The Negotiator

In the sitting room of a quiet house forty miles from London, four silent and tense men watched the broadcast. The leader rapidly translated into French for two of them. In fact one was Belgian, the other Corsican. The fourth needed no translation. His spoken English was good but heavily accented with the Afrikaner tones of his native South Africa.

The two from Europe spoke no English at all, and the leader had forbidden all of them to stray from the house until the affair was over. He alone left and returned, always out of the attached garage, always in the Volvo sedan, which now had new tires and license plates-the original and legitimate plates. He never left without his wig, beard, moustache, and tinted glasses. During his absences the others were instructed to stay out of sight, not even appearing at the windows and certainly not answering the door.

As the newscast changed to the Middle East situation, one of the Europeans asked a question. The leader shook his head.

“Demain,” he replied, “tomorrow morning.”

More than two hundred calls came to the embassy basement that night. Each was handled carefully and courteously, but only seven were passed through to Qui

Through the night, Sam Somerville and Duncan McCrea stayed with him. Sam commented on his laid-back performance on the phone.

“It hasn’t even begun yet,” he said quietly. But the strain had. The two younger people were feeling it already.

Just after midnight, having caught the noon plane from Washington, Kevin Brown and a picked team of eight FBI agents flew into Heathrow. Forewarned, an exasperated Patrick Seymour was there to greet them. He gave the senior officer an update on the situation to 11:00 P.M., when he had left for the airport. That included the installation of Qui

“Knew he was a smartass,” growled Brown when told of the tangle in the Winfield House driveway. “We’ve got to sit on this bastard or he’ll be into every kind of trick. Let’s get to the embassy. We’ll sleep on cots right there in the basement. If that yo-yo farts, I want to hear it, loud and clear.”

Inwardly, Seymour groaned. He had heard of Kevin Brown and could have done without the visit. Now, he thought, it was going to be worse than he had feared. When they reached the embassy at 1:30 A.M., the 106th phony call was coming in.

Other people were getting little sleep that night. Two of them were Commander Williams of S.O. 13 and a man called Sidney Sykes. They spent the hours of darkness confronting each other in the interview room of Wandsworth police station in south London. A second officer present was the head of the Vehicles Section of the Serious Crimes Squad, whose men had traced Sykes.

As far as a small-time crook like Sykes was concerned, the two men across the plain table were very heavy pressure indeed and by the end of the first hour he was a badly frightened man. After that things got worse.

The Vehicles Section, following a description given by the jobbing builder in Leicester, had traced the recovery firm that had removed the wrecked Transit from its lethal embrace with the steam shovel. Once it was established that the vehicle had a twisted chassis and was a write-off, the recovery company offered it back to its owner. As the charge for bringing it on a flat-bed to Leicester was greater than its value, he had declined. The recovery team had sold it to Sykes as scrap, for he ran a car-wrecking yard in Wandsworth. The Vehicles Section rummage crews had spent the day turning over that yard.

They found a barrel three-quarters full of dirty black sump oil, whose murky depths had yielded twenty-four car license plates, twelve perfectly matched pairs, all made up in the Sykes yard and all as genuine as a three-pound note. A recess beneath the floorboards of Sykes’s shabby office had given up a wad of thirty vehicle registration documents, all pertaining to cars and vans that had ceased to exist except on paper.

Sykes’s racket was to acquire crash vehicles written off by their insurers, tell the owner that he, Sykes, would inform Swansea the vehicle had ceased to exist except as a mass of scrap, and then inform Swansea of exactly the opposite-that he had bought the vehicle from its previous owner. The Swansea computer would then log that “fact.” If the car really was a write-off, Sykes was simply buying the legitimate paperwork, which could then be applied to a working vehicle of similar make and type, the working vehicle having been stolen from some parking lot by one of Sykes’s light-fingered associates. With new plates to match the registration document of the write-off, the stolen car could then be resold. The final touch was to abrade the original chassis and engine block numbers, etch in new ones, and smear on enough grease and dirt to fool the ordinary customer. Of course this would not fool the police, but as all such deals were in cash, Sykes could later deny he had ever seen the offending car, let alone sold it.

A variation on the racket was to take a van like the Transit, in good shape apart from its twisted chassis, cut out the distorted section, bridge the gap with a length of girder, and put it back on the road. Illegal and dangerous, but such cars and vans could probably run for several thousand more miles before falling apart.

Confronted by the statements of the Leicester builder, the recovery firm that had sold him the Transit as scrap for £20, and the imprints of the old, real chassis and engine numbers; and informed what deed the truck had been used for, Sykes realized he was in very deep trouble indeed, and came clean.

The man who had bought the Transit, he recalled after racking his memory, had been wandering around the yard one day six weeks back, and on being questioned had said he was looking for a low-priced van. By chance, Sykes had just finished recycling the chassis of the blue Transit and spraying it green. It had left his yard within the hour for £300 cash. He had never seen the man again. The fifteen £20 notes were long gone.

“Description?” asked Commander Williams.

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” pleaded Sykes.

“Do that,” said Williams. “It will make the rest of your life so much easier.”

Medium height, medium build. Late forties. Rough face and ma

The three men spent two more hours with the police artist. Commander Williams brought the picture back to Scotland Yard just before the breakfast hour and showed it to Nigel Cramer. He took it to the COBRA committee at nine that morning. The trouble was, the picture could have been anyone. And there the trail ran out.

“We know the van was worked on by another and better mechanic after Sykes,” Cramer told the committee. “And a sign painter created the Barlow fruit company logo on each side. It must have been stored somewhere, a garage with welding facilities. But if we issue a public appeal, the kidnappers will see it and could lose their nerve, cut and run, and leave Simon Cormack dead.”

It was agreed to issue the description to every police station in the country, but not to bring in the press and the public.