Hostage Tower u-1

by John Denis

  ‘Yes, you could, my darling.’ She was blonde and Nordic, not too big, but lushly voluptuous; her eyes were greeny-blue, her face and body enticingly rounded, all dips and curves, valleys and delicately swelling mounds. Smith owned her.

  ‘Why is it, then, that I am cursed with this disease, addiction … pestilence of crime? It’s not even aesthetic. It’s … positively plebeian.’

  Leah lifted well-shaped eyebrows and smiled indulgently. ‘Plebeian?’ she queried. ‘The theft of the Black Goyas from the Prado? The substitution of Troy in the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe so that even his owner didn’t spot it? The Liz Taylor ring, straight off her bath tray with a magnetized fishhook? The Inca sunburst smuggled out in a pizza? Plebeian?’

  Smith’s mouth pursed into a lazy smirk. ‘Mmm,’ he purred. ‘You’re right, of course. They said the Bloemfontein Krugerrands were untouchable, too, didn’t they? And the Tutankhamen Exhibition that left London laced with pinchbeck. And what about that exploding ping-pong ball of Chairman Mao’s?’

  Leah giggled. ‘And the Fabergé eggs!’ Smith laughed. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Melted, didn’t they? Into rather good chocolate, actually.’

  Leah stood up. Smith nodded. With a casual oscillation of her body, she shrugged off the robe, and stood naked before him. Her breasts were upturned and expectant. She parted her legs. His eyes travelled down her inviting form to the vee of her thighs. He nodded again, and she stepped into the Jacuzzi.

  ‘No,’ she breathed, ‘not plebeian, my sweet. You are endlessly inventive, and for you, life, without crime, would be death. You have to have it. And besides, if you didn’t, you’d be so bored … and boring.’

  Smith wasn’t absolutely sure he caught what she had said, and granted her the benefit of the doubt. Boring he was not. He stretched out an encircling arm, and Leah floated within it. She moaned softly as their bodies fused with practised ease.

  * * *

  The château stood in its own grounds, stretching several hundred acres, south of Orléans. Its parkland had been laid out and maintained in a state of unnatural and almost geometric perfection.

  There were horses in the stable that Smith seldom rode. There were reaches of the garden he had never visited; rooms of the château he had never entered. The château was a possession, and Smith was plagued by possessions.

  As he himself had said, he lacked for nothing. He was going to make a cool thirty million dollars from his current enterprise, yet money was the last thing he wanted. True, it brought him power … but who needed power? Smith, who changed his appearance and life-style so often that he had genuinely forgotten what he looked like as a young man, required only sufficient power and influence for the next crime — and the next — and the next.

  If people got in the way, or Governments, or nations … then they must be removed. Smith cared nothing for people, for humanity as such; and even less for nations. Where had he been born? Paraguay, was it? Or Samoa? Could have been. Iceland, even. In which language had he first spoken the faltering words of infancy? Did it matter? All tongues were his now; he had but to choose. All peoples were his; he was a citizen of the world, with a hundred names and faces. He demanded nothing from life, and he surely gave nothing to it.

  Smith turned, and felt for Leah, knowing she would be there. Someone was always there. It did not matter who it was.

  A helicopter descended to the lawns outside the château, and a young man, tall, dark and muscular, with a wicked scar giving an evil cast to an otherwise pleasant face, crossed to the front steps. His name was Claude Légère, and Smith owned him, too.

  Smith and Leah lay locked together as Claude knocked at the Jacuzzi room door, and Smith said, ‘Come in.’

  Claude stopped short when he saw the couple and stammered, ‘Forgive me. I thought you were alone.’

  Smith withdrew from her, and regarded Claude mildly. ‘You know I’m never alone,’ he said. ‘Is everything all right? It must be, or you would not be here. You would not dare to be here.’

  ‘Of course everything is going well,’ Claude protested. ‘How could it be otherwise?’

  ‘True,’ Smith conceded. He fondled Leah again, but under the surface of the water. Somehow, it seemed to Claude even more obscene.

  ‘I–I am going to the airport now,’ he ventured. ‘I’ll pick up our new recruits and bring them here.’

  Smith turned to him. ‘Not straight here, obviously,’ he warned. ‘You’ll follow the procedure we agreed.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Claude assured him hastily. ‘Please don’t worry, Mister Smith. Every possible care will be taken to safeguard yourself, your identity, and this place. It will be done as you said. When they arrive, they will not have the slightest idea where they are, or how far they have travelled, or even whether it’s still the same day.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Smith sighed. ‘Everything on schedule. That’s how I like it. That’s how it should be, Claude.’

  ‘It is,’ Claude insisted.

  Smith turned in the water, and stretched out his legs. Leah followed his movements, then drifted to the edge of the Jacuzzi, hoisted herself up, and sat dripping on the edge.

  Smith grinned at Claude. ‘Would you like to join us?’ he offered.

  Claude controlled his breathing with difficulty, and tore his eyes away from Leah.

  ‘Another day, perhaps,’ he said, ‘when I am less occupied. But thank you for asking.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’ Smith said. ‘You’re welcome, any time.’

  * * *

  The clouds grudgingly parted, and Sonya, in a window seat of the Concorde, looked down on the futuristic disc of Charles de Gaulle Airport, twelve miles north-east of central Paris on the broad, flat plain of Île-de-France.

  A stewardess arrived to collect their empty glasses, still awash with the remains of the ice, and Sonya’s with a twist of lemon. Another stewardess came with a note.

  ‘It was radioed through from the Élysée Palace,’ she whispered. ‘You must be very important.’

  ‘I am,’ Sonya whispered back.

  ‘She means I am,’ Philpott grunted, slumping further down in his seat.

  ‘Would you sit up, then, please, Mr VIP?’ the stewardess requested, ‘since we shall shortly be landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport.’

  ‘If we don’t,’ Philpott acknowledged, ‘it will indeed have been a wasted journey.’ The girl grinned and wiggled off.

  Sonya opened the slip of paper. ‘From Giscard,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your Red priority.’

  Philpott sat bolt upright at this, then folded his arms behind his head, and leaned back in his seat with a complacent smirk on his face, like a cat that’s just cornered the cream market.

  The Concorde dipped into its final descent, levelled out, and caressed the runway, its long, pointed nose skimming the tarmac. Philpott — who had a horror of VIP suites — took Sonya through the Concorde gate into one of the seven satellite buildings of Number One Terminal, in the slipstream of executives and pop stars who make up the normal daily cargo of the flagships of Air France.

  They joined the ‘travelator’ crush, riding inside totally enclosed glass tubes, to the first nest of three concentric levels in the terminal dish: the Transfer Level, a mezzanine through which all arriving and departing passengers must pass. Philpott kept his eyes skinned, but could see no one he recognized.

  They went through passport and Customs controls, and boarded the next travelator up to the Arrival Level — another sub-division into three concentric areas: the inner baggage hall, topped by a ring of Customs control filters, and finally an outer gallery leading to coaches, taxis and the car-park.

  They collected their cases, and waited in the outer gallery — for there were many things due to happen shortly in Charles de Gaulle Airport that interested Philpott.

  Two passengers they already knew about — Sabrina and C.W., who would arrive on different flights, but near enough at the same time. And Philpott was sure they would be
met. He had to know who was meeting them.

  But it was the third potential traveller that concerned him most. For if Sabrina and C.W. had been summoned to France to serve Mister Smith that day, then so, too, he reasoned, would the laser-gun thief be similarly called.

  Malcolm Philpott was most particularly anxious to see the laser-gun thief. He could be the key to Smith’s destruction or to the defeat of UNACO.

  * * *

  A Pan-Am Boeing 747 followed the Concorde down, and C.W. took the fantastic trip, wary all the time, through the Transfer Level to the Arrival Level. Philpott, seated at a restaurant table on level two, spotted him, but looked quickly away.

  Half an hour passed, and then the Munich flight turned up, delayed by some minor industrial action. Michael Graham lounged against a pillar next to the baggage carousel that claimed to be able to produce his case. He spotted it, and made a quick lunge for it. As he did so, the public address tannoy rasped his name. ‘Mr Graham, Mr Michael Graham, passenger from Munich. Will Mr Michael Graham please go to the lost luggage office on level one.’

  Graham threaded his way through the green Customs channel, and got directions to level one. There was a small queue at the lost luggage office, and he joined it. He was in no hurry. He identified himself when his turn came, and the clerk placed a small pocket radio on the counter.

  ‘Yours, I believe?’ the girl asked.

  Mike studied the radio. Nothing happened by chance in the dangerous game he was playing, he reasoned, so he said, ‘Yes, it is. Where on earth did you find it?’

  The girl laughed. ‘Not on earth, as it happens. You left it on the plane, and the stewardess remembered seeing you with it. She knew your name, so she brought it to us.’

  ‘Well, thank her for me,’ Mike said.

  ‘I did,’ the girl replied. ‘We’re only glad you didn’t lose it for good.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘Me too.’

  A stewardess caught up with Sabrina Carver on the travelator. ‘You dropped this as you were leaving the Rome plane, Signorina,’ she puffed. ‘A little radio — see?’

  ‘Hey so I did,’ Sabrina returned. ‘How stupid of me. Thank you very much indeed.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  C.W., to whom impatience had more than once been a virtue, got tired of waiting for a contact. He stalked up to the information desk in the Arrival Level, and demanded if there had been a message left for him.

  ‘Not a message, sir,’ the official said, ‘but apparently you were supposed to collect this.’

  He handed C.W. the radio, and C.W. said, ‘Jeeze, so I had to. Guess I forgot all about it. Thanks.’ He looped the radio on to his right shoulder by its carrying-strap.

  Sonic bleeps were keyed simultaneously to all three radios at intervals of two seconds until their owners had the sense to switch on the receivers.

  ‘Good,’ said Claude’s voice. ‘You should all be receiving me now. If you are, acknowledge.’

  ‘Loud and clear,’ said Graham. ‘Uh-huh,’ from C.W., and ‘Roger, or whatever,’ from Sabrina.

  ‘Right,’ Claude went on, ‘now please listen carefully. I want you to ride the travelators until I tell you to stop. You will receive instructions during the course of the trip. The passenger from Rome will start from level one, the passenger from New York from level two, and the passenger from Munich from level three. When you arrive at a disembarkation point, you will simply take the next available travelator, in the reverse direction. Understood?’

  Affirmative. ‘Munich?’ Sabrina thought wildly. ‘Who the hell’s from Munich?’ C.W. chewed over the unexpected gobbet of information. ‘Three of us, huh? So?’ he mused.

  Philpott and Sonya had split up as a security precaution, and Philpott was playing the part of a tired man squatting on a case in the corner of the ground level central arrival area. He looked at his watch occasionally, heaved dramatic sighs, and morosely chewed a choc bar. He watched in bafflement as Sabrina started her weird odyssey in the glass tubes, and sat bolt upright when he saw the object she held clamped to her ear. A radio, was it?

  ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ Philpott gritted. So there would be no personal contact. Instructions by remote control. ‘Clever bastards.’

  Though the ruse did give him one slight edge: he could keep Sabrina and C.W., once located, in plain sight as they rode the steeply ramped, Space-age tubes, criss-crossing each other at dramatic angles.

  And all he’d have to do was find another traveller with a radio jammed to his ear, and he had the Third Man. The laser-gun thief.

  He scanned the travelators. They were crowded, and it was difficult work. There? No … there! No … just scratching. Ah — C.W. And Sabrina getting off. And back on yet another travelator ending up somewhere else, he supposed … but no Third Man. Where is the bastard, where is he? And what the hell are my two people listening to so intently?

  Claude whispered, ‘Stand by for a message from your employer. Again, listen well.’

  Claude — who was in a telephone booth nearer to Sonya Kolchinsky at that moment than either of them realized — held a small but efficient tape-recorder next to the microphone of the two-way radio, and clicked on a switch.

  Philpott saw C.W. take out a cigarette lighter and palm it in the hand holding the radio. ‘Good boy,’ Philpott breathed, ‘Good boy.’

  Smith’s voice carried to the three on the ramps, caught in the tubes like goldfish in elongated bowls.

  ‘Welcome to Paris,’ he said. C.W. cocked his ear at the cold, emotionless, neutral tones. Familiar? No, he decided.

  ‘You will call me Mister Smith,’ the voice said. It was an unarguable statement. ‘I am now going to give you the terms of my offer. There is no negotiation. You may accept the offer, or reject it. If you do not wish to co-operate, you will find a return ticket to the place from which you came, waiting for you at the ‘reserved’ section of the ticket desk on the ground level.

  ‘No immediate sanction will be taken against you if you refuse my offer, but I feel I should warn you that you will never again work for me, or for any organization that I control; and you will discover that my operation is worldwide. If you are prepared to take that chance, then feel free to say “No”. I do not, however, recommend it.’

  C.W. remained impassive, but a frisson of alarm crossed Sabrina’s face. Of the three listeners, she alone had heard the name before in a criminal connection. And Sabrina wanted above all to go on working. Mike Graham merely grinned; he took neither the name nor the threat seriously.

  Philpott still frantically combed the travelators for the laser-gun thief, and Graham just as obstinately stayed shielded by an enormous African in flowing chieftain’s robes, who seemed to be riding the ramps out of sheer exuberance. Wherever Mike went, the Zulu went; Graham actually began at one point to suspect the giant African, but the expression on his face was so fatuously innocent that Mike correctly diagnosed him as a travelator freak. Some people felt like that about subway escalators, he recalled.

  Smith continued, his tone still expressionless. ‘If you accept my terms you will, from that moment, be incommunicado. Further, you will be required to obey me, or my authorized representatives, as soldiers obey their commanding officers. Any breach of discipline will be treated with the utmost severity. The punishment for treachery is death.’ C.W.’s eyebrows lifted, and Sabrina’s mouth set in a hard line. Philpott kept his eyes on her. She was more responsive than the taciturn black.

  ‘However,’ Smith went on, ‘I do not intend serious injury to anyone during this operation, least of all to one of you three. On the other hand, should it be necessary, I may require you to carry out an order to kill. It is doubtful, but it could happen, so I have made it a condition of your acceptance.’

  This time it was Mike Graham who registered surprise, although of the two killers in the group (C.W.’s victims had been in the line of duty in Vietnam) Graham was the more accomplished assassin.

  ‘In exchange for your acceptance
of these terms,’ Smith said after a slight pause, ‘I shall pay you the sum of one million dollars — each. You will receive this fee whether or not the operation is successful. You have ten seconds in which to consider your reply.’

  The three moving faces on the travelators registered emotions from delight to incredulity. For C.W. and Sabrina there was, in any case; no choice: their agreement would be automatic. And from Graham, there was never an instant’s hesitation. It was an awful lot of money.

  Claude snapped off the tape-recorder, and said into the two-way radio, ‘Mister Smith will have your answers — now.’

  There was a heart-beat’s delay, then C.W. drawled ‘Tell him, yes.’ Sabrina said, ‘I’m in.’ And from Mike Graham, ‘Sure. Why not?’ Claude seemed satisfied, and gave all three fresh instructions.

  Philpott saw that C.W. and Sabrina were now heading by a ‘down’ travelator to the ground floor level, and he guessed correctly that the electronic conference was over. That meant that his chance of spotting the laser man had gone. He signalled to Sonya, and moved out into the centre of the busy concourse.

  Sonya marched furiously up to Philpott and gave him a good old-fashioned dressing-down in tart, idiomatic French. Where had he been? she demanded. Why had he left her? What the hell did he think he was doing?

  Philpott replied in kind, in fact going several better, and Sonya turned majestically on her heel to leave him standing there, throwing one final insult to his manhood over her shoulder. It was then that she collided with a well-dressed young black man, who was about to light a cigarette with an expensive-looking lighter.

  The man lost his balance, and dropped his lighter to the ground. He stooped, a little slowly, to retrieve it. Sonya mouthed a confused apology and joined him, getting to the lighter fractionally before C.W. She handed him the lighter, smiled, and he walked away.