Time of Terror
Authors: Hugh Pentecost
A Pierre Chambrun Mystery
Hugh Pentecost
PART ONE
Chapter 1
I
T BEGAN LIKE ANY
other day. To an outsider an ordinary day at the Hotel Beaumont, New York’s top luxury hotel, might have seemed thoroughly hysterical. There are hundreds of different activities that cross and recross each other like the strands in a spider’s web, but to those of us in the know they all mesh together and work with the preciseness of a Swiss watch. The moment anything is slightly out of order, from the lateness of one member of the cleaning crew that takes over the lower floors in the early hours of the morning to the faint fuzziness on the telephone line into one of the thousand or more rooms a report is made and an answer found. Complaints from guests are handled quickly and efficiently; hundreds of mechanical functions from elevators, to hot water boilers, to air conditioners, down to a leaky faucet are checked and double-checked. All of this mass of minutiae is funneled into an office on the second floor, presided over by Pierre Chambrun, the legendary manager of the Beaumont. Hopefully the problems have all been solved when they reach him. If they haven’t, someone is in for a tough time.
Chambrun is a short, square man with the brightest black eyes you ever saw, eyes that can be compassionate or as relentless as a hanging judge’s. The hundreds of people who work for him in the Beaumont love him and respect him because they know he will always be fair and just. If you don’t know how to solve a problem you go to him and ask him, but if you don’t know how to solve it and you muck it up, then you are in trouble. I’ve sometimes thought he has a secret radar system that alerts him to troubles he couldn’t possibly know about, but the truth is he knows every detail of the operation so thoroughly that so small a thing as a frown on the night bell captain’s face tells him that there is something wrong. He doesn’t pass it by, wondering. He inquires, and there isn’t a man or woman on the staff who will hide anything from him.
The Beaumont is Chambrun’s world, a city within a city. It has its own restaurants and bars and shops and hospital. It has its own maintenance crews, its sanitation crews, its security force, its press and public relations department, its accountants, its bank vaults, its lock boxes, its travel agency, its areas for banquets and balls and private business conferences, its gymnasium and sauna baths. Name it, and it exists in the Beaumont. And Chambrun, the mayor, the city manager, the king, has his finger on every item of the operation and that finger is as sensitive as a doctor’s on a patient’s pulse. Let there be the slightest flutter in that pulse and Chambrun is instantly on the spot, surrounded by the right people to solve the problem.
There was a day, however, when Chambrun’s interlocking systems broke down a little and he was late in dealing with a problem that launched a time of terror that will not soon be forgotten.
My name is Mark Haskell, and I am the Beaumont’s public relations director. I like to think that I am one of the three people in whom Chambrun places complete confidence. The others are Miss Betsy Ruysdale, his fabulous secretary, who reads his mind, anticipates his needs, protects him from a thousand minor irritations, and Jerry Dodd, head of the hotel’s security force, a wiry little man with the face of a fox and the guts of a burglar, who runs the tightest ship imaginable in a world of the very rich, who are always targets for the very greedy.
My routines are different in detail every day and yet pretty much the same. It is my job to see that fashion shows, banquets, coming-out balls, conventions and other special events are given the right publicity and promotion and to see to it that no one in any department dealing with any one of these events falls short of what is required.
I have an office down the hall from Chambrun’s on the second floor. I get up at eight o’clock after a normal five to six hours of sleep. I check over the schedule of events for the day. At exactly nine o’clock I report to Chambrun’s office. On his desk are the registration cards from the night before and a list of guests who are expected to check in that day. Some of the guests might be a little distressed if they knew the information we had on those cards: credit ratings, is the guest an alcoholic, a woman or a man chaser, a married man double-crossing his wife, or a wife two-timing her husband, home town information of any use to us. My job is to know what guests want publicity and those who don’t. A movie star from the West Coast may want a flag run up or may want complete privacy. The same goes for bank presidents or foreign diplomats. The Beaumont’s proximity to the United Nations results in its being a home-away-from-home for a great many important people from other parts of the world. Local gossip columnists are on my back every day to find out who is new in the world of the Beaumont, and it’s my responsibility to leak only the information that our guests want me to leak.
On the morning that the terror began I was in Chambrun’s office going over the guest list with him. Chambrun’s office is more like a handsome living room than an office. The Armenian rug on the floor is priceless. The carved Florentine desk behind which the great man sits is a work of art. The blue-period Picasso that looks down on him from the opposite wall was a personal gift from the artist. There is a richness and luxury to all the furnishings. Chambrun, following a hearty breakfast of steak or chops, sits smoking a flat Egyptian cigarette and sipping the foul Turkish coffee that Ruysdale brews for him on the carved sideboard which also contains an elaborate bar.
There was nothing very touchy on the guest list that morning and I was about to leave when Ruysdale came in from the outer office. She looked unnaturally tense.
“There is a phone call I think you should take, Mr. Chambrun,” she said.
“Later,” he said, frowning. He never takes phone calls during this period.
“This one you must take,” Ruysdale said. “And turn on your tape recorder.”
Chambrun trusted her judgment. He switched on the tape recorder and turned on the talk box so we could all hear the conversation.
“Chambrun here,” he said.
“Good morning, Mr. Chambrun,” a cheerful, cultivated voice said. “In order to hold your attention, I would like to spell out one dirty four-letter word to you. Don’t be upset. It won’t embarrass the beautiful Miss Ruysdale, whom I take it is listening. The word is
B-O-M-B
—bomb. Will that hold your interest, Mr. Chambrun?”
Let me interrupt what was one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever heard to say that the word “bomb” turns your blood cold if you are involved in the operation of any kind of public place, like a hotel or an office or apartment building or a railroad terminal or an airport. Bombs are almost a way of life with a large segment of our society, beginning with the Irish Republican Army, the Palestinian guerrillas, and down through the various screwpot revolutionary groups that seem to operate in every country in the world. It is far from unusual to find yourself walking along a New York street and discover yourself in a crowd of people staring up at some building. When you ask, you hear the matter-of-fact words “bomb threat.” A lot of these are phony alarms turned in by malicious idiots who just want to make trouble, but too many of them are not. At the Beaumont we have never had a threat, but a couple of years ago a man was torn to pieces by a letter bomb. One thing is certain. You can’t ignore the threat when it comes.
Chambrun had scribbled something on a desk pad and handed it to Miss Ruysdale. “Trace this call and get Jerry.”
“Who are you?” Chambrun asked in a cold, hard voice.
Miss Ruysdale hurried out into her office.
The voice on the squawk box sounded amused. “I’ll save you the trouble of trying to trace this call, Chambrun. I’m calling from suite A on the fifteenth floor, normally occupied by Terrence Cleaves, the British Ambassador to the United Nations.”
“Normally occupied?”
“I am occupying it at this moment, Chambrun. Shall we get back to the word bomb?”
“Who are you?” Chambrun insisted.
“Must you have a name? Well, you can call me Colonel Coriander. I am the commanding officer for the Army For Justice. We have some demands to make of you, Chambrun; demands to make of you and through you.”
“So I’m listening,” Chambrun said. A second light was blinking on his phone, and he signaled to me to tell Miss Ruysdale to take it in her office.
“I must try to persuade you first not to send the troops charging up here to the fifteenth floor,” the voice said.
Colonel Coriander! Coriander, I thought I knew, was some kind of flower.
“Everyone on this floor has been evacuated from their rooms, Chambrun. Men who passed themselves off as members of your security force have told the guests there is a bomb threat. If someone is trying desperately to reach you on another phone, it’s because your lobby is swarming with frightened people, some of them still in their pajamas and nightgowns. Know this, Chambrun. We have enough men and arms and ammunition to hold off the United States Marine Corps. They could only come down the hallway four abreast. So a head-on attack is quite futile.”
“Go on. What is it you want?”
“All in good time. Some weeks ago we acquired the architect’s plans for this building, Chambrun. The result is that we have placed bombs in strategic places all along this floor level. They are attached to one detonator. One false move and we blow out your elevator shafts, your fire stairs, and every room on this floor. We will, of course, kill ourselves in the process, but it will be a little like sawing the lady in half—the lady being your hotel. Perhaps the ten stories above us will remain standing, perhaps they will go tumbling down into the street. At best they will be useless for a long, long time, and a great many people will die along with us.”
“Let’s assume, for the moment, that I believe you,” Chambrun said.
“Oh, you’ll believe me before I’m done with you,” Colonel Coriander said. “Maybe no one but you will care whether your hotel is destroyed or not. So to make sure that our demands are met, we have some rather important hostages.”
At that moment Jerry Dodd, our security chief, came barging into the office followed by Miss Ruysdale. Chambrun signaled for silence. Miss Ruysdale passed a pad to me to hand on to Chambrun. On it she had written: “Call coming from 15 A. Guests on that floor told there is a bomb threat. Panic in the lobby.”
Colonel Coriander went on in his faintly mocking voice: “Our hostages consist of two little girls, aged ten and twelve. They are Miss Elizabeth Cleaves and Miss Mariella Cleaves, daughters of the Ambassador. There is also Miss Katherine Horn, their governess, a rather cold and unresponsive, if glamorous, chick.”