiracy began right here in the United States. The real paymasters are still clothed in secrecy, but the man they employed to arrange the abduction and murder of Simon Cormack, the one Zack called the fat man, is known to me. Orsini had recognized him and gave me his name. When he is captured, as he will be, I have no doubt he will deliver the names of the men who paid him to do this thing.

“ ‘For the moment, Sam, I am holed up writing everything down, chapter and verse: names, dates, places, events. The whole story from start to finish. When I am done I will mail copies of the manuscript to a dozen different authorities: the Vice President, the FBI, the CIA, et cetera. Then, if anything happens to me after that, it will be too late to stop the wheels of justice from rolling into motion.

“ ‘I will not be in touch with you again until I have finished. Please understand—if I do not tell you where I am, it is only for your own protection.

“ ‘All my love, Quinn.’ ”

There was a minute of stunned silence. One of those present was sweating profusely.

“Jesus,” breathed Michael Odell. “Is this guy for real?”

“If what he says is true,” suggested Morton Stannard, the former lawyer, “he should certainly not be at large. He should say what he has to say to us, right here.”

“I agree,” said the Attorney General. “Apart from anything else, he has just constituted himself a material witness. We have a witness protection program. He should be taken into protective custody.”

The agreement was unanimous. By nightfall the Department of Justice had authorized a material-witness warrant for the arrest and detention of Quinn. The FBI operated all the resources of the National Crime Information System to alert every FBI bureau in the country to be on the lookout for him. To back this up, messages went out on the National Law Enforcement Teletype System to all other enforcement arms: city police departments, sheriffs’ offices, U.S. marshals, and highway patrols. Quinn’s picture accompanied them all. The “cover” used was that he was wanted in connection with a major jewel heist.

An all-points bulletin is one thing; America is a very big country with a lot of places to hide. Wanted felons have stayed at large for years despite a national alert for them. Moreover, the alert was out for Quinn, an American citizen, of known passport number and driving license. It was not an alert for a French-Canadian called Lefevre with perfect IDs, a different hairstyle, horn-rimmed glasses, and a light beard. Quinn had let his beard grow since shaving in the Soviet embassy in London, and though not long, it now covered his lower face.

Back in his mountain cabin, he gave the White House committee three days to simmer over his deliberate letter to Sam Somerville, then set about contacting her covertly. The clue was in something she had told him in Antwerp. “A Rockcastle preacher’s daughter,” she had called herself.

A bookshop in St. Johnsbury yielded an atlas that showed three Rockcastles in the United States. But one was in the Deep South, another the Far West. Sam’s accent was nearer to the East Coast. The third Rockcastle was in Goochland County, Virginia.

Telephone inquiries clinched it. They showed a Reverend Brian Somerville of Rockcastle, Virginia. There was just the one listing—the comparatively unusual spelling of the name kept it apart from the Summervilles and Sommervilles.

Quinn left his hideout again, flew from Montpelier to Boston and on to Richmond, landing at Byrd Field, now renamed with glorious optimism Richmond International Airport. The Richmond directory right in the airport had the usual yellow pages at the back, showing that the reverend was incumbent at the Smyrna Church of St. Mary’s at Three Square Road, but resident at 290 Rockcastle Road. Quinn rented a compact and drove the thirty-five miles west on Route 6 to Rockcastle. It was Reverend Somerville who came to the door himself when Quinn rang the bell.

In the front parlor the quiet, silver-haired preacher served tea and confirmed that his daughter was indeed Samantha and worked for the FBI. Then he listened to what Quinn had to say. As he did so, he became grave.

“Why do you think my daughter is in danger, Mr. Quinn?” he asked.

Quinn told him.

“But under surveillance? By the Bureau itself? Has she done anything wrong?”

“No, sir, she has not. But there are those who suspect her, unjustly. And she does not know it. What I want to do is warn her.”

The kindly old man surveyed the letter in his hands and sighed. Quinn had just lifted a corner of a curtain to reveal a world unknown to him. He wondered what his late wife would have done; she was always the dynamic one. He decided she would have taken the message to her child in trouble.

“Very well,” he said. “I will go and see her.”

He was as good as his word. He took his elderly car, drove sedately up to Washington, and visited his daughter at her apartment without announcement. As briefed, he kept the conversation to small talk and handed her the single sheet first. It said simply: “Keep talking naturally. Open the envelope and read it at your leisure. Then burn it and obey the instructions. Quinn.”

She nearly choked when she saw the words and realized Quinn meant her apartment was bugged. It was something she had done in the course of duty to others, but never expected for herself. She gazed into the worried eyes of her father, kept talking naturally, and took the proffered envelope. When he left to drive back to Rockcastle she escorted him to his car and gave him a long kiss.

The paper in the envelope was just as brief. At midnight she should stand next to the phone booths opposite Amtrak boarding platforms H and J in Union Station and wait. One phone would ring; it would be Quinn.

She took his call from a booth in St. Johnsbury exactly at midnight. He told her about Corsica, and London, and the phony letter he had sent her, convinced it would be redirected to the White House committee.

“But, Quinn,” she protested, “if Orsini really gave you nothing, it’s over, just as you said. Why pretend he talked when he didn’t?”

He told her about Petrosian, who even when he was down, with his opponents staring at the chessboard, could persuade them he had some master stroke in preparation and force them into error.

“I think they, whoever they are, will break cover because of that letter,” he said. “Despite what I said about not contacting you anymore, you’re still the only possible link if the police can’t find me. As the days pass they ought to get more and more frantic. I want you to keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll call you every second day, at midnight, on one of these numbers.”