The Negotiator

There was a man from the Ministry of Transport, controlling Britain’s ports and airports. Liaising with the Coastguards and Customs, his department would operate a blanket port-watch, for a prime concern now was to keep Simon Cormack inside the country in case the kidnappers had other ideas. He had already spoken to the Department of Trade and Industry, who had made plain that to examine every single sealed and bonded freight container heading out of the country was quite literally impossible. Still, any private airplane, yacht or cruiser, fishing smack, camper, or motor home heading out with a large crate on board, or someone on a stretcher or simply drugged and insensible, would find a Customs officer or Coastguard taking more than a passing interest.

The key man, however, sat at Sir Harry’s right: Nigel Cramer.

Unlike Britain’s provincial county constabularies and police authorities, London’s police force—the Metropolitan Police, known as “the Met.”—is headed not by a chief constable but by a commissioner and is the largest force in the country. The commissioner, in this case Sir Peter Imbert, is assisted in his task by four assistant commissioners, each in charge of one of the four departments. Second of these is Specialist Operations, or S.O.

S.O. Department has thirteen branches, One through Fourteen, excluding Five, which, for no known reason, does not exist. Among the thirteen are the Covert Squad, Serious Crimes Squad, Flying Squad, Fraud Squad, and Regional Crimes Squad. And the Special Branch (counterintelligence), the Criminal Intelligence Branch (S.O. 11), and the Anti-Terrorist Branch (S.O. 13).

The man designated by Sir Peter Imbert to represent the Met. on the COBRA committee was the Deputy Assistant Commissioner, S.O. Department, Nigel Cramer. Cramer would report in two directions: upward, to his Assistant Commissioner and the Commissioner himself; sideways, to the COBRA committee. Toward him would flow the input from the official investigating officer, the I.O., who in turn would be using all the branches and squads of the department, as appropriate.

It takes a political decision to superimpose the Met. on a provincial force, but the Prime Minister had already taken that decision, justified by the suspicion that Simon Cormack might well by now be out of the Thames Valley area; and Sir Harry Marriott had just informed the Chief Constable of that decision. Cramer’s men were already on the outskirts of Oxford.

There were two non-British invited to sit with the COBRA. One was Patrick Seymour, the FBI man at the American embassy; the other was Lou Collins, the London-based liaison officer of the CIA. Their inclusion was more than just courtesy; they were there so they could keep their own organizations aware of the level of effort being put in at London to solve the outrage, and maybe to contribute any nuggets their own people might unearth.

Sir Harry opened the meeting with a brief report of what was known so far. The abduction was just three hours old. At this point he felt it necessary to make two assumptions. One was that Simon Cormack had been driven away from Shotover Plain and was by now sequestered in a secret place; the second was that the perpetrators were terrorists of some kind who had not yet made any form of contact with the authorities.

The man from Secret Intelligence volunteered that his people were trying to contact a variety of penetration agents inside known European terrorist groups in an attempt to identify the group behind the snatch. It would take some days.

“These penetration agents lead very dangerous lives,” he added. “We can’t just ring them up and ask for Jimmy. Covert meetings will take place in various places over the next week to see if we can get a lead.”

The Security Service man added that his department was doing the same with home-grown groups who might be involved, or know something. He doubted that the perpetrators were local. Apart from the I.R.A. and the INLA—both Irish—the British Isles had its fair share of weirdos, but the level of ruthless professionalism shown at Shotover Plain seemed to exclude the usual noisy malcontents. Still, his own penetration agents would also be activated.

Nigel Cramer reported that the first clues were likely to come from forensic examination or a chance witness not yet interviewed.

“We know the van used,” he said. “A green-painted, far-from-new Ford Transit, bearing on both sides the familiar logo—in Oxfordshire—of the Barlow fruit company. It was seen heading east through Wheatley, away from the scene of the crime, about five minutes after the attack. And it was not a Barlow van—that is confirmed. The witness did not note the registration number. Obviously, a major search is on for anyone else who saw that van, its direction of travel, or the men in the front seat. Apparently there were two—just vague shadows behind the glass—but the milkman believes one had a beard.

“On forensics, we have a car jack, perfect tire prints from the van—the Thames Valley people established exactly where it stood—and a collection of spent brass casings, apparently from a submachine carbine. They are going to the Army experts at Fort Halstead. Ditto the slugs when they come out of the bodies of the two Secret Service men and Sergeant Dunn of the Oxford Special Branch. Fort Halstead will tell us exactly, but at first glance they look like Warsaw Pact ordnance. Almost every European terrorist group except the I.R.A. uses East Bloc weaponry.

“The forensic people at Oxford are good, but I’m still bringing every piece of evidence back to our own labs at Fulham. Thames Valley will continue to look for witnesses.

“So, gentlemen, we have four lines of enquiry. The getaway van, witnesses at or near the scene, the evidence they left behind, and—another for the Thames Valley people—a search for anyone seen observing the house off the Woodstock Road. Apparently”—he glanced at the two Americans—“Simon Cormack made the same run over the same ground each morning at the same hour for several days.”

At that point the phone rang. It was for Cramer. He took the call, asked several questions, listened for some minutes, then came back to the table.

“I’ve appointed Commander Peter Williams, head of S.O. 13, the Anti-Terrorist Branch, the official investigating officer. That was he. We think we have the van.”

The owner of Whitehill Farm, close to Fox Covert on the Islip road, had called the fire brigade at 8:10 after seeing smoke and flames rising from a near-derelict timber barn he owned. It was situated in a meadow close to the road but five hundred yards from his farmhouse and he seldom visited it. The Oxford Fire Brigade had responded, but too late to save the barn. The farmer had been standing helplessly by and had watched the flames consume the timber structure, bringing down first the roof and then the walls.

As the firemen were damping down the debris, they observed what appeared to be the gutted wreck of a van underneath the charred timbers. That was at 8:41. The farmer was adamant there had not been a vehicle stored in the barn. Fearing there might have been people—gypsies, tinkers, even campers—inside the van, the firemen stayed on to pull the timbers away. They peered inside the van when they could get near to it, but saw no evidence of bodies. But it was definitely the wreck of a Ford Transit.

On returning to the Brigade headquarters, a smart leading officer heard on the radio that the Thames Valley Police were looking for a Transit, believed to have participated in “an offense involving firearms” earlier that morning. He had rung Kidlington.

“I’m afraid it’s gutted,” said Cramer. “Tires probably burnt out, fingerprints erased. Still, engine block and chassis numbers will not

be affected. My Vehicles Section people are on their way. If there’s anything—and I do mean anything—left, we’ll get it.”

Vehicles Section at Scotland Yard comes under the Serious Crimes Squad, part of S.O. Department.

The COBRA stayed in session, but some of its leading participants left to get on with other matters, handing over to subordinates who would report if there was a break. The chair was taken by a junior Minister from the Home Office.

In a perfect world, which it never is, Nigel Cramer would have preferred to keep the press out of things, for a while at least. By 11:00 A.M. Clive Empson of the Oxford Mail was at Kidlington asking about reports of a shooting and killing on Shotover Plain just about sunrise. Three things then surprised him. One was that he was soon taken to a detective chief superintendent, who asked him where he had got this report. He refused to say. The second was that there was an air of genuine fear among the junior officers at the Thames Valley Police headquarters. The third was that he was given no help at all. For a double shooting—the print technician’s wife had seen only two bodies—the police would normally be asking for press cooperation and issuing a statement, not to mention holding a press conference.

Driving back to Oxford, Empson mulled things over. A “natural causes” would go to the city morgue. But a shooting would mean the more sophisticated facilities of the Radcliffe Infirmary. By chance he was having a rather agreeable affair with a nurse at the Radcliffe; she was not in the “bodies” section, but she might know someone who was.

By the lunch hour he had been told there was a big flap going on at the Radcliffe. There were three bodies in the morgue; two were apparently American and one was a British policeman. There was a forensic pathologist all the way from London, and someone from the American embassy. That puzzled him.

Servicemen from nearby Upper Heyford base would bring uniformed USAF to the Infirmary; American tourists on a slab might bring someone from the embassy; but why would Kidlington not say so? He thought of Simon Cormack, widely known to be a student these past nine months, and went to Balliol College. Here he met a pretty Welsh student called Jenny.

She confirmed that Simon Cormack had not come to tutorials that day but took it lightly. He was probably knocking himself out with all that cross-country running. Running? “Yes, he’s the main hope to beat Cambridge in December. Goes for brutal training runs every morning. Usually on Shotover Plain.”