Time of Terror (21 page)

It wasn’t until sometime afterwards that I knew what happened in Chambrun’s office. Chambrun and Brand and Priest and the others waited, and presently one of Brand’s men checked with him. I’d made it onto the fifteenth floor.

After a while Buck Ames exploded. “What the hell do we do, just sit here and wait for that bastard to phone us from Kalamazoo?”

Chambrun glanced at his watch. “I think we might as well go up and release the hostages,” he said.

Brand stared at him. “We’re to wait till he phones.”

“He won’t phone,” Chambrun said. “He really doesn’t expect us to wait very long.”

“You can’t risk it,” Cleaves said. “The girls—”

“Coriander is gone,” Chambrun said. His eyes were so bright, Brand told me afterwards, that he had to look away. “Gone forever.”

“Impossible,” Brand said.

“Not only possible but accomplished,” Chambrun said. “I think it will be quite safe to go up and in.”

“And pull the trigger on the bombs!” Cleaves said.

“There won’t be any explosion,” Chambrun said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I finally know the only way Coriander could ‘walk away,’” Chambrun said.

If I’d known that Chambrun and Brand were planning to invade the fifteenth floor, I might just have quietly passed out. I hadn’t a doubt in my mind that Coriander had left things set up so that the place would be blown up to hell and gone if anyone tried to attack.

It wasn’t, I learned later, anything like an attack. Chambrun commandeered an elevator, and over the protests of Cleaves and Buck Ames, and accompanied by Gus Brand, who had apparently decided to put himself in Chambrun’s hands, and Jerry Dodd, who would have walked into the lion’s den if Chambrun had asked it, they went directly to 15.

Chambrun suggested that Brand let his men in from the stairway. No need to bother looking for a trip wire, Chambrun assured the FBI man. Brand looked anyway, found nothing, and the men from Mars came in off the fire stairs, guns at the ready.

“Find that detonator!” Brand ordered. “Search every room on this floor.”

Chambrun walked casually down the hall to the door of 15 A, unlocked it with a pass key, and walked in.

I nearly fainted when I saw him. Brand was just behind him along with two men in attack helmets waving guns. Chambrun came over to me, smiling.

“This is going to hurt a little,” he said, and ripped the adhesive off my mouth before I realized what he was talking about.

“Coriander phoned you so soon?”

“No phone call,” Chambrun said, working on my wrists and ankles.

“You took a chance on the bombs exploding?”

“Not really a chance,” Chambrun said. “There. Stand up and stretch your legs.”

“The children!” I said.

We found them two rooms down the hall along with Katherine Horn. They were trussed up the same way I’d been. Chambrun and I got them free. The two girls were laughing and crying. Katherine Horn looked as if she’d lived through some kind of nightmare.

But the big surprise happened a moment later. Two of the armed FBI agents came into the room where we were with the children, and walking between them, a stubble of red beard shadowing his face, was Douglas Horween, supposedly dead. He was wearing a sports shirt, a pair of summer-weight slacks that looked slept in, and loafers on his feet.

“I thought you’d never come,” he said to us, “and most of the time I hoped you wouldn’t. That bastard was crazy enough to blow us all to hell. I’ve been tied up down the hall since yesterday.”

“He told us he’d killed you,” Brand said. “We had the clothes you were wearing when you came up here posing as a waiter. Your blood was apparently on them.”

Horween rolled back a shirt sleeve. “They carved me up to get that blood,” he said, revealing a deep cut on his arm. “He wanted you to be sure he meant business. I imagined he had another plan for me later if he came to a showdown. Have you got him?”

We didn’t have him. We had his false face and the fright wig and the red bathrobe, all discarded in a room—1511—where the detonator was now placed. The detonator wasn’t hooked up to anything. Captain Valentine and his bomb experts were gathering up the explosive charges all along the hallway and in the rooms. Coriander was gone. The two stocking-masked men were gone. The two suitcases and the attaché case that had well over four million dollars were in 1511, empty. Horween and the two girls and Miss Horn and I had been the only people left on the fifteenth floor when Chambrun and Brand and the men from Mars had come in. Brand was in a state. Nobody had left the fifteenth floor by the fire stairs or by the elevators in the north and west wings, or by the freight elevators. But three men were gone, plus heavy luggage that couldn’t be concealed.

Horween requested permission to go to 1507, which had been his room before Coriander took over. He’d like to get clean clothes, a shower, a shave. Brand was sorry. No one was to go into any of the rooms until the entire fifteenth floor was dusted for fingerprints from one end to the other.

“As I recall, you have clothes in a locker in the waiters’ quarters at Room Service,” Chambrun said. “Mark or I can supply you with a shower and shaving equipment.”

“Of course, I’d forgotten,” Horween said.

“Coriander must have stripped you naked,” Chambrun said. “He sent us everything you were wearing as Fritz Schindler.”

“Naked as the day I was born,” Horween said with a bitter smile. “They got me these things out of my room.”

“After drawing blood to fool us,” Chambrun said.

“After that, yes,” Horween said. “I—I owe you an apology, Chambrun. I damn near got myself killed by not obeying your orders.”

“I’m sure Mr. Brand has a lot of questions to ask all of you,” Chambrun said, looking around at the girls and Katherine Horn. “I’m sure the children’s parents and their grandfather are beside themselves at this moment. I suggest we join them in my office.”

The reunion of the children with their parents and old Buck Ames was a moving thing to watch—Connie, on her knees, hugging and kissing them both; Cleaves, standing at a distance, his face working, waiting his turn to welcome them home; Buck Ames, pounding anyone who came near him on the back, announcing this was the happiest goddam moment of his whole life. Horween retired to the boss’s dressing room after being greeted with surprise and relief. A waiter from Room Service delivered the clothes he’d left there.

Jerry Dodd had come down from Fifteen with Chambrun. I’d gone down first with the kids and Katherine Horn. Jerry looked grimly content about something. Evidently Chambrun had told him something that none of the rest of us knew.

Finally, just as Horween was emerging from the dressing room, shaved, wearing clean clothes, his bright red hair damp from a shower, Brand rejoined us. He was an angry man.

“All right, Mr. Chambrun, I’ve followed your lead up to now,” he said. “Now I want explanations. Nobody left the fifteenth floor, but three men are gone. Three men, the contents of two heavy suitcases, and an attaché case.”

“Have you counted noses?” Chambrun asked. He was sitting at his desk, the cat who’d swallowed the canary, lighting a cigarette as Miss Ruysdale brought him a cup of his beloved Turkish coffee.

“What noses? What do you mean, counted noses?”

“Do you know how many men you had wearing those bulky vests and attack helmets?”

“Twenty on the north side, ten more on the west side,” Brand said.

“I suggest that in the confusion they were augmented by at least two men, dressed exactly like them, who eventually left Fifteen without anyone questioning them. They were probably a little fatter than the others because they had four million dollars in money hidden under those bulletproof vests. Walked out, as I told you they would. You’ll find the vests and the attack helmets discarded in a broom closet somewhere.”

“You knew it was going to happen and you let it happen right under our noses?” Brand said, his voice shaken with anger.

“I wasn’t particularly interested in those two men,” Chambrun said. “To have tried to stop them would have cost us lives. I was only really concerned about Coriander and the money. The money had to be passed to someone who could, when the excitement is all over, carry it out in luggage. Carried out by one of Coriander’s outside contacts.”

I found myself looking at Cleaves, the Coldstream Guardsman. God knows he had needed money.

“I suppose you know who that outside contact is?” Brand said.

“I’ll make a guess—a little later,” Chambrun said. He looked at Horween. “I find myself fascinated by your extraordinary red hair, Mr. Horween. As a child were you ever, by any chance, called ‘Carrot Top’?”

Horween grinned. “My father’s pet name for me,” he said. “How did you know?”

“I looked up the word ‘coriander’ in the dictionary,” Chambrun said. “‘A plant of the carrot family, with a strong-smelling seedlike fruit used in flavoring foods and in medications.’ Shall we stop playing games?”

“Games?” Horween’s eyes had narrowed and his face suddenly looked marble-hard.

“An expert at disguises,” Chambrun said, sipping at his coffee. “I don’t think you intended to run off with the money to some country from which you couldn’t be extradited. I think you meant to spend it here, in your own world, and to live happily ever after with the lady of your choice.”

“I simply don’t know what you’re talking about,” Horween said.

“Colonel Coriander—Carrot Top,” Chambrun said. “Interesting how we go back to childhood associations when we start to play charades.”

“Are you suggesting,” Horween asked in a low voice, “that I am Coriander?”

“I’m not suggesting it; I know it,” Chambrun said. “If I had been wrong, I would be dead at this moment, and so would the children and Miss Horn and you and God knows how many of Brand’s men.” He glanced at Brand. “There was no way out, my friend. You proved that to your own satisfaction. But there had to be a way out. Horween, a master of disguise, becomes Fritz Schindler, a room service waiter, and disobeys our orders. He goes up with food and drink for Fifteen A. Why? Because he had to get up there to command the operation. You see, he had an alibi for when the kidnapping took place. He was with Mr. Cleaves at the United Nations. That seemed to prove he wasn’t the kidnapper. So now he must join his collaborators who are holding the children and Miss Horn. Fritz Schindler had access. Horween took his place and got where he had to be. The case of Horween is closed when we get Schindler’s bloodied clothes.”

“But,” I said in a very small voice. “But I first talked to Coriander while Horween was still with Cleaves at the U.N.”

“You talked to a man in a false face, with a fright wig and an empty sleeve. Ten different men could have assumed that outrageous disguise and they would have all seemed like one and the same man. The first Coriander you talked to was not Horween. The other times it was.”

“I think I’ve had about enough of this nonsense,” Horween said. He started for the office door.

“Not just yet, friend,” Brand said. He was blocking the way. “What made you sure Coriander was Horween, Chambrun?”

“You have to believe what you know to be facts,” Chambrun said. “We knew that no one had gone up to Fifteen or left it except the room service waiters, Horween disguised as one of them, and Mark. No one else had come or gone. Fact. You very efficiently covered every possible avenue of escape. No way out. Fact. But there had to be a way out. So the only way was after a break-in by your men. Fact. So there wouldn’t be an explosion because Coriander was still on the fifteenth floor. So it was safe to go in. Some of the people in Coriander’s group would mingle with the attack squad. They’d know how your men would be equipped because that kind of business has been Horween’s profession. But Horween wouldn’t leave that way, because he wants to live openly and publicly in his world with a tidy fortune, even after he splits with his helpers, to provide all the luxuries of life. So, I reasoned, Coriander would be found—with a story to tell of how he, too, had been a hostage. He would walk away with us. Now he couldn’t walk out into the open unless he had an ironclad alibi for the kidnapping. So it had to be Horween. Fact. Enough fact, Mr. Brand?”

“Not quite,” Brand said. “We have a murder that wasn’t a fake on our hands. We have an accomplice who was in this office when we gave Mark instructions before his third visit to Fifteen A. We have a lot of double talk about something Mrs. Cleaves had on her husband, and something Cleaves had on Buck Ames.”

Chambrun smiled at him. “I would have to guess about the double talk,” he said. “Maybe the time has come for Mr. Cleaves to come clean with us. But as to the accomplice, I don’t have to guess. Jerry?”

Jerry Dodd held out his hand. In it was a small transistor type walkie-talkie gadget. “While Mrs. Cleaves was getting her children, I took this out of her handbag,” he said.

Connie! I couldn’t believe it. I looked at her where she was sitting with the children huddled close to her. I saw her snatch at the handbag on the table beside her and open it. The black glasses hid most of her expression except for her mouth, which had become a straight, hard slit.

“Mrs. Cleaves also went into the dressing room at the time when someone had to have been in touch with Coriander,” Chambrun said.

“Baby! Oh, my God,” Buck Ames said.

What happened then was too fast and too startling for anyone to anticipate. Connie stood up and she took something out of her bag and tossed it to Horween. It was a very serviceable-looking Police Special. Horween covered us with it.

“All right, love,” he said. “You wait for me in the outer office. Don’t move, any of you. I am a notoriously good shot with this kind of weapon, and at this distance I can make holes right between your eyes. I think to guarantee our safe departure I will take you, Miss Ruysdale, as a hostage and a shield. Everyone seems so fond of you. I’m sure Mr. Chambrun wouldn’t want you hurt. Step over in front of me, please, pausing on the way to relieve Mr. Brand of his gun.” It was Coriander’s mocking voice coming out of Horween’s mouth.

“Stay where you are, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said. He got up from his desk and started to move toward Horween.