by John Denis
Philpott scratched his head, and his eyes lit up once more. ‘Is there an outlet,’ he asked, eager but reluctant to hear the answer, ‘anywhere near the Bateaux Mouches out there on the river?’
The superintendent again consulted the plan. ‘Indeed there is,’ he announced. They drew back, and looked questioningly at each other.
‘Worth the risk?’ Philpott put to Poupon and C.W.
Poupon replied, ‘It’s your decision, Monsieur.’
Philpott duly debated it with himself for a full minute. ‘Then it’s worth it,’ he announced. ‘This is what we do …’
As he started to outline the plan forming in his mind, a great shout went up from the crowd outside, lining the perimeter now in ever-growing numbers since the TV outside broadcasts began. Sonya pushed her way to the door of the van, and gasped.
C.W. stood at her elbow, and gazed in astonishment at the tower. He whistled admiringly and muttered, ‘Will you look at that now? The crazy bastard’s started a fireworks display. Real fireworks.’
Poupon chuckled. ‘Smith must be French,’ he reflected. ‘He may be mad — but he has a truly Gallic sense of style.’
* * *
Expert pyro-technicians in Smith’s crew had arranged the display in the little top gallery. It was one of the most dazzling ever seen in Paris — like Bastille Day, the Fifth of November and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.
Stunning rainbow bursts erupted from the tower to bathe the night sky in vivid washes of spectral colours. Stars rained over the enthralled crowds, and mighty explosions sent jet-streams of gold and silver, green and blue, and garish orange soaring up to fizz and crackle, to subdivide, and eventually to die in cascades of glowing embers.
The watching people actually cheered themselves hoarse at the finale. Thin, strong poles projecting invisibly from the foot of the television mast supported a scale model, picked out in tiny Catherine wheels and modest little colour showers, of — the Eiffel Tower. For accompaniment, Roman Candles sent charges of silver diamonds and golden sunbursts climbing ever higher into the wind, and the tower’s public address system played the Marseillaise.
Poupon stood at attention until Philpott jogged his arm and said, ‘It’s probably only a cover for something spectacularly nasty.’
On the first landing. Smith looked out over the rolling parkland at the sea of upturned faces. ‘Adieu,’ he whispered, ‘you have given me a fitting salute to my victory. I shall remember you … and you will remember me.’
The commandos and remaining hostages poured into the elevator on Smith’s instructions. He took a key from his pocket and handed it to Pei.
The Asian inserted it into a keyhole in a red box bearing a DANGER! stamp. Next to the key sat an innocent-looking black button. Smith nodded briskly and said, ‘Arm it.’
Pei pressed the button. ‘The — the — d-detonators are now fully armed. Mister Smith,’ he stammered. ‘We have ten minutes. And there is, I’m afraid, no way you can change your mind.’
Smith replied, ‘I am not in the habit of changing my mind.’
He glanced at the set of stout canvas bags leaning against the railing. Pei stood over them, and looked up at Smith. ‘Shall I put them in the elevator?’ he asked.
Smith grinned — a knowing, sinister smile. ‘No, Pei,’ he said, ‘I’ll take charge of the money now. You get into the elevator with the others.’
There was a mutter of alarm from the lift. Smith stalked to the rail and stood with his back to it. His machine pistol was levelled at the crew. ‘Pei,’ he waved the gun at the Asian, ‘do as you were told.’
Pei squeezed into the elevator next to Graham and Sabrina, and Smith rapped at the newly released liftman, ‘Close the gates.’
The heavy iron gates crashed into position. ‘Gentlemen, and Miss Carver,’ Smith sneered, ‘you have all performed magnificently. However, from this point I no longer have any need for your services. I thank you warmly for what you have done for me, and I sincerely wish you were able to enjoy the successful conclusion as much as I shall.
‘But that cannot be,’ he went on, as a paralysing fear overcame the commandos in the elevator. ‘Since I am leaving with only half the ransom I claimed, you are — how shall I put it? — ah … an unwarrantable expense. I simply cannot afford the luxury of paying you. Goodbye — and God speed.’
He chuckled, and shouted ‘Down!’ at the petrified lift operator. The man pressed the button as a reflex action, and the elevator sank complainingly out of sight.
Smith fingered the transmit button of his walkie-talkie and said to Leah, ‘Are you ready?’ From the small red box came the steady, relentless tick of the metronome timer. Leah replied that she was. ‘Then proceed, please,’ Smith ordered.
Leah’s hand hovered over a lever on the wall — the isolator to the mains power supply to the tower, though not affecting the secondary generators which powered the lasers. She threw the switch, and Smith, peering into the lift shaft, watched with satisfaction as the elevator shuddered to a halt.
The ransom bags were linked at their necks by a leather thong, and Smith took a nickel pro tection tag from his pocket and clipped it to the strap. Then he stooped, hoisted up the bags, and heaved them over the side.
The two west facing laser-guns followed the same path as Smith’s eyes in tracking the bags to the ground. The mouse-ears moved, but the guns obeyed the metal tag.
Smith moved further along the railing to a coil of rope already looped around it and fastened tightly. The rope led to one of the four massive arches between the legs of the tower. He shinned down it and dropped to the ground. He smiled at the thought that his descent had been a great deal easier than C.W.’s … the black agent had had to drop through the structure of the tower, carrying a burden which, Smith admitted, most men would have found insupportable.
With the generators roaring defiantly at the massed troops and guns, and still in the circle of protection afforded by his trucks, Smith made for the electrical inspection chamber on the last lap of his escape from the hostage tower.
On the way, almost as an afterthought, he scooped up fifteen million dollars that someone had left lying around …
* * *
Panic spread like a forest fire through the elevator. Graham clutched Pei’s arm and gritted, ‘The charges? Are they armed?’ Dumbly, Pei nodded. He sought Tote, and rested his head on the big man’s shoulder.
Mike pounded the glass side of the lift in rage and fear. ‘That bastard!’ he shouted, ‘Oh, that — bastard.’ Then his eye fell on the metal bench that formed the only seating in the lift.
‘Give me a hand,’ he shouted to Pei. The Indonesian leapt to the other end of the bench and grasped it. Together they lifted it up, and used it as a battering-ram to smash one of the windows of the elevator.
There was a mad scramble to get to the shattered window, but the opening was too small. ‘Again!’ Mike screamed, ‘again!’ They backed a few paces, and charged once more at the windows. Another went under the hammer-blows — and another; and a central strut.
It was enough, and Sabrina was brutally felled to the floor in the heedless stampede. Graham helped her to her feet, and said swiftly, ‘You realize what you have to do.’ He jerked his head aloft. She said, ‘Yes … if there’s time.’
‘There’s got to be,’ Mike returned. ‘At least we have to try. You know that, Sabrina.’ She blinked and said, ‘OK, Mike. And you?’
‘I’m going after Smith,’ he said grimly. She turned to scale the cab and the tower, and Graham called softly, ‘Sabrina.’ She looked back. ‘Good luck, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘And take care. Please?’ She nodded. ‘And you, Mike.’ He thought she had never looked lovelier — or more terrified.
Graham perched on a cross-beam and saw Smith’s escape rope swaying just out of reach in the wind. He clasped an upright and leaned out. His finger-tips barely touched the hempen strands, and as they did the rope moved tantalizingly away again.
Mike breathed
a heartfelt sigh and muttered, ‘C.W., C.W., where are you?’
Then he took a firm, balanced stance on the cross-beam, lowered his body into a crouch, cursed Malcolm Philpott quite vilely, and sprang into the night. His fingers clutched frantically for the rope — and found it. He shed some skin from his burning hands as he slithered at least eight feet, but then he caught the rope in a firmer grasp, and slid to the foot of the tower, searching in vain for any trace of the vanished Smith …
Sabrina sighted her target — the nearest explosive charge — ten feet above her head.
She estimated she had probably six minutes in which to disarm not one, but four, bombs.
Dangling outside the ribs of the tower she spotted Smith’s rope, which Graham had just abandoned. She calculated she could reach two charges on the rope, which would save her precious climbing time. She made for it, caught it more easily than Mike had done, and swarmed up the tower to the bomb that, on the west-facing side, was furthest away from her.
Sabrina planted her feet on a cross-strut, anchoring the rope between her legs. She studied the plastique charge, wedged into the hollow of the box girder. Deep inside the cloying, deadly putty was the live detonator. Cautiously, she reached out a hand, fingers trembling, her teeth trapping her full bottom lip.
A hurricane gust of wind rose up behind her and howled through the tower. She was literally blown into the girder, her face no more than six inches from the bomb, her questing fingers splayed out over the plastique, yet not touching the wired detonator. She clung there, knuckles white, eyes rounded in horror.
The timer in the little red box ticked round to 5.15, 5.14, 5.13 …
Graham combed the vault beneath the tower, but Smith had left no trace of his presence. ‘Where in hell’s he gone?’ Mike queried to himself.
The smallest of sounds came from behind him, and Graham whirled round, alarm on his face but savage power in the set of his body and the menace of his arms and hands. C.W. sauntered out past a generator truck and drawled, ‘Hi.’ He still wore Claude’s safety tag.
Mike relaxed. ‘Smith?’ he asked. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Sho’ has, boss,’ C.W. replied, then dropped his bantering tone. ‘He’s in the inspection chamber in the basement. We figure he’s getting out through a water-main.’
‘A water-main!’ Mike groaned. ‘Christ alive, of course. That’d be the only thing that makes sense.’
‘Where’s Sabrina?’ C.W. put in.
Graham pointed upwards. ‘She’s got her hands full,’ he said. ‘Five minutes or so to disarm four bloody great bombs — or “bingo”, and up she goes.’
‘Shit,’ said C.W. ‘OK, I’m on my way.’
He jumped for the rope, and made it to the first level almost as quickly as Mike had climbed down …
Leah Fischer lifted a red ‘beer tank’ and settled it on Mister Smith’s back, alongside a bulky pack. The tank now had straps fixed to it, and tubes ran from the top. She turned a tap.
As C.W. had discovered, the tanks contained not beer, but oxygen. For Leah and Smith, they served as aqualungs.
Smith winked at Leah behind his face mask. Like her, he had a breathing tube clamped between his teeth.
Smith had already removed a manhole-sized inspection plate from one of the huge conduits carrying water power beneath the streets of Paris. He peered into the hole. The pipe had a diameter of four feet, and foaming water raced through it under pressure.
He had hooked the loop of a nylon line over one of the rusting bolt-heads. The end of the line disappeared into the rushing torrent …
Hundreds of feet above them, on the wind-battered Eiffel Tower, Sabrina Carver’s slim fingers reached out once more to stop tentatively a centimetre short of the embedded detonator.
The timer ticked remorselessly on. 4.22. 4.21. 4.20.
TWELVE
Smith motioned to Leah to turn off his oxygen tap. He pushed up the rubber mask, and let the breathing pipe drop from his mouth.
She looked at him, an unspoken query on her face. He gently lifted her mask off and teased the tube out from between her strong white teeth.
Leah had a sudden premonition, yet dared not give voice to it. But she knew Mister Smith … better than he imagined.
Smith’s voice was like an evil caress, a touch from the grave: like the breath of Satan.
‘Leah, you have always pleased me greatly,’ he purred. ‘I could not have asked for a better companion. You have been loyal, inventive, daring; you share my glorious vision of crime as a redeeming force, a power that can cleanse the soul and uplift the spirit.
‘But Leah … dear, faithful Leah; my brave passionate friend.’
Leah’s mouth was dry with the sour taste of fear. Smith saw burgeoning panic in her eyes, those blue-green eyes that regarded him normally with such undiscriminating adoration. He touched her face, stroked the rounded cheek; he let his finger trace the curve of her eyebrow, and smiled understandingly as she tried to speak but couldn’t, the words lodged in her throat like uninvited guests.
‘It’s simply that … I’m tired of you, Leah.’ The fingers wandered down the other cheek, trailing over her ear, and settling on her smooth neck.
‘I need a change, my pet. Besides, you will be an encumbrance on the journey I am planning to take. You will slow me down, Leah. I cannot permit that to happen. You are, I regret to say, dispensable. Superfluous.’
Leah found the words at last, and they came tumbling out: declarations of love, protestations of faith, words of pleading … begging.
Smith’s manicured hand still rested on her neck. ‘Of course, of course, Leah, of course I understand. And we shall meet again, as you say. One day. Who knows? But for now, sweet Leah, this is —’ he paused and chuckled as the thought occurred to him ‘— this is one bath I shall be taking alone.’
He laughed, found the pressure point in her neck, dug his finger into it, and carefully caught her as she slumped unconscious to the concrete floor.
‘We can’t have you damaged now, can we?’ he murmured. ‘I don’t like pretty things to be hurt — and you are a pretty little thing, Leah.’ Her unseeing eyes looked up at him.
‘Yet I believe,’ Smith went on, as though she could hear him, ‘that I actually heard you say one day that I was “boring”, was it? Did you think I’d forgotten that, Leah? Oh no, my dear. Mister Smith never forgets anything.’
He had cradled her head, and now he let it fall on to the stonework. Her mouth gaped open, and only the rise and fall of her breasts showed that she was still alive.
Smith readjusted his mask and tube, and set the aqualung tap once more to ‘on’. He shook his head sadly, and lowered himself into the water-main. His hand holding the rim of the inspection hatch, he uncoupled the nylon thread from the bolt, and pulled on it.
Three blue rubberized diver’s bags swam into view. They were linked together, fat, bulbous cylinders, like monstrous sausages.
Smith smiled and released them, keeping hold of the end of the line.
The king-sized dollar frankfurters and the swiftly moving current pulled him to the Seine.
* * *
Sabrina’s tremulous fingers touched the detonator. Holding her breath, she hooked her thumbnail and fingernail around the live wire.
Millimetre by millimetre, with sticky globules of plastique clinging to it, the detonator slid out. It freed itself from its vicious mooring with an obscene ‘plop’.
Sabrina groaned and murmured a long, drawn-out ‘H-e-e-e-y.’ She let the detonator fall from her hand, and it plummeted to earth.
‘One down,’ she breathed. ‘Three to go. Ah well —’
The clock dial on the red box showed 3.52. 3.51. 3.50. 3.49 …
Graham launched himself furiously against the door of the inspection chamber. It splintered under his charge, and he burst into the room at the crouch, prepared to sell his unprotected life dearly.
He pulled up short, taking in the open water-main, the unconscious woman
— and the line of bubbles leading out to the river.
Without a second’s hesitation he bent down, ripped the mask and tube from Leah’s front and the tank from her back, donned them swiftly, and dropped into the fast-flowing stream …
* * *
Sabrina squirmed down the flailing rope, and pulled up short, jamming her feet against the tower struts, opposite the next charge. Her head told her to get on with the job: to disarm the second, the third, the fourth bombs.
Her heart told her there just wasn’t time. When the mighty tower buckled and plunged to the ground in a tangle of twisted iron, she would still be on it. She sniffed, and approached the muddy-grey mess of plastique.
Crew members and hostages jumped off the tower to freedom or arrest as C.W. clambered up the spidery frame and snapped on a torch to locate Sabrina. He spotted her with her hand easing into the heart of a girder, and he wisely kept silent.
Then he saw her holding a detonator, clinging to the swaying rope and wiping her streaming brow on the shoulder-piece of her combat jacket.
‘Sabrina — it’s me. How many have you got?’
She followed the beam of light to its source. ‘Oh, thank God you’re here, C.W. We may have a chance now. Not a big one, but at least a chance. This is my second —’ she tossed the detonator into the wind. ‘I’ve done the west and south pillars. I haven’t touched east or north. Take whichever you like.’
C.W. galvanized his weary body into action, and scrambled over the tower as if his life depended on it.
Which it did.
The timer clicked on. 2.48. 2.47. 2.46. 2.45 …
Arc-lamps were now trained on the tower from all sides. At the communications van, Ducret and Poupon followed through binoculars every agonizing second of the battle to save their preposterous tower.
‘How much time left?’ Ducret muttered.
‘We don’t know precisely when the charges were armed,’ Poupon replied, puffing his pipe into Ducret’s face, ‘but there can’t be more than three of Smith’s fifteen minutes remaining. So —’ he shrugged expansively.