“On a roadside in the middle of nowhere?” asked Stannard.
“As I told you, the post-mortem will indicate what happened.”
“When the British have finished interviewing him, we have to have him back over here,” said Kelly. “We need to talk to him.”
“The Deputy Assistant Director of your Division is doing that already,” said Weintraub.
“If he refuses to come, can we force him to return?” asked Bill Walters.
“Yes, Mr. Attorney General, we can,” said Kelly. “Kevin Brown believes he may have been involved in some way. We don’t know how ... yet. But if we issued a material-witness warrant, I believe the British would put him on the plane.”
“We’ll give it another twenty-four hours, see what the British come up with,” said Odell finally.
The Washington statement was issued at 5:00 P.M. local time and rocked the United States as little had done since the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The media went into a furor, not helped by Press Secretary Craig Lipton’s refusal to answer the two hundred supplementary questions they had to ask. Who had arranged the ransom, how much was it, in what form, how had it been handed over, by whom, why had no attempt been made to arrest the kidnappers at the handover, was the package or packet of ransom money bugged, had the kidnappers been tracked too clumsily and killed the boy as they fled, what level of negligence had been shown by the authorities, did the White House blame Scotland Yard, if not why not, why did the U.S. not leave it to Scotland Yard in the first place, had any descriptions of the kidnappers been obtained, were the British police closing in on them ...? The questions went on and on. Craig Lipton definitely decided to resign before he was lynched.
The time in London was five hours later than Washington’s but the reaction was similar: Late TV shows were interrupted by news flashes that left the nation stunned. The switchboards at Scotland Yard, the Home Office, Downing Street, and the American embassy were jammed. Teams of journalists just about to go home around 10:00 P.M. were told to work through the night as fresh editions were prepared for issue as late as 5:00 A.M. By dawn they were staking out the Radcliffe Infirmary, Grosvenor Square, Downing Street, and Scotland Yard. In chartered helicopters they hovered over the empty stretch of road between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham to photograph, at first light, the bare tarmac and the last few barriers and police cars parked there.
Few slept. Impelled by a personal plea for haste from Sir Harry Marriott himself, Dr. Barnard and his team worked through the night. The forensic scientist had finally quit the road as night fell, certain it had nothing more to yield. Ten hours of scouring had left the thirty-yard circle cleaner than any piece of ground in England. What that ground had yielded now reposed in a series of gray plastic drums along the wall of his laboratory. For him and his team it was the night of the microscopes.
Nigel Cramer spent the night in a plain, bare room in a Tudor grange, screened from the nearest road by a belt of trees, in the heart of Surrey. Despite its elegant exterior aspect, the old house was well equipped for interrogation. The British Security Service used its ancient cellars as a training school for such delicate matters.
Brown, Collins, and Seymour were present, at their own insistence. Cramer did not object—his brief from Sir Harry Marriott was to cooperate with the Americans wherever and whenever possible. Any information Quinn had would go to both governments anyway. A relay of tapes filled themselves in the machines on the table beside them.
Quinn had a long and livid bruise on the side of his jaw, a lump and a Band-Aid on the back of his head. He was still in his shirt, now filthy, and slacks. Shoes had been removed, along with belt and tie. He was unshaven and looked exhausted. But he answered the questions calmly and clearly.
Cramer started at the beginning: Why had he quit the flat in Kensington? Quinn explained. Brown glowered at him.
“Did you have any reason, Mr. Quinn, to believe that a person or persons unknown might have attempted to interfere in the ransom exchange, to the effect of endangering the safety of Simon Cormack?” Nigel Cramer was phrasing it by the book.
“Instinct,” said Quinn.
“Just instinct, Mr. Quinn?”
“May I ask you a question, Mr. Cramer?”
“I don’t promise to answer it.”
“The attaché case with the diamonds in it. It was bugged, wasn’t it?”
He got his answer from the four faces in the room.
“If I had shown up at any exchange with that case,” said Quinn, “they’d have spotted it and killed the boy.”
“They did that anyway, smartass,” Brown grunted.
“Yes, they did,” said Quinn grimly. “I admit I did not think they would do that.”
Cramer took him back to the moment he left the flat. He told them about Marylebone, the night at the hotel, the terms Zack had laid down for the rendezvous, and how he had just made the deadline. For Cramer the meat was in the head-to-head in the abandoned factory. Quinn gave him the car, a Volvo sedan, and its registration number; both men surmised, rightly, that the plates would have been changed for that meeting, then changed back again. Ditto the road-tax disc stuck in the windshield. These men had shown they were careful.
He could describe the men only as he had seen them, masked, in shapeless track suits. One he had not seen at all, the fourth, who had stayed at the hideout ready to kill Simon Cormack at a phone call or a no-show by his colleagues by a certain time. He described the physiques of the two men he had seen upright, Zack and the gunman. Medium height, medium build. Sorry.
He identified the Skorpion submachine gun, and of course the Babbidge warehouse. Cramer left the room to make a phone call. A second team of forensic men from Fulham visited the warehouse before dawn and spent the morning there. It yielded nothing but a small ball of marzipan and a set of perfect tire tracks in the dust. These would eventually identify the abandoned Volvo, but not for two weeks.
The house used by the kidnappers was of particular interest. A gravel drive—Quinn had heard the crunching of the gravel—about ten yards from front gate to garage doors; automatic door-opening system, attached garage; a house with a concrete cellar beneath it—the real estate agents could help there. But direction from London—nothing. Quinn had been in the trunk the first time, and masked on the floor of the backseat the second. Driving time, one and a half hours the first time, two hours the second. If they drove by an indirect route, that could be anywhere; right in the heart of London or up to fifty miles in any direction.
“There’s nothing we can charge him with, Home Secretary,” Cramer reported to the Minister early next morning. “We can’t even detain him any longer. And frankly, I don’t think we should. I don’t believe he was criminally involved in the death.”
“Well, he seems to have made a complete balls of it,” said Sir Harry. The pressure from Downing Street for some new lead was becoming intense.
“So it would seem,” said the police officer. “But if those criminals were determined to kill the boy, and it seems with hindsight that they were, they could have done it any time, before or after receiving the diamonds, in the cellar, on the road, or on some lonely Yorkshire moorland. And Quinn with him. The mystery is why they let Quinn live, and why they first released the boy and then killed him. It’s almost as if they were looking to make themselves the most hated and hunted men on earth.”
“Very well,” sighed the Home Secretary. “We have no further interest in Mr. Quinn. Are the Americans still holding him?”
“Technically, he’s their voluntary guest,” said Cramer carefully.
“Well, they can let him go back to Spain when they wish.”
While they were talking, Sam Somerville was pleading with Kevin Brown. Collins and Seymour were present, in the manor’s elegant drawing room.
“What the hell do you want to see him for?” asked Brown. “He failed. He’s a busted flush.”
“Look,” she said, “in those three weeks I
got closer to him than anybody. If he’s holding out at all, on anything, maybe I could get it out of him, sir.”
Brown seemed undecided.
“Couldn’t do any harm,” said Seymour.
Brown nodded. “He’s downstairs. Thirty minutes.”
That afternoon Sam Somerville took the regular flight from Heathrow to Washington, landing just after dark.
When Sam Somerville took off from Heathrow, Dr. Barnard was sitting in his laboratory at Fulham staring at a small collection of pieces of debris spread on a crisp white sheet of paper across a tabletop. He was very tired. Since the urgent call to his small London house just after dawn the previous day, he had not stopped working. Much of that work was a strain on the eyes, peering through magnifying glasses and into microscopes. But if he rubbed his eyes that late afternoon, it was more from surprise than exhaustion.
He now knew what had happened, how it had happened, and what had been the effect. Stains on fabric and leather had yielded to chemical analysis to reveal the exact chemical components of the explosive; the extent of burn- and impact-deterioration had shown him how much was used, where it had been placed, and how it had been triggered. There were some pieces missing, of course. Some would never appear, vaporized, lost forever, having ceased to exist. Others would emerge from the ruin of the body itself, and he had been in constant contact with Ian Macdonald, who was still at work in Oxford. The yield from Oxford would arrive shortly. But he knew what he was looking at, though to the untrained eye it was just a pile of minuscule fragments.
Some of them made up the remnants of a tiny battery, source identified. Others were tiny pieces of polyvinyl-chloride insulated plastic covering, source identified. Strands of copper wire, source identified. And a mess of twisted brass bonded with what had once been a small but efficient pulse-receiver. No detonator. He was 100 percent sure, but he wanted to be 200 percent. He might have to go back to the road and start again. One of his assistants poked his head around the door.
“Dr. Macdonald on the line from the Radcliffe.”
The pathologist had also been working since the previous afternoon, at a task many would find horribly gruesome but which to him was more full of detective fascination than any other he could imagine. He lived for his profession, so much so that instead of limiting himself to examining the remains of bomb-blast victims, he attended the courses and lectures available only to a very few on bomb-making and disarming offered at Fort Halstead. He wished to know not simply that he was looking for something, but what it was and what it looked like.
He had begun by studying the photographs for two hours before he even touched the cadaver itself. Then he carefully removed the clothes, not relying on an assistant but doing it himself. The running shoes came first, then the ankle socks. The rest was snipped off, using fine scissors. Each item was bagged and sent direct to Barnard in London. The yield from the clothes had reached Fulham by sunrise.
When the body was naked, it was X-rayed from top to toe. Macdonald studied the prints for an hour and identified forty nonhuman particles. Then he swabbed the body down with a sticky powder, which removed a dozen infinitely small particles stuck to the skin. Some were crumbs of grass and mud; some were not. A second police car took this grim harvest to Dr. Barnard in Fulham.
He did an external autopsy, dictating into a recorder in his measured Scottish lilt. He only began to cut just before dawn. The first task was to excise from the cadaver all the “relevant tissue.” This happened to be all of the middle section of the body, which had lost almost everything from and including the bottom two ribs down to the top of the pelvis. Within the excised matter were the small particles that remained of eight inches of lower spine, which had come straight through the body and the ventral wall to lodge in the front of the jeans.
The autopsy—establishment of cause of death—was no problem. It was massive explosive injury to spine and abdomen. The full post-mortem needed more. Dr. Macdonald had the excised matter X-rayed again, in much finer grain. There were things in there, all right, some so small they would defy tweezers. The excised flesh and bone was finally “digested” in a brew of enzymes to create a thick soup of dissolved human tissue, bone included. It was the centrifuge that yielded the last cull, a final ounce of bits of metal.
When this ounce was available for examination Dr. Macdonald selected the largest piece, the one he had spotted in the second X-ray, deeply impacted into a piece of bone and buried inside the young man’s spleen. He studied it for a while, whistled, and rang Fulham.
Barnard came on the line. “Ian, glad you called. Anything else for me?”
“Aye. There’s something here you have got to see. If I’m right, it’s something I’ve never seen before. I think I know what it is, but I can hardly believe it.”
“Use a squad car. Send it now,” said Barnard grimly.
Two hours later the men were speaking again. It was Barnard who called this time.
“If you were thinking what I believe you were thinking, you were right,” he said. Barnard had his 200 percent.
“It couldn’t come from anywhere else?” asked Macdonald.
“Nope. There’s no way one of these gets into anybody’s hands but the manufacturer’s.”
“Bloody hell,” said the pathologist quietly.
“Mum’s the word, matey,” said Barnard. “Ours but to do or die, right? I’m having my report with the Home Secretary in the morning. Can you do the same?”
Macdonald glanced at his watch. Thirty-six hours since he had been roused. Another twelve to go.
“Sleep no more. Barnard does murder sleep,” he parodied Macbeth. “All right, on his desk by breakfast.”
That evening he released the body, or both parts of it, to the coroner’s officer. In the morning the Oxford coroner would open and adjourn the inquest, enabling him to release the body to the next of kin, in this case Ambassador Fairweather in person, representing President John Cormack.
As the two British scientists wrote their reports through the night, Sam Somerville was received, at her own request, by the committee in the Situation Room beneath the West Wing. She had appealed right up to the Director of the Bureau, and after she had telephoned Vice President Odell, he had agreed to bring her along.
When she entered the room they were all already seated. Only David Weintraub was missing, away in Tokyo talking to his opposite number there. She felt intimidated; these men were the most powerful in the land, men you only saw on television or in the press. She took a deep breath, held her head up, and walked forward to the end of the table. Vice President Odell gestured to a chair.
“Sit down, young lady.”
“We understand you wanted to ask us to let Mr. Quinn go free,” said Attorney General Bill Walters. “May we ask why?”
Sam took a deep breath. “Gentlemen, I know some may suspect Mr. Quinn was in some way involved in the death of Simon Cormack. I ask you to believe me. I have been in close contact with him in that apartment for three weeks and I’m convinced he genuinely tried to secure that young man’s release safe and unharmed.”
“Then why did he run?” asked Philip Kelly. He did not appreciate having his junior agents brought to the committee to speak for themselves.
“Because there were two freak news leaks in the forty-eight hours before he went. Because he had spent three weeks trying to gain that animal’s trust and he had done it. Because he was convinced Zack was about to scuttle and run, if he couldn’t get to him alone and unarmed, without a shadow from either the British or American authorities.”
No one failed to grasp that by “American authorities” she meant Kevin Brown. Kelly scowled.
“There remains a suspicion he could have been involved in some way,” he said. “We don’t know how, but it needs to be checked out.”
“He couldn’t, sir,” said Sam. “If he had proposed himself as the negotiator, maybe. But the choice to ask him was made right here. He told me he didn’t even want to come. And from
the moment Mr. Weintraub saw him in Spain he has been in someone’s company twenty-four hours a day. Every word he spoke to the kidnappers, you listened to.”
“Except those missing forty-eight hours before he showed up on a roadside,” said Morton Stannard.
“But why should he make a deal with the kidnappers during that time?” she asked. “Except for the return of Simon Cormack.”
“Because two million dollars is a lot of money to a poor man,” suggested Hubert Reed.
“But if he had wanted to disappear with the diamonds,” she persisted, “we’d still be looking for him now.”
“Well,” said Odell unexpectedly, “he did go to the kidnappers alone and unarmed—except for some goddam marzipan. If he didn’t know them already, that takes grit.”
“And yet Mr. Brown’s suspicions may not be entirely unfounded,” said Jim Donaldson. “He could have made his contact, struck a deal. They kill the boy, leave Quinn alive, take the stones. Later they meet up and split the booty.”
“Why should they?” asked Sam, bolder now, with the Vice President apparently on her side. “They had the diamonds. They could have killed him too. Even if they didn’t, why should they split with him? Would you trust them?”
None of them would trust such men an inch. There was silence as they thought it over.
“If he’s allowed to go, what has he in mind? Back to his vineyard in Spain?” asked Reed.
“No, sir. He wants to go after them. He wants to hunt them down.”
“Hey, hold on, Agent Somerville,” said Kelly indignantly. “That’s Bureau work. Gentlemen, we have no need of discretion to protect the life of Simon Cormack anymore. He’s been murdered, and that murder is indictable under our laws, just like that murder on the cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. We’re putting teams into Britain and Europe with the cooperation of all the national police authorities. We want them and we’re going to get them. Mr. Brown controls the operations out of London.”