Time of Terror (6 page)

There it was, out in the open.

“Well, I assumed—” I said, or something equally senseless.

“Don’t assume anything about Terrence and me, Mark.” Suddenly she was hanging onto me, her face buried against my shoulder, her whole body shaken by a struggle against tears. “Can you imagine such a situation—a situation where Liz and Mariella are in the hands of—of a bloody killer—and their parents can’t comfort each other or help each other?”

“Why not?” I asked.

She pulled back from me and lifted her eyes. “Because,” she said in a kind of intense whisper, “we loathe each other.”

It was not the moment to go into it with her, and she helped make that clear by walking away from me and taking a little tour of the apartment. I showed her where the coffeepot was—and the liquor—and the clean towels.

“I’ve got to get moving,” I said. “If there’s anything you need, call my office. It’s just next door. And I promise you, if there’s any news from upstairs, good or bad, you’ll have it the minute after we do.”

She was standing beside me near the door, and she reached up and kissed me on the cheek—just a friendly kiss. The subtle scent of her perfume, the closeness of her, tempted me to take my mind off the problems at hand. Some other time, Dad, I told myself. Some other goddamned time.

I
WENT DOWN THE
hall to my office, where I found all hell was cooking. There had been a normal schedule of events planned for the day—normal for the Beaumont. There was to have been a luncheon in one of the private dining rooms for a group of United Nations diplomats; a special film showing in our small theater on the second floor North for some big shots in the movie and television world; a lecture in the grand ballroom by Harley Latham, the newest evangelical creep, whose theory was that prayer and positive thinking would not only make you money but supply you with a passport through the heavenly gates; the reading of a new play in one of the private dining rooms by a cast of actors, the playwright, and the director for a group of potential backers or angels; a very private and secret showing of next spring’s fashions designed by Audrey Spector, more secret than the plans for the next Middle East war. Someone representing each one of these groups was clamoring for the word from me. Must their meetings be postponed? Would it be safe to go ahead? Everyone wanted to ask the same question at the same time. Just to make things simpler, there were half a dozen people from the press and the media, including the scholarly looking Mr. Colin Andrews, who didn’t believe that Terrence Cleaves had three good friends.

I tried to make a general statement that would satisfy everyone. There was no danger on the lower floors of the Beaumont, no reason to postpone.

“What about the pickets outside the hotel?” someone asked.

I didn’t know anything about any pickets. Andrews, a faintly bitter smile moving his mouth at the corners, told me what was cooking.

“Release South Vietnam’s political victims,” he said.

Colonel Coriander was way ahead of us, I thought. There hadn’t been time to organize this kind of group in the short time since the news had broken. Coriander had had them ready well in advance. The Army For Justice was for real.

I explained that I had nothing new to tell anyone. Chambrun was satisfied that all the special events could go forward without any danger. People began to drift away. They didn’t want to cancel unless it was absolutely necessary. The four girls in my office were all on phones. Hundreds of inquiries were coming through the switchboard and being channeled here.

Colin Andrews of the
London Times
showed no inclination to leave.

“I’d like to talk to you privately,” he said.

“There’s nothing new,” I said.

“Not as a reporter for the
Times,”
he said. “It’s just possible I might be useful.”

Instinct told me he wasn’t conning me. I took him into my private office.

“Like two minutes,” I told him.

He sat down in the chair beside my desk and lit a cigarette, very carefully, as though it was a scientific experiment.

“Only two minutes to save a human life?” he asked.

“What human life?”

“I should have said ‘lives,’” he said. “Katie and the children.”

He had a nickname for the sultry Katherine Horn. “So you’re another hero,” I said.

“Another?” he asked, frowning.

“Douglas Horween,” I said. “The spy who came out of the woodwork.” I knew I shouldn’t have said it the minute it slipped out. If Horween was to try anything, it had to be a secret. And, come to think of it, how did I know that Mr. Colin Andrews wasn’t a member of the Army For Justice, working for Coriander on the outside?

“What’s his plan?” Andrews asked. His eyes were unblinking behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

“Just big talk—maybe to reassure Mrs. Cleaves,” I said.

“Poor Connie,” he said.

A friend of the family, I thought. I’d already talked too much, so I glanced at my watch to let him know his two minutes was running out. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Do you know what an investigative reporter is?” he asked.

His British accent, rather pleasant, very precise, made him sound patronizing. “I don’t have time for word games,” I said.

“I want to make the point that I’m not here in the United States on any sort of general assignment,” he said. “I’m in the process of preparing some material that will be an expose of people in very high places in England’s politics.”

“Don’t tell me there’s a new call-girl scandal,” I said.

“Nothing so amusing,” he said. “The story I’m working on is going to blow the lid off in a very big way. I can’t talk about it in any detail, but in view of what’s happening here I think someone should be made aware of certain facts. It’s my feeling that your Mr. Chambrun is the man who would know how to use those facts.”

“Your time is about up, Mr. Andrews,” I said.

He took a deep drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out in a long sigh. “So I will give you facts,” he said. “The Right Honorable Terrence Cleaves is supposed to be a very wealthy man. The fact is that he’s on the verge of colossal bankruptcy. It will be one of the great financial scandals of our time. At this moment, for his own purposes, Terrence Cleaves couldn’t raise a shilling to make a telephone call.”

“That makes it rough for him,” I said.

“To hell with him,” Andrews said. “The children are the ones who matter. The fact is that Terrence Cleaves needs to raise a huge sum of money to cover his tracks and keep from spending the rest of his life in prison.”

“And now he has to raise a second huge sum of money to save his children,” I said.

He looked at me, unblinking, from behind his faintly tinted glasses. “Think of the possibilities,” he said. “He needs to raise millions of pounds to save himself from disgrace and disaster—prison for the rest of his natural life. No one will lend him the money. He has no security left to guarantee a loan of any sort. His property in England is mortgaged to the hilt. Now he has to raise money to ransom his children, and for this, and under the circumstances, he may find people, even governments, willing to help him.”

“But that money, if he can raise it, will go to Coriander and his army,” I said.

“Quite so,” Andrews said. “You’re not quite as quick on the trigger as I’d hoped you might be, Haskell.”

I felt my jaw going slack. “Are you suggesting that Cleaves kidnapped his own children? That he is Coriander?”

“One thing is certain,” Andrews said. “Cleaves isn’t the one-armed man in the fright wig and mask who told you he was Coriander. Cleaves was at the United Nations while that was going on. I know, because I was covering the meeting of the General Assembly when he got the word from Chambrun. Your Coriander was someone else. But ‘Coriander’ isn’t anyone’s real name. Cleaves isn’t in this alone, obviously. But fifty million dollars leaves a nice little packet for everyone.”

“You’re dreaming,” I said.

“How were guns and ammunition and explosives smuggled into Cleaves’s suite? They couldn’t have been brought in overnight by some outside group. They would have been seen by your security people. I suggest they were brought in by Cleaves and his people over a period of time—a box here, a suitcase there. No one would have been suspicious of Cleaves or his people.”

“What people?”

“Horween, three male clerks, Katie,” Andrews said.

“You’re suggesting Miss Horn is in on this?”

“Why not?” Andrews said. His voice was bitter. “He’s been screwing her for months.”

I leaned back in my chair because I felt weak. “Is that gossip or a fact?”

“Fact,” he said. “She was my girl, God help me. She wangled a job taking care of the Cleaves girls so she could get information for me on the inside. Instead of that she wound up in bed with him.”

“So you hate him for that,” I said.

“I hate him for that,” Andrews said, his voice flat and hard. “But I’m out to get him because I think of myself as a decent British subject and this man is planning to sell out his country in order to recoup his private losses.”

“So don’t hold back your story. Come out in the open with it,” I said. “The children aren’t in danger if they’ve been kidnapped by their own father.”

“You don’t know Terrence Cleaves,” Andrews said. He ground out his cigarette in the ash tray beside his chair. “I can’t prove my theory—yet—that he is the big man behind all this, the real Coriander. If I hinted at it in public, I don’t think he’d stop at anything to get the money and escape to some sanctuary. He doesn’t give a damn for the children, or for Connie. If I blast him publicly, I’d have to live the rest of my bloody life with whatever he does to the girls or his wife or to Katie on my conscience.”

“And what do you expect Chambrun to do?”

“Check out on the sketch I’ve drawn for you,” Andrews said. “He has top-level contacts all over the world. He’ll come across other people who have doubts and suspicions about Terrence Cleaves.”

“Suppose he does. What can he do about it? He can’t risk the lives of those children and Miss Horn, or the guests in his hotel, or the hotel itself. He’s handcuffed. Everybody is handcuffed. So we all sit around and chew on your little bit of gossip and wait for the negotiations with Coriander to begin. We can’t act on anything, even if you’re right about Cleaves. Tell me something, will you?”

“If I can.”

“Is it Cleaves’s affair with your Miss Horn that has wrecked his marriage to Connie?”

“His affair with Katie and God knows how many others,” Andrews said.

“Why does she stay with him?” I asked. “The children?”

“I doubt that,” he said, as though it was something he’d thought about before. “If she walked out on him, the courts would surely give her custody of the children. Cleaves’s woman chasing is one thing that’s public knowledge. I think he’s got some other kind of hold on her. I’ve tried to dig out what it might be, but I’ve had no luck.”

I stood up. “I’ll pass along your story to Chambrun,” I said.

He didn’t move. It was as if the telling of his story had exhausted him. “You saw Katie when you had your session with Coriander?” he asked.

“I saw her. She seemed quite cool.”

He brought his hand down hard on the arm of his chair. “Why not?” he said, his voice harsh. “She knows she’s in no danger!”

Mr. James Priest from the State Department was in Chambrun’s office when I got back there. I knew him, slightly, as a frequent guest at the Beaumont. He always stayed with us when he came to New York, quite often on United Nations business. He was a big, easy-going man, who made you feel comfortable with a quick humor and a sense of relaxed control of himself and complete self-confidence in his ability to handle his specialty, diplomatic maneuvering. You had the feeling he was thoroughly familiar with every highway and byway and side street and cul-de-sac in his business.

He was relaxed in one of Chambrun’s big green leather armchairs, a pipe held between his strong white teeth, the light from the north windows shining on his sun-tanned bald head. He gave me a little wave of a hand as I came in.

“It looks as though this Coriander fellow has taken over your job, Mark,” he said. “He seems to be keeping the press informed. I just walked through the picket lines and the crowds out on the street.”

“He’s certainly well organized,” I said. I glanced at Chambrun, who was sipping his inevitable Turkish coffee. “Things are pretty well under control,” I told him. “We haven’t had a single cancellation of any special events.”

“Jim would like to hear a detailed account of your visit with Coriander,” Chambrun said. “It seems there are no records in any official departments—the FBI, the CIA, anywhere else—of an Army For Justice. It could almost have been invented for this purpose.”

“Those pickets outside the hotel didn’t just grow like Topsy,” I said. “They were ready the minute Coriander let the news out.”

Priest nodded, puffing gently on his pipe. “This Army can have been in existence for some time,” he said. “The reason there are no reports or records on them is that this is the first time they’ve made any sort of public display. They’ve undoubtedly been preparing for the big one and keeping under cover so that there was no chance we could anticipate them. Tell me about Coriander, Mark.”

“Before I do that I’d like to pass on a theory that’s just been given to me,” I said. “Do you know of an English newspaperman named Colin Andrews, Mr. Priest?”

“Oh, yes,” Priest said. “One of the top political reporters in his country.”

“He’s for real?”

“Very much for real,” Priest said. “British politicos keep their fingers well out of the cookie jar when Andrews is on the horizon. He has a very keen nose for secret shenanigans.”

“You remember him?” I said to Chambrun. “He’s the one who suggested Cleaves didn’t have three friends. Well, he’s got another theory about Cleaves.”

I gave it to them from top to bottom. Neither one of them spoke till I had finished. They were a couple of dead-pan artists, those two.

Chambrun looked at Priest, an eyebrow raised, when I’d finished. That look was a question.