The Negotiator

Lee Alexander was aware that although he was DCI, he was a political appointee, not a career intelligence officer. The man who headed up the entire operational area of the Agency was the DDO, David Weintraub. He waited outside with the others.

Don Edmonds had also brought one of his top men. Under the Director of the FBI come three executive assistant directors, heading respectively Law Enforcement Services, Administration, and Investigations. Within Investigations were three divisions-Intelligence, International Liaison (from which came Patrick Seymour in London), and Criminal Investigations Division. The EAD for Investigations, Buck Revell, was away sick, so Edmonds had brought the assistant director in charge of the CID, Philip Kelly.

“We’d better have them all in,” suggested Brad Johnson. “As of now, they know more than we do.”

Everyone concurred. Later the experts would form the Crisis Management Group, meeting in the Situation Room downstairs, next to the Communications Center, for convenience and privacy. Later still, the Cabinet men would join them there, when the telephoto lenses on the press cameras began to peer through the windows of the Cabinet Room and across the Rose Garden.

First they heard from Creighton Burbank, an angry man who blamed the British squarely for the disaster. He gave them everything he had learned from his own team in Summertown, a report that covered everything up to the ru

“I’ve got two men dead,” he snapped, “two widows and three orphans to see. And all because those bastards can’t run a security operation. Iwish it to go on record, gentlemen, that my service repeatedly asked that Simon Cormack not spend a year abroad, and that we needed fifty men in there, not a dozen.”

“Okay, you were right,” said Odell placatingly.

Don Edmonds had just taken a long call from the FBI man in London, Patrick Seymour. He filled them in on everything else he had learned right up to the close of the first COBRA meeting under the Cabinet Office, which had just ended.

“Just what happens in a kidnap case?” asked Hubert Reed mildly.

Of all President Cormack’s senior advisers in the room, Reed was the one generally deemed to be least likely to cope with the tough political infighting habitually associated with power in Washington.

He was a short man whose air of diffidence, even defenselessness, was accentuated by owllike eyeglasses. He had inherited wealth, and had started on Wall Street as a pension-fund manager with a major brokerage house. A sound nose for investments had made him a leading financier by his early fifties, and he had in previous years managed the Cormack family trusts-which was how the two men met and became friends.

It was Reed’s genius for finance that had caused John Cormack to invite him to Washington, where, at Treasury, he had managed to hold America ’s spiraling budget deficit within some limits. So long as the matter at hand was finance, Hubert Reed was at home; only when he was made privy to some of the “hard” operations of the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Secret Service, both subagencies of the Treasury Department, did he become thoroughly uncomfortable.

Don Edmonds glanced at Philip Kelly for an answer to Reed’s question. Kelly was the crime expert in the room.

“Normally, unless the abductors and their hideout can be quickly established, you wait until they make contact and demand a ransom. After that, you try to negotiate the return of the victim. Investigations continue, of course, to try to locate the whereabouts of the criminals. If that fails, it’s down to negotiation.”

“In this case, by whom?” asked Sta

There was silence. America has some of the most sophisticated alarm systems in the world. Her scientists have developed infrared sensors that can detect body heat from several miles above the earth’s surface; there are noise sensors that can hear a mouse breathe at a mile; there are movement and light sensors to pick up a cigarette stub from i

“We need a presence over there,” urged Walters. “We can’t just leave this entirely to the British. We have to be seen to be doing something, something positive, something to get that boy back.”

“Hell, yes,” exploded Odell. “We can say they lost the boy, even though the Secret Service insisted that the British police take a backseat.” Burbank glared at him. “We have the leverage. We can insist we participate in their investigation.”

“We can hardly send a Washington Police Department team in to take over from Scotland Yard on their real estate,” Attorney General Walters pointed out.

“Well, what about the negotiation, then?” asked Brad Johnson. There was still silence from the professionals. By his insistence, Johnson was blatantly infringing the rules of Cover Your Ass.

Odell spoke, to mask the hesitation of them all. “If it comes to negotiation,” he asked, “who is the best hostage-recovery negotiator in the world?”

“Out at Quantico,” ventured Kelly, “we have the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Group. They handle our kidnap negotiations here in America. They’re the best we have over here.”

“I said, who’s the best in the world?” repeated the Vice President.

“The most consistently successful hostage-recovery negotiator in the world,” remarked Weintraub quietly, “is a man called Qui

Ten pairs of eyes swiveled toward the CIA man.

“Background him,” commanded Odell.

“He’s American,” said Weintraub. “After leaving the Army he joined an insurance company in Hartford. After two years they sent him to head their Paris operation, covering all their clients in Europe. He married, had a daughter. His French wife and child were killed in an expressway accident outside Orléans. He hit the bottle, Hartford fired him, he pulled himself back together, and he went to work for a firm of Lloyd’s underwriters in London, a firm specializing in personal security and, thus, hostage negotiation.

“So far as I recall, he spent ten years with them-1978 through ’88. Then he retired. Till then he had handled personally-or, where there was a language problem, advised on-over a dozen successful hostage recoveries all over Europe. As you know, Europe is the kidnap capital of the developed world. I believe he speaks three languages outside of English, and he knows Britain and Europe like the back of his hand.”

“Is he the man for us?” asked Odell. “Could he handle this for the U.S.?”

Weintraub shrugged. “You asked who was the best in the world, Mr. Vice President,” he pointed out. There were nods of relief around the table.

“Where is he now?” asked Odell.

“I believe he retired to the South of Spain, sir. We’ll have it all on file back at Langley.”

“Go get him, Mr. Weintraub,” said Odell. “Get him back here, this Mr. Qui

At 7:00 P.M. that evening the first news hit the TV screens like an exploding bomb. On TVE a gabbling newscaster told a stu

“Mala cosa,” he said sympathetically. The tall man did not take his eyes from the screen.

“No es mi asunto,” he said, puzzlingly. It is not my affair.

David Weintraub took off from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington at 10:00 A.M. Washington time in a USAF VC20A, the military version of the Gulfstream Three. She crossed the Atlantic direct, cruising at 43,000 feet and making 483 mph, in seven and a half hours, with a helpful tail wind.