Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“Been a long time since Son Tay, Quinn,” said Weintraub in a low voice. The knife point moved away from his jugular.

“What’s that, sir?” asked Sneed cheerfully from the other end of the room. A shadow moved over the tiles, a match flared, and the oil lamp on the table gave a warm glow to the room. Sneed jumped a foot. Major Kerkorian in Belgrade would have loved him.

“Tiring journey,” said Weintraub. “Mind if I sit?”

Quinn was in a cotton wraparound from the waist down, like a sarong from the Orient. Bare to the waist, lean, work-hardened. Sneed’s mouth fell open at the scars.

“I’m out of it, David,” said Quinn. He seated himself at the refectory table, at the opposite end from the DDO. “I’m retired.”

He pushed a tumbler and the earthenware pitcher of red wine toward Weintraub, who poured a glass, drank, and nodded with appreciation. A rough red wine. It would never see the tables of the rich. A peasant’s and a soldier’s wine.

“Please, Quinn.”

Sneed was amazed. DDOs did not say “please.” They gave orders.

“I’m not coming,” said Quinn. Sneed came into the light glow, his jacket hanging free. He allowed it to swing to show the butt of the piece he carried in a hip holster. Quinn did not even look at him. He stared at Weintraub.

“Who is this asshole?” he inquired mildly.

“Sneed,” said Weintraub firmly, “go check the tires.”

Sneed went outside. Weintraub sighed.

“Quinn, the business at Taormina. The little girl. We know. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Can’t you understand? I’m out. It’s over. No more. You’ve wasted your journey. Get someone else.”

“There is no one else. The Brits have people, good people. Washington says we need an American. In-house, we don’t have anyone to match you when it comes to Europe.”

“ Washington wants to protect its ass,” snapped Quinn. “They always do. They need a fall guy in case it goes wrong.”

“Yeah, maybe,” admitted Weintraub. “But one last time, Quinn. Not for Washington, not for the Establishment, not even for the boy. For the parents. They need the best. I told the committee you’re it.”

Quinn stared around the room, studying his few but treasured possessions as if he might not see them again.

“I have a price,” he said at last.

“Name it,” said the DDO simply.

“Bring my grapes in. Bring in the harvest.”

They walked outside ten minutes later, Quinn hefting a gunnysack, dressed in dark trousers, sneakers on bare feet, a shirt. Sneed held open the car door. Quinn took the front passenger seat; Weintraub, the wheel.

“You stay here,” he said to Sneed. “Bring in his grapes.”

“Do what ?” Sneed gasped.

“You heard. Go down to the village in the morning, rent some labor, and bring in the man’s grape harvest. I’ll tell Madrid Head of Station it’s okay.”

He used a hand communicator to summon the Sea Sprite, which was hovering over Casares beach when they arrived. They climbed aboard and wheeled away through the velvety darkness toward Rota and Washington.

David Weintraub was away from Washington for just twenty hours. On the eight-hour flight from Rota to Andrews, he gained six hours in time zones, landing at the Maryland headquarters of the 89th Military Airlift Wing at 4:00 A.M. In the intervening period two governments, in Washington and London, had been virtually under siege.

There are few more awesome sights than the combined forces of the world’s media when they have completely lost any last vestige of restraint. The appetite is insatiable; the methodology, brutal.

Airplanes bound out of the United States for London, or any British airport, were choked from the flight-deck doors to the toilets, as every American news outlet worth the name sent a team to the British capital. On arrival they went berserk; there were minute-by-minute deadlines to meet and nothing to say. London had agreed with the White House to stick with the original terse statement. Of course it was nowhere near enough.

Reporters and TV teams staked out the detached house off the Woodstock Road as if its doors might open to reveal the missing youth. The doors remained firmly closed as the Secret Service team, on orders from Creighton Burbank, packed every last item and prepared to leave.

The Oxford city coroner, using his powers under Section Twenty of the Coroners Amendment Act, released the bodies of the two dead Secret Service agents as soon as the Home Office pathologist had finished with them. Technically they were released to Ambassador Aloysius Fairweather on behalf of next of kin; in fact they were escorted by a senior member of the embassy staff to the USAF base at nearby Upper Heyford, where an honor guard saw the caskets aboard a transport for Andrews Air Force Base, accompanied by the other ten agents, who had nearly been mobbed for statements when they left the house in Summertown.

They returned to the States, to be met by Creighton Burbank and to begin the long inquiry into what had gone wrong. There was nothing left for them to do in England.

Even when the Oxford house had been closed down, a small and forlorn group of reporters waited outside it lest something, anything, happen there. Others pursued, throughout the university city, anyone who had ever known Simon Cormack-tutors, fellow students, college staff, barmen, athletes. Two other American students at Oxford, albeit at different colleges, had to go into hiding. The mother of one, traced in America, was kind enough to say she was bringing her boy home at once to the safety of downtown Miami. It made a paragraph and got her a spot on a local quiz show.

The body of Sergeant Dunn was released to his family, and the Thames Valley Police prepared for a funeral with full honors.

All the forensic evidence was brought east to London. The military hardware went to the Royal Armoured Research and Development Establishment at Fort Halstead, outside Sevenoaks in Kent, where the ammunition from the Skorpion was quickly identified, underlining the chance of European terrorists’ being involved. This was not made public.

The other evidence went to the Metropolitan Police laboratory in Fulham, London. That meant blades of crumpled grass with blood smears on them, pieces of mud, casts of tire tracks, the jack, footprints, the slugs taken from the three dead bodies, and the fragments of glass from the shattered windshield of the shadowing car. Before nightfall of the first day, Shotover Plain looked as if it had been vacuum-cleaned.

The car itself went on a flatbed truck to the Vehicles Section of the Serious Crimes Squad, but of much more interest was the Ford Transit van recovered from the torched barn. Experts crawled all over the charred timbers of the barn until they emerged as black as the soot. The farmer’s rusted and severed chain was removed from the gate as if it were made of eggshell, but the only outcome was a report that it had been sheared by a standard bolt-cutter. A bigger clue was the track of the sedan that had driven out of the field after the switch-over.

The gutted Transit van came to London in a crate and was slowly taken to pieces. Its license plates were false but the criminals had taken pains; the plates would have belonged to a van of that year of manufacture.

The van had been worked on-serviced and tuned by a skilled mechanic; that at least they could tell. Someone had tried to abrade the chassis and engine numbers, using a tungsten-carbide angle-grinder, obtainable from tool stores anywhere and slotted into a power drill. Not good enough. These numbers are die-stamped into the metal, so spectroscopic examination brought out the numbers from the deeper imprint inside the metal.