The Negotiator

They wriggled back into the line of trees. Dusk was descending.

“Take the blanket from the trunk,” said Brown. “And stay here. Stake it out all night. I’ll be back with the team before sunup—if there ever is any sun in this damn country.”

Across the valley, stretched out along a branch in a giant oak, a man in camouflage uniform lay motionless. He, too, had powerful binoculars, with which he had noted the movements among the trees on the opposite side from his own position. As Kevin Brown and his agent slithered off the rim of the high ground and into the woodland, he drew a small radio from his pocket and spoke quietly and urgently for several seconds. It was October 28, nineteen days since Simon Cormack had been kidnapped and seventeen since Zack’s first call to the Kensington apartment.

Zack called again that evening, burying himself in the hurrying crowds in the center of Luton.

“What the hell’s going on, Quinn? It’s been three bloody days.”

“Hey, take it easy, Zack. It’s the diamonds. You caught us by surprise, ole buddy. That kind of package takes a while to put together. I laid it on them over there in Washington—I mean, but hard. They’re working on it as fast as they can, but hell, Zack, twenty-five thousand stones, all good, all untraceable—that takes a bit—”

“Yeah, well, just tell them they got two more days and then they get their boy back in a bag. Just tell ’em.”

He hung up. The experts would later say his nerves were badly shot. He was reaching the point where he might be tempted to hurt the boy out of frustration or because he thought he was being tricked in some way.

Kevin Brown and his team were good and they were armed. They came in four pairs, from the only four directions from which the farm could be assailed. Two skirted the track, darting from cover to cover. The other three pairs came from the trees and down the sloping fields in complete silence. It was that hour just before dawn when the light is at its trickiest, when the spirits of the quarry are at their lowest, the hour of the hunter.

The surprise was total. Chuck Moxon and his partner took the suspect barn. Moxon snipped off the padlock; his partner went in on the roll, coming to his feet on the dusty floor inside the barn with his sidearm drawn. Apart from a petrol generator, something that looked like a kiln, and a bench with an array of chemistry glassware, there was no one there.

The six men, plus Brown, who took the farmhouse, fared better. Two pairs went in through windows, taking the glass and the frames as they went, came to their feet without a pause, and headed straight upstairs to the bedrooms.

Brown and the remaining pair went through the front door. The lock shattered with a single blow of the sledgehammer and they were in.

By the embers of the fire in the grate of the long kitchen, the burly man had been asleep in a chair. It was his job to keep watch through the night, but boredom and tiredness had taken over. At the crash from the front door he came out of his chair and reached for a .12-bore shotgun that lay on the pine table. He almost made it. The shout of “Freeze!” from the door and the sight of the big crew-cut man crouched over a Colt .45 aimed straight at his chest caused the burly one to stop. He spat and slowly raised both hands.

Upstairs the red-haired man was in bed with the only woman in the group. They both awoke as the windows and doors crashed in downstairs. The woman screamed. The man went for the bedroom door and met the first FBI man on the landing. The fighting was too close for firearms; the two men went down together in the darkness and wrestled until another American could discern which was which and hit the redhead hard with the butt of his Colt.

The fourth member of the farmhouse group was led blinking out of his bedroom a few seconds later, a thin, scrawny young man with lank hair. The FBI team all had flashlights in their belts. It took two more minutes to examine all the other bedrooms and establish that four people was the limit. Kevin Brown had them all brought to the kitchen, where lamps were lit. He surveyed them with loathing.

“Okay, where’s the kid?” he asked. One of his men looked out the window.

“Chief, we have company.”

About fifty men were descending into the valley and toward the farmhouse on all sides, all in kneeboots, all in blue, a dozen with Alsatians straining at the leash. In an outhouse the Rottweiler roared his rage at the intrusion. A white Range Rover with blue markings jolted up the track to stop ten yards from the broken door. A middle-aged man in blue, aglitter with silver buttons and insignia, descended, a braided peaked cap on his head. He walked into the lobby without a word, entered the kitchen, and gazed at the four prisoners.

“Okay, we hand it over to you now,” said Brown. “He’s here somewhere. And those sleazeballs know where,”

“Exactly,” asked the man in blue, “who are you?”

“Yes, of course.” Kevin Brown produced his Bureau identification. The Englishman looked at it carefully and handed it back.

“See here,” said Brown, “what we’ve done—”

“What you’ve done, Mr. Brown,” said the Chief Constab

le of Bedfordshire with icy rage, “is to blow away the biggest drug bust this county was ever likely to have and now, I fear, never will have. These people are low-level minders and a chemist. The big fish and their consignment were expected any day. Now, would you please return to London?”

At that hour Steve Pyle was with Mr. Al-Haroun in the latter’s office in Jiddah, having flown to the coast following a disturbing phone call.

“What exactly did he take?” he asked for the fourth time. Mr. Al-Haroun shrugged. These Americans were even worse than the Europeans, always in a hurry.

“Alas, I am not an expert in these machines,” he said, “but my night watchman here reports ...”

He turned to the Saudi night watchman, and rattled off a stream of Arabic. The man replied, holding out his arms to signify the extent of something.

“He says that the night I returned Mr. Laing his passport, duly altered, the young man spent most of the night in the computer room, and left before dawn with a large amount of computer printout. He returned for work at the normal hour without it.”

Steve Pyle went back to Riyadh a very worried man. Helping his government and his country was one thing, but in an internal accounting inquiry, that would not show up. He asked for an urgent meeting with Colonel Easterhouse.