The Negotiator

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“Well, the negotiator. We’ve been worried about you. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m ... fine.”

There were three knocks on the door. The young man pulled on his hood. The door opened. Zack stood there. Masked. Armed.

“Well, there he is. Now, the diamonds.”

“Sure,” said Quinn. “You kept your deal. I keep mine.”

He replaced the pencil in the jaws of the clothespin, and let it hang from its wires to his waist. He slipped off the raincoat and ripped the wooden box from his chest. From the center he took the flat velour package of gems and held them out. Zack took them and passed them to a man in the passage behind him. His gun was still on Quinn.

“I’ll take the bomb, too,” he said. “You’re not blowing your way out of here with it.”

Quinn folded the wires and clothespin into the space left in the open box, pulled the wires out of the beige substance. The wires had no detonators attached to the ends of them. Quinn twisted a piece of the substance off one of the blocks and tasted it.

“Never could develop a taste for marzipan,” he said. “Too sweet for me.”

Zack stared at the assembly of household items lying in the box in his free hand.

“Marzipan?”

“The best that Marylebone High Street can offer.”

“I should bloody kill you, Quinn.”

“You could, but I hope you won’t. No need, Zack. You got what you want. Like I said, pros kill when they have to. Examine the diamonds in peace, make your escape, let the kid and me stay here till you phone the police.”

Zack closed the door and bolted it behind him. He spoke through the peephole.

“I’ll say this for you, Yank. You got balls.”

Then the peephole closed. Quinn turned to the figure on the bed and pulled off his hood for him. He sat down beside the boy.

“Now, I’d better bring you up to date a bit. A few more hours, if all goes well, and we should be out of here and heading for home. By the way, your mom and dad send their love.”

He ruffled the young man’s tangled hair. Simon Cormack’s eyes filled with tears and he began to cry uncontrollably. He tried to wipe them away on the sleeve of his plaid shirt, but it was no good. Quinn wrapped one arm around the thin shoulders and remembered a day long ago in the jungles along the Mekong; the first time he was ever in combat, and how he survived while others died, and how afterward the sheer relief caused the tears to come and he could not stop them.

When Simon stopped and began to bombard him with questions about home, Quinn had a chance to have a look at the youth. Bearded, moustached, dirty, but otherwise in good shape. They’d fed him and had the decency to give him fresh clothes: the plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a broad leather belt with an embossed brass buckle to hold them up—camping-shop gear but adequate against the chill of November.

There seemed to be some kind of a row going on upstairs. Quinn could vaguely hear raised voices, principal among them Zack’s. The sounds were too indistinct for him to hear the words, but the tone was clear enough. The man was angry. Quinn’s brow furrowed; he had not checked the stones himself—he had not the skill to tell real diamonds from good forgeries—but now prayed no one had been foolish enough to insert a proportion of paste among the gems.

In fact that was not the reason for the dispute. After several minutes it calmed down. In an upstairs bedroom—the kidnappers tended to avoid the downstairs rooms during daylight hours, despite the thick net curtains that screened them—the South African was seated at a table brought up there for the purpose. The table was covered by a bed sheet, the slit velvet packet lay empty on the bed, and all four men gazed in awe at a small mountain of uncut diamonds.

Using a spatula, the South African began to divide the pile into smaller ones, then smaller again, until he had separated the mountain into twenty-five small hillocks. He gestured to Zack to choose one mound. Zack shrugged, picked one in the middle—approximately a thousand stones out of the twenty-five thousand on the table.

Without a word the South African began to scoop up the other twenty-four piles and tip them one by one into a stout canvas bag with a drawstring at the top. When the selected pile alone remained, he switched on a powerful reading lamp above the table, took a jeweler’s loupe from his pocket, a pair of tweezers in his right hand, and held up the first stone to the light.

After several seconds he grunted and nodded, dropping the diamond into the open-topped canvas bag. It would take six hours to examine all thousand stones.

The kidnappers had chosen well. Top quality diamonds, even small ones, are normally “sourced” with a certificate when released to the trade by the Central Selling Organization, which dominates the world diamond trade, handling over 85 percent of stones passing from the mines to the trade. Even the U.S.S.R. with its Siberian extractions is smart enough not to break this lucrative cartel. Large stones of lesser quality are also usually sold with a certificate of provenance.

But in picking melees of medium quality gems between a fifth- and a half-carat, the kidnappers had gone for an area of the trade that is almost uncontrollable. These stones are the bread and butter of the manufacturing and retailing jewelers around the world, changing hands in packages of several hundred at a time without certification. Any manufacturing jeweler would honestly be able to take over a consignment of several hundred stones, especially if he was offered a 10 or 15 percent discount off the market price. Transferred into the settings around larger stones, they would simply disappear into the trade.

If they were genuine. Uncut diamonds do not glitter and gleam like the cut and polished article that appears at the end of the process. They look like dull pieces of glass, with a milky, opaque surface. But they cannot be confused with glass by an examiner of moderate skill and experience.

Real diamonds have a quite distinctive, soapy texture to the surface and are immune from water. If a piece of glass is dipped in water, the drops of liquid stay on the surface for several seconds; with a diamond they run off instantly, leaving the gem dry as a bone.