The Negotiator

The time in London was five hours later than Washington’s but the reaction was similar: Late TV shows were interrupted by news flashes that left the nation stu

Few slept. Impelled by a personal plea for haste from Sir Harry Marriott himself, Dr. Barnard and his team worked through the night. The forensic scientist had finally quit the road as night fell, certain it had nothing more to yield. Ten hours of scouring had left the thirty-yard circle cleaner than any piece of ground in England. What that ground had yielded now reposed in a series of gray plastic drums along the wall of his laboratory. For him and his team it was the night of the microscopes.

Nigel Cramer spent the night in a plain, bare room in a Tudor grange, screened from the nearest road by a belt of trees, in the heart of Surrey. Despite its elegant exterior aspect, the old house was well equipped for interrogation. The British Security Service used its ancient cellars as a training school for such delicate matters.

Brown, Collins, and Seymour were present, at their own insistence. Cramer did not object-his brief from Sir Harry Marriott was to cooperate with the Americans wherever and whenever possible. Any information Qui

Qui

Cramer started at the begi

“Did you have any reason, Mr. Qui

“Instinct,” said Qui

“Just instinct, Mr. Qui

“May I ask you a question, Mr. Cramer?”

“I don’t promise to answer it.”

“The attaché case with the diamonds in it. It was bugged, wasn’t it?”

He got his answer from the four faces in the room.

“If I had shown up at any exchange with that case,” said Qui

“They did that anyway, smartass,” Brown grunted.

“Yes, they did,” said Qui

Cramer took him back to the moment he left the flat. He told them about Marylebone, the night at the hotel, the terms Zack had laid down for the rendezvous, and how he had just made the deadline. For Cramer the meat was in the head-to-head in the abandoned factory. Qui

He could describe the men only as he had seen them, masked, in shapeless track suits. One he had not seen at all, the fourth, who had stayed at the hideout ready to kill Simon Cormack at a phone call or a no-show by his colleagues by a certain time. He described the physiques of the two men he had seen upright, Zack and the gunman. Medium height, medium build. Sorry.

He identified the Skorpion submachine gun, and of course the Babbidge warehouse. Cramer left the room to make a phone call. A second team of forensic men from Fulham visited the warehouse before dawn and spent the morning there. It yielded nothing but a small ball of marzipan and a set of perfect tire tracks in the dust. These would eventually identify the abandoned Volvo, but not for two weeks.

The house used by the kidnappers was of particular interest. A gravel drive-Qui

“There’s nothing we can charge him with, Home Secretary,” Cramer reported to the Minister early next morning. “We can’t even detain him any longer. And frankly, I don’t think we should. I don’t believe he was criminally involved in the death.”

“Well, he seems to have made a complete balls of it,” said Sir Harry. The pressure from Downing Street for some new lead was becoming intense.

“So it would seem,” said the police officer. “But if those criminals were determined to kill the boy, and it seems with hindsight that they were, they could have done it any time, before or after receiving the diamonds, in the cellar, on the road, or on some lonely Yorkshire moorland. And Qui

“Very well,” sighed the Home Secretary. “We have no further interest in Mr. Qui

“Technically, he’s their voluntary guest,” said Cramer carefully.

“Well, they can let him go back to Spain when they wish.”

While they were talking, Sam Somerville was pleading with Kevin Brown. Collins and Seymour were present, in the manor’s elegant drawing room.

“What the hell do you want to see him for?” asked Brown. “He failed. He’s a busted flush.”

“Look,” she said, “in those three weeks I got closer to him than anybody. If he’s holding out at all, on anything, maybe I could get it out of him, sir.”

Brown seemed undecided.

“Couldn’t do any harm,” said Seymour.

Brown nodded. “He’s downstairs. Thirty minutes.”

That afternoon Sam Somerville took the regular flight from Heathrow to Washington, landing just after dark.

When Sam Somerville took off from Heathrow, Dr. Barnard was sitting in his laboratory at Fulham staring at a small collection of pieces of debris spread on a crisp white sheet of paper across a tabletop. He was very tired. Since the urgent call to his small London house just after dawn the previous day, he had not stopped working. Much of that work was a strain on the eyes, peering through magnifying glasses and into microscopes. But if he rubbed his eyes that late afternoon, it was more from surprise than exhaustion.

He now knew what had happened, how it had happened, and what had been the effect. Stains on fabric and leather had yielded to chemical analysis to reveal the exact chemical components of the explosive; the extent of burn- and impact-deterioration had shown him how much was used, where it had been placed, and how it had been triggered. There were some pieces missing, of course. Some would never appear, vaporized, lost forever, having ceased to exist. Others would emerge from the ruin of the body itself, and he had been in constant contact with Ian Macdonald, who was still at work in Oxford. The yield from Oxford would arrive shortly. But he knew what he was looking at, though to the untrained eye it was just a pile of minuscule fragments.