‘No. It came to our managing editor’s desk. I was already here. The news of the raid on the hotel had already come in and I got the assignment to cover it.’
‘So what you know is secondhand?’
‘Yes and no,’ Wilson said. ‘My boss taped the call when it came in. The caller laid it on the line—hostages, bomb, the works. He told us London and Washington had been informed. He told us you had complied with his first demand, clearing everyone off the twenty-second floor. He told us he’d given you twenty-four hours to free the eight political prisoners the government is holding, and then, if they weren’t freed, the hostages would begin to pay. My boss played me the tape over the phone. He thought it might be some crazy hoax by the people who’d raided the hotel. He checked with other papers, radio stations, TV. They’d all gotten the same message. Several of them had been sensible enough to tape the call, at least partway through. Same voice.’
‘Spanish?’
‘No, oddly enough. Rather cultivated English voice. I don’t mean British, but cultivated, well-educated.’
‘No name, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Wilson’s smile faded. ‘It still sounded pretty wild-eyed to me. I tried to find one or more of the alleged hostages—the girl singer, Sheldon Tranter, our State Department man, Sir George Brooks, who’d been involved in that crazy shooting up on the roof earlier, Ortiz, the OAS man. There wasn’t hide nor hair of any of them. That, I guess, made me a believer. I tried Washington and London. No luck. Like you, they claim not to have any plan. That, of course, is hooey! You’re all toying with a dozen plans. You really believe them when they tell you they’ll give you time?’
‘I have to believe,’ Chambrun said.
‘I believe,’ Sam Yardley said, ‘and not just because the heat’s on. I have some facts you may not have. The eight prisoners these terrorists want released—they aren’t all being held in one place. Several of them are in Central America, the rest in different jails in this country.’
‘So?’
‘My people got instructions on the telephone, too.’
‘The CIA?’
Yardley nodded. ‘The eight prisoners are all to be flown to an airport in Georgia. A plane must be waiting to fly them overseas—Middle East somewhere. The pilot will get his instructions when the men are on the plane.’
‘Which gets us where?’ Jerry Dodd asked.
‘It gets us the time they promised you. It will take at least twenty-four hours to assemble those eight men in one spot and have them airborne.’
‘Why not just turn them all loose wherever they are?’ I asked.
‘Because they don’t trust us, like we don’t trust them,’ Yardley said. ‘We are to deliver all eight of them, safe and sound, to some place where they’ll be welcomed by friends who are our enemies. The four hostages upstairs will guarantee, they hope, that we’ll give in to their demands. They know that it will take at least a day for us to comply.’
‘And three hours of that day are gone,’ Chambrun said. ‘Are they doing anything to move those eight prisoners to an airport in Georgia?’
‘I assume they are,’ Yardley said. ‘That’s just the first step. Since they have means of communicating, they’ll know if we are, and they haven’t warned you, Mr. Chambrun, to get things moving.’
‘So you are giving in,’ Jack Wilson said.
Yardley gave him a tight little smile. ‘I think we are taking the first steps. We are making it look as though we’re giving in. But when they get those eight men to the airport in Georgia, there has to be a final decision. Do we provide them with a plane? Do we fly them to freedom?’ He glanced at Chambrun. ‘You have time to figure out how to save your hotel, Mr. Chambrun. Our people have time to decide whether those four people upstairs are too big a price to pay for turning eight terrorists with a huge following loose to attack us somewhere else.’
‘You’re saying those four people upstairs may not be worth paying their price?’ Wilson asked. He sounded as if he couldn’t believe it.
‘Could be,’ Yardley said.
‘Who makes the decision?’ I asked.
Yardley shrugged. ‘The President, the Prime Minister, the Joint Chiefs, the security experts—everyone who is supposed to be able to make such an evaluation. They’re at it now. They may have decided by now.’
‘Can you find out?’ Chambrun asked.
‘I doubt it,’ Yardley said. ‘Too big a decision to trust to one of their foot soldiers.’
Chambrun stood up behind his desk. ‘So if they won’t trust us with answers, we have to make our own decisions.’
‘Such as?’ Jack Wilson asked.
‘I’m not going to let those four hostages upstairs be killed in my hotel,’ Chambrun said.
‘How?’ Wilson asked.
‘When I have the answer to that, Mr. Wilson, I just may let you know,’ Chambrun said.
Part Two
Chapter One
‘CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT,’ my mother used to tell me when I was a kid. The Beaumont was crowded with curious cats when I went down to the lobby. In spite of the fact that hundreds of people were crowding around the front desk in the lobby, trying to check out, they weren’t hysterical. They all knew as much as we did from the papers, the radio, and the TV. There was time before a deadline for the bombing. There were what seemed like hundreds of people from the media, demanding to know what the next move was going to be. And there were hundreds of others crowding the bars, the main restaurants, the lobby, hungry to be where the action was that the whole damn world was talking about. I was to discover that no one recognized as being part of the establishment could walk ten feet in the public areas without being swarmed over by people with a thousand questions.
I had gone down from Chambrun’s office to the lobby. He wanted a report on how things were going there. Mean Joe Greene couldn’t have worked his way across what is usually an open space. Some reporters hemmed me in, and I was suddenly aware that someone was hanging onto my arm as if I was a life raft in a stormy sea. I looked down into the anxious face of a young woman—young meaning in her early twenties.
Superlatives don’t always tell a true story, but this girl was something. She had the body of Raquel Welch and the face of an intense angel.
‘You’re Mark Haskell, aren’t you?’ she asked. She almost had to shout it over the roar of voices.
‘Yes. But look, lady—’ I began.
‘My father pointed you out to me the other night,’ she said.
‘You should have chosen that moment—’ I said, waving at the sea of yammering faces around us.
‘I want you to take me to Mr. Chambrun,’ she said. ‘My father is Sheldon Tranter. I might be useful.’
The daughter of one of the hostages! At that moment Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, who should have been off duty but wasn’t, reached me.
‘You trying to get somewhere, Mark?’ he asked. ‘I’ll run interference for you.’ He gave the girl an appreciative eye.
‘I want to get this lady up to the boss’s office,’ I said.
‘Follow me,’ Mike said.
The Chicago Bears could have used him for a blocking back. It was ten yards to the stairway and Mike lowered his shoulder and made a path for us. I put my arm around the girl and seconds later we were inside the stairway, blocked off by security people. A little breathless, the girl and I both leaned against the wall for a minute.
‘If you’re some kind of a reporter pulling a fast one on me—’ I said.
Her eyelids fluttered. ‘I am Lois Tranter,’ she said. ‘My father is a prisoner up on the twenty-second floor.’
‘You ready to climb one flight of stairs?’ I asked.
‘I can climb to the roof if it will help,’ she said.
Instinct told me it was right to get this girl to Chambrun. As far as I knew, no one connected closely to any of the hostages had been in touch, with the exception of Max London, Hilary Foster’s agent, and he hadn’t known what was happening when he
called to ask for his client. I suppose it was logical for people who didn’t know the tight little world that was the Beaumont to make their inquiries to the police, the State Department, Number Ten Downing Street, or even the United Nations. To me the only place of vital importance was Chambrun’s second floor office.
‘Everything around here is spinning like a top,’ I told Lois Tranter as we walked along the second-floor corridor toward what I thought of as the hub of the wheel. ‘You may not get as much time or attention as you hope for.’
Her wide blue eyes gave me a steady look. ‘I am my father’s private secretary,’ she said. ‘When I said I might be able to help I meant it, Mr. Haskell.’
‘Try “Mark,”’ I said.
Would you believe we walked right by the door of my apartment, and I never gave a thought to the lovely girl who was waiting there for me to reappear?
A woman from the stenographic pool had taken over the outer office which was Betsy Ruysdale’s. I told Lois Tranter to wait there and I went on into the inner sanctum. The people I’d left there were all gone except Sam Yardley, the CIA man, and Betsy. Tony Guardino, the police commissioner’s boy, was back. Chambrun gave me a bleak look.
‘The police are threatening to order us to get everyone out of the hotel,’ he said. ‘Of course I won’t leave, nor will I remove my security people, nor anyone else on the staff who volunteers to stay.’
Guardino sounded like a man who’d been arguing with a rock. ‘So the captain and the crew won’t leave the sinking ship,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can talk some sense to him, Haskell.’
I looked at the boss. ‘Well, to start with, I volunteer to stay,’ I said.
‘We’ll bring in the bomb squad experts,’ Guardino said. ‘We need to search every inch of the hotel without interference from curious bystanders.’
‘You will search every inch of the hotel except the twenty-second floor, where the hostages are being held and where the bomb is located,’ Chambrun said. ‘You barge in there and the hostages will start going out the windows. If you try it, you’ll have to get past me and my security people.’
‘You fool,’ Guardino said, ‘you’ve probably got a thousand lives hanging on the whim of those bastards up there.’
‘I’ve got a world here that can be fouled up forever if I turn it over to you and your people, Guardino,’ The Man said.
‘Try to listen, just once,’ Guardino said. ‘You admit there must be someone on the outside letting them know every move we make. You admit that the raid last night and what’s been going on since has been long planned. That a bomb—or bombs—don’t have to be up in Twenty-two B. They can be planted anywhere in the hotel, and set off by someone we haven’t spotted who’s walking around the hotel. Get everyone out of the hotel and you get rid of the potential bomber.’
‘You argue against yourself, Guardino,’ Chambrun said. ‘If it was all long planned—and I think you’re right about that—then they’ve planned for every contingency. Get rid of everyone in the hotel and they have another way to set off the bomb, from somewhere else. I’ve cleared the twenty-second floor, I’m letting everybody check out who feels nervous about staying. We still have—according to the man on the phone—about twenty hours in which to come up with a sensible plan. Yardley has given us a reason to believe we do have that much time. Tell the commissioner we need time to find an angle before he starts to play hotshot and makes those characters upstairs nervous.’
I thought it was time for me to get into the act, maybe give Guardino time to mull over what Chambrun was telling him. I told them I’d taken the liberty of bringing Lois Tranter up from the lobby. ‘She thinks she might be helpful,’ I said.
‘How?’ Chambrun asked.
‘She says she’s her father’s private secretary. No way I could talk to her downstairs.’
He turned to Betsy. ‘Bring her in, Ruysdale.’
‘I just want to say to you—’ Guardino began as Betsy left the room.
‘Let’s hear what this young woman has to say,’ Chambrun interrupted him. ‘We can’t afford to pass up anything.’
Men are men. When Betsy came in with Lois Tranter I could see both Yardley and Guardino reacting with a little check at a necktie. They hadn’t expected a movie star. Chambrun stood up, an unusual courtesy for him in this place where he was king.
‘Thank you for coming, Miss Tranter,’ he said. ‘Please sit down.’
She sat, and I thought a little of her studied composure began to crack. Betsy went to the sideboard and brought her a cup of coffee.
‘Is there any news we haven’t heard—on the outside?’ Lois asked.
‘About your father?’ Chambrun asked.
Lois nodded.
‘Only that he is one of the hostages being held,’ Chambrun said.
‘You have no way of knowing if they’re all right, being decently treated?’
‘No way.’
‘You can’t ask them? You have a right to be reassured, don’t you, if you’re meeting their demands?’
Chambrun sat down at his desk again. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as tired as he looked just then. Going over and over the situation with different people had worn him pretty thin.
‘What I have contributed to meeting their demands, Miss Tranter, is really quite secondary,’ he said. ‘I’ve cleared all the other guests and the staff off that floor. I’d have done that whether they’d asked or not. The main decisions about meeting their demands are to be made by people much more important than I am.’
‘I—I think I understand,’ she said. ‘But you are in touch with them!’
‘They are not taking any in-calls,’ Chambrun said. ‘The out-calls they’ve made so far have been made public—by them, not the hotel.’
‘But you’ve asked about my father, and the others?’
‘I’ve been told what will happen to the hostages if we try to cross the people who are holding them,’ Chambrun said.
‘Oh, my God!’ she said. She lifted her hands to her lovely face for a moment, trying to hide what she obviously felt.
‘I don’t want to pressure you, Lois,’ Chambrun said, ‘but you must understand that the heat is on. Mr. Yardley, here, is from the CIA. Mr. Guardino is from the New York police. We have only a few hours in which to make what could be final and fatal decisions. You told Mark Haskell that you might be able to help us.’
She was silent for a moment and then lowered her hands. Her courage had returned. You could almost see it flowing back into her.
‘My father and I were having drinks in the Trapeze Bar, night before last,’ she said. ‘About six o’clock in the evening.’
‘You’re not registered here in the hotel with your father,’ Chambrun said.
‘No. Our home is in Washington. I’m staying with friends here in the city, but Dad invited me to join him for drinks and dinner.’
‘Why was he staying here and not with friends?’ Chambrun asked.
‘Professional reasons—politics,’ she said. ‘There were people staying here who were important to him and he wanted to be close to them.’
‘Who were those people?’ Chambrun asked.
‘Dad is an expert on Central America,’ Lois said. ‘There are people here from the Organization of American States—Mr. Ortiz, who is one of the hostages and who was staying in Suite Twenty-two B. There was Sir George Brooks, who is another of the hostages. He was involved in the Falkland Islands war and knows that part of the world inside out. Others whose names I don’t know.’
‘How does that help us, Lois?’
‘I was just answering your questions,’ Lois said. ‘But the other night in the Trapeze …’ She hesitated and drew a deep breath. ‘I’d never been there before. My father told me it was the place to go to see some of the most interesting people in the world. He pointed some of them out to me.’ She glanced at me. ‘You were one of them, Mark, and there were a couple of movie stars, and a famous Texas oil tycoon, and others who didn’t me
an anything to me then or now. But then Dad turned serious. “That man at the bar,” he said, pointing out a nice looking middle-aged man who was drinking by himself. “He may be one of the most dangerous men in the world—or at least, my world,” Dad said. I asked him what the man’s name was. “He’s used a dozen different names in his time,” Dad said. “God knows what he’s calling himself now.” I asked him in what way this man was dangerous. “I wouldn’t want to meet him alone in a dark alley,” Dad said. “Looks like a nice, friendly creature, doesn’t he? He’s a terrorist, a revolutionary, a plotter against everything democracy stands for. He helps provide arms and mercenaries and sophisticated technology for the people who are our enemies in Central America.” “And he stands around here, in public? Why isn’t he arrested?” I asked. Dad laughed. “Most of the most important criminals in the world walk around scot-free,” he told me. “We never get them for their crimes. Maybe income-tax evasion or something absurd like that.” I was surprised to see a shudder shake my father. “I should have known he would be here where his particular world is under discussion.” “Is he dangerous to you?” I asked. “He’s dangerous to anyone who gets in his way,” Dad said.’
‘He never told you the man’s name?’
‘No.’
‘Would you know this man if you saw him again?’
‘I remember looking back at the bar after Dad told me all this, but the man was gone. I think I’d recognize him. I’ve been looking for him ever since last night’s raid and Dad’s disappearance. But the hotel has been so jammed with people …’ She shrugged. ‘If I saw him again I’m sure I’d know him.’
‘That’s it?’ Chambrun asked, when she didn’t go on.
‘One other thing that may not be related at all,’ Lois said. ‘There was a fabulous-looking old, old lady sitting at a corner table, surrounded by people who seemed to be enjoying her conversation. She had a little black-and-white dog sitting on a red cushion on a chair specially provided for it.’
Chambrun glanced at me. Victoria Haven! She went to the Trapeze every late afternoon with Toto and held court there. Our old lady with what she called ‘my Japanese gentleman friend.’ Toto!
Remember to Kill Me (The Pierre Chambrun Mysteries, 19) Page 6