Servicemen from nearby Upper Heyford base would bring uniformed USAF to the Infirmary; American tourists on a slab might bring someone from the embassy; but why would Kidlington not say so? He thought of Simon Cormack, widely known to be a student these past nine months, and went to Balliol College. Here he met a pretty Welsh student called Jenny.
She confirmed that Simon Cormack had not come to tutorials that day but took it lightly. He was probably knocking himself out with all that cross-country running. Running? “Yes, he’s the main hope to beat Cambridge in December. Goes for brutal training runs every morning. Usually on Shotover Plain.”
Clive Empson thought he had been kicked in the belly. Accustomed to the idea of spending his life covering affairs for the Oxford Mail, he suddenly saw the bright lights of Fleet Street, London, beckoning. He almost got it right, but he assumed Simon Cormack had been shot. That was the report he filed to a major London newspaper in the late afternoon. It had the effect of forcing the government to make a statement.
Washington insiders will sometimes, in complete privacy, admit to British friends that they would give their right arms for the British governmental system.
The British system is fairly simple. The Queen is the head of state and she stays in place. The head of government is the Prime Minister, who is always the leader of the party that wins the general election. This has two advantages. The nation’s chief executive cannot be at loggerheads with a majority from the opposing political party in Parliament (which facilitates necessary, though not always popular, legislation) and the incoming Prime Minister after an election victory is almost always a skilled and experienced politician at the national level, and probably a former Cabinet Minister in a previous administration. The experience, the know-how, the awareness of how things happen and how to make them happen, are always there.
In London there is a third advantage. Behind the politicians stands an array of senior civil servants who probably served the previous administration, the one before that, and the one before that. With a hundred years of experience at the top between a dozen of them, these “mandarins” are of vital help to the new winners. They know what happened last time and why; they keep the records; they know where the land mines are situated.
In Washington the outgoing incumbent takes almost everything with him—the experience, the advisers, and the records—or, at any rate, those that some congenial colonel has not shredded. The incoming man starts cold, often with experience in government only at the state level, bringing his own team of advisers, who may come in “cold turkey,” just as he does, not quite sure which are the footballs and which the land mines. It accounts for quite a few Washington reputations soon walking around with a permanent limp.
Thus when a stunned Vice President Odell left the Mansion and crossed to the West Wing at 5:05 that October morning, he realized that he was not entirely certain what to do or whom to ask.
“I cannot handle this thing alone, Michael,” the President had told him. “I will try to carry on the duties of the President. I retain the Oval Office. But I cannot chair the Crisis Management Committee. I am too involved, in any case. ... Get him back for me, Michael. Get my son back for me.”
Odell was a much more emotional man than John Cormack. He had never seen his wry, dry, academic friend so distraught, nor ever thought to. He had embraced his President and sworn it would be done. Cormack had returned to the bedroom where the White House physician was administering sedation to a weeping First Lady.
Odell now sat in the center chair at the Cabinet Room table, ordered coffee, and started to make phone calls himself. The snatch had taken place in Britain; that was abroad; he would need the Secretary of State. He called Jim Donaldson and woke him up. He did not tell him why, just to come straight to the Cabinet Room. Donaldson protested. He would be there at nine.
“Jim, get your butt in here now. It’s an emergency. And don’t call the President to check. He can’t take your call, and he’s asked me to handle it.”
While he had been governor of Texas, Michael Odell had always considered foreign affairs a closed book. But he had been in Washington, and Vice President, long enough to have had numberless briefings on foreign affairs issues and to have learned a lot. Those who fell for the deliberately folksy image he liked to cultivate did Odell an injustice, often to their later regret. Michael Odell had not gained the trust and respect of a man like John Cormack because he was a fool. In fact, he was very smart indeed.
He called Bill Walters, the Attorney General, political chief of the FBI. Walters was up and dressed, having taken a call from Don Edmonds, Director of the Bureau. Walters knew already.
“I’m on my way, Michael,” he said. “I want Don Edmonds on hand as well. We’re going to need the Bureau’s expertise here. Also, Don’s man in London is keeping him posted on an hourly basis. We need up-to-date reports. Okay?”
“That’s great,” said Odell with relief. “Bring Edmonds.”
When the full group was present by 6:00 A.M., it also included Hubert Reed of Treasury (responsible for the Secret Service); Morton Stannard of Defense; Brad Johnson, the National Security Adviser; and Lee Alexander, Director of Central Intelligence. Waiting and available in addition to Don Edmonds were Creighton Burbank of the Secret Service, and the Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA.
Lee Alexander was aware that although he was DCI, he was a political appointee, not a career intelligence officer. The man who headed up the entire operational area of the Agency was the DDO, David Weintraub. He waited outside with the others.
Don Edmonds had also brought one of his top men. Under the Director of the FBI come three executive assistant directors, heading respectively Law Enforcement Services, Administration, and Investigations. Within Investigations were three divisions—Intelligence, International Liaison (from which came Patrick Seymour in London), and Criminal Investigations Division. The EAD for Investigations, Buck Revell, was away sick, so Edmonds had brought the assistant director in charge of the CID, Philip Kelly.
“We’d better have them all in,” suggested Brad Johnson. “As of now, they know more than we do.”
Everyone concurred. Later the experts would form the Crisis Management Group, meeting in the Situation Room downstairs, next to the Communications Center, for convenience and privacy. Later still, the Cabinet men would join them there, when the telephoto lenses on the press cameras began to peer through the windows of the Cabinet Room and across the Rose Garden.
First they heard from Creighton Burbank, an angry man who blamed the British squarely for the disaster. He gave them everything he had learned from his own team in Summertown, a report that covered everything up to the runner’s departure from Woodstock Road that morning, and what his men had later seen and learned at Shotover Plain.
“I’ve got two men dead,” he snapped, “two widows and three orphans to see. And all because those bastards can’t run a security operation. I wish it to go on record, gentlemen, that my service repeatedly asked that Simon Cormack not spend a year abroad, and that we needed fifty men in there, not a dozen.”
“Okay, you were right,” said Odell placatingly.
Don Edmonds had just taken a long call from the FBI man in London, Patrick Seymour. He filled them in on everything else he had learned right up to the close of the first COBRA meeting under the Cabinet Office, which had just ended.
“Just what happens in a kidnap case?” asked Hubert Reed mildly.
Of all President Cormack’s senior advisers in the room, Reed was the one generally deemed to be least likely to cope with the tough political infighting habitually associated with power in Washington.
He was a short man whose air of diffidence, even defenselessness, was accentuated by owllike eyeglasses. He had inherited wealth, and had started on Wall Street as a pension-fund manager with a major brokerage house. A sound nose for investments had made him a leading financier by his early fifties, and he had in previous years managed the Cormack family
trusts—which was how the two men met and became friends.
It was Reed’s genius for finance that had caused John Cormack to invite him to Washington, where, at Treasury, he had managed to hold America’s spiraling budget deficit within some limits. So long as the matter at hand was finance, Hubert Reed was at home; only when he was made privy to some of the “hard” operations of the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Secret Service, both subagencies of the Treasury Department, did he become thoroughly uncomfortable.
Don Edmonds glanced at Philip Kelly for an answer to Reed’s question. Kelly was the crime expert in the room.
“Normally, unless the abductors and their hideout can be quickly established, you wait until they make contact and demand a ransom. After that, you try to negotiate the return of the victim. Investigations continue, of course, to try to locate the whereabouts of the criminals. If that fails, it’s down to negotiation.”
“In this case, by whom?” asked Stannard.
There was silence. America has some of the most sophisticated alarm systems in the world. Her scientists have developed infrared sensors that can detect body heat from several miles above the earth’s surface; there are noise sensors that can hear a mouse breathe at a mile; there are movement and light sensors to pick up a cigarette stub from inner space. But no system in the entire arsenal can match the CYA sensor system that operates in Washington. It had already been in action for two hours and now was headed for peak performance.
“We need a presence over there,” urged Walters. “We can’t just leave this entirely to the British. We have to be seen to be doing something, something positive, something to get that boy back.”
“Hell, yes,” exploded Odell. “We can say they lost the boy, even though the Secret Service insisted that the British police take a backseat.” Burbank glared at him. “We have the leverage. We can insist we participate in their investigation.”
“We can hardly send a Washington Police Department team in to take over from Scotland Yard on their real estate,” Attorney General Walters pointed out.
“Well, what about the negotiation, then?” asked Brad Johnson. There was still silence from the professionals. By his insistence, Johnson was blatantly infringing the rules of Cover Your Ass.
Odell spoke, to mask the hesitation of them all. “If it comes to negotiation,” he asked, “who is the best hostage-recovery negotiator in the world?”
“Out at Quantico,” ventured Kelly, “we have the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Group. They handle our kidnap negotiations here in America. They’re the best we have over here.”
“I said, who’s the best in the world?” repeated the Vice President.
“The most consistently successful hostage-recovery negotiator in the world,” remarked Weintraub quietly, “is a man called Quinn. I know him—knew him once, at any rate.”
Ten pairs of eyes swiveled toward the CIA man.
“Background him,” commanded Odell.
“He’s American,” said Weintraub. “After leaving the Army he joined an insurance company in Hartford. After two years they sent him to head their Paris operation, covering all their clients in Europe. He married, had a daughter. His French wife and child were killed in an expressway accident outside Orléans. He hit the bottle, Hartford fired him, he pulled himself back together, and he went to work for a firm of Lloyd’s underwriters in London, a firm specializing in personal security and, thus, hostage negotiation.
“So far as I recall, he spent ten years with them—1978 through ’88. Then he retired. Till then he had handled personally—or, where there was a language problem, advised on—over a dozen successful hostage recoveries all over Europe. As you know, Europe is the kidnap capital of the developed world. I believe he speaks three languages outside of English, and he knows Britain and Europe like the back of his hand.”
“Is he the man for us?” asked Odell. “Could he handle this for the U.S.?”
Weintraub shrugged. “You asked who was the best in the world, Mr. Vice President,” he pointed out. There were nods of relief around the table.
“Where is he now?” asked Odell.
“I believe he retired to the South of Spain, sir. We’ll have it all on file back at Langley.”
“Go get him, Mr. Weintraub,” said Odell. “Get him back here, this Mr. Quinn. No matter what it takes.”
At 7:00 P.M. that evening the first news hit the TV screens like an exploding bomb. On TVE a gabbling newscaster told a stunned Spanish public of the events of that morning outside the city of Oxford. The men around the bar at Antonio’s in Alcántara del Rio watched in silence. Antonio brought the tall man a complimentary glass of the house wine.
“Mala cosa,” he said sympathetically. The tall man did not take his eyes from the screen.
“No es mi asunto,” he said, puzzlingly. It is not my affair.
* * *
David Weintraub took off from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington at 10:00 A.M. Washington time in a USAF VC20A, the military version of the Gulfstream Three. She crossed the Atlantic direct, cruising at 43,000 feet and making 483 mph, in seven and a half hours, with a helpful tail wind.
With six hours’ time difference, it was 11:30 P.M. when the DDO, CIA, landed at Rota, the U.S. Navy air base across the bay from Cádiz, Andalusia. He transferred at once to a waiting Navy SH2F Sea Sprite helicopter, which lifted away toward the east before he was even seated. The rendezvous was the wide, flat beach called Casares, and here the young staffer who had driven down from Madrid was waiting for him with a car from the Madrid Station. Sneed was a brash, bright young man fresh out of CIA training school at Camp Peary, Virginia, and seeking to impress the DDO. Weintraub sighed.
They drove carefully through Manilva, operative Sneed twice asking directions, and found Alcántara del Rio just after midnight. The whitewashed casita out of town was harder, but a helpful peasant pointed the way.
The limousine eased to a halt and Sneed killed the engine. They got out, surveyed the darkened cottage, and Sneed tried the door. It was on the latch. They walked straight into the wide, cool ground-floor sitting area. By the moonlight Weintraub could make out a man’s room: cowhide rugs over quarry tiles, easy chairs, an old refectory table of Spanish oak, a wall of books.
Sneed began poking about looking for a light switch. Weintraub noticed the three oil lamps and knew he was wasting his time. There would be a diesel generator out back to give electricity for cooking and bathing, probably shut off at sundown. Sneed was still clattering about. Weintraub took a step forward. He felt the needle tip of the knife just below the lobe of his right ear, and froze. The man had come down the tiled stair from the bedroom without a sound.
“Been a long time since Son Tay, Quinn,” said Weintraub in a low voice. The knife point moved away from his jugular.
“What’s that, sir?” asked Sneed cheerfully from the other end of the room. A shadow moved over the tiles, a match flared, and the oil lamp on the table gave a warm glow to the room. Sneed jumped a foot. Major Kerkorian in Belgrade would have loved him.
“Tiring journey,” said Weintraub. “Mind if I sit?”
Quinn was in a cotton wraparound from the waist down, like a sarong from the Orient. Bare to the waist, lean, work-hardened. Sneed’s mouth fell open at the scars.
“I’m out of it, David,” said Quinn. He seated himself at the refectory table, at the opposite end from the DDO. “I’m retired.”
He pushed a tumbler and the earthenware pitcher of red wine toward Weintraub, who poured a glass, drank, and nodded with appreciation. A rough red wine. It would never see the tables of the rich. A peasant’s and a soldier’s wine.
“Please, Quinn.”
Sneed was amazed. DDOs did not say “please.” They gave orders.
“I’m not coming,” said Quinn. Sneed came into the light glow, his jacket hanging free. He allowed it to swing to show the butt of the piece he carried in a hip holster. Quinn did not even look at him. He stared at Weintraub.
/> “Who is this asshole?” he inquired mildly.
“Sneed,” said Weintraub firmly, “go check the tires.”
Sneed went outside. Weintraub sighed.
“Quinn, the business at Taormina. The little girl. We know. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Can’t you understand? I’m out. It’s over. No more. You’ve wasted your journey. Get someone else.”
“There is no one else. The Brits have people, good people. Washington says we need an American. In-house, we don’t have anyone to match you when it comes to Europe.”
“Washington wants to protect its ass,” snapped Quinn. “They always do. They need a fall guy in case it goes wrong.”
“Yeah, maybe,” admitted Weintraub. “But one last time, Quinn. Not for Washington, not for the Establishment, not even for the boy. For the parents. They need the best. I told the committee you’re it.”
Quinn stared around the room, studying his few but treasured possessions as if he might not see them again.
“I have a price,” he said at last.
“Name it,” said the DDO simply.
“Bring my grapes in. Bring in the harvest.”
They walked outside ten minutes later, Quinn hefting a gunnysack, dressed in dark trousers, sneakers on bare feet, a shirt. Sneed held open the car door. Quinn took the front passenger seat; Weintraub, the wheel.
“You stay here,” he said to Sneed. “Bring in his grapes.”
“Do what?” Sneed gasped.
“You heard. Go down to the village in the morning, rent some labor, and bring in the man’s grape harvest. I’ll tell Madrid Head of Station it’s okay.”
He used a hand communicator to summon the Sea Sprite, which was hovering over Casares beach when they arrived. They climbed aboard and wheeled away through the velvety darkness toward Rota and Washington.
Chapter 5
David Weintraub was away from Washington for just twenty hours. On the eight-hour flight from Rota to Andrews, he gained six hours in time zones, landing at the Maryland headquarters of the 89th Military Airlift Wing at 4:00 A.M. In the intervening period two governments, in Washington and London, had been virtually under siege.