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They were aghast.
“What’s so good about a professional killer?” asked Sam.
“Not a lot,” admitted Quinn, who seemed strangely relieved. “But a professional only works for money. And so far he doesn’t have any.”
Chapter 7
The kidnapper did not call back until six that evening. In the interim Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea stared at the flash-line telephone almost without cease, praying that whoever he was, the man would call back and not sever communication.
Quinn alone seemed to have the ability to relax. He lay on the sitting-room sofa, stretched out with his shoes off, reading a book. The Anabasis by Xenophon, Sam reported quietly from the phone in her room. He had brought it from Spain.
“Never heard of it,” grumbled Brown in the basement of the embassy.
“It’s about military tactics,” volunteered Seymour helpfully, “by a Greek general.”
Brown grunted. He knew they were members of NATO but that was about it.
The British police were far busier. Two telephone booths, one in Hitchin, a small and pretty provincial town at the northern tip of Hertfordshire, the other in the great new-town sprawl of Milton Keynes, were visited by quiet men from Scotland Yard and dusted for fingerprints. There were dozens, but though they did not know it, none belonged to the kidnapper, who had worn flesh-colored surgical gloves.
Discreet inquiries were made in the vicinity of both booths to discover if any witness might have seen the booths being used at the specific moments that the calls were made. No one had noticed, not to a matter of seconds. Both booths were in banks of three or four, all in constant use. Besides, both places had been crowded at the time. Cramer grunted.
“He’s using the daily rush hours. Morning and lunch.”
The tapes of the caller’s voice were taken to a professor of philology, an expert in speech patterns and the origins of accents, but Quinn had done most of the talking and the academic shook his head.
“He’s using several layers of paper tissue or a thin cloth over the mouthpiece of the phone,” he said. “Crude, but fairly effective. It won’t fool the speech-pattern oscillators, but I, like the machines, need more material to discern patterns.”
Commander Williams promised to bring him more material when the man phoned again. During the day, six houses went quietly under surveillance. One was in London, the other five in the Home Counties. All were rented properties, all six-month leases. By nightfall two had been cleared: a French bank official in one, married with two children, working quite legitimately for the London branch of the Société Générale; and in the other, a German professor doing research work at the British Museum.
By the end of the week the other four would also be cleared, but the property market was producing more “possibles” in a constant stream. They would all be checked out.
“If the criminals have actually bought a property,” Cramer told the COBRA committee, “or borrowed one from a bona fide homeowner, I’m afraid it becomes impossible. In the latter case there would be no trace at all; in the former the volume of house purchases in the Southeast in any one year would simply swamp our resources for months on end.”
Privately Nigel Cramer favored Quinn’s argument (which he had heard on tape) that the caller sounded more like a professional criminal than a political terrorist. Still, the run-through of both kinds of lawbreaker went on and would do so until the end of the case. Even if the abductors were underworld criminals, they might have acquired their Czech machine pistol from a terrorist group. The two worlds sometimes met and did business.
If the British police were overwhelmed with work, the problem for the American team in the basement of the embassy was idleness. Kevin Brown paced the long room like a caged lion. Four of his men were on their cots, the other four watching the light that would flash on when the single dedicated phone in the Kensington apartment, whose number the kidnapper now had, was used. The light flashed at two minutes after six.
To everyone’s amazement, Quinn let it ring four times. Then he answered, getting in the first words.
“Hi, there. Glad you called.”
“Like I said, you want Simon Cormack back alive, it’s going to cost you.” Same voice, deep, gruff, throaty, and muffled by paper tissues.
“Okay, let’s talk,” said Quinn in a friendly tone. “My name’s Quinn. Just Quinn. Can you give me a name?”
“Get stuffed.”
“Come on, not the real one. We’re not fools, either of us. Any name. Just so I can say ‘Hi there, Smith, or Jones—’ ”
“Zack,” said the voice.
“Z-A-C-K? You got it. Listen, Zack, you’ve got to keep these calls to twenty seconds, right? I’m not a magician. The spooks are listening and tracing. Call me back in a couple of hours and we’ll talk again. Okay?”
“Yeah,” said Zack, and put the phone down.
The Kensington exchange wizards had got their “lock” in seven seconds. Another public phone booth, in the town center of Great Dunmow, county of Essex, nine miles west of the M.11 motorway from London to Cambridge. Like the other two towns, north of London. A small town with a small police station. The plainclothes officer reached the bank of three booths eighty seconds after the phone was hung up. Too late. At that hour, with the shops closing and the pubs open, there was a swirl of people but no one looking furtive, or wearing a ginger wig, moustache, and tinted glasses. Zack had chosen the third daily rush hour, early evening, dusk but not yet dark, for in the dark, phone booths are illuminated inside.
In the embassy basement Kevin Brown exploded.
