Hostage Tower (12 page)

‘He is mad,' C.W. whispered to Sabrina. ‘God Almighty, he really is.'

Mad, perhaps, but not stupid. When Sabrina tentatively peeped outside her bedroom door just after 1.30 a.m., she saw two armed guards seated in adjoining chairs midway along the stretch of corridor between her room and C.W.'s. With the secret plan now the common property of all five new recruits, Smith was clearly taking no chances that any of them might be foolish enough to consider passing on their knowledge to the outside.

‘Yet somehow,' Sabrina murmured furiously, ‘I've got to get word to Philpott.' She knew he would still be watching the château – that he would have seen the laser-guns and, knowing what he did of their enormous power, would have ruled out a frontal attack. He could not have spotted the Restaurant Larousse trucks, which had always been concealed. He could also know nothing of the target, or the timing of Smith's scheme. Either she or C.W. must pass that information to him if there was to be any even remote chance of stopping Smith.

She was sure the guards had not spotted her, but equally aware that she could not get past them undetected. So it would have to be the window. She switched off her bedroom light, leaving the bathroom illuminated so that from the outside it would appear she was taking a late shower. She pulled aside the thick drapes … as she expected, searchlights positioned on the crenellated roof coping swept the lawns, gardens and approach roads. The façade of the château itself was bathed in floodlighting. She could see commandos leashed to tracker dogs patrolling the grounds.

Sabrina sighed. It would be suicidal to risk flashing a message from her window: one of the patrolling commandos would be bound to see it, and she would be unmasked. She opened the window, and peered upwards. Thick, leafy creepers dropped from the eaves to fall down the château walls between the windows.

The searchlights at either end weaved continuously over the manicured lawns and landscaped parkland, but two beams of light from a central point on the roof stayed fixed, trained on the approach road to the château, converging at a distant spot. Sabrina calculated that if she could climb up to the roof unseen, and use one of the fixed lights for signalling, there was a fair chance she would not be spotted from the ground. From the air, though, the message flashed through the intermittently broken beam would be recorded on video-tape.

She changed into tight black jeans and a black sweater, and coated her face and hands with mud from the guttering above her dormer window. She glanced to her left: the wall of enveloping creepers was about six feet away. She eased her body over the window-sill, stood upright, pressing her face to the rough, hard stone of the wall, and crab-walked the ledge until she reached the shelter of the ivy and Virginia creeper.

She burrowed into the dusty, spider-webbed area behind the impenetrable waterfall of green and red leaves, and used the cover to climb up to the battlemented roof coping. She scaled the wall linking the two turrets, and lay panting in the fork between the battlements and the sloping roof. To either side of her, the big end-mounted searchlights kept up their sweeping pattern. The two smaller, fixed lights were on the apex of the roof between nests of chimneys, a little to her right.

Sabrina marvelled at the fantastic towers and turrets strewn across the roof and battlements, darker than the house below them but still sufficiently lit to throw grotesque shadows on the tiles. She squirmed along to a patch of deeper shadow and, inch by inch, started the long crawl up the roof.

Small, twin campaniles stood at either end of the roof, and from the open spaces above the bell mountings, eight bright and beady eyes looked out between the slim stone pillars and monitored her progress …

Sabrina froze as she felt the beating of wings on the air, terrifyingly close to her face. The pair of shaheen peregrine falcons, one an eyas, trained from the nest, the other haggard, caught wild, had taken to the air fractionally before the matched pair of Greenland gerfalcons from the opposite bell-tower. They were both eyasses, and, like the peregrines, females. The female hunting hawk is a third larger than the tiercel, or male, and the gerfalcon is the biggest of the game-taking hawks.

The peregrines soared high above the château, and the eyas made the first dive, dropping almost perpendicularly, then flattening out in a swooping dive that took her unsheathed claws to within eighteen inches of Sabrina's disbelieving eyes. The haggard peregrine followed her, legs and claws extended, beak open in an eldritch screech, her whole body aimed like a deadly live projectile. Sabrina choked back a scream as the hawk's
mottled belly flashed before her face, and one of the tufted wing-tips brushed her hair.

She jerked up her head and saw, with relief, the two hunting birds climbing away in a high arc above her. Then a second throaty squawk assailed her from the right, and the first of the monstrous, white-plumed gerfalcons bore down on her from the night sky. She rolled over, and the gerfalcon's claws scraped the tiles where her face had been.

Terror overwhelmed her mind, and she slipped and bumped her way down the eight feet of roof she had climbed to lay hunched in the angle of the battlements. Even so, she was not quick enough for the second gerfalcon, which altered course at the last moment and, as Sabrina upended herself in her tumbling flight, took a quarter-inch strip of flesh away from her left ankle.

She could see all four hawks now, circling overhead to dive for what she suspected would be a concerted attack. Worse, shouts from below told her that Smith's airborne guard-dogs had been spotted by a patrol.

Sabrina guessed she had one chance left: if the attention of the armed commandos was fixed on the hawks, she might be able to squeeze unobserved between the fortified battlements and drop to the creepers.

A third grating screech was all the warning she needed. As the haggard peregrine started its dive, Sabrina slithered over the eaves and dropped head first into the nest of creepers.

Her clutching hands found thick bundles of liana, and she broke her fall, twisted round, and prayed that the creepers would support her weight. Dust flew, wall-roots tore apart and the spiders danced unaccustomed nocturnal capers – but the creepers held. Sabrina got her breath back, and hauled herself up to the ledge.

She looked out between the leaves, and saw with a sinking heart that she was still far away from her own window, which she had left unobtrusively ajar. Then the window nearest her squeaked open, and C.W. hissed, ‘Swing over here, you silly cow!'

Sabrina grasped a bunch of ivy and wooded liana and launched herself into space. She landed in C.W.'s arms feet first, and he grabbed her body and hauled her into his darkened bathroom. He slammed the window shut, and said to her brusquely, ‘Strip.'

Meekly, Sabrina did as she was told …

Ten minutes later, bathed and coiffured, Sabrina sat demurely on a chaise-longue in the Louis Seize suite. C.W. answered the peremptory knock at the door.

Smith stood there, flanked by armed guards. His eyes took in the nonchalant black, clearly naked under the terry-robe; they shifted to Sabrina who, equally clearly, was wearing only a bath towel.

‘My guards tell me,' Smith began, ‘that the hawks have been active. They believe someone came into
a room on this floor, possibly from the roof. Could it have been either of you?' He let the question hang dangerously in the air.

‘It could have been,' C.W. shrugged; then adding, seemingly as an afterthought. ‘Sir.'

‘In fact, it was,' Sabrina put in. Smith raised his eyebrows in her direction.

She went on calmly, ‘Since you chose, for reasons of your own, Mister Smith, to make us prisoners, I took it as a challenge, a point of honour almost, to sneak along the ledge outside my room and see my friend C.W.'

‘For what purpose, may I ask?' Smith enquired.

Sabrina simpered. ‘When I'm dressed like this?' she said, letting the towel slip further down her shoulders. ‘Really, Mister Smith, you either have very little imagination or you lead an abnormally sheltered life here.'

Smith looked steadily at her, weighing the evidence. ‘My guards didn't see you,' he pointed out.

‘The wall was completely lit up,' Sabrina countered, ‘bathed, you could say, in white light.'

‘So?'

‘So I was naked. Camouflage – n'est-ce-pas?'

Smith's stony face relaxed into a grin. ‘Now that's the kind of audacity I admire. Well, assuming you have finished what you came here to do, Sabrina –' she nodded, and C.W. winked. ‘Good,' Smith went on, ‘in that case, let me escort you back to your own room by a route considerably
less arduous and dangerous than the one you selected for the outward trip.'

She rose to her feet, and let the towel drop to the floor. ‘Thanks C.W. – for everything,' she said.

Smith's eyes combed her naked body. ‘I trust my little falcons didn't treat you too badly, Sabrina,' he said.

She showed him her blood-spotted ankle. ‘Hardly anything,' she replied.

Smith tutted solicitously. ‘Dear, dear,' he murmured, ‘I hope they don't get a taste for human flesh.'

Sonya Kolchinsky rose early and walked from the most celebrated and luxurious hotel in Paris, into the most harmonious square in that city of beautiful proportions, Place Vendôme. She strolled through the markets, and then embarked on a determined window-shopping spree, from the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré through Rue Castiglione, crossing to Boulevard Haussmann, and on through Boulevard Batignolles and Boulevard Courcelles to the Arc de Triomphe.

She took the bus down Avenue Kleber to the Palais de Chaillot, and trekked back across the river, past the Eiffel Tower, to the Boulevard Garibaldi. She checked her watch: it was still only eight-fifteen.

Sonya found the side street at the rear of the École Militaire, and saw the unsalubrious little workmen's café. It was three-quarters full. The atmosphere was compounded about equally of coffee, croissants, Disque Bleue and Caporal. Two
sweat-shirted labourers sat at the corner table, and it was there that she headed.

Sonya approached the table uncertainly. One workman was eyeing his cognac with practised relish; the other had his face plunged into a newspaper. She peered over the top of the paper. This man also had a cognac in front of him. He wore a greasy cap, and printed on his T-shirt was the legend, ‘APRÈS MOI LE DÉLUGE'. ‘Sit down, then,' Philpott said. She lowered herself into the spare seat, and was made embarrassingly aware that she was dressed a shade formally for ‘La Chatte qui siffle' on a busy September midweek morning.

‘Cats,' she said tartly to Philpott, ‘do not whistle.' Without looking up from his newspaper, Philpott drawled, ‘In here, baby, they do as they're told.' Their neighbour got up to leave, and wished them ‘bon appétit' with a knowing leer. Sonya tossed her well-groomed head and ordered coffee and croissants. They were, as she suspected, delicious.

Philpott laid down the paper. ‘To business,' he said. ‘I didn't wake you last night, but I had a call at about 2 a.m. They're on the move. Or, at least, the chopper and half a dozen trucks left in the small hours. And that is a Lap-Laser on the roof of the château, or rather, was. It's gone now. The game, as Holmes probably never said, is afoot.'

‘And still nothing from Sabrina or C.W.', Sonya said, bitterly.

‘You've checked?' Philpott asked. She nodded.

‘On the way here, and back at the Ritz. The stations, the Élysée – everywhere. Not a single word. We don't even know if they're alive.'

‘If Graham has denounced Sabrina, then she'll certainly be dead,' Philpott muttered, grimly, ‘and I can't see C.W. letting that happen, without getting involved. So … we must be prepared for the worst.'

Sonya drained her first cup of coffee, and set the cup down with a nervous clatter. ‘And we still don't know his target, where he's going to strike, or when. Or anything, really.' She looked beseechingly into Philpott's eyes. ‘Have we lost, Malcolm – lost out to Smith? And sacrificed C.W. and Sabrina into the bargain? Has it all been for nothing?'

Philpott placed his hand over hers. He shook his head. ‘No,' he whispered. ‘We haven't lost yet. We're some way down, but we're far from out.' He rose to his feet and put two ten-franc bills on the table. ‘Come on,' he said, ‘I'm fed up with slumming. Let's go back to the hotel. At least we'll be in touch there.'

Sonya got up. ‘I never did find out why you picked this place for a meeting at this ungodly hour,' she remarked.

‘I'll tell you back at the hotel,' he promised.

They turned into Boulevard Garibaldi, and right again past the École Militaire into the Champ de Mars. Philpott stopped to light a pleasant-smelling cheroot, and glanced upwards.

The trite and infuriatingly ugly bulk of the Eiffel Tower completely filled his vision.

Tote and Pei left the table they had been occupying by the door of ‘La Chatte qui siffle', and took the same path Philpott and Sonya had taken a few minutes before. They, too, looked up at the Eiffel Tower, and Pei grinned happily at Tote. They traversed the Champ de Mars, and crossed the busy intersection to reach the foot of the tower.

It is difficult to imagine any construction as crass as the Eiffel Tower being erected to mark the dawn of the age of technology, but that indeed was the driving force behind the eccentric French engineer, Gustave Alexandre Eiffel, in the late 1880s. Eiffel greatly admired the American inventors Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and worked for two years to design possibly the ugliest, but most charming, commemorative monument in history.

Eiffel used five thousand yard-square sheets of paper for his
full-scale
plan of the tower, but at least by the time he had finished there could be only one answer to the ludicrous question: what's made of two and a half million rivets and twelve thousand pieces of metal, weighs fifteen million pounds, stands nearly a thousand feet tall, and looks like a giraffe?