Time of Terror (17 page)

“I’ll be back before the end of the day,” I said. “We’ll have things worked out by then. No one will have to be hurt.” I tried to sound as though I believed it.

“Tell Mum that we—” Elizabeth began.

“Tell her we know she’s doing everything that can be done,” Mariella finished for her.

“Times awasting,” Coriander said.

I reached out and touched Mariella’s hair, so like her mother’s. “Keep your cool,” I said. “We’re doing everything we can. I’ll be back, I promise.”

I went back out into the living room with Coriander. I hadn’t seen a sign of anyone else. The men in the stocking masks were conspicuous by their absence.

“Don’t come back without the money and the plan for departure,” Coriander said. “If you do, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here for the payoff.”

I was out in the hall by myself and running toward the west wing. I went clattering down the fire stairs to Fourteen, passing the two security men who were stationed there. They both knew me and they didn’t stop me for any chit-chat.

It took the elevator forever, it seemed, to come up to Fourteen. The most urgent thing on my mind was to get back to Chambrun’s office and warn them that the place was bugged. While they were making plans for an attack on the fifteenth floor, Coriander was hearing every word they said.

I got awfully smart at that time, I thought. Instead of going direct to Chambrun’s office, I went into my apartment down the hall. I called Chambrun on the house phone. He sounded impatient when he answered.

“Just listen to me without making any comments,” I said. “Your office is bugged. Coriander hears everything that’s going on in there. He knew you’d ordered me to try to make certain about his arm. He knew you’d told me to make certain where the girls were kept and if the detonator was still in 1507. He knew Brand is planning a break-in. He knew you were certain he’d planned an escape route for himself. He might just as well have been in the office with you.”

“Come on back in,” Chambrun said in a flat, emotionless voice.

Well, I’d warned him. Chambrun was right, of course. If I didn’t return to the office and report, Coriander would know that I’d spilled the beans.

All the people who’d been in the office when I’d gone upstairs were still there. They were talking quite openly about the fact that the office might be bugged. Jerry Dodd was taking apart the telephone instruments on Chambrun’s desk. Brand and Lieutenant Hardy were searching the baseboards, the light fixtures, the underside of Chambrun’s desk, the pictures on the wall. I couldn’t believe it.

Chambrun gave me a patient, paternal look. “He wouldn’t have made it obvious to you, Mark, unless he expected you to tell us. He wanted you to tell us. There’s no point in pretending you haven’t.”

Connie Cleaves wasn’t concerned about electronics. She came directly to me; her hands groped for mine.

“You saw them?” she asked.

“They’re still all right,” I said. “Unfortunately they know the whole story and they’re quite naturally frightened.”

“Coriander’s threatened them?”

“There’s a television set in the room and they’ve been listening. They know what Coriander has in mind for them.”

“Oh, God!”

Gus Brand joined us. “They’re in the same room?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Katherine Horn is still with them?”

“I didn’t see her,” I said. “Coriander suggested that she—she’d given in to certain sexual demands they’d made.” I glanced at Cleaves. He was the completely expressionless Coldstream Guardsman. If he was shocked by the news, it didn’t show on his rock-hard face. “There are new demands,” I said.

The room went dead quiet as I told them. The money by the end of the business day, a way out for Coriander and his men and the children, probably Miss Horn, and a plane ready to fly them to Cuba. Coriander would wait for his other demands to be met when he was safely away from the hotel.

“A quarter of a billion dollars by five o’clock? He’s off his rocker!” Buck Ames exploded.

Lieutenant Hardy wandered back into focus. “If there’s a bug in this office, it’s built into the cement walls,” he said.

Chambrun nodded as though that was exactly what he’d expected. “I’m going to ask Mr. and Mrs. Cleaves and Mr. Ames to leave us while we decide what’s to be done,” he said.

“We have a right to know what you plan,” Cleaves said in a dead voice.

“There is the money, Mr. Cleaves,” Chambrun said. “You have less than seven hours in which to raise what you can. You, too, Buck. Don’t shoot for the whole amount. Just get up what you can. Mr. Priest will work at it, too. When it’s time to report to Coriander, we’ll offer what we’ve got. Meanwhile we have to decide what the alternatives are if Coriander won’t accept what we come up with. Ruysdale, you take Mrs. Cleaves back to Mark’s apartment and stay with her.

Connie needed to hang onto Miss Ruysdale for support as they left the office. Cleaves and Buck Ames left without a word between them. They weren’t going to be working together, that was for sure. When they were gone, Chambrun turned to me.

“How is the money to be delivered?” he asked.

“I take it,” I said. “If we try to pull a fast one on him, I become a hostage, too.”

Chambrun took a sip from the demitasse of Turkish coffee on his desk. “You don’t have to do it,” he said.

“You haven’t seen those kids,” I said. “But it’s academic, isn’t it? You can’t raise the money.”

Gus Brand took off his glasses and wiped them carefully. “Let’s face the cold facts,” he said. He held the glasses up to the light, was satisfied, and put them back on again. “We’re not going to let him get away with it.”

“Which is why I wanted the Cleaveses and Buck Ames out of here,” Chambrun said. “Better they should be active than be tortured by that knowledge.”

“I think you’re all out of your minds,” I said. “You haven’t found a bug in here, but somehow he knows everything that’s said in this office. You might as well tell him to go ahead and chop up the kids. You want pieces of them shipped down here to convince you he means business?”

“He’s not hearing what goes on here,” Chambrun said. He looked around at the tense faces—Priest, Treadway, Valentine, Hardy, Jerry Dodd. “Somebody reports it to him.”

“How?” Priest asked. “Phone calls to the suite are monitored. There’s been nothing. No one has come or gone except—” and he looked straight at me—“except Mark.”

“And the room service waiters,” Jerry said.

“Who have not heard anything that goes on in this room,” Chambrun said.

“Then for God sake how?” I said. “Because you know damn well I haven’t told him anything.”

“I’d like to think that,” Priest said.

“Let’s not waste time with nonsense,” Chambrun said.

“Mark is struck with the lady,” Priest said in a matter-of-fact voice. “He has a natural compassion for the children. He may have decided that cooperating with Coriander is the one way to save them. The last bit of cooperating will come when he goes up with whatever money we can raise and he tells Coriander what kind of trap we’ve set for him.”

I felt cold sweat running down my back. “You’re a crazy sonofabitch,” I said.

“I’m pointing out the only possible explanation if there is no bug,” Priest said.

“So there is a bug,” I said. “You just haven’t found it.”

Priest smiled at me, a gentle smile. “In my business we learn to consider all possible alternatives, Mark,” he said. “Suggest another one. No bug, not you, then how?”

“If we must theorize,” Chambrun said, “then I offer one, Jim. Coriander has an ally on the outside. We know that ally doesn’t communicate by phone; we know he hasn’t been up to the fifteenth floor. So he has another way of communicating. I suggest some kind of walkie-talkie set.”

“So one of us here in this room goes to the john and tells Coriander what’s happening?” Brand asked.

“You suspect one of us?” Valentine asked, his jaw jutting toward Chambrun.

“It has to be someone who was in this room when we gave Mark instructions,” Chambrun said.

Jerry Dodd laughed. “So we frisk each other for a walkie-talkie set—or look in the John for it.”

“Not a bad idea to clear the air,” Chambrun said, “but a waste of time. I don’t suspect anyone here—now.”

Brand gave him a steady look. “Cleaves? Ames?”

“Plus Mrs. Cleaves and Miss Ruysdale,” Priest said. He sure did cover all the alternatives.

“It was suggested to us at the very beginning by the late Mr. Andrews that Cleaves might be Coriander, or working with Coriander,” Chambrun said.

“That’s really why you sent them away, isn’t it, Pierre?” Priest said. “Not concern for their feelings.”

“One of the reasons,” Chambrun said. “There’s no bug in this office. Coriander had to be in touch with someone who overheard the instructions we gave Mark. I happen to believe in all of you present, and in Miss Ruysdale.”

“But nobody left this office while Mark was upstairs,” Priest said.

“Several people went to the john while we waited to hear from Mark,” Jerry Dodd said. “This situation kind of worked on bladders. God help me, I didn’t keep track of who went and who didn’t.”

“Cleaves went,” Hardy said. “I was fascinated with him. Not a word to his wife, not the smallest suggestion of sympathy for her.”

“I think it’s safe to say we can talk about what’s to be done without its being relayed to Coriander,” Chambrun said.

“What about Buck Ames? Could he be the one? His people work in devious ways,” Priest said.

“At any rate he isn’t here,” Chambrun said. “So how do you see this situation, Mr. Brand?”

Brand moved around to stand by Chambrun’s desk. On it were the blueprints of the building plus a floor plan. It was marked as the plan for the fifteenth floor, but all the floors above the second and up to the roof where there were penthouses were exactly the same.

“One of the most miserable parts of my job,” Brand said, in his quiet, schoolteacher voice, “is to plan how to kill people. I think you all know that we aren’t going to let Coriander get away with this. No way. We can’t meet his demands, even if we were so inclined. The problem is, how to take him and still give the hostages some sort of outside chance of survival.”

“I find myself puzzled by one thing,” Chambrun said. “Coriander must have known from the beginning that his political demands couldn’t be met. The money demand is astronomical. He knew Cleaves couldn’t meet it. Perhaps he thought public pressure from people who believed his political demands were genuine might help produce it. But he also had to know that the FBI would never let him walk away with whatever he got. He’d know you’d string it out as far as you could in the hope of saving the hostages. But you’d never let him go free. He starts out by trapping himself here in the hotel. With his bomb threat he probably thought the owners would help sweeten the pot to save their building from severe damage. In passing, I imagine they will. But he can’t get out with anything—any political gains or any money. He’ll be in range of your sharpshooters the minute he sticks his head out the door. If he adopts this second plan of taking the hostages to a waiting plane, he has to know he’ll never get aboard it.”

“Thirty men could put up a pretty tough fight with the arms they’ve got—the arms Haskell saw,” the Assistant Commissioner said.

“We don’t know that there are thirty men,” Chambrun said. “Mark has seen only two.”

“We’ve fed thirty people,” Jerry Dodd said.

“We’ve sent up thirty servings,” Chambrun said. “That would include the hostages, which reduces the fighting men to twenty-seven. We have no way of being sure thirty servings were actually eaten. Food could be flushed down the drain. I have a strange feeling there is no army up there. Just three or four men.”

“The explosives are real and set in place,” Valentine said. “Haskell saw them.”

“That I believe,” Chambrun said. “But it only takes one man—with one finger—to set them off.”

“And kill himself when he does it,” Valentine said.

“Not necessarily,” Chambrun said. “There can be a time mechanism that Mark didn’t spot. They leave the fifteenth floor by whatever the escape route is they have planned, and the bombs go off after they’re out of danger. The danger to the hostages is just as real as we’ve always thought it was, but Coriander and his two or three soldiers walk right out past us.”

“With empty pockets,” Jim Priest said.

“Maybe not,” Chambrun said. “He waits for Mark to bring him whatever money has been raised. It should be a substantial amount, enough for Coriander and his friends to live as rich men for the rest of their lives. After Mark has delivered, he is made a prisoner. Coriander and his boys walk out, and if we haven’t gotten to Mark in a very few minutes, the time mechanism blows him, the girls, and the fifteenth floor to smithereens. But that’s still the best chance of saving the children.”

“I don’t follow,” Gus Brand said.

“He can’t walk out with the children and Miss Horn and his soldiers, no matter how many. He can’t get them all out and to safety—or to a waiting plane—without being spotted. You can’t disguise those children. So Coriander knows he’s going to die that way. Your sharpshooters don’t miss. The only way he and his two or three friends are going to escape with their lives is to somehow mingle with the other hotel guests and walk away.”

“How do they get off the fifteenth floor to mingle?” Brand asked.

“I don’t know,” Chambrun said. “But count on it, they’ve found a way. So they will wait for Mark to deliver whatever money is raised. They will hold him, locked away somewhere, walk out with the money. If we don’t break in within minutes, Mark and the girls go boom.”

“Why not just walk away?” Jim Priest asked. “Why blow up the hotel if they’re free and clear?”

“Just in case their luck runs out,” Chambrun said. “It will be a hole card for them if we catch up with them.”

“You know something?” Jerry Dodd said. “If they can get out to ‘mingle,’ as you put it, we have no chance at all of spotting them. Coriander could walk into this office right now and we wouldn’t know it was Coriander. We can forget that missing arm.”

“Oh, by all means, let’s forget the empty sleeve,” Chambrun said. “So there you have it, Mr. Brand. If we buy his end-of-the-day plan, he walks out on us with whatever money’s been raised, and luck will have to be on our side to save the hostages, which will include Mark. Coriander has only to get out of the hotel and he’s lost in that mob of pickets and ghouls on the street. Has it occurred to you he can’t let the children go? Even if he’s worn that false face all the time they’ve been there, they’re very bright girls. They will remember enough things about him, tricks of speech, physical mannerisms, even conversations overheard, to help us put an eventual finger on him.”