Time of Terror

by Hugh Pentecost

  No one answered her. She turned back to me.

  “I don’t think you need to worry for the time being, Mrs. Cleaves,” I said. “They don’t expect decisions to be made quickly. The girls are being kept in one of the bedrooms with Miss Horn, who appears to have kept her cool.”

  Rather astonishingly, Constance Cleaves laughed—a short, sharp little laugh. “Katherine can be depended on to be cool,” she said. No love lost there, I thought. I remember thinking that while her speech pattern was cultivated, it didn’t sound British. I wondered if Terrence Cleaves had married an American.

  “I think you can count on the girls’ being safe for the time being, Mrs. Cleaves,” Chambrun said in a hard, flat voice. “If you will forgive us, there are a great many questions we need to ask Mark.”

  Several of the strange men in the room started to ask questions at the same time, but Chambrun cut them off.

  “First, a description of Coriander, Mark,” he said.

  “No dice,” I said. “Would you believe he was wearing a kid’s Halloween mask and a wig? I saw two other men, both wearing stocking masks. There is one thing, though. Coriander’s left arm is missing.”

  “That narrows it down some,” one of the men said. “An amputee, served in Vietnam. Hospital records.”

  This man was a slim, dark, thoughtful-looking fellow who turned out to be the local head of the FBI, Augustus V. Brand, known as Gus to his intimates. I came to like and respect him in the time ahead, but at that moment he was a zero to me. He spoke to a young man standing next to him who took off, apparently to check on Vietnam amputees. I told myself that could be a life work.

  Two men who had “cop” written all over them were standing to the left of Chambrun’s desk. One, a bald, sharp-eyed man with a fringe of blond hair around his shiny skull, was the Assistant Commissioner of Police named Treadway. The other was a great hulk of a man with a shock of iron-gray hair and unpleasant narrowed eyes. He turned out to be Captain Valentine of the bomb squad. Chambrun introduced them both.

  “These gentlemen are interested in what else you saw, Mark,” he said.

  “Just as Coriander said on the phone, enough guns and ammunition to hold off an army.”

  “What kind of guns?” the Assistant Commissioner asked.

  “Machine pistols, rifles, handguns. Boxes and trunks full of ammunition.”

  “How did they get all that stuff up there without anyone noticing?” Treadway asked Chambrun.

  Chambrun just shook his head.

  “Explosives?” Captain Valentine asked.

  “In every room I was shown; perhaps twelve of the twenty rooms in the north wing. Outside the elevator shaft and I was assured inside the shaft, too.”

  “But you didn’t see inside the shaft?”

  “No.”

  “How did you come down, Mark?” Chambrun asked. “From Fourteen or Sixteen?”

  “Fourteen,” I said. “I went down the fire stairs from Fifteen.”

  “Did you see any explosives on the fire stairs?”

  “No, but I have to tell you I wasn’t looking. I was in a hell of a hurry to get out of there. Two of Jerry’s men were on the stairs, though. They could tell you.”

  “What kind of explosives?” Valentine, the bomb squad man, asked.

  “I’m no expert,” I said. “It looked like sticks of dynamite tied together in little bundles. Each one has a wire running from it to the next one. In the room next to Fifteen A one of those stocking-masked creeps is sitting in front of some kind of electric control box. One wrong move, Coriander told me, and he presses the button that blows up the works.”

  “Could they set off a whole string of charges like that at one time?” the Assistant Commissioner asked Valentine.

  “Sure they could. And if some jerk tries cutting one of those connecting wires, he could set it off for them,” Valentine said.

  “Of course you’re going to have to evacuate the hotel, Mr. Chambrun,” Treadway said.

  “I think not,” Chambrun said. He sat hunched in his desk chair, looking like an inscrutable Buddha, a curl of smoke from one of his Egyptian cigarettes forcing him to narrow his bright black eyes. “Not just yet—”

  “But, my God, man!” Valentine said. “They’re set to blow your hotel into the East River.”

  “They won’t commit suicide until all the negotiations have failed, and that can take a long time,” Chambrun said.

  “Or until someone makes a wrong move,” I said.

  “What kind of wrong move?” Treadway asked.

  “How the hell do I know?” I said. “Anything that displeases Coriander.”

  “Anything that threatens him,” Chambrun said. “We’re dealing with a zealot with a cause.”

  “You’re just going to let people stay in the rooms without telling them they’re sitting on a volcano?” Gus Brand, the FBI man, asked. “I mean the word’s out, isn’t it?”

  Chambrun’s lips moved in a tight little smile. “Everyone will be warned and I’ll make you a bet, Mr. Brand. Not ten people will leave the hotel until they are ordered out.”

  “Which will be when?” Brand said.

  “When I think the danger is acute,” Chambrun said.

  “The Commissioner may not go for that,” the Assistant Commissioner said.

  “And the danger won’t be acute until they have first mutilated my children and Katherine Horn,” Constance Cleaves said in a shaken voice.

  That brought us all back to something besides bricks and mortar and steel girders. The hostages would be used to keep us in line before Coriander admitted defeat and blew up Chambrun’s world.

  The little red button on Chambrun’s desk phone blinked, and Miss Ruysdale, who was standing right by the desk, picked it up and answered. She looked at Chambrun, her face expressionless.

  “An order for luncheon for thirty people on the fifteenth floor,” she said.

  “It’s to be filled, of course,” Chambrun said. “Served to them however they want it served.”

  “How about a couple of our men to act as waiters?” the Assistant Commissioner suggested;

  “Not worth the risk just yet,” Chambrun said. “Coriander knows this hotel too well. He suggested on the phone that Ruysdale serve me a cup of Turkish coffee. Only someone who’s been in this office knows about that Turkish coffee maker. He’s smuggled in guns and arms and ammunition without being detected. That means he knows our routines inside out. It would surprise me if he didn’t have a rundown on every bellhop and waiter in the place, everyone on Jerry Dodd’s security force. Right now I think it would be a mistake to play it any way but absolutely straight with him.”

  “So we just let him have his way?” Treadway said, a muscle rippling along the line of his jaw.

  “Until the people who must meet his demands—if they are to be met—have evaluated the situation. It gives us time to plan some kind of move in case the answers are all ‘no.’”

  “What kind of move?” Gus Brand asked.

  “The one right one,” Chambrun said. “Because, gentlemen, we’ll never get a second chance.”

  Just then the party enlarged as Terrence Cleaves, the Ambassador, and the man I knew to be his executive assistant came charging into the office. An astonishing thing happened. Cleaves didn’t go to his wife to comfort her. He walked straight past her as though she weren’t there and confronted Chambrun.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  Chapter 3

  TERRENCE CLEAVES WAS A striking-looking man. He stood over six feet tall with a trim, athletic body to match. He had been something of a sports figure in his younger days, an international cricket star, a six-goal polo player, had once reached the semifinals in the British Amateur Golf Championship. His face was that of a typical British aristocrat: high cheekbones, broad forehead, a little military mustache over a straight, firm mouth, with deep crow’s-feet at the corners of bright black eyes. His hair was curly, modern-styled, gray at the temples. A man of distincti
on. Like most of Britain’s wealthy upper class, money inherited from his father and his father’s father, he had gone into government as a career. He had served in at least two cabinets after World War II, in which he had been decorated for bravery. He was now Ambassador to the United Nations.

  Perhaps anxiety for his children, justified God knows, had made him brush past his wife as he had, but I wondered. I looked at her and her lovely face was twisted into a little mask of pain.

  Douglas Horween, who came in with Cleaves, was, I knew, given the title of executive assistant to the ambassador. He was eye-catching in his own right. About forty, I imagined, with brick-red hair, mod-styled, long but in perfect order. He was about my height, a little shorter than Cleaves. He had a pug nose, a square jaw, and a face with laughing lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. But there was no laughter in his eyes, pale blue and as cold as newly minted dimes. He was wearing a seersucker jacket and beautifully cut gray slacks. His shoes were custom-made. A man of expensive tastes, as suggested by the pale blue silk shirt and the dark blue club tie. We have pretty complete files on most of our guests at the Beaumont, and Douglas Horween’s card indicated that he had been a British Intelligence agent until he joined Cleaves’s staff about three years ago. He had been an expert on China and most of the other Far Eastern countries. Rumor had it that he’d been dropped from the Service after too much publicity had been given to the assassination of some Cambodian big shots. He was a tough, tough cookie from all accounts.

  It was Horween who stopped by Constance Cleaves. It was Horween who put his hand gently on her shoulder. I heard him speak to her in his very British voice.

  “Chin up, love,” he said. “We’ll get them back. I promise you.”

  I thought she flinched a little under his touch, but she looked up at him with her fear-darkened eyes. “How?” she asked him.

  Horween moved past her to stand next to Cleaves, facing Chambrun. Treadway, the Assistant Commissioner, Valentine the bomb man, and Gus Brand, the FBI man, moved away into a little huddle while Chambrun outlined Coriander’s demands again to the Ambassador. Cleaves stood as straight and still as a Coldstream Guardsman outside Buckingham Palace. Horween fidgeted with a pack of cigarettes—English Players—but never got to light one.

  When Chambrun had finished, Terrence Cleaves spoke in a hollow-sounding voice. “Two hundred and fifty million is an astronomical amount,” he said, “but I suppose there might be some way to raise it. But the rest—”

  “The United States would have to send its bloody army back to Vietnam to release those prisoners,” Horween said. “The South Vietnamese would never do it voluntarily. Their own lives are worth more to them than Elizabeth’s, or Mariella’s, or Katherine’s. Released, those prisoners would throw the present South Vietnam government down the nearest sewer.” He turned to me, and I thought those pale, cold eyes might be reading the shirtmaker’s label on the inside of my collar. “You’ve been over the fifteenth floor, Haskell?”

  I gave him a quick rundown.

  “There is no such thing as an impenetrable fortress,” he said when I’d finished. “There has to be a way to get to the girls and get them out.”

  “You have a notion?” Chambrun asked. He hated bravado, and it sounded in his voice.

  “Getting in and out of places has been my life’s work,” Horween said. “What about food—room service?”

  “A luncheon order for thirty is being prepared for them now,” Chambrun said.

  “Served by?”

  “Regular staff.”

  “So I become a member of the regular staff,” Horween said.

  Chambrun explained, patiently, his conviction that Coriander knew the workings of the hotel and its staff. Bring in an outsider and Coriander might decide we were not showing good faith.

  Horween gave the great man a tight, frozen smile. “One of my better skills lies in the art of disguise,” he said. “If there is a waiter in your room service group who is at least six feet tall and who can be assigned to deliver this first order, let me see him, study him. I promise you that by suppertime I can take his place and I promise you your one-armed monster will never on this earth detect the substitution.”

  “It’s too risky, Douglas,” Cleaves said. “One mistake and Elizabeth and Mariella will pay for it.”

  “And Katherine,” Horween said. “You know my history, Terrence. I don’t make mistakes.”

  The law had come back to join the circle and it was Gus Brand, the FBI man, who added his objections to Horween’s idea. “I don’t think we can risk any one-man heroics at this time,” he said.

  Horween looked at him as though he wasn’t very bright. “It may come to that sooner or later,” he said. “You can’t afford not to prepare for it now. Let me look over the room service crew for a waiter whose place I can take later. You can all be the jury that decides whether I can pass for him when the time comes.” He turned to Cleaves. “Don’t overlook the chance for something later, Terrence. You may regret it all the rest of your life.” He looked now at Constance Cleaves, but he didn’t speak to her.

  “Please, Terrence,” she said to her husband.

  “It’s really up to the people in charge,” Cleaves said, still turned away from her. He seemed to want something from Chambrun who, in turn, was studying Horween.

  “I see no harm in letting Mr. Horween show us what he can do,” he said. “Provided it’s understood he makes no move without our consent.”

  “Understood,” Horween said. “But let me pick out a waiter now, quickly. When I take his place, you’ll have a much more detailed report than Haskell is able to give us.” He smiled at me. “No offense, old man, but checking out a place like that is my profession.”

  I hadn’t a doubt he might see things I’d overlooked.

  Gus Brand exchanged glances with the bomb squad man and the Assistant Commissioner. He shrugged. “I’m willing to look at what you can do, Horween,” he said. “If we could get a man on the inside it would be a big help.”

  “So let’s stop stalling,” Horween said.

  I thought I might get the assignment of taking Horween down to the room service depot, but Chambrun had something else in mind for me, and it was Miss Ruysdale, with detailed instructions, who went off with our would-be hero.

  Still there was nothing between the Cleaveses. The Ambassador had no word for his wife, no gesture of sympathy or reassurance. They were hostile strangers. When Horween had left the office, Constance Cleaves walked over to the far windows and stood with her back to us, looking down at the park. I remembered that the two girls, Elizabeth and Mariella, had gone to the park to play almost every morning under the protection of Katherine Horn. Constance was looking for ghosts, I thought.

  “Reporters are going to break down these office doors if we don’t have a statement for them soon,” Chambrun said. “The question, gentlemen, is what kind of statement?”

  “No kind of silence has been imposed on us, from what you’ve told me,” Treadway, the Assistant Commissioner, said. “Coriander started the bomb scare himself by getting all your guests off the fifteenth floor. If room service people are going to be in and out, the presence of the Cleaves children and Miss Horn will leak. I don’t know that any limits have been imposed on us. It may be quite refreshing to be able to tell the whole truth about something with political overtones.”

  “Oh, I think Coriander wants the whole truth told,” Chambrun said. “He thinks millions of people may sympathize with his cause when it’s made public.”

  “If this Army For Justice really exists, there must be other members of it outside the hotel,” Gus Brand, the FBI man, said. “I think what is released to the press and the media may not be in our hands at all.” I kept thinking he looked more like a college professor than a top manhunter. “Our major concern, it seems to me, has to be the safety of the Cleaves children and Miss Horn. What you, personally, release to the press, Mr. Chambrun, should be guided by that.”

 
; “In what way?” Terrence Cleaves asked. He sounded like a man who had been drained of all emotion—flat, cold, defeated in some way.

  “The most important thing is to keep all the crackpots, souvenir hunters, crazy people, away from the fifteenth floor,” Brand said. “It’s my opinion that the best course is to tell the press that the Cleaves children and their governess have been kidnapped, are being held in Fifteen A, and that a ransom has been demanded. There is the threat of a bombing if anyone tries to interfere. Mr. Cleaves is in the process of trying to meet the kidnappers’ demands. He needs time and elbow room. People will keep their hands off, one hopes, if they know they might be responsible for harming the children.”

  “Oh, God!” It was a whisper from the woman standing by the windows.

  Chambrun put out his cigarette in the brass ash tray on his desk. There was something emphatic about it, as though he’d made up his mind about the whole problem.

  “One of the reasons I don’t think much of Horween’s scheme, no matter how skillful he is at disguise, is that we are living in a goldfish bowl as far as Coriander is concerned. You’re right, Mr. Brand, about one thing. We have to assume that not all the Army For Justice is holed up on the fifteenth floor. Some of them may be guests in the hotel. Some of them may actually be working in the kitchen or on the room service staff.”

  “You don’t trust your people?” Cleaves asked.

  “I trust them to function efficiently and not to steal from me,” Chambrun said. “I can’t trust them not to espouse causes with which I have no sympathy. It goes deeper than that, however. Coriander or someone close to him knows the routines of this office, as I explained.” He waved at the Turkish coffee maker on the sideboard. “So they can be all around us. Some wide-eyed reporter asking us questions may actually be a member of the army, acting as ears for Coriander. As I said, we are in a goldfish bowl. We have to assume, for the moment, that any move we make will be known to Coriander almost before we make it. That’s why I’m not keen for Horween’s notion. While he’s disguising himself to look like one of our waiters, that waiter himself may be a member of Coriander’s army.”