“Ready by sundown,” said Stannard.
“Get a fast bird standing by and ready,” said Vice President Odell. Stannard nodded and made a note.
Andy Laing finally got his interview with the internal accountant just after lunch that day. The man was a fellow-American and had been on a tour of European branches for the previous three days.
He listened soberly and with growing dismay to what the young bank officer from Jiddah had to say, and scanned the computer printouts across his desk with a practiced eye. When he had finished he leaned back in his chair, puffed out his cheeks, and exhaled noisily.
“Dear God, these are very serious accusations indeed. And yes, they appear to be substantiated. Where are you staying in London?”
“I still have an apartment in Chelsea,” said Laing. “I’ve been there since I arrived. Luckily my tenants moved out two weeks back.”
The accountant noted its address and phone number.
“I’m going to have to consult with the general manager here, maybe the president in New York. Before we face Steve Pyle with this. Stay close to the phone for a couple of days.”
What neither of them knew was that the morning pouch from Riyadh contained a confidential letter from Steve Pyle to the London-based general manager for Overseas Operations.
The British press was as good as its word, but Radio Luxembourg is based in Paris and for French listeners the story of a first-class row between their Anglo-Saxon neighbors to the west is too good to miss.
Where the tip-off really came from could never be later established, except that it was a phone-in and anonymous. But the London office checked it out and confirmed that the sheer secrecy of the Bedford police gave credence to the story. It was a thin day and they ran it on the four o’clock news.
Hardly anybody in England heard it, but the Corsican did. He whistled in amazement and went to find Zack. The Englishman listened carefully, asked several supplementary questions in French, and went pale with anger.
Quinn knew already, and that was a saving grace because he had time to prepare an answer in the event Zack called. He did, just after 7:00 P.M.and in a towering rage.
“You lying bastard. You said there’d be no cowboy antics from the police or anyone else. You bloody lied to me-”
Quinn protested that he did not know what Zack was talking about-it would have been too phony to know all the details without a reminder. Zack told him in three angry sentences.
“But that was nothing to do with you,” Quinn shouted back. “The Frogs got it wrong, as usual. It was a DEA drug-bust that went wrong. You know these Rambos from the Drug Enforcement Agency-they did it. They weren’t looking for you-they were looking for cocaine. I had a Scotland Yard man here an hour ago and he was puking about it. For chrissake, Zack, you know the media. If you believe them, Simon’s been sighted eight hundred different places and you’ve been caught fifty times.”
It was plausible. Quinn counted on Zack’s having spent three weeks reading miles of inaccurate nonsense in the tabloid papers and having a healthy contempt for the press. In a booth in Linslade bus depot, he calmed down. His phone time was running out.
“Better not be true, Quinn. Just better not,” he said, and hung up.
Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea were pale with fear by the time the call ended.
“Where are those damn diamonds?” asked Sam.
There was worse to come. Like most countries, Britain has a range of breakfast-hour radio programs, a mix of mindless chitchat from the show host, pop music, news flashes, and phone-in trivia. The news is up-to-the-minute snippets torn from the wire service printers, hastily rewritten by junior subeditors, and thrust under the disc jockey’s nose. The pace of the programs is such that the careful checking and rechecking practiced by the investigative reporters of the Sunday “heavies” just does not take place.
When an American voice rang the busy news desk of City Radio’s Good Morning show, the call was taken by a girl trainee who later tearfully admitted she had not thought to query the claim that the speaker was the press counselor from the U.S. embassy with a genuine news bulletin. It went on the air in the excited tones of the D.J. seventy seconds later.
Nigel Cramer did not hear it but his teenage daughter did.
“Dad,” she called from the kitchen, “you going to catch them today?”
“Catch who?” said her father, pulling on his coat in the hall. His official car was at the curb.
“The kidnappers-you know.”
“I doubt it. Why do you ask?”
“Says so on the radio.”
Something hit Cramer hard in the stomach. He turned back from the door and into the kitchen. His daughter was buttering toast.
“What, exactly, did it say on the radio?” he asked in a very tight voice. She told him. That an exchange of the ransom for Simon Cormack would be set up within the day, and that the authorities were confident all the kidnappers would be caught in the process. Cramer ran out to his car, took the handset from the dashboard, and began to make a series of frantic calls as the car rolled.
It was too late. Zack had not heard the program, but the South African had.
Chapter 9
The call from Zack was later than usual-10:20 A.M. If he had been angry the previous day over the matter of the raid on the Bedfordshire farm, he was by now almost hysterical with rage.
Nigel Cramer had had time to warn Quinn, speaking from his car as it sped toward Scotland Yard. When Quinn put down the phone, it was the first time Sam had seen him appear visibly shaken. He paced the apartment in silence; the other two sat and watched in fear. They had heard the gist of Cramer’s call and sensed that it was all going to fail, somehow, somewhere.
Just waiting for the flash line to ring, not even knowing whether the kidnappers would have heard the radio show at all, or how they would react if they had, made Sam nauseous from stress. When the phone finally rang, Quinn answered it with his usual calm good humor. Zack did not even bother with preambles.
“Right, this time you’ve bloody blown it, you Yankee bastard. You take me for some kind of fool, do you? Well, you’re the fool, mate. ’Cos you’re going to look a right fool when you bury Simon Cormack’s body.”
Quinn’s shock and amazement were convincingly feigned.
“Zack, what the hell are you talking about? What’s gone wrong?”
“Don’t give me that,” screamed the kidnapper, his gruff voice rising. “If you didn’t hear the news, then ask your police mates about it. And don’t pretend it was a lie-it came from your own sodding embassy.”
Quinn persuaded Zack to tell him what he had heard, even though he knew. The telling caused Zack to calm down slightly; and his time was running out.
“Zack, it’s a lie, a phony. Any exchange would be just you and me, pal. Alone and unarmed. No direction-finder devices, no tricks, no police, no soldiers. Your terms, your place, your time. That’s the only way I’d have it.”
“Yeah, well, it’s too late. Your people want a body, that’s what they’re going to get.”
He was about to hang up. For the last time. Quinn knew if that happened it would be over. Days, weeks later, someone somewhere would enter a house or a flat, a cleaner, a caretaker, a real estate agent, and there he’d be. The President’s only son, shot through the head, or strangled, half decomposed…
“Zack, please, stay there just a few more seconds.”
Sweat was running off Quinn’s face, the first time he had ever shown the massive strain inside himself these past twenty days. He knew just how close it was to disaster.
In the Kensington exchange a group of Telecom engineers and police officers stared at the monitors and listened to the rage coming down the line; at Cork Street, beneath the pavements of smart Mayfair, four men from MI-5 were rooted in their chairs, motionless as the anger poured out of the speaker into the room and the tape deck wound silently around and around.