The Golden Gate

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘The fishing fleet can go fish in the bay. Send an ambulance and a doctor and do it quickly. A couple of men here have gotten themselves hurt, one badly’

  ‘Who? How?’

  ‘The oil ministers – Iman and Kharan. Self-inflicted injuries, you might say.’ As he spoke Branson watched Peters hurry into the coach, approach Iman and start scissoring away the sleeve of his coat. ‘There will be a TV van coming to the bridge soon. Let it through. I also want some chairs brought on to the bridge – forty should do.’

  ‘Chairs?’

  ‘You don’t have to buy them,’ Branson said patiently. ‘Confiscate them from the nearest restaurant. Forty.’

  ‘Chairs?’

  ‘Things you sit on. I’m going to hold a news conference in an hour or so. You don’t stand around at news conferences. You sit around.’

  Hendrix said carefully: ‘You’re going to hold a news conference and you’re going to televise it live?’

  ‘That’s it. Nationwide.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘My mental health is my concern. Milton and Quarry there yet?’

  ‘You mean the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury?’

  ‘I mean Milton and Quarry.’

  ‘They’ve just arrived and are with me now.’

  Hendrix looked at the two men who were with him then inside the big mobile communications van. Milton, the Secretary of State, was a tall, thin, dyspeptic character with no hair, rimless steel-legged glasses and an enviable reputation in Foreign Offices around the world: Quarry, white-haired, plump and cheerful, had a kindly avuncular air about him which many men, even some very highly intelligent ones, had taken to be a reflection of the true personality of the man: his reputation as a banker and economist stood as high as that of Milton in his field.

  Milton said: ‘It would be easy to say “he’s quite crazy, of course". Is he?’

  Hendrix spread his hands. ‘You know what they say. Crazy like a fox.’

  ‘And violent, it would seem?’

  ‘No. Violence he uses only as a last resort and even then only when pushed into a corner. Iman and Kharan must have made the mistake of pushing him into a corner.’

  Quarry said: ‘You would seem to know a fair bit about him?’

  Hendrix sighed. ‘Every senior police officer in the States knows about him. And in Canada, Mexico and God knows how many South American countries.’ Hendrix sounded bitter. ‘So far he has spared Europe his attentions. It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure.’

  ‘What’s his speciality?’

  ‘Robbery. He robs trains, planes, armoured cars, banks and jewellers. Robbery, wherever possible, as I say, without violence.’

  Quarry was dry. ‘I gather he is quite successful?’

  ‘Quite successful! To the best of our knowledge he has been operating for at least a dozen years and the lowest estimate of his takings in that time is twenty million dollars.’

  ‘Twenty million!’ For the first time there was a note of respect in Quarry’s voice, the banker and economist in him surfacing. ‘If he’s got all that money, why does he want more?’

  ‘Why do Niarchos and Getty and Hughes want more – after all, they too are comfortably off? Maybe he’s just a businessman in the way that they are businessmen and he’s hooked on his job. Maybe he finds it a stimulating intellectual exercise. Maybe it’s sheer greed. Maybe anything.’

  Milton said: ‘Has he ever been convicted?’

  Hendrix looked pained. ‘He’s never even been arrested.’

  ‘And that has something to do with the fact that neither of us has ever heard of him?’

  Hendrix gazed through the van window at the magnificent sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a far-off look of yearning in his eyes. He said: ‘Let us say, sir, that we do not care to advertise our failures.’

  Milton smiled at him. ‘John and I’ – he nodded at the Secretary of the Treasury – ‘frequently suffer from the same bashfulness and for the same reasons. Infallibility is not the lot of mankind. Anything known about this man – apart from what is known about his criminal activities?’

  Hendrix said sourly: ‘It wouldn’t be hard to know more about him than we do about his life of crime. Pretty well documented background, really. A WASP from out east. Comes from what they call a good family. Father a banker and when I say banker I mean he owned – still does, I believe – his own bank.’

  ‘Branson,’ the Treasury Secretary said. ‘Of course. Know him. Not personally, though.’

  ‘And something else that will interest you, sir-professionally. Branson took a degree in economics and went to work in his father’s bank. While he was there he took a PhD – and no coffee-grinder diploma school either – genuine Ivy League. Then for his post-graduate course he took up the subject of crime – something to do with having worked in his old man’s bank, maybe.’ Hendrix looked gloomy. ‘I suppose we could say that he has graduated in that subject now too – summa mm laude.’

  Milton said: ‘You seem to have almost a degree of admiration for this person, Hendrix?’

  ‘I’d give my pension to see him behind bars. Both as a man and a policeman he outrages whatever passes for my sensibilities. But one can’t help respecting sheer professionalism, no matter how misused.’

  ‘My sentiments too, I’m afraid,’ Milton said. ‘He’s not a particularly retiring person, this Branson of yours?’

  ‘I wish he were mine. If you mean does he suffer from our bouts of bashfulness, no, sir, he does not.’

  ‘Arrogant?’

  ‘To the point, perhaps, of megalomania. At least, that’s what General Cartland says, and I wouldn’t care to dispute what the General says.’

  ‘Few would.’ Milton spoke with some feeling. ‘Speaking of self-opinionated characters, where art thou at this hour, my James?’

  ‘Sir?’

  “What other self-opinionated character is there? I refer to Mr Hagenbach, the self-opinionated head of our FBI. I would have thought he would have been the first man hot-foot to the scene.’

  ‘Washington says they don’t know where he is. They’re trying every place they can think of. I’m afraid he’s a very elusive man, sir.’

  ‘Man’s got a mania for secrecy’ Milton brightened. ‘Well, if he’s watching his TV in an hour or so he should be considerably enlightened. What a perfectly splendid thought – the head of our FBI the last man in America to know about this.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Branson’s insistence on maximum publicity – TV, radio I’ll be bound, newsmen, photographers – has he ever declared himself publicly like this before? I mean, before or during any of his criminal activities?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘The man must be terribly sure of himself.’

  ‘In his place, so would I.’ Quarry appeared distracted. ‘What can we do to the man? As I see it, he’s in an impregnable, quite unassailable position.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give up hope, sir. We have one or two experts looking for an answer. Admiral Newson and General Carter are in our HQ now working on this.’

  ‘Newson. Carter. Our twin geniuses of finesse.’ Quarry seemed more discouraged than ever. ‘Never use one hydrogen bomb where two will suffice. Someone should send our Arabian oil friends word that they’re about to become involved in a nuclear holocaust.’ He gestured through his window towards the bridge. ‘Just look at it. Just think of it. A totally impossible situation – if it weren’t for the fact that we can see now that it’s all too possible. Total, absolute isolation, completely cut off from the world – and in the full view of everybody in San Francisco-everybody in the world, for that matter, as soon as those TV cameras start turning. A figurative stone’s throw away – and they might as well be on the moon.’ He sighed heavily. ‘One must confess to a feeling of utter helplessness.’

  ‘Come, come, John.’ Milton was severe. ‘Is this the spirit that won the West?’

  ‘The hell with the West. I’m thinking about
me. I don’t have to be very clever to know beyond any doubt that I am going to be the man in the middle.’

  Hendrix said: ‘Sir?’

  ‘Why else do you think this ruffian had summoned the Secretary of the Treasury to his royal presence?’

  Hands in pockets, as if deep in thought, Revson wandered along the east side of the bridge, stopping frequently to gaze at, and presumably admire the panorama stretched out before him – to his left the tip of Belvedere beyond Fort Baker, Tiburon and Angel Island, the largest in the Bay; to his right the city itself and straight ahead Alcatraz Island and beyond it Treasure Island: between the two the rapidly diminishing shape of the New Jersey was heading for its berth at Alameda. He made frequent stops, as if peering over the side. On one of those occasions he reached casually for the green cord he’d attached to the strut and hefted it. It was weightless.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He turned unhurriedly. April Wednesday’s big green eyes, if not exactly alive with curiosity, held a certain puzzlement.

  ‘You do have flannel feet. I thought I was the only person within miles – well, yards.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘When I look at this marvellous view here and then at you I really don’t know which I prefer. I think you. Have any people ever told you that you’re really rather beautiful?’

  ‘Lots.’ She caught the green cord between finger and thumb and started to lift it then made a muffled sound of pain as his hand closed none too gently over hers.

  ‘Leave that alone.’

  She rubbed her hand, looked around and said: ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m fishing.’

  ‘Not for compliments, that’s for sure.’ She massaged her knuckles tenderly, then looked at him with some uncertainty. ‘Fishermen tell tall tales, don’t they?’

  ‘I’ve done it myself.’

  ‘Tell me one.’

  ‘Are you as trustworthy as you’re beautiful?’ ‘Am I beautiful? And I’m not fishing. Honest.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Then I’m trustworthy too.’ They smiled at each other and he took her arm. ‘A really tall one?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ They walked slowly away together.

  Hendrix replaced the receiver in its cradle. He looked at Milton and Quarry. ‘You are ready, gentlemen?’

  ‘Act One, Scene One, and all the world’s a stage. That’s wrong somehow.’ Milton rose and looked critically at Quarry. ‘The shirt’s wrong too, John. White shows up badly on TV. Should be blue-like me – or the President. Blue shirts are all he has: you never know when a TV camera is lurking round the next corner.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Quarry turned morosely towards the rear door of the van then stopped as a motorcycle policeman drew up with a suitably dramatic screeching of tyre and smell of burning rubber, dismounted, propped his machine and hurried to the rear steps of the van. He held up his hand to Hendrix. ‘For you, sir.’

  Hendrix took the eight-inch-long narrow cylinder. ‘It’s got my name on it, all right. Where did you get it from?’

  The pilot boat brought it in from the New Jersey. The captain – of the New Jersey, that is-thought it might be very urgent.’

  FIVE

  The centre section of the Golden Gate Bridge was fast assuming the appearance of an embryonic town, sprawling, inchoate and wholly disorganized as those burgeoning settlements tend to be, but none the less possessed of a vitality, a feverish restlessness that augured well for its expansive future. The fact that all the buildings were on wheels and that all the village elders, seated in solemn conclave, were immaculately dressed and had clearly never done a single day’s physical toil in their collective lives, did little to detract from the curious impression that here were the pioneers pushing forward the limits of the wild frontier.

  There were three coaches and three police cars – the third had just brought Hendrix, Milton and Quarry. There were two large, glaze-windowed vehicles which bore the euphemistic legend ‘Rest Room': painted in becoming red and yellow stripes they had been borrowed from an itinerant circus currently stopped-over in the city. There was an ambulance, which Branson had commandeered for purposes best known to himself, a large side-counter wagonette which had provided hot meals, a very large TV camera truck with its generator placed at a discreet hundred yards distance and, finally, a van that was unloading blankets, rugs and pillows to help ease the new settlers through the rigours of their first night.

  There were, of course, the discordant, even jarring items. The helicopters, the tracked antiaircraft guns, the patrolling armed men, the army engineers at a distance on either side busily erecting steel barricades – those did tend to project a disturbing hint of violence to come. And yet they were not entirely alien there: so bizarre were the circumstances that the normal would have tended to look sadly out of place. The unreality of it all, when matched up against the outside world, had its own strange reality in this particular point in time and place. And for those participating in the scene, the reality of their situation was all too self-evident. No one smiled.

  The cameras were in position, so were the hostages, the three newly arrived men and, behind them in the second row, sat the journalists. The photographers had taken up positions best suited to themselves, none of them more than a few feet distant from an armed guard. Facing them, in solitary splendour, sat Branson. Close by him on the ground lay a peculiar object, a length of heavy canvas with cone-shaped objects embedded in it: beside it lay a heavy metal box, its lid closed.

  ‘I will not detain you unnecessarily, gentlemen,’ Branson said. Whether or not he was enjoying his moment of glory, the knowledge that he held some of the most powerful men in the world at his complete mercy, the consciousness that a hundred million people were looking at and listening to him, was quite impossible to say. He was calm, relaxed, unnervingly confident of and in himself, but displaying no other visible emotion. ‘You will have guessed why we all find ourselves here and why I am here.’

  ‘The reason why I’m here, I take it,’ Quarry said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You will bear in mind that, unlike you, I am not a law unto myself. The final decision is not mine.’

  ‘Appreciated.’ Branson could have been conducting some urbane seminar in an Ivy college. ‘That comes later. First things first, don’t you think, Mr Quarry?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘How much?’ Quarry’s reputation for disconcerting bluntness had been easily earned.

  ‘One moment, Mr Secretary’ The President had his weaknesses no less than the two hundred million people for whom he was the elected head of state and high on the list was an almost pathological dislike of being upstaged. ‘What do you want this money for, Branson?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it – supposing it’s any of your business?’

  ‘It is my business. I must state categorically if you want it for any subversive activities, for any evil practices whatsoever, and especially for any anti-American activities – well, I tell you here and now that you can have my body first. Who am I compared to America?’

  Branson nodded approval. ‘Stoutly spoken, Mr President, especially considering the fact that you have left your speech-writers behind. I hear the voice of our founding fathers, the clarion call of the conscience that lies at the grass-roots of America. The Grand Old Party are going to love you for that. It should be worth another two million votes come November. However, quite apart from the fact that you don’t mean a word you say, I have to reassure you that this money is required for purely apolitical purposes. It’s for a private trust, in fact. Branson Enterprises, Inc. Me.’

  The President wasn’t a man to be easily knocked off stride – if he were he wouldn’t have been President. ‘You have just mentioned the word “conscience". You have none?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know,’ Branson said frankly. ‘Where money is concerned, none. Most of the really weal
thy men in the world are moral cripples, basically criminally-minded types who maintain a facade of spurious legality by hiring lawyers as morally crippled as they are themselves.’ Branson appeared to muse. ‘Multi-millionaires, politicians, lawyers – which of them lies furthest beyond the moral pale? But don’t answer that – I may unintentionally be putting you in an invidious position. We’re all rogues, whether under the hypocritical cover of legalism or out in the noonday sun, like me. I just want some fast money fast and I reckon this is as good a way as any of getting it.’

  Quarry said: ‘We accept that you are an honest thief. Let us come to cases.’

  ‘My reasonable demands?’

  ‘The point, Mr Branson.’

  Branson surveyed the Arabian oil barons – now without Iman who was in hospital – and the President. ‘For this lot, on the hoof, in prime condition and no haggling about pennies – three hundred million dollars. That’s a three followed by eight nothings.’

  To the many million viewers throughout America it was immediately obvious that there had been a sound transmission breakdown. The silence, however, was more than compensated for by the wide and interesting variety of expressions registered on the faces of those on the screen, which ranged from total outrage through total incomprehension through total incredulity to total shock: indeed, in those few imperishable moments, sound would have been an unforgivable intrusion. Predictably, in view of the fact that he was accustomed to dealing with figures which contained large numbers of zeros, Secretary of the Treasury Quarry was the first to recover.

  ‘You did say what I thought I heard you say?’

  ‘Three zero zero, comma, zero zero zero, comma, zero zero zero period. If you give me a blackboard and some chalk I’ll write it out for you.’

  ‘Preposterous! Lunatic! The man’s mad, mad, mad.’ The President, whose now puce colour showed up rather well on colour television, clenched his fist and looked round in vain for a table to bang it on. ‘You know the penalty for this, Branson – kidnapping, blackmail, extortion under threats on a scale -’