The Last Hostage

by Nance, John J. ;

  “I’m wondering,” MacCabe went on, “why no one seems to be openly talking about the possibility that a terrorist act is involved? The FBI certainly wasn’t slow to come to that conclusion with the TWA crash off Long Island in 1996.”

  “And we were dead wrong, weren’t we!” Kat snapped, cautioning herself too late to keep irritation out of her voice. “Look. This isn’t the appropriate forum for your questions, Sir. And we’re out of time. Thank you again,” she said to the audience, nodding as she stepped away from the podium. She let her eyes roam around the hall, aware that the spell her speech had cast had been broken.

  Damn him! she thought, as the host moved to the podium to thank her once again before closing the conference.

  Kat was engulfed at the foot of the stage by delegates wanting to talk, offering business cards and congratulations for a good speech.

  So the damage wasn’t total! she told herself, but the smoldering desire to find Robert MacCabe and snap his head off was leading her to short responses and a continuous push toward the exit. With her purse slung over her shoulder and a leather folder held tightly against her chest, she paused for a second outside the door, her eyes sweeping left and right before coming to rest on a figure almost directly in front of her.

  Robert MacCabe was waiting ten feet away. His large hazel eyes watched her as he leaned uneasily against a huge concrete post with both hands shoved into the pockets of his suit coat. A case that probably held a computer was at his feet.

  Kat strode the few feet to him with her jaw set, ignoring the mingling aromas of rich coffee from an espresso cart and suppressing her desire for some.

  “So, Mr. MacCabe, to what do I owe the honor of that attack? That little sabotage-the-speaker routine?”

  He smiled nervously, a disarming, toothy, Kennedy-esque smile, his tanned face framed by a full and slightly tousled head of dark hair. Five foot ten, late thirties, and probably an Ivy Leaguer, Kat decided. He was very young to have won a Pulitzer, but a lot better-looking in person than in the newspaper picture she remembered.

  Robert MacCabe straightened up and took his hands from his pockets, raising them in a gesture of capitulation. “Agent Bronsky, honestly, I wasn’t trying to sabotage you.”

  She fixed him with a steely glare. “That’s pretty hard to believe!”

  He stared back, his eyes penetrating hers with equal intensity. “Look …” he began.

  “No, you look, Mr. MacCabe! What I want to know is precisely what …”

  She paused as he put his index finger to his lips and inclined his head toward several delegates standing nearby, talking in a cloud of cigarette smoke. The gesture instantly irritated her. She lowered her voice to just above a whisper, angry with herself for having lost control and ignoring the pleasant hint of a woody aftershave.

  “I want to know what you were trying to accomplish in there, needling me about that MD-eleven crash and terrorism.”

  “We have to talk,” he said simply.

  Kat straightened up, her eyebrows raised. “I was under the impression that we were doing precisely that. Talk about what?”

  His eyes had shifted to another group of delegates talking in the distance, audible above the background din of distant traffic and closer voices, and he continued to watch them as he answered. “About that crash. About the reason for my questions in there.” He wasn’t smiling now, she noticed.

  Kat shook her head in disgust. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you are not going to trick me into a statement!”

  Robert MacCabe’s hand was up in a “stop” gesture. “No! I’m trying to give you something, not get an interview. I remember you from the Colorado hijacking. I’ve been following you.”

  Kat tried not to look stunned. “You followed me here?”

  His eyes snapped back to hers. “No, I mean I’ve followed your career. I was assigned to cover this convention for the Post. That’s why I’m here.”

  Kat stood in silence for a few moments, trying to read his expression. He shook his head and rolled his eyes before filling the silence. “Look, I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’m not making myself clear. I bored into you back there because I had to know if you were the right one to talk to.” MacCabe looked around quickly. “And you are. Can we, maybe, go somewhere private?”

  “Why?” Kat asked, aware that one of the delegates was waiting patiently at a respectful distance to talk with her. She smiled at the man and gestured “just a moment” before turning back to MacCabe.

  “Because …” He stopped and sighed, shaking his head as he momentarily dropped his gaze to the floor, licked his lips, and struggled with a decision. Once again he glanced around, taking inventory of the man waiting and various stragglers nearby before nodding and leaning toward her.

  “Okay. Look. Something’s happened. I’ve ended up as the recipient of some very frightening information … maybe I should say allegations. From a very, very reliable source. I wasn’t sure what to make of them at the time, but now …”

  “Allegations about what?” A second delegate was waiting for her, she noticed.

  “The MD-eleven crash and what might have caused it.”

  “I told you in there, Mr. MacCabe, I am not on that investigation.”

  His hand was up again. “Hear me out. Please! Something happened this morning that I don’t want to talk about here, something that makes me think the information I was given is dead-on correct.” He waited for a response, smiling nervously while running a free hand through his hair.

  She sighed and shook her head. “So, why come to me? I’m not on duty here in Hong Kong. Well, I am, but only as a delegate.”

  “You’re FBI, Agent Bronsky. Even when you’re taking a shower or sleeping, you’re FBI. I remember you said those words yourself in an interview after the Colorado hijacking. I’m coming to you because you know a lot about international terrorism. And I’m asking you to listen because I’ve changed my reservation and am flying back to Los Angeles in a few hours, around midnight, and it frankly scares me to death that I’m the only one who knows what I now think I know.”

  Kat could see genuine worry in his eyes. “So,” she began, “this information is something you picked up here in Hong Kong?”

  “No. Back in D.C. But I really don’t want to discuss it here, okay?”

  “You said you’re leaving around midnight. Is that on Meridian Airlines?” Kat asked, her voice still cool, her thinking cautious.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Then we’re on the same flight.”

  A look of surprise crossed his face. “Really? Tell you what. I’m staying in a hotel down the street and I have to go check out and get my stuff. Let me get a cab and come by here to pick you up early, say in about forty-five minutes. If you’ll let my newspaper buy you dinner, I’ll lay this all out for you.”

  Kat shook her head no, then shot another “please wait” smile at the gathering fan club ten feet away. There were four men now waiting for her.

  “Please!” Robert MacCabe added, keeping his voice low.

  “I’ve got a better idea, Mr. MacCabe. Let’s just talk on the plane.”

  “No. Please! I hate to make this sound like cloak-and-dagger stuff, but what I have to tell you is too sensitive to throw around on a crowded airplane.” He reached out and carefully touched her arm. “Look. I’m not kidding. This may be very serious and I don’t know whom else to talk to.”

  Kat studied him carefully for a few seconds, wondering what sort of ploy could possibly spawn such a request.

  None, she decided. She sighed and nodded.

  “All right, Mr. MacCabe. Forty-five minutes. As much as I hate to admit it, you’ve tweaked my curiosity.”

  “Great!” he said, turning to go.

  She watched him walk off, reminding herself suddenly that people were waiting to talk to her.

  chapter 3

  HONG KONG, CHINA

  NOVEMBER 12—DAY ONE

  9:40 P.M. LOCAL/1340 ZULU

>   Robert MacCabe folded the international edition of USA Today and put it in a side pocket of his computer case. He glanced at his watch, his mind far away as the hotel elevator opened on thirty-two. Forty-five minutes had been ambitious, he concluded. He’d have to hurry to pick up Katherine Bronsky on time.

  He shot through the elevator doors and almost collided with a large man in his path. “Sorry,” Robert mumbled, as he turned down the long hallway, belatedly aware that he hadn’t heard the elevator doors close. He was thirty feet down the hall when a sudden compulsion to look back overwhelmed him. He stopped and turned.

  The dark, heavyset man was still there, a lit cigarette in his hand. Watching. One hand held the elevator door as the other clutched a plastic shopping bag with a Mercedes-Benz logo emblazoned on it.

  The man made eye contact for no more than a moment before turning without a word and stepping out of sight into the elevator, letting the doors shut behind him.

  Strange, Robert thought, reminding himself that, although he was considerably short of being a celebrity, his face had become public when he’d won the Pulitzer.

  He stepped around a service cart in the middle of the hallway and nodded to the maid as he fished out his card key, wondering almost in passing why the door would swing inward before he’d turned the handle.

  What the …? He stood in confusion for a few seconds. He’d checked the door when he left, hadn’t he? He was always careful about such things.

  Of course. The housekeeper! She must have just opened it.

  Robert looked around, but the housekeeper and her cart were gone, which was curious. He turned back with a growing feeling of unease and pushed the door open. He moved inside slowly, flipped on the light switch, and came to a sudden halt.

  Everything was in shambles. Drawers had been pulled and dumped. The contents of his bag were everywhere. The seams of his gray suit had been ripped open. His computer disks were spread over the bed, several of them bent and destroyed.

  Good Lord.

  The scene in the bathroom was no better. The room reeked of his cologne; the remains of the green bottle lay strewn on the bathroom floor.

  He placed the small computer briefcase on the edge of the bed and moved to check the closets before slamming the door to the hallway and bolting it. His heart was pounding, apprehension driving his blood pressure through the roof.

  As the door clicked closed, the phone rang, causing him to jump. He moved to it immediately and lifted the receiver, but there was only an open line—followed by a deliberate hang-up. He replaced the receiver and the phone rang again almost instantly.

  Once more he answered. Once more someone listened without a word for nearly fifteen seconds before deliberately breaking the connection.

  The chill that had crept up his back when he walked in returned as a virtual ice storm of apprehension, as if someone were watching him with malevolent intent. Whoever had searched his possessions knew he was back in his room.

  There was no time to call security. Robert yanked his upended roll-on bag back to the bed and began piling his possessions inside as fast as he could. What if someone knocked? There was no other way out. He was on the thirty-second floor.

  The telephone began ringing again, each repetition a malignant presence.

  The gray suit was a total loss and he decided to leave it. He dumped his shaver into the mound of clothes in his bag and struggled to close the fabric top, working the zippers and kneeling on the bag to compact it, succeeding at last. The room was too warm suddenly, and he found himself perspiring, whether more from effort and apprehension than atmospheric conditions, he couldn’t tell.

  The telephone continued to ring as he rushed to the door and pressed his eye to the peephole to survey the distorted version of the hallway on the other side.

  It was empty.

  He threw open the door and entered the hall, carrying his roll-on in one hand and his computer case in the other, feeling like a panicked child leaving a haunted house. The elevators were a hundred feet distant, and he broke into a run, the roll-on bag banging painfully against his shins along the way. He could still hear the telephone ringing in room 3205.

  He reached the elevators and jabbed at the DOWN button. The rancid aroma of cigarette smoke still hung in the air as his eyes took in the furniture of the elevator lobby: a small table, two end chairs, a potted plant, and a plastic shopping bag someone had left propped against the wall.

  A bag with a Mercedes logo.

  Blind panic washed over Robert as he recalled the bag in the hand of the heavyset man at the elevator ten minutes ago. The man had obviously come back, or never left. Probably the one who trashed my room, Robert concluded. He recalled the brief, cold moment of eye contact, and the man’s hesitation at the elevator door suddenly made sense.

  There was no sign of the elevator, but there was an emergency stairway a dozen yards back and Robert dashed in that direction, throwing open the door and hefting his bags through the opening to race down the staircase, relieved to hear the heavy fire door slam shut above him.

  He stopped on the twenty-ninth-floor landing, out of breath, wondering if it would be safe to try for the elevator again. The air in the stairwell was musty, with a disorienting hint of garlic mixed with the dust of a seldom-used enclosure. But this is better than walking down twenty-nine flights with these bags.

  He reached for the doorknob to the hallway and found it locked. He tried it again several times, but it wouldn’t budge.

  There was a sound from somewhere above. A fire door being opened, followed by the footfall of heavy shoes on the landing.

  Once more the feeling of unfocused panic welled up in his stomach, this wave more sustained and unyielding. He struggled blindly with the locked door, his face plastered against the little wire-mesh-embedded glass window as he rattled it and struggled. But it was immovable, and the hallway beyond was empty.

  The footsteps above began moving down the stairs with an ominous, confident, unhurried gait. Whoever it was-knew there was no way out for the quarry.

  Robert dashed as quietly as he could down another flight to the twenty-eighth floor, finding that door locked as well. As he turned, a small sign caught his attention, warning that there were no exits from the stairwell except on the ground floor.

  He plastered his back against the door and tried to think. Calm down, dammit! How do I know whoever’s coming is a threat?

  His trashed hotel room and the ringing phone answered the question.

  Once more he lifted the bags and ran on the balls of his feet down the stairway as fast as he could go. The footsteps from above sped up suddenly.

  Robert’s heart was pounding, his mind focused only on escape, his feet slipping every few steps as he tried to accelerate the descent. He scrambled around the landing of the twenty-second floor, calculating his leap to the next set of steps, when the fire door flew open and knocked him off his feet. His roll-on bag flew out of control into the wall with a loud crash that reverberated in the concrete shaft.

  “Oh! So sorry!” A feminine voice reached him through the fog of panic. Two young girls, probably fifteen, were standing in the doorway, holding the door open and wondering what to do for the wild-eyed man they’d decked with the door.

  Robert picked himself up quickly, grabbed the roll-on, and dashed past the startled girls into the safety of the hallway to head for the elevator. He heard the girls reenter the hallway behind him and let the door close.

  “You all right, Mister?” one of them asked, some thirty feet behind him, as he moved to the elevator and jabbed at the DOWN button.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” he shouted. “But don’t let anyone else in through that door.”

  “I … not understand,” one of them said.

  The bell chimed above the elevator. The elevator doors would be opening in a second, and whoever was chasing him in the stairwell would be approaching the hallway door, which was now locked.

  He turned toward the girls again
. “Don’t let anyone out of that stairwell, okay? Do not open that door. No one’s supposed to come through there.” Their blank stare and startled expression told him it was a losing battle.

  The elevator doors were sliding open, the car blessedly empty, and he launched himself inside before repeatedly punching LOBBY and DOOR CLOSE.

  The doors remained motionless.

  The unmistakable sound of the fire door being opened reached his ears. A male voice was drowning out the girls’ startled reply.

  Finally the elevator doors began to close, but there were heavy footsteps now running in his direction. The doors moved in slow motion, now halfway closed. Robert tucked himself into a forward corner to stay out of sight just as the footsteps reached a crescendo and a male hand thrust into the remaining crack, grabbing the door and struggling to reopen it. The doors kept closing relentlessly, and the hand was withdrawn.

  The elevator began its descent, the soft noise drowned out by the pounding in Robert MacCabe’s head. He quickly secured the computer case on top of the roll-on bag and extended the handle. If he could lose his expression of panic and move into the lobby like a normal guest, maybe he could meld into the crowd and find a taxi.

  The lobby! He’ll radio down and have someone waiting!

  He punched MEZZANINE just in time, stopping the elevator one floor above the lobby level, and stepped out as soon as the doors opened. The lobby was visible from the upper railing of the balcony, and he moved quickly toward it, surveying the crowd and spotting two dark-suited men leaping onto the escalator and taking the moving steps two at a time, both of them holding walkie-talkies.

  Another surge of adrenaline coursed through his system, propelling him down the nearest hallway, through a pair of double doors, and into a large service bay behind the convention and ballroom areas. He could hear employees on both sides of the large hall talking, but no one was paying any attention to him as he ran the length of the hallway and down two flights through another set of doors into the steam-filled hotel laundry, racing past startled employees to a small stairway on the far wall. There were several angry shouts, but no one moved to stop him.