“Of course not,” said Jim Donaldson. “This country will pay that easily, for the President’s son. I’m just surprised it’s taken two weeks.”
“Actually, that’s pretty fast, or so I’m told,” said Bill Walters. Don Edmonds of the FBI nodded his agreement.
“We want to rehear the rest, the tapes from the apartment?” asked the Vice President.
No one needed to.
“Mr. Edmonds, what about what Mr. Cramer, the Scotland Yard man, told Quinn? Any comments from your people?”
Edmonds cast a sidelong glance at Philip Kelly, but answered for the Bureau.
“Our people at Quantico agree with their British colleagues,” he said. “This Zack is at the end of his tether, wants to close it down, make an exchange. The strain in his voice is coming through, hence the threats most probably. They also agree with the analysts over there on another thing. Which is that Quinn appears to have established some kind of wary empathy with this animal Zack. It seems his efforts—which are what has taken two weeks”—he glanced at Jim Donaldson as he spoke—“to portray himself as the guy trying to help Zack, and all the rest of us here and there as the bad guys making problems, has worked. Zack has an element of trust for Quinn, but for no one else. That may prove crucial at the safe-handover process. At least, that’s what the voice analysts and behavioral psychologists are saying.”
“Lord, what a job, having to sweet-talk scum like that,” observed Jim Donaldson with distaste.
David Weintraub, who had been staring at the ceiling, cast an eye toward the Secretary of State. To keep these amateurs in their high office, he might have said but did not, he and his people sometimes had to deal with creatures just as nasty as Zack.
“Okay, gentlemen,” said Odell, “we go with the deal. At last the ball is back with us in America, so let’s make it fast. Personally I think this Quinn has done a pretty good job. If he can get the boy back safe and sound, we owe him. Now, diamonds. Where do we get them?”
“New York,” said Weintraub, “diamond center of the country.”
“Morton, you’re from New York. Have you got any discreet contacts you could tap into fast?” Odell asked the ex-banker.
“Certainly,” Stannard said. “When I was with Rockman-Queens we had a number of clients who were high in the diamond trade. Very discreet—they have to be. You want me to handle it? How about the money?”
“The President has insisted he will personally pay the ransom, won’t have it any other way,” said Odell. “But I don’t see why he should be troubled by these details. Hubert, could the Treasury make a personal loan until the President can liquidate trust funds?”
“No problem,” said Hubert Reed. “You’ll have your money, Morton.”
The committee rose. Odell had to see the President over at the Executive Mansion.
“Fast as you can, Morton,” he said. “We want to be talking here in two to three days. Tops.”
In fact, it would take another seven.
It was not until morning that Andy Laing could secure an interview with Mr. Al-Haroun, the branch manager. But he did not waste the night.
Mr. Al-Haroun, when confronted, was as gently apologetic as only a well-bred Arab can be when confronted by an angry Occidental. The matter gave him enormous regret, no doubt an unhappy situation whose solution lay in the lap of the all-merciful Allah; nothing would give him greater pleasure than to return to Mr. Laing his passport, which he had taken into nightly safekeeping only at the specific request of Mr. Pyle. He went to his safe and, with slim brown fingers, withdrew the blue United States passport and handed it back.
Laing was mollified, thanked him with the more formal and gracious “Ashkurak,” and withdrew. Only when he had returned to his own office did it occur to him to flick through the passport’s pages.
In Saudi Arabia, foreigners not only need an entry visa, but an exit visa as well. His own, formerly valid without limit of time, had been canceled. The stamp of the Jiddah Immigration Control office was perfectly genuine. No doubt, he mused bitterly, Mr. Al-Haroun had a friend in that bureau. It was, after all, the local way of doing things.
Aware there was no going back, Andy Laing determined to scrap it out. He recalled something the Operations manager had once told him.
“Amin, my friend, did you not mention once that you had a relative in the Immigration Service here?” he asked him. Amin saw no trap in the question.
“Yes, indeed. A cousin.”
“In which office is he based?”
“Ah, not here, my friend. He is in Dhahran.”
Dhahran was not near Jiddah, on the Red Sea, but right across the country in the extreme east, on the Persian Gulf. In the late morning Andy Laing made a phone call to Mr. Zulfiqar Amin at his desk in Dhahran.
“This is Mr. Steven Pyle, General Manager of the Saudi Arabian Investment Bank,” he said. “I have one of my officers conducting business in Dhahran at this moment. He will need to fly on urgent matters to Bahrein tonight. Unfortunately he tells me his exit visa is time-expired. You know how long these things can take through normal channels. ... I was wondering, in view of your cousin being in such high esteem with us ... You will find Mr. Laing a most generous man. ...”
Using the lunch hour, Andy Laing returned to his apartment, packed his bags, and caught the 3:00 P.M. Saudia airline flight to Dhahran. Mr. Zulfiqar Amin was expecting him. The reissue of an exit visa took two hours and a thousand riyals.
Mr. Al-Haroun noticed the absence of the Credit and Marketing Manager around the time he took off for Dhahran. He checked the Jiddah airport, but only the international departures office. No trace of a Mr. Laing. Puzzled, he called Riyadh. Pyle asked if a block could be put on Laing’s boarding any flight at all, even internal.
“I’m afraid, dear colleague, that cannot be arranged,” said Mr. Al-Haroun, who hated to disappoint. “But I can ask my friend if he has left by any internal flight.”
Laing was traced into Dhahran just at the moment he crossed the frontier on the causeway to the neighboring Emirate of Bahrein. From there he easily caught a British Airways flight on a stopover from Mauritius to London.
Unaware that Laing had obtained a new exit visa, Pyle waited till the following morning, then asked his bank staff in the Dhahran office to check around the city and find out what Laing was doing there. It took them three days and they came up with nothing.
Three days after the Secretary of Defense was charged by the Washington committee with obtaining the package of diamonds demanded by Zack, he reported back that the task was taking longer than foreseen. The money had been made available; that was not the problem.
“Look,” he told his colleagues, “I know nothing about diamonds. But my contacts in the trade—I am using three, all very discreet and understanding men—tell me the number of stones involved is very substantial.
“This kidnapper has asked for uncut, rough melees—mixtures—of one fifth of a carat to half a carat, and of medium quality. Such stones, I am told, are worth between two hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars a carat. To be on the safe side they are calculating the base price of two-fifty. We are talking here about some eight thousand carats.”
“And what’s the problem?” asked Odell.
“Time,” said Morton Stannard. “At a fifth of a carat per stone, that would be forty thousand stones. At half a carat, sixteen thousand stones. With a mixture of different weights, let’s say twenty-five thousand stones. It’s a lot to put together this fast. Three men are buying furiously, and trying not to make waves.”
“What’s the bottom line?” asked Brad Johnson. “When can they be ready for shipment?”
“Another day, maybe two,” said the Defense Secretary.
“Stay on top of it, Morton,” Odell ordered. “We have the deal. We can’t keep this boy and his father waiting much longer.”
“The moment they’re in a bag, weighed and authenticated, you’ll have them,” said Stannard.
The
following morning Kevin Brown took a private call in the embassy from one of his men.
“We may have hit pay dirt, Chief,” said the agent tersely.
“No more on an open line, boy. Get your ass in here fast. Tell me to my face.”
The agent was in London by noon. What he had to say was more than interesting.
East of the towns of Biggleswade and Sandy, both of which lie on the A.1 highway from London to the north, the county of Bedfordshire butts up against Cambridgeshire. The area is intersected only by minor B-class roads and country lanes, contains no large towns, and is largely given over to agriculture. The county border area contains only a few villages, with old English names like Potton, Tadlow, Wrestlingworth, and Gamlingay.
Between two of these villages, off the beaten path, lay an old farmhouse, partly ruined by fire but with one wing still furnished and habitable, in a shallow valley and approached by a single track.
Two months earlier, the agent had discovered, the place had been rented by a small group of supposed “rustic freaks,” who claimed they wanted to return to nature, live simply, and create artifacts in pottery and basket-weaving.
“The thing is,” said the agent, “they had the money for the rental in cash. They don’t seem to sell much pottery, but they can run two off-road Jeeps, which are parked undercover in the barns. And they mix with no one.”
“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brown.
“Green Meadow Farm.”
“Okay, we have enough time if we don’t hang around. Let’s go take a look at Green Meadow Farm.”
There were two hours of daylight left when Kevin Brown and the agent parked their car at the entrance to a farm lane and made the rest on foot. Guided by the agent, the pair approached with extreme caution, using the trees for cover, until they emerged from the tree line above the valley. From there they crawled the last ten yards to the edge of a rise and looked down into the valley. The farmhouse lay below them, its fire-gutted wing black in the autumn afternoon, a low gleam as from an oil lamp coming from one window of the other wing.
As they watched, a burly man came out of the farmhouse and crossed to one of the three barns. He spent ten minutes there, then returned to the house. Brown scanned the complex of farm buildings with powerful binoculars. Down the track to their left came a powerful Japanese off-road four-wheel-drive. It parked in front of the farm and a man climbed out. He gazed carefully around him, scanning the rim of the valley for movement. There was none.
“Damn,” said Brown. “Ginger hair, eyeglasses.”
The driver went into the farmhouse and emerged a few seconds later with the burly man. This time they had a big Rottweiler with them. The pair went to the same barn, spent ten minutes, and returned. The burly man drove the Jeep into another barn and closed the doors.
“Rustic pottery, my ass,” said Brown. “There’s something or someone in that damn barn. Five will get you ten it’s a young man.”
They wriggled back into the line of trees. Dusk was descending.
“Take the blanket from the trunk,” said Brown. “And stay here. Stake it out all night. I’ll be back with the team before sunup—if there ever is any sun in this damn country.”
Across the valley, stretched out along a branch in a giant oak, a man in camouflage uniform lay motionless. He, too, had powerful binoculars, with which he had noted the movements among the trees on the opposite side from his own position. As Kevin Brown and his agent slithered off the rim of the high ground and into the woodland, he drew a small radio from his pocket and spoke quietly and urgently for several seconds. It was October 28, nineteen days since Simon Cormack had been kidnapped and seventeen since Zack’s first call to the Kensington apartment.
Zack called again that evening, burying himself in the hurrying crowds in the center of Luton.
“What the hell’s going on, Quinn? It’s been three bloody days.”
“Hey, take it easy, Zack. It’s the diamonds. You caught us by surprise, ole buddy. That kind of package takes a while to put together. I laid it on them over there in Washington—I mean, but hard. They’re working on it as fast as they can, but hell, Zack, twenty-five thousand stones, all good, all untraceable—that takes a bit—”
“Yeah, well, just tell them they got two more days and then they get their boy back in a bag. Just tell ’em.”
He hung up. The experts would later say his nerves were badly shot. He was reaching the point where he might be tempted to hurt the boy out of frustration or because he thought he was being tricked in some way.
Kevin Brown and his team were good and they were armed. They came in four pairs, from the only four directions from which the farm could be assailed. Two skirted the track, darting from cover to cover. The other three pairs came from the trees and down the sloping fields in complete silence. It was that hour just before dawn when the light is at its trickiest, when the spirits of the quarry are at their lowest, the hour of the hunter.
The surprise was total. Chuck Moxon and his partner took the suspect barn. Moxon snipped off the padlock; his partner went in on the roll, coming to his feet on the dusty floor inside the barn with his sidearm drawn. Apart from a petrol generator, something that looked like a kiln, and a bench with an array of chemistry glassware, there was no one there.
The six men, plus Brown, who took the farmhouse, fared better. Two pairs went in through windows, taking the glass and the frames as they went, came to their feet without a pause, and headed straight upstairs to the bedrooms.
Brown and the remaining pair went through the front door. The lock shattered with a single blow of the sledgehammer and they were in.
By the embers of the fire in the grate of the long kitchen, the burly man had been asleep in a chair. It was his job to keep watch through the night, but boredom and tiredness had taken over. At the crash from the front door he came out of his chair and reached for a .12-bore shotgun that lay on the pine table. He almost made it. The shout of “Freeze!” from the door and the sight of the big crew-cut man crouched over a Colt .45 aimed straight at his chest caused the burly one to stop. He spat and slowly raised both hands.
Upstairs the red-haired man was in bed with the only woman in the group. They both awoke as the windows and doors crashed in downstairs. The woman screamed. The man went for the bedroom door and met the first FBI man on the landing. The fighting was too close for firearms; the two men went down together in the darkness and wrestled until another American could discern which was which and hit the redhead hard with the butt of his Colt.
The fourth member of the farmhouse group was led blinking out of his bedroom a few seconds later, a thin, scrawny young man with lank hair. The FBI team all had flashlights in their belts. It took two more minutes to examine all the other bedrooms and establish that four people was the limit. Kevin Brown had them all brought to the kitchen, where lamps were lit. He surveyed them with loathing.
“Okay, where’s the kid?” he asked. One of his men looked out the window.
“Chief, we have company.”
About fifty men were descending into the valley and toward the farmhouse on all sides, all in kneeboots, all in blue, a dozen with Alsatians straining at the leash. In an outhouse the Rottweiler roared his rage at the intrusion. A white Range Rover with blue markings jolted up the track to stop ten yards from the broken door. A middle-aged man in blue, aglitter with silver buttons and insignia, descended, a braided peaked cap on his head. He walked into the lobby without a word, entered the kitchen, and gazed at the four prisoners.
“Okay, we hand it over to you now,” said Brown. “He’s here somewhere. And those sleazeballs know where,”
“Exactly,” asked the man in blue, “who are you?”
“Yes, of course.” Kevin Brown produced his Bureau identification. The Englishman looked at it carefully and handed it back.
“See here,” said Brown, “what we’ve done—”
“What you’ve done, Mr. Brown,” said the Chief Constab
le of Bedfordshire with icy rage, “is to blow away the biggest drug bust this county was ever likely to have and now, I fear, never will have. These people are low-level minders and a chemist. The big fish and their consignment were expected any day. Now, would you please return to London?”
At that hour Steve Pyle was with Mr. Al-Haroun in the latter’s office in Jiddah, having flown to the coast following a disturbing phone call.
“What exactly did he take?” he asked for the fourth time. Mr. Al-Haroun shrugged. These Americans were even worse than the Europeans, always in a hurry.
“Alas, I am not an expert in these machines,” he said, “but my night watchman here reports ...”
He turned to the Saudi night watchman, and rattled off a stream of Arabic. The man replied, holding out his arms to signify the extent of something.
“He says that the night I returned Mr. Laing his passport, duly altered, the young man spent most of the night in the computer room, and left before dawn with a large amount of computer printout. He returned for work at the normal hour without it.”
Steve Pyle went back to Riyadh a very worried man. Helping his government and his country was one thing, but in an internal accounting inquiry, that would not show up. He asked for an urgent meeting with Colonel Easterhouse.
The Arabist listened to him calmly and nodded several times.
“You think he has reached London?” he asked.
“I don’t know how he could have done it, but where the hell else could he be?”
“Mmmm. Could I have access to your central computer for a while?”
It took the colonel four hours at the console of the master computer in Riyadh. The job was not difficult, since he had all the access codes. By the time he had finished, all the computerized records had been erased and a new record created.
Nigel Cramer got a first telephone report from Bedford in mid-morning, long before the written record arrived. When he called Patrick Seymour at the embassy he was incandescent with anger. Brown and his team were still on the road south.