The Negotiator

  Steve Pyle was a big, bluff executive who prided himself on his paternal handling of his younger staff of all nationalities. His slightly flushed complexion indicated that though the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia might be “dry” down at street level, his own cocktail cabinet lacked for nothing.

  He greeted Laing with geniality but some surprise.

  “Mr. Al-Haroun didn’t warn me you were coming, Andy,” he said. “I’d have had a car meet you at the airport.”

  Mr. Al-Haroun was the manager at Jiddah, Laing’s Saudi boss.

  “I didn’t tell him, sir. I just took a day’s leave. I think we have a problem down there and I wanted to bring it to your attention.”

  “Andy, Andy, my name’s Steve, right? Glad you came. So what’s the problem?”

  Laing had not brought the printouts with him; if anyone at Jiddah was involved in the scam, taking them would have given the game away. But he had copious notes. He spent an hour explaining to Pyle what he had found.

  “It can’t be coincidence, Steve,” he argued. “There is no way these figures can be explained except as major bank fraud.”

  Steve Pyle’s geniality had dropped away as Laing explained his predicament. They had been sitting in the deep club chairs of Spanish leather that were grouped around the low beaten-brass coffee table. Pyle rose and walked to the smoked-glass wall, which gave a spectacular view over the desert for many miles around. Finally he turned and walked back to the table. His broad smile was back, his hand outstretched.

  “Andy, you are a very observant young man. Very bright. And loyal. I appreciate that. I appreciate your coming to me with this ... problem.” He escorted Laing to the door. “Now I want you to leave this with me. Think nothing more about it. I’ll handle this one personally. Believe me, you’re going to go a long way.”

  Andy Laing left the bank building and headed back to Jiddah aglow with self-righteousness. He had done the proper thing. The GM would put a stop to the swindle.

  When he had left, Steve Pyle drummed his fingers on his desk top for several minutes, then made a single phone call.

  Zack’s fourth call, and second on the flash line, was at quarter to nine in the morning. It was traced to Royston, on the northern border of Hertfordshire, where that county abuts Cambridge. The police officer who got there two minutes later was ninety seconds adrift. And there were no fingerprints.

  “Quinn, let’s keep it short. I want five million dollars, and fast. Small denominations, used bills.”

  “Jeez, Zack, that’s a hell of a lot. You know how much that weighs?”

  A pause. Zack was bemused by the unexpectedness of the reference to the money’s weight.

  “That’s it, Quinn. Don’t argue. Any tricks and we can always send you a couple of fingers to straighten you out.”

  In Kensington, McCrea gagged and skittered away to the bathroom. He hit a coffee table on the way.

  “Who’s with you?” snarled Zack.

  “A spook,” said Quinn. “You know the way it is. These assholes are not going to leave me alone, now are they?”

  “I meant what I said.”

  “Come on, Zack, there’s no need for that. We’re both pros. Right? Let’s keep it like that, eh? We do what we have to do, nothing more or less. Now time’s up. Get off the line.”

  “Just get the money, Quinn.”

  “I have to deal with the father on this one. Call me back in twenty-four hours. By the way, how is the kid?”

  “Fine. So far.” Zack cut the call and left the booth. He had been on-line for thirty-one seconds. Quinn replaced the receiver. McCrea came back into the room.

  “If you ever do that again,” said Quinn softly, “I will have you both out of here instantly, and screw the Agency and the Bureau.”

  McCrea was so apologetic he looked ready to cry.

  In the basement of the embassy Brown looked at Collins.

  “Your man fouled up,” he said. “What was that bang on the line anyway?”

  Without waiting for an answer he picked up the direct line from the basement to the apartment. Sam Somerville took it and explained about the threat of severed fingers, and McCrea’s knee hitting the coffee table.

  When she put the phone down, Quinn asked, “Who was that?”

  “Mr. Brown,” she said formally. “Mr. Kevin Brown.”

  “Who’s he?” asked Quinn. Sam glanced nervously at the walls.

  “The Deputy Assistant Director of the C.I. Division at the Bureau,” she said formally, knowing Brown was listening.

  Quinn made a gesture of exasperation. Sam shrugged.

  There was a conference at noon, in the apartment. The feeling was that Zack would not phone back until the next morning, allowing the Americans to think over his demand.

  Kevin Brown came, with Collins and Seymour. So did Nigel Cramer, who brought Commander Williams. Quinn had met all but Brown and Williams.

  “You can tell Zack that Washington agrees,” said Brown. “It came through twenty minutes ago. I hate it myself, but it’s been agreed. Five million dollars.”

  “But I don’t agree,” said Quinn.

  Brown stared at him as if unable to believe his ears.

  “Oh, you don’t agree, Quinn. You don’t agree. The government of the U.S.A. agrees, but Mr. Quinn doesn’t agree. May we ask why?”

  “Because it is highly dangerous to agree to a kidnapper’s first demand,” said Quinn quietly. “Do that, and he thinks he should have asked for more. A man who thinks that, thinks he has been fooled in some way. If he’s a psychopath, that makes him angry. He has no one on whom to vent that anger but the hostage.”

  “You think Zack is a psychopath?” asked Seymour.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” said Quinn. “But one of his sidekicks may be. Even if Zack’s the one in charge—and he may not be—psychos can go out of control.”

  “Then what do you advise?” asked Collins. Brown snorted.

  “It’s still early days,” said Quinn. “Simon Cormack’s best chance of surviving unhurt lies in the kidnappers’ believing two things: that they have finally screwed out of the family the absolute maximum they can pay; and that they will see that money only if they produce Simon alive and unharmed. They won’t come to those conclusions in a few seconds. On top of that, the police may yet get a break and find them.”

  “I agree with Mr. Quinn,” said Cramer. “It may take a couple of weeks. It sounds harsh, but it’s better than a rushed and botched case resulting in an error of judgment and a dead boy.”

  “Any more time you can give me I’d appreciate,” said Commander Williams.

  “So what do I tell Washington?” demanded Brown.

  “You tell them,” said Quinn calmly, “that they asked me to negotiate Simon’s return, and I am trying to do that. If they want to pull me off the case, that’s fine. They just have to tell the President that.”

  Collins coughed. Seymour stared at the floor. The meeting ended.

  When Zack phoned again, Quinn was apologetic.

  “Look, I tried to get through to President Cormack personally. No way. The man’s under sedation much of the time. I mean, he’s going through hell—”

  “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 f
rom 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 somew
here 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.