Remember to Kill Me (The Pierre Chambrun Mysteries, 19)

by Hugh Pentecost

  ‘At the cost of at least four lives and a massive destruction of property.’

  ‘Can we discuss the terrain up there on the Twenty-second floor?’ Yardley asked.

  ‘There’s nothing secret about it,’ Chambrun said. ‘The hotel is divided into east and west corridors, divided by banks of elevators that go from the basement to the forty-first floor. There are only two elevators that go all the way to the roof, one in the west bank, and one at the rear in the service area.’

  ‘How many elevators go to Twenty-two?’

  ‘Six in the west bank and two in the service area—freight elevators.’

  ‘The suite itself—Twenty-two B?’

  ‘A sitting room, two bedrooms, two baths, and a kitchenette. Closets, of course—a pantry in the kitchen. A television set, a radio, telephones in each room. Not in the bathrooms, of course.’

  ‘Entrances and exits?’

  ‘Two. One into the main hall, one at the rear into the service area.’

  ‘Two ways to approach it, then?’

  ‘Fire stairs, both front and back,’ Jerry Dodd said, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Actually you can come and go, front or back?’

  ‘Technically, yes,’ Chambrun said. ‘Actually, guests aren’t expected to use the service area or its facilities.’

  ‘But they could?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘If you’re thinking of people coming or going to Twenty-two B the way things are now, no way,’ Jerry Dodd said. ‘Elevators won’t stop at Twenty-two, and we have the fire stairs, front and back, guarded by security people. No one can sneak up to Twenty-two B, or sneak out.’

  ‘Suppose someone took an elevator up and pulled a gun on the operator?’ Yardley asked. ‘He’d stop at Twenty-two, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jerry said. ‘But he’d also have stepped on an emergency button in the floor of the car, right by his controls.’

  ‘Which would result in …?’

  ‘Getting him help,’ Jerry said.

  ‘Shutting off the power in that particular elevator in a matter of seconds,’ Chambrun said. ‘At any rate, that hasn’t happened. Jerry and I would know.’

  ‘Since we got the other guests off that floor, no one has come out of there, or gone up,’ Jerry said.

  Yardley crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on Chambrun’s desk and lit a fresh one. ‘Suppose we gave in to their demands and released their political prisoners in Guatemala, how do they get out?’

  ‘By releasing their hostages and giving us time to make sure there are no armed bombs left behind,’ Chambrun said. ‘I will personally escort them to the front door when I know the hostages and the hotel are safe.’

  ‘Where the police, the FBI, the CIA, the agents of foreign countries will be waiting for them,’ Yardley said. ‘They’ll know that.’

  ‘I suspect they will have demanded free passage,’ Chambrun said. ‘If you have given in on their primary demand, you will probably have given in on whatever their plan is to get away.’

  ‘And if the powers involved don’t give in?’

  ‘I’ve spent the last two hours, Mr. Yardley, trying to come up with an answer to that question,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘We’re dealing with fanatics,’ Jerry Dodd said. ‘They’re prepared to be heroes in the eyes of their own people. They will be heroes if they manage to free their comrades in prison, and they will be heroes if they die in the attempt. As far as they’re concerned it’s “heads I win, tails you lose.”’

  ‘With death and violence the message they leave behind them if they lose,’ Chambrun said. ‘What do you think the people in their White Houses and their palaces will do if we can get that message across to them, Mr. Yardley?’

  Yardley’s smile was grim. ‘If I could answer that kind of question, Chambrun, I might be living in a White House myself!’

  There were so many things we didn’t know. Beside the four hostages, how many people were holed up in Twenty-two B? With no room service, they’d be pretty damned hungry in twenty-four hours, Yardley suggested. Chambrun pointed out that nobody starves to death in twenty-four hours, and how long had they been preparing for this? There could be enough food in the kitchenette’s refrigerator to last them for weeks. We could shut off the water and there would still be enough in the toilet tanks to last them their twenty-four hours. Yardley suggested shutting off the electricity.

  ‘In every suite and guest room in this hotel there is an emergency light, like they have in theaters, battery-powered in case Con Ed does us dirt,’ Jerry Dodd said.

  ‘Making them uncomfortable isn’t going to get us anywhere,’ Chambrun said. ‘Would-be heroes can stand quite a little discomfort to earn their medals.’

  ‘I think you’re both overlooking the most likely situation we’ll have to face,’ Jerry Dodd said.

  ‘Let’s have it, Jerry,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘The British government, and our government, and the OAS people agree to release the eight prisoners they’re holding. But heroes or not, these characters who are holding the hostages in Twenty-two B intend to get out of this alive. They’re not going to turn over their hostages to you, Boss, and let you escort them out of the hotel to where the cops are waiting. They’re not going to release the Foster girl, and Sir George Brooks, and Tranter, and Ortiz until they’re safe. And I find myself wondering if you let them take the hostages away somewhere—spirit them out of the hotel through the basement garage in cars we give them to use—will they let them go once they’re away?’

  ‘Why not? If their people are free, why would they want to hang onto our people? A deal is a deal.’

  ‘Not with those creeps,’ Jerry said. His face was a dark, angry cloud. ‘Once they’re out of the hotel, they’re not safe if they turn the hostages loose. The hostages can identify them, name them probably. Your people, Yardley, and the British and the OAS won’t give up until they have these guys nailed to the barn door. The only way they’ll be safe is if they silence those hostages forever.’

  Yardley spoke after a moment of uneasy silence. ‘You’re suggesting they won’t deal for prisoners?’

  Jerry’s smile was a twisted fake. ‘I wouldn’t if I was in their shoes,’ he said.

  ‘So heads they win and tails we lose,’ Chambrun said, repeating Jerry’s earlier crack.

  ‘That’s the way it appears to me,’ Jerry said. ‘And it must look that way in the oval office and in Ten Downing Street in London. You give in, release the prisoners you’re holding in Twenty-two B, and in the end you haven’t saved them and you’ve set eight dangerous men free, ready to attack you from somewhere else. So they’ll try to look decent and humane to the people who read the papers and listen to the radio and TV. They’ll make it look as if they’ve tried to make a deal to save those four people upstairs. But, privately, they know they can’t save them and so they won’t let their prisoners go. They’ll have convinced themselves that national securities are at stake.’

  ‘You agree with that, Yardley—off the record?’ Chambrun asked.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Yardley said. ‘A tragic possibility, but a possibility.’

  ‘Which leaves us where?’ I asked.

  ‘It leaves us with a need to find a way to save the hostages in Twenty-two B without any help from the Great White Father in Washington, and the Great White Mother in London,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘And how do we do that?’ I asked.

  Chambrun glanced at his wristwatch. ‘We have about twenty-two hours to come up with that answer,’ he said.

  The music goes round and round and comes out on the same sour note. You agree to terms and your four people come out dead; you attack the suite with a force of men and they still come out dead, plus the possibility that the whole midsection of the hotel is destroyed, the attack force killed along with the kidnappers. You can’t decide with the toss of a coin, because whatever way it comes up you lose.

  ‘So there is no way to win,’ Bets
y Ruysdale said, in a voice I scarcely recognized.

  Yardley nodded like a man dreaming. ‘We give in and we lose the four hostages while setting eight dangerous enemies free. We play it tough and we have the eight prisoners but we still lose the four hostages plus no one knows how many more dead, maimed, and wounded as the result of a bombing.’

  ‘It isn’t much of a choice unless you like the taste of blood,’ Chambrun said. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him so bitter or so angry.

  The red light on the phone blinked and Betsy answered it. She looked at Chambrun and pointed toward the ceiling. Twenty-two B was calling us again. The squawk box was on.

  ‘Chambrun here.’

  ‘Time is wasting, Chambrun,’ the voice said. ‘Has Yardley persuaded you that you don’t have any choice?’

  ‘He’s not in a position to persuade me of anything,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘You must be toying with a dozen choices,’ the voice said.

  ‘How can we be sure our hostages will be safe if we set your people free?’ Chambrun asked.

  The man in Twenty-two B chuckled. ‘You have to trust me.’

  ‘I’m not in a mood for jokes,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘I understand. It’s not a joking matter, is it? I think we hold the trump cards, Chambrun. We have four hostages who can be dead in a matter of seconds. We can put your hotel out of business for the foreseeable future simply by pressing a button.’

  ‘At the cost of your own life,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘Quite so,’ the voice said, hardening. ‘That will give the man who takes my place an extra card to play. The President and the Prime Minister and the OAS people will know that we’re not bluffing. There will be more important hostages the next time and damage to more important property than your fancy hotel. All the nuclear bombs and missiles in the world are not going to stop us, Mr. Chambrun. You’d better be persuaded—and persuade the others—to play the game while the stakes are relatively low.’

  ‘And if they decide to take your eight revolutionaries out and face them with a firing squad?’

  ‘Then probably three times as many important people on your side will not be eating breakfast tomorrow morning, Mr. Chambrun. Think about it. I’ll be back to you in a couple of hours. I suggest you bear one thing in mind. We have considered all the alternatives and we know exactly what we will do, whatever you decide.’

  The phone clicked off.

  ‘Checkmate,’ Yardley said in a flat voice.

  Chambrun’s hand wasn’t quite steady as he reached for the cup of Turkish coffee on his desk. ‘I have never known any man who, in a crisis, didn’t overlook something,’ he said.

  ‘What have they overlooked?’ Yardley said.

  ‘I was talking about me, Mr. Yardley,’ Chambrun said. ‘What have I overlooked?’

  I suppose you can live next door to a man, work for him, and not respect him; even hold him in contempt. I lived, you might say, ‘next door’ to Chambrun, spent most of every working day of my life with him and I not only had respect for him, I could say I idolized him—like a kid feels about a loving father. That day, in spite of the dark picture they’d managed to paint, I didn’t really believe Chambrun wouldn’t come up with an answer.

  Sam Yardley had contacted us about an hour ago and I thought his attitude then was slightly hostile. He was CIA, a professional in the world of terrorism and violence. Chambrun, and Jerry Dodd and the rest of us just hotel people. We could tell him where the men’s room was, where a power switch was, and we could monitor phone calls in and out—though it would be better if one of his own people was doing the monitoring. After an hour with Chambrun in his office Yardley, I think, had become a friend. Chambrun had earned his respect and confidence. But was he expecting too much of Chambrun? Was I?

  Something I hadn’t anticipated happened shortly after the man in Twenty-two B hung up on the boss. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, appeared at the office door carrying an armful of newspapers.

  ‘You haven’t wanted to tell us what’s cooking here, Mr. Chambrun,’ Johnny said, ‘but all we have to do is read the extra editions of the newspapers and listen to the radio and TV.’ He put the papers down on Chambrun’s desk.

  It was all there, the story of last night’s raid, the names of the hostages, the demands made by the people holding them. We hadn’t released anything to reporters. The information had to have come from the kidnappers. How had they gotten it out? Every phone call out from Twenty-two B had been listened to by Mrs. Veach and her people at the switchboard. There’d been nothing from there that accounted for this. No one but the guests being evacuated had left the twenty-second floor.

  ‘Is there a reporter you trust, Mark, circulating downstairs?’ Chambrun asked me.

  ‘Jack Wilson, International News,’ I said.

  ‘You know him by sight, Johnny?’ Chambrun asked Thacker.

  ‘No problem,’ Johnny said. ‘There’s an army of reporters waiting at the lobby stairs, waiting to get up to you.’

  ‘Just Wilson. Get him up here on the double. And Johnny—’

  Johnny hesitated at the door.

  ‘I’m sorry to have kept you in the dark so long. We’ve been trying to develop a plan of action. So far, nothing that makes sense.’

  Johnny managed a smile. ‘We trust you, Boss. Although we’ve been itching real bad!’

  ‘I can understand and I’m sorry. We hadn’t expected this.’ Chambrun tapped the stack of newspapers. ‘I want all the heads of departments here in my office in half an hour—you, get Mike Maggio back here—’

  ‘He never left,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Mr. Atterbury from the front desk. McIntosh from engineering, Mrs. Veach from the switchboard, Jack Borglum, maintenance. Anyone who runs any department.’

  ‘Front desk may be a problem,’ Johnny said. ‘Guests are lined up like cordwood trying to check out before we get blown into the East River. Rats deserting the sinking ship.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you leave if you thought a bomb was about to go off?’ Chambrun said.

  Johnny managed a grin. ‘Not till you told me to, Boss. So tell me in time, will you?’ He took off.

  Yardley was scowling at one of the newspapers as he read it. ‘There’s almost more here than I know,’ he said. ‘Details of the demands made to London and Washington, names of the hostages. That includes Raul Ortiz—we were only guessing about him—Hilary Foster, Sheldon Tranter, Sir George Brooks. The threat to blow up the hotel and put you out of business for a long time and kill or hurt God knows how many others. The reporters have been told every damn thing there is to know!’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Chambrun said. ‘The man upstairs knew you were here, talking to me, Yardley.’

  ‘That bothered me, too,’ Yardley said. ‘How could he know that? There’ve been no calls in to Twenty-two B. Nobody could have told them I was here.’

  ‘But somebody did,’ Chambrun said. ‘I wouldn’t expect a man in your job to be surprised, Yardley. You people mess around with all the modern technologies. Some kind of sophisticated walkie-talkie radio that bypasses us? None of what’s happened is spur of the moment. They can have been preparing for a long time.’

  ‘The concert in the park.’

  ‘Just helped them set a date—a time to set their goons loose. I think we have to face an unpleasant fact. There’s someone ambling around the hotel whom we have no reason to suspect—a guest, a regular patron of one of our bars—who had all this information in advance, who can watch every move we make, and has means to communicate with Twenty-two B.’

  ‘So we look for a guy who’s carrying some kind of radio,’ Jerry Dodd said.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Jerry. He won’t be carrying anything that could incriminate him. He watches, sees what’s important, and goes to his radio in an apartment down the block, or another hotel around the corner.’

  ‘Could be someone on your staff,’ Yardley said.

  ‘I’d bet my life against th
at,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘These people have access to staggering sums of money,’ Yardley said. ‘Enough to turn an honest man’s conscience into mush.’

  Chambrun’s face was grim. ‘If that should be true, if someone I trust has sold us out, I’ll go up to Twenty-two B and take the first dive out the window,’ he said.

  ‘You trust your people that much?’ Yardley asked.

  ‘That much,’ Chambrun said.

  Johnny Thacker came back with Jack Wilson, the IN reporter. Johnny must have been right. The reporters were just down the hall at the foot of the mezzanine stairs. Wilson is a sort of young Jack Lemmon type, with a sardonic smile that suggests he finds all the horrors he covers faintly amusing.

  ‘To what do I owe the honor of being chosen from the common herd?’ he asked. ‘The boys and girls downstairs will eat me alive when I go back.’

  ‘Mark trusts you,’ Chambrun said. ‘I need one set of clear answers and not a thousand questions. Are you willing? If not, we’ll pick someone else.’

  ‘I’ll answer what I can,’ Wilson said, ‘if you’ll answer one question for me.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Do you have a plan of action?’

  ‘No,’ Chambrun said.

  Wilson’s eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘You don’t believe they’ll do what they threaten to do?’

  ‘I believe they’ll do what they threaten to do, and more,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘And you have no plan?’

  ‘That’s three questions, Mr. Wilson. Now it’s my turn,’ Chambrun said. He touched the newspapers on his desk. ‘I haven’t read your story, but I suspect they’re all pretty much the same. Where did the information you have come from?’

  ‘The telephone,’ Wilson said.

  ‘You took the call?’