The Negotiator

“It’s on Lost Ridge,” said the agent. “The owner only uses it in high summer for fishing and walking. You trying to avoid the wife’s lawyers or something?”

“I need the peace and quiet to write a book,” said Qui

“Oh, a writer,” said the agent, satisfied. People make allowances for writers, as for all other lunatics.

They headed back toward Danville, then branched north up an even smaller road. At North Danville the agent guided Qui

The cabin was of logs, great tree trunks laid horizontally under a low roof with a yard of snow on it. But it was well built, with an i

“I’ll take it,” said Qui

“You’ll need oil for the lamps, butane bottles for cooking, an axe to split down the logs for the stove,” said the agent. “And food. And spare gasoline. No use ru

“I’ll take it,” said Qui

They drove back to St. Johnsbury. Qui

The agent was either too courteous or too incurious to ask why a Quebecer should want to find sanctuary in Vermont when Quebec had so many tranquil places of her own.

Qui

Once, pausing on the road out of North Danville to check his bearings, he thought he heard the snarl of an engine down the mountain behind him, but deduced it must be a sound from the village or even his own echo.

He lit the stove and slowly the cabin thawed out. The stove was efficient, roaring behind its steel doors, and when he opened them it was like facing a blast furnace. The water tank defrosted and heated up, warming the radiators in the cabin’s four rooms and the secondary tank for washing and bathing. By midday he was down to his shirt sleeves and feeling the heat. After lunch he took his axe and cut a week’s supply of split timber from the cords of pine stacked in the back.

He had bought a transistor radio, but there was no television and no phone. When he was equipped with a week’s supplies, he sat down with his new portable typewriter and began to type. The next day he drove to Montpelier and flew to Boston and on to Washington.

His destination was Union Station, on Massachusetts Avenue at Second Street, one of the most elegant railway stations in America, still gleaming from its recent refurbishment. Some of the layout had been changed from what he remembered from years ago. But the tracks were still there, ru

He found what he wanted opposite the Amtrak boarding gates H and J. Between the door of the Amtrak Police office and the ladies’ room was a row of eight public phone booths. All their numbers began with the 789 prefix; he noted all eight, mailed his letter, and left.

As his cab took him back across the Potomac to Washington National Airport it turned down 14thStreet, and to his right he caught a glimpse of the White House. He wondered how fared the man who lived in the Mansion, the man who had said, “Get him back for us,” and whom he had failed.

In the month since the burial of their son a change had come over the Cormacks, and their relationship to each other, which only a psychiatrist would be able to rationalize or explain.

During the kidnapping the President, though he had deteriorated through stress, worry, anxiety, and insomnia, had still managed to retain control of himself. Toward the end of the abduction of his son, when reports from London seemed to indicate an exchange was near, he had even seemed to recover. It was his wife, less intellectual and without administrative responsibilities to distract her mind, who had abandoned herself to grief and sedation.

But since that awful day at Nantucket when they had consigned their only son to the cold ground, the roles of the parents had subtly reversed. Myra Cormack had wept against the chest of the Secret Service man by the graveside, and on the flight back to Washington. But as the days went by she seemed to recover. It might be she recognized that, having lost one dependent child, she had inherited another, the husband who had never been dependent on her before.

Her maternal and protective instincts seemed to have given her an i

She knew her man was mortally stricken, unable to carry on for much longer. She knew that what had destroyed him as much as, if not more than, the actual death of his son was the bewilderment of not knowing who had done it, or why. Had the boy died in a car crash, she believed, John Cormack could have accepted the logic even of the illogic of death. It was the ma

She believed there would never be an answer now, and that her husband could not go on like this. She had come to hate the White House, and the job she had once been so proud to see her husband hold. All she wanted now was for him to lay down the burden of that office and retire with her, back to New Haven, so that she could nurse him.

The letter Qui

“I have to admit, gentlemen,” said Kelly, “that it was with the gravest reservations that I asked for one of my own trusted agents to be put under this kind of surveillance. But I think you will agree, it paid dividends.”

He placed the letter on the table in front of him.

“This letter, gentlemen, was mailed yesterday, right here in Washington. That does not necessarily prove Qui

“Read it,” commanded Odell.

“It’s… er… fairly dramatic,” said Kelly. He adjusted his glasses and began to read.

“ ‘My darling Sam…’ This form of address would seem to indicate that my colleague Kevin Brown was right-there was a relationship beyond the professional one required, between Miss Somerville and Qui

“So your hound dog fell in love with the wolf,” said Odell. “Well done, very smart. What does he say?”

Kelly resumed.

“ ‘Here I am at last, back in the United States. I would very much love to see you again, but am afraid that for the moment it would not be safe.