Captors

by Farris, John

  "What about Metts?" Sam said, looking around at him. "He knows as much about your business as you do."

  The General knocked back another half ounce of Southern Comfort; staring at Sam, his eyes unfriendly. "Vernon Metts has been with me for twenty-six years; I've trusted him with my life more than once. Kidnap my granddaughter? He's a rich man in his own right." He laughed, studying the FBI agent. "It could be a dissatisfied customer, wanting to get his money back. But I don't have dissatisfied customers."

  "Still, it's worth looking into," Gaffney said, refusing to be baited.

  "I've sold dozens of lots in the past year," the General replied. "All transactions are a matter of record. The CIA might help you with your paperwork, but I won't." He grinned, relishing his jibe; Gaffney allowed himself a trace of a smile.

  Sam said wrathfully, "Let's keep our minds on Carol!"

  "When they call, the money will be ready," the General said, somewhat subdued by Sam's tone. He mopped his steamy face with a handkerchief.

  "When they call." Sam turned to the FBI man, trying unsuccessfully not to look dismayed. "How long do you think that will be?"

  "Assuming the kidnappers have planned this thoroughly, I doubt they'll try to get in touch before noon tomorrow. They would want to—soften you up, and they'd know that General Morse's bank would need time to fill an order for a two-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-dollar package of used fifties and twenties."

  "They must have been planning this for weeks."

  "That would be a safe bet."

  "Carol's only been home for two weeks."

  "So I understand. Unless one of the kidnappers knows your family well, chances are that when they began to plan it, Kevin was the intended victim."

  "Kevin?" Sam said, shocked again.

  "But when your stepdaughter came home from college they might have changed their plans. Kevin is a good-size boy, and looks even bigger than he actually is. The kidnappers couldn't be certain how much trouble he'd give them. A girl is usually much easier to handle."

  Sam felt that he needed air. He went to the windows which looked out on the spacious west lawn. In the moonlight the white trunks of birches were sharply, gracefully drawn against the night sky. He took off his glasses and began to wipe moisture from the lenses. There was no wind, which accounted for the unusual humidity. The warm air smelled faintly of honeysuckle. He heard the sounds of the hungry setter wolfing its meal, and he heard Felice crooning in an undertone to the dog.

  "How about a drink, Sam?" the General suggested. "It'll be a long wait."

  "Not now, thanks."

  "Mr. Holland, your wife said you could give us the name of the village in Ireland where Joseph and Mattie Dowd are visiting."

  Sam said automatically, "It's a little place in County Wexford; I wrote the name down and put it in my—" He turned slowly away from the windows, staring at the agent, his lips pressed irritably together. "What do you want with the Dowds? You can't think they know anything about this!"

  "They may, without realizing it. Something they might have observed during the past few weeks, seemingly harmless in itself, could be useful to us now."

  "That's farfetched. I don't see why you have to bother them. They've been with Felice eighteen years, and this trip to Ireland is the first real vacation they've had. Once they know about Carol it'll be ruined for them."

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Holland. I can't afford to overlook any possibilities."

  Sam reluctantly took out his wallet and found the right slip of paper after a search. "Village of Saint Clare."

  Gaffney asked him to spell it, then rose and left the kitchen. The dog was making a peculiar, unnerving sound. Sam and the General looked at each other, and both realized at the same tithe that it wasn't Riggs at all.

  Sam found his wife on her knees on the dark porch, arms folded tightly across her breasts, weeping.

  "I don't know, Sam," Felice sobbed as he helped her up. "I don't know. I'm trying to keep my mind off it. But what if they—what if C-Carol—"

  "All they want is money; she'll be all right. They'll let her go."

  "Oh, Sam, oh, God, I want to believe that!"

  "Better take her up to bed, Sam," the General muttered.

  "I intend to."

  Felice broke away from him. "Oh, no, Sam," she protested, her voice strained, "I have to stay up, they're going to call and—"

  "According to Gaffney they probably won't call before noon tomorrow. He knows about these things."

  Felice looked at him in disappointment and frustration, her tan a gray-yellow shade in the underlighted brick kitchen. She shook her head slowly, tears streaming. "Not until n-noon? Oh, I can't—I don't think I—"

  She began to shake with sobs. Sam put both arms around her; this time Felice didn't resist. He guided her up the crooked low-ceilinged back stairs to the second floor, then along the hall to her bedroom. Once she had wept she barely could keep her eyes open. In the bathroom they shared, Sam ran water into a glass, found the prescription Seconals they both took occasionally and gave one to Felice, to ensure that she slept. Then he helped her undress. When he pulled the sheet over her bare breasts, Felice gripped one of his wrists with a strength that surprised him, looked mutely out at him as if from a tunnel, eyes sore but dry.

  "Stay with me, Sam."

  "I'll be right back," he promised. "Before you fall asleep." He kissed her lips, which were swollen from biting.

  "I wish—after this—I wish the two of us could just get away, to some place we've never been. I'd be—so happy to meet you again, Sam Holland."

  He smiled at her passion for their own lives, eyes stinging, and he was still smiling when her eyelids closed and she drifted away, her breathing becoming deep. After a couple of minutes Felice's fingers loosened on his wrist, and Sam placed her hand at her side.

  He closed the bathroom door three-quarters of the way but left the light on within, thinking there was a chance she might wake up—or be awakened by one of the nightmares which she had taken with her to bed.

  After turning the window air-conditioner on low, Sam went out. He paused a minute to look in on Kevin, who was sleeping restless and brawny in his shorts, which were unbuttoned and revealed a tentative light smudge of pubic hair. The bedclothes were in a tangle and half on the floor. Sam couldn't help staring at the shadowed length of Kevin; for him it was like seeing a stranger in a well-loved little boy's bed. He thought of kidnappers trailing Kevin, sizing him up. What if they had tried to take him and had been clumsy, or careless? Kevin would have fought tenaciously, Sam was sure of that. He had taught his stepson a few useful things about self-defense. Kevin would have fought until he was unconscious, or dead.

  There was an obstruction in his throat which Sam couldn't force away. He went slowly downstairs to the kitchen, feeling prematurely bereaved, helpless. The kitchen was empty now. On the back porch, Riggs barked sharply once, then grumbled and settled back to sleep. The General's smeared glass was empty too, sitting in the brassy gleam of light from the fixture above the captain's table.

  Lieutenant Demilia made a sound in his throat as he came up behind Sam.

  "Is everything all right?"

  "Yes, my wife's asleep. I gave her a Seconal. Where's the General?"

  "He went home after an argument with Gaffney."

  "What were they arguing about?"

  There was amusement in Demilia's soft eyes. "Procedure, I believe. The General has threatened to conduct his own investigation." Sam said grimly, "I think I'd better have a talk with General Morse before morning."

  "I wouldn't worry; it's his way of expressing anxiety. He wants to be doing something. We'll think of a way to keep him occupied."

  "Do you know anything about Gaffney?"

  "We've worked with him on a couple of other matters. He's good. At your wife's suggestion we've set our equipment in the library, Mr. Holland. You may have some questions."

  Sam led the way to the library, which adjoined the living room in t
he one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house. Sam did most of his writing in this paneled and oak-beamed room. The furnishings were antiques, mostly English, and there were good paintings on the walls: a Rouault, a Soutine, a Pollock, two bold works by the Spaniard known as Hipólito.

  The investigators were using a folding game table in one corner. As Sam walked in Gaffney finished testing one of their two tape recorders, which were built into standard attaché cases.

  "The recorders are voice-activated," Gaffney explained. "As soon as you or your wife answers the telephone—it can be any phone in the house, by the way, not just this one—everything said will go down on tape. This gadget is an ordinary voice amplifier, which will enable our people in the room to hear both ends of the conversation. And they needn't pick up the receiver of the telephone in order to hear." He smiled. "Wonders of the electronic age."

  Demilia said, "It's possible these days to be in Washington and listen to conversations in, say, San Francisco, just by dialing a telephone number. The telephone in San Francisco doesn't ring, which isn't much of a trick when you know how to do it. But every word spoken in that room is subsequently transmitted, over telephone lines, back to Washington."

  "That's one of the things about the police—and the FBI—that really frightens me," Sam remarked, an edge to his voice. He went to the bar, installed in a sideboard, to make himself a badly needed drink.

  "We have the technical means of doing this, Mr. Holland," Gaffney said, and Sam could imagine the look he gave Demilia—Remember who you're talking to. "But we don't do it."

  "Of course not," Sam said, glumly and almost inaudibly; he didn't want a public-relations job done on him at this particular moment. Nor did he want the investigators to feel they had to be careful of every word said in his presence, because he was a journalist who had been critical in the past of certain FBI practices.

  He turned his head and smiled, willing to be friends. "I suppose you can't have hard liquor on the job, but there's cold beer if you want it."

  Demilia looked parched and susceptible, but both men shook their heads. "I'll go ahead then," Sam said, selecting a bottle of Beefeater gin and taking ice cubes from the compact refrigerator fitted into the sideboard. "How will the recordings help you?" he asked Gaffney.

  "They may be useful in providing, by means of a voice print, positive identification of one of the kidnappers. Also, if the call should be placed from a pay phone, we may pick up background noises—sounds of construction, for instance, or a train—that could give us a fix on the location of the telephone."

  "I see. What happens when they call? Can you trace it?"

  "Possibly. But they should know enough to limit their call to sixty seconds. There's no way the telephone-company technicians can make even a partial trace in that length of time."

  "We'll have to keep our man talking, then."

  "That's a must, if it can be done without arousing suspicion."

  "They'll be suspicious of everything," Sam said, feeling hot and miserable. The window air-conditioner in the library didn't seem to be functioning properly. He turned it up as high as it would go. "I suppose the kidnappers will arrange for a drop. Isn't that what you call it? Will you try to pick up the man who comes for the money?"

  "No," Gaffney said. "It wouldn't be worth the risk to Carol. There's no point in trying to tell you now just what we'll do. That depends on the situation from moment to moment." He was testing the other tape recorder. Two, in case one failed at a critical time, Sam thought. Although he partially resented Gaffney's evasion about their plans, he was aware that the agent had complete confidence in himself and in his routine. Sam wished he could share in that confidence.

  When Gaffney completed his test of the tape recorder he lifted the receiver of a telephone on the other side of the card table. "Direct line to Chief Demkus's office," he explained to Sam. Then, as someone came on the line, "This is Gaffney. We've finished setting up here. What did the phone company have to say about—Good. Anything of interest from the girl's car? I didn't think there would be. Yes? As well as could be expected. I'll be sure to tell him, Chief. Good-bye."

  Gaffney hung up. "The chief wanted you to know that everything conceivable is being done, and he personally guarantees you'll have Carol back soon." Sam smiled wryly. "He'll stop by in the morning to see you and Mrs. Holland. Oh, and Carol's car is at the State Police building just south of Hawthorne Circle. General Morse drove it well out of the area for us, just in case somebody was watching to see what happened to it. Might be a good idea if you brought it home yourself tomorrow." Gaffney suppressed a yawn. "I wouldn't mind having another glass of that cold buttermilk your wife served earlier," he said.

  "Right. Lieutenant Demilia?"

  "I'm a city boy myself. But I'd appreciate a Coke."

  Gaffney accompanied Sam to the kitchen. As their long shadows fell across the porch, Riggs, uneasy in his sleep, growled. "I understand the General gave you a hard time," Sam said, opening one of the doors of the restaurant-size refrigerator.

  "Not really. He asked sharp questions; there was some give-and-take. He wanted to be convinced I knew my job. Just as you want to be convinced, Mr. Holland."

  Sam gave the agent a glass of buttermilk, then poured a Coke over ice. Gaffney leaned against the captain's table and admired the handmade cabinetry, a wealth of old glass displayed in a glass-front cabinet, the gleam of copper on antique brick and the spacious hearth where log fires on cold winter mornings were a ritual.

  "Fine old house. Well-preserved. Have you lived here long?"

  "We bought it five years ago, when it became available. Before that it was in one family for over a hundred years. Felice had been lusting after this house since she was a girl. Felice and her mother summered next door while the General was off fighting his wars."

  "Do you find it difficult living so close to your father-in-law?" the FBI man asked, wiping at a childlike moustache of buttermilk with his handkerchief.

  Sam was well aware of what was coming but he said, sardonically, "It might be less difficult if the six acres between us were an impenetrable swamp. But there's no swamp, so when he's not halfway around the world on business he's here, keeping things running smoothly for us. That's what he thinks. As you've become aware, he's a dominating old bastard. If Joe and Mattie Dowd weren't the most patient people on earth—I guess they feel sorry for him. He's alone over there, except when Vernon Metts flies in from Europe; the General is too suspicious to have live-in help on his place. And he despises restaurant food. If Mattie didn't feed him from our cupboard, like a stray dog, I suppose he'd have starved to death long ago."

  Gaffney grinned. "So the two of you don't get along."

  "We keep up a pretense; it's easier on everybody's nerves."

  "You differ politically, I take it."

  Sam said, "We're fundamentally different, like apes and alligators. The General has been out of the Service for nearly twenty-five years, but he's still very much the professional soldier—mercenary is a better word. He has no morals. He's made a fortune promoting competition between backward nations eager for the latest in small arms. Battles have been fought and people have died because of the General's activities. The Bureau must have a dossier on him half a foot thick."

  Gaffney said without hesitation, "We have several dossiers that thick."

  "So you watch him closely."

  "General Morse is a legitimate businessman who operates, with Washington's consent, in a sensitive area. Justice always keeps an eye on him; his business is on a cash basis so of course the tax boys have him in perpetual audit. He's scrupulous about permits and documentation. He doesn't deal in stolen weapons or military explosives. It isn't the dramatic, hazardous business he hints at: clandestine meetings, running guns into a deserted beach before dawn, all that. The truth is he's succeeded because he's aggressive, shrewd, a pitchman; and he can figure profit margins like a CPA."

  Sam said, "I'm convinced that what anyone sees of his business is
what he wants them to see. But we won't get into that. I tend to be a fanatic on the subject of arms dealers." He hesitated, his expression crushingly remote. Then he smiled sadly.

  "I'm curious, what sort of file does the FBI have on me?"

  Gaffney chuckled. "I know you've been arrested a couple of times during peace demonstrations. I don't think that's worth much space in our files."

  "The General wouldn't agree. As far as he's concerned, I'm a damned nihilist." Sam looked dourly amused. "That's what he calls me, five minutes after we set out to have a serious discussion on any topic. In public the most the General will allow, with a very thin smile, is that I have 'strange politics.'" Sam shook his head in accustomed bemusement. "Would you believe that ten years ago I was a perfectly ordinary Liberal Democrat?"

  "I can't imagine. What got into you?"

  "Well, I think it was exposure to the General and his views as well as the trend of the times, that changed this benign boy into the contentious radical he is today. Now, when the General is really in his cups and annoyed with me, he comes out with his ultimate epithet: I'm a 'spaghetti-brained Marxist.' You don't know how vile that can sound until you hear it from Henry Phelan Morse himself."

  Gaffney smiled and said, "I would expect that your wife hates politics."

  "We find other things to quarrel about. Bridge. French cooking. Vladimir Nabokov. Carol is going to be the politician in the family—" Sam's voice trailed and he glanced at his watch. It was now past three in the morning.

  "The General told me you and your wife are considering a divorce," Gaffney said, completing the change of mood.

  Sam said with undisguised annoyance, "There won't be any divorce, although of course the General would be delighted. Felice hardly saw him while she was growing up, but lately he's rediscovered his 'little girl.' I guess he's going through some crisis of identity I don't know anything about. Or else he's just getting sentimental and possessive in his old age." Sam shrugged. "I don't know why I let the old boy irritate me. Apes and alligators. The last couple of years I've spent more and more time away from home. Too many speaking engagements, too many causes I couldn't turn down. Felice couldn't go everywhere I went; she would have been bored if she had. So we lost touch emotionally, as married people often do. Felice is not a woman to settle for a figurehead husband. I've told her that my marriage means a great deal to me. I think I've begun to prove it, by cutting my schedule drastically. I'd say we just need time to—bum around together. Mend our ties."