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 Quinn.”

“Quinn?”

“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…

Quinn was shown into the private study on the second floor of the Executive Mansion an hour after leaving the Cabinet Room. Odell had led him personally, not via the holly and box hedges of the Rose Garden, but through the basement corridor that emerged to a set of stairs giving onto the Mansion’s ground-floor corridor. Long Tom cameras were now ranged on the garden from half a mile away.

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 Quinn to a chair, he took his own seat behind his desk. A defense mechanism, creating a barrier, not wanting to unbend. He was about to speak when Quinn got in first.

“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. Quinn.”

“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 suntanned. A craggy face, calm gray eyes, an impression of strength and patience.

“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 Quinn in surprise. The question was so unexpected. He knew Odell was completely estranged from his own two grown-up offspring, but it had never occurred to him how much he loved his only son. He rose, came around the desk, and seated himself on the edge of an upright chair, much closer to Quinn.

“Mr. Quinn, he is the sun and the moon to me-to us both. Get him back for us.”

“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, grinning.

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

“Tell me about Nantucket,” said Quinn gently.

President Cormack talked for an hour. It seemed to help him. When Quinn rose to leave, Cormack scribbled a number on a pad and handed it to Quinn.

“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. Quinn. God go with you.” He was trying to control himself. Quinn nodded and left quickly. He had seen it before, the effect, the dreadful effect.

While Quinn was still in the washroom, Philip Kelly had driven back to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, where he knew his Deputy Assistant Director, CID, would be waiting for him. He and Kevin Brown had a lot in common, which was why he had pressed for Brown’s appointment.

When he entered his office his deputy was there, reading Quinn’s file. Kelly nodded toward it as he took his seat.

“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.