Time of Terror

by Hugh Pentecost

  “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.”

  “But don’t we have to risk it?” Treadway asked. “We get ready to break in as soon as Mark has delivered the money and hope we get to the timing device before it sets off the explosives.”

  Brand seemed to be lost somewhere else. “One way or another, timing is everything,” he said. “This is what I had in mind.” He pointed at the blueprint with a yellow pencil. “The suite—Fifteen A—and the room next to it where the detonator is located are on the outside of the north wing—the east side looking toward the river. Across the street is an apartment building. The roof of that building comes just level with your fifteenth floor. The windows to the room where the detonator is located are here.” He drew a circle on the blueprint. “Snipers on that roof, armed with rifles with telescopic sights, can see the man at the detonator as clearly as if they were just across the hall. He can’t be just sitting there with a hand poised over a button hour after hour. He must light a cigarette, or get up and walk around the room to stretch his muscles, or involve himself with eating or drinking something. Maybe they change men. There has to be a moment when someone isn’t poised directly over that detonator. When that moment comes, we open fire. Meanwhile we have men ready on the fire stairs outside the fifteenth-floor corridor. The moment the men on the roof open fire, we charge in. Properly timed, we get to the detonator before they can replace their dead man. We hopefully get to the children, in the confusion, before they do.” He turned away from the blueprint. “I like this better than waiting to play it Coriander’s way. His way the timing is his, he supplies the surprises. This way the timing is ours, the surprise element ours.”

  I liked it better, too. It didn’t involve me!

  “Your snipers are that good, Brand?” Treadway asked.

  “With telescopic sights they can hit a dime at two hundred yards,” Brand said. “We can drill that sonofabitch at the detonator right in the eye.”

  “How do you coordinate with the men on the fire stairs?” Jim Priest asked.

  “Coriander’s friend isn’t the only man with walkie-talkie equipment,” Brand said. “From the moment the shots are fired to the moment we reach the detonator is a matter, literally, of seconds.”

  “How long will it take you to get set up?” Chambrun asked.

  Brand glanced at his wrist watch. “Let’s say an hour—just before noon.”

  “They’ll be ordering something from Room Service, I’d guess, between twelve and one. They may be thrown off guard a little by the arrival of food. When the waiters are gone—” Chambrun was concerned for his people.

  Brand looked around at all of us. Somebody was supposed to say “go.”

  Chambrun said it.

  Chapter 3

  GUS BRAND WAS NOT a careless planner. I had a chance to watch him at work for a few minutes before I got an assignment from him that made me a part of what he referred to as his “game plan.” It was, in effect, a military operation and I’ve seen men in charge of an attack in my time. Once the decision is made to “go,” nothing matters except getting from point A to point B, losing as few men as possible in the process. Casualties are numbers and not human beings.

  Gus Brand was something else again. He hated the gamble he was taking. He was genuinely concerned for the safety of innocent people, and particularly the safety of Elizabeth and Mariella Cleaves and Katherine Horn. Their lives depended on a kind of split-second efficiency.

  People with rooms in the north wing on the sixteenth and fourteenth floors were to be kept away for the period of time between noon and the time when an “all clear” could be sounded. This in case Coriander’s big explosion couldn’t be prevented.

  “We are guessing, without any proof, that Cleaves is the person on the outside who’s making contact with Coriander,” Brand said. Chambrun’s office was the headquarters for the “game plan” and the cops and officials and our staff were waiting for instructions. “But for all we know there are others, God knows how many. That means we’ve got to get our men into position without anyone guessing what we’re up to. I can’t march twenty armed men through the lobby wearing bulletproof vests and attack helmets. We’d have a panic that way and the word gets to Coriander.”

  “Freight elevator,” Chambrun said. “Your men can come in the service entrance, one or two at a time. You’ve got an hour to get them all into position.”

  Brand located the service entrance and the freight elevator on the blueprint. “That should do,” he said. “There’s no problem getting my sharpshooters on the roof of the adjoining building.” He picked up one of the phones on Chambrun’s desk and dialed an in-house number. He obviously had a man or men at a command post somewhere else in the hotel. “Plan A,” he said in his quiet voice. He had worked out his scheme long before he proposed it to us. He glanced at his wrist watch. “The time now is eleven-O-six. Ready to move in exactly one hour. We’ll hold then, however, if an order has been placed with Room Service and is in the process of being delivered. You will send in the attack squad through the service entrance and use the freight elevator. Say, two men at a time. Hold a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at Jerry Dodd. “Do those men have to go through the kitchen area in full view of the staff there?”

  “Kitchen area can be shut off,” Jerry said. “The only persons who can’t be avoided are the chief engineer and his assistant.”

  “You can have someone there to show our men the way, and make sure your engineer and his man aren’t talking to someone on a walkie-talkie?”

  “I’ll cover it myself,” Jerry said.

  “Fine—with one of my men,” Brand said. “I don’t want a single step of the way covered by anyone outside my command. I’m going to have to take the rap if anything goes wrong.” He smiled very faintly. “And the credit if it works.” He turned back to the phone. “Dodd, the hotel security man, will meet you outside the hotel at the service entrance in five minutes?” He raised a questioning eyebrow to Jerry, who nodded and started out of the office. Brand put down the phone. “There are other angles to be covered.” He fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “The joint is swarming with newspaper and media reporters. Every damned one of them is like a detective on the case. Anything that arouses the least suspicion will have them on our tails like a pack of bloodhounds.”

  “That should be easy,” Chambrun said. “You haven’t held your press conference yet this morning, have you, Mark?” I indicated no. “Well, call it for twelve o’clock. They all know you’ve been up to see Coriander. They’re panting for that story. You should be able to keep them occupied in that special dining room for as long as is necessary.”

  I picked up the phone and called my office. I ordered the girls there to spread the word I’d meet with reporters at noon. That would be a nice, comfortable place to be when the shooting started.

  “Finally,” Brand said when I’d hung up, “not one word of this must leak to Cleaves, or Buck Ames, or Mrs. Cleaves.” The tinted glasses turned my way. “I know you have a genuine sympathy for the lady, Haskell. But it will be easier for her to keep a secret she doesn’t know than one she does. She might talk to her father no matter what promises you extract from her. I haven’t written off Ames as Coriander’s outside contact. Mrs. Cleaves must think we’re trying to meet Coriander’s demand for money and a safe flight to Cuba.”

  “I don’t think she’d be reassure
d by what we are doing,” I said. “Seriously, how much chance do the kids have?”

  Brand glanced down at the blueprint. “It’s about forty feet from the door of the fire stairs to Fifteen A, fifty to the door of 1507. If we knock out the man at the detonator, we should have no problem there. But the minute Coriander hears shooting, he’ll know what’s up. If he turns on the girls then—” He let it ride there.

  “No one’s going to open doors for you, you know,” Chambrun said. “We can supply you with master keys, but there are inside chain locks. It’s going to take time to break into any locked room.”

  “I have two men armed with bazookas,” Brand said. “We’ll blow those doors open in seconds. The children are down a corridor in the bedroom here.” He pointed at the blueprint. “They’ll be safe from the break-in. If Coriander isn’t with the kids when it happens, we have a very good chance.”

  “If—for God sake,” I said. Those brave little girls were very vivid to me.

  “This plan or any other, the gamble is a big one, Mark,” Chambrun said. “This way we can hope that surprise is working our way. The girls have almost no chance in an open shoot-out on the way to a plane and Cuba.”

  “Or left behind to be blown to pieces by a timed explosion,” Brand said. “It makes me ill just to think about it, but I’m certain this gives them their best chance—maybe the only one.”

  I wasn’t protesting from strength, just a kind of sick anxiety for the children and for what the end result might do to Connie. You could talk and argue about it, but in less than an hour it would be NOW! A few agonizing minutes in time, no turning back, no second guessing, no alternatives once it began. All or nothing.

  Feeling queasy and weak-kneed I went down the hall to my apartment. Somehow I had to see Connie, to bolster her courage without telling her what was really cooking.

  Connie and Miss Ruysdale were sitting on the couch together, coffee, untouched and cold, on the table in front of them. Ruysdale had evidently busied herself trying to put the living room into some kind of order again. Connie looked at me from behind the black glasses, her lips parted in an unspoken question.