“You can take the hood off,” said Zack’s voice. He was speaking through the peephole in the cellar door. Quinn used his right hand to remove his hood. He was in a bare cellar: concrete floor, concrete walls, perhaps a wine cellar converted to a new purpose. On a steel-frame bed against the far wall sat a lanky figure, his head and shoulders covered by another black hood. There were two knocks on the door. As if on command the figure on the bed tugged off his hood.
Simon Cormack stared in amazement at the tall man near the door, his raincoat half open, holding up a clothespin in his left hand. Quinn looked back at the President’s son.
“Hi there, Simon. You okay, kid?” A voice from home.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
“Well, the negotiator. We’ve been worried about you. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m ... fine.”
There were three knocks on the door. The young man pulled on his hood. The door opened. Zack stood there. Masked. Armed.
“Well, there he is. Now, the diamonds.”
“Sure,” said Quinn. “You kept your deal. I keep mine.”
He replaced the pencil in the jaws of the clothespin, and let it hang from its wires to his waist. He slipped off the raincoat and ripped the wooden box from his chest. From the center he took the flat velour package of gems and held them out. Zack took them and passed them to a man in the passage behind him. His gun was still on Quinn.
“I’ll take the bomb, too,” he said. “You’re not blowing your way out of here with it.”
Quinn folded the wires and clothespin into the space left in the open box, pulled the wires out of the beige substance. The wires had no detonators attached to the ends of them. Quinn twisted a piece of the substance off one of the blocks and tasted it.
“Never could develop a taste for marzipan,” he said. “Too sweet for me.”
Zack stared at the assembly of household items lying in the box in his free hand.
“Marzipan?”
“The best that Marylebone High Street can offer.”
“I should bloody kill you, Quinn.”
“You could, but I hope you won’t. No need, Zack. You got what you want. Like I said, pros kill when they have to. Examine the diamonds in peace, make your escape, let the kid and me stay here till you phone the police.”
Zack closed the door and bolted it behind him. He spoke through the peephole.
“I’ll say this for you, Yank. You got balls.”
Then the peephole closed. Quinn turned to the figure on the bed and pulled off his hood for him. He sat down beside the boy.
“Now, I’d better bring you up to date a bit. A few more hours, if all goes well, and we should be out of here and heading for home. By the way, your mom and dad send their love.”
He ruffled the young man’s tangled hair. Simon Cormack’s eyes filled with tears and he began to cry uncontrollably. He tried to wipe them away on the sleeve of his plaid shirt, but it was no good. Quinn wrapped one arm around the thin shoulders and remembered a day long ago in the jungles along the Mekong; the first time he was ever in combat, and how he survived while others died, and how afterward the sheer relief caused the tears to come and he could not stop them.
When Simon stopped and began to bombard him with questions about home, Quinn had a chance to have a look at the youth. Bearded, moustached, dirty, but otherwise in good shape. They’d fed him and had the decency to give him fresh clothes: the plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a broad leather belt with an embossed brass buckle to hold them up—camping-shop gear but adequate against the chill of November.
There seemed to be some kind of a row going on upstairs. Quinn could vaguely hear raised voices, principal among them Zack’s. The sounds were too indistinct for him to hear the words, but the tone was clear enough. The man was angry. Quinn’s brow furrowed; he had not checked the stones himself—he had not the skill to tell real diamonds from good forgeries—but now prayed no one had been foolish enough to insert a proportion of paste among the gems.
In fact that was not the reason for the dispute. After several minutes it calmed down. In an upstairs bedroom—the kidnappers tended to avoid the downstairs rooms during daylight hours, despite the thick net curtains that screened them—the South African was seated at a table brought up there for the purpose. The table was covered by a bed sheet, the slit velvet packet lay empty on the bed, and all four men gazed in awe at a small mountain of uncut diamonds.
Using a spatula, the South African began to divide the pile into smaller ones, then smaller again, until he had separated the mountain into twenty-five small hillocks. He gestured to Zack to choose one mound. Zack shrugged, picked one in the middle—approximately a thousand stones out of the twenty-five thousand on the table.
Without a word the South African began to scoop up the other twenty-four piles and tip them one by one into a stout canvas bag with a drawstring at the top. When the selected pile alone remained, he switched on a powerful reading lamp above the table, took a jeweler’s loupe from his pocket, a pair of tweezers in his right hand, and held up the first stone to the light.
After several seconds he grunted and nodded, dropping the diamond into the open-topped canvas bag. It would take six hours to examine all thousand stones.
The kidnappers had chosen well. Top quality diamonds, even small ones, are normally “sourced” with a certificate when released to the trade by the Central Selling Organization, which dominates the world diamond trade, handling over 85 percent of stones passing from the mines to the trade. Even the U.S.S.R. with its Siberian extractions is smart enough not to break this lucrative cartel. Large stones of lesser quality are also usually sold with a certificate of provenance.
But in picking melees of medium quality gems between a fifth- and a half-carat, the kidnappers had gone for an area of the trade that is almost uncontrollable. These stones are the bread and butter of the manufacturing and retailing jewelers around the world, changing hands in packages of several hundred at a time without certification. Any manufacturing jeweler would honestly be able to take over a consignment of several hundred stones, especially if he was offered a 10 or 15 percent discount off the market price. Transferred into the settings around larger stones, they would simply disappear into the trade.
If they were genuine. Uncut diamonds do not glitter and gleam like the cut and polished article that appears at the end of the process. They look like dull pieces of glass, with a milky, opaque surface. But they cannot be confused with glass by an examiner of moderate skill and experience.
Real diamonds have a quite distinctive, soapy texture to the surface and are immune from water. If a piece of glass is dipped in water, the drops of liquid stay on the surface for several seconds; with a diamond they run off instantly, leaving the gem dry as a bone.
Moreover, under a magnifying loupe, diamonds have a perceivable triangular crystallography on the surface. The South African was looking for this patterning, to ensure they had not been foisted off with sand-blasted bottle glass or the other principal substitute, cubic zirconia.
As this scrutiny was going on, Senator Bennett R. Hapgood rose to his feet on the podium erected for the purpose in the sweeping grounds of the open-air Hancock Center in the heart of Austin and surveyed the crowd with satisfaction.
Straight ahead of him he could see the dome of the Texas State Capitol, second largest in the nation after the Capitol in Washington, gleaming in the late morning sun. The crowd might have been larger, considering the massive paid-for publicity that had presaged this important launch, but the media—local, state, and national—were well in attendance and this pleased him.
He raised his hands in a boxer’s victory salute to acknowledge the roar of applause from the cheerleaders that began as soon as the encomium that announced him had ended. As the chants of the high-kicking girls continued and the crowd felt obliged to join in, he shook his head in well-simulated disbelief at such honor and held his hands high, palms outward, in a gesture to indicate the
re was no need to afford an insignificant junior senator from Oklahoma such an ovation.
When the cheering died down he took the microphone and began his speech. He used no notes; he had rehearsed his words many times since receiving the invitation to inaugurate and become president of the new movement that would soon sweep America.
“My friends, my fellow Americans, everywhere.”
Though his present audience was overwhelmingly composed of Texans, he was aiming through the lens of the television camera at a much larger audience.
“We may come from different parts of this great nation of ours. We may have different backgrounds, inhabit different walks of life, possess different hopes, fears, and aspirations. But one thing we share, wherever we may be, whatever we may do—we are all, men, women, and children, patriots of this great land. ...”
The statement was undeniable and the cheering testified to that.
“This above all we share: We want our nation to be strong ...” More cheering. “... and proud ...” Ecstasy.
He talked for an hour. The evening newscasts across the United States would use between thirty seconds and one minute, according to taste. When he had finished and sat down, the breeze scarcely ruffling his snow-white, blow-dried, and spray-fixed hair above the cattleman’s suntan, the Citizens for a Strong America movement was well and truly launched.
Dedicated, in broad terms, to the regeneration of national pride and honor through strength—the notion that it had never perceivably degenerated was overlooked—the CSA would specifically oppose the Nantucket Treaty root and branch, and demand its repudiation in Congress.
The enemy to pride and honor through strength had been clearly and incontrovertibly identified; it was Communism, meaning socialism, which ran from Medicaid through welfare checks to tax increases. Those fellow travelers of Communism who sought to dupe the American people into arms control at lower levels were not identified, but implied. The campaign would be conducted at every level—regional offices, media-oriented information kits, lobbying at the national and constituency levels, and public appearances by true patriots who would speak against the treaty and its progenitor—an oblique reference to the stricken man in the White House.
By the time the crowd was invited to sample the barbecues scattered around the periphery of the park, and made available by the generosity of a local philanthropist and patriot, Plan Crockett, the second campaign to destabilize John Cormack to the point of resignation, was on the road.
Quinn and the President’s son spent a fitful night in the cellar. The boy took the bed, at Quinn’s insistence, but could not sleep. Quinn sat on the floor, his back against the hard wall, and would have dozed but for the questions from Simon.
“Mr. Quinn?”
“It’s Quinn. Just Quinn.”
“Did you see my dad? Personally?”
“Sure. He told me about Aunt Emily ... and Mr. Spot.”
“How was he?”
“Fine. Worried of course. It was just after the kidnap.”
“Did you see Mom?”
“No, she was with the White House doctor. Worried but okay.”
“Do they know I’m okay?”
“As of two days ago, I told them you were still alive. Try and get some sleep.”
“Okay ... When do you figure we’ll get out of here?”
“Depends. In the morning, I hope, they’ll quit and run. If they make a phone call twelve hours later, the British police should be here minutes afterward. It depends on Zack.”
“Zack? He’s the leader?”
“Yep.”
At two in the morning the overstrung youth finally ran out of questions and dozed. Quinn stayed awake, straining to identify the muffled sounds from upstairs. It was almost 4:00 A.M. when the three loud knocks came at the door.
Simon swung his legs off the bed and whispered, “The hoods.” Both men pulled oft the cowled hoods to prevent their seeing the abductors. When they were blindfolded, Zack entered the cellar with two men behind him. Each carried a pair of handcuffs. He nodded toward the two captives. They were turned around and their wrists cuffed behind their backs.
What they did not know was that the examination of the diamonds had finished before midnight, to the complete satisfaction of Zack and his accomplices. The four men had spent the night scouring their living quarters from top to bottom. Every surface that might have had a fingerprint was wiped; every trace they could think of, expunged. They did not bother to dismantle the cellar of its bolted-down bed or the length of chain that had tethered Simon to it for over three weeks. Their concern was not that others might come here one day and identify the place as having been the kidnappers’ hideout; rather, that those examiners would never discover who the kidnappers had been.
Simon Cormack was detached from his ankle chain and both men were led upstairs, through the house, and into the garage. The Volvo awaited. Its trunk was stuffed with the carryalls of the kidnappers and had no room left. Quinn was forced into the backseat and down to the floor, then covered with a blanket. He was uncomfortable but optimistic.
If the kidnappers had intended to kill them both, the cellar would have been the place. He had proposed they be left in the cellar, to be liberated later by the police following a phone call from abroad. That was evidently not to be. He guessed, rightly, that the kidnappers did not want their hideout discovered, at least not yet. So he lay hunched on the floor of the car and breathed as best he could through the thick hood.
He felt the depression of the seat cushions above him as Simon Cormack was made to lie along the backseat. He, too, was covered by a blanket. The two smallest men climbed in the back, sitting on the edge of the seat with the slim body of Simon behind their backs, their feet on Quinn. The giant climbed into the passenger seat; Zack took the wheel.
At his command all four took off their masks and track-suit tops and threw them through the windows onto the garage floor. Zack started the engine and operated the door-opener. He backed out into the driveway, closed the garage door, reversed into the street, and drove off. No one saw the car. It was still dark, with another two and a half hours to dawn.
The car ran steadily for about two hours. Quinn had no idea where he was or where he was going. Eventually (it would later be established it must have been within a few minutes of six-thirty), the car slowed to a halt. No one had spoken during the drive. They all sat bolt upright in their seats, in business suits and ties, and remained silent. When they stopped, Quinn heard the rear near-side door open and the two sets of feet on his body were removed. Someone dragged him out of the car by the feet. He felt wet grass under his cuffed hands, knew he was on the grassy edge of a road somewhere. He scrambled to his knees, then his feet, and stood up. He heard two men reentering the rear of the car and the slamming of the door.
“Zack,” he called. “What about the boy?”
Zack was standing on the road by the driver’s open door, looking at him across the roof of the car.
“Ten miles up the road,” he said, “by the roadside, same as you.”
There was the purr of a powerful engine and the crunch of gravel under wheels. Then the car was gone. Quinn felt the chill of a November morning on his shirt-sleeved torso. The moment the car was gone, he got to work.
Hard labor in the vineyards had kept him in shape. His hips were narrow, like those of a man fifteen years his junior, and his arms were long. When the handcuffs went on he had braced the sinews of his wrists to secure the maximum space when he relaxed. Tugging the cuffs down over his hands as far as they would go, he worked his cuffed wrists down his back and around his behind. Then he sat in the grass, brought his wrists up under his knees, kicked off his shoes, and worked his legs through his locked arms, one after the other. With his wrists now in front of him he tore off the hood.
The road was long, narrow, straight, and utterly deserted in the predawn half-light. He sucked in lungsful of the cool fresh air and looked around for human habitation. There was none. H
e pulled on his shoes, rose, and began to jog along the road in the direction the car had taken.
After two miles he came to a garage on the left, a small affair with old-style hand-operated pumps and a little office. Three kicks brought the door down and he found the telephone on a shelf behind the pump attendant’s chair. He lifted the receiver two-handed, leaned his ear against it to make sure he had a dial tone, laid it down, dialed 01 for London, and then the flash line in the Kensington apartment.
In London the chaos took three seconds to get into full gear. A British engineer in the Kensington exchange came jolting out of his chair and began to search for a lock on the transmitting number. He got it in nine seconds.
In the basement of the U.S. embassy the duty ELINT man gave a yell as his warning light blazed red in his face and the sound of a phone ringing came into his headset. Kevin Brown, Patrick Seymour, and Lou Collins ran into the listening post from the cots where they had been dozing.
“Throw sound onto the wall speaker,” snapped Seymour.
In the apartment Sam Somerville had been dozing on the couch, once so favored by Quinn because it was right next to the flash phone. McCrea was asleep in one of the armchairs. It was their second night like this.
When the phone rang, Sam jolted awake but for two seconds did not register which phone was ringing. The pulsing red bulb on the flash line told her. She picked it up at the third ring.
“Yes?”
“Sam?”
There was no mistaking the deep voice at the other end.
“Oh, Quinn!” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Screw Quinn. What about the boy?” fumed Brown, unheard beneath the embassy.