“You mean the British are listening to all this as well?” asked Brown dourly.
“Only the phone lines,” said Seymour. “We have to have their cooperation on telephones—they own the exchanges. Besides, they could have a good input on voice patterns, speech defects, regional accents. And of course the call-tracing has got to be done by them, right out of the Kensington exchange. We don’t have an untappable line from the apartment to this basement.”
Collins coughed.
“Yes, we do,” he said, “but it only works for the room bugs. We have two apartments in that building. All the stuff on all the room bugs is fed on internal wires down to our second and smaller apartment in the basement. I have a man down there now. In the basement the speech is scrambled, transmitted on ultrashort-wave radio up here, received, descrambled, and piped down here.”
“You radio it for just a mile?” asked Brown.
“Sir, my Agency gets on very well with the British. But no secret service in the world will ever pipe classified information through the land lines running under a city they do not control.”
Brown enjoyed that. “So the Brits can hear the phone conversations but not the room talk.”
He was wrong, actually. Once MI-5 knew of the Kensington apartment, that the two Metropolitan chief inspectors were not being allowed to live in, and that their own bugs had been removed, they calculated there must be a second American apartment in there to relay Soviet debriefings to CIA Control somewhere else. Within an hour the apartment-building records had pinpointed the small bed-sitter in the basement. By midnight a team of plumbers had found the connecter wires running through the central heating system, and did an intercept from a ground-floor apartment, whose tenant was courteously urged to take a brief vacation and thus assist Her Majesty. By sunrise everyone was listening to everyone.
Collins’s ELINT—electronic intelligence—man at the console lifted the headset off his ears.
“Quinn’s just finished with the caller,” he said. “Now they’ll talk among themselves. You want to hear, sir?”
“Sure,” said Brown.
The engineer threw the conversation in the sitting room in Kensington from headset to wall mike. Quinn’s voice came through the speaker.
“... would be fine. Thanks, Sam. Milk and sugar.”
“Do you think he’ll call back, Mr. Quinn?” That was McCrea.
“Nope. Plausible, but he didn’t smell right.” Quinn.
The men in the embassy basement turned to go. Cots had been set up in a number of nearby offices. Brown intended to stay on the job at all times. He designated two of his eight men to take the night watch. It was 2:30 A.M.
The same conversations, on the phone and in the sitting room, had been heard and logged in the MI-5 communications center in Cork Street. In the Kensington telephone exchange the police heard only the telephone call, traced it within eight seconds to a phone booth in nearby Paddington, and dispatched a plainclothes officer from Paddington Green police station, two hundred yards from the booth. He arrested an old man with a history of mental illness.
At 9:00 A.M. on the third day, one of the women in Grosvenor Square took another call. The voice was English, rough, curt.
“Put me through to the negotiator.”
The girl went pale. No one had used that word before. She kept her voice honeyed.
“Putting you through, sir.”
Quinn had the receiver in his hand at half a ring. The girl’s voice was a rapid whisper.
“Someone asking for the negotiator. Just that.”
Half a second later the connection was made. Quinn’s deep, reassuring voice came through the speakers.
“Hi there, pal. You wanted to speak to me?”
“You want Simon Cormack back, it’s going to cost you. A lot. Now listen to me—”
“No, friend, you listen to me. I’ve had a dozen hoax calls already today. You can understand how many crazies there are in this world, right? So do me a favor—just a simple question ...”
In Kensington the tracers got a “lock” in eight seconds, Hitchin, Hertfordshire ... a public booth in ... the railway station. Cramer got it at the Yard ten seconds later; Hitchin police station was slower to get in gear. Their man set off in a car thirty seconds later, was dropped two corners from the station a minute thereafter, and came ambling around the corner toward the booths 141 seconds after the call began. Too late. The man had spent thirty seconds on the line and was by then three streets away, lost in the morning throng.
McCrea stared at Quinn in amazement.
“You hung up on him,” he said.
“Had to,” said Quinn laconically. “By the time I had finished we were out of time.”
“If you’d kept him on the line,” said Sam Somerville, “the police might have caught him.”
“If he’s the man, I want to give him confidence, not a bad fright—yet,” said Quinn, and lapsed into silence. He seemed completely relaxed; his two companions were strung out with tension, staring at the phone as if it might ring again. Quinn knew the man could not possibly get back to another phone booth for a couple of hours. He had learned long ago in combat: If you cannot do anything but wait, relax.
In Grosvenor Square, Kevin Brown had been awakened by one of his men and hustled into the listening post in time to hear the end of Quinn’s conversation.
“... is the name of that book? You answer me that and call me right back. I’ll be waiting, pal. Bye now.”
Collins and Seymour joined him, and all three listened to the playback.
Then they switched to wall speaker and heard Sam Somerville make her point.
“Right,” growled Brown.
They heard Quinn’s reply.
“Asshole,” said Brown. “Another couple of minutes and they could have caught that bastard.”
“They get one,” pointed out Seymour. “The others still have the boy.”
“So get the one and persuade him to reveal the hideout,” said Brown. He smacked one beefy fist into the palm of his other hand.
“They probably have a deadline. It’s something we use if a member of one of our networks gets taken. If he doesn’t show back at the hideout in, say, ninety minutes, allowing for traffic, the others know he’s been taken. They waste the kid and vaporize.”
“Look, sir, these men have nothing to lose,” added Seymour, to Brown’s irritation. “Even if they walk in and hand Simon back, they’re going to do life anyway. They killed two Secret Service men and a British cop.”
“That Quinn just better know what he’s doing,” said Brown as he walked out.
There were three loud knocks on the door of Simon Cormack’s cellar prison at 10:15. He pulled on his hood. When he took it off, a card was propped against the wall by the door.
WHEN YOU WERE A KID ON HOLIDAY AT NANTUCKET,
YOUR AUNT EMILY USED TO READ TO YOU FROM HER
FAVOURITE BOOK. WHICH BOOK WAS IT?
He stared at the card. A wave of relief swept over him. Someone was in contact. Someone had spoken to his father in Washington. Someone was out there trying to get him back. He tried to fight back the tears, but they kept welling up into his eyes. Someone was watching through the peephole. He snuffled; he had no handkerchief. He thought back to Aunt Emily, his father’s elder sister, prim in her high-necked cotton dresses, taking him for walks along the beach, sitting him on a tussock and reading about little animals who talked and acted like humans. He sniffed again and shouted the answer at the peephole. It closed. The door opened a fraction; a black-gloved hand came around the corner and withdrew the card.
* * *
The man with the gruff voice came through again at 1:30 P.M. The patch-through from the embassy was immediate. The call was traced in eleven seconds—to a booth in a shopping mall at Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. By the time a plainclothes officer from the Milton Keynes force reached the booth and looked around, the caller had been gone for ninety seconds. On the line he had wasted no time
.
“The book,” he rasped. “Called The Wind in the Willows.”
“Okay, friend, you’re the man I’ve been waiting to speak to. Now take this number, get off the line, and call me from a fresh booth. It’s a line that reaches me, and me only. Three-seven-oh; zero-zero-four-zero. Please stay in touch. Bye now.”
Again he replaced the receiver. This time he raised his head and addressed the wall.
“Collins, you can tell Washington we have our man. Simon is alive. They want to talk. You can dismantle the telephone exchange in the embassy.”
They heard it all right. They all heard it. Collins used his encoded flash line to Weintraub in Langley, and he told Odell, who told the President. Within minutes the switchboard operators in Grosvenor Square were being sent away. There was one last call, a plaintive, whining voice.
“We are the Proletarian Liberation Army. We are holding Simon Cormack. Unless America destroys all her nuclear weapons—”
The switchboard girl’s voice was like running molasses.
“Honeychild,” she said, “go screw yourself.”
“You did it again,” said McCrea. “You hung up on him.”
“He has a point,” said Sam. “These people can be unbalanced. Couldn’t that kind of treatment annoy him to the point of hurting Simon Cormack?”
“Possible,” said Quinn. “But I hope I’m right, and I think I am. Doesn’t sound like political terrorists. I’m praying he’s just a professional killer.”
They were aghast.
“What’s so good about a professional killer?” asked Sam.
“Not a lot,” admitted Quinn, who seemed strangely relieved. “But a professional only works for money. And so far he doesn’t have any.”
Chapter 7
The kidnapper did not call back until six that evening. In the interim Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea stared at the flash-line telephone almost without cease, praying that whoever he was, the man would call back and not sever communication.
Quinn alone seemed to have the ability to relax. He lay on the sitting-room sofa, stretched out with his shoes off, reading a book. The Anabasis by Xenophon, Sam reported quietly from the phone in her room. He had brought it from Spain.
“Never heard of it,” grumbled Brown in the basement of the embassy.
“It’s about military tactics,” volunteered Seymour helpfully, “by a Greek general.”
Brown grunted. He knew they were members of NATO but that was about it.
The British police were far busier. Two telephone booths, one in Hitchin, a small and pretty provincial town at the northern tip of Hertfordshire, the other in the great new-town sprawl of Milton Keynes, were visited by quiet men from Scotland Yard and dusted for fingerprints. There were dozens, but though they did not know it, none belonged to the kidnapper, who had worn flesh-colored surgical gloves.
Discreet inquiries were made in the vicinity of both booths to discover if any witness might have seen the booths being used at the specific moments that the calls were made. No one had noticed, not to a matter of seconds. Both booths were in banks of three or four, all in constant use. Besides, both places had been crowded at the time. Cramer grunted.
“He’s using the daily rush hours. Morning and lunch.”
The tapes of the caller’s voice were taken to a professor of philology, an expert in speech patterns and the origins of accents, but Quinn had done most of the talking and the academic shook his head.
“He’s using several layers of paper tissue or a thin cloth over the mouthpiece of the phone,” he said. “Crude, but fairly effective. It won’t fool the speech-pattern oscillators, but I, like the machines, need more material to discern patterns.”
Commander Williams promised to bring him more material when the man phoned again. During the day, six houses went quietly under surveillance. One was in London, the other five in the Home Counties. All were rented properties, all six-month leases. By nightfall two had been cleared: a French bank official in one, married with two children, working quite legitimately for the London branch of the Société Générale; and in the other, a German professor doing research work at the British Museum.
By the end of the week the other four would also be cleared, but the property market was producing more “possibles” in a constant stream. They would all be checked out.
“If the criminals have actually bought a property,” Cramer told the COBRA committee, “or borrowed one from a bona fide homeowner, I’m afraid it becomes impossible. In the latter case there would be no trace at all; in the former the volume of house purchases in the Southeast in any one year would simply swamp our resources for months on end.”
Privately Nigel Cramer favored Quinn’s argument (which he had heard on tape) that the caller sounded more like a professional criminal than a political terrorist. Still, the run-through of both kinds of lawbreaker went on and would do so until the end of the case. Even if the abductors were underworld criminals, they might have acquired their Czech machine pistol from a terrorist group. The two worlds sometimes met and did business.
If the British police were overwhelmed with work, the problem for the American team in the basement of the embassy was idleness. Kevin Brown paced the long room like a caged lion. Four of his men were on their cots, the other four watching the light that would flash on when the single dedicated phone in the Kensington apartment, whose number the kidnapper now had, was used. The light flashed at two minutes after six.
To everyone’s amazement, Quinn let it ring four times. Then he answered, getting in the first words.
“Hi, there. Glad you called.”
“Like I said, you want Simon Cormack back alive, it’s going to cost you.” Same voice, deep, gruff, throaty, and muffled by paper tissues.
“Okay, let’s talk,” said Quinn in a friendly tone. “My name’s Quinn. Just Quinn. Can you give me a name?”
“Get stuffed.”
“Come on, not the real one. We’re not fools, either of us. Any name. Just so I can say ‘Hi there, Smith, or Jones—’ ”
“Zack,” said the voice.
“Z-A-C-K? You got it. Listen, Zack, you’ve got to keep these calls to twenty seconds, right? I’m not a magician. The spooks are listening and tracing. Call me back in a couple of hours and we’ll talk again. Okay?”
“Yeah,” said Zack, and put the phone down.
The Kensington exchange wizards had got their “lock” in seven seconds. Another public phone booth, in the town center of Great Dunmow, county of Essex, nine miles west of the M.11 motorway from London to Cambridge. Like the other two towns, north of London. A small town with a small police station. The plainclothes officer reached the bank of three booths eighty seconds after the phone was hung up. Too late. At that hour, with the shops closing and the pubs open, there was a swirl of people but no one looking furtive, or wearing a ginger wig, moustache, and tinted glasses. Zack had chosen the third daily rush hour, early evening, dusk but not yet dark, for in the dark, phone booths are illuminated inside.
In the embassy basement Kevin Brown exploded.
“Who the hell’s side does Quinn think he’s on?” he asked. “He’s treating that bastard like the flavor of the month.”
His four agents nodded in unison.
In Kensington, Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea asked much the same question. Quinn just lay back on the couch, shrugged, and returned to his book. Unlike the newcomers, he knew he had two things to do: try to get into the mind of the man on the other end of the line, and try to gain his confidence.
He suspected already that Zack was no fool. So far, at any rate, he had made few mistakes, or he would have been caught by now. So he must know his calls would be monitored and traced. Quinn had told him nothing he did not know already. Volunteering the advice that would keep Zack safe and at large would teach Zack nothing he wouldn’t be doing anyway, without instruction.
Quinn was just bridge-building, repugnant though the task was, laying down the first bri
cks in a relationship with a killer that, he hoped, would cause the man almost involuntarily to believe that Quinn and he shared a common goal—an exchange—and that the authorities were really the bad guys.
From his years in England, Quinn knew that to British ears the American accent can appear the friendliest tone in the world. Something about the drawl. More amiable than the clipped British voice. He had accentuated his drawl a mite beyond its usual level. It was vital not to give Zack the impression he was putting him down or making a mockery of him in any way. Also vital to let nothing slip as to how much he loathed the man who was crucifying a father and a mother three thousand miles away. He was so persuasive he fooled Kevin Brown.
But not Cramer.
“I wish he’d keep the bastard talking a while longer,” said Commander Williams. “One of our country colleagues might get a look at him, or his car.”
Cramer shook his head.
“Not yet,” he said. “Our problem is, these detective constables in the smaller county stations are not trained agents when it comes to shadowing people. Quinn will try to extend the speaking periods later and hope Zack doesn’t notice.”
Zack did not call that evening; not until the following morning.
Andy Laing took the day off and flew by an internal Saudia commuter flight to Riyadh, where he sought and was given a meeting with the general manager, Steve Pyle.
The office block of SAIB in the Saudi capital was a far cry from the Foreign Legion fort building in Jiddah. The bank had really spent some money here, constructing a tower of buff-colored marble, sandstone, and polished granite. Laing crossed the vast central atrium at ground-floor level, the only sound the clack of his heels on the marble and the splash of the cooling fountains.
Even in mid-October it was fiercely hot outside, but the atrium was like a garden in spring. After a thirty-minute wait he was shown into the office of the general manager on the top floor, a suite so lush that even the president of Rockman-Queens, on a stopover visit six months earlier, had found it more luxurious than his own New York penthouse quarters.