The Negotiator

Kevin Brown and his eight-strong team did not feel like sleep. Jet-lagged from the flight across the Atlantic, their body clocks were still on Washington time, five hours earlier than London.

Brown insisted that Seymour and Collins show him around the basement telephone exchange and listening post at the embassy, where in an office at the end of the complex, American engineers-the British had not been given access-had set up wall speakers to bring in the sounds recorded by the various bugs in the Kensington apartment.

“There are two taps in the sitting room,” explained Collins reluctantly. He saw no reason why he should explain Company techniques to the man from the Bureau, but he had his orders, and the Kensington apartment was “burned” from an operational point of view anyway.

“If a senior officer from Langley was using the place as a base, they would of course be deactivated. But if we were debriefing a Soviet there, we find invisible bugs less inhibiting than having a tape recorder turning away on the table. The sitting room would be the main debriefing area. But there are two more in the master bedroom-Qui

“Out of respect for Miss Somerville and our own man McCrea, we have deactivated the two smaller bedrooms. But if Qui

Collins indicated two switches on the master console.

Brown asked, “In any case, if he talked to either of them out of range of any speakers, we would expect them to report back to us, right?”

Collins and Seymour nodded.

“That’s what they’re there for,” added Seymour.

“Then we have three telephones in there,” Collins went on. “One is the new flash line. Qui

“You mean the British are listening to all this as well?” asked Brown dourly.

“Only the phone lines,” said Seymour. “We have to have their cooperation on telephones-they own the exchanges. Besides, they could have a good input on voice patterns, speech defects, regional accents. And of course the call-tracing has got to be done by them, right out of the Kensington exchange. We don’t have an untappable line from the apartment to this basement.”

Collins coughed.

“Yes, we do,” he said, “but it only works for the room bugs. We have two apartments in that building. All the stuff on all the room bugs is fed on internal wires down to our second and smaller apartment in the basement. I have a man down there now. In the basement the speech is scrambled, transmitted on ultrashort-wave radio up here, received, descrambled, and piped down here.”

“You radio it for just a mile?” asked Brown.

“Sir, my Agency gets on very well with the British. But no secret service in the world will ever pipe classified information through the land lines ru

Brown enjoyed that. “So the Brits can hear the phone conversations but not the room talk.”

He was wrong, actually. Once MI-5 knew of the Kensington apartment, that the two Metropolitan chief inspectors were not being allowed to live in, and that their own bugs had been removed, they calculated there must be a second American apartment in there to relay Soviet debriefings to CIA Control somewhere else. Within an hour the apartment-building records had pinpointed the small bed-sitter in the basement. By midnight a team of plumbers had found the co

Collins’s ELINT-electronic intelligence-man at the console lifted the headset off his ears.

“Qui

“Sure,” said Brown.

The engineer threw the conversation in the sitting room in Kensington from headset to wall mike. Qui

“… would be fine. Thanks, Sam. Milk and sugar.”

“Do you think he’ll call back, Mr. Qui

“Nope. Plausible, but he didn’t smell right.” Qui

The men in the embassy basement turned to go. Cots had been set up in a number of nearby offices. Brown intended to stay on the job at all times. He designated two of his eight men to take the night watch. It was 2:30 A.M.

The same conversations, on the phone and in the sitting room, had been heard and logged in the MI-5 communications center in Cork Street. In the Kensington telephone exchange the police heard only the telephone call, traced it within eight seconds to a phone booth in nearby Paddington, and dispatched a plainclothes officer from Paddington Green police station, two hundred yards from the booth. He arrested an old man with a history of mental illness.

At 9:00 A.M. on the third day, one of the women in Grosvenor Square took another call. The voice was English, rough, curt.

“Put me through to the negotiator.”

The girl went pale. No one had used that word before. She kept her voice honeyed.

“Putting you through, sir.”

Qui

“Someone asking for the negotiator. Just that.”

Half a second later the co

“Hi there, pal. You wanted to speak to me?”

“You want Simon Cormack back, it’s going to cost you. A lot. Now listen to me-”

“No, friend, you listen to me. I’ve had a dozen hoax calls already today. You can understand how many crazies there are in this world, right? So do me a favor-just a simple question…”

In Kensington the tracers got a “lock” in eight seconds, Hitchin, Hertfordshire… a public booth in… the railway station. Cramer got it at the Yard ten seconds later; Hitchin police station was slower to get in gear. Their man set off in a car thirty seconds later, was dropped two corners from the station a minute thereafter, and came ambling around the corner toward the booths 141 seconds after the call began. Too late. The man had spent thirty seconds on the line and was by then three streets away, lost in the morning throng.

McCrea stared at Qui

“You hung up on him,” he said.

“Had to,” said Qui

“If you’d kept him on the line,” said Sam Somerville, “the police might have caught him.”

“If he’s the man, I want to give him confidence, not a bad fright-yet,” said Qui

In Grosvenor Square, Kevin Brown had been awakened by one of his men and hustled into the listening post in time to hear the end of Qui

“… is the name of that book? You answer me that and call me right back. I’ll be waiting, pal. Bye now.”