The Negotiator (22 page)

As the newscast changed to the Middle East situation, one of the Europeans asked a question. The leader shook his head.

“
Demain
,” he replied, “tomorrow morning.”

More than two hundred calls came to the embassy basement that night. Each was handled carefully and courteously, but only seven were passed through to Quinn, He took each with a cheerful friendliness, addressing the caller as “friend” or “pal,” explaining that regretfully “his people” simply had to go through the tiresome formality of establishing that the caller really
had
Simon Cormack, and carefully asking them to get the answer to a simple question and call him back. No one called back. In a break between 3:00
A.M
. and sunrise he catnapped for four hours.

Through the night, Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea stayed with him. Sam commented on his laid-back performance on the phone.

“It hasn’t even begun yet,” he said quietly. But the strain had. The two younger people were feeling it already.

Just after midnight, having caught the noon plane from Washington, Kevin Brown and a picked team of eight FBI agents flew into Heathrow. Forewarned, an exasperated Patrick Seymour was there to greet them. He gave the senior officer an update on the situation to 11:00
P.M.
, when he had left for the airport. That included the installation of Quinn in his chosen aerie as opposed to Winfield House, and the telephone-intercept situation.

“Knew he was a smartass,” growled Brown when told of the tangle in the Winfield House driveway. “We’ve got to sit on this bastard or he’ll be into every kind of trick. Let’s get to the embassy. We’ll sleep on cots right there in the basement. If that yo-yo farts, I want to hear it, loud and clear.”

Inwardly, Seymour groaned. He had heard of Kevin Brown and could have done without the visit. Now, he thought, it was going to be worse than he had feared. When they reached the embassy at 1:30
A.M
., the 106th phony call was coming in.

Other people were getting little sleep that night. Two of them were Commander Williams of S.O. 13 and a man called Sidney Sykes. They spent the hours of darkness confronting each other in the interview room of Wandsworth police station in south London. A second officer present was the head of the Vehicles Section of the Serious Crimes Squad, whose men had traced Sykes.

As far as a small-time crook like Sykes was concerned, the two men across the plain table were very heavy pressure indeed and by the end of the first hour he was a badly frightened man. After that things got worse.

The Vehicles Section, following a description given by the jobbing builder in Leicester, had traced the recovery firm that had removed the wrecked Transit from its lethal embrace with the steam shovel. Once it was established that the vehicle had a twisted chassis and was a write-off, the recovery company offered it back to its owner. As the charge for bringing it on a flat-bed to Leicester was greater than its value, he had declined. The recovery team had sold it to Sykes as scrap, for he ran a car-wrecking yard in Wandsworth. The Vehicles Section rummage crews had spent the day turning over that yard.

They found a barrel three-quarters full of dirty black sump oil, whose murky depths had yielded twenty-four car license plates, twelve perfectly matched pairs, all made up in the Sykes yard and all as genuine as a three-pound note. A recess beneath the floorboards of Sykes’s shabby office had given up a wad of thirty vehicle registration documents, all pertaining to cars and vans that had ceased to exist except on paper.

Sykes’s racket was to acquire crash vehicles written off by their insurers, tell the owner that he, Sykes, would inform Swansea the vehicle had ceased to exist except as a mass of scrap, and then inform Swansea of exactly the opposite—that he had bought the vehicle from its previous owner. The Swansea computer would then log that “fact.” If the car really was a write-off, Sykes was simply buying the legitimate paperwork, which could then be applied to a working vehicle of similar make and type, the working vehicle having been stolen from some parking lot by one of Sykes’s light-fingered associates. With new plates to match the registration document of the write-off, the stolen car could then be resold. The final touch was to abrade the original chassis and engine block numbers, etch in new ones, and smear on enough grease and dirt to fool the ordinary customer. Of course this would not fool the police, but as all such deals were in cash, Sykes could later deny he had ever seen the offending car, let alone sold it.

A variation on the racket was to take a van like the Transit, in good shape apart from its twisted chassis, cut out the distorted section, bridge the gap with a length of girder, and put it back on the road. Illegal and dangerous, but such cars and vans could probably run for several thousand more miles before falling apart.

Confronted by the statements of the Leicester builder, the recovery firm that had sold him the Transit as scrap for £20, and the imprints of the old, real chassis and engine numbers; and informed what deed the truck had been used for, Sykes realized he was in very deep trouble indeed, and came clean.

The man who had bought the Transit, he recalled after racking his memory, had been wandering around the yard one day six weeks back, and on being questioned had said he was looking for a low-priced van. By chance, Sykes had just finished recycling the chassis of the blue Transit and spraying it green. It had left his yard within the hour for £300 cash. He had never seen the man again. The fifteen £20 notes were long gone.

“Description?” asked Commander Williams.

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” pleaded Sykes.

“Do that,” said Williams. “It will make the rest of your life so much easier.”

Medium height, medium build. Late forties. Rough face and manner. Not a posh voice, and not a Londoner by birth. Ginger hair—could have been a wig, but a good one. Anyway, he wore a hat, despite the heat of late August. Moustache, darker than the hair—could have been a stick-on, but a good one. And tinted glasses. Not sunglasses, just blue-tinted, with horn frames.

The three men spent two more hours with the police artist. Commander Williams brought the picture back to Scotland Yard just before the breakfast hour and showed it to Nigel Cramer. He took it to the COBRA committee at nine that morning. The trouble was, the picture could have been anyone. And there the trail ran out.

“We know the van was worked on by another and better mechanic after Sykes,” Cramer told the committee. “And a sign painter created the Barlow fruit company logo on each side. It must have been stored somewhere, a garage with welding facilities. But if we issue a public appeal, the kidnappers will see it and could lose their nerve, cut and run, and leave Simon Cormack dead.”

It was agreed to issue the description to every police station in the country, but not to bring in the press and the public.

Andrew “Andy” Laing spent the night poring over the records of bank transactions, becoming more and more puzzled, until just before dawn his bemusement gave way to the growing certainty that he was right and there was no other explanation.

Andy Laing was the head of the Credit and Marketing team in the Jiddah branch of the Saudi Arabian Investment Bank, an institution established by the Saudi government to handle most of the astronomical sums of money that washed around those parts.

Although Saudi-owned and with a mainly Saudi board of directors, the SAIB was principally staffed by foreign contract officers, and the biggest single contributor of staff was New York’s Rockman-Queens Bank, from which Laing had been seconded.

He was young, keen, conscientious, and ambitious, eager to make a good career in banking and enjoying his term in Saudi Arabia. The pay was better than in New York, he had an attractive apartment, several girlfriends among the large expatriate community in Jiddah, was not worried by the no-liquor restrictions, and got on with his colleagues.

Although the Riyadh branch was the head office of SAIB, the busiest branch was in Jiddah, the business and commercial capital of Saudi Arabia. Normally, Laing would have left the crenellated white building—looking more like a Foreign Legion fort than a bank—and walked up the street to the Hyatt Regency for a drink before six o’clock the previous evening. But he had two more files to close, and rather than leave them till the next morning, he stayed on for an extra hour.

So he was still at his desk when the old Arab messenger wheeled ’round the cart stacked with printout sheets torn from the bank’s computer, leaving the appropriate sheets in each executive’s office for attention the next day. These sheets bore the records of the day’s transactions undertaken by the bank’s several departments. Patiently the old man placed a sheaf of printouts on Laing’s desk, bobbed his head, and withdrew. Laing called a cheerful “
Shukran
” after him—he prided himself on being courteous to the Saudi menial staff—and went on working.

When he had finished he glanced at the papers by his side and uttered a sound of annoyance. He had been given the wrong papers. The ones beside him were the in-and-out records of deposits and withdrawals from all the major accounts lodged with the bank. These were the business of the Operations manager, not Credit and Marketing. He took them and strolled down the corridor to the empty office of the Ops manager, Mr. Amin, his colleague from Pakistan.

As he did so he glanced at the sheets and something caught his attention. He stopped, turned back, and began to go through the records page by page. On each the same pattern emerged. He switched on his computer and asked it to go back into the records of two client accounts. Always the same pattern.

By the small hours of the morning he was certain there could be no doubt. What he was looking at had to be a major fraud. The coincidences were just too bizarre. He replaced the printouts on the desk of Mr. Amin and resolved to fly to Riyadh at the first opportunity for a personal interview with his fellow American, the general manager, Steve Pyle.

As Laing was going home through the darkened streets of Jiddah, eight time zones to the west the White House committee was listening to Dr. Nicholas Armitage, an experienced psychiatrist who had just come across to the West Wing from the Executive Mansion.

“Gentlemen, so far I have to tell you that the shock has affected the First Lady to a greater degree than the President. She is still taking medication under the supervision of her physician. The President has, no doubt, the tougher temperament, though I’m afraid the strain is already beginning to become noticeable, and the telltale signs of post-abduction parental trauma are beginning to show in him too.”

“What signs, Doctor?” asked Odell without ceremony. The psychiatrist—who did not like to be interrupted, and never was when he lectured students—cleared his throat.

“You have to understand that in these cases the mother acceptably has the release of tears, even hysteria. The male parent often suffers in a greater way, experiencing, apart from the normal anxiety for the abducted child, a profound sense of guilt, of self-blame, of conviction that he was responsible in some way, should have done more, should have taken more precautions, should have been more careful.”

“That’s not logical,” protested Morton Stannard.

“We’re not talking about logic here,” said the doctor. “We’re talking about the symptoms of trauma, made worse by the fact the President was—
is
—extremely close to his son, loves him very deeply indeed. Add to that the feeling of helplessness, the inability to do anything. So far, of course, with no contact from the kidnappers, he does not even know if the boy is alive or dead. It’s still early, of course, but it won’t get better.”

“These kidnappings can go on for weeks,” said Jim Donaldson. “This man is our Chief Executive. What changes can we expect?”

“The strain will be eased slightly when and if the first contact is made and proof obtained that Simon is still alive,” said Dr. Armitage. “But the relief will not last long. As time drags on, the deterioration will deepen. There will be stress at a very high level, leading to irritability. There will be insomnia—that can be helped with medication. Finally there will be listlessness in matters concerning the father’s profession—”

“In this case running the damn country,” said Odell.

“... and lack of concentration, loss of memory in matters of government. In a word, gentlemen, half or more of the President’s mind until further notice will be devoted to thinking about his son, and a further part to concern for his wife. In some cases, even after the successful release of a child kidnap victim, it has been the parents who needed months, even years, of post-trauma therapy.”

“In other words,” said Attorney General Bill Walters, “we have half a President, maybe less.”

“Oh, come now,” Treasury Secretary Reed interjected. “This country has had Presidents on the operating table, wholly incapacitated in the hospital, before now. We must just take over, run things as he would wish, disturb our friend as little as possible.”

His optimism evoked little matching response. Brad Johnson rose.

“Why the hell won’t those bastards get in touch?” he asked. “It’s been nearly forty-eight hours.”

“At least we have our negotiator set up and waiting for their first call,” said Reed.

“And we have a strong presence in London,” added Walters. “Mr. Brown and his team from the Bureau arrived two hours ago.”

“What the hell are the British police doing?” muttered Stannard. “Why can’t they find those bastards?”

“We have to remember it’s been only forty-eight hours—not even,” observed Secretary of State Donaldson. “Britain’s not as big as the U.S., but with fifty-four million people there are a lot of places to hide. You recall how long the Symbionese Liberation Army kept Patty Hearst, with the whole FBI hunting them? Months.”

“Let’s face it, gentlemen,” drawled Odell, “the problem is, there’s nothing more we can do.”

That
was
the problem; there was nothing anybody could do.