Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“On a roadside in the middle of nowhere?” asked Stannard.

“As I told you, the post-mortem will indicate what happened.”

“When the British have finished interviewing him, we have to have him back over here,” said Kelly. “We need to talk to him.”

“The Deputy Assistant Director of your Division is doing that already,” said Weintraub.

“If he refuses to come, can we force him to return?” asked Bill Walters.

“Yes, Mr. Attorney General, we can,” said Kelly. “Kevin Brown believes he may have been involved in some way. We don’t know how… yet. But if we issued a material-witness warrant, I believe the British would put him on the plane.”

“We’ll give it another twenty-four hours, see what the British come up with,” said Odell finally.

The Washington statement was issued at 5:00 P.M.local time and rocked the United States as little had done since the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The media went into a furor, not helped by Press Secretary Craig Lipton’s refusal to answer the two hundred supplementary questions they had to ask. Who had arranged the ransom, how much was it, in what form, how had it been handed over, by whom, why had no attempt been made to arrest the kidnappers at the handover, was the package or packet of ransom money bugged, had the kidnappers been tracked too clumsily and killed the boy as they fled, what level of negligence had been shown by the authorities, did the White House blame Scotland Yard, if not why not, why did the U.S. not leave it to Scotland Yard in the first place, had any descriptions of the kidnappers been obtained, were the British police closing in on them…? The questions went on and on. Craig Lipton definitely decided to resign before he was lynched.

The time in London was five hours later than Washington’s but the reaction was similar: Late TV shows were interrupted by news flashes that left the nation stunned. The switchboards at Scotland Yard, the Home Office, Downing Street, and the American embassy were jammed. Teams of journalists just about to go home around 10:00 P.M. were told to work through the night as fresh editions were prepared for issue as late as 5:00 A.M. By dawn they were staking out the Radcliffe Infirmary, Grosvenor Square, Downing Street, and Scotland Yard. In chartered helicopters they hovered over the empty stretch of road between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham to photograph, at first light, the bare tarmac and the last few barriers and police cars parked there.

Few slept. Impelled by a personal plea for haste from Sir Harry Marriott himself, Dr. Barnard and his team worked through the night. The forensic scientist had finally quit the road as night fell, certain it had nothing more to yield. Ten hours of scouring had left the thirty-yard circle cleaner than any piece of ground in England. What that ground had yielded now reposed in a series of gray plastic drums along the wall of his laboratory. For him and his team it was the night of the microscopes.

Nigel Cramer spent the night in a plain, bare room in a Tudor grange, screened from the nearest road by a belt of trees, in the heart of Surrey. Despite its elegant exterior aspect, the old house was well equipped for interrogation. The British Security Service used its ancient cellars as a training school for such delicate matters.

Brown, Collins, and Seymour were present, at their own insistence. Cramer did not object-his brief from Sir Harry Marriott was to cooperate with the Americans wherever and whenever possible. Any information Quinn had would go to both governments anyway. A relay of tapes filled themselves in the machines on the table beside them.

Quinn had a long and livid bruise on the side of his jaw, a lump and a Band-Aid on the back of his head. He was still in his shirt, now filthy, and slacks. Shoes had been removed, along with belt and tie. He was unshaven and looked exhausted. But he answered the questions calmly and clearly.

Cramer started at the beginning: Why had he quit the flat in Kensington? Quinn explained. Brown glowered at him.

“Did you have any reason, Mr. Quinn, to believe that a person or persons unknown might have attempted to interfere in the ransom exchange, to the effect of endangering the safety of Simon Cormack?” Nigel Cramer was phrasing it by the book.

“Instinct,” said Quinn.

“Just instinct, Mr. Quinn?”

“May I ask you a question, Mr. Cramer?”

“I don’t promise to answer it.”

“The attaché case with the diamonds in it. It was bugged, wasn’t it?”

He got his answer from the four faces in the room.

“If I had shown up at any exchange with that case,” said Quinn, “they’d have spotted it and killed the boy.”

“They did that anyway, smartass,” Brown grunted.

“Yes, they did,” said Quinn grimly. “I admit I did not think they would do that.”

Cramer took him back to the moment he left the flat. He told them about Marylebone, the night at the hotel, the terms Zack had laid down for the rendezvous, and how he had just made the deadline. For Cramer the meat was in the head-to-head in the abandoned factory. Quinn gave him the car, a Volvo sedan, and its registration number; both men surmised, rightly, that the plates would have been changed for that meeting, then changed back again. Ditto the road-tax disc stuck in the windshield. These men had shown they were careful.

He could describe the men only as he had seen them, masked, in shapeless track suits. One he had not seen at all, the fourth, who had stayed at the hideout ready to kill Simon Cormack at a phone call or a no-show by his colleagues by a certain time. He described the physiques of the two men he had seen upright, Zack and the gunman. Medium height, medium build. Sorry.

He identified the Skorpion submachine gun, and of course the Babbidge warehouse. Cramer left the room to make a phone call. A second team of forensic men from Fulham visited the warehouse before dawn and spent the morning there. It yielded nothing but a small ball of marzipan and a set of perfect tire tracks in the dust. These would eventually identify the abandoned Volvo, but not for two weeks.

The house used by the kidnappers was of particular interest. A gravel drive-Quinn had heard the crunching of the gravel-about ten yards from front gate to garage doors; automatic door-opening system, attached garage; a house with a concrete cellar beneath it-the real estate agents could help there. But direction from London-nothing. Quinn had been in the trunk the first time, and masked on the floor of the backseat the second. Driving time, one and a half hours the first time, two hours the second. If they drove by an indirect route, that could be anywhere; right in the heart of London or up to fifty miles in any direction.

“There’s nothing we can charge him with, Home Secretary,” Cramer reported to the Minister early next morning. “We can’t even detain him any longer. And frankly, I don’t think we should. I don’t believe he was criminally involved in the death.”

“Well, he seems to have made a complete balls of it,” said Sir Harry. The pressure from Downing Street for some new lead was becoming intense.

“So it would seem,” said the police officer. “But if those criminals were determined to kill the boy, and it seems with hindsight that they were, they could have done it any time, before or after receiving the diamonds, in the cellar, on the road, or on some lonely Yorkshire moorland. And Quinn with him. The mystery is why they let Quinn live, and why they first released the boy and then killed him. It’s almost as if they were looking to make themselves the most hated and hunted men on earth.”

“Very well,” sighed the Home Secretary. “We have no further interest in Mr. Quinn. Are the Americans still holding him?”