“Don’t worry, Mr. Quinn. We’d obviously like to try and grab them, but I take your point. There’ll be no tricks from us, no heroics.”
“Thank you,” said Quinn. He shook hands with the Scotland Yard man, who left to report progress to the one o’clock COBRA committee.
Kevin Brown had spent the morning secluded in his office beneath the embassy. When the stores opened he had sent out two of his men to buy him a list of items he needed: a very large-scale map of the area north of London, extending fifty miles in all directions; a matching sheet of clear plastic; map pins; wax pencils in different colors. He assembled his team of detectives and spread the plastic across the map.
“Okay, let’s just look at these phone booths the rat has been using. Chuck, read them out one by one.”
Chuck Moxon studied his list. “First call, Hitchin, county of Hertfordshire.”
“Okay, we have Hitchin right… here.” A pin was stuck in Hitchin.
Zack had made eight calls in thirteen days; the ninth was about to come in. One by one, pins were stuck in the site of each call. Just before ten o’clock one of the two FBI men in the listening post stuck his head around the door.
“He just called again. Threatening to cut off Simon’s fingers with a chisel.”
“Hot damn,” swore Brown. “That fool Quinn’s going to blow it away. I knew he would. Where’d the call come from?”
“Place called Saffron Waiden,”said the young man.
When the nine pins were in place, Brown joined up the perimeter of the area they bounded. It was a jagged shape, involving pieces of five counties. Then he took a ruler and joined the extremities to their opposites on the other side of the pattern. In the approximate center a web of crisscross lines appeared. To the southeast the extremity was Great Dunmow, Essex; to the north was St. Neots, Cambridgeshire; and to the west, Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire.
“The densest area of the crossed lines lies right here,” Brown pointed out with his fingertip, “just east of Biggleswade, county of Bedfordshire. No calls from that area at all. Why?”
“Too close to base?” ventured one of the men.
“Could be, boy, could be. Look, I want you to take these two country towns, Biggleswade and Sandy, the two closest to the geographic center of the web. Get up there and visit all the realtors who have offices in those towns. Make like you are prospective clients, looking to rent a secluded house to write a book or something. Listen to what they say-maybe some place that’ll be free soon, maybe some place they could have let you have three months back but it went to someone else. You got it?”
They all nodded.
“Should we let Mr. Seymour know we’re on our way?” asked Moxon. “I mean, maybe Scotland Yard has been in that area.”
“You leave Mr. Seymour to me,” said Brown reassuringly. “We get along just fine. And the bobbies may have been up there and they may just have overlooked something. Maybe so, maybe not. Let’s just check it out.”
Steve Pyle greeted Laing with an attempt at his usual geniality.
“I… ah… called you up here, Andy, because I just got a request from London that you go visit with them. Seems this could be the start of a career move for you.”
“Sure,” said Laing. “Would this request from London have anything to do with the package and report I sent them, which never arrived because it was intercepted right here in this office?”
Pyle dropped all semblance of bonhomie.
“All right. You’re smart, maybe too smart. But you’ve been dabbling in things that don’t concern you. I tried to warn you off, but no, you had to go playing private detective. Okay, now I’ll level with you. I’m transferring you back to London. You don’t fit in down here, Laing. I’m not happy with your work. You’re going back. That’s it. You have seven days to put your desk in order. Your ticket’s been booked. Seven days from now.”
Had he been older, more mature, Andy Laing would probably have played his cards more coolly. But he was angry that a man of Pyle’s eminence in the bank could be ripping off client money for his own enrichment. And he had the naïveté of the young and eager, the conviction that Right would triumph. He turned at the door.
“Seven days? Time enough for you to fix things with London? No way. I’m going back all right, but I’m going back tomorrow.”
He was in time for the last flight of the night back to Jiddah. When he got there he went straight to the bank. He kept his passport in the top drawer of his desk, along with any other valuable papers-burglaries of European-owned apartments in Jiddah are not unheard-of, and the bank was safer. At least, it was supposed to be. The passport was missing.
That night there was a stand-up row among the four kidnappers.
“Keep your bloody voices down,” hissed Zack on several occasions. “Baissez les voix, merde.”
He knew his men were running to the limit of their patience. It was always a risk, using this kind of human material. After the screaming adrenaline of the snatch outside Oxford, they had been penned up day and night in a single house, drinking beer from cans he had bought at a supermarket, keeping out of sight all the time, hearing callers at the door ring and ring before finally going away without an answer. The nervous strain had been bad, and these were not men with the mental resources to immerse themselves in books or thought. The Corsican listened to his French-language pop programs all day, interspersed with news flashes. The South African whistled tunelessly for hours on end, and always the same tune, “Marie Marais.” The Belgian watched the television, of which he could not understand a word. He liked the cartoons best.
The argument was over Zack’s decision to close with the negotiator called Quinn and have done with the whole thing at $2 million ransom.
The Corsican objected, and because they both spoke French, the Belgian tended to agree with him. The South African was fed up, wanted to get home, and agreed with Zack. The main argument from the Corsican was that they could hold out forever. Zack knew this was not true, but he was aware he could have a very dangerous situation on his hands if he told them they were beginning to show cracks, and could not take more than another six days of numbing boredom and inactivity.
So he appeased them, placated them, told them they had done brilliantly and would all be very rich men in just a few more days. The thought of all that money calmed them down and they subsided. Zack was relieved it had ended without blows. Unlike the three men in the house, his problem was not boredom but stress. Every time he drove the big Volvo along the crowded motorways he knew that one random police check, one brush with another car, one moment of inattention, would have a blue-capped officer leaning in his window, wondering why he wore a wig and false moustache. His disguise would pass in a crowded street, but not at six inches’ range.
Every time he went into one of those phone booths, he had a mental image of something going wrong, of a faster-than-usual trace, of a plainclothes policeman being only a few yards away, taking the alarm on his personal radio and walking up to the phone booth. Zack carried a gun, and knew he would use it to get away. If he did, he would have to abandon the Volvo, always parked a few hundred yards away, and escape on foot. Some idiot member of the public might even try to tackle him. It was getting to the point that whenever he saw a policeman sauntering along the crowded streets he chose for his phone calls, his stomach turned over.
“Go give the kid his supper,” he told the South African.
Simon Cormack had been fifteen days in his underground cell, and thirteen since he had answered the question about Aunt Emily and known that his father was trying to get him out. He realized now what solitary confinement must be like and wondered how people could survive months, even years of it. At least in the prisons he had heard of, inmates in solitary had writing materials, books, sometimes television, something to occupy the mind. He had nothing. But he was a tough boy and he determined not to go to pieces.