John Denis - Hostage Tower

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.

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.