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“These kidnappings can go on for weeks,” said Jim Donaldson. “This man is our Chief Executive. What changes can we expect?”
“The strain will be eased slightly when and if the first contact is made and proof obtained that Simon is still alive,” said Dr. Armitage. “But the relief will not last long. As time drags on, the deterioration will deepen. There will be stress at a very high level, leading to irritability. There will be insomnia—that can be helped with medication. Finally there will be listlessness in matters concerning the father’s profession—”
“In this case running the damn country,” said Odell.
“... and lack of concentration, loss of memory in matters of government. In a word, gentlemen, half or more of the President’s mind until further notice will be devoted to thinking about his son, and a further part to concern for his wife. In some cases, even after the successful release of a child kidnap victim, it has been the parents who needed months, even years, of post-trauma therapy.”
“In other words,” said Attorney General Bill Walters, “we have half a President, maybe less.”
“Oh, come now,” Treasury Secretary Reed interjected. “This country has had Presidents on the operating table, wholly incapacitated in the hospital, before now. We must just take over, run things as he would wish, disturb our friend as little as possible.”
His optimism evoked little matching response. Brad Johnson rose.
“Why the hell won’t those bastards get in touch?” he asked. “It’s been nearly forty-eight hours.”
“At least we have our negotiator set up and waiting for their first call,” said Reed.
“And we have a strong presence in London,” added Walters. “Mr. Brown and his team from the Bureau arrived two hours ago.”
“What the hell are the British police doing?” muttered Stannard. “Why can’t they find those bastards?”
“We have to remember it’s been only forty-eight hours—not even,” observed Secretary of State Donaldson. “Britain’s not as big as the U.S., but with fifty-four million people there are a lot of places to hide. You recall how long the Symbionese Liberation Army kept Patty Hearst, with the whole FBI hunting them? Months.”
“Let’s face it, gentlemen,” drawled Odell, “the problem is, there’s nothing more we can do.”
That was the problem; there was nothing anybody could do.
The boy they were talking about was getting through his second night of captivity. Though he did not know it, there was someone on duty in the corridor outside his cell throughout the night. The cellar of the suburban house might be made of poured concrete, but if he decided to scream and shout, the abductors were quite prepared to subdue him and gag him. He made no such mistake. Resolving to quell his fear and behave with as much dignity as possible, he did two dozen push-ups and toe-touching calisthenics, while a skeptical eye watched through the peephole. He had no wristwatch—he had been running without one on—and was losing track of time. The light burned constantly but at what he judged to be around midnight—he was two hours off—he curled up on the bed, drew the thin blanket over his head to shut out most of the light, and slept. As he did so, the last dozen of the hoax calls were coming in at his country’s embassy forty miles away in Grosvenor Square.
Kevin Brown and his eight-strong team did not feel like sleep. Jet-lagged from the flight across the Atlantic, their body clocks were still on Washington time, five hours earlier than London.
Brown insisted that Seymour and Collins show him around the basement telephone exchange and listening post at the embassy, where in an office at the end of the complex, American engineers—the British had not been given access—had set up wall speakers to bring in the sounds recorded by the various bugs in the Kensington apartment.
“There a
re two taps in the sitting room,” explained Collins reluctantly. He saw no reason why he should explain Company techniques to the man from the Bureau, but he had his orders, and the Kensington apartment was “burned” from an operational point of view anyway.
“If a senior officer from Langley was using the place as a base, they would of course be deactivated. But if we were debriefing a Soviet there, we find invisible bugs less inhibiting than having a tape recorder turning away on the table. The sitting room would be the main debriefing area. But there are two more in the master bedroom—Quinn’s sleeping in there, but not at the moment, as you will hear—and others in the remaining two bedrooms and the kitchen.
“Out of respect for Miss Somerville and our own man McCrea, we have deactivated the two smaller bedrooms. But if Quinn went into one of them to talk confidentially, we could reactivate them by switching here and here.”
Collins indicated two switches on the master console.
Brown asked, “In any case, if he talked to either of them out of range of any speakers, we would expect them to report back to us, right?”
Collins and Seymour nodded.
“That’s what they’re there for,” added Seymour.
“Then we have three telephones in there,” Collins went on. “One is the new flash line. Quinn will use that only when he is convinced he is talking to the genuine abductors, and for no other purpose at all. All conversations on that line will be intercepted in the Kensington exchange by the British and piped through on this speaker here. Second, he has a direct patch-through from this room, which he is using now to talk to one of the callers we believe to be a hoaxer, but maybe not. That connection also passes through the Kensington exchange. And there is the third line, an ordinary outgoing and incoming line, also on intercept but probably not to be used unless he wants to call out.”
“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.”
