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“You radio it for just a mile?” asked Brown.
“Sir, my Agency gets on very well with the British. But no secret service in the world will ever pipe classified information through the land lines running under a city they do not control.”
Brown enjoyed that. “So the Brits can hear the phone conversations but not the room talk.”
He was wrong, actually. Once MI-5 knew of the Kensington apartment, that the two Metropolitan chief inspectors were not being allowed to live in, and that their own bugs had been removed, they calculated there must be a second American apartment in there to relay Soviet debriefings to CIA Control somewhere else. Within an hour the apartment-building records had pinpointed the small bed-sitter in the basement. By midnight a team of plumbers had found the connecter wires running through the central heating system, and did an intercept from a ground-floor apartment, whose tenant was courteously urged to take a brief vacation and thus assist Her Majesty. By sunrise everyone was listening to everyone.
Collins’s ELINT—electronic intelligence—man at the console lifted the headset off his ears.
“Quinn’s just finished with the caller,” he said. “Now they’ll talk among themselves. You want to hear, sir?”
“Sure,” said Brown.
The engineer threw the conversation in the sitting room in Kensington from headset to wall mike. Quinn’s voice came through the speaker.
“... would be fine. Thanks, Sam. Milk and sugar.”
“Do you think he’ll call back, Mr. Quinn?” That was McCrea.
“Nope. Plausible, but he didn’t smell right.” Quinn.
The men in the embassy basement turned to go. Cots had been set up in a number of nearby offices. Brown intended to stay on the job at all times. He designated two of his eight men to take the night watch. It was 2:30 A.M.
The same conversations, on the phone and in the sitting room, had been heard and logged in the MI-5 communications center in Cork Street. In the Kensington telephone exchange the police heard only the telephone call, traced it within eight seconds to a phone booth in nearby Paddington, and dispatched a plainclothes officer from Paddington Green police station, two hundred yards from the booth. He arrested an old man with a history of mental illness.
At 9:00 A.M. on the third day, one of the women in Grosvenor Square took another call. The voice was English, rough, curt.
“Put me through to the negotiator.”
The girl went pale. No one had used that word before. She kept her voice honeyed.
“Putting you through, sir.”
Quinn had the receiver in his hand at half a ring. The girl’s voice was a rapid whisper.
“Someone asking for the negotiator. Just that.”
Half a second later the connection was made. Quinn’s deep, reassuring voice came through the speakers.
“Hi there, pal. You wanted to speak to me?”
“You want Simon Cormack back, it’s going to cost you. A lot. Now listen to me—”
“No, friend, you listen to me. I’ve had a dozen hoax calls already today. You can understand how many crazies there are in this world, right? So do me a favor—just a simple question ...”
In Kensington the tracers got a “lock” in eight seconds, Hitchin, Hertfordshire ... a public booth in ... the railway station. Cramer got it at the Yard ten seconds later; Hitchin police station was slower to get in gear. Their man set off in a car thirty seconds later, was dropped two corners from the station a minute thereafter, and came ambling around the corner toward the booths 141 seconds after the call began. Too late. The man had spent thirty seconds on the line and was by then three streets away, lost in the morning throng.
McCrea stared at Quinn in amazement.
“You hung up on him,” he said.
“Had to,” said Quinn laconically. “By the time I had finished we were out of time.”
“If you’d kept him on the line,” said Sam Somerville, “the police might have caught him.”
“If he’s the man, I want to give him confidence, not a bad fright—yet,” said Quinn, and lapsed into silence. He seemed completely relaxed; his two companions were strung out with tension, staring at the phone as if it might ring again. Quinn knew the man could not possibly get back to another phone booth for a couple of hours. He had learned long ago in combat: If you cannot do anything but wait, relax.
In Grosvenor Square, Kevin Brown had been awakened by one of his men and hustled into the listening post in time to hear the end of Quinn’s conversation.
