Free Hostage Tower by John Denis Page B

saw the object she held clamped to her ear. A radio, was it?
    â€˜Damn, damn, damn,’ Philpott gritted. So there would be no personal contact. Instructions by remote control. ‘Clever bastards.’
    Though the ruse did give him one slight edge: he could keep Sabrina and C.W., once located, in plain sight as they rode the steeply ramped, Space-age tubes, criss-crossing each other at dramatic angles.
    And all he’d have to do was find another traveller with a radio jammed to his ear, and he had the Third Man. The laser-gun thief.
    He scanned the travelators. They were crowded, and it was difficult work. There? No … there! No … just scratching. Ah – C.W. And Sabrina getting off. And back on yet another travelator ending up somewhere else, he supposed … but no Third Man. Where is the bastard, where is he? And what the hell are my two people listening to so intently?
    Claude whispered, ‘Stand by for a message from your employer. Again, listen well.’
    Claude – who was in a telephone booth nearer to Sonya Kolchinsky at that moment than either of them realized – held a small but efficient tape-recorder next to the microphone of the two-way radio, and clicked on a switch.
    Philpott saw C.W. take out a cigarette lighterand palm it in the hand holding the radio. ‘Good boy,’ Philpott breathed, ‘Good boy.’
    Smith’s voice carried to the three on the ramps, caught in the tubes like goldfish in elongated bowls.
    â€˜Welcome to Paris,’ he said. C.W. cocked his ear at the cold, emotionless, neutral tones. Familiar? No, he decided.
    â€˜You will call me Mister Smith,’ the voice said. It was an unarguable statement. ‘I am now going to give you the terms of my offer. There is no negotiation. You may accept the offer, or reject it. If you do not wish to co-operate, you will find a return ticket to the place from which you came, waiting for you at the ‘reserved’ section of the ticket desk on the ground level.
    â€˜No immediate sanction will be taken against you if you refuse my offer, but I feel I should warn you that you will never again work for me, or for any organization that I control; and you will discover that my operation is worldwide. If you are prepared to take that chance, then feel free to say “No”. I do not, however, recommend it.’
    C.W. remained impassive, but a frisson of alarm crossed Sabrina’s face. Of the three listeners, she alone had heard the name before in a criminal connection. And Sabrina wanted above all to go on working. Mike Graham merely grinned; he took neither the name nor the threat seriously.
    Philpott still frantically combed the travelators for the laser-gun thief, and Graham just as obstinately stayed shielded by an enormous African in flowing chieftain’s robes, who seemed to be riding the ramps out of sheer exuberance. Wherever Mike went, the Zulu went; Graham actually began at one point to suspect the giant African, but the expression on his face was so fatuously innocent that Mike correctly diagnosed him as a travelator freak. Some people felt like that about subway escalators, he recalled.
    Smith continued, his tone still expressionless. ‘If you accept my terms you will, from that moment, be incommunicado. Further, you will be required to obey me, or my authorized representatives, as soldiers obey their commanding officers. Any breach of discipline will be treated with the utmost severity. The punishment for treachery is death.’ C.W.’s eyebrows lifted, and Sabrina’s mouth set in a hard line. Philpott kept his eyes on her. She was more responsive than the taciturn black.
    â€˜However,’ Smith went on, ‘I do not intend serious injury to anyone during this operation, least of all to one of you three. On the other hand, should it be necessary, I may require you to carry out an order to kill. It is doubtful, but it could happen, so I have made it a