The Negotiator (25 page)

“So cut it short and get me the money,” snapped Zack.

“I tried, I swear to God. Look, five million is over the top. He doesn’t have that kind of cash—it’s all tied up in blind trust funds that will take weeks to unlock. The word is, I can get you nine hundred thousand dollars, and I can get it fast—”

“Naff off,” snarled the voice on the phone. “You Yanks can get it from somewhere else. I can wait.”

“Yeah, sure, I know,” said Quinn earnestly. “You’re safe. The fuzz are getting nowhere, that’s for sure—so far. If you could just come down a bit ... The boy all right?”

“Yeah.”

Quinn could tell Zack was thinking.

“I have to ask this, Zack. Those bastards in back of me are leaning real hard. Ask the boy what his pet dog’s name was—the one he had from a toddler up through the age of ten. Just so we know he’s okay. Won’t cost you anything. Helps me a lot.”

“Four million,” snapped Zack. “And that’s bloody it.”

The phone cut off. The call had come from St. Neots, a town in the south of Cambridge, just east of the county line with Bedfordshire. No one was spotted leaving the booth, one of a row outside the main post office.

“What are you doing?” asked Sam curiously.

“Putting the pressure on,” said Quinn, and would explain no more.

What Quinn had realized days before was that in this case he had one good ace not always available to negotiators. Bandits in the mountains of Sardinia or Central America could hold out for months or years if they wished. No army sweep, no police patrol would ever find them in those hills riddled with caves and undergrowth. Their only real hazard might be from helicopters, but that was it.

In the densely populated southeast corner of England, Zack and his men were in law-abiding—that is, hostile—territory. The longer they hid, the greater by the law of averages the chance of their being identified and located. So the pressure on
them
would be to settle and clear out. The trick would be to get them to think they had won, had got the best deal they could, and had no need to kill the hostage as they fled.

Quinn was counting on the rest of Zack’s team—the police knew from the ambush site that there were at least four in the gang—being confined to the hideout. They would get impatient, claustrophobic, eventually urging their leader to settle up and be done with it, precisely the same argument Quinn would be using. Assailed from both sides, Zack would be tempted to take what he could get and seek escape. But that would not happen until the pressure on the kidnappers had built up a lot more.

Quinn had deliberately sown two seeds in Zack’s mind: that Quinn was the good guy, trying to do his best for a fast deal and being obstructed by the Establishment—he recalled the face of Kevin Brown and wondered if that was wholly a lie—and that Zack was quite safe ... so far. Meaning the opposite. The more Zack’s sleep was disturbed by nightmares of a police breakthrough, the better.

The professor of linguistics had now decided that Zack was almost certainly in his mid-forties to early fifties, and probably the leader of the gang. There was no hesitation to indicate he would have to consult someone else before agreeing to terms. He was born of working-class people, did not have a very good formal education, and almost certainly stemmed from the Birmingham area. But his native accent had been muted over the years by long periods away from Birmingham, possibly abroad.

A psychiatrist tried to build up a portrait of the man. He was certainly under strain, and it was growing as the conversations were prolonged. His animosity toward Quinn was decreasing with the passage of time. He was accustomed to violence—there had been no hesitation or qualm in his voice when he mentioned the severing of Simon Cormack’s fingers. On the other hand he was logical and shrewd, wary but not afraid. A dangerous man but not crazy. Not a psycho and not “political.”

These reports went to Nigel Cramer, who reported all to the COBRA committee. Copies went at once to Washington, straight to the White House committee. Other copies came to the Kensington apartment. Quinn read them, and when he was finished, so did Sam.

“What I don’t understand,” she said as she put down the last page, “is why they picked Simon Cormack. The President comes from a wealthy family, but there must be other rich kids walking around England.”

Quinn, who had worked that one out while sitting watching a TV screen in a bar in Spain, glanced at her but said nothing. She waited for an answer but got none. That annoyed her. It also intrigued her. She found as the days passed that she was becoming very intrigued by Quinn.

On the seventh day after the kidnap and the fourth since Zack had made his first call, the CIA and the British SIS took their penetration agents throughout the network of European terrorist organizations off the job. There had been no news of the procurement of a Skorpion machine pistol from these sources, and the view had faded that political terrorists were involved. Among groups investigated had been the I.R.A. and the INLA, both Irish, and in both of which the CIA and SIS each had sleepers whose identity they were not going to reveal to each other; the German Red Army Faction, successor to Baader-Meinhof; the Italian Red Brigades; the French Action Directe; the Spanish/Basque ETA; and the Belgian CCC. There were smaller and even weirder groups, but these had been thought too small to have mounted the Cormack operation.

The next day Zack was back. The call came from a bank of booths in a service station on the M.11 motorway just south of Cambridge and was locked and identified in eight seconds, but it took seven minutes to get a plainclothes officer there. In the swirling mass of cars and people passing through, it was a false hope that Zack would still be there.

“The dog,” he said curtly. “Its name was Mister Spot.”

“Thanks, Zack,” said Quinn. “Just keep the kid okay and we’ll conclude our business sooner than you know. And I have news: Mr. Cormack’s financial people can raise one-point-two million dollars after all, spot cash and fast. Go for it, Zack.”

“Get stuffed,” barked the voice on the phone. But he was in a hurry; time was running out. He dropped his demand to $3 million. And the phone went dead.

“Why don’t you settle for it, Quinn?” asked Sam. She was sitting on the edge of her chair; Quinn had stood up, ready to go to the bathroom. He always washed, bathed, dressed, used the bathroom, and ate just after a call from Zack. He knew there would be no further contact for a while.

“It’s not a question just of money,” said Quinn as he headed out of the room. “Zack’s not ready yet. He’d start raising the demand again, thinking he was being cheated. I want him undermined a bit more yet; I want more pressure on him.”

“What about the pressure on Simon Cormack?” Sam called down the corridor. Quinn paused and came back to the door.

“Yeah,” he said soberly, “and on his mother and father. I haven’t forgotten. But in these cases the criminals have to believe, truly believe, that the show is over. Otherwise they get angry and hurt the hostage. I’ve seen it before. It really is better slow and easy than rushing around like the cavalry. If you can’t crack it in forty-eight hours with a quick arrest, it comes to a war of attrition, the kidnapper’s nerve against the negotiator’s. If he gets nothing, he gets mad; if he gets too much too quickly, he reckons he blew it and his pals will tell him the same. So he gets mad. And that’s bad for the hostage.”

His words were heard on tape a few minutes later by Nigel Cramer, who nodded in agreement. In two cases he had been involved in, the same experience had been gone through. In one the hostage was recovered alive and well; in the other he had been liquidated by an angry and resentful psychopath.

The words were heard live in the basement beneath the American embassy.

“Crap,” said Brown. “He has a deal, for God’s sake. He should get the boy back now. Then I want to go after those sleazeballs myself.”

“If they get away, leave it to the Met.,” advised Seymour. “They’ll find ’em.”

“Yeah, and a British court will give them life in a soft pen. You know what life means over here? Fourteen years with time off. Bullshit. You hear this, mister: No one, but no one, does this to the son of my President and gets away with it. One day this is going to become a Bureau matter, the way it should have been from the start. And I’m going to handle it—Boston rules.”

Nigel Cramer came around to the apartment personally that night. His news was no news. Four hundred people had been quietly interviewed, nearly five hundred “sightings” checked out, one hundred and sixty more houses and apartments discreetly surveyed. No breakthrough.

Birmingham CID had gone back into their records for fifty years looking for criminals with a known record of violence who might have left the city long ago. Eight possibles had come up and all had been investigated and cleared; either dead, in prison, or identifiably somewhere else.

Among one of Scotland Yard’s resources, little known to the public, is the voice bank. With modern technology, human voices can be broken down to a series of peaks and lows, representing the way a speaker inhales, exhales, uses tone and pitch, forms his words, and delivers them. The trace-pattern on the oscillograph is like a fingerprint; it can be matched and, if there is a sample on file, identified.

Often unknown to themselves, many criminals have tapes of their voices in the voice bank: obscene callers, anonymous informants, and others who have been arrested and taped in the interview room. Zack’s voice simply did not show up.

The forensic leads had also fizzled out. The spent cartridge cases, lead slugs, footprints, and tire tracks lay dormant in the police laboratories and refused to give up any more secrets.

“In a radius of fifty miles outside London, including the capital, there are eight million dwelling units,” said Cramer. “Plus dry drains, warehouses, vaults, crypts, tunnels, catacombs, and abandoned buildings. We once had a murderer and rapist called the Black Panther, who practically lived in a series of abandoned mines under a national park. He took his victims down there. We got him—eventually. Sorry, Mr. Quinn. We just go on looking.”

By the eighth day the strain in the Kensington apartment was telling. It affected the younger people more; if Quinn was experiencing it, he showed little trace. He lay on his bed a lot, between calls and briefings, staring at the ceiling, trying to get inside the mind of Zack and thence to work out how to handle the next call. When should he go for a final step? How to arrange the exchange?

McCrea remained good-natured but was becoming tired. He had developed an almost doglike devotion to Quinn, always prepared to run an errand, make coffee, or do his share of chores around the flat.

On the ninth day Sam asked permission to go out shopping. Grudgingly Kevin Brown called up from Grosvenor Square and gave it. She left the apartment, her first time outside for almost a fortnight, took a cab to Knightsbridge, and spent a glorious four hours wandering through Harvey Nichols and Harrods. In Harrods she treated herself to an extravagant and handsome crocodile-skin handbag.

When she got back, both men admired it very much. She also had a present for each of them: a rolled-gold pen for McCrea and a cashmere sweater for Quinn. The young CIA operative was touchingly grateful; Quinn put on the sweater and cracked one of his rare but dazzling smiles. It was the only lighthearted moment the three of them spent in that Kensington apartment.

In Washington the same day, the crisis management committee listened grimly to Dr. Armitage. The President had made no public appearances since the kidnapping, which a sympathetic populace understood, but his behavior behind the scenes had the committee members very concerned.

“I am becoming increasingly worried about the President’s health,” Dr. Armitage told the Vice President, National Security Adviser, four Cabinet Secretaries, and the Directors of the FBI and the CIA. “There have been periods of stress in government before, and always will be. But this is personal and much deeper. The human mind, let alone the body, is not equipped to tolerate these levels of anxiety for very long.”

“How is he physically?” asked Bill Walters, the Attorney General.

“Extremely tired, needing medication to sleep at night if he sleeps at all. Aging visibly.”

“And mentally?” asked Morton Stannard.

“You have seen him trying to handle the normal affairs of state,” Armitage reminded them. They all nodded soberly. “To be blunt, he is losing his grip. His concentration is ebbing; his memory is often faulty.”

Stannard nodded sympathetically but his eyes were hooded. A decade younger than Donaldson of State or Reed of Treasury, the Defense Secretary was a former international banker from New York, a cosmopolitan operator who had developed tastes for fine food, vintage wines, and French Impressionist art. During a stint with the World Bank he had established a reputation as a smooth and efficient negotiator, a hard man to convince—as Third World countries seeking overblown credits with small chance of repayment had discovered when they went away empty-handed.

He had made his mark at the Pentagon over the previous two years as a stickler for efficiency, committed to the notion that the American taxpayer should get a dollar’s worth of defense for his tax dollar. He had made his enemies there, among the military brass and the lobbyists. But then came the Nantucket Treaty, which had changed a few allegiances across the Potomac. Stannard found himself siding with the defense contractors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in opposing the sweeping cuts.

While Michael Odell had fought against Nantucket on gut feeling, Stannard’s priorities were also concerned with the brokerage of power, and his opposition to the treaty had not been wholly on philosophical grounds. Still, when he had lost his case in the Cabinet, not a flicker of expression had crossed his face; and none did now as he listened to the account of his President’s deterioration.

Not so Hubert Reed. “Poor man. God, poor man,” he murmured.

“The added problem,” concluded the psychiatrist, “is that he is not a demonstrative, emotional man. Not on the outside. Inside ... of course, we all are. All normal people, anyway. But he bottles things up, won’t scream or shout. The First Lady is different—she does not have the strains of office; she’s more willing to accept medication. Even so, I think her condition is as bad, if not worse. This is her only child. And that’s an added pressure on the President.”