AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It’s still early days,” said Quinn. “Simon Cormack’s best chance of surviving unhurt lies in the kidnappers’ believing two things: that they have finally screwed out of the family the absolute maximum they can pay; and that they will see that money only if they produce Simon alive and unharmed. They won’t come to those conclusions in a few seconds. On top of that, the police may yet get a break and find them.”
“I agree with Mr. Quinn,” said Cramer. “It may take a couple of weeks. It sounds harsh, but it’s better than a rushed and botched case resulting in an error of judgment and a dead boy.”
“Any more time you can give me I’d appreciate,” said Commander Williams.
“So what do I tell Washington?” demanded Brown.
“You tell them,” said Quinn calmly, “that they asked me to negotiate Simon’s return, and I am trying to do that. If they want to pull me off the case, that’s fine. They just have to tell the President that.”
Collins coughed. Seymour stared at the floor. The meeting ended.
When Zack phoned again, Quinn was apologetic.
“Look, I tried to get through to President Cormack personally. No way. The man’s under sedation much of the time. I mean, he’s going through hell—”
“So cut it short and get me the money,” snapped Zack.
“I tried, I swear to God. Look, five million is over the top. He doesn’t have that kind of cash—it’s all tied up in blind trust funds that will take weeks to unlock. The word is, I can get you nine hundred thousand dollars, and I can get it fast—”
“Naff off,” snarled the voice on the phone. “You Yanks can get it from somewhere else. I can wait.”
“Yeah, sure, I know,” said Quinn earnestly. “You’re safe. The fuzz are getting nowhere, that’s for sure—so far. If you could just come down a bit ... The boy all right?”
“Yeah.”
Quinn could tell Zack was thinking.
“I have to ask this, Zack. Those bastards in back of me are leaning real hard. Ask the boy what his pet dog’s name was—the one he had f
rom a toddler up through the age of ten. Just so we know he’s okay. Won’t cost you anything. Helps me a lot.”
“Four million,” snapped Zack. “And that’s bloody it.”
The phone cut off. The call had come from St. Neots, a town in the south of Cambridge, just east of the county line with Bedfordshire. No one was spotted leaving the booth, one of a row outside the main post office.
“What are you doing?” asked Sam curiously.
“Putting the pressure on,” said Quinn, and would explain no more.
What Quinn had realized days before was that in this case he had one good ace not always available to negotiators. Bandits in the mountains of Sardinia or Central America could hold out for months or years if they wished. No army sweep, no police patrol would ever find them in those hills riddled with caves and undergrowth. Their only real hazard might be from helicopters, but that was it.
In the densely populated southeast corner of England, Zack and his men were in law-abiding—that is, hostile—territory. The longer they hid, the greater by the law of averages the chance of their being identified and located. So the pressure on them would be to settle and clear out. The trick would be to get them to think they had won, had got the best deal they could, and had no need to kill the hostage as they fled.
Quinn was counting on the rest of Zack’s team—the police knew from the ambush site that there were at least four in the gang—being confined to the hideout. They would get impatient, claustrophobic, eventually urging their leader to settle up and be done with it, precisely the same argument Quinn would be using. Assailed from both sides, Zack would be tempted to take what he could get and seek escape. But that would not happen until the pressure on the kidnappers had built up a lot more.
Quinn had deliberately sown two seeds in Zack’s mind: that Quinn was the good guy, trying to do his best for a fast deal and being obstructed by the Establishment—he recalled the face of Kevin Brown and wondered if that was wholly a lie—and that Zack was quite safe ... so far. Meaning the opposite. The more Zack’s sleep was disturbed by nightmares of a police breakthrough, the better.
The professor of linguistics had now decided that Zack was almost certainly in his mid-forties to early fifties, and probably the leader of the gang. There was no hesitation to indicate he would have to consult someone else before agreeing to terms. He was born of working-class people, did not have a very good formal education, and almost certainly stemmed from the Birmingham area. But his native accent had been muted over the years by long periods away from Birmingham, possibly abroad.
A psychiatrist tried to build up a portrait of the man. He was certainly under strain, and it was growing as the conversations were prolonged. His animosity toward Quinn was decreasing with the passage of time. He was accustomed to violence—there had been no hesitation or qualm in his voice when he mentioned the severing of Simon Cormack’s fingers. On the other hand he was logical and shrewd, wary but not afraid. A dangerous man but not crazy. Not a psycho and not “political.”
These reports went to Nigel Cramer, who reported all to the COBRA committee. Copies went at once to Washington, straight to the White House committee. Other copies came to the Kensington apartment. Quinn read them, and when he was finished, so did Sam.
“What I don’t understand,” she said as she put down the last page, “is why they picked Simon Cormack. The President comes from a wealthy family, but there must be other rich kids walking around England.”
Quinn, who had worked that one out while sitting watching a TV screen in a bar in Spain, glanced at her but said nothing. She waited for an answer but got none. That annoyed her. It also intrigued her. She found as the days passed that she was becoming very intrigued by Quinn.
On the seventh day after the kidnap and the fourth since Zack had made his first call, the CIA and the British SIS took their penetration agents throughout the network of European terrorist organizations off the job. There had been no news of the procurement of a Skorpion machine pistol from these sources, and the view had faded that political terrorists were involved. Among groups investigated had been the I.R.A. and the INLA, both Irish, and in both of which the CIA and SIS each had sleepers whose identity they were not going to reveal to each other; the German Red Army Faction, successor to Baader-Meinhof; the Italian Red Brigades; the French Action Directe; the Spanish/Basque ETA; and the Belgian CCC. There were smaller and even weirder groups, but these had been thought too small to have mounted the Cormack operation.
