第 26 页

?Of course,? said Quinn. ?I?d like to handle it myself. But I want no concealed bugs?they?ll probably thinkof that. I don?t think they?ll bring Simon to the rendezvous, so he could still die if there were any tricks.?

?Don?t worry, Mr. Quinn. We?d obviously like to try and grab them, but I take your point. There?ll be no tricks from us, no heroics.?

?Thank you,? said Quinn. He shook hands with the Scotland Yard man, who left to report progress to the one o?clock COBRA committee.

?

Kevin Brown had spent the morning secluded in his office beneath the embassy. When the stores opened he had sent out two of his men to buy him a list of items he needed: a very large-scale map of the area north of London, extending fifty miles in all directions; a matching sheet of clear plastic; map pins; wax pencils in different colors. He assembled his team of detectives and spread the plastic across the map.

?Okay, let?s just look at these phone booths the rat has been using. Chuck, read them out one by one.?

Chuck Moxon studied his list. ?First call, Hitchin, county of Hertfordshire.?

?Okay, we have Hitchin right ... here.? A pin was stuck in Hitchin.

Zackhad made eight calls in thirteen days; the ninth was about to come in. One by one, pins were stuck in the site of each call. Just before ten o?clock one of the two FBI men in the listening post stuck his head around the door.

?He just called again. Threatening to cut off Simon?s fingers with a chisel.?

?Hot damn,? swore Brown. ?That fool Quinn?s going to blow it away. I knew he would. Where?d the call come from　

?Place called SaffronWaiden, ?said the young man.

When the nine pins were in place, Brown joined up the perimeter of the area they bounded. It was a jagged shape, involving pieces of five counties. Then he took a ruler and joined the extremities to their opposites on the other side of the pattern. In the approximate center a web of crisscross lines appeared. To the southeast the extremity was Great Dunmow, Essex; to the north was St. Neots, Cam-bridgeshire; and to the west, Milton Keynes in Buckingham-shire.

?The densest area of the crossed lines lies right here,? Brown pointed out with his fingertip, ?just east of Biggleswade, county of Bedfordshire. No calls from that area at all. Why　

?Too close to base　 ventured one of the men.

?Could be, boy, could be. Look, I want you to take these two country towns, Biggleswade and Sandy, the two closest to the geographic center of the web. Get up there and visit all the realtors who have offices in those towns. Make like you are prospective clients, looking to rent a secluded house to write a book or something. Listen to what they say?maybe some place that?ll be free soon, maybe some place they could have let you have three months back but it went to someone else. You got it　

They all nodded.

?Should we let Mr. Seymour know we?re on our way　 asked Moxon. ?I mean, maybe Scotland Yard has been in that area.?

?You leave Mr. Seymour to me,? said Brown reassuringly. ?We get along just fine. And the bobbies may have been up there and they may just have overlooked something. Maybe so, maybe not. Let?s just check it out.?

?

Steve Pyle greeted Laing with an attempt at his usual genial-ity.

?I ... ah ... called you up here, Andy, because I just got a request from London that you go visit with them. Seems this could be the start of a career move for you.?

?Sure,? said Laing. ?Would this request from London have anything to do with the package and report I sent them, which never arrived because it was intercepted right here in this office　

Pyle dropped all semblance of bonhomie.

?All right. You?re smart, maybe too smart. But you?ve been dabbling in things that don?t concern you. I tried to warn you off, but no, you had to go playing private detective. Okay, now I?ll level with you. I?m transferring you back to London. You don?t fit in down here, Laing. I?m not happy with your work. You?re going back. That?s it. You have seven days to put your desk in order. Your ticket?s been booked. Seven days from now.?

Had he been older, more mature, Andy Laing would probably have played his cards more coolly. But he was an-gry that a man of Pyle?seminence in the bank could be rip-ping off client money for his own enrichment. And he had thena?vet? of the young and eager, the conviction that Right would triumph. He turned at the door.

?Seven days? Time enough for you to fix things with London? No way. I?m going back all right, but I?m going back tomorrow.?

He was in time for the last flight of the night back to Jiddah. When he got there he went straight to the bank. He kept his passport in the top drawer of his desk, along with any other valuable papers?burglaries of European-owned apartments in Jiddah are not unheard-of, and the bank was safer. At least, it was supposed to be. The passport was missing.

* * *

That night there was a stand-up row among the four kidnap-pers.

?Keep your bloody voices down,? hissedZack on sev-eral occasions.? Baissez les voix, merde.?

He knew his men were running to the limit of their pa-tience. It was always a risk, using this kind of human mate-rial. After the screaming adrenaline of the snatch outside Oxford, they had been penned up day and night in a single house, drinking beer from cans he had bought at a supermar-ket, keeping out of sight all the time, hearing callers at the door ring and ring before finally going away without an an-swer. The nervous strain had been bad, and these were not men with the mental resources to immerse themselves in books or thought. The Corsican listened to his French-language pop programs all day, interspersed with news flashes. The South African whistled tunelessly for hours on end, and always the same tune, ?MarieMarais.? The Bel-gian watched the television, of which he could not under-stand a word. He liked the cartoons best.

The argument was overZack?s decision to close with the negotiator called Quinn and have done with the whole thing at $2 million ransom.

The Corsican objected, and because they both spoke French, the Belgian tended to agree with him. The South African was fed up, wanted to get home, and agreed withZack. The main argument from the Corsican was that they could hold out forever.Zack knew this was not true, but he was aware he could have a very dangerous situation on his hands if he told them they were beginning to show cracks, and could not take more than another six days of numbing boredom and inactivity.

So he appeased them, placated them, told them they had done brilliantly and would all be very rich men in just a few more days. The thought of all that money calmed them down and they subsided.Zack was relieved it had ended without blows. Unlike the three men in the house, his prob-lem was not boredom but stress. Every time he drove the big Volvo along the crowded motorways he knew that one ran-dom police check, one brush with another car, one moment of inattention, would have a blue-capped officer leaning in his window, wondering why he wore a wig and false mous-tache. His disguise would pass in a crowded street, but not at six inches? range.

Every time he went into one of those phone booths, he had a mental image of something going wrong, of a faster-than-usual trace, of a plainclothes policeman being only a few yards away, taking the alarm on his personal radio and walking up to the phone booth.Zack carried a gun, and knew he would use it to get away. If he did, he would have to abandon the Volvo, always parked a few hundred yards away, and escape on foot. Some idiot member of the public might even try to tackle him. It was getting to the point that when-ever he saw a policeman sauntering along the crowded streets he chose for his phone calls, his stomach turned over.

?Go give the kid his supper,? he told the South African.

Simon Cormack had been fifteen days in his under-ground cell, and thirteen since he had answered the question about Aunt Emily and known that his father was trying to get him out. He realized now what solitary confinement must be like and wondered how people could survive months, even years of it. At least in the prisons he had heard of, inmates in solitary had writing materials, books, sometimes television, something to occupy the mind. He had nothing. But he was a tough boy and he determined not to go to pieces.

He exercised regularly, forcing himself to overcome the prisoner?s lethargy, doing his push-ups ten times a day, jog-ging in place a dozen times. He still wore his same running shoes, socks, shorts, and T-shirt, and was aware he must smell awful. He used the toilet bucket carefully, so as not to soil the floor, and was grateful it was removed every second day.

The food was boring, mainly fried or cold, but it was enough. He had no razor, of course, so he sported a straggly beard and moustache. His hair had grown; he tried to comb it with his fingers. He had asked for, and eventually been given, a plastic bucket of cold water and a sponge. He never realized how grateful a man could be for the chance to wash. He had stripped naked, running his shorts halfway up the ankle-chain to keep them dry, and sponged himself from head to foot, scouring his skin with the sponge to try to keep clean. After it he felt transformed. But he tried no escape maneuvers. The chain was impossible to break; the door solid and bolted from the outside.

Between exercises he tried to keep his mind occupied in a number of ways: reciting every poem he could remember, pretending to dictate his autobiography to an invisible sten-ographer so that he could go over everything that had ever happened to him in his twenty-one years. And he thought of home, of New Haven and Nantucket and Yale and the White House. He thought of his mom and dad and how they were; he hoped they weren?t worried about him, but expected they were. If only he could tell them he was all right, in good shape, considering ...

There were three loud knocks on the cellar door. He reached for his black hood and put it on. Supper time?or was it breakfast ...?

?

That same evening, but after Simon Cormack had fallen asleep, and Sam Somerville lay in Quinn?s arms while the tape recorder breathed into the wall outlet, five time zones farther west, the White House committee met in the late eve-ning. Apart from the usual Cabinet members and department heads, Philip Kelly of the FBI and David Weintraub of the CIA also attended.

They heard the tapes ofZack on the phone to Quinn, the rasping tones of the British criminal and the reassuring drawl of the American trying to appease him, as they had done almost every day for two weeks.

WhenZack had finished, Hubert Reed was pale with shock.

?My God,? he said, ?cold chisel and hammer. The man?s an animal.?

?We know that,? said Odell. ?But at least now we have an agreed ransom. Two million dollars. In diamonds. Any objections　

?Of course not,? said Jim Donaldson. ?This country will pay that easily, for the President?s son. I?m just sur-prised 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 apart-ment　 asked the Vice President.

No one needed to.

?Mr. Edmonds, what about what Mr. Cramer, the Scot-land Yard man, told Quinn? Any comments from your peo-ple　

Edmonds cast a sidelong glance at Philip Kelly, but an-swered for the Bureau.

?Our people at Quantico agree with their British col-leagues,? he said. ?ThisZack 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 animalZack. 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 try-ing to helpZack, and all the rest of us here and there as the bad guys making problems, has worked.Zack has an ele-ment 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 ama-teurs in their high office, he might have said but did not, he and his people sometimes had to deal with creatures just as nasty asZack.

?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. Hu-bert, could the Treasury make a personal loan until the Presi-dent 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 apolo-getic 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 plea-sure 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.