YOU HEAR THREE KNOCKS YOU PUT ON THE HOOD.

UNDERSTAND? ACKNOWLEDGE.

He waited for several seconds, unsure what to do. The card waggled impatiently.

“Yes,” he said, “I understand. Three knocks on that door and I put on the hood.”

The card was withdrawn and replaced by another. The second card said:

TWO KNOCKS YOU CAN TAKE THE HOOD OFF AGAIN.

ANY TRICKS—YOU DIE.

“I understand that,” he called toward the door. The card was withdrawn. The door closed. After several seconds there were three loud knocks. Obediently the youth reached for the thick black cowl hood, which lay on the end of his bed. He pulled it over his head and even down to his shoulders, placed his hands on his knees, and waited, trembling. Through the thickness of the material he heard nothing, just sensed that someone in soft shoes had entered the cellar.

In fact the kidnapper who came in was still dressed in black from head to foot, complete with ski mask, only his eyes visible, despite Simon Cormack’s inability to see a thing. These were the leader’s instructions. The man placed something near the bed and withdrew. Under his hood Simon heard the door close, the rasp of bolts, then two clear knocks. Slowly he pulled off the hood. On the floor lay a plastic tray. It bore a plastic plate, knife, fork, and tumbler. On the plate were sausages, baked beans, bacon, and a hunk of bread. The tumbler held water.

He was ravenous, having eaten nothing since the dinner of the night before his run, and without thinking called “Thank you” at the door. As he said it he could have kicked himself. He should not be thanking these bastards. He did not realize in his innocence that the Stockholm syndrome was beginning to take effect: that strange empathy that builds up from a victim to his persecutors, so that the victim turns his rage against the authorities who allowed it all to happen, rather than against the abductors.

He ate every last scrap of food, drank the water slowly and with deep satisfaction, and fell asleep. An hour later the signals were repeated, the process was reversed, and the tray disappeared. Simon used the bucket for the fourth time, then lay back on the bed and thought of home, and what they might be doing for him.

As he lay there Commander Williams returned from Leicester to London and reported to Deputy A.C. Cramer at the latter’s office in New Scotland Yard. Conveniently, the Yard, headquarters of the Met., is only four hundred yards from the Cabinet Office.

The former owner of the Ford Transit had been in Leicester police station under guard, a frightened and, as it turned out, innocent man. He protested that his Transit van had been neither stolen nor sold; it had been written off in a crash two months earlier. As he was moving to a new home at the time, he had forgotten to inform the Licensing Center at Swansea.

Step by step Commander Williams had checked out the story. The man, a jobbing builder, had been picking up two marble fireplaces from a dealer in south London. Swerving around a corner near the demolition site from which the fireplaces had been stripped, he had an argument with a steam shovel. The steam shovel won. The Transit van, then still its original blue, had to be written off completely. Although visible damage had been small, and mainly concentrated in the radiator area, the chassis had been twisted out of alignment.

He had returned to Nottingham alone. His insurance company had examined the Transit in the yard of a local recovery firm, pronounced it unmendable, but declined to pay him because his coverage was not comprehensive and he was at fault for hitting the steam shovel. Much aggrieved, he had accepted £20 for the wreck, by telephone from the recovery firm, and had nev

er returned to London.

“Someone put it back on the road,” said Williams.

“Good,” said Cramer. “That means they’re ‘bent.’ It checks. The lab boys said someone had worked on the chassis with a welder. Also the green paint had been laid over the maker’s blue cellulose finish. A rough spray job. Find out who did it and whom they sold it to.”

“I’m going down to Balham,” said Williams. “The crash-recovery firm is based there.”

Cramer went back to his work. He had a mountain of it, coming in from a dozen different teams. The forensic reports were almost all in and were brilliant as far as they went. The trouble was, that was not far enough. The slugs taken from the bodies matched the bullet cases from the Skorpion, not surprisingly. No further witnesses had come forward from the Oxford area. The abductors had left no fingerprints, or any other traces except car tire tracks. The van tracks were useless—they had the van, albeit fire-gutted. No one had seen anyone near the barn. The sedan tire tracks leading from the barn had been identified by make and model, but would fit half a million sedans.

A dozen county forces were quietly checking with real estate agents for a property leased over the past six months with enough space and privacy to suit the kidnappers. The Met. was doing the same inside London, in case the criminals were holed up right in the capital itself. That meant thousands of house rentals to be checked out. Cash deals were top of the list, and there were still hundreds of those. Already a dozen discreet little love nests, two rented by national celebrities, had come to light.

Underworld informants, the “grasses,” were being leaned on to see if they had heard whispers of a team of known villains, preparing a big one, or of “slags” and “faces” (slang for known criminals) suddenly disappearing from their haunts. The underworld was being turned over in a big way but had come up with nothing so far.

Cramer had a pile of reports of “sightings” of Simon Cormack which ranged from the plausible through the possible to the lunatic, and they were all being checked out. There was another pile of transcripts of phoned-in messages from people claiming to be holding the U.S. President’s son. Again, some were crazy, and some sounded promising. Each of the latter callers had been treated seriously and begged to stay in touch. But Cramer had a gut feeling that the real kidnappers were still maintaining silence, allowing the authorities to sweat. It would be the skillful thing to do.

A special room in the basement was already set aside and a skilled team of men from the Criminal Intelligence Branch, the negotiators used in British kidnappings, sat waiting for the big one, meanwhile talking patiently and calmly to the hoaxers. Several of the latter had already been caught and would be charged in due course.

Nigel Cramer walked to the window and looked down. The sidewalk on Victoria Street was awash with reporters— he had to avoid them every time he left for Whitehall by driving straight through, sealed into his car with windows firmly closed. And still they howled through the glass for a tidbit of information. The Met.’s press office was being driven crazy.

He checked his watch and sighed. If the kidnappers held on a few more hours, the American, Quinn, would presumably take over. He did not like having been overruled on that one. He had read the Quinn file, loaned to him by Lou Collins of the CIA, and he had had two hours with the Chief Executive Officer of the Lloyd’s underwriting firm that had employed Quinn and his strange but effective talents for ten years. What he had learned left him with mixed feelings. The man was good, but unorthodox. No police force likes to work with a maverick, however talented. He would not be going out to Heathrow to meet Quinn, he decided. He would see him later and introduce him to the two chief inspectors who would sit at his side and advise him throughout the negotiation—if there ever was one. It was time to go back to Whitehall and brief the COBRA—on precious little. No, this was definitely not going to be a “quickie.”

The Concorde had picked up a jetstream at 60,000 feet and rode into London fifteen minutes ahead of schedule at 6:00 P.M. Quinn hefted his small valise and headed down the tunnel toward the arrivals area with Somerville and McCrea in tow. A few yards into the tunnel two quiet gray men in gray suits waited patiently. One stepped forward.

“Mr. Quinn?” he said quietly. Quinn nodded. The man did not flash an identity card, American-style; he just assumed that his manner and bearing would indicate he represented the authorities. “We were expecting you, sir. If you would just care to come with me ... My colleague will carry your case.”

Without waiting for objections he glided down the tunnel, turned away from the stream of passengers at the entrance to the main corridor and soon into a small office that bore simply a number on the door. The bigger man, with ex-NCO stamped all over him, nodded amiably at Quinn and took his valise. In the office the quiet man flipped quickly through Quinn’s passport, and those of “your assistants,” produced a stamp from his side pocket, stamped all three, and said, “Welcome to London, Mr. Quinn.”

They left the office by another door, down some steps to a waiting car. But if Quinn thought he was going straight into London, he was wrong. They drove to the VIP suite. Quinn stepped inside and stared bleakly about him. Low-profile, he had said. No-profile. There were representatives from the American embassy, the British Home Office, Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office, the CIA, the FBI, and, for all he knew, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. It took twenty minutes.

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net