Time of Terror

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Nothing yet,” I said.

  “No word from Buck?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And Terrence?”

  “Nothing.” I tried to sound cheerful. “But there is more than five hours to the end of the business day.”

  Ruysdale stood up. “Can you stay with Mrs. Cleaves for a few minutes, Mark? I’d like very much to know if there is anything I can do for Mr. Chambrun.”

  I glanced at my watch. “I have a press conference in about twenty-five minutes,” I said. “Take fifteen minutes if you want.”

  Connie leaned her head against the back of the couch. I imagined her eyes were shut. The door closed behind Ruysdale and we were alone together. I wanted to go to her, hold her, comfort her. I didn’t. Instead I went to the kitchenette and poured a hot cup of coffee for myself and a fresh one for her.

  “Why wouldn’t he let me go up to the girls?” she asked. “What could it have cost him?” Her voice sounded lifeless.

  “Perhaps he thought that down here you could help persuade people to meet his demands,” I said.

  “What could I persuade anyone to do that isn’t being done?”

  I wanted to say something absurd, like all the world loves a mother, but I didn’t.

  “What will I do if I don’t get the children back?” she asked.

  “You mustn’t think that way,” I said.

  “You must have talked about it back there in the office—how much chance they’ve got.”

  “Mr. Brand thinks they have a very good chance,” I said.

  “If Coriander takes them off to Cuba?”

  “It may not come to that—if he gets the money,” I said.

  “Without the children as hostages they won’t let him go,” she said. “Surely he knows that.” She was facing reality. “You’re not telling me the real truth, Mark. There is no chance for them, is there?”

  “A good chance,” I said. I sat down beside her on the couch and took her hands in mine. They were ice-cold. I had the crazy impulse to tell her, in spite of Brand’s instructions, that in about forty-five minutes she might have the children back. She had just to hang on for that long. I came close, but I didn’t.

  “The very best trained men in the country are handling this,” I said. “There couldn’t be a better man in charge than Augustus Brand. He’s not a crazy, trigger-happy kid. He’s thinking about the children every step of the way.”

  “Oh, my God, Mark.” She was suddenly in my arms, crying softly. I held her, kissing her forehead and her cheeks, muttering some inane words of comfort. When this was over, I told myself, no matter how it came out, I wasn’t going to let her go. Not ever.

  “You’re very sweet, Mark,” she whispered. “Very kind.”

  I was going to be a hell of a lot more than kind to her in the future.

  There was a discreet knock on the door and I knew that Ruysdale was back. “Chin up,” I said to Connie, like some sort of romantic idiot. I kissed her, very lightly, on the lips and went to the door. Ruysdale gave me an odd, faintly amused smile.

  “Mr. Chambrun said to remind you that it’s going on twelve o’clock,” she said.

  I explained to Connie that I had to meet with the reporters. I wished I could tell her that the next time I saw her we’d have all the answers, that however it came out I, Sir Mark the Glorious, would be standing by. I touched her cheek and got the hell out of there. My part of the plan, an important part, was about to begin. I was to keep the reporters occupied while Brand and his men gambled for the lives of the children and Katherine Horn.

  It was ten minutes to noon.

  At five minutes to twelve I walked into the private dining room and found a large crowd of men and women waiting for me. Cameras clicked. A few hundred yards away snipers were staring through their telescopic sights at the room where a man sat ready to blow up the hotel. I wished I’d asked Ruysdale whether an order had gone through to Room Service from 15 A. If it hadn’t, the shooting would begin in about eight minutes. If it had, I might have to hang onto these people for quite a while.

  I made a brief statement. Coriander had reduced his demands for the time being. He would accept the money and a safe flight to Cuba with his hostages. They could bargain for his other demands from there.

  “Will the FBI buy that?” someone asked.

  The questions came at me like machine-gun fire. I wanted them to keep coming, so I wasn’t too direct with some answers. These people weren’t dummies. They knew the past history of this kind of situation. That was all too fresh in all their minds—the shoot-out with the Hearst girl’s friends in California, the jail break with hostages in Texas where two women were shot and killed rather than let the prisoners go free. A man from the News was particularly persistent.

  “You have to be kidding,” he said to me. “They’re seriously considering supplying this Coriander with a plane and a safe getaway? They don’t think that way.”

  “And can they raise the money?” someone else asked.

  Round and round. And then the News man hit me with another tough one. “So you can only tell us what you’re told to tell us,” he said. “Let’s try something else. Colin Andrews.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Lieutenant Hardy about that,” I said.

  “Sure, sure. The police expect to make an early arrest. We don’t like it very much, Haskell, when one of us is a target. It could get to be a habit.”

  “He was a nice guy,” I said.

  “He was a hell of a nice guy, working on a feature about Terrence Cleaves. What’s the connection between these two cases, Haskell?”

  “No connection that I know of.”

  “Andrews is having a drink with Martha Blodgett, who works for Cleaves. Connections all over the place.”

  “As a matter of fact Andrews and Miss Blodgett were having a drink in my apartment earlier in the evening. That doesn’t connect me with it, does it?”

  “You were also one of the people who answered the Blodgett girl’s call for help. You were there. You saw it.”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “Is it true they were in the hay together when someone broke in and killed Colin?”

  Now that was something that hadn’t been mentioned in the first press releases on the story. Hardy had felt there was no advantage in exposing what would be thought of as a scandal for Martha. In the end, when he’d caught his man, it would probably have to be told. Right now Hardy was content to let the kidnapping be the big press story.

  “You’ll have to ask Lieutenant Hardy that question,” I said.

  “But you were there, Haskell!”

  “It’s Hardy’s case,” I said.

  “Thanks for nothing,” the News man said. “When we get around to writing the truth, I’ll personally take pleasure in letting the public know what kind of a joint the Beaumont really is.”

  I was about to try to cool him off when I saw Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, waving frantically at me from the back of the room. I looked at my watch. It was twenty past twelve. I felt my heart jam against my ribs. It could all be over up on the fifteenth floor. I excused myself, got a yowl of protest, and elbowed my way through the crowd to Johnny.

  “You’re wanted upstairs on the double. Boss’s office. Drop everything and run is the word,” Johnny said.

  The stairway was quicker than waiting for an elevator. I took it, two steps at a time, and I hit Chambrun’s office out of breath. The Assistant Commissioner, Jim Priest, and Captain Valentine were with the boss. I really didn’t want to hear how it had worked out. I had a premonition that it had all gone very wrong.

  Chambrun, looking like that hanging judge I’ve mentioned in connection with him, had the phone to his ear, but he wasn’t talking. Only when I came in did he speak.

  “He’s here now,” he said, and held the phone out to me.

  My mouth felt dry. “The children?” I asked.

  Chambrun didn’t say anything. He just held the phone for me to take.
r />   I managed to say, “Mark Haskell here.”

  “Brand,” the FBI man said. “Do you have the blueprint there in front of you on the desk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Count the windows down from the closed end of the corridor to the windows in the bedroom where the children are being kept.”

  I checked them off. “Eight windows, and then the two windows in the bedroom where the children are.”

  “Were,” Brand said.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “You mean—?”

  “There’s nobody in that room. Now count on till you come to the windows in 1507 where the detonator is.”

  “Two windows in the other bedroom in the suite—Fifteen A. A frosted window in the bathroom. Then two windows in 1507.”

  “My men on the roof across the way,” Brand said in a voice that sounded strained, “looking through their telescopic sights, can see into those rooms as clearly as if they were just outside the windows. There’s nobody visible in the bedrooms of the suite. There’s nobody in 1507. There is no detonator in 1507. Venetian blinds are drawn on every other window on the corridor. You can’t have been wrong about the rooms?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “The sonofabitch is laughing at us,” Brand said. “He knows or guessed what we planned.”

  “You’re not going in?” I asked him.

  “How can we if he’s expecting us and we don’t know where the children are, or where they’ve placed the detonator? The factor of surprise has changed hands. Put Chambrun on.”

  I handed the phone to Chambrun. He listened and then put down the phone without speaking a word. He looked around at us.

  “He’s got us licked and hung out to dry,” he said.

  I’d never heard him admit defeat before.

  Brand joined us in the office a few moments later. His attack force was still grouped on the fire stairs outside 15 North, on the landing and on the flights up and down, waiting for instructions.

  “I don’t suppose Coriander had to be a genius to anticipate what we might try. He figured out his weak spot just the way we figured it, only he moved faster. He also knows now that we have no intention of letting him walk out of here, with or without his hostages, with or without some ransom money.”

  “So what does he do next?” Jim Priest asked.

  Brand was bending over the blueprint on the desk. “Look, Mr. Chambrun,” he said. “You said earlier on that you were certain Coriander had some kind of escape route. Show me, on this floor plan, how it’s possible. We have the fire stairs blocked. He can’t get around to the west wing without our seeing him go. I promise you he can’t just shoot his way out, army against army. We can reinforce our men without limitation. He’s only got however many men there are up on fifteen. There’s no way to add to them.”

  “There are a couple of thousand people outside the hotel,” Priest said.

  “And I’d swear only a handful of them can possibly be organized,” Brand said. “The rest of them are just sightseers. Show me his way out, Chambrun.”

  Chambrun wasn’t looking at the blueprint. His eyes were buried deep in their pouches and he was concentrated on something far away in time and space.

  “The only possible way is by the elevators or the elevator shafts,” Brand said. “Now the elevators are manned by security, and nothing is going to force them to stop at Fifteen. We can cut off the power for all the elevators in the hotel on a moment’s notice. I talked to your engineer in the basement. He’s standing by just in case.”

  “A human fly,” Chambrun said in a faraway voice. He wasn’t being serious, I knew. “Walk down the outside of the building—or up to the roof. Walk down or up the inside of the elevator shaft.”

  “Go ahead, kid around,” Brand said angrily. “We may not have planned to stop him walking up or down the outside walls of the building. But the elevator shaft is impossible. He’s got to get to it, and he can’t even show his face—or his false face—in the fifteenth-floor corridor without my men seeing him.”

  “And he knows that as well as you do,” Chambrun said, still far away. “You’ve got him backed into a corner. But bear in mind, Mr. Brand, he must have known from the beginning that’s exactly how it would be. So I tell you, he has a way out.”

  “Where? How, god damn it?”

  “He begins to work on us another way,” Jim Priest suggested. “Piece-by-piece mutilation of the children until we cry for mercy.”

  “I hope you’re wrong, Jim,” Chambrun said. “I think he will wait for whatever money we get up for him, and then he will walk away with it.”

  I thought for a moment Brand was going to attack Chambrun physically. “Will you stop jabbering and tell me how?”

  “Magic. Basic principles of the magic trick,” Chambrun said. “We concentrate on the elevators, the fire stairs, the outside of the building, if you like, and while our attention is focused on those points, he walks away.”

  “A helicopter from the roof,” Jim Priest suggested.

  “He can’t get up to the roof!” Brand literally shouted. He brought his fist down on the desk so hard that Chambrun’s tiny coffee cup jumped. “He can’t ‘walk away’!”

  “Figure of speech,” Chambrun said. He looked at the frustrated FBI man and the corners of his mouth twitched with a smile he fought to control. “He flies out the window. He has learned the secret of the Invisible Man. ‘Down the drain’ he said about Horween.”

  “Will you stop talking that kind of crap?” Brand said. “Human lives, your building; those are the stakes.”

  “Have we given up on the possibility that Cleaves is Coriander?” Priest asked. “He’ll walk away because he isn’t there.”

  “But there are people there we know about,” Brand said. “The man in the false face and wig and the empty sleeve. We know he’s there. At least two men Mark saw wearing stocking masks. You saw all three of those men at the same time, together, on your second visit. No?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He leaves them to be mowed down or blown up, along with the hostages?” Brand said.

  “I think they ‘walk away,’ too,” Chambrun said. “Please, Mr. Brand, I’m not trying to irritate you. It’s just a conviction of mine. I’ve never believed in the Army For Justice. If it exists, Coriander is just using it for his personal gain. The money is everything. I think he always meant to settle for the money. I think he’ll take a very great deal less than his two hundred and fifty million. I think he and his handful of henchmen will take it and ‘walk away’ with it. I haven’t figured out how, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense. So I, personally, have to assume that’s the way it’s planned. They’ll frighten us with threats, but actually they’ll just walk away with a fortune, laughing at us.”

  “Well, I’ll make you a promise, Chambrun. He won’t ‘walk away.’ No chance. No way.”

  I guess it won’t be too hard for anyone to guess that I was thinking about myself. If money was to be delivered to Coriander, I was going to have to be the messenger. Since it couldn’t be what he’d asked for, it looked as if I would join Elizabeth and Mariella and Katherine Horn for the payoff. It was a pretty scary prospect. Chambrun must have read my mind, because after Brand and the others had left the office to shore up their defenses, he spoke to me with something like paternal affection.

  “I don’t ask you to go back up there when the time comes,” he said.

  “All that stuff about flying out the window,” I said. “What do you really think?”

  “I really think he has a careful plan for escape,” Chambrun said.

  “But Brand is right. There is no way,” I said.

  “Brand is wrong,” he said, his face hardening. “There has to be a way.” He reached for a cigarette in the box on his desk. “Cleaves and Buck Ames will show up with what will look like a small fortune to you and me. It will be far short of Coriander’s demand.” He lit his cigarette. “Coriander will have to be persuaded to accept it. My guess
is that he will. For all his fancy talk, he’s a realist. I have a feeling that he knows, almost to the penny, what Cleaves and Buck can raise. I don’t think he’ll take too much time to argue about it. But I don’t think that you—or whoever takes him the money—will be allowed to simply deliver and come back downstairs. I think the messenger will be kept as a hostage.”

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I promised those kids I’d be back.”

  “Don’t be a sentimental ass,” he said.

  “You haven’t seen them,” I said. “You don’t know how much they mean to Connie.”

  “So let me mention something to you that I didn’t say to Brand, because he knows it.” Chambrun put out the cigarette on which he’d only taken a couple of drags. “Coriander’s explosives are carefully placed. Only he knows where they are all located. If they are all set off at once, the fire stairs will go and Brand’s men will be buried under rubble or blown to pieces. Everybody on Fifteen except those who know how to protect themselves when the blast comes will be blown to pieces.”

  “Protect themselves?” I asked.

  “Some room, probably one closest to the fire stairs, will not have been mined. In the terrible confusion that could follow the blast Coriander and his boys could, quite literally, walk out.”

  “To the floor below or the floor below that,” I said. “But then Brand’s reserves will have every hallway, stairway, exit, blocked. If Coriander is so smart, he’ll know that, too.”

  “That’s why I think it’s going to be very much less obvious, very much simpler. But I repeat, Mark, you don’t have to run the risk. I couldn’t ask you to.”

  “I’ll go,” I said, feeling heroic.

  Chapter 4

  TIME MOVED ON WITH frightening speed as far as I was concerned. The end of the business day was, I took it, five o’clock. Coriander might give us a little more than that, assuming that Cleaves and Buck Ames would be working at the money raising till the very last minute.

  Actually it was about four o’clock when Terrence Cleaves checked into Chambrun’s office. He was carrying a fairly large black suitcase. He looked washed up. Brand and Jim Priest were with us in the office.