His colleague was already talking to Nigel Cramer, who had spent the night at Scotland Yard.

“Where the hell is it?” he hissed.

“Hang about ... here, Tubbs Cross Garage, on the A.421 between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham.”

At the same time Quinn saw an invoice pad belonging to the garage. It bore the address of the garage also, and he relayed it to Sam. Seconds later the line was dead. Sam and Duncan McCrea raced down to the street, where Lou Collins had left a CIA car should the listeners in the apartment need transport. Then they were off, McCrea driving and Sam map-reading.

From Scotland Yard, Nigel Cramer and six officers set off in two patrol cars, their sirens howling up Whitehall and down the Mall to pick up Park Lane and the road north out of London. Two big limousines sped out of Grosvenor Square at the same time, bearing Kevin Brown, Lou Collins, Patrick Seymour, and six of Brown’s Washington-based FBI men.

The A.421 between Fenny Stratford and the county town of Buckingham twelve miles farther west is a long, almost straight road devoid of towns or villages, running through largely flat agricultural country studded by the occasional clump of trees. Quinn jogged steadily west, the direction taken by the car. The first light of day began to filter through gray clouds above, giving visibility that rose steadily to three hundred yards. That was when he saw the thin figure jogging toward him in the gloom, and heard the roar of engines coming up fast behind him. He turned his head: a British police car, one of two, two black American limousines just ahead of them, and an unmarked Company car behind them. The leading car saw him and started to slow; due to the narrowness of the road the ones behind slowed as well.

No one in the cars had seen the tottering figure farther down the road. Simon Cormack had also worked his wrists around to the front of his body, and had covered five miles to Quinn’s four and a half. But he had made no phone call. Weakened by his captivity, dazed by his release, he was running slowly, rolling from side to side. The lead car from the embassy was beside Quinn.

“Where’s the boy?” roared Brown from the front seat.

Nigel Cramer leaped from the red-and-white squad car and shouted the same question. Quinn stopped, sucked air into his lungs, and nodded forward along the road.

“There,” he gasped.

That was when they saw him. Already out from their cars and on the road, the group of Americans and the British police officers began to run toward the figure two hundred yards away. Behind Quinn the car of McCrea and Sam Somerville swerved to a stop.

Quinn had stopped; there was nothing more he could do. He felt Sam run up behind him and grab his arm. She said something but he could never later recall what it was.

Simon Cormack, seeing his rescuers approaching him, slowed until he was hardly jogging at all. Just under a hundred yards separated him from the police officers of two nations when he died.

The witnesses would say later that the searingly brilliant white flash seemed to last for several seconds. The scientists would tell them it actually lasted for three milliseconds, but the human retina retains such a flash for some seconds afterward. The fireball that came with the flash lasted for half a second and enveloped the whole stumbling figure.

Four of the watchers, experienced men, not easy to shock, later had to undergo therapy. They described how the figure of the youth was picked up and hurled twenty yards toward them, like a rag doll, first flying, then bouncing and rolling in a twisted assembly of disjointed limbs. They all felt the blast wave.

Most would agree, with hindsight, that everything seemed to happen in slow motion, during and after the murder. Recollections came in bits and pieces, and the patient interrogators would listen, and note down the bits and pieces until they had a sequence, usually overlapping in parts.

There was Nigel Cramer, rock-still, pale as a sheet, repeating “Oh, God, oh, my God” over and over again. A Mormon FBI man dropped to his knees at the roadside and began to pray. Sam Somerville screamed once, buried her face in Quinn’s back, and began to cry. There was Duncan McCrea, behind both of them, on his knees, head down over a ditch, hands deep in the water supporting his weight, retching up his guts.

Quinn, they would say, was standing still, having been overtaken by the main group but able to see what had happened up the road, shaking his head in disbelief and murmuring, “No ... no ... no.”

It was a gray-haired British sergeant who was the first to break the spell of immobility and shock, moving forward toward the tangled body sixty yards away. He was followed by several FBI men, among them Kevin Brown, pale and shaking, then Nigel Cramer and three more men from the Yard. They looked at the body in silence. Then background and training took over.

“Clear the area, please,” said Nigel Cramer. It was in a tone no one was prepared to argue. “Tread very carefully.”

They all walked back toward the cars.

“Sergeant, get on to the Yard. I want the CEO up here, by chopper, within the hour. Photographs, forensics, the best team Fulham have got. You”—to the men in the second car—“get up and down the road. Block it off. Raise the local boys—I want barriers beyond the garage that way and up to Buckingham that way. No one enters this stretch of road until further notice except those I authorize.”

The officers designated to take the stretch of road beyond the body had to walk, crossing into the fields for a while to avoid treading on fragments, then running up the road to head off approaching cars. The second squad car went east toward Tubbs Cross Garage to block the road in the other direction. The first squad car was used for its radio.

Within sixty minutes police out of Buckingham to the west and Bletchley to the east would seal the road completely with steel barriers. A screen of local officers would fan out across the fields to fend off the curious seeking to approach cross-country. At least this time there would be no press for a while. They could put the road closing down to a burst water main—enough to deter the local small-town reporters.

Within fifty minutes the first Metropolitan Police helicopter swung in across the fields, guided by the radio of the squad car, to deposit on the road behind the cars a small, birdlike man called Dr. Barnard, the Chief Explosives Officer of the Met., a man who, thanks to the bomb outrages of the I.R.A. in mainland Britain, had examined more explosion scenes than he would have wished. He brought with him, apart from his “bag of tricks,” as he liked to call it, an awesome reputation.

They said of Dr. Barnard that from fragments so minuscule as almost to deceive a magnifying glass, he could reconstitute a bomb to the point of identifying the factory that had made its components and the man who had assembled it. He listened to “Nigel Cramer for several minutes, nodded, and gave his own orders to the dozen men who had clambered out of the second and third helicopters—the team from the Fulham forensic laboratories.

Impassively they set about their work, and the machinery of post-crime science rolled into action.

Long before any of this, Kevin Brown had returned from looking at the corpse of Simon Cormack to the point where Quinn still stood. He was gray with shock and rage.

“You bastard,” he grated. Both tall men, they were eyeball to eyeball. “This is your fault. One way or another you caused this, and I’m going to make you pay for it.”

The punch, when it came, surprised the two younger FBI men by Brown’s side, who took his arms and tried to calm him down. Quinn may have seen the punch coming. Whatever, he made no attempt to dodge it. Still with his hands cuffed in front of him, he took it full on the jaw. It was enough to knock him backwards; then his head caught the edge

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net