Time of Terror

by Hugh Pentecost

  Chambrun sat very still behind his desk, scowling. “Have you come up with any way to deactivate these explosives, Captain Valentine?” he asked.

  “No way,” Valentine said. “There is no way to get at the charges without Coriander being aware. We thought of trying to send men up the elevator shaft on the roof of a car and trying to remove the explosives in the shaft. But each one of these charges is wired to the next one. Start fiddling with any one of them and the man sitting at the detonator would know it. Unless you’re prepared to give up on the hostages, we can’t storm the fifteenth floor, and even if we tried, all that jerk at the detonator has to do is press a button and we’d all be blown to hell and gone. If Coriander’s demands are met and he walks out of the hotel a free man—which will be one of his demands, of course—then we can reasonably be sure of deactivating the charges. He’s got us by the short hairs, Mr. Chambrun.”

  “According to Captain Valentine the man at the detonator is in 1507,” Crenshaw said, pointing to the blueprint with his pencil. “The windows to that room are on the east side—no ledge, of course, no outside fire escapes. I suppose it would be possible to lower a man, or men, down from one of the upper floors to those two windows in 1507. It would be touch and go then.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Shoot the man at the detonator, smash in through the windows and disconnect the contraption before Coriander’s army are aware of what’s happening. Last resort, I expect. I wouldn’t like to try it, hanging in space twelve hundred feet above the street.”

  “The man at the detonator has a machine pistol right on the table beside him,” I said.

  Crenshaw shrugged. “So you see—” he said.

  So much for that kind of heroics.

  Treadway, the Assistant Commissioner, had placed himself in personal charge of the small army of policemen who were swarming over the Beaumont. They were there to protect us from the rapidly growing army of pickets outside all the entrances to the hotel, and against any violence that might suddenly erupt inside. Inside, things went on as usual in the Trapeze Bar, the Spartan Bar, and the Blue Lagoon Room, which is a combination restaurant and night club. You could sense a kind of special tension and excitement. I sometimes wonder about people. I remember seeing film clips of the shootout in California between the cops and the Hearst kidnappers. Guns were being fired like a full-scale war, but people were everywhere, watching, risking death in order to be witnesses to a blood-letting. You’d have imagined that people would have stayed away from the Beaumont, being fully informed about the bomb threat. They didn’t. They had to be turned away from the Blue Lagoon, and they were standing four deep at the bars. Violence seems to be an unbelievable magnet.

  I had a project of my own and Chambrun turned me loose on it. I was concerned about the two little girls and Katherine Horn held hostage on the fifteenth floor; I was concerned about the threat to the hotel itself, not just the damage explosions might cause, but what it might do to its future. Chambrun has said at some time or other that the Beaumont is not just a hotel, it’s a way of life. That way of life might be dislocated for a long time by what was happening. But my concern was chiefly centered on Connie Cleaves. She had been gone for nearly ten hours without any word, without an inquiry from her about her children. It couldn’t, it seemed to me, possibly be a voluntary disappearance. She was very real to me; the scent she wore, the touch of her hand, the brushing of her lips against my cheek, her momentary clinging to me in despair. I wanted to find her, and not for any of the lewd reasons that have been suggested. She was someone with big troubles who needed help. I wanted to give it to her if I could.

  The one person who might be helpful since her father wasn’t reachable seemed to me to be Colin Andrews, the newspaperman. He had been covering Cleaves for some time and he probably knew a great many intimate details about the entire family. There could be friends he would know of to whom Connie might have gone for help. Help meant money, huge sums of it. If she hadn’t gone to her father, Andrews might know of someone else.

  I had a feeling Andrews wouldn’t be very far from the center of action and I wondered if he might actually have checked into the hotel. He hadn’t, but after shouldering my way through a mob of people in the Trapeze Bar, I spotted him at a distant corner table. He was with a nice-looking blonde girl who turned out to be one of Cleaves’s secretaries. He introduced me to Martha Blodgett.

  Waiters were having difficulty serving the tables, the mob around the bar was so large and so noisy. You had to shout to carry on a conversation. I suggested the drinks would flow a little more freely and that we could hear ourselves think in my apartment. Andrews and Miss Blodgett seemed pleased to go there with me.

  It wasn’t until I had poured them drinks that I told them about my concern for Connie. I didn’t tell them the Horween story. That was not yet for public consumption.

  “It’s hard to believe she would just take off,” Martha Blodgett said. “Those kids mean everything to her. She’s put up with hell in order to stay with them.”

  Andrews smiled at me, his eyes unblinking behind the tinted glasses. “You need a program to tell the players,” he said. “Martha happens to be working my side of the street. She isn’t fond of Terry Cleaves.”

  “But you work for him,” I said.

  “I work for Britain’s U.N. staff,” she said. “If Cleaves was removed tomorrow, I’d still be on the new ambassador’s staff. I’m not English, you know. They need someone who knows New York and the American scene in general.” She wrinkled her pretty nose. “Cleaves is a horse’s derrière.”

  “It occurred to me that one of you might know where Connie can have gone,” I said. “Someone to whom she might go for help?”

  “And not inquire about her children for ten hours?” Andrews asked, frowning.

  “Her father,” Martha Blodgett said.

  “We haven’t been able to reach him.”

  “He has a sort of hideaway in a little town called Athens, in the Catskills,” Martha said.

  “We know, but we haven’t been able to reach him there. He doesn’t answer his phone.”

  “If anybody can raise the ransom money, it’s Buck Ames,” Andrews said.

  “Connie’d know that,” Martha said. “She’d also know that Cleaves doesn’t have any chance at all of raising it personally. If she knew her father wasn’t in Athens, but someplace some distance away, she may have gone to him.”

  “And still not checked back here to find out about the girls?”

  “It’s hard to imagine,” Martha said.

  “Neither of you has any other suggestion?” I asked.

  I thought they exchanged a kind of uncertain glance. They knew something, I thought.

  “Look here,” I said. “I have two different stories, one from you, Andrews, and one from Jim Priest.”

  “Good man, Priest,” Andrews said.

  “He vouches for you,” I said, “but he doubts your story, particularly one part of it. You tell me Cleaves is a woman chaser.”

  “My track shoes are worn out,” Martha said.

  “Priest tells me that the story is that Connie is the promiscuous sex addict in the family. Cleaves seems to back that up.”

  “There’s always gossip about beautiful women,” Martha said. “Unfortunately nobody gossips about me.”

  “I’d like the truth,” I said. “Does Connie have a rich lover somewhere she can have gone to for help?”

  “If she hasn’t, she ought to have,” Martha said.

  “Why does she stay with Cleaves if he’s what you say he is?” I asked.

  “Because he’s got something on her,” Martha said.

  “An affair or affairs?”

  “He could take the children away from her if he has proof,” Martha said.

  Andrews lit a cigarette and sat staring at a small landscape by Eugene Ludins that hangs over one of the bookcases. “You’re not out for something to pass on to the local gossip boys, are you, Haskell.” It
wasn’t a question. It was a conclusion he’d come to. “Still, I can’t tell you everything I know about Terrence Cleaves. Martha knows some of it; she’s been digging for me on the inside. But if anything should leak, the sonofabitch might get off the hook before I can land him. I’ve been on his trail for two years, Haskell, and I can’t risk having all that go down the drain.”

  “So you can’t talk,” I said. “All I want is help in finding Connie. Where she could have gone; if there is any other likely person beside her father she might count on for help. You must know the whole history of the Cleaves family, Colin. If there is someone like that—?” I let it lie there.

  Colin Andrews took a deep drag on his cigarette. “So here is something,” he said finally. “Until about four years ago the Cleaves marriage seemed to be a happy and successful one. It was about that time that Cleaves invested a very large sum of money, probably most of his liquid assets, into a project for manufacturing and marketing a new sports car.”

  “The TC 4,” I said. “Priest told us that.”

  “It was a disaster,” Andrews said. “The car was too expensive; inflation and taxes in Britain were eating up the average man alive. It was a question of coming up with a new product at the very worst possible time. Cleaves had to pour in more money to try to save his original investment. I know, from my research, that he mortgaged his property, borrowed, and—and eventually stole in an effort to save himself.”

  “Stole?”

  “Used funds that didn’t belong to him,” Andrews said. “Then he was faced with finding money to replace what he had stolen. Most of his friends had no idea how bad his situation was. They knew he’d taken a whipping, but not how bad a whipping. All this time he was in highly sensitive positions in the government. He knew things about international financial dealings in which our government was involved. And he knew a great deal about our defense plans, our secret diplomacy. In short he was a man in a position of the highest trust. He still is, or he wouldn’t be at the United Nations. But we live in a time when political leaks are part of the world of government. You people in this country know how it was with Watergate. A whiff of smoke here, another there, suggesting a raging fire somewhere. Some of those whiffs of smoke came my way, which is when I started to work on the Cleaves story. What those whiffs were are what I can’t talk about, Mark, beyond saying that Cleaves found enough money to save himself from a public bankruptcy and a scandal. Where it came from is what concerns me. I think I can tell you that I’m certain he sold information which came his way as a trusted public servant to foreign interests. I think, in short, he is guilty of treason. I don’t yet have the proof that would hang him.”

  “Connie is my concern,” I reminded him.

  “It was in this time when he had to cover up a theft or be exposed that the marriage fell apart,” Andrews said. “My guess is that Cleaves went to Buck Ames and was turned down flat. The old buccaneer had always been openly unfriendly to his son-in-law. I don’t know the reasons for that, except that Ames is a man of passionate likes and dislikes, passionate pleasures, passionate grudges and animosities. Cleaves was on his enemy list, and I think he refused flatly to help, even to save Connie from going down with the ship. It was after that Cleaves began, discreetly enough as far as the public was concerned, to enjoy the company of other women, all kinds of women. I know for certain that he flaunted them in front of Connie. He actually brought them home to his own house and made love to them with Connie and the children there on another floor.”

  “And Connie put up with it?” I asked, hardly believing.

  “She put up with it for a long time,” Andrews said. He was frowning at the ash on his cigarette. “I got to talk to a maid in the household who left because Cleaves found her conveniently attractive. She didn’t understand why or how Connie could take it. She did tell me that she overheard a breakfast table conversation at which Connie protested on account of the children and Cleaves told her she would damn well take it and like it or she knew what he would do to her.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Andrews said. “But he has some hold on her that is something a good deal more than custody of the children. And at that time, Mark, take notice that there wasn’t the slightest hint from any source that Connie was anything but a faithful and dutiful wife.”

  “At that time? So there was a later time?”

  Andrews nodded slowly. “How much can a woman take, laughed at, degraded in front of a collection of cheap trollops? There was a man, an attractive young fellow in the Foreign Secretary’s office. He’d come to parties at the Cleaves house in the days before all these horrors started. Connie ran into him somewhere, broke down and told him her troubles, and needing love and sympathy, wound up in his bed. For some reason Cleaves must have had his wife watched. He broke into the young man’s house, gave him an unmerciful beating that hospitalized him for months, and dragged Connie, wrapped only in a sheet, out onto the street and into his car. Right after that Connie began to be seen everywhere with a collection of men, different ones every night, making something of a public display of herself.” Andrews put out his cigarette. “I dug into this as far as I could, Mark, and I came to the conclusion that this was all window dressing. I couldn’t find a shred of evidence that she was ever seriously involved with any of these men. The gossip Priest reported to you was very real. But I’d bet my last shilling that Connie was putting on a show and not sleeping with half the young males in London.”

  “Why would she put on such a show?” Martha asked.

  “Punishment,” Andrews said. “When an attractive woman like Connie belongs to a man and starts running around in public with dozens of others—” He shrugged. “People certainly must have wondered what was wrong with Cleaves. Great athlete, national hero, why couldn’t he satisfy his wife?”

  “But none of these boy friends come to mind as someone she might turn to in trouble? What about the first one, the one Cleaves clobbered?” I asked.

  “Poor fellow got one of the ghastly far-out assignments in the Foreign Service—Burma, Pakistan, God knows where,” Andrews said. “No, Connie can’t have gone to him, even if she knows where he is.”

  My phone rang and I went over to the center table to answer. I glanced at my watch as I picked up the instrument. It was going on one o’clock in the morning. It was Chambrun on the phone.

  “I just had a call from Walter Ames,” he said.

  “Connie’s with him?” I asked, feeling relieved.

  “No,” Chambrun said. “He called, asking for her. Been on some kind of a boat cruise up the Hudson. No radio or TV. He hadn’t heard the news until he got home a short time ago. He’s on his way. Should arrive in about an hour.”

  “He can’t drive a hundred and twenty-five miles in an hour, even at night,” I said.

  “Helicopter,” Chambrun said. “Buck Ames always does things in style. You’ve had no luck?”

  “Nothing practical. Some gossip.”

  “Well, if you can stay awake till Ames arrives—”

  Buck Ames was like a blast of fresh wind as he came charging into Chambrun’s office about two o’clock that morning. I was instantly reminded of the present-day Caesar Romero, the movie actor—a big man, white-haired, with a beak of a nose over a black mustache and white-toothed smile. Black eyebrows shaded very bright black eyes. He was suntanned to a mahogany brown, and though I suspect he was sixty years old, he looked trim and well-muscled as an exercised man of thirty. Something in the shape of his face was reminiscent of the more delicate, fine-boned Connie. His voice was big, booming—the Buccaneer shouting his commands from the quarter-deck. He ignored me as if I was a useless piece of furniture and bore down on Chambrun.

  “You’re Chambrun,” he said. “Have you found Connie?”

  Chambrun shook his head.

  “Jesus H. Christ, why not?” Buck shouted. “You’ve got the whole goddam city police force, the FBI, your own security people. Why not?”

/>   “Because we’re walking on eggs in this case, Mr. Ames,” Chambrun said. “I’d like you to know Mark Haskell, a trusted assistant. He’s been looking for Connie.”

  “Without any luck,” I said.

  “I’ll lay ten to one I can tell you where she is,” Buck said.

  “We hoped you could,” Chambrun said. “That’s why we’ve been trying to reach you all night.”

  “She’s upstairs on the fifteenth floor with those crazy bastards,” Buck said. “She’d want to be with her kids. She’s given herself up as another hostage.”

  “I thought of that,” Chambrun said quietly. “But I’ve had to write it off.”

  “Why?” Buck demanded. “I know that girl like I know myself. Nothing would keep her away from those kids. She knows how scared they must be. She knows how badly they must need her.”

  He was right, of course. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that myself. And as I wondered, Chambrun knocked it down.

  “Pour Mr. Ames a drink of whatever he wants, Mark,” he said. “And help yourself.”

  “Bourbon, neat, and don’t spare the horses,” Buck said, before I could ask him. “Why did you write off that theory, Chambrun?”

  “I told you, we’re walking on eggs, Mr. Ames.”

  “Buck, for Christ sake,” Buck said. “Everybody calls me Buck including my no-good son-in-law.”

  “I wrote it off, Buck, because there’s no way she could have got there or made contact with this Coriander fellow without my knowing,” Chambrun said. “The phones to the fifteenth floor are open. We don’t interfere with calls in or out, but we monitor them. Your daughter hasn’t made any attempt to contact Coriander by phone, nor has he made any attempt to reach her. There is no way to get to the fifteenth floor without having to pass one of our security guards on the stairway or in an elevator. No one she would have to pass to get there has seen her.”

  “Someone slipped up, took a walk, went to the john.”

  “My people are working in pairs in that area,” Chambrun said.