Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

President Cormack did not need to be awakened. He had slept little these past three and a half weeks, often waking of his own accord in the predawn darkness, and walking through to his personal study to attempt to concentrate on papers of state. Hearing the Vice President was downstairs and wished to see him, President Cormack went into the Yellow Oval Room and said he would greet Odell there.

The Yellow Oval Room, on the second floor, is a spacious reception room between the study and the Treaty Room. Beyond its windows, looking over the South Lawn, is the Truman Balcony. Both are at the geometric center of the White House, beneath the cupola and right above the South Portico.

Odel entered. President Cormack was in the center of the room, facing him. Odell was silent. He could not bring himself to say it. The air of expectancy on the President’s face drained away.

“Well, Michael?” he said dully.

“He… Simon… has been found. I’m afraid he is dead.”

President Cormack did not move, not a muscle. His voice when it came was flat; clear but emotionless.

“Leave me, please.”

Odell turned and left, moving into the Center Hall. He closed the door and turned toward the stairs. From behind him he heard a single cry, like that of a wounded animal in mortal pain. He shuddered and walked on.

Secret Service agent Lepinsky was at the end of the hall, by a desk against the wall, a raised phone in his hand.

“It’s the British Prime Minister, Mr. Vice President,” he said.

“I’ll take it. Hello, this is Michael Odell. Yes, Prime Minister, I’ve just told him. No, ma’am, he’s not taking any calls right now. Any calls.”

There was a pause on the line.

“I understand,” she said quietly. Then: “Do you have a pencil and paper?”

Odell gestured to Lepinsky, who produced his duty notebook. Odell scribbled what he was asked.

President Cormack got the slip of paper at the hour most Washingtonians, unaware of what had happened, were drinking their first cup of coffee. He was still in a silk robe, in his office, staring dully at the gray morning beyond the windows. His wife slept on; she would wake and hear it later. He nodded as the servant left and flicked open the folded sheet from Lepinsky’s notebook.

It said just: Second Samuel XVIII 33 .

After several minutes he rose and walked to the shelf where he kept some personal books, among them the family Bible, bearing the signatures of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather. He found the verse toward the end of the Second Book of Samuel.

“And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Dr. Barnard declined to use the services of the hundred young police constables offered by the Thames Valley Police in the search for clues on the road and the verges. He took the view that mass searches were fine for discovering the hidden body of a murdered child, or even a murder weapon like a knife, gun, or bludgeon.

But for this work, skill, patience, and extreme delicacy were needed. He used only his trained specialists from Fulham.

They taped off an area one hundred yards in diameter ’round the scene of the explosion; it turned out to be overkill. All the evidence was eventually found inside a circle of thirty yards’ diameter. Literally on hands and knees, his men crawled over every inch of the designated area with plastic bags and tweezers.

Every tiny fragment of fiber, denim, and leather was picked up and dropped in the bags. Some had hair, tissue, or other matter attached to them. Smeared grass stems were included. Ultrafine-tuned metal detectors covered every square centimeter of the road, the ditches, and the surrounding fields, yielding inevitably a collection of nails, tin cans, rusty screws, nuts, bolts, and a corroded plowshare.

The sorting and separation would come later. Eight big plastic garbage cans were filled with clear plastic bags and flown to London. The oval area from where Simon Cormack had been standing when he died to the point where he stopped rolling, at the heart of the larger circle, was treated with special care. It was four hours before the body could be removed.

First it was photographed from every conceivable angle, in long-shot, mid-shot, and extreme close-up. Only when every part of the grass verge around the body had been scoured, and only the piece of turf actually under the body remained to be examined, would Dr. Barnard allow human feet to walk on the ground to approach the body.

Then a body bag was laid beside the corpse, and what remained of Simon Cormack was gently lifted from where it lay and placed on the spread-out plastic. The bag was folded over him and zipped up, then placed on a stretcher, into a pannier beneath a helicopter, and flown to the post-mortem laboratory.

The death had taken place in the countryside of Buckinghamshire, one of the three counties comprising the Thames Valley Police area. So it was that in death Simon Cormack returned to Oxford, to the Radcliffe Infirmary, whose facilities are a match even for Guy’s Hospital, London.

From Guy’s came a friend and colleague of Dr. Barnard, a man who had worked with the Chief Explosives Officer of the Metropolitan on many cases and had formed a close professional relationship with him. Indeed, they were often regarded as a team, though they followed different disciplines. Dr. Ian Macdonald was a senior consultant pathologist at the great London hospital and also a retained Home Office pathologist, and was usually asked for by Scotland Yard if he was available. It was he who received the body of Simon Cormack at the Radcliffe.

Throughout the day, as the men crawled over the grass by the side of the A.421, continuous consultation took place between London and Washington regarding the release of the news to the media and the world. It was agreed that the statement should come from the White House, with immediate confirmation in London. The statement would simply say that an exchange had been arranged in conditions of total secrecy, as demanded by the kidnappers, an unspecified ransom had been paid, and that they had broken their word. The British authorities, responding to an anonymous phone call, had gone to a roadside in Buckinghamshire and there found Simon Cormack dead.

Needless to say, the condolences of the British monarch, government, and people to the President and to the American people were without limit of sincerity or depth, and a search of unparalleled vigor was now in progress to identify, find, and arrest the culprits.

Sir Harry Marriott was adamant that the phrase referring to the arrangement of the exchange should include an extra seven words: “between the American authorities and the kidnappers.” The White House, albeit reluctantly, agreed to this.

“The media are going to have our hides,” growled Odell.

“Well, you wanted Quinn,” said Philip Kelly.

“Actually, you wanted Quinn,” snapped Odell at Lee Alexander and David Weintraub, who sat with them in the Situation Room. “By the way, where is he now?”

“Being detained,” said Weintraub. “The British refused to allow him to be lodged on sovereign U.S. territory inside the embassy. Their MI-5 people have lent us a country house in Surrey. He’s there.”

“Well, he has a hell of a lot of explaining to do,” said Hubert Reed. “The diamonds are gone, the kidnappers are gone, and that poor boy is dead. How exactly did he die?”

“The Brits are trying to find that out,” said Brad Johnson. “Kevin Brown says it was almost as if he was hit by a bazooka, right in front of them, but they saw nothing like a bazooka. Or he stepped on a land mine of some sort.”