Алистер Маклин: Hostage Tower

Lorenz van Beck had three hours to kill. For a man to whom killing came easily, it was time enough. But on that fine, pastel-golden Paris day, van Beck had nothing to kill but time.

Van Beck wandered through the leafy shades of the Île Saint-Louis and basked in the dappled darts of sunlight that sought out his square, unsmiling face beneath its cap of spiked grey hair. He was hatless, and dressed in a dark suit of heavy broadcloth, his waistcoat buttoning high to bunch up the small-knotted, unimpressive tie. He looked, unsurprisingly, like a businessman.

With a muttered sigh, van Beck turned to business, choosing the Musée Rodin and the Musée de Cluny for modern art, porcelain and glass. He noted recent additions, their placings and lighting, their security surveillance. He made jottings in a notebook: enter by this or that window; copy key to door 2, 9, 15; how big, how small, how friendly the curator’s guards; proximity to sewers, access roads; MO – bombs? Gas?

Occasionally he wrote down a name, one of a thousand – ten thousand – thieves, killers, weapons men, explosives men, biologists, hit-men, stunt-men, drivers, pimps … the freelance employees of Lorenz van Beck, international fence extraordinary. Against a particularly splendid loan collection of Venetian glass he set another name – a well-known name, titled, respected – a lady, you could say, of some quality. Not an employee, but a client.

Van Beck flipped back through the pages of the notebook to the diary section, and checked the client appointment he had fixed that day. He cast an eye at the gold watch chained to his waistcoat, sniffed the expensively musty air of the museum once again – what delicious odours wealth created! – and strolled to the car he had rented under a false name and driving licence at the Gare d’Austerlitz. He retrieved a shabby leather case with an obstinate clasp from the front seat, locked the car, and abandoned it. It would later, he knew, be reported missing, but the matter did not greatly concern van Beck.

He made his way by taxi to another car rental office in the Boulevard Haussmann, where the pretty secretary recognized him as Marcel Louvain, and drove to Rambouillet by way of Versailles, stopping at the palace to sit in the lengthening garden shadows and eat warm bread and rough Ardennes pâté. The Rambouillet bell-tower boomed the first chime of six o’clock as Lorenz van Beck pushed open a creaking internal door and clumped into the darker silence of the church …

The bell notes reverberated through the empty nave. Van Beck peered into the gloom, grunted, and plodded to the second in a group of confessional boxes set in the furthest shadowy corner. He pushed through the dingy red curtain, lowered his bulk on to the chair, cleared his throat, and sniffed in the direction of the confessional grille. A polite cough came from the scarcely discernible figure on the other side.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ van Beck mumbled.

‘ In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sanc –’ the priest began, and was rudely interrupted by van Beck’s derisive chuckle.

‘This was your idea, Smith,’ he said, ‘but I’m a sensitive man, and play-acting becomes neither of us. Say what you have to say, and let me go.’

‘I rely, as always, van Beck,’ Smith returned in his dry, precise voice, ‘on your absolute discretion.’

‘And I on your consuming lust for making money illegally.’

The vaguely outlined head nodded agreement. ‘Though you do me a small injustice,’ Smith said. ‘I am fascinated more by crime than by money, as you well know. For me, stealing ten dollars from the coffee fund in the desk of the secretary to the Director of Fort Knox is worth all the jackpots in Las Vegas … in the world.

‘I have made crime my life’s study, my life’s work. It is the ultimate excitement, van Beck. No other physical experience can match it.’

‘ Ja, ja ,’ the Bavarian sighed, ‘so you have said, so you have said, Mister Smith. So you’re different from me … huh? I can fence anything from the Mona Lisa to a uranium mine. I could find customers for the Taj Mahal or Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. I’ve even sold his own gold back to the Director of Fort Knox. But I’m a peasant. You’re an artist. What do you want?’

‘A team.’

‘To do what?’

‘You know better than that, van Beck,’ Smith rapped.

‘OK, OK.’ Van Beck was silent. ‘How many?’

‘Three,’ Smith replied.

Van Beck wrote the figure in his dog-eared notebook. ‘Any preferences?’ he enquired.

‘None.’

‘So tell me.’

Smith’s urbane voice dropped to a sibilant hiss. ‘One – a weapons expert. The best. Tough … resourceful … professional.’ Van Beck’s blunting pencil stump dug into the cheap paper.

‘Two – a thief. Again, the best. I have to steal two and a half million rivets and somebody’s mother.’ Smith giggled. ‘The best thief you know, van Beck. Daring, totally unafraid.’

‘What’s the going rate for scrap iron and old ladies?’ van Beck enquired.

‘For this collection?’ Smith said. ‘Could be thirty million.’

‘Rivets?’

‘Dollars.’

Van Beck whistled low, unmelodiously. ‘I can get a good team for a slice of that.’

‘Then do it,’ Smith whispered. ‘Do it.’

‘The third one?’

Smith hesitated. ‘Someone … inventive. Incredibly ingenious. Strong, and – again – afraid of nothing. Especially heights.’

Van Beck was thoughtful, rubbing his fleshy, prickly chin.

‘That apply to the other two as well?’ he queried, blandly.

‘What?’

‘The heights,’ the German replied, trying to fit rivets in the sky into a recognizable pattern.

Smith was quiet, dangerously quiet. At length he said. ‘Don’t push me, van Beck. Do what you have to do, but don’t try your luck too hard. It may not last.’

Van Beck swallowed, and shuffled uncomfortably. ‘It will be as you say.’ He made to get up, but Smith’s rasping command froze him.

‘One more thing. There is a new gun, a laser-gun, the Lap-Laser. The Americans have it for their army. I want some. The weapons man must get them. Agreed?’

‘It’ll cost.’

‘I’ll pay.’

‘Sure,’ van Beck grunted. ‘You pay, I’ll supply. That’s business.’

‘Thank you.’ Smith relaxed back in his seat. ‘You may go. Contact me in the usual way. You have a month.’

Van Beck nodded, making no reply. None was needed. He threw aside the curtain on its jangling brass rings, and strode out into the mellow light of evening. He drank white wine, marginally chilled, and cognac at the pavement table of a café, then rejoined his car and took the road to Chartres.

From the church porch, piercing eyes in a hooded face watched him.

Then the heavy door swung open once again, and a bent, shabby little priest joined the home-goers and the evening walkers. He smiled benignly at an old woman dressed, like himself, in rusty black. He reached to pat the head of a passing boy, but missed.

It was a sheltered place, twenty-eight miles west of Stuttgart: a plateau in wooded country screened from the road by trees, and hardly ever overflown. It made an ideal secret firing range. The US Army used the unfenced fields to test their newest toy, the General Electric Lap-Laser-gun.

The US Army had four Lap-Lasers at Stuttgart. Not very many, they conceded, but still one-third of those known to exist. For the manufacturers had made only twelve so far, and they were as yet in the experimental stage. Since the Army chiefs were confident that neither General Electric’s security nor their own had been breached, they took their time about putting the Lap-Laser through its paces. No one, after all, they reasoned, was going to steal it …