by Emma Lathen
Their visitor gaped. “I’m Paul Volpe!” he started to protest before stopping in midflight. Then he produced a shamefaced grimace. “Look, I guess I began the wrong way. It never occurred to me you wouldn’t know who I am. And the truth is, I’ve been spinning my wheels so much this past couple of days, I don’t know which end is up anymore. But somebody at Macklin must have mentioned me. And I can prove that I’m Paul Volpe. God knows, if I could satisfy the Turkish police, I can satisfy anyone. See, here’s my passport and my Italian residence permit and my driver’s license.”
“What do you think we are? The CIA? The next thing, you’ll be giving us a password.”
But even as Charlie recoiled from these hints of cloak and dagger, Thatcher stretched out a hand and began to leaf through Volpe’s passport, studying exit and entry stamps.
“Yes,” he murmured thoughtfully, “I believe Lancer did tell me about you.”
Charlie’s memory was also stirring to life. “Say, didn’t the papers say you were in Istanbul when Wylie was snatched? You work for Macklin, too.”
“I wasn’t just in Istanbul. I was looking down the barrel of the same gun.”
Thatcher had no intention of encouraging more dramatics. “Well, you didn’t get shot. And this morning, we delivered the ransom.” He then undid the effect of this dash of cold water by succumbing to curiosity. “What exactly has been happening in Istanbul? I gather you’ve been there until today?”
“God, yes. You know, I still can’t take it in. Poor Dave! They’ve got half of Turkey mobilized, but if you ask me they don’t know where to start. It’s the awful helplessness that gets to you. You keep thinking you should be doing something. But when you get right down to it, what is there to do but yell at someone?”
The monotonic chant alerted Thatcher. At his best Paul Volpe was probably not a robust figure. Short and slight, he had a pale complexion and long, nervous fingers. But now the white blotches of skin visible between the dark circles under his eyes and the dark shadow of his jaw were waxen, his fingers obsessively kneaded a corner of the tablecloth, and a tic just under one earlobe throbbed remorselessly. Emotional strain was bad enough. But Thatcher had a hunch that this young fool had compounded it.
“I’m sure you’ve done everything that could be done in this situation,” Thatcher said dispassionately. “And as you probably haven’t eaten in some time, perhaps we should defer our discussion. Trinkam and I were about to order.”
As he half-expected, Paul Volpe reacted with impatience.
“No, no. You go ahead,” he said. “I couldn’t eat a thing . . .”
One hour later Volpe had demolished a steak, a large platter of fried potatoes and a mountain of salad. He still looked like the wrath of God, but his speech assumed a new coherence. The tic had subsided altogether.
“We dealt directly with the president of the bank,” Thatcher told him. “The deposit was entered into the numbered account a full two hours before the deadline. What’s more, the whole performance was televised, so the kidnappers could watch it.”
“Then Dave should be all right. They promised they’d let him go within 36 hours of getting the money.” Volpe’s brow creased as a new worry emerged. “They won’t have any trouble emptying the account, will they? Nobody’s going to interfere with them?”
“Certainly not.” Thatcher decided not to expound on Swiss attitudes. On the other hand he did not wish to raise false hopes. “The money will go through, but that does not guarantee Wylie’s safety. After all, there is a real possibility that his abductors will not leave a witness to testify against them.”
Volpe shook his head. “I don’t see why not. Everyone in the restaurant saw as much of them as Dave did. If Black Tuesday lets Dave loose someplace off the beaten track, they can probably be on their way back to Libya, or Syria, or wherever they come from, before he gets to a main highway.”
“Is that what they said they’d do?”
“They didn’t say anything to me. They just left that damned note. Maybe I’d better tell you how it happened.”
Charlie primed him. “Let’s see, you were in Turkey before Wylie, weren’t you?”
“Oh, I’d been there for three months. You know I’m working on the Aegean offshore oil situation. Under Dave, of course. When I finished up in Athens, he came down and checked out what I’d done. He was going to do the same thing in Istanbul. He got there Monday morning, and we spent the day going around to some of the Ministry officials. Then when dinner time came, he said he’d heard about this little place up the coast that specialized in fish. God, it never occurred to me that it might be dangerous to take him out of the city. I never thought twice about it.”
“Why should you?” demanded Charlie. “You didn’t expect terrorists to come crawling out of the woodwork. Nobody’s blaming you.”
“I’ll bet that isn’t how they see it in Houston.” Volpe was kneading his napkin this time. “They’ve been so indoctrinated by years in South America and the Middle East that they take precautions unconsciously. They’ll wonder why I didn’t.”
John Thatcher had just invested an hour bringing his guest to some measure of rationality. The good work was not going to be swamped by a tide of self-accusation.
“Nonsense!” he said bracingly. “Macklin is very much aware that conditions in Europe are unlike those elsewhere. Lancer tells me that’s why they didn’t assign one of their own people to set up a European office. They didn’t have the right background.”
“It’s true that’s why they hired Dave.” Volpe’s face cleared. “He’s been doing business in Europe for over fifteen years.”
Charlie Trinkam had some worldly wisdom to contribute. “And so long as Wylie was your boss, you were going to end up eating where he wanted. It didn’t make any difference whether it was the Hilton, or some out-of-the-way gourmet spot the tourists haven’t discovered yet.”
“Well, this place sure hasn’t been discovered.” Volpe produced his first grin, shaky but genuine. “It’s a ramshackle mom-and-pop operation with about ten or twelve tables. You know, the kind where they have the shellfish and squid and eels lying on a slab. After you pick out what you want, the owner does it for you right there. Hell, for all I know, the food is wonderful. I never got to taste it.”
“You mean they were waiting for you?”
“No, things didn’t happen that fast. I figure they must have been following us. Anyway, at first we were the only people there, but we were awfully early by Turkish standards, so that didn’t surprise me. Another couple came in while we were choosing our dinner. Then we had a drink and the old man began grilling our fish. The old lady had tossed together a plate of tidbits as appetizers. She was just putting them down when the door burst open, and these two guys came in. They had stun guns aimed at us and ski masks hiding their faces. I tell you, for a minute or two, I had a hard time taking it in. It was like something you see in the movies.”
Thatcher decided that, by now, a measure of sympathy could do no harm.
“It must have been a shock,” he murmured. “What did they say?”
“Not much. I suppose it was a real professional operation. They were in and out of there in less time than it takes to describe. They just barked a few orders in broken English about not moving and keeping our hands in sight. But they made Dave get up and one of them marched him out with a gun in his back. The other one waited until there was a whistle from the front and then started to back out. Just before he cleared the door he took an envelope out of his pocket and rammed it at the old man. The next thing we heard was a motor revving and tires screeching. So I ran to my car, but it wouldn’t start. Later on the police showed me how the distributor cap had been taken off.”
Charlie Trinkam occasionally fell into the error of admiring competence no matter how improperly applied. “Stands to reason,” he said approvingly. “They would have immobilized all the transport before they came in. Only sensible thing to do.”
Paul Volpe res
ented this detachment. “Oh, they were great,” he said shortly. “Maybe you think I was lucky to deal with such efficient gunmen. As far as I’m concerned, my only stroke of luck was that the restaurant had a phone. When I went back in, the old man was already talking to the cops. I don’t know what he told them, but he must have pressed the right button. Because the bigwigs arrived less than ten minutes after the locals. And I’ll say one thing for them, they didn’t waste any time once they read the ransom note. They were calling Macklin headquarters in Houston and alerting the border points before you could catch your breath.”
Thatcher could well imagine how the letter had galvanized the Turkish authorities. “The police realized that Black Tuesday’s schedule wasn’t leaving much leeway,” he remarked.
“I didn’t know that then,” Volpe answered. “It was damned frustrating. The envelope was addressed to Manager of Operations at the Macklin Company, but the police brass acted like it was none of my business. I do know that they read the ransom note over the phone to Hugo Cramer so he could get started. Then, after they photographed it and dusted it for fingerprints and all that jazz, they sent it on to him in Houston by the first plane.” Volpe took a deep breath to continue loudly: “And I still say we were damn lucky to have the cops get cracking that fast.”
Charlie was struck by this defensiveness. “Who says you weren’t?”
“Hugo Cramer, for openers,” snapped Volpe. “He gave me a lot of flak about how I should have kept the police out of it until we got Dave back. Lord! There were four other witnesses. Did he expect me to throttle them?”
Thatcher shook his head at this evidence of panic at Macklin’s headquarters. “This Cramer of yours must have temporarily lost his head,” he reasoned. “Terrorists aren’t like ordinary kidnappers. They revel in publicity. And this particular group was demanding worldwide TV coverage. I shouldn’t let Cramer’s outburst bother you. He’s probably forgotten all about it by now.”
But Paul Volpe’s grievance against his home office covered more than a blast of criticism.
“They act as if having the police in on this doesn’t matter one way or another. But if Captain Harbak hadn’t got right on the stick, Black Tuesday could have Dave anywhere in the Middle East by now. At least we know he’s still in Turkey.”
“You mean because they alerted the border crossings?” Charlie was frankly dubious. “That’s always being done, but it doesn’t always work. Look at the number of American radicals who ended up in Algiers. Hell, Turkey has a damn long coast. They could have taken Wylie out in a dinghy for a rendezvous with a big boat.”
Now, however, they were on Paul Volpe’s ground— he knew the territory. “It’s been clear as a bell the last two nights and they’ve been patrolling the coast from the air. Sure, they could have missed the dinghy, but not the big boat.”
“Well, what about a land route?” suggested Charlie, dusting off his dim memories of Turkish geography. “Haven’t I heard about smuggling between Iran and Turkey?”
Volpe was unimpressed. “You mean Kurdistan? The mountains there are 10,000 feet high. Besides, that area is 700 miles from Istanbul. They never could have gotten through the roadblocks to get to the foothills.”
“Exactly so,” said Thatcher decisively, closing the speculation. He knew nothing about Kurdistan and he rather suspected that neither did the terrorists. “The odds are that Wylie is being held in downtown Istanbul, just as you said earlier. But what interests me in your account of the kidnapping is that the envelope was already addressed. Black Tuesday was not simply cruising around looking for the most important American businessman they could find.”
“Not on your life. The letter was centered around Macklin, too. There was nothing random about it.”
Thatcher thought Volpe was missing the point. “Then who knew Wylie was going to be in Istanbul? Many people?”
Clearly this had not occurred to Volpe. He hesitated. “Some people, but not all that many. I had to make appointments for him at the Ministries. He was only going to be in town for a couple of days.”
“Then the chances of his leaving downtown Istanbul were quite remote. It makes him an odd choice of victim.”
Charlie had no trouble following the drift of Thatcher’s argument. “So,” he said turning to Volpe, “what’s really interesting is that the note never mentioned Davidson Wylie specifically.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Maybe Wylie was an unexpected bonus.” Charlie sounded amused. “You were the one who’d been around for months. Maybe they were planning to snatch you.”
Volpe goggled. He was speechless for several seconds, then spoke without thinking. “Then it’s a damned good thing they took Dave instead of me!”
“Self! . . . self!” Charlie chided him.
“That’s not what I meant. Nobody would pay a million dollars for me. I’m not doing anything special. But with the Noss Head negotiations starting next week, Macklin doesn’t have any choice about Dave. Nobody in Houston is prepared to make that kind of presentation to the British government. No matter what it costs them, Macklin has got to have Dave sitting at that table in London by Tuesday.”
“Let’s hope they do,” said Thatcher gravely as he signaled for the check.
Charlie Trinkam could see another possibility.
“Volpe says he’s going on to London to hold the fort,” he said later. “Do you think he’s hoping to step into his boss’s shoes?”
Tolerantly Thatcher shook his head. “Oh, there’s no doubt the boy is genuinely horrified at Wylie’s plight. But he’s human too. He wants to show how well he can pinch-hit in an emergency.”
“Maybe,” Charlie conceded. “But he sure has convinced himself that nobody in Houston is capable of operating in Europe.”
“There, I think he may be unduly optimistic.”
“And what was Wylie doing down in Turkey anyway? I thought he was their North Sea specialist.”
Thatcher reminded himself that Macklin had never been one of Charlie’s accounts. “It’s a good deal more complicated than that. You know that Macklin has been doing heavy construction for the oil companies since before World War II?”
“God, have they been around that long? I think of them as a postwar phenomenon.”
“It was after the war that they moved out of Texas and California onto the international scene.” Thatcher mentally reviewed the far-flung arenas of Macklin’s enterprises. “You could say that they spent the last 30 years working everywhere in the world except Europe. And, as they believe in bringing up people within the organization, the front office now has the same experience as the company at large. Then, when offshore oil became economically viable, Europe suddenly became part of the world oil scene. At that time Macklin didn’t even have an office in Europe. They looked around and found Wylie, an American businessman with years of experience in Europe. They hired him to open a European office and to stay on top of the whole offshore oil picture. That was about three years ago and he has, in fact, already gotten a few small subcontracts in Germany. Then the big one came along.”
Charlie had found his footing. “The British North Sea operation.”
“Yes. The oil companies of course got the contracts for drilling rights long ago. The exploratory work is now far enough along so that commercial drilling at certain sites has begun. Six months ago the British government announced an invitation for bids as prime contractor on all the land work at Noss Head in northeast Scotland—dockage, storage, and pumping facilities.”
“Big business,” said Charlie appreciatively.
“Very big, indeed.”
“And construction companies came rushing from the four corners of the globe.” By now Charlie was right at home.
“And who can blame them?” Thatcher retorted. “There then began the endless process of negotiating with the British Department of Energy for deviations from the specifications, demanding clarifications, putting in sliding scales, coping with t
he fluctuations in the pound, forging compromises with the trade unions. Finally it was all done.”
“And the small fry had been shaken out.”
“Considerably more than the small fry. The only ones left, even formally, are two American companies, two Scandinavian companies, and one German company. Next Tuesday is the starting date for the final presentations.”
Charlie never bothered with mere formal contenders. “And what does the smart money say?”
“That it’s neck-and-neck between Macklin and the German company. And Davidson Wylie is the man who has been the Macklin Company in the eyes of the British government. He’s done all the bargaining in the last three months.”
“Boy, what a time for him to be snatched.” Charlie was rueful. “Do you think Wylie’s really that essential?”
“Macklin doesn’t want to find out the hard way.” Thatcher raised two fingers to illustrate his points. “First of all, they know the contest between themselves and the Germans is extraordinarily evenly balanced. They don’t want to lose a feather of their fighting weight. Second, there is some truth in the claims of young Volpe. Macklin doesn’t have any seasoned European personnel. So, in Wylie’s absence, they would not only have to send in a newcomer unfamiliar with these particular negotiations, but one unfamiliar with general practices in the area.”
Charlie grinned. “They could get in real hot water trying some of their Venezuelan tricks over here.”
“Precisely. Wylie himself regarded his presence as essential every minute of the next two weeks. That’s why he checked out any problems in Scandinavia and then completed his circuit down to the Aegean. He didn’t intend even to take a phone call from the Continent until this contract was awarded.”
“Well, you’ve convinced me of one thing. That kid wasn’t talking through his hat. Macklin has to have Wylie in London by next Tuesday.”
Chapter 3
Pipelines
“It’s over four days, and there’s been no word of Wylie. What do you think now, Hugo?”
