“Fine. I’ve been released. Simon’s due for release about now, maybe already. But farther up the road.”
“Quinn, where are you?”
“I don’t know. In a beat-up garage on a long stretch of road—the number on this phone is unreadable.”
“Bletchley number,” said the engineer in the Kensington exchange. “Here we are ... got it. Seven-four-five-oh-one.”
His colleague was already talking to Nigel Cramer, who had spent the night at Scotland Yard.
“Where the hell is it?” he hissed.
“Hang about ... here, Tubbs Cross Garage, on the A.421 between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham.”
At the same time Quinn saw an invoice pad belonging to the garage. It bore the address of the garage also, and he relayed it to Sam. Seconds later the line was dead. Sam and Duncan McCrea raced down to the street, where Lou Collins had left a CIA car should the listeners in the apartment need transport. Then they were off, McCrea driving and Sam map-reading.
From Scotland Yard, Nigel Cramer and six officers set off in two patrol cars, their sirens howling up Whitehall and down the Mall to pick up Park Lane and the road north out of London. Two big limousines sped out of Grosvenor Square at the same time, bearing Kevin Brown, Lou Collins, Patrick Seymour, and six of Brown’s Washington-based FBI men.
The A.421 between Fenny Stratford and the county town of Buckingham twelve miles farther west is a long, almost straight road devoid of towns or villages, running through largely flat agricultural country studded by the occasional clump of trees. Quinn jogged steadily west, the direction taken by the car. The first light of day began to filter through gray clouds above, giving visibility that rose steadily to three hundred yards. That was when he saw the thin figure jogging toward him in the gloom, and heard the roar of engines coming up fast behind him. He turned his head: a British police car, one of two, two black American limousines just ahead of them, and an unmarked Company car behind them. The leading car saw him and started to slow; due to the narrowness of the road the ones behind slowed as well.
No one in the cars had seen the tottering figure farther down the road. Simon Cormack had also worked his wrists around to the front of his body, and had covered five miles to Quinn’s four and a half. But he had made no phone call. Weakened by his captivity, dazed by his release, he was running slowly, rolling from side to side. The lead car from the embassy was beside Quinn.
“Where’s the boy?” roared Brown from the front seat.
Nigel Cramer leaped from the red-and-white squad car and shouted the same question. Quinn stopped, sucked air into his lungs, and nodded forward along the road.
“There,” he gasped.
That was when they saw him. Already out from their cars and on the road, the group of Americans and the British police officers began to run toward the figure two hundred yards away. Behind Quinn the car of McCrea and Sam Somerville swerved to a stop.
Quinn had stopped; there was nothing more he could do. He felt Sam run up behind him and grab his arm. She said something but he could never later recall what it was.
Simon Cormack, seeing his rescuers approaching him, slowed until he was hardly jogging at all. Just under a hundred yards separated him from the police officers of two nations when he died.
The witnesses would say later that the searingly brilliant white flash seemed to last for several seconds. The scientists would tell them it actually lasted for three milliseconds, but the human retina retains such a flash for some seconds afterward. The fireball that came with the flash lasted for half a second and enveloped the whole stumbling figure.
Four of the watchers, experienced men, not easy to shock, later had to undergo therapy. They described how the figure of the youth was picked up and hurled twenty yards toward them, like a rag doll, first flying, then bouncing and rolling in a twisted assembly of disjointed limbs. They all felt the blast wave.
Most would agree, with hindsight, that everything seemed to happen in slow motion, during and after the murder. Recollections came in bits and pieces, and the patient interrogators would listen, and note down the bits and pieces until they had a sequence, usually overlapping in parts.
There was Nigel Cramer, rock-still, pale as a sheet, repeating “Oh, God, oh, my God” over and over again. A Mormon FBI man dropped to his knees at the roadside and began to pray. Sam Somerville screamed once, buried her face in Quinn’s back, and began to cry. There was Duncan McCrea, behind both of them, on his knees, head down over a ditch, hands deep in the water supporting his weight, retching up his guts.
Quinn, they would say, was standing still, having been overtaken by the main group but able to see what had happened up the road, shaking his head in disbelief and murmuring, “No ... no ... no.”
It was a gray-haired British sergeant who was the first to break the spell of immobility and shock, moving forward toward the tangled body sixty yards away. He was followed by several FBI men, among them Kevin Brown, pale and shaking, then Nigel Cramer and three more men from the Yard. They looked at the body in silence. Then background and training took over.
“Clear the area, please,” said Nigel Cramer. It was in a tone no one was prepared to argue. “Tread very carefully.”
They all walked back toward the cars.
“Sergeant, get on to the Yard. I want the CEO up here, by chopper, within the hour. Photographs, forensics, the best team Fulham have got. You”—to the men in the second car—“get up and down the road. Block it off. Raise the local boys—I want barriers beyond the garage that way and up to Buckingham that way. No one enters this stretch of road until further notice except those I authorize.”
The officers designated to take the stretch of road beyond the body had to walk, crossing into the fields for a while to avoid treading on fragments, then running up the road to head off approaching cars. The second squad car went east toward Tubbs Cross Garage to block the road in the other direction. The first squad car was used for its radio.
Within sixty minutes police out of Buckingham to the west and Bletchley to the east would seal the road completely with steel barriers. A screen of local officers would fan out across the fields to fend off the curious seeking to approach cross-country. At least this time there would be no press for a while. They could put the road closing down to a burst water main—enough to deter the local small-town reporters.
Within fifty minutes the first Metropolitan Police helicopter swung in across the fields, guided by the radio of the squad car, to deposit on the road behind the cars a small, birdlike man called Dr. Barnard, the Chief Explosives Officer of the Met., a man who, thanks to the bomb outrages of the I.R.A. in mainland Britain, had examined more explosion scenes than he would have wished. He brought with him, apart from his “bag of tricks,” as he liked to call it, an awesome reputation.
They said of Dr. Barnard that from fragments so minuscule as almost to deceive a magnifying glass, he could reconstitute a bomb to the point of identifying the factory that had made its components and the man who had assembled it. He listened to “Nigel Cramer for several minutes, nodded, and gave his own orders to the dozen men who had clambered out of the second and third helicopters—the team from the Fulham forensic laboratories.
Impassively they set about their work, and the machinery of post-crime science rolled into action.
Long before any of this, Kevin Brown had returned from looking at the corpse of Simon Cormack to the point where Quinn still stood. He was gray with shock and rage.
“You bastard,” he grated. Both tall men, they were eyeball to eyeball. “This is your fault. One way or another you caused this, and I’m going to make you pay for it.”
The punch, when it came, surprised the two younger FBI men by Brown’s side, who took his arms and tried to calm him down. Quinn may have seen the punch coming. Whatever, he made no attempt to dodge it. Still with his hands cuffed in front of him, he took it full on the jaw. It was enough to knock him backwards; then his head caught the edge
of the roof of the car behind him, and he went down unconscious.
“Put him in the car,” growled Brown when he had recovered his self-control.
There was no way Cramer could hold the American group. Seymour and Collins had diplomatic immunity; he let them all depart back to London in their two cars fifteen minutes later, warning them that he would want Quinn, for whom there was no diplomatic status, available for the taking of lengthy statements in London. Seymour gave his word Quinn would be available. When they had gone, Cramer used the phone in the garage to put through a call to Sir Harry Marriott at his home and give him the news; the phone was more secure than a police radio band.
The politician was shocked to his core. But he was still a politician.
“Mr. Cramer, were we, in the form of the British authorities, in any way involved in all this?”
“No, Home Secretary. From the time Quinn ran out of that apartment, this was wholly his affair. He handled it the way he wanted to, without involving us or his own people. He chose to play a lone hand, and it has failed.”
“I see,” said the Home Secretary. “I shall have to inform the Prime Minister at once. Of all aspects.” He meant that the British authorities had had no hand in the affair at all. “Keep the media out of it at all costs for the moment. At worst we will have to say that Simon Cormack has been found murdered. But not yet. And, of course, keep me in touch on every development, no matter how small.”
This time the news reached Washington from its own sources in London. Patrick Seymour telephoned Vice President Odell personally, on a secure line. Thinking he was taking a call from the FBI liaison man in London to announce Simon Cormack’s release, Michael Odell did not mind the hour—5:00 A.M. in Washington. When he heard what Seymour had to tell him, he went white.
“But how? Why? In God’s name, why?”
“We don’t know, sir,” said the voice from London. “The boy had been released safe and sound. He was running toward us, ninety yards away, when it happened. We don’t even know what ‘it’ was. But he’s dead, Mr. Vice President.”
The committee was convened within the hour. Every member felt ill with shock when told the news. The question was, who should tell the President. As chairman of the committee, the man saddled with the task of “Get my son back for me” twenty-four days earlier, it fell to Michael Odell. With a heavy heart he walked from the West Wing to the White House living quarters.
President Cormack did not need to be awakened. He had slept little these past three and a half weeks, often waking of his own accord in the predawn darkness, and walking through to his personal study to attempt to concentrate on papers of state. Hearing the Vice President was downstairs and wished to see him, President Cormack went into the Yellow Oval Room and said he would greet Odell there.
The Yellow Oval Room, on the second floor, is a spacious reception room between the study and the Treaty Room. Beyond its windows, looking over the South Lawn, is the Truman Balcony. Both are at the geometric center of the White House, beneath the cupola and right above the South Portico.
Odel entered. President Cormack was in the center of the room, facing him. Odell was silent. He could not bring himself to say it. The air of expectancy on the President’s face drained away.
“Well, Michael?” he said dully.
“He ... Simon ... has been found. I’m afraid he is dead.”
President Cormack did not move, not a muscle. His voice when it came was flat; clear but emotionless.
“Leave me, please.”
Odell turned and left, moving into the Center Hall. He closed the door and turned toward the stairs. From behind him he heard a single cry, like that of a wounded animal in mortal pain. He shuddered and walked on.
Secret Service agent Lepinsky was at the end of the hall, by a desk against the wall, a raised phone in his hand.
“It’s the British Prime Minister, Mr. Vice President,” he said.
“I’ll take it. Hello, this is Michael Odell. Yes, Prime Minister, I’ve just told him. No, ma’am, he’s not taking any calls right now. Any calls.”
There was a pause on the line.
“I understand,” she said quietly. Then: “Do you have a pencil and paper?”
Odell gestured to Lepinsky, who produced his duty notebook. Odell scribbled what he was asked.
President Cormack got the slip of paper at the hour most Washingtonians, unaware of what had happened, were drinking their first cup of coffee. He was still in a silk robe, in his office, staring dully at the gray morning beyond the windows. His wife slept on; she would wake and hear it later. He nodded as the servant left and flicked open the folded sheet from Lepinsky’s notebook.
It said just: Second Samuel XVIII 33.
After several minutes he rose and walked to the shelf where he kept some personal books, among them the family Bible, bearing the signatures of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather. He found the verse toward the end of the Second Book of Samuel.
“And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”
Chapter 11
Dr. Barnard declined to use the services of the hundred young police constables offered by the Thames Valley Police in the search for clues on the road and the verges. He took the view that mass searches were fine for discovering the hidden body of a murdered child, or even a murder weapon like a knife, gun, or bludgeon.
But for this work, skill, patience, and extreme delicacy were needed. He used only his trained specialists from Fulham.
They taped off an area one hundred yards in diameter ’round the scene of the explosion; it turned out to be overkill. All the evidence was eventually found inside a circle of thirty yards’ diameter. Literally on hands and knees, his men crawled over every inch of the designated area with plastic bags and tweezers.
Every tiny fragment of fiber, denim, and leather was picked up and dropped in the bags. Some had hair, tissue, or other matter attached to them. Smeared grass stems were included. Ultrafine-tuned metal detectors covered every square centimeter of the road, the ditches, and the surrounding fields, yielding inevitably a collection of nails, tin cans, rusty screws, nuts, bolts, and a corroded plowshare.
The sorting and separation would come later. Eight big plastic garbage cans were filled with clear plastic bags and flown to London. The oval area from where Simon Cormack had been standing when he died to the point where he stopped rolling, at the heart of the larger circle, was treated with special care. It was four hours before the body could be removed.
First it was photographed from every conceivable angle, in long-shot, mid-shot, and extreme close-up. Only when every part of the grass verge around the body had been scoured, and only the piece of turf actually under the body remained to be examined, would Dr. Barnard allow human feet to walk on the ground to approach the body.
Then a body bag was laid beside the corpse, and what remained of Simon Cormack was gently lifted from where it lay and placed on the spread-out plastic. The bag was folded over him and zipped up, then placed on a stretcher, into a pannier beneath a helicopter, and flown to the post-mortem laboratory.
The death had taken place in the countryside of Buckinghamshire, one of the three counties comprising the Thames Valley Police area. So it was that in death Simon Cormack returned to Oxford, to the Radcliffe Infirmary, whose facilities are a match even for Guy’s Hospital, London.
From Guy’s came a friend and colleague of Dr. Barnard, a man who had worked with the Chief Explosives Officer of the Metropolitan on many cases and had formed a close professional relationship with him. Indeed, they were often regarded as a team, though they followed different disciplines. Dr. Ian Macdonald was a senior consultant pathologist at the great London hospital and also a retained Home Office pathologist, and was usually asked for by Scotland Yard if he was available. It was he who received t
he body of Simon Cormack at the Radcliffe.
Throughout the day, as the men crawled over the grass by the side of the A.421, continuous consultation took place between London and Washington regarding the release of the news to the media and the world. It was agreed that the statement should come from the White House, with immediate confirmation in London. The statement would simply say that an exchange had been arranged in conditions of total secrecy, as demanded by the kidnappers, an unspecified ransom had been paid, and that they had broken their word. The British authorities, responding to an anonymous phone call, had gone to a roadside in Buckinghamshire and there found Simon Cormack dead.
Needless to say, the condolences of the British monarch, government, and people to the President and to the American people were without limit of sincerity or depth, and a search of unparalleled vigor was now in progress to identify, find, and arrest the culprits.
Sir Harry Marriott was adamant that the phrase referring to the arrangement of the exchange should include an extra seven words: “between the American authorities and the kidnappers.” The White House, albeit reluctantly, agreed to this.
“The media are going to have our hides,” growled Odell.
“Well, you wanted Quinn,” said Philip Kelly.
“Actually, you wanted Quinn,” snapped Odell at Lee Alexander and David Weintraub, who sat with them in the Situation Room. “By the way, where is he now?”
“Being detained,” said Weintraub. “The British refused to allow him to be lodged on sovereign U.S. territory inside the embassy. Their MI-5 people have lent us a country house in Surrey. He’s there.”
“Well, he has a hell of a lot of explaining to do,” said Hubert Reed. “The diamonds are gone, the kidnappers are gone, and that poor boy is dead. How exactly did he die?”
“The Brits are trying to find that out,” said Brad Johnson. “Kevin Brown says it was almost as if he was hit by a bazooka, right in front of them, but they saw nothing like a bazooka. Or he stepped on a land mine of some sort.”