Hostage Tower (25 page)

Although Smith kept his body and skills in trim, he rarely had to use them in earnest. Smith fought like he fenced – elegantly, correctly, as a gentleman should, obeying the rules.

Mike Graham was no gentleman. For him, the rule book didn't exist.

Graham started to close, looking over-confident. Smith took half a pace back, as if in fear – then whipped his lithe body forward and down, his knife arm shooting out, the blade as rigid as a natural extension of his hand, striking straight and true for Graham's heart.

But Mike's whole move had been a feint to trap Smith into a committed lunge. He leaned his torso to the right like a bullfighter, and lashed out his foot at Smith's leading leg.

The kick caught Smith right on target – just below the kneecap. He hardly had time to squeal with pain when the second heel kick landed in his groin. Two inches to the left and he would have been Miss Smith.

He was still in a half-crouch, and Graham closed again. Well supported now on his left leg, he
brought his right knee in and uppercut Smith on the point of his smoothly shaven chin.

The blow loosened four of Smith's bottom teeth, and shook his individual vertebrae to a point half way down his back. His head swam, his eyes shot out of focus, and Graham jerked his unresisting knife-arm.

Mike caught the wrist in a cruel grip with his left hand, and locked his right arm around Smith's in a twisting judo hold. Smith winced and squealed again, and the knife left his unclenched fingers to clatter on the deck.

Graham beat him to the dagger, and turned on Smith with ugly triumph in his eyes. But Smith had scampered away. He headed for the wheel-house, jumped on a barrel, and vaulted up to the roof of the Bateau Mouche.

Mike followed him by another route, and was facing him on the flat, scoured planks before Smith could take any preventative stance. They measured each other, shivering inside their wet-suits, panting and angry. Smith conceded that Graham was more than a match for him in a dirty fight; he also conceded that there was no way Mike was going to fight cleanly.

He judged that Graham could very easily use the knife on him, with little provocation. He decided to compromise by talking his way out of trouble. Smith had done that more than once; his natural bent for treachery made conversation, for him, almost as deadly a weapon as a knife or a sword.

His decision was influenced by a sound that was music to his ears: the hum of an approaching helicopter. It was low at first, though unmistakable. Now it rose in intensity.

‘Well, Graham,' Smith began, ‘so the day goes to you. Congratulations.'

Mike ignored him.

‘I imagine you also put my laser-guns out of commission?'

Graham shook his head, and said ‘No.'

Smith raised his eyebrows. ‘Whitlock?' he enquired.

Again, Mike replied, ‘No.'

‘Then who?'

Graham smiled. ‘Sabrina Carver. At least, I told her to.'

Smith's face clouded. ‘She was in it, too,' he mused. ‘A pity. I rather liked her. I was contemplating offering her a – mmm – position, in my organization. How fortunate that I resisted the temptation.'

Graham nodded. Smith rubbed his aching jaw. The noise of the helicopter grew louder.

Smith said. ‘She and C.W. are with Philpott, I imagine.'

‘Indeed,' Mike remarked.

Smith raised his voice and suggested a division of the spoils. ‘Is that what you have in mind, Mike?' he asked. ‘Surely it must be, now that you have the whip hand.'

Graham shook his head, slowly but decisively.

‘Money on this scale doesn't attract you?' Smith queried acidly.

Graham said. ‘It's not what I want, Smith.'

‘And what do you want? Me?'

Mike looked steadily at him. The helicopter seemed to be circling overhead now, but Graham was concentrating his whole attention on Smith.

‘Libya,' he shouted, ‘four years ago. Remember? You sold Russian weapons to a group of crazy terrorists. You
couldn't
forget that, Smith, could you?'

Smith inclined his head superciliously. ‘It strikes,' he admitted, ‘a familiar note.'

‘A CIA agent was on to you,' Mike persisted. ‘You booby-trapped his car. Do you remember that, Smith?'

The other man shrugged. ‘It's all in the game. Sometimes one has to order retaliatory actions which one finds personally distasteful.'

‘Distasteful!' Graham echoed. ‘Yes, it was. Because, you see, you didn't kill the CIA man. You killed his wife. She was pregnant, with their only child.'

The sneer left Smith's face. He swallowed, though it was difficult for him. ‘
Your
… wife?' he ventured.

Mike nodded. His hate-filled eyes were slits now, his muscles bunched, his teeth bared. ‘And since then, Smith,' he snarled, ‘there hasn't been one second of any day or night that I haven't been on your trail.'

He started forward, the knife held before him, glinting ominously, the instrument of his revenge.

‘For you, Mister Smith,' he hissed, ‘it's the end of the line.'

Suddenly they were bathed in light from the helicopter, coming down out of the night sky like a stone. Mike looked up, and was blinded by the dazzling beam. Smith shielded his eyes, dived for the side of the roof, and snatched up a heavy iron boat-hook.

Mike recovered, and whirled to face him again. Smith hurled the boat-hook at him, and it smashed into the side of Graham's head. Mike staggered and fell to one knee, then slumped to the floor. His knife flew from his hand, skidded along the wet planks – and slipped over the edge into the Seine.

The helicopter pilot waved at Smith, and made an urgent motion of summons with his hand. From the side of the machine, a winch-operated cable dropped to the wheelhouse roof and landed with a clang. Smith ran to it, and dragged it down with him to the main deck of the Bateau Mouche. He wrenched open the hatch-cover of a small hold, and hooked the cable to a metal ring at the end of his trio of ransom bags.

Smith pulled frantically on the rope, and the winch brought the garish blue sausages up into the chopper's belly.

Mike Graham started to come round, lurching
painfully to his feet, as the cable and hook descended once more.

Smith grabbed the hook with both hands, and yanked it twice. He gave a fierce yell of exult ation as he left the deck.

Graham's desperate shout followed Smith's on the wind. Mike launched a furious charge that took him in one jarring bound on to the deck below and, without pausing, into a flying leap for Smith's trailing foot.

His hand grasped Smith's ankle, fingers digging into the bone. The other hand came up and found the toe-cap of a sensible brogue.

Smith hacked savagely with his free foot at Graham's hands, crunching down on unprotected fingers time and time again with shocking force.

Mike felt the flesh torn from his hands, and his last sensation before he slipped despairingly into the river was the ‘snap' of his little finger breaking.

Smith chanted ‘Come on! Faster! Faster!' as the helicopter zoomed away and he drew nearer to its welcoming embrace.

Graham came up for the second time, and lashed the water in ungovernable fury when he saw the man he hated disappear into the 'plane that would take him to freedom.

Smith clamped his hands on the landing skids, and pulled himself into the chopper's hold. Other hands reached to help him, to guide him safely
away from the sliding door, and to shut it behind him.

The exhausted man staggered across the helicopter and collapsed over his king's ransom for the hostage tower.

He rested his face on the wet, cold rubber, and tears of joy and relief started from his eyes. He pressed his lips to the blue bag, tasting its substance, smelling its brackish scent.

He had done it! He had won! The perfect crime, fashioned at the hands of the perfect criminal. The feeling that coursed through his body was almost orgasmic.

He was invincible! The Great Khan of crime, the most audacious adventurer in history!

No one could halt his relentless progress – nobody could stand against him. Not governments, nor agencies, nor armies. There was nothing – nothing – he could not achieve.

He was the indomitable, unconquerable criminal colossus of the world!

‘Welcome aboard, Mister Smith,' Malcolm Philpott said from the co-pilot's seat. ‘We've been expecting you.'

Smith's head turned slowly in the direction of the voice. His eyes rested on the man who had spoken, and on the woman crouching beside him.

He panned along the whole length of the helicopter. Three grinning paras rocked on their heels in the swaying plane, machine-guns pointed at his head and heart.

He sighed and looked back at the man in the co-pilot's seat.

Mister Smith smiled, fleetingly and resignedly, and said, ‘Touché, Mr Philpott. Touché.'

In a stunted butt-end of street between the Avenue Émile Deschamel and the Allé Adriènne Lecouvreur is a restaurant infinitely more salubrious than ‘La Chatte qui siffle'. On the day after Smith was taken into the unfriendly custody of the French police (and a traditionalist Examining Magistrate), Malcolm Philpott hosted a luncheon party for six – himself and Sonya Kolchinsky, C. W. and Sabrina, Mike Graham, and Commissioner Poupon.

On the way to the restaurant, Sonya had insisted on taking group photographs twice – against the backdrop of the middle pavilion dome at the École Militaire (where, as Poupon pointed out, Napoleon himself had been a cadet) and again by the equestrian statue of the Marne hero, Maréchal Joffre. They were in a mood to do full justice to a Lucullan meal, washed down with château wine at forty dollars a bottle.

Throughout the lunch, Philpott had deliberately
kept the conversation light. He did not favour post mortems, and he was adept at steering the talk away from himself, Sonya, and UNACO. Philpott rightly considered that the less anyone knew about his organization – even his own agents – the better for the future of the department.

He was genuinely but shyly pleased to see a relationship growing between Graham and Sabrina. Mike's injured hands were still strapped and bandaged, and Sabrina carefully cut the Châteaubriand she was sharing with him into manageable pieces, and even speared the odd segment of meat for him, greatly to his embarrassment.

C.W., seated next to Sabrina, amused himself by eavesdropping on Graham's attempts to persuade her to take a brief holiday with him in the South of France. Mike owned a hillside villa near Carcassonne, in Languedoc, and he spent a great deal of time extolling its virtues of beauty and solitude.

C.W. had observed the two of them easing naturally together on the tower. He knew a little of Graham's background, and much of Sabrina's, and he was not quite cynical enough not to hope that they'd make it.

‘I'll think about it, Mike,' Sabrina said. ‘I have a lot I want to do just at the moment, and I may take a raincheck on it … but really I would love to come.'

‘Nothing of these things you wish to do is of a criminal nature, I trust,' Philpott teased.

‘Why of course not, sir,' she replied, fluttering her thick eye-lashes at him. ‘How could you even suggest such a thing?'

‘How indeed?' Philpott rejoined.

Graham coughed expertly to wean the subject away from crime. ‘There wouldn't, of course,' he insisted, ‘be any strings. You'd be absolutely free to do anything you liked, with anyone you liked.'

‘Of course,' she assented.

‘Hon,' C.W. leered, ‘if you believe that, you'd believe anything, as the Duke of Wellington said.' Sabrina blushed, and Graham turned a look of mock fury on the sardonic black.

C.W. winked at him and said, ‘Only kidding, Mike. But it seemed to me from the way you described the place that there just wouldn't be anyone else within a hundred or so miles of it except good ole' Mike Graham. Huh?'

It was Philpott's turn to cough, not as expertly as Graham, but well enough. ‘Now I have a toast,' he announced. ‘To all of us, for an operation well done. We may not have been on top all the time, but by George we sure caught up in the end.'

They drank, and Philpott added, ‘And a special toast to you, Mike. It would have been impossible without you. You have our grateful thanks.'

Mike flushed and said, ‘Aw, shucks,' and Philpott got in quickly. ‘If you ever consider rejoining the Intelligence community, Mike, you might contact me. I think you'd find UNACO a little less, shall we say, orthodox than the CIA.'

‘Sure thing,' C.W. supplemented, ‘unorthodox is the word. What do you say, Mike?'

Mike hesitated, and Sabrina laid her hand over his and said, ‘We did work well together, didn't we?'

Graham looked at each of the UNACO people in turn, his gaze resting longest on Sabrina. ‘Well,' he replied slowly, ‘as someone once said to me when I invited her on an idyllic holiday in the South of France … I'll think about it.'

Philpott beamed and said, ‘Any time, Mike. You'll be welcome any time.' He then excused himself from the coffee and liqueurs. ‘There's something I have to do,' he explained to Sonya. ‘It's a kind of tidying-up. A few loose ends, you know. Just for the record – and your files. I'll see you back at the Ritz: and don't forget we're painting the Moulin Rouge red tonight.'

‘Think they'd mind a little black as well?' C.W. enquired innocently.

Lorenz van Beck had two hours to kill. But being a peaceable man, he decided to spend them more profitably.

This time he chose the Musée d'Art Moderne in the Avenue du President Wilson, and the Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries, Place de la Concorde, both for their superb modern French art. On reflection, he threw in the Centre Culturel Georges Pompidou, on the valid assumption that any construction of such an outré design would be unlikely to have provided for maximum security.