Sam Somerville had come back into the room, shouting at the bugs: “He’s gone! Quinn’s gone!” Brown’s question could be heard in the listening post but not by Somerville. Frantically Brown scrambled for the phone that would connect him with his special agent in Kensington.
“Agent Somerville,” he boomed when he heard her on the line, “get after him.”
At that moment McCrea’s fifth kick broke the lock on the apartment door. He raced for the stairs, followed by Sam. Both were in bedroom slippers.
The greengrocer’s shop and delicatessen across the street from the apartment, whose number Quinn had obtained from the London telephone directory in the sitting-room cabinet, was called Bradshaw, after the man who had started it, but was now owned by an Indian gentleman called Mr. Patel. Quinn had watched him from across the street, tending his exterior fruit display or disappearing inside to attend to a customer.
Quinn hit the opposite pavement thirty-three seconds after ending his call from Zack. He dodged two pedestrians and came through the doorway into the food shop like a tornado. The telephone was on the cash desk, next to the register, behind which stood Mr. Patel.
“Those kids are stealing your oranges,” said Quinn without ceremony. At that moment the phone rang. Torn between a telephone call and stolen oranges, Mr. Patel reacted like a good Gujarati and ran outside. Quinn picked up the receiver.
The Kensington exchange had reacted fast, and the inquiry would show they had done their best. But they lost several of the forty seconds through sheer surprise, then had a technical problem. Their lock was on the flash line in the apartment. Whenever a call came into that number, their electronic exchange could run back up the line to establish the source of the call. The number it came from would then be revealed by the computer to be such-and-such a booth in a certain place. Between six and ten seconds.
They already had a lock on the number Zack had used first, but when he changed booths, even though the kiosks were side by side in Dunstable, they lost him. Worse, he was now ringing another London number into which they were not tapped. The only saving grace was that the number Quinn had dictated on the line to Zack was still on the Kensington exchange. Still, the tracers had to start at the beginning, their call-finder mechanism racing frantically through the twenty thousand numbers on the exchange. They tapped into Mr. Patel’s phone fifty-eight seconds after Quinn had dictated the number, then got a lock on the second number in Dunstable.
“Take this number, Zack,” said Quinn without preamble.
“What the hell’s going on?” snarled Zack.
“Nine-three-five; three-two-one-five,” said Quinn remorselessly. “Got it?”
There was a pause as Zack scribbled.
“Now we’ll do it ourselves, Zack. I’ve walked out on the lot of them. Just you and me; the diamonds against the boy. No tricks—my word on it. Call me on that number in sixty minutes, and ninety minutes if there’s no reply first time. It’s not on trace.”
He put the phone down. In the exchange the listeners heard the words “... minutes, and ninety minutes if there’s no reply first time. It’s not on trace.”
“Bastard’s given him another number,” said the engineer in Kensington to the two Metropolitan officers with him. One of them was already on the phone to the Yard.
Quinn came out of the shop to see Duncan McCrea across the road trying to push his way through the jammed street door. Sam was behind him, waving and gesticulating. The porter joined them, scratching his thinning hair. Two cars went down the street on the opposite side; on Quinn’s side a motorcyclist was approaching. Quinn stepped into the road, right in the man’s path, his arms raised, attaché case swinging from his left hand. The motorcyclist braked, swerved, skidded, and slithered to a stop.
“ ’Ere, wot on erf ...”
Quinn gave him a disarming smile as he ducked around the handlebars. The short, hard kidney punch completed the job. As the youth in the crash helmet doubled over, Quinn hoisted him off his machine, swung his own right leg over it, engaged gear, and gunned the engine. He went off down the street just as McCrea’s flailing hand missed his jacket by six inches.
McCrea stood in the street, dejected. Sam joined him. They looked at each other, then ran back into the apartment building. The fastest way to talk to Grosvenor Square was to get back to the third floor.
“Right, that’s it,” said Brown five minutes later,
after listening to both McCrea and Somerville on the line from Kensington. “We find that bastard. That’s the job.”
Another phone rang. It was Nigel Cramer from Scotland Yard.
“Your negotiator has done a bunk,” he said flatly. “Can you tell me how? I’ve tried the apartment—the usual number is engaged.”
Brown told him in thirty seconds. Cramer grunted. He still resented the Green Meadow Farm affair, and always would, but events had now overtaken his desire to see Brown and the FBI team off his patch.
“Did your people get the number of that motorcycle?” he asked. “I can put out an all-points on it.”
“Better than that,” said Brown with satisfaction. “That attaché case he’s carrying. It contains a direction finder.”
“It what?”
“Built in, undetectable, state-of-the-art,” said Brown. “We had it fitted out in the States, changed it for the case provided by the Pentagon just before takeoff last night.”
“I see,” said Cramer thoughtfully. “And the receiver?”
“Right here,” said Brown. “Came in on the morning commercial flight at dawn. One of my boys went out to Heathrow to pick it up. Range two miles, so we have to move. I mean right now.”