Four of the watchers, experienced men, not easy to shock, later had to undergo therapy. They described how the figure of the youth was picked up and hurled twenty yards toward them, like a rag doll, first flying, then bouncing and rolling in a twisted assembly of disjointed limbs. They all felt the blast wave.

Most would agree, with hindsight, that everything seemed to happen in slow motion, during and after the murder. Recollections came in bits and pieces, and the patient interrogators would listen, and note down the bits and pieces until they had a sequence, usually overlapping in parts.

There was Nigel Cramer, rock-still, pale as a sheet, repeating “Oh, God, oh, my God” over and over again. A Mormon FBI man dropped to his knees at the roadside and began to pray. Sam Somerville screamed once, buried her face in Quinn’s back, and began to cry. There was Duncan McCrea, behind both of them, on his knees, head down over a ditch, hands deep in the water supporting his weight, retching up his guts.

Quinn, they would say, was standing still, having been overtaken by the main group but able to see what had happened up the road, shaking his head in disbelief and murmuring, “No… no… no.”

It was a gray-haired British sergeant who was the first to break the spell of immobility and shock, moving forward toward the tangled body sixty yards away. He was followed by several FBI men, among them Kevin Brown, pale and shaking, then Nigel Cramer and three more men from the Yard. They looked at the body in silence. Then background and training took over.

“Clear the area, please,” said Nigel Cramer. It was in a tone no one was prepared to argue. “Tread very carefully.”

They all walked back toward the cars.

“Sergeant, get on to the Yard. I want the CEO up here, by chopper, within the hour. Photographs, forensics, the best team Fulham have got. You”-to the men in the second car-“get up and down the road. Block it off. Raise the local boys-I want barriers beyond the garage that way and up to Buckingham that way. No one enters this stretch of road until further notice except those I authorize.”

The officers designated to take the stretch of road beyond the body had to walk, crossing into the fields for a while to avoid treading on fragments, then running up the road to head off approaching cars. The second squad car went east toward Tubbs Cross Garage to block the road in the other direction. The first squad car was used for its radio.

Within sixty minutes police out of Buckingham to the west and Bletchley to the east would seal the road completely with steel barriers. A screen of local officers would fan out across the fields to fend off the curious seeking to approach cross-country. At least this time there would be no press for a while. They could put the road closing down to a burst water main-enough to deter the local small-town reporters.

Within fifty minutes the first Metropolitan Police helicopter swung in across the fields, guided by the radio of the squad car, to deposit on the road behind the cars a small, birdlike man called Dr. Barnard, the Chief Explosives Officer of the Met., a man who, thanks to the bomb outrages of the I.R.A. in mainland Britain, had examined more explosion scenes than he would have wished. He brought with him, apart from his “bag of tricks,” as he liked to call it, an awesome reputation.

They said of Dr. Barnard that from fragments so minuscule as almost to deceive a magnifying glass, he could reconstitute a bomb to the point of identifying the factory that had made its components and the man who had assembled it. He listened to “Nigel Cramer for several minutes, nodded, and gave his own orders to the dozen men who had clambered out of the second and third helicopters-the team from the Fulham forensic laboratories.

Impassively they set about their work, and the machinery of post-crime science rolled into action.

Long before any of this, Kevin Brown had returned from looking at the corpse of Simon Cormack to the point where Quinn still stood. He was gray with shock and rage.

“You bastard,” he grated. Both tall men, they were eyeball to eyeball. “This is your fault. One way or another you caused this, and I’m going to make you pay for it.”

The punch, when it came, surprised the two younger FBI men by Brown’s side, who took his arms and tried to calm him down. Quinn may have seen the punch coming. Whatever, he made no attempt to dodge it. Still with his hands cuffed in front of him, he took it full on the jaw. It was enough to knock him backwards; then his head caught the edge of the roof of the car behind him, and he went down unconscious.

“Put him in the car,” growled Brown when he had recovered his self-control.

There was no way Cramer could hold the American group. Seymour and Collins had diplomatic immunity; he let them all depart back to London in their two cars fifteen minutes later, warning them that he would want Quinn, for whom there was no diplomatic status, available for the taking of lengthy statements in London. Seymour gave his word Quinn would be available. When they had gone, Cramer used the phone in the garage to put through a call to Sir Harry Marriott at his home and give him the news; the phone was more secure than a police radio band.

The politician was shocked to his core. But he was still a politician.

“Mr. Cramer, were we, in the form of the British authorities, in any way involved in all this?”

“No, Home Secretary. From the time Quinn ran out of that apartment, this was wholly his affair. He handled it the way he wanted to, without involving us or his own people. He chose to play a lone hand, and it has failed.”

“I see,” said the Home Secretary. “I shall have to inform the Prime Minister at once. Of all aspects.” He meant that the British authorities had had no hand in the affair at all. “Keep the media out of it at all costs for the moment. At worst we will have to say that Simon Cormack has been found murdered. But not yet. And, of course, keep me in touch on every development, no matter how small.”

This time the news reached Washington from its own sources in London. Patrick Seymour telephoned Vice President Odell personally, on a secure line. Thinking he was taking a call from the FBI liaison man in London to announce Simon Cormack’s release, Michael Odell did not mind the hour-5:00 A.M. in Washington. When he heard what Seymour had to tell him, he went white.

“But how? Why? In God’s name, why?”

“We don’t know, sir,” said the voice from London. “The boy had been released safe and sound. He was running toward us, ninety yards away, when it happened. We don’t even know what ‘it’ was. But he’s dead, Mr. Vice President.”

The committee was convened within the hour. Every member felt ill with shock when told the news. The question was, who should tell the President. As chairman of the committee, the man saddled with the task of “Get my son back for me” twenty-four days earlier, it fell to Michael Odell. With a heavy heart he walked from the West Wing to the White House living quarters.

President Cormack did not need to be awakened. He had slept little these past three and a half weeks, often waking of his own accord in the predawn darkness, and walking through to his personal study to attempt to concentrate on papers of state. Hearing the Vice President was downstairs and wished to see him, President Cormack went into the Yellow Oval Room and said he would greet Odell there.

The Yellow Oval Room, on the second floor, is a spacious reception room between the study and the Treaty Room. Beyond its windows, looking over the South Lawn, is the Truman Balcony. Both are at the geometric center of the White House, beneath the cupola and right above the South Portico.

Odel entered. President Cormack was in the center of the room, facing him. Odell was silent. He could not bring himself to say it. The air of expectancy on the President’s face drained away.