The Negotiator

Nigel Cramer had news for the COBRA committee under Whitehall at 10:00 A.M. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Center in Swansea had come up with a lead. A man with the same name as the missing former owner of the Transit van had purchased and registered another van, a Sherpa, a month earlier. There was now an address, in Leicester. Commander Williams, the head of S.O. 13 and the official investigating officer, was on his way there by police helicopter. If the man no longer owned it, he must have sold it to somebody. It had never been reported stolen.

After the conference Sir Harry Marriott took Cramer to one side.

“ Washington wants to handle the negotiations, if there are any,” he said. “They’re sending their own man over.”

“Home Secretary, I must insist that the Met. has primacy in all areas,” said Cramer. “I want to use two men from Criminal Intelligence Branch as negotiators. This is not American territory.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sir Harry. “I have to overrule you on this one. I’ve cleared it with Downing Street. If they want it that way, the view is we have to let them have it.”

Cramer was affronted, but he had made his protest. The loss of his primacy in negotiation simply made him more determined than ever to end the abduction by finding the kidnappers through police detective work.

“May I ask who their man is, Home Secretary?”

“Apparently he’s called Qui

“Qui

“Yes. Have you heard of him?”

“Certainly, Home Secretary. He used to work for a firm in Lloyd’s. I thought he’d retired.”

“Well, Washington tells us he’s back. Is he any good?”

“Extremely good. Excellent record in five countries, including Ireland years ago. I met him on that one. The victim was a British citizen, a businessman snatched by some renegade I.R.A. men.”

Privately, Cramer was relieved. He had feared some behavioral theorist who would be amazed to find that the British drove on the left.

“Splendid,” said Sir Harry. “Then I think we should concede the point with good grace. Our complete cooperation, all right?”

The Home Secretary, who had also heard of CYA-though he would have pronounced and spelled the last word “arse”-was not displeased by Washington ’s demand. After all, if anything went wrong…

Qui

President Cormack was fully dressed in a dark suit, but he looked pale and tired, the lines of strain showing around his mouth, smudges of insomnia beneath his eyes. He shook hands and nodded at the Vice President, who withdrew.

Gesturing Qui

“How is Mrs. Cormack?”

Not “the First Lady.” Just Mrs. Cormack, his wife. He was startled.

“Oh, she’s sleeping. It has been a terrible shock. She’s under sedation.” He paused. “You have been through this before, Mr. Qui

“Many times, sir.”

“Well, as you see, behind the pomp and the circumstance is just a man, a very worried man.”

“Yes, sir. I know. Tell me about Simon, please.”

“Simon? What about him?”

“What he is like. How he will react to… to this. Why did you have him so late in life?”

There was no one in the White House who would have dared ask that. John Cormack looked across the desk. He was tall himself, but this man matched him at six feet two inches. Neat gray suit, striped tie, white shirt-all borrowed, though he did not know that. Clean-shaven, deeply sunta

“So late? Well, I don’t know. I married when I was thirty; Myra was twenty-one. I was a young professor then. We thought we would start a family in two or three years. But it didn’t happen. We waited. The doctors said there was no reason… Then, after ten years of marriage, Simon came. I was forty by then, Myra thirty-one. There was only ever the one child… just Simon.”

“You love him very much, don’t you?”

President Cormack stared at Qui

“Mr. Qui

“Tell me about his childhood, when he was very young.”

The President jumped up.

“I have a picture,” he said triumphantly. He walked to a cabinet and returned with a framed snapshot. It showed a sturdy toddler of four or five, in swim trunks on a beach, holding a pail and shovel. A proud father was crouched behind him, gri

“That was taken at Nantucket in ’75. I had just been elected congressman from New Haven.”

“Tell me about Nantucket,” said Qui

President Cormack talked for an hour. It seemed to help him. When Qui

“This is my private number. Very few people have it. It will reach me directly, night or day.” He held out his hand. “Good luck, Mr. Qui

While Qui

When he entered his office his deputy was there, reading Qui

“So, that’s our hotshot. What do you think?”

“He was brave enough in combat,” conceded Brown. “Otherwise a smartass. About the only thing I like about the guy is his name.”

“Well,” said Kelly, “they’ve put him in there over the Bureau’s head. Don Edmonds didn’t object. Maybe he figures if it all turns out badly… Still and all, the sleazeballs who did this thing have contravened at least three U.S. statutes. The Bureau still has jurisdiction, even though it happened on British territory. And I don’t want this yo-yo operating out on his own with no supervision, no matter who says so.”

“Right,” agreed Brown.

“The Bureau’s man in London, Patrick Seymour-do you know him?”

“Know of him,” grunted Brown. “Hear he’s very pally with the Brits. Maybe too much so.”

Kevin Brown had come out of the Boston police force, an Irishman like Kelly, whose admiration for Britain and the British could be written on the back of a postage stamp with room left over. Not that he was soft on the I.R.A.; he had pulled in two arms dealers trading with the I.R.A., who would have gone to jail but for the courts.

He was an old-style law-enforcement officer who had no truck with criminals of any ilk. He also remembered as a small boy in the slums of Boston listening wide-eyed to his grandmother’s tales of people dying with mouths green from grass-eating during the famine of 1848, and of the hangings and the shootings of 1916. He thought of Ireland, a place he had never visited, as a land of mists and gentle green hills, enlivened by the fiddle and the chaunter, where poets like Yeats and O’Faolain wandered and composed. He knew Dublin was full of friendly bars where peaceable folk sat over a stout in front of peat fires, immersed in the works of Joyce and O’Casey.