Hostage Tower (16 page)

Sonya looked from face to face. ‘Do you want me to go on? The Channel Islands bank heist? Remember? Hell, he practically hi-jacked Jersey; commandos all over the island.' She started to tick off another, but Ducret intervened. ‘No, Mrs Kolchinsky, that will be enough, thank you. But why have I, any of us, never heard of a man like this? A man who actually lives in a Loire château, and apparently spends enormous sums of money here in my country.'

Philpott explained. ‘He always disguises his identity. I hate to use the phrase, but he is a master of disguise. He can change his appearance so completely that his closest associates will fail to recognize him. Five years ago in Tokyo he appeared as a German: he speaks God knows how many languages. He was a Spaniard in Johannesburg two years back. But the main point about him, which I feel you have yet failed to appreciate, is that: whatever identity he assumes, when Smith issues a demand, it is axiomatic that he will make it as difficult as possible to avoid compliance.'

‘You're saying he will give us no room to manoeuvre,' Ravensberg put in.

‘Exactly,' Philpott replied. ‘Absolutely none. However, we've managed to make some room for ourselves. Gentlemen,' Philpott sighed heavily, ‘there is no time for me to extract promises from you not to broadcast around what I'm going to tell you, so I'll take it on trust that you won't. My organization, UNACO, has planted two agents in Smith's team on the Eiffel Tower.'

The response was gratifying, although muted by the realization that, as Philpott said, ‘Whatever advantage it gives us, we can't capitalize on it for the moment, because we're out of touch with our people. So, not to gloss over the matter, we still know damn-all about what's going on up there.' He pointed out of the window at the tower.

Mike Graham looked keenly at the group gathered around him in the kitchen. Sabrina's special talent made her the leader; the other three commandos were make-weight, but would obey orders. A plan of the tower lay before them on the table, held down incongruously by four bulky explosive charges.

Graham's finger jabbed at the plan. ‘Here, here, here and here – the stress points. That's where I calculate the tower is at its weakest – the fulcrums, so to speak. Hit them – and whoompf.' He spread his hands wide, palm downwards. ‘No more Eiffel Tower.'

‘At each point?' Sabrina asked. ‘A full charge?'

Mike nodded. ‘Uh-huh. A twenty-five pounder.' He picked up a detonator from a steel box. ‘And one of these. This is a radioactivated detonator. It's completely safe until activated by a radio signal. But once the command to arm has been delivered, it cannot be countermanded. However long the fuse duration is – that's the time you've got to get clear. If you can.'

As it happened two of the commandos weren't even good ballast; they were scared stiff of heights. Tote contemptuously elbowed one out of the way and roughly hauled the other from the harness perched on the gallery rail. He took the quaking man's place, jumped down the side of the tower, and fitted two charges of moulded explosive. Sabrina and the third commando did the others.
Like Tote, she scorned the use of the restraining harness.

She worked, as always, quickly and with a seemingly inborn skill, swinging surely out on the angled iron struts, taping the rolls of pliable greyish-pink plastique into the girder-beds, and pressing home the detonators. At the end of it, the bombs, mocking the innocence of their classroom plasticine substance, sat snugly like sinister bird's nests in the branches of the tower.

Sabrina flashed the uneasy commando above her a grateful smile. He may be scared, she thought, but at least he's competent. The commando offered her a hand to help her up, but she waved it impatiently away. ‘Look after yourself,' she instructed, ‘you're in more danger than I am.'

The man shrugged, and balanced nonchalantly astride a cross-beam intended to take him to the safety of the spiral staircase. He lunged for the guard rail – and missed. His scream rang out on the air as he swivelled on the beam and tried to hook his legs around it.

The iron cut into the backs of his knees, and the pain reflexes straightened his legs. With a second wild, throaty cry, he fell from the beam. His body cannoned off an angle strut, and passed Sabrina close enough for her to feel the wind of its passage and the agony of his despair.

She anchored herself securely to an upright, and shot out a rigid arm and hand to grasp his own flailing fingers. It fastened on his hand, nails
digging into the flesh, the grip moving to enclose his wrist like an iron band. The wrench on her corded muscles as she took the full strain of his body almost dislocated her shoulder, but she gasped with the numbing pain and gritted her teeth, trying to control the ugly rasp of the breath forced from her heaving chest.

Tote, from the opposite side of the tower, shouted, ‘Hang on! Hold him!' What, Sabrina thought wildly, does he think I'm trying to do?

‘Get your feet on a girder!' she screamed, as the squirming man on the end of her arm kicked aimlessly out into space. Even Sabrina's strength was fast giving out, and she knew it would be a matter only of seconds before she must release him or join him in his death fall.

‘For Christ's sake, I can't hold you!' she yelled. The girder she was clinging to bit into her muscles and sent waves of pain coursing through her body. Her fingers started to slip from the ironwork, her toes curled to ease the intolerable pressure, and she felt herself bowing and slumping down the beam. A sobbing moan of terror and frustration escaped from her clenched teeth.

Then it was over. The tension relaxed so suddenly as Tote, from below, swung across to catch the commando in a crushing hug, that Sabrina almost let go of the upright. She caught herself in time, and her body snapped back to embrace the girder, spacing her legs and arms
away from the metal edges that were denting and ridging her flesh.

She heaved herself gratefully up to the gallery, and lay on the floor, blinking back tears of relief, and at last breathing deeply and evenly. Tote dumped the commando unceremoniously next to her. She turned to the man. ‘You all right?' she whispered. Dumbly, he nodded. ‘Yeah, thanks,' he replied. Then he gasped and retched as Tote's booted foot caught him in the side.

‘I'll say you're all right,' the Finn growled. ‘You one lucky sonofabitch, your hear me, man? Me, I'd have dropped you. You hear that?' He kicked the commando again. The man grunted and coughed a spray of blood.

‘Worse t'ing you do,' Tote continued remorselessly, ‘is you nearly kill her. You, we can do without. She's worth ten of you – a hundred. You hear? I ever see you again, I kick you off the – tower myself.'

Beneath the tower, the area was all bustle and activity. The Larousse trucks formed a circle like settler's wagons against marauding Indians. Inside the enclosure, Claude and C.W. led a team unspooling massive lengths of cable from a truck, and transporting them to an underground chamber.

They clamped the cables on to the tower's main power line. Other members of the crew brought in several small cartons, which they stacked against the wall as company for a couple of beer tanks.

As before, the cable-linking was a nerve-racking
job, and when it was done, C.W. stepped back from the bench and mopped the sweat from his brow. He looked for a freshener, and his eye fell on the beer tanks. He loped over to them, hunkered down, put his mouth under the spigot, and turned the valve.

Nothing came from the nozzle but the hiss of compressed air. ‘Jeeze,' C.W. complained, ‘there's an awful lot of bubbles in your beer, Claude.' Claude whipped round and barked, ‘Don't touch that. If you want a drink, wait until you get upstairs.'

C.W. rose to his feet and shrugged. The drink he could do without … but the knowledge that at least some of Smith's beer tanks were filled with oxygen might come in handy.

Not for the first time, the black man cudgelled his agile brain for some way of getting the priceless information he had off the tower and into Philpott's hands. Here, in the basement, on the ground, he was so close to safety. All he had to do was cut and run. Except, he thought ruefully, that Claude would blast his head off before he'd taken half a dozen steps …

The activity at the Interior Ministry was more controlled now. Philpott and Ducret kept useless talk down to the minimum, and concentrated on getting the best scientific and military advice on how to deal with the lasers.

At one stage it seemed as if they might have
achieved a break-through, when a tall, gangling, humourless French boffin came up with a startingly obvious solution.

‘The guns operate on light-beams,' he explained earnestly, ‘so all you have to do is reflect the – how you say? – death ray back at the Lap-Laser.'

Philpott leapt to his feet. ‘Mirrors, by God!' he exploded. ‘That's it! Big mirrors! Catch the beam, and bend it back. Why didn't we think of that before?'

He set the scientific team to work, but they mournfully reported half an hour later that if the angle of refraction wasn't absolutely correct, the bouncing beam could shear off large sections of the Eiffel Tower and miss the lasers altogether.

‘Can't you fix the angle of refraction and keep it fixed?' Philpott pleaded, desperately. ‘When you're running with a damned great looking-glass?' the tall boffin moaned. ‘Or when all they have to do is alter the angle of the laser anyway, and you're in even deeper trouble than before?'

Philpott reluctantly conceded defeat. He scowled when Ravensberg, in some trepidation, reported that both Capitol Hill and the Élysée Palace wanted action – fast. ‘Tell 'em they'll get it when I think fit, and not before,' Philpott snarled. ‘Tell Washington I'll save Mrs Wheeler even if I have to pay Smith his thirty million bucks. Tell Paris I'll save their money even if I have to endanger Mrs Wheeler's life. Above all, make it clear that I'm in command.
Tell anyone you meet that I can be a real bastard if I'm crossed.'

Ducret glanced across at him sympathetically. ‘You appreciate what's happening, my friend,' he ventured. ‘Only too well,' Philpott replied, ‘but tell me, anyway.'

Ducret studied his exquisitely tidy hands. ‘From the French viewpoint,' he said, ‘our President is delighted that you're in command, as you say, because you are an American, and if you fail it will be an American failure. If one girder of the Eiffel Tower falls, you and your country will be held to account. If one American dollar passes from our Treasury to Mister Smith, it will be your fault, not ours.'

Philpott nodded, gloomily. ‘It's the same on my side,' he admitted. ‘Should anything happen to the President's mother, I have no doubt whatsoever that, despite my long-standing friendship with Warren Wheeler, my department will close down virtually overnight. I shall be lucky if I can get a job teaching woodwork in a ghetto junior school.'

‘What will you do, then?'

‘Politically? Play one off against the other until I get
what I want. When you're part of the United Nations, Ducret, you get used to walking on razor-blades. With me, it's a way of life. But I normally do get what I want.'

‘And what is that?'

‘Smith,' Philpott replied unhesitatingly. ‘That's what I want – Smith. I want to take him out, Ducret. And by God I will.'

‘You're willing to stake your department, your career, on it?' Ducret inquired.

‘I am. Perhaps even my life.'

Ducret sighed. ‘Then I can only hope that the decisions you make in the next few hours are the right ones.'

Philpott grinned. ‘Or that I can persuade Giscard and Wheeler that they're the right ones,' he mused.

So the scheming and counter-scheming went on, and the hot line between the two Presidents, Warren G. Wheeler and Valéry Giscard D'Estaing, buzzed with traffic. Eventually, they were compelled to consider paying Smith off, though neither realized that they had been cunningly manipulated to this conclusion by Malcolm G. Philpott.

Marcel Le Grain, the Finance Minister, was called into the conference room. ‘Let me make my position quite clear from the outset,' the burly, pugnacious ex-Rugby football forward stated. ‘If you give in to this bandit, I shall resign and take the key of the Treasury with me.

‘You cannot, and you must not, encourage the forces of anarchy that threaten the very foundation of our economic well-being. I say we grind this Monsieur Smith into the ground like an insect.' He demonstrated by gouging his heel deeply into the carpet. Ducret winced, and added,
‘Splendid, Marcel. And of course, none of us will overlook the fact that, apart from anything else, it is also election year.'

Philpott chuckled, and Le Grain was about to frame a barbed response when an aide tactfully buttonholed Ducret and pointed to the TV screen. ‘Our newest star is about to go nova again,' he said.

They clustered around the set. Smith graciously allowed a commercial to wind up, then removed RTF from service and brought in the tower.

He looked grim. ‘It is now,' he announced, ‘1 p.m. If the thirty million dollars I have requested is not in my hands within twelve hours, I and my associates will leave the tower – under the protection of our laser-guns. Shortly thereafter, four simultaneous explosions will reduce the Eiffel Tower to a scrap heap.

‘I am sure,' Smith continued, ‘that you would not wish that to happen. I am equally convinced that President Wheeler will not relish the thought that his mother will be in the tower when it goes up – because she will not, I regret to say, be accompanying us.'

Smith allowed a few moments for the information to sink in, then produced an emotive trump card. ‘But why not let the lady speak for herself?' he suggested. The camera panned slowly to the left. Adela Wheeler sat at Smith's side.

‘Do you expect me to plead for you, Mister Smith? Or for my life?' she demanded, bitingly.