Free Nightmare Time by Hugh Pentecost

hotel, a well-lighted street, but deserted at three-thirty in the morning.
    There is no doorman or any visible help in the brownstone where Betsy lived. The superintendent cares for several buildings in the area. It didn’t surprise Jerry that Chambrun had a key to the front door of the building and another to Betsy’s apartment.
    “The apartment was neat as a pin,” Jerry told me a little later. “Bed made, not even a coffee cup left on a table. I was satisfied that Betsy never got there after she left the hotel.”
    Chambrun was certain she had been there. “Out-of-character neat,” he told Jerry. “And the bed! Betsy didn’t make that bed.” He explained she had a special way of making the bed, the spread pulled up under the pillow, then doubled back out and up over the pillow. “As automatic as the way you brush your teeth,” Chambrun said. “Betsy never made the bed this time.”
    “Cleaning woman?” Jerry suggested.
    “Comes on Fridays—day after tomorrow,” Chambrun said. “Betsy was here, sleeping. Somehow they got to her.”
    “She had to let them in. There’s no sign the door was forced.”
    Chambrun nodded. “They’d have to ring the buzzer outside the front door to this building. Betsy answers. It’s someone she knows. Betsy presses the release button that lets them in downstairs, and opens up for them when they get here.”
    “At four in the morning?”
    “Someone claims they have a message from me.”
    “Would she buy that? You’d phone her, wouldn’t you?”
    “The way things were boiling at the hotel? In any case, Betsy was flimflammed by someone she knew. I’m guessing there was some kind of physical struggle when Betsy discovered she’d been had, place messed up. When they had her under control, they neatened it up, made the bed.”
    “Why?”
    “There are some men’s clothes in the closet, shaving equipment in the bathroom. A boyfriend might be turning up. They didn’t want us to know anything had happened to Betsy until they were ready for us to know.”
    “Betsy has a live-in boyfriend?”
    “She certainly does,” Chambrun said. “Me!”
    I don’t think Jerry was remotely surprised by the information, only that Chambrun had gone public with it.
    “If it was someone Betsy knew,” Jerry said, “then it almost certainly is someone you know.”
    “I haven’t missed that one, Jerry,” Chambrun said. “And I can promise you, if Betsy’s been hurt, he’s not going to be someone I know, but someone I knew!”
    While this was going on I was with Hardy and Zachary in Chambrun’s office at the Beaumont, bringing them up to date on what had happened to Betsy. They reacted differently. Hardy had come to know Betsy over the years, trusted her, had probably come to like her. He acted as any normal man would to the threat of danger to a friend. To Zachary, however, Betsy was just another piece on the chessboard of a game he was playing. They make a move, we make a move. Until now it seemed to me they had made all the moves.
    “I’ve thought from the beginning Chambrun should let the boy go,” Zachary said. “We cover him and are taken right to where they’re holding Major Willis. Now, it seems, they’ve forced his hand.”
    “Doesn’t it occur to you that if they get the boy to his father the classified information you care so much about will be gone?”
    “Not if we’re right there behind the boy,” Zachary said.
    “Can you guarantee that?” Hardy asked.
    “Can you guarantee anything in your job?” Zachary countered. “In our kind of jobs we just have to play the best card we hold and hope.”
    “The best card we hold is the boy—kept out of their reach,” Hardy said.
    “Look, Lieutenant,” Zachary said, anger darkening his face. “In your job you want to find a man and punish him for a crime. If you fail, you fail. In my job I’m trying to save a whole nation from disaster. If I fail, that whole nation may go down the drain. Would I risk one