第 20 页

?I?m a good cook,? she said. ?Now that you?ve deep-sixed the Residence and all its staff, you?re going to have to have someone who can cook. Being where we are, it would be a spook anyway.?

For the first time since they had met him, Quinn grinned. Somervillethought it transformed his otherwise en-igmatic face.

?All right,? he said to Collins and Seymour. ?You?re going to bug every room and phone call anyway. You two take the remaining bedrooms.?

The young agents went down the hall.

?But that?s it,? he told Collins and Seymour. ?No more guests. I need to speak to the British police. Who?s in charge　

?Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cramer. Nigel Cra-mer. Number two man in Specialist Operations Department. Know him　

?Rings a bell,? said Quinn.

At that moment a bell did ring?the telephone. Collins took it, listened, and covered the mouthpiece.

?This is Cramer,? he said. ?At Winfield House. He went there to liaise with you, just heard the news. Wants to come here. Okay　

Quinn nodded. Collins spoke to Cramer and asked him to come ?round. He arrived in an unmarked police car twenty minutes later.

?Mr. Quinn? Nigel Cramer. We met once, briefly.?

He stepped into the apartment warily. He had not known about its existence as a Company safe-house, but he did now. He also knew the CIA would vacate it when this affair was over and take another one.

Quinn recalled Cramer when he saw the face.

?Ireland, years back. The Don Tidey affair. You were head of Anti-Terrorist Branch then.?

?S.O. 13, yes. You?ve a good memory, Mr. Quinn. I think we need to talk.?

Quinn led Cramer into the sitting room, sat him down, took a chair opposite, and gestured around the room with his hand to indicate it was certainly bugged. Lou Collins might be a nice guy, but no spook is ever that nice. The British policeman nodded gravely. He realized he was effectively on American territory, in the heart of his own capital city, but what he had to say would be fully reported by him to the COBRA.

?Let me, as you say in America, level with you, Mr. Quinn. The Metropolitan Police have been granted full pri-macy in the investigation into this crime. Your government has agreed to that. So far we have not had a big break, but it?s early days and we are working flat-out.?

Quinn nodded. He had worked in bugged rooms before, many times, and spoken on tapped phone lines. It was always an effort to keep conversation normal. He realized Cramer was speaking for the record, hence the pedantry.

?We asked for primacy in the negotiation process and were overruled at Washington?s request. I have to accept that. I don?t have to like it. I have also been instructed to give you every cooperation the Met. and the entire range of our government?s departments can offer. And that you will get. You have my word on it.?

?I?m very grateful for that, Mr. Cramer,? said Quinn. He knew it sounded terribly stilted, but somewhere the spools were turning.

?What exactly is it you want　

?Background first. The last update I read was in Wash-ington ...? Quinn checked his watch?8:00P.M. in London. ?Over seven hours ago. Have the kidnappers made contact yet　

?So far as we are aware, no,? said Cramer. ?There have been calls, of course. Some obvious hoaxes, some not so obvious, a dozen really plausible. To the last, we asked for some element of proof they were really holding Simon Cormack　

?How　 asked Quinn.

?A question to be answered. Something from his nine months at Oxford that it would be hard to discover. No one called back with a right answer.?

?Forty-eight hours is not unusual waiting time for the first contact,? said Quinn.

?Agreed,? said Cramer. ?They may communicate by mail, with a letter or a tape recording, in which case the package may be on its way. Or by phone. If it?s the former, we?ll bring them ?round here, though I will want our forensic people to have first crack at the paper, envelope, wrappings, and letter for any prints, saliva, or other traces. Fair, I think? You have no laboratory facilities here.?

?Perfectly fair,? said Quinn.

?But if the first contact is by phone, how do you want to handle it, Mr. Quinn　

Quinn spelled out his requirements. A public an-nouncement on the News at Ten program, requiring anyone holding Simon Cormack to contact the American embassy and only the embassy on any of a series of given numbers. A line of switchboard operators in the embassy basement to filter out the obvious phonies and patch the serious possibili-ties through to him at the apartment.

Cramer looked up at Collins and Seymour, who nod-ded. They would set up the embassy first-filter multiline switchboard within the next hour and a half, in time for the newscast. Quinn went on.

?Your Telecom people can trace every call as it comes into the embassy, maybe make a few arrests of hoaxers stu-pid enough not to use a public phone booth or who stay on the line too long. I don?t think the real kidnappers will be that dumb.?

?Agreed,? said Cramer. ?So far, they?re smarter than that.?

?The patch-through must be without a cutoff, and just to one of the phones in this flat. There are three, right　

Collins nodded. One was a direct line to his office, which was in the embassy building anyway.

?Use that one,? said Quinn. ?When I?ve established contact with the real kidnappers, assuming I do, I want to give them a new number, a designated line that reaches me and only me.?

?I?ll get you a flash line within ninety minutes,? said Cramer, ?a number that has never been used before. We?ll have to tap it, of course, but you won?t hear a sound on the line. Finally, I?d like to have two detective chief inspectors living in here with you, Mr. Quinn. They?re good and experi-enced. One man can?t stay awake twenty-four hours a day.?

?I?m sorry, no,? said Quinn.

?They could be of great help,? Cramer persisted. ?If the kidnappers are British, there will be the question of re-gional accents, slang words, hints of strain or desperation in the voice at the other end, tiny traces only another Britisher could spot. They wouldn?t say anything, just listen.?

?They can listen at the exchange,? said Quinn. ?You will be recording everything anyway. Run it past the speech experts, add your own comments on how lousily I?m doing, and come knock on the door here with the results. But I work alone.?

Cramer?s mouth tightened slightly. But he had his or-ders. He rose to leave. Quinn rose too.

?Let me see you to your car,? he said. They all knew what that meant?the stairs were not bugged. At the door Quinn jerked his head at Seymour and Collins to stay behind. Reluctantly they did so. On the stairs he murmured in Cra-mer?s ear.

?I know you don?t like it this way. I?m not very happy about it myself. Try to trust me. I?m not about to lose this boy if I can help it. You?ll hear every damn syllable on the phone. My own people will even hear me on the can. It?s like a Radio Shack in there.?

?All right, Mr. Quinn. You?ll get everything I can offer you. That?s a promise.?

?One last thing ...? They had reached the pavement; the police car waited. ?Don?t spook them. If they phone, or stay on the line a mite too long, no squad cars roaring up to the phone booth ...?

?We do know that, Mr. Quinn. But we?ll have to have plainclothes men heading for the source of the phone call. They?ll be very discreet, just about invisible. But if we just spot the car number ... get a physical description ... that could shorten the whole thing to a couple of days.?

?Don?t get seen,? warned Quinn. ?The man in the phone booth will be under horrendous pressure. Neither of us wants contact to cease. That would probably mean they?ve cut and run for the tall timber, leaving a body behind them.?

Cramer nodded, shook hands, and climbed into his car.

Thirty minutes later the engineers arrived, none in Telecom uniform, all offering Telecom identification cards. Quinn nodded amiably, knowing they came from MI-5, the Security Service, and they set to work. They were good and they were fast. Most of the work was being done in the Ken-sington exchange, anyway.

One of the engineers, with the base off the sitting-room telephone, raised an eyebrow a fraction. Quinn pretended not to notice. Trying to insert a bug, the man had found one in there already. Orders are orders; he slotted his own in beside the American one, establishing a new and miniature Anglo-American relationship. By 9:30P.M. Quinn had his flash line, theultraprivate line to which he would pass the real kidnapper if he ever spoke to the man. The second line was patched through permanently to the embassy switchboard, for incoming ?possibles.? The third was left for outgoing calls.

More work was going on in the basement at the em-bassy in Grosvenor Square. Ten lines already existed and they were all taken over. Ten young women, some American, some British, sat and waited.

The third operation was in the Kensington exchange, where the police set up an office to monitor incoming calls heading for Quinn?sflash line. As Kensington was one of the new electronic exchanges, tracing would be fast, eight to ten seconds. On their way out of the exchange, the flash-line calls would have two more taps, one to the MI-5 communica-tions center in Cork Street, Mayfair, the other to the U.S. embassy basement which, after the isolation of the kidnap-pers, would change from a switchboard to a listening post.

Thirty seconds after the British group left, Lou Collins?s American engineer arrived to remove all the newly in-stalled British bugs and tune their own. Thus, when Quinn spoke other than on the telephone, only his fellow Americans would be listening. ?Nice try,? remarked Seymour to his MI-5 colleague a week later over a drink in Brooks?s Club.

At 10:00P.M. ITN newscaster Sandy Gall stared into the camera as the booming chimes of the Big Ben theme died away, and made the announcement to the kidnappers. The numbers to call stayed on the screen throughout the update on the Simon Cormack kidnapping, which had little to say but said it anyway.

In the sitting room of a quiet house forty miles from London, four silent and tense men watched the broadcast. The leader rapidly translated into French for two of them. In fact one was Belgian, the other Corsican. The fourth needed no translation. His spoken English was good but heavily ac-cented with the Afrikaner tones of his native South Africa.

The two from Europe spoke no English at all, and the leader had forbidden all of them to stray from the house until the affair was over. He alone left and returned, always out of the attached garage, always in the Volvo sedan, which now had new tires and license plates?the original and legitimate plates. He never left without his wig, beard, moustache, and tinted glasses. During his absences the others were in-structed to stay out of sight, not even appearing at the win-dows and certainly not answering the door.

As the newscast changed to the Middle East situation, one of the Europeans asked a question. The leader shook his head.

? Demain,?he replied, ?tomorrow morning.?

More than two hundred calls came to the embassy base-ment that night. Each was handled carefully and courte-ously, but only seven were passed through to Quinn, He took each with a cheerful friendliness, addressing the caller as ?friend? or ?pal,? explaining that regretfully ?his people? simply had to go through the tiresome formality of establish-ing that the caller really had Simon Cormack, and carefully asking them to get the answer to a simple question and call him back. No one called back. In a break between 3:00A.M. and sunrise he catnapped for four hours.

Through the night, Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea stayed with him. Sam commented on his laid-back per-formance on the phone.

?It hasn?t even begun yet,? he said quietly. But the strain had. The two younger people were feeling it already.

Just after midnight, having caught the noon plane from Washington, Kevin Brown and a picked team of eight FBI agents flew into Heathrow. Forewarned, an exasperated Patrick Seymour was there to greet them. He gave the senior officer an update on the situation to 11:00P.M. , when he had left for the airport. That included the installation of Quinn in his chosen aerie as opposed to Winfield House, and the telephone-intercept situation.

?Knew he was a smartass,? growled Brown when told of the tangle in the Winfield House driveway. ?We?ve got to sit on this bastard or he?ll be into every kind of trick. Let?s get to the embassy. We?ll sleep on cots right there in the basement. If that yo-yo farts, I want to hear it, loud and clear.?

Inwardly, Seymour groaned. He had heard of Kevin Brown and could have done without the visit. Now, he thought, it was going to be worse than he had feared. When they reached the embassy at 1:30A.M ., the 106th phony call was coming in.

?

Other people were getting little sleep that night. Two of them were Commander Williams of S.O. 13 and a man called Sid-ney Sykes. They spent the hours of darkness confronting each other in the interview room of Wandsworth police sta-tion in south London. A second officer present was the head of the Vehicles Section of the Serious Crimes Squad, whose men had traced Sykes.

As far as a small-time crook like Sykes was concerned, the two men across the plain table were very heavy pressure indeed and by the end of the first hour he was a badly fright-ened man. After that things got worse.

The Vehicles Section, following a description given by the jobbing builder in Leicester, had traced the recovery firm that had removed the wrecked Transit from its lethal em-brace with the steam shovel. Once it was established that the vehicle had a twisted chassis and was a write-off, the recov-ery company offered it back to its owner. As the charge for bringing it on a flat-bed to Leicester was greater than its value, he had declined. The recovery team had sold it to Sykes as scrap, for he ran a car-wrecking yard in Wandsworth. The Vehicles Section rummage crews had spent the day turning over that yard.

They found a barrel three-quarters full of dirty black sump oil, whose murky depths had yielded twenty-four car license plates, twelve perfectly matched pairs, all made up in the Sykes yard and all as genuine as a three-pound note. A recess beneath the floorboards of Sykes?s shabby office had given up a wad of thirty vehicle registration documents, all pertaining to cars and vans that had ceased to exist except on paper.

Sykes?s racket was to acquire crash vehicles written off by their insurers, tell the owner that he, Sykes, would inform Swansea the vehicle had ceased to exist except as a mass of scrap, and then inform Swansea of exactly the opposite?that he had bought the vehicle from its previous owner. The Swansea computer would then log that ?fact.? If the car really was a write-off, Sykes was simply buying the legiti-mate paperwork, which could then be applied to a working vehicle of similar make and type, the working vehicle having been stolen from some parking lot by one of Sykes?s light-fingered associates. With new plates to match the registra-tion document of the write-off, the stolen car could then be resold. The final touch was to abrade the original chassis and engine block numbers, etch in new ones, and smear on enough grease and dirt to fool the ordinary customer. Of course this would not fool the police, but as all such deals were in cash, Sykes could later deny he had ever seen the offending car, let alone sold it.