The Negotiator (38 page)

When the body was naked, it was X-rayed from top to toe. Macdonald studied the prints for an hour and identified forty nonhuman particles. Then he swabbed the body down with a sticky powder, which removed a dozen infinitely small particles stuck to the skin. Some were crumbs of grass and mud; some were not. A second police car took this grim harvest to Dr. Barnard in Fulham.

He did an external autopsy, dictating into a recorder in his measured Scottish lilt. He only began to cut just before dawn. The first task was to excise from the cadaver all the “relevant tissue.” This happened to be all of the middle section of the body, which had lost almost everything from and including the bottom two ribs down to the top of the pelvis. Within the excised matter were the small particles that remained of eight inches of lower spine, which had come straight through the body and the ventral wall to lodge in the front of the jeans.

The autopsy—establishment of cause of death—was no problem. It was massive explosive injury to spine and abdomen. The full post-mortem needed more. Dr. Macdonald had the excised matter X-rayed again, in much finer grain. There were things in there, all right, some so small they would defy tweezers. The excised flesh and bone was finally “digested” in a brew of enzymes to create a thick soup of dissolved human tissue, bone included. It was the centrifuge that yielded the last cull, a final ounce of bits of metal.

When this ounce was available for examination Dr. Macdonald selected the largest piece, the one he had spotted in the second X-ray, deeply impacted into a piece of bone and buried inside the young man’s spleen. He studied it for a while, whistled, and rang Fulham.

Barnard came on the line. “Ian, glad you called. Anything else for me?”

“Aye. There’s something here you have got to see. If I’m right, it’s something I’ve never seen before. I think I know what it is, but I can hardly believe it.”

“Use a squad car. Send it now,” said Barnard grimly.

Two hours later the men were speaking again. It was Barnard who called this time.

“If you were thinking what I believe you were thinking, you were right,” he said. Barnard had his 200 percent.

“It couldn’t come from anywhere else?” asked Macdonald.

“Nope. There’s no way one of these gets into anybody’s hands but the manufacturer’s.”

“Bloody hell,” said the pathologist quietly.

“Mum’s the word, matey,” said Barnard. “Ours but to do or die, right? I’m having my report with the Home Secretary in the morning. Can you do the same?”

Macdonald glanced at his watch. Thirty-six hours since he had been roused. Another twelve to go.

“Sleep no more. Barnard does murder sleep,” he parodied
Macbeth
. “All right, on his desk by breakfast.”

That evening he released the body, or both parts of it, to the coroner’s officer. In the morning the Oxford coroner would open and adjourn the inquest, enabling him to release the body to the next of kin, in this case Ambassador Fairweather in person, representing President John Cormack.

As the two British scientists wrote their reports through the night, Sam Somerville was received, at her own request, by the committee in the Situation Room beneath the West Wing. She had appealed right up to the Director of the Bureau, and after she had telephoned Vice President Odell, he had agreed to bring her along.

When she entered the room they were all already seated. Only David Weintraub was missing, away in Tokyo talking to his opposite number there. She felt intimidated; these men were the most powerful in the land, men you only saw on television or in the press. She took a deep breath, held her head up, and walked forward to the end of the table. Vice President Odell gestured to a chair.

“Sit down, young lady.”

“We understand you wanted to ask us to let Mr. Quinn go free,” said Attorney General Bill Walters. “May we ask why?”

Sam took a deep breath. “Gentlemen, I know some may suspect Mr. Quinn was in some way involved in the death of Simon Cormack. I ask you to believe me. I have been in close contact with him in that apartment for three weeks and I’m convinced he genuinely tried to secure that young man’s release safe and unharmed.”

“Then why did he run?” asked Philip Kelly. He did not appreciate having his junior agents brought to the committee to speak for themselves.

“Because there were two freak news leaks in the forty-eight hours before he went. Because he had spent three weeks trying to gain that animal’s trust and he had done it. Because he was convinced Zack was about to scuttle and run, if he couldn’t get to him alone and unarmed, without a shadow from either the British or American authorities.”

No one failed to grasp that by “American authorities” she meant Kevin Brown. Kelly scowled.

“There remains a suspicion he could have been involved in some way,” he said. “We don’t know how, but it needs to be checked out.”

“He couldn’t, sir,” said Sam. “If he had proposed himself as the negotiator, maybe. But the choice to ask him was made right here. He told me he didn’t even want to come. And from the moment Mr. Weintraub saw him in Spain he has been in someone’s company twenty-four hours a day. Every word he spoke to the kidnappers, you listened to.”

“Except those missing forty-eight hours before he showed up on a roadside,” said Morton Stannard.

“But why should he make a deal with the kidnappers during that time?” she asked. “Except for the return of Simon Cormack.”

“Because two million dollars is a lot of money to a poor man,” suggested Hubert Reed.

“But if he had wanted to disappear with the diamonds,” she persisted, “we’d still be looking for him now.”

“Well,” said Odell unexpectedly, “he did go to the kidnappers alone and unarmed—except for some goddam marzipan. If he didn’t know them already, that takes grit.”

“And yet Mr. Brown’s suspicions may not be entirely unfounded,” said Jim Donaldson. “He could have made his contact, struck a deal. They kill the boy, leave Quinn alive, take the stones. Later they meet up and split the booty.”

“Why should they?” asked Sam, bolder now, with the Vice President apparently on her side. “They had the diamonds. They could have killed him too. Even if they didn’t, why should they split with him? Would
you
trust them?”

None of them would trust such men an inch. There was silence as they thought it over.

“If he’s allowed to go, what has he in mind? Back to his vineyard in Spain?” asked Reed.

“No, sir. He wants to go after them. He wants to hunt them down.”

“Hey, hold on, Agent Somerville,” said Kelly indignantly. “That’s Bureau work. Gentlemen, we have no need of discretion to protect the life of Simon Cormack anymore. He’s been murdered, and that murder is indictable under our laws, just like that murder on the cruise ship, the
Achille
Lauro
. We’re putting teams into Britain and Europe with the cooperation of all the national police authorities. We want them and we’re going to get them. Mr. Brown controls the operations out of London.”

Sam Somerville played her last card.

“But, gentlemen, if Quinn was not involved, he got closer than anyone to them, saw them, spoke to them. If he
was
involved, then he will know where to go. That could be our best lead.”

“You mean, let him run and tail him?” asked Walters.

“No, sir. I mean let me go with him.”

“Young lady”—Michael Odell leaned forward to see her better—“do you know what you’re saying? This man has killed before—okay, in combat. If he’s involved, you could end up very dead.”

“I know that, Mr. Vice President. That’s the point. I believe he’s innocent and I’m prepared to take the risk.”

“Mmmmm. All right. Stay in town, Miss Somerville. We’ll let you know. We need to discuss this—in private,” said Odell.

Home Secretary Marriott spent a disturbed morning reading the reports of Drs. Barnard and Macdonald. Then he took them both to Downing Street. He was back in the Home Office by lunchtime. Nigel Cramer was waiting for him.

“You’ve seen these?” asked Sir Harry.

“I’ve read copies, Home Secretary.”

“This is appalling, utterly dismaying. If this ever gets out ... Do you know where Ambassador Fairweather is?”

“Yes. He’s at Oxford. The coroner released the body to him an hour ago. I believe Air Force One is standing by at Upper Heyford to fly the casket back to the States. The Ambassador will see it depart, then return to London.”

“Mmm. I’ll have to ask the Foreign Office to set up an interview. I want no copies of this to anybody. Ghastly business. Any news on the manhunt?”

“Not a lot, sir. Quinn made plain that none of the other two kidnappers he saw uttered a word. It could be they were foreigners. We’re concentrating the hunt for the Volvo at major ports and airports connecting to Europe. I fear they may have slipped away. Of course, the hunt for the house goes on. No further need for discretion—I’m having a public appeal issued this evening, if you agree. A detached house with an attached garage, a cellar, and a Volvo of that color—someone must have seen something.”

“Yes, by all means. Keep me posted,” said the Home Secretary.

That evening in Washington, a very tense Sam Somerville was summoned from her apartment in Alexandria to the Hoover Building. She was shown to the office of Philip Kelly, her ultimate departmental boss, to hear the White House decision.

“All right, Agent Somerville, you’ve got it. The powers-that-be say you get to return to England and release Mr. Quinn. But this time, you stay with him, right with him, all the time. And you let Mr. Brown know what he’s doing and where he’s going.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

She was just in time to catch the overnight red-eye for Heathrow. There was a slight delay in the departure of her scheduled plane out of Dulles International. A few miles away, at Andrews, Air Force One was landing with the casket of Simon Cormack. At that hour, right across America, all airports ceased traffic for two minutes’ silence.

She landed at Heathrow at dawn. It was the dawn of the fourth day since the murder.

Irving Moss was awakened early that morning by the sound of the ringing phone. It could only be one source—the only one that had his number here. He checked his watch: 4:00
A.M
., 10:00 the previous evening in Houston. He took down the lengthy list of produce prices, all in U.S. dollars and cents, eradicated the zeros or “nulls”—which indicated a space in the message—and according to the day of the month set the lines of figures against prepared lines of letters. When he had finished decoding, he sucked in his cheeks. Something extra, something not foreseen, something else he would have to take care of. Without delay.

Aloysius Fairweather, Jr., United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, had received the message conveyed by the British Foreign Office the previous evening on his return from the Upper Hey ford U.S. Air Force Base. It had been a bad, sad day: receiving permission from Oxford’s coroner to take charge of the body of his President’s son, collecting the casket from the local morticians, who had done their best with little chance of success, and dispatching the tragic cargo back to Washington on Air Force One.

He had been in this post almost three years, the appointee of the new administration, and he knew he had done well, even though he had to succeed the incomparable Charles Price of the Reagan years. But these past four weeks had been a nightmare no ambassador should have to live through.

The Foreign Office request puzzled him, for it was not to see the Foreign Secretary, with whom he normally dealt, but the Home Secretary, Sir Harry Marriott. He knew Sir Harry, as he knew most of the British Ministers, well enough to drop titles in private and revert to first names. But to be called to the Home Office itself, and at the breakfast hour, was unusual, and the Foreign Office message had lacked explanation. His long black Cadillac swept into Victoria Street at five to nine.

“My dear Al.” Marriott was all charm, albeit backed by the gravity the circumstances demanded. “I hope I don’t need to tell you the level of shock that the last few days have brought to this entire country.”

Fairweather nodded. He had no doubt the reaction of the British government and people was totally genuine. For days the queue to sign the condolence book in the embassy lobby had stretched twice around Grosvenor Square. Near the top of the first page was the simple inscription “Elizabeth R,” followed by the entire Cabinet, the two archbishops, the leaders of all the other churches, and thousands of names of the high and the obscure. Sir Harry pushed two manila-bound reports across the desk at him.

“I wanted you to see these first, in private, and I suggest now. There may be matters we should discuss before you leave.”

Dr. Macdonald’s report was the shorter; Fairweather took it first. Simon Cormack had died of massive explosive damage to spine and abdomen, caused by a detonation of small but concentrated effect near the base of his back. At the time he died he was carrying the bomb on his person. There was more, but it was technical jargon about his physique, state of health, last known meal, and so on.

Dr. Barnard had more to say. The bomb Simon Cormack had been carrying on his person was concealed in the broad leather belt he wore around his waist and which had been given him by his abductors to hold up the denim jeans they had also provided him.

The belt had been three inches wide and made of two strips of cowhide sewn together along their edges. At the front it was secured by a heavy and ornate brass buckle, four inches long and slightly wider than the belt itself, decorated at its front by the embossed image of a longhorn steer’s head. It was the sort of belt sold widely in shops specializing in Western or camping equipment. Although appearing solid, the buckle had in fact been hollow.

The explosive had been a two-ounce wafer of Semtex, composed of 45 percent penta tetro ether nitrate (or PETN), 45 percent RDX, and 10 percent plasticizer. The wafer had been three inches long and one-and-a-half inches wide, and had been inserted between the two strands of leather precisely against the young man’s backbone.