The Negotiator (32 page)

The men who scurried past him, and the increasingly large number of attractive young women, were thinking of commodity prices, buying long or short, or a flicker of movement in the money markets that might be a trend or just a flicker. They used computers instead of quill pens, but the outcome of their labors was still what it had been for centuries: trade, the buying and selling of things that other people made. It was a world that had captured Andy Laing’s imagination ten years before, when he was just finishing school, and it was a world he would never enter again.

He had a light lunch in a small sandwich bar off the street called Crutched Friars, where monks once hobbled with one leg bound behind them to cause pain for the greater glory of God, and he made up his mind what he would do.

He finished his coffee and took the underground back to his studio apartment in Beaufort Street, Chelsea, where he had prudently stored photocopies of the evidence he had brought out of Jiddah. When a man has nothing more to lose, he can become very dangerous. Laing decided to write it all down, from start to finish, to include copies of
his
printouts, which he knew to be genuine, and to send a copy to every member of the bank’s board of directors in New York. The membership of the board was public knowledge; their business addresses would be in the American
Who’s Who
.

He saw no reason why he should suffer in silence. Let Steve Pyle do some worrying for a change, he thought. So he sent the general manager in Riyadh a personal letter telling him what he was going to do.

Zack finally rang at 1:20
P.M.
, the height of the lunchtime rush hour, while Laing was finishing his coffee, and Moss was entranced by a new child-abuse movie fresh in from Amsterdam. Zack was in one of a bank of four public booths set into the rear wall of Dunstable post office—as always, north of London.

Quinn had been dressed and ready since sunup, and that day there really was a sun to see, shining brightly out of a blue sky with only a hint of cool in the air. Whether he was feeling the cold neither McCrea nor Sam had thought to ask, but he had put on jeans, his new cashmere sweater over his shirt, and a zip-up leather jacket.

“Quinn, this is the last call—”

“Zack, old buddy, I am staring at a fruit bowl, a big bowl, and you know what? It’s full to the damn brim with diamonds, glittering and gleaming away like they were alive. Let’s deal, Zack. Let’s deal now.”

The mental image he had drawn stopped Zack in his tracks.

“Right,” said the voice on the phone. “These are the instructions—”

“No, Zack. We do this my way or it all gets blown to kingdom come. ...”

In the Kensington exchange, in Cork Street and Grosvenor Square, there was stunned silence among the listeners. Either Quinn knew just what he was doing or he was going to provoke the kidnapper into putting down the phone. Quinn’s voice went on without a pause.

“I may be a bastard, Zack, but I’m the only bastard in this whole damn mess you can trust and you’re going to have to trust me. Got a pencil?”

“Yeah. Now listen, Quinn—”

“You listen, buddy. I want you to move to another booth and call me in forty seconds on this number. Three-seven-oh; one-two-oh-four. Now GO!”

The last word was a shout. Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea would later tell the inquiry that they were as stunned as those listening on the line. Quinn slammed down the phone, grabbed the attaché case—the diamonds were still inside it, not in a fruit bowl—and ran out the sitting-room door. He turned as he went and roared, “Stay there!”

The surprise, the shout, the authority in his command, kept them pinned in their chairs for a vital five seconds. When they reached the apartment’s front door they heard the key turn in the lock on the far side. Apparently it had been placed there in the predawn.

Quinn avoided the elevator and hit the stairs about the time McCrea’s first shout came through the door, followed by a hefty kick at the lock. Among the listeners there was already a nascent chaos that would soon grow to pandemonium.

“What the hell’s he doing?” whispered one policeman to another at the Kensington exchange, to be met by a shrug. Quinn was racing down the three flights of stairs to the lobby level. The inquiry would show that the American at the listening post in the basement apartment did not move because it was not his job to move. His job was to keep the stream of voices from inside the apartment above him recorded, encoded, radioed to Grosvenor Square for decoding and digestion by the listeners in the basement. So he stayed where he was.

Quinn crossed the lobby fifteen seconds after slamming down the phone. The British porter in his booth looked up, nodded, and went back to his copy of the
Daily Mirror
. Quinn pushed open the street door, which opened outward, closed it behind him, dropped a wooden wedge—which he had carved in the privacy of the toilet—under the sill and gave it a hard kick. Then he ran across the road, dodging the traffic.

“What do they mean, he’s gone?” shouted Kevin Brown in the listening post at Grosvenor Square. He had been sitting there all morning, waiting, as they all were, British and Americans alike, for Zack’s latest and maybe last call. At first the sounds coming from Kensington had been merely confusing; they heard the phone cut off, heard Quinn shout “Stay there!” at someone, dien a series of bangs, confused shouts and cries from McCrea and Somerville, then a series of regular bangs, as if someone was kicking a door.

Sam Somerville had come back into the room, shouting at the bugs: “He’s gone! Quinn’s gone!” Brown’s question could be heard in the listening post but not by Somerville. Frantically Brown scrambled for the phone that would connect him with his special agent in Kensington.

“Agent Somerville,” he boomed when he heard her on the line, “get after him.”

At that moment McCrea’s fifth kick broke the lock on the apartment door. He raced for the stairs, followed by Sam. Both were in bedroom slippers.

The greengrocer’s shop and delicatessen across the street from the apartment, whose number Quinn had obtained from the London telephone directory in the sitting-room cabinet, was called Bradshaw, after the man who had started it, but was now owned by an Indian gentleman called Mr. Patel. Quinn had watched him from across the street, tending his exterior fruit display or disappearing inside to attend to a customer.

Quinn hit the opposite pavement thirty-three seconds after ending his call from Zack. He dodged two pedestrians and came through the doorway into the food shop like a tornado. The telephone was on the cash desk, next to the register, behind which stood Mr. Patel.

“Those kids are stealing your oranges,” said Quinn without ceremony. At that moment the phone rang. Torn between a telephone call and stolen oranges, Mr. Patel reacted like a good Gujarati and ran outside. Quinn picked up the receiver.

The Kensington exchange had reacted fast, and the inquiry would show they had done their best. But they lost several of the forty seconds through sheer surprise, then had a technical problem. Their lock was on the flash line in the apartment. Whenever a call came into that number, their electronic exchange could run back up the line to establish the source of the call. The number it came from would then be revealed by the computer to be such-and-such a booth in a certain place. Between six and ten seconds.

They already had a lock on the number Zack had used first, but when he changed booths, even though the kiosks were side by side in Dunstable, they lost him. Worse, he was now ringing another London number into which they were not tapped. The only saving grace was that the number Quinn had dictated on the line to Zack was still on the Kensington exchange. Still, the tracers had to start at the beginning, their call-finder mechanism racing frantically through the twenty thousand numbers on the exchange. They tapped into Mr. Patel’s phone fifty-eight seconds after Quinn had dictated the number, then got a lock on the second number in Dunstable.

“Take this number, Zack,” said Quinn without preamble.

“What the hell’s going on?” snarled Zack.

“Nine-three-five; three-two-one-five,” said Quinn remorselessly. “Got it?”

There was a pause as Zack scribbled.

“Now we’ll do it ourselves, Zack. I’ve walked out on the lot of them. Just you and me; the diamonds against the boy. No tricks—my word on it. Call me on that number in sixty minutes, and ninety minutes if there’s no reply first time. It’s not on trace.”

He put the phone down. In the exchange the listeners heard the words “... minutes, and ninety minutes if there’s no reply first time. It’s not on trace.”

“Bastard’s given him another number,” said the engineer in Kensington to the two Metropolitan officers with him. One of them was already on the phone to the Yard.

Quinn came out of the shop to see Duncan McCrea across the road trying to push his way through the jammed street door. Sam was behind him, waving and gesticulating. The porter joined them, scratching his thinning hair. Two cars went down the street on the opposite side; on Quinn’s side a motorcyclist was approaching. Quinn stepped into the road, right in the man’s path, his arms raised, attaché case swinging from his left hand. The motorcyclist braked, swerved, skidded, and slithered to a stop.

“ ’Ere, wot on erf ...”

Quinn gave him a disarming smile as he ducked around the handlebars. The short, hard kidney punch completed the job. As the youth in the crash helmet doubled over, Quinn hoisted him off his machine, swung his own right leg over it, engaged gear, and gunned the engine. He went off down the street just as McCrea’s flailing hand missed his jacket by six inches.

McCrea stood in the street, dejected. Sam joined him. They looked at each other, then ran back into the apartment building. The fastest way to talk to Grosvenor Square was to get back to the third floor.

“Right, that’s it,” said Brown five minutes later, after listening to both McCrea and Somerville on the line from Kensington. “We find that bastard. That’s the job.”

Another phone rang. It was Nigel Cramer from Scotland Yard.

“Your negotiator has done a bunk,” he said flatly. “Can you tell me how? I’ve tried the apartment—the usual number is engaged.”

Brown told him in thirty seconds. Cramer grunted. He still resented the Green Meadow Farm affair, and always would, but events had now overtaken his desire to see Brown and the FBI team off his patch.

“Did your people get the number of that motorcycle?” he asked. “I can put out an all-points on it.”

“Better than that,” said Brown with satisfaction. “That attaché case he’s carrying. It contains a direction finder.”

“It
what
?”

“Built in, undetectable, state-of-the-art,” said Brown. “We had it fitted out in the States, changed it for the case provided by the Pentagon just before takeoff last night.”

“I see,” said Cramer thoughtfully. “And the receiver?”

“Right here,” said Brown. “Came in on the morning commercial flight at dawn. One of my boys went out to Heathrow to pick it up. Range two miles, so we have to move. I mean right now.”

“This time, Mr. Brown, will you please stay in touch with the Met.’s squad cars? You do not make arrests in this City. I do. Your car has radio?”

“Sure.”

“Stay on open line, please. We’ll patch in on you and join you if you tell us where you are.”

“No problem. You have my word on it.”

The embassy limousine swept out of Grosvenor Square sixty seconds later. Chuck Moxon drove; his colleague beside him operated the D/F receiver, a small box like a miniature television set, save that on the screen in place of a picture was a single glowing dot. When the antenna now clipped to the metal rim above the passenger door heard the blip emitted from the D/F transmitter in Quinn’s attaché case, a line would race out from the glowing dot to the perimeter of the screen. The car’s driver would have to maneuver so that the line on the screen pointed dead ahead of his car’s nose. He would then be following the direction finder. The device in the attaché case would be activated by remote control from inside the limousine.

They drove fast down Park Lane, through Knightsbridge, and into Kensington.

“Activate,” said Brown. The operator depressed a switch. The screen did not respond.

“Keep activating every thirty seconds until we get lock-on,” said Brown. “Chuck, start to sweep around Kensington.”

Moxon took the Cromwell Road, then headed south down Gloucester Road toward Old Brompton Road. The antenna got a lock.

“He’s behind us, heading north,” said Moxon’s colleague. “Range, about a mile and a quarter.”

Thirty seconds later Moxon was back across the Cromwell Road, heading north up Exhibition Road toward Hyde Park.

“Dead ahead, running north,” said the operator.

“Tell the boys in blue we have him,” said Brown. Moxon informed the embassy by radio, and halfway up Edgware Road a Metropolitan Police Rover closed up behind them.

In the back with Brown were Collins and Seymour.

“Should have known,” said Collins regretfully. “Should have spotted the time gap.”

“What time gap?” asked Seymour.

“You recall that snarl-up in the Winfield House driveway three weeks back? Quinn set off fifteen minutes before me but arrived in Kensington three minutes ahead. I can’t beat a London cabbie in rush-hour traffic. He paused somewhere, made some preparations.”

“He couldn’t have planned this three weeks ago,” objected Seymour. “He didn’t know how things would pan out.”

“Didn’t have to,” said Collins. “You’ve read his file. Been in combat long enough to know about fallback positions in case things go wrong.”

“He’s pulled a right into St. John’s Wood,” said the operator.

At Lord’s roundabout the police car came alongside, its window down.

“He’s heading north up there,” said Moxon, pointing up the Finchley Road. The two cars were joined by another squad car and headed north through Swiss Cottage, Hendon, and Mill Hill. The range decreased to three hundred yards and they scanned the traffic ahead for a tall man wearing no crash helmet, on a small motorcycle.