The Negotiator

With six hours’ time difference, it was 11:30 P.M. when the DDO, CIA, landed at Rota, the U.S. Navy air base across the bay from Cádiz, Andalusia. He transferred at once to a waiting Navy SH2F Sea Sprite helicopter, which lifted away toward the east before he was even seated. The rendezvous was the wide, flat beach called Casares, and here the young staffer who had driven down from Madrid was waiting for him with a car from the Madrid Station. Sneed was a brash, bright young man fresh out of CIA training school at Camp Peary, Virginia, and seeking to impress the DDO. Weintraub sighed.

They drove carefully through Manilva, operative Sneed twice asking directions, and found Alcántara del Rio just after midnight. The whitewashed casita out of town was harder, but a helpful peasant pointed the way.

The limousine eased to a halt and Sneed killed the engine. They got out, surveyed the darkened cottage, and Sneed tried the door. It was on the latch. They walked straight into the wide, cool ground-floor sitting area. By the moonlight Weintraub could make out a man’s room: cowhide rugs over quarry tiles, easy chairs, an old refectory table of Spanish oak, a wall of books.

Sneed began poking about looking for a light switch. Weintraub noticed the three oil lamps and knew he was wasting his time. There would be a diesel generator out back to give electricity for cooking and bathing, probably shut off at sundown. Sneed was still clattering about. Weintraub took a step forward. He felt the needle tip of the knife just below the lobe of his right ear, and froze. The man had come down the tiled stair from the bedroom without a sound.

“Been a long time since Son Tay, Qui

“What’s that, sir?” asked Sneed cheerfully from the other end of the room. A shadow moved over the tiles, a match flared, and the oil lamp on the table gave a warm glow to the room. Sneed jumped a foot. Major Kerkorian in Belgrade would have loved him.

“Tiring journey,” said Weintraub. “Mind if I sit?”

Qui

“I’m out of it, David,” said Qui

He pushed a tumbler and the earthenware pitcher of red wine toward Weintraub, who poured a glass, drank, and nodded with appreciation. A rough red wine. It would never see the tables of the rich. A peasant’s and a soldier’s wine.

“Please, Qui

Sneed was amazed. DDOs did not say “please.” They gave orders.

“I’m not coming,” said Qui

“Who is this asshole?” he inquired mildly.

“Sneed,” said Weintraub firmly, “go check the tires.”

Sneed went outside. Weintraub sighed.

“Qui

“Can’t you understand? I’m out. It’s over. No more. You’ve wasted your journey. Get someone else.”

“There is no one else. The Brits have people, good people. Washington says we need an American. In-house, we don’t have anyone to match you when it comes to Europe.”

“ Washington wants to protect its ass,” snapped Qui

“Yeah, maybe,” admitted Weintraub. “But one last time, Qui

Qui

“I have a price,” he said at last.

“Name it,” said the DDO simply.

“Bring my grapes in. Bring in the harvest.”

They walked outside ten minutes later, Qui

“You stay here,” he said to Sneed. “Bring in his grapes.”

“Do what?” Sneed gasped.

“You heard. Go down to the village in the morning, rent some labor, and bring in the man’s grape harvest. I’ll tell Madrid Head of Station it’s okay.”

He used a hand communicator to summon the Sea Sprite, which was hovering over Casares beach when they arrived. They climbed aboard and wheeled away through the velvety darkness toward Rota and Washington.

Chapter 5

David Weintraub was away from Washington for just twenty hours. On the eight-hour flight from Rota to Andrews, he gained six hours in time zones, landing at the Maryland headquarters of the 89th Military Airlift Wing at 4:00 A.M. In the intervening period two governments, in Washington and London, had been virtually under siege.

There are few more awesome sights than the combined forces of the world’s media when they have completely lost any last vestige of restraint. The appetite is insatiable; the methodology, brutal.

Airplanes bound out of the United States for London, or any British airport, were choked from the flight-deck doors to the toilets, as every American news outlet worth the name sent a team to the British capital. On arrival they went berserk; there were minute-by-minute deadlines to meet and nothing to say. London had agreed with the White House to stick with the original terse statement. Of course it was nowhere near enough.

Reporters and TV teams staked out the detached house off the Woodstock Road as if its doors might open to reveal the missing youth. The doors remained firmly closed as the Secret Service team, on orders from Creighton Burbank, packed every last item and prepared to leave.

The Oxford city coroner, using his powers under Section Twenty of the Coroners Amendment Act, released the bodies of the two dead Secret Service agents as soon as the Home Office pathologist had finished with them. Technically they were released to Ambassador Aloysius Fairweather on behalf of next of kin; in fact they were escorted by a senior member of the embassy staff to the USAF base at nearby Upper Heyford, where an honor guard saw the caskets aboard a transport for Andrews Air Force Base, accompanied by the other ten agents, who had nearly been mobbed for statements when they left the house in Summertown.

They returned to the States, to be met by Creighton Burbank and to begin the long inquiry into what had gone wrong. There was nothing left for them to do in England.

Even when the Oxford house had been closed down, a small and forlorn group of reporters waited outside it lest something, anything, happen there. Others pursued, throughout the university city, anyone who had ever known Simon Cormack-tutors, fellow students, college staff, barmen, athletes. Two other American students at Oxford, albeit at different colleges, had to go into hiding. The mother of one, traced in America, was kind enough to say she was bringing her boy home at once to the safety of downtown Miami. It made a paragraph and got her a spot on a local quiz show.

The body of Sergeant Du

All the forensic evidence was brought east to London. The military hardware went to the Royal Armoured Research and Development Establishment at Fort Halstead, outside Sevenoaks in Kent, where the ammunition from the Skorpion was quickly identified, underlining the chance of European terrorists’ being involved. This was not made public.

The other evidence went to the Metropolitan Police laboratory in Fulham, London. That meant blades of crumpled grass with blood smears on them, pieces of mud, casts of tire tracks, the jack, footprints, the slugs taken from the three dead bodies, and the fragments of glass from the shattered windshield of the shadowing car. Before nightfall of the first day, Shotover Plain looked as if it had been vacuum-cleaned.