Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

Simon Cormack was detached from his ankle chain and both men were led upstairs, through the house, and into the garage. The Volvo awaited. Its trunk was stuffed with the carryalls of the kidnappers and had no room left. Quinn was forced into the backseat and down to the floor, then covered with a blanket. He was uncomfortable but optimistic.

If the kidnappers had intended to kill them both, the cellar would have been the place. He had proposed they be left in the cellar, to be liberated later by the police following a phone call from abroad. That was evidently not to be. He guessed, rightly, that the kidnappers did not want their hideout discovered, at least not yet. So he lay hunched on the floor of the car and breathed as best he could through the thick hood.

He felt the depression of the seat cushions above him as Simon Cormack was made to lie along the backseat. He, too, was covered by a blanket. The two smallest men climbed in the back, sitting on the edge of the seat with the slim body of Simon behind their backs, their feet on Quinn. The giant climbed into the passenger seat; Zack took the wheel.

At his command all four took off their masks and track-suit tops and threw them through the windows onto the garage floor. Zack started the engine and operated the door-opener. He backed out into the driveway, closed the garage door, reversed into the street, and drove off. No one saw the car. It was still dark, with another two and a half hours to dawn.

The car ran steadily for about two hours. Quinn had no idea where he was or where he was going. Eventually (it would later be established it must have been within a few minutes of six-thirty), the car slowed to a halt. No one had spoken during the drive. They all sat bolt upright in their seats, in business suits and ties, and remained silent. When they stopped, Quinn heard the rear near-side door open and the two sets of feet on his body were removed. Someone dragged him out of the car by the feet. He felt wet grass under his cuffed hands, knew he was on the grassy edge of a road somewhere. He scrambled to his knees, then his feet, and stood up. He heard two men reentering the rear of the car and the slamming of the door.

“Zack,”he called. “What about the boy?”

Zack was standing on the road by the driver’s open door, looking at him across the roof of the car.

“Ten miles up the road,” he said, “by the roadside, same as you.”

There was the purr of a powerful engine and the crunch of gravel under wheels. Then the car was gone. Quinn felt the chill of a November morning on his shirt-sleeved torso. The moment the car was gone, he got to work.

Hard labor in the vineyards had kept him in shape. His hips were narrow, like those of a man fifteen years his junior, and his arms were long. When the handcuffs went on he had braced the sinews of his wrists to secure the maximum space when he relaxed. Tugging the cuffs down over his hands as far as they would go, he worked his cuffed wrists down his back and around his behind. Then he sat in the grass, brought his wrists up under his knees, kicked off his shoes, and worked his legs through his locked arms, one after the other. With his wrists now in front of him he tore off the hood.

The road was long, narrow, straight, and utterly deserted in the predawn half-light. He sucked in lungsful of the cool fresh air and looked around for human habitation. There was none. He pulled on his shoes, rose, and began to jog along the road in the direction the car had taken.

After two miles he came to a garage on the left, a small affair with old-style hand-operated pumps and a little office. Three kicks brought the door down and he found the telephone on a shelf behind the pump attendant’s chair. He lifted the receiver two-handed, leaned his ear against it to make sure he had a dial tone, laid it down, dialed 01 for London, and then the flash line in the Kensington apartment.

In London the chaos took three seconds to get into full gear. A British engineer in the Kensington exchange came jolting out of his chair and began to search for a lock on the transmitting number. He got it in nine seconds.

In the basement of the U.S. embassy the duty ELINT man gave a yell as his warning light blazed red in his face and the sound of a phone ringing came into his headset. Kevin Brown, Patrick Seymour, and Lou Collins ran into the listening post from the cots where they had been dozing.

“Throw sound onto the wall speaker,” snapped Seymour.

In the apartment Sam Somerville had been dozing on the couch, once so favored by Quinn because it was right next to the flash phone. McCrea was asleep in one of the armchairs. It was their second night like this.

When the phone rang, Sam jolted awake but for two seconds did not register which phone was ringing. The pulsing red bulb on the flash line told her. She picked it up at the third ring.

“Yes?”

“Sam?”

There was no mistaking the deep voice at the other end.

“Oh, Quinn!” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Screw Quinn. What about the boy?” fumed Brown, unheard beneath the embassy.

“Fine. I’ve been released. Simon’s due for release about now, maybe already. But farther up the road.”

“Quinn, where are you?”

“I don’t know. In a beat-up garage on a long stretch of road-the number on this phone is unreadable.”

“Bletchley number,” said the engineer in the Kensington exchange. “Here we are… got it. Seven-four-five-oh-one.”

His colleague was already talking to Nigel Cramer, who had spent the night at Scotland Yard.

“Where the hell is it?” he hissed.

“Hang about… here, Tubbs Cross Garage, on the A.421 between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham.”

At the same time Quinn saw an invoice pad belonging to the garage. It bore the address of the garage also, and he relayed it to Sam. Seconds later the line was dead. Sam and Duncan McCrea raced down to the street, where Lou Collins had left a CIA car should the listeners in the apartment need transport. Then they were off, McCrea driving and Sam map-reading.

From Scotland Yard, Nigel Cramer and six officers set off in two patrol cars, their sirens howling up Whitehall and down the Mall to pick up Park Lane and the road north out of London. Two big limousines sped out of Grosvenor Square at the same time, bearing Kevin Brown, Lou Collins, Patrick Seymour, and six of Brown’s Washington-based FBI men.

The A.421 between Fenny Stratford and the county town of Buckingham twelve miles farther west is a long, almost straight road devoid of towns or villages, running through largely flat agricultural country studded by the occasional clump of trees. Quinn jogged steadily west, the direction taken by the car. The first light of day began to filter through gray clouds above, giving visibility that rose steadily to three hundred yards. That was when he saw the thin figure jogging toward him in the gloom, and heard the roar of engines coming up fast behind him. He turned his head: a British police car, one of two, two black American limousines just ahead of them, and an unmarked Company car behind them. The leading car saw him and started to slow; due to the narrowness of the road the ones behind slowed as well.

No one in the cars had seen the tottering figure farther down the road. Simon Cormack had also worked his wrists around to the front of his body, and had covered five miles to Quinn’s four and a half. But he had made no phone call. Weakened by his captivity, dazed by his release, he was running slowly, rolling from side to side. The lead car from the embassy was beside Quinn.

“Where’s the boy?” roared Brown from the front seat.

Nigel Cramer leaped from the red-and-white squad car and shouted the same question. Quinn stopped, sucked air into his lungs, and nodded forward along the road.