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“What have you got, Sergeant?”
Kidd glanced across at the cornered Volkswagen, its terrified inhabitant, the three FBI men examining the empty attaché case, two more Yankees standing back and staring hopefully at the sky, and three of his colleagues trying to take statements.
“Bit of a mess, sir.”
“Sergeant Kidd, listen carefully. Have you captured a very tall American who has just stolen two million dollars?”
“No, sir,” said Kidd. “We’ve captured a very gay hairdresser who’s just wet his pants.”
“What do you mean ... disappeared?” The cry, shout, or yell, in a variety of tones and accents, was within an hour echoing around a Kensington apartment, Scotland Yard, Whitehall, the Home Office, Downing Street, Grosvenor Square, and the West Wing of the White House. “He can’t just disappear.”
But he had.
Chapter 10
Quinn had dropped the attaché case into the open back of the Golf only thirty seconds after swerving around the corner of the street containing the apartment house. When he had opened the case as Lou Collins presented it to him before dawn, he had not seen any direction-finding device, but did not expect to. Whoever had worked on the case in the laboratory would have been smarter than to leave any traces of the implant visible. Quinn had gambled on there being something inside the case to lead police and troops to whatever rendezvous he established with Zack.
Waiting at a traffic light, he had flicked o
pen the locks, stuffed the package of diamonds inside his zipped leather jacket, and looked around. The Golf was standing next to him. The driver, muffled in his fur hat, had not noticed a thing.
Half a mile later Quinn abandoned the motorcycle; without the legally obligatory crash helmet, he was likely to attract the attention of a policeman. Outside the Brompton Oratory he hailed a cab, directed it to Marylebone, and paid it off in George Street, completing his journey on foot.
His pockets contained all he had been able to abstract from the apartment without attracting attention: his U. S. passport and driver’s license—though these would soon be useless when the alert went out—a wad of British money from Sam’s purse, his multibladed penknife, and a pair of pliers from the fuse cupboard. A chemist’s shop in Marylebone High Street had yielded a pair of plain-glass spectacles with heavy horn rims; and a men’s outfitters, a tweed hat and Burberry.
He made a number of further purchases at a confectioner’s, a hardware shop, and a luggage store. He checked his watch: fifty-five minutes from the time he had replaced the phone in Mr. Patel’s fruit store. He turned into Blandford Street and found the call box he sought on the corner of Chiltern Street, one of a bank of two. He took the second, whose number he had memorized three weeks earlier and dictated to Zack an hour before. It rang right on time.
Zack was wary, uncomprehending, and angry. “All right, you bastard, what the hell are you up to?”
In a few short sentences Quinn explained what he had done. Zack listened in silence.
“Are you leveling?” he asked. “ ’Cos if you ain’t, that kid is still going to end up in a body bag.”
“Look, Zack, I frankly don’t give a shit whether they capture you or not. I have one concern and one only: to get that kid back to his family alive and well. And I have inside my jacket two million dollars’ worth of raw diamonds I figure interest you. Now, I’ve thrown the bloodhounds off because they wouldn’t stop interfering, trying to be smart. So, do you want to set up an exchange or not?”
“Time’s up,” said Zack. “I’m moving.”
“This happens to be a public phone in Marylebone,” said Quinn, “but you’re right not to trust it. Call me, same number, this evening with the details. I’ll come, alone, unarmed, with the stones, wherever. Because I’m on the lam, make it after dark. Say, eight o’clock.”
“All right,” growled Zack. “Be there.”
It was the moment Sergeant Kidd took his car’s radio mike to talk to Nigel Cramer. Minutes later every police station in the metropolitan area was receiving a description of a man and instructions for every beat officer to keep an eye open, to spot but not approach, to radio back to the police station, and tail the suspect but not intervene. There was no name appended to the all-points, nor a reason why the man was wanted.
Leaving the phone booth, Quinn walked back into Blandford Street and down to Blackwood’s Hotel. It was one of those old established inns tucked away into the side streets of London that have somehow avoided being bought and sanitized by the big chains, an ivy-covered twenty-room place with paneling and bay windows and a fire blazing in the brick hearth of a reception area furnished in rugs over uneven boards. Quinn approached the pleasant-looking girl behind the desk.
“Hi, there,” he said, with his widest grin.
She looked up and smiled back. Tall, stooping, tweed hat, Burberry, and calfskin grip—an all-American tourist.
“Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”
“Well, now, I hope so, miss. Yes, I surely do. You see, I just flew in from the States and I took your British Airways—my all-time favorite airline—and you know what they did? They lost my luggage. Yes, ma’am, sent it all the way to Frankfurt by mistake.”
Her face puckered with concern.
“Now, see here, they’re going to get it back for me, twenty-four hours tops. Only my problem is, all my package-tour details were in my small suitcase, and would you believe it, I cannot for the life of me recall where I am checked in. Spent an hour with that lady from the airline going over names of hotels in London—you know how many there are?—but no way can I recall it, not till my suitcase reaches me. So the bottom line is, I took a cab into town and the driver said this was a real nice place ... er ... would you by any chance have a room I could take for the night? By the way, I’m Harry Russell.”
She was quite entranced. The tall man looked so bereft at the loss of his luggage, his inability to recall where he was supposed to be staying. She watched a lot of movies and thought he looked a bit like that gentleman who was always asking people to make his day, but he talked like the man with the funny bird-feather in his hat from Dallas. It never occurred to her not to believe him, or even to ask for identification. Blackwood’s did not normally take guests with neither luggage nor reservation, but losing one’s luggage, and forgetting one’s hotel, and because of a British airline ... She scanned the vacancy sheet; most of their guests were regulars up from the provinces, and a few permanent residents.
