Hostage Tower

For C.W., home was always the haven, not of peace, but of resentment; an island of poverty and bitterness in a sea of plenty. Above all, it was the place where his racism (and C.W. would accept that he qualified as a black racist) was nurtured. His youth had been the time of the awakening of black race consciousness, and that false dawn had a magnetic attraction for him. He did not actively loathe whites, but he was deeply afraid of them; and fear, he decided, was a more powerful emotion altogether than hate.

Only later, when he was beginning to establish himself to an unarguable degree, did C.W. discover that his fear of whites had turned to cautious regard, and then to grudging awareness, and finally to acceptance of them as a necessary aspect of his society. For without them, who would be the negro’s negro? The Jew, perhaps? Polacks? Spics? Dagos? Wops?

Juvenile crime was a way of life for C.W. Whitlock before any alternative path had even been considered. And when, as he grew older, the question arose in his mind of a career, the choice – as it had been for Sabrina Carver – was easy.

For apart from a cool head crowning his lithe body, C.W. possessed one priceless accomplishment: he could climb anything, by day or night, any structure that he had ever been asked to climb, or been forced to. Some in his vicious circle of cronies dubbed him ‘Monkey’, and quickly learned that C.W. did not take kindly to nick-names. Later he secretly revelled in being known to the American Underworld as ‘The Black Spider-man’: that, he felt, was a fitting tribute to an impressive talent.

But in the early days, he concentrated on going from strength to strength – or, more properly, from height to height. He devised ever more complex and daring pathways to robbery, and his gangster acquaintances were not surprised when he quickly outgrew his need for the basic talents of thuggery which were the limits of their collective repertoire.

He kept one friend, and occasional accomplice, Pawnee Michaels, a full-blooded black Red Indian, for God’s sake. He went through Vietnam with Pawnee, and they travelled the road of crime together. But Pawnee was a liability, and knew it. Unadept and clumsy, he tried one day his own caper. C.W watched him fall from the City Bank in Trenton, New Jersey, and turned away because there could be no percentage in claiming what was left of the poor, smashed body.

Since then, he had worked alone. Like Sabrina Carver, he migrated to New York, where the buildings were taller and more challenging. Again like her, he fenced through Lorenz van Beck …

C.W. leapt the light-beams and glided between the statues, betraying no sign of his presence.

He landed on his toes by the central plinth, and froze, controlling his body, steeling his reactions. Then he plunged both hands into the cat’s-cradle of light, and seized the T’ang horse.

The infernal clangour of the alarms cut through the quiet of the building like a bolt of lightning. The security chief jerked awake and smashed the clock from his bedside table. He swore and reached for the telephone.

The lobby guards raced efficiently through their drill, the one haring for the elevator, and the other double-locking the front doors, then returning to bring down the three unused elevators. When they reached the ground floor, they would be immobilized.

He gazed hypnotically as the floor indicator of the occupied lift raced up to thirty-eight. The phone rang. He palmed the receiver and said ‘Check. Check. Right.’ Then he slammed it back on its rest, and crossed to where the three remaining elevators were settling, their doors opening in sequence.

The guard snapped off the operating switches to all three, and grinned. The bastard was trapped. Wherever he was hiding, he could not leave the building.

His security chief paused long enough to drag on his underpants, for he normally slept only in his gun. His apartment was immediately below the exhibition suite, and he made the stairwell in seven seconds.

There was no one on the stairs, either way. Nobody could have been quick enough to get clear, so the guy had still to be up there.

Security chief and guard entered the suite simultaneously from different doors, and came within an ace of killing each other. But they were professionals, with quicksilver reactions.

The chief muttered ‘Shit!’ when he saw the empty podium of the T’ang Flying Horse, and his guard shouted ‘There!’ as he spotted the big hole in the window.

They sprinted over to it, stuck their heads out, and looked down. Down was where the thief must be, should have been … but wasn’t. The security floodlights had been activated by the alarms, and the whole front of the building was clearly visible. They doubted whether even a fly could pass unnoticed on the glass palace.

So it must be up. And both men fired at the trundling gondola, which even now was within a few yards of the top.

‘Get the roof!’ the chief yelled. ‘I’ll send Tommy up, and make sure the police chopper’s airborne.’ He leaned and fired again, and saw the bullets hit the metal frame, but could not be sure that they had penetrated.

C.W. flattened himself against the side of the gondola, and felt it judder to a halt as it reached the end of its track. He had been counting the bullets, and there was still the last of an estimated six to come. But he could delay his flight no longer.

He threw his body frantically upwards, and his questing fingers closed on the rough granite parapet which topped the building. Through the thin fabric of his gloves, he felt tiny chips of stone digging into his finger-tips. His toes clamped on to the smooth surface of the facade like limpets. The last shot came, and ploughed into the granite an inch away from his left hand. Two fingernails split as he tensed his whole frame in mental and physical anguish.

The little cradle bucked under his feet. He gulped another lungful of air and made a last supreme effort to haul himself over the parapet. With a throat-wrenching grunt, he landed on the roof, and raced for the wooden shed housing the head of the ventilation shaft and air-conditioning central station. He knew it could be only a matter of seconds before the security guards got someone up there to seek him out, and he had much to do.

He tore open the parcel he had stowed there a week before, and quickly assembled the contraption that would take him to freedom. As he strapped on the harness, he permitted himself the briefest of sardonic grins. There was no earthly doubt that he would make it, given a lucky break, a few more seconds, now … given that, he was safe.

For C. W. Whitlock was one of the world’s great experts at hang-gliding.

He climbed on to the perch that was to be his launch-pad into thin air: the cover of the ventilation shaft. At that moment, the roof door burst open, and the security guard loosed off a volley of bullets. But he was a fraction of a second too late … C.W. had gone.

The Black Spider-man had never attempted hang-gliding in a city before, and he would have preferred a less spectacular launch than throwing himself into a vertical dive down the wall of a skyscraper. But he had no choice.

It occurred to him with the storeys flashing by and the wind tearing at his flailing body, that nobody else had ever tried hang-gliding in Manhattan, either. Well, aficionados would soon know whether or not it worked.

He had planned the unorthodox technique of gathering tremendous speed for an all-out power glide rather than use the currents of warm air which rose from the city streets. It was to this specific end that he had chosen hang-gliding for his exit: he dared not land in the carriageways, where he would be at the mercy of the traffic and the police. But if he could make the sanctuary of Central Park in one continuous leap …

The slipstream was a dull roar in his ears, and the concrete and glass and marble veneer of the tower merged into a dark-grey blur as he plummeted towards the street. He tried pulling out of the dive, but he was going too fast, and the great, broad bulk of the neighbouring skycraper grew larger by the second.

He yanked the harness into the tightest turn that he dared, and almost wrenched his arms from their sockets. The soaring parallel streaks of light that traced the outline of another building suddenly swivelled through a right angle, and C.W.’s panic-stricken eyes gave his brain the mad message that New York had tilted on its side.

The skyscraper he was trying to avoid seemed for one appalling moment to be directly beneath his feet, so that he could land on it and walk down it like a fly down a post. Then he fought the wind, and straightened out, almost crying aloud his relief as the road slid away from his wingtip, to resume its rightful place in the scheme of gravity.

He looked wildly about him, and saw that he was not yet too low to catch a thermal current, if only he could reach one. Then, mercifully, a thermal found him. Almost immediately, but so imperceptibly that he failed to realise it, he started to rise.

He was now two floors higher than he had been, and still going up. At the moment, he was well out of range of the roof-top security men’s guns in the exhibition building. But if he continued his ascent?

Yet the thermal zephyr was playful and, after lifting him fifty feet or so further, it shot him across the face of the neighbouring skyscraper. He needed no prompting to steer round the corner and reach the end of the block. There, on the opposite side of 59th Street, were the welcoming trees of Central Park.

C.W. waved gleefully at a pair of lovers enjoying a session of palpitating sex in a fourteenth floor apartment. They were so surprised at being spied on by a passing birdman that they pulled apart and fell off the bed. The girl, C.W. spotted, was a lulu. He made a mental note of the position of the flat.

He rode the life-saving thermal across 59th, dropped lower in a controlled dive, and tree-hopped until he found an unobtrusive landing-place. From there he linked with a pick-up driver who had been waiting for him, concealed the hang-glider and the Flying Horse under its false floor, and headed for home, scarcely noticing the minor irritation of the police road-block at the corner of 5th and 59th.

Lorenz van Beck stepped off the Rambouillet bus and walked across the square to a different café from the one he had patronized on his last visit. Today he wore a sports shirt in a violent check, a loosely belted open jacket, sunglasses and jeans. He downed a Dubonnet and made for the church. The church clock welcomed him inside, and as he settled down in the confessional booth, he heard Smith rustling paper on the other side of the grille.

‘Well?’ Smith enquired.

‘Bless me, Father, for I –’

‘Cut it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ van Beck apologized, ‘last time I thought –’

‘Never mind about last time. Now I’m in a hurry. Report.’

Van Beck considered the situation, and how he might make best advantage of it. ‘Well …’ he began, slowly. ‘I – uh – I take it you were satisfied with Mike Graham’s performance? And, of course, you do have the Lap-Lasers – do you not?’

‘We do,’ Smith agreed, ‘and I was. Very satisfied. I want him again, for the big one. Tell him. No details – not that you know the details, anyway – but make it clear he’ll be very well paid.’

‘He already has been,’ van Beck returned.

‘I know,’ said Smith, shortly. ‘When I buy, I buy only the best. My price for extreme skill is high.’

‘It shall be done,’ the German said. Then he fell silent again.

‘Hurry it up,’ Smith snapped. ‘What of the others?’

‘There are two whom I can recommend,’ van Beck continued, ‘because of their, as you so adroitly put it, extreme skills. The trouble is that they’re loners. I just don’t know how they’ll react to working for you. They’ll never have heard of you, of course, since you seem to adopt a different name and disguise for each little – ah – outing. Even I have no idea who you are, or which are the jobs that have been pulled by you, or at your orders.’

‘Good.’

‘For all I know, you could be my best friend.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Oh.’

‘However,’ Smith said, ‘if you are pursuing a devious route towards an increase in your fee, you need not strive so officiously. Ask, and you shall have it.’

‘Aaah,’ van Beck sighed. ‘In that case – there is a jewel-thief, Sabrina Carver, and a cat-man, C.W. Whitlock, both in New York. I think they would suit you admirably.’

‘Sound them out,’ Smith ordered. ‘If they agree, tell both of them, and Graham, that they’ll be getting further instructions very shortly. Plus money and plane tickets.’

‘Airline tickets to – ?’

‘Paris,’ Smith said. ‘From there, of course, it could be anywhere.’

‘As you say,’ the German agreed.

Smith rose to his feet. ‘This time,’ he smiled thinly, ‘you stay and I go.’

‘Unusual,’ van Beck replied, ‘but acceptable.’

Smith walked quietly from the church. He was a taller, immaculately dressed, more confident priest than in his previous incarnation, and he held his manicured hands clasped in front of him, so that even eminently pattable children escaped his attentions.

And, still seated in the confessional box, Lorenz van Beck mused on rivets, heights and Paris. This time, though, he got a definite picture forming, as if he had suddenly joined up a series of dots. It was a very well-known shape indeed that sprang into his mind.

FOUR

There are probably fewer than a dozen nightclubs or discos throughout the civilized world where top-drawer international jet setters will admit to being seen. Il Gattopardo, in Rome, is one of them.

Dawn is a good time to be noticed at Il Gattopardo, though for the highest of swingers, an appearance at that hour will have been a reflex action, rather than a matter of calculation.

For Sabrina Carver, standing outside ‘The Leopard’ waiting for her car, it was merely the end of a less than scintillating night. She distanced herself by about three yards from two quite beautiful young men, scions of top Roman families, close friends both of each other and of Sabrina, who were trying to settle a tactful argument as to which of them should go home with her.

The discussion did not interest Sabrina. She would have been tolerably happy with either, or neither.

Guilio and Roberto had reached a temporary accomodation, based on an apportionment of past rewards for Sabrina’s favours, and future opportunities, when the parking attendant pulled up in Sabrina’s Alfa Romeo. A portly, excitable little man with a waxed moustache and a too-large, braided cap, the attendant jumped out, held the door open for Sabrina, and bowed low over her generous tip. That way, he could also peer into her generous cleavage without seeming forward.

She settled herself into the driving seat, and the attendant leaned in again, adopting the sort of confidential air at which Italian operatic tenors excel. He handed her a small, plain box, tied with pretty white ribbons.

‘Someone left this for you, Signorina Carver,’ he whispered through an effluvium of garlic.

‘Who?’

He shrugged extravagantly, using most of his upper body and the ends of his moustache.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and made with the lire again. The attendant decided not to push his luck with the décolletage, and backed away obsequiously. As Sabrina pulled apart the ribbons, the entente of Guilio and Roberto fractured, and they decided to settle the matter like gentlemen with the toss of a coin.

Signorina Carver’s educated fingers coped busily with the wrapping. The attendant sighed, dramatically. ‘Bella, bellissima,’ he murmured; and with good reason. She was classically, breath-catchingly lovely, with a cascade of hair shaded now to russet-brown, falling on her bare shoulders, framing a face that had more than once peered wistfully out from the front covers of Vogue and Woman’s World. Gone was the saintliness of childhood, but not to give way to artfulness or knowingness. Her brow was deep, her eyes wide-spaced and round, her nose and mouth in exquisite proportion, her chin cheekily dimpled.

How such a flower of Grecian beauty could ever have been the product of that dour, grain-encrusted Middle Western state of Iowa had baffled Fort Dodge. Sabrina had agreed, and settled the matter by leaving. Now her voice, like her face and body, was international, and she kept nothing of her childhood but her name, and her high regard for the stones which, as she could abundantly testify, were indeed a girl’s best friend.

Inside the box, in a bed of cotton wool and wrapped in tissue paper, were five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

She stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as she noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.

A coin was duly borrowed from the parking attendant, and flipped by Roberto, as Sabrina throttled warningly and released the hand-brake. Giulio shouted ‘Ciao’ while the coin was still in the air, hurdled over the back of the growling little car, and landed in the seat next to Sabrina. The Alfa screamed away and Giulio fastened his safety belt. He had never before ridden with Sabrina, but he was aware she had a reputation for a certain nonchalance at the wheel.

Upper Madison Avenue, New York City, like Fifth Avenue, is stacked with discreet, bijou little shops and boutiques catering for expensive and often esoteric tastes. There is also a sprinkling of way-out art galleries on Madison, to take advantage of the carriage trade’s lust for artifacts that no-one else possessed, nor indeed would wish to. ‘PRIMITIVES INC.’, which the elegant and faultlessly dressed black man with the pencil-thin moustache was about to enter, was one such gallery.

‘PRIMITIVES INC.’ dealt, as its name implied, in primitive art. This meant that it engaged agents, who suborned other agents who, in turn, bribed African village headmen, to lean on their tribes to produce badly carved, multi-hued bric-a-brac for half a bowl of gruel, which then sold on Upper Madison Avenue for six hundred bucks apiece.

The receptionist sat at a gleaming steel and glass desk (Stockholm, c. 1978) amid a weird but well-arranged clutter of masks, assegais and fertility symbols.

‘Good morning, Mr Whitlock,’ she smirked.

‘And to you, Mary-Lou,’ C.W. answered. Then he flashed her a brilliant smile and said, ‘Hey, that rhymes.’ Mary-Lou grinned back. He was a dish, she decided; pity he was … well, you know, black. She tried to think of a suitable rhyme for ‘C.W.’, but her intellectual equipment wasn’t up to it.

‘Anything doing, gorgeous?’ C.W. enquired.

‘It so happens,’ Mary-Lou replied coyly, ‘that yes, there is.’

C.W. was rapidly losing patience, but tried not to show it. The dumb white chicks, he mused, were even more of a pain in the ass than the smart ones, of whom there were not all that many.

‘A message, perhaps?’ he suggested.

‘In back,’ she inclined her peroxided head. ‘You know.’

‘Indeedy I do,’ C.W. simpered. He rolled his eyes as he passed her desk and crossed to the door leading to the lavish, semi-private display area behind the main gallery. Here the sculptures staring down at him from lucite shelves were, if even more wildly expensive, at least genuine and finely wrought. The semi-private nature of the rear gallery was required of the owners, because many of the costlier fertility symbols were all too explicitly fertile.

The gallery served (for a fee) as one of C.W.’s collection of New York dead-letter boxes, a facility that chimed in well with his tendency to divide his life into separate, equally secret, compartments. He had this in common with Sabrina Carver, too.

On a splendid oak refectory table sat a large, flat parcel. C.W. twisted the fastening string around his finger, and snapped the twine as if it were cotton. He shuffled aside the decorative paper wrapping, and looked with undisguised pleasure on a fresh wheel of his favourite French cheese, Brie.

C.W. selected a Pathan ornamental dagger from the wall, and cut himself a generous slice. He bit into it. The rind was deliciously crisp, the cheese at a perfect creamy consistency. C.W. munched the remainder of the slice, then set the knife into the far edge of the wheel, and cut the entire cheese precisely in half.

He dipped the blade of the dagger into one segment, and traced a path along it. Puzzled, he repeated the process on the other crescent. The point of the knife encountered an obstruction. C.W. smiled, and hooked it out.

It was a small package, enclosed in rice-paper. He scraped the rice-paper off, and unfolded five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.

He stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as he noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.

‘Classy,’ C.W. said, admiringly. ‘Very classy.’ He walked out humming ‘The last time I saw Paris’.

Bureaucracy thrives on paper. Paper demands circulation. In order to facilitate distribution bureaucrats love drawing up lists that squeeze as many people as possible on to them while, in order to save paper, confining them to a single sheet. Thus was born the acronym, an indispensable arm of bureaucracy.

The United Nations is bureaucracy run riot, and acronyms proliferate there like hamsters. Few of them are important. One, in a little-frequented part of the UN Building in New York, scarcely rates a second glance. The sign on the office door says: ‘UNACO’. And below that: ‘Malcolm G. Philpott, Director’. And underneath, ‘Sonya Kolchinsky, Assistant Director’.

This acronym is misleadingly innocent, since ‘UNACO’ stands for ‘United Nations Anti-Crime Organization’, and it is very important indeed.

Sonya Kolchinsky picked up the ornate silver tray and carried it carefully across the room to Philpott’s desk. Philpott’s desk, like Philpott, was invariably tidy; there was plenty of space to set down the tray, which she did, again carefully. It bore a small espresso coffee machine, and cups and saucers in delicate china from a full service. Next to the silver sugar bowl and cream jug stood a cut-glass crystal decanter of brandy.

Sonya poured out a cup of coffee, and added a half spoonful of demerara sugar. She stirred the brew and, without asking Philpott, slipped in a touch, measured almost in droplets, of Remy Martin. She stirred the contents again, then topped it up with cream. Philpott, his eyes still glued to a file on his desk, raised the cup to his lips and sipped.

‘Delicious,’ he remarked, absently.

‘I know,’ she said.

He looked up at her, and grinned, a shade selfconsciously. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Miles away.’

‘You’re forgiven.’ She inclined her head mockingly. She was of above average height, and statuesquely built. She had a round, slightly pug-nosed face, and lightish-brown hair, cut fairly short with a sweeping fringe, then layered back over her shapely head.

Sonya was in her early forties, Czech-born, but now a naturalized American. She was an expert linguist; she had a degree in molecular physics; and her IQ was a few points higher than the man whom now she faced. She had clear, grey eyes that twinkled at Malcolm Gregory Philpott, enjoying his temporary discomfiture.

She sat in a chair at an angle from the desk, and raised her eyebrows quizzically. ‘The list?’ she enquired.

‘By all means,’ Philpott replied. He placed a finger on his intercom buzzer, and a voice rasped, ‘Director?’

‘The list.’

‘Sir.’

In the large and roomy outer office, a young man in a sober suit with a shaving rash and earnest glasses, picked up a message-pad and started across the deep-piled carpet. He passed a wall-to-wall neon map of the world. In front of the map was a practically wall-to-wall inclined counter, a cross between a library reading room desk and a Dickensian office lectern.