Three hours after the Eagle rose from the tarmac at Trenton, a scheduled airlines jumbo jet had taken off from Kennedy for London Heathrow. In the business class section was a tall and clean-cut young man who had caught the flight after connecting from Houston. He worked for a major oil corporation there called Pan-Global and felt he was privileged to be entrusted by his employer, the proprietor himself, with such a discreet mission.
Not that he had the faintest idea of the contents of the envelope he carried within the breast pocket of the jacket he declined to hand over to the stewardess. Nor did he wish to know. He only knew it must contain documents of great corporate sensitivity, since it could not be mailed or faxed or sent by commercial courier pouch.
His instructions were clear; he had repeated them many times. He was to go to a certain address on a certain day—the following day—at a certain hour. He was not to ring the bell, just drop the envelope through the letter slot, then return to Heathrow Airport and Houston. Tiring but simple. Cocktails were being served, before dinner; he did not drink alcohol, so he gazed out the window.
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The sky had long turned inky black above the heaving winter wastes of the North Atlantic, but above the cloud layer the stars were hard and bright. The young man staring out of the porthole could not know that far ahead of him another jet plane was howling through the darkness towards England. Neither he nor Colonel Bowers would ever know of the other’s existence, nor that each was racing towards the British capital on different missions; and neither would ever know exactly what it was he carried.
The colonel got there first. He touched down at Upper Heyford right on schedule at 1:55 A.M. local time, disturbing the sleep of the villagers beneath him as he made his final turn into the approach lights. The tower told him which way to taxi and he finally stopped in a bright ring of lights inside a hangar whose doors closed the moment he shut down his engines. When he opened the canopy the base commander approached with a civilian. It was the civilian who spoke.
“Colonel Bowers?”
“That’s me, sir.”
“You have a package for me?”
“I have an attaché case. Right under my seat.”
He stretched stiffly, climbed out, and clambered down the steel ladder to the hangar floor. Helluva way to see England, he thought. The civilian went up the ladder and retrieved the attaché case. He held out his hand for the combination code. Ten minutes later Lou Collins was back in his Company limousine, heading toward London. He reached the Kensington apartment at ten minutes after four. The lights still burned; no one had slept. Quinn was in the sitting room drinking coffee.
Collins laid the attaché case on the low table, consulted the slip of paper, and tumbled the rollers. From the case he took the flat, near-square, velvet-wrapped package and handed it to Quinn.
“In your hands, by dawn,” he said. Quinn hefted the pack in his hands. Just over a kilogram—about three pounds.
“You want to open it?” asked Collins.
“No need,” said Quinn. “If they are glass, or paste, or any part of them are, or any one of them, someone will probably blow away Simon Cormack’s life.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” said Collins. “No, they’re genuine all right. Do you think he’ll call?”
“Just pray he does,” said Quinn.
“And the exchange?”
“We’ll have to arrange it today.”
“How are you going to handle it, Quinn?”
“My way.”
He went off to his room to take a bath and dress. For quite a lot of people the last day of October was going to be a very rough day indeed.
The young man from Houston landed at 6:45 A.M. London time and, with only a small suitcase of toiletries, moved quickly through customs and into the concourse of Number Three Building. He checked his watch and knew he had three hours to wait. Time to use the washroom, freshen up, have breakfast, and take a cab to the center of London’s West End.
At 9:55 he presented himself at the door of the tall and impressive apartment house a block back from Great Cumberland Place in the Marble Arch district. He was five minutes early. He had been told to be exact. From across the street a man in a parked car watched him, but he did not know that. He strolled up and down for five minutes, then, on the dot of ten, dropped the fat envelope through the letter slot of the apartment house. There was no hall porter to pick it up. It lay there on the mat inside the door. Satisfied that he had done as he had been instructed, the young American walked back down to Bayswater Road and soon hailed a cab for Heathrow.
Hardly was he around the corner than the man in the parked car climbed out, crossed the road, and let himself into the apartment house. He lived there—had done for several weeks. His sojourn in the car was simply to assure himself that the messenger responded to the given description and had not been followed.
The man picked up the fallen envelope, took the lift to the eighth floor, let himself into his apartment, and slit open the envelope. He was satisfied as he read, and his breath came in snuffles, whistling through the distorted nasal passages as he breathed. Irving Moss now had what he believed would be his final instructions.
* * *
In the Kensington apartment the morning ticked away in silence. The tension was almost tangible. In the telephone exchange, in Cork Street, in Grosvenor Square, the listeners sat hunched over their machines waiting for Quinn to say something or McCrea or Sam Somerville to open their mouths. There was silence on the speakers. Quinn had made it plain that if Zack did not call, it was over. The careful search for an abandoned house and a body would have to begin.
And Zack did not call.
At half past ten Irving Moss left his Marble Arch flat, took his rental car from its parking bay, and drove to Paddington Station. His beard, grown in Houston during the planning stages, had changed the shape of his face. His Canadian passport was beautifully forged and had brought him effortlessly into the Republic of Ireland and thence on the ferry to England. His driving license, also Canadian, had caused no problems in the renting of a compact car on long-term lease. He had lived quietly and unobtrusively for weeks behind Marble Arch, one of more than a million foreigners in the British capital.