by John Denis
‘And still nothing from Sabrina or C.W.’, Sonya said, bitterly.
‘You’ve checked?’ Philpott asked. She nodded.
‘On the way here, and back at the Ritz. The stations, the Élysée — everywhere. Not a single word. We don’t even know if they’re alive.’
‘If Graham has denounced Sabrina, then she’ll certainly be dead,’ Philpott muttered, grimly, ‘and I can’t see C.W. letting that happen, without getting involved. So … we must be prepared for the worst.’
Sonya drained her first cup of coffee, and set the cup down with a nervous clatter. ‘And we still don’t know his target, where he’s going to strike, or when. Or anything, really.’ She looked beseechingly into Philpott’s eyes. ‘Have we lost, Malcolm — lost out to Smith? And sacrificed C.W. and Sabrina into the bargain? Has it all been for nothing?’
Philpott placed his hand over hers. He shook his head. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘We haven’t lost yet. We’re some way down, but we’re far from out.’ He rose to his feet and put two ten-franc bills on the table. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’m fed up with slumming. Let’s go back to the hotel. At least we’ll be in touch there.’
Sonya got up. ‘I never did find out why you picked this place for a meeting at this ungodly hour,’ she remarked.
‘I’ll tell you back at the hotel,’ he promised.
They turned into Boulevard Garibaldi, and right again past the École Militaire into the Champ de Mars. Philpott stopped to light a pleasant-smelling cheroot, and glanced upwards.
The trite and infuriatingly ugly bulk of the Eiffel Tower completely filled his vision.
* * *
Tote and Pei left the table they had been occupying by the door of ‘La Chatte qui siffle’, and took the same path Philpott and Sonya had taken a few minutes before. They, too, looked up at the Eiffel Tower, and Pei grinned happily at Tote. They traversed the Champ de Mars, and crossed the busy intersection to reach the foot of the tower.
It is difficult to imagine any construction as crass as the Eiffel Tower being erected to mark the dawn of the age of technology, but that indeed was the driving force behind the eccentric French engineer, Gustave Alexandre Eiffel, in the late 1880s. Eiffel greatly admired the American inventors Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and worked for two years to design possibly the ugliest, but most charming, commemorative monument in history.
Eiffel used five thousand yard-square sheets of paper for his full-scale plan of the tower, but at least by the time he had finished there could be only one answer to the ludicrous question: what’s made of two and a half million rivets and twelve thousand pieces of metal, weighs fifteen million pounds, stands nearly a thousand feet tall, and looks like a giraffe?
The tower was inaugurated on June 10 1889, by Prince Bertie of England, later King Edward VII, who, it was doubtless said at the time, should have known better. Later, though, when successful wireless experiments were carried out between the tower and the Panthéon, Eiffel’s éléphant blanc was used as a radio broadcasting tower.
Gustave Eiffel could not have foreseen it, but would doubtless have been pleased, that the tower now doubles as a television transmitter. At the moment it is 984 ft 6 ins high, but with the Eiffel Tower, you never can tell. The German occupying forces in Paris during World War II considered requisitioning the tower and turning it, presumably, into tanks, but in the end the plan proved to be either sacrilegious or too much trouble.
Apart from the fact that the face of Paris would today be unthinkable without the tower, its undeniably most useful function is one that probably never occurred to Eiffel: the peak provides one of the most astonishing views on Earth.
From the quaint little all-round balcony at the top, the day-time shadow falls across the Champ de Mars (where Napoleon used to review his troops) and the École Militaire. The military school was the creation of an unlikely trio: the financier, Paris-Duverney; Madame Pompadour; and the playwright, Beaumarchais. Below the tower is the River Seine, behind it the superb Palais de Chaillot, with its gardens and ornamental fountains. The feet of the tower plunge into the woodland, spanned by the access road. There are fountains in the foreground, too, and everywhere broad, sweeping avenues of tarmac and grass; theatres, museums, palaces … Paris.
Pei and Tote skirted the balloon-seller, and passed through the light morning crowd to the entrance of the tower. The balloon-man was doing a fair trade — some tribute, no doubt, to the fact that Michael Graham had filled balloons before, and was used to handling gas. He put a shot of hydrogen into a long, knobbly, purple job, and handed it to an ecstatic little Dutch girl.
‘Whirrrrr-click!’ went the automatic shutter of an expensive camera round the neck of a tourist. Smith was dressed in a well-cut lightweight suit with matching tie and pocket handkerchief, and sensible brogues; to avoid confusing his troops, he had kept the same face.
Smith took another picture, sighting through the central arch of the tower towards the Palais de Chaillot. He strolled unconcernedly to the waiting elevator. He boarded it, and as it soared upwards, he stood gazing vacantly into space, with an imbecilic expression on his face, as tourists often do. On the far side of the elevator, Sabrina and Claude chatted animatedly about nothing in particular.
The elevator reached the first, and widest, landing, and Smith got out. Another, less expensive, camera clicked. Leah Fischer, elbows balancing on the rail, squinted through the eyepiece and took a second meaningless snap. She ignored Smith when he brushed against her as he passed. Pei and another member of the commando team, dressed in business suits, rounded the gallery; Pei was deep into a clipboard of technical papers; his companion pointed occasionally, and made helpful comments.
The elevator reached the first landing again on its way down. A burly, powerful workman got out; he was in overalls, with oil-stained hands. He was on his morning coffee break — rather ahead of time, considering — and he walked to the rail next to Leah.
‘It’s OK,’ Tote grunted. ‘We’re ready.’ And he nodded in the direction of the private, commercial access road to the Eiffel Tower.
* * *
The three ‘RESTAURANT LAROUSSE’ generator trucks trundled to the foot of the tower, and moved into position near a service elevator. A white-coated chef climbed stiffly from the cab of the leading vehicle, stretched prodigously, and winked at the balloon-seller. ‘Sassy idiot,’ Graham muttered, but C.W. was too far away to hear.
One of the tower guards stepped from his office and spoke to the tall-hatted black chef. A pantechnicon and a smaller lorry had joined the generator trucks. A team of workmen busily, and very swiftly, unloaded crates, steam-boxes, brightly coloured beer tanks, portable stoves and microwave ovens — a bewildering mass of equipment.
The guard surveyed the mountain range of boxes. ‘Open the crates, please,’ he directed the chef, who had presented a perfect set of documents explaining everything.
‘Open the crates!’ C.W. expostulated. ‘The steam-boxes, the sealed containers? You want me to ruin my soufflés? You want dust in my sauces? You want my bombe surprise to melt? That is either a joke in extremely bad taste, Monsieur, or you are irretrievably unhinged.’
Ignoring him, the guard prised off the lid of a steam-box. C.W. closed his eyes, and muttered a prayer to the patron saint of haute cuisine. Neat rows of unbaked bread, flûte alternating with baguette, stared up at the custodian.
‘Don’t even breathe,’ C.W. snarled, gently closing the case. ‘They must rest — like innocent children. Their labours are barely begun — while yours, Monsieur, may be coming to an untimely but completely justified end!’
Graham regarded the scene with amusement, tinged with reluctant admiration. C.W. again caught his eye. Mike looked away, clutched the balloon strings in his hand more tightly, then leapt up in frustration as a yellow balloon escaped and floated into the air. He shook his free fist at it, and cursed volubly, but in fairly restrained language. C.W. wasn’t the only one who could put on a convincin
g act, he thought smugly.
The guard surveyed the hopelessness of his task. He couldn’t possibly open every one of the bound crates, and the chef was becoming too overbearing for words, stamping around him in a circle and heaping culinary curses on his undeserving head.
‘Eh bien — allez!’ he said, resignedly. C.W. triumphantly gathered his team and trophies around him, and they commenced loading the service lift.
At the rail of the lower gallery, Smith had swapped his camera for a pair of binoculars, and panned over the view below. He locked on to the yellow balloon as it rose skywards against the glorious panorama of Paris. He took the binoculars from his eyes, and a half-smile played on his lips.
Then he raised the glasses once more, his gaze wandering further out, to the river. He ranged over the Bateaux Mouches, the sight-seeing boats of the Seine that ply up and down the river between April and October, on hour-long trips. He picked up, too, a flotilla of Tour Eiffel Vedettes, the smaller, eighty-two seater, glass-topped motor boats, which started from the Pont d’Iéna, near the tower, or the Quai Montebello. The Bateaux Mouches leave from the Right Bank, at the Pont de l’Alma.
Smith fixed the precise location of the particular Bateau Mouche for which he had been searching, and once more grinned his satisfaction.
The service elevator drew up at the gallery. C.W. stepped importantly out, chef’s hat aquiver, and stood with arms folded, casing the scene. He directed that his mass of equipment, now borne on stout-wheeled trolleys, should be taken into the restaurant kitchen facing him. A brace of commandos jumped forward to hold open the swing doors. Inside the restaurant itself, C.W. could see a French television crew, from RTF, setting up cameras and lights to cover a news event.
Smith, still at the rail, but standing now next to Leah as the crowds on the tower began to thicken, peered through the binoculars at the press of people swarming round the tower entrance. Claude, who had descended some time before, was waiting to come back up. Smith spotted other commandos in the crowd, dressed as tourists, workmen, waitresses (for Sabrina Carver was by far from being the only woman on the team) and other employees of the tower.
Mister Smith murmured to Leah, ‘Let me know when everyone’s up here.’ Perhaps three minutes later, she touched his arm tentatively, and whispered, ‘All present and correct, sir.’
The urgent wail of a police-car klaxon penetrated the hubbub. Smith swung round at the rail, and brought the glasses to his eyes. A limousine, one of the largest and grandest at the disposal of the French Government, turned into the tower access road. It was preceded by two armed motorcycle outriders, flanked by two more and trailed by a further pair. The Doppler effect scaled the siren down an octave, and the noise stopped altogether as the car drew to a halt.
A man stepped out, and shut the car door behind him. Even from the gallery perch, Smith could see the bulge of the gun in the visitor’s left armpit. The Secret Service agent looked carefully around him, then up at the tower, then down again, his eyes hunting the scattering of people, his hands and shoulders twitching.
From the other side of the car, a second agent got out, slammed the door, and repeated the scrutiny his colleague had already made. They glanced at each other and, on a nod from the first agent, the second opened the car door on his side, and politely ushered out a tall, handsome woman in her late sixties or early seventies.
The four men in the official welcoming committee detached themselves from the tower entrance, and hurried forward. In the van was a small, round, flustered type, in morning coat and striped trousers, bare-headed. He beamed distractedly (he always beamed distractedly) at the dignified lady, and said, ‘My dear Mrs Wheeler. What an honour for us! What a great pleasure and privilege! What a truly glorious day this is for the Eiffel Tower, for the Children’s Relief Fund, for France, for —’
‘Monsieur Verner, how very nice to see you again.’ Adela Wheeler cut in. ‘On the contrary, it was kind of you to invite me, and I’m glad to be here.’
Bertrand Verner stammered his profuse thanks, and introduced her to the other dignitaries of the tower and of the International Children’s Relief Fund. She met them graciously, her strong, mellifluous voice speaking in scarcely-accented French or, when prompted, in Western seaboard American, but so unassumingly upper crust that it could have been Bostonian or Southern Standard English.
French security men stood in a discreet ring behind the official party, and they divided to let through Mrs Wheeler and her guards, who were guided into the elevator to make the trip alone to the first floor. True to form, the Secret Service calculated that the fewer people close to their charge at any one time, the better.
In the kitchen of the tower restaurant, where the lunchtime fund-raising banquet was to be held, all was controlled chaos under the regular chef, Albert. The last thing Albert wanted was for the doors to burst open, and a rival chef enter, pursued by seemingly dozens of assistant chefs and commis waiters bearing impossible cargoes of equipment. But Albert had been prepared for the intrusion of the Restaurant Larousse, specialists in outside catering, though he still regarded C.W.’s presence with resentment and hostility.
Albert watched in silence as C.W. commandeered his kitchen, and muttered at one point, ‘Tiens! Warmed-up food. Pffft!’
C.W. spun round on him. ‘Warmed up? WARMED UP? Here, my peasant friend,’ he indicated a stack of steaming boxes, ‘here are cooking, not warming, cooking, fifty and more light and incomparable Soufflés aux Crevettes démoulent in modulated microwaves. Here, idiot, are braising truffles in Sauce Brune aux Fines Herbes. Do you call that warming up? Hein?’
Albert shrugged, and made as if to open a case. C.W. administered a hefty slap to his wrist and snapped, ‘Ne touchez pas,’ like to a naughty child.
Inside the restaurant, the also-rans were waiting to welcome their undisputed guest of honour. Smith whispered to Claude, who sidled out to the corridor and sent the service elevator back down. Beneath the fork of the tower, an ice-cream vendor opened his ice-box and produced two machine pistols. He handed one to Mike Graham, who barged into the tower guard’s office.
The guard saw Mike’s gun, and made for his own. Graham caught him by the front of his uniform, dragged him over the guardroom counter, and brutally pistol-whipped him. Then he herded the guard and the elevator operator into the service elevator and took it up.
The main elevator now stopped at the restaurant level, the operator opened the gate, and Mrs Wheeler’s two Secret Service agents led her into the corridor. Claude’s ambush was sudden and appallingly savage.
He felled the first agent with a vicious groin kick. The second man was going for his weapon, but his arm was seized by another commando, and Claude, in a movement that was purely balletic, whirled and lashed out another kick from the rear. It caught the agent in the gut, and a swing with a lead-tipped truncheon from a commando ended his interest in the affair.
Back in the kitchen, C.W. rounded once more on Albert, and snorted, ‘Now, my fine friend, I will show you — my pièce de résistance.’ He tapped the lid of a formidably large catering case. Albert’s eyes followed the movement.
The lid of the case flew up, and C.W. calmly handed out to his team a succession of wicked-looking MA-28 Meisner machine pistols and Thompson machine-guns. C.W. waved at Albert with the snout of a gun. ‘Up,’ he commanded. The chef and his entire staff shot their arms into the air, and stood rigid as statues. C.W. chuckled. ‘I bet this is the craziest entrée you’ve ever seen, Albert, old son,’ he said in English. Albert goggled.
C.W.’s men were already pushing napkin-draped trolleys into the restaurant, and peeling off the cloths to reveal an assortment of dangerous hardware, when Smith walked up to Mrs Wheeler and announced, in a pleasant and neutral voice, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wheeler. I am Mister Smith. I regret to tell you that you are my prisoner. If you will accompany this young lady —’ he indicated Leah ‘— without too much trouble, I guarantee that you will come to no harm whatsoever.’
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br /> Adela Wheeler gazed steadily at him. ‘I presume,’ she said, ‘that you know who I am.’
Smith nodded acquiescence. ‘If I did not,’ he pointed out, ‘I would hardly have gone to all the trouble of kidnapping you.’
Adela Wheeler still regarded him stonily. ‘You cannot, of course, hope to get away with this foolish and disastrous crime. You will be made to pay for it; of that you can be certain.’ Smith looked at her admiringly; she was dignity personified, exquisitely gowned, her grey hair piled in bouffant waves, her face imperious and haughty, unafraid, scornful.
‘Please,’ Smith gestured towards Leah. ‘You will be comfortable, and unmolested, in the VIP room.’
‘I know the room well,’ Mrs Wheeler rejoined, ‘whereas I honestly doubt whether you have ever been inside it — or would be welcomed there if you did.’ She turned on her heel, brushed Leah aside, and walked firmly out of the restaurant.
The dining-room commandos spread out and herded the guests into a corner at gun-point. Graham and his ice-cream vendor arrived, with members of the tower staff under guard. On the second landing, far above their heads, other commandos poured out of the elevators and trained their guns on the trippers. A guard rushed to an alarm button, but was cut down by a burst of fire from a Kalashnikov.
Pei shouted through a loud-hailer. ‘No one is to move. Stand absolutely still. Do not try to be heroes. You will die if you do.’
The elevator continued its deadly journey. The top observation platform, at the very summit of the tower below the television mast, was only lightly peopled. The assault team took it with ease, disarming and trussing up the defeated guards.
In the first-level restaurant, C.W. unlocked a catering crate marked ‘Microwave Oven P769/521 COOKFAST’. He called Mike Graham over, and together they tenderly lifted out a darkly gleaming Lap-Laser. Up aloft by the rail of the second gallery, three men just as carefully hoisted Sabrina Carver over the side of the tower. She wore a welding mask, and someone handed to her an acetylene torch and a stout iron bracket. Sabrina got to work … and she was a fast worker.