The hell with the West. I'm thinking about me. I don't have to be very clever to know beyond any doubt that I am going to be the man in the middle.'
Hendrix said: 'Sir?'
'Why else do you think this ruffian had summoned the Secretary of the Treasury to his royal presence?"
Hands in pockets, as if deep in thought, Revson wandered along the east side of the bridge, stopping frequently to gaze at, and presumably admire the panorama stretched out before him-to his left the tip of Belvedere beyond Fort Baker, Titouron and Angel Island, the largest in the Bay, to his right the city itself and straight ahead Alcatraz Island and beyond it Treasure Island: between the two the rapidly diminishing shape of the New Jersey was heading for its berth at Akuneda. He made frequent stops, as if peering over the side. On one of those occasions he reached casually for the green cord he'd attached to the strut and hefted it It was weightless.
'What are you doing?'
He turned unhurriedly. April Wednesday's big green eyes, if not exactly alive with curiosity, held a certain puzzlement
'You do have flannel feet. I thought I was the only person within miles - well, yards.'
'What are you doing?'
'When I look at this marvellous view here and then at you I really don't know which I prefer. I think you. Have any people ever told you that you're really rather beautiful?'
'Lots.' She caught the green cord between finger and thumb and started to lift it then made a muffled sound of pain as his hand closed none too gently over hers.
'Leave that alone.'
She rubbed her hand, looked around her and said: 'Well?'
'I'm fishing.'
'Not for compliments, that's for sure.' She massaged her knuckles tenderly, then looked at him with some uncertainty. 'Fishermen tell tall tales, don't they?'
'I've done it myself.'
Tell me one.'
'Are you as trustworthy as you're beautiful?'
'Am I beautiful? And I'm not fishing. Honest'
'You are.'
"Then I'm trustworthy too.' They smiled at each other and he took her arm. 'A really tall one?'
'Yes, please.'
'Why ever not?' They walked slowly away together.
Hendrix replaced the receiver in its cradle. He looked at Milton and Quarry. 'You are ready, gentlemen?'
'Act One, Scene One, and all the world's a stage. That's wrong somehow.' Milton rose and looked critically at Quarry. "The shirt's wrong too, John. White shows up badly on TV. Should be blue-like me-or the President Blue shirts are all he has: you never know when a TV camera is lurking round the next corner.'
'Oh, shut up.' Quarry turned morosely towards the rear door of the van then stopped as a motor-cycle policeman drew up with a suitably dramatic screeching of tyre and smell of burning rubber, dismounted, propped his machine and hurried to the rear steps of the van. He held up his hand to Hendrix. 'For you, air.'
Hendrix took the eight-inch-long narrow cylinder. 'It's got my name on it, all right Where did you get it from?'
'The pilot boat brought in from the New Jersey. The captain of the New Jersey, that is, thought it might be very urgent'
FIVE
The centre section of the Golden Gate Bridge was fast assuming the appearance of an embryonic town, sprawling, inchoate and wholly disorganized as those burgeoning settlements tend to be, but none the less possessed of a vitality, a feverish restlessness that augured well for its expansive future. The fact that all the buildings were on wheels and that all the village elders, seated in solemn conclave, were immaculately dressed and had clearly never done a single day's physical toil in their collective lives, did little to detract from the curious impression that here were the pioneers pushing forwards the limits of the wild frontier.
There were three coaches and three police cars-the third had just brought Hendrix, Milton and Quarry. There were two large, glaze-windowed vehicles which bore the euphemistic legend 'Rest Room': painted in becoming red and yellow stripes they had been borrowed from an itinerant circus currently stopped-over in the city. There was an ambulance, which Branson had commandeered for purposes best known to himself, a large side-counter wagonette which had provided hot meals, a very large TV camera truck with its generator placed at a discreet hundred yards distance and, finally, a van that was unloading blankets, rugs and pillows to help ease the new settlers through the rigours of their first night.
There were, of course, the discordant, even jarring items. The helicopters, the tracked anti-aircraft guns, the patrolling aimed men, the army engineers at a distance on either side busily erecting steel barricades-those did tend to project a disturbing hint of violence to come. And yet they were not entirely alien there: so bizarre were the circumstances that the normal would have tended to look sadly out of place. The unreality of it all, when matched up against the outside world, had its own strange reality in this particular point in time and place. And for those participating in the scene, the reality of their situation was all too self-evident. No one smiled.
The cameras were in position, so were the hostages, the three newly arrived men and, behind them in the second row, sat the journalists. The photographers had taken up positions best suited to themselves, none of them more than a few feet distant from an armed guard. Facing them, in solitary splendour, sat Branson. Close by him on the ground lay a peculiar object, a length of heavy canvas with cone-shaped objects embedded in it: beside it lay a heavy metal box, its lid closed.
'I will not detain you unnecessarily, gentlemen,' Branson said. Whether or not he was enjoying his moment of glory, the knowledge that he held some of the most powerful men in the world at his complete mercy, the consciousness that a hundred million people were looking at and listening to him, was quite impossible to say. He was calm, relaxed, unnervingly confident of and in himself, but displaying no other visible emotion. 'You will have guessed why we all find ourselves here and why I am here.'
The reason Why I'm here, I take it,' Quarry said.
'Exactly.'
'You will bear in mind that, unlike you, I am not a law unto myself. The final decision is not mine.'
'Appreciated.' Branson could have been conducting some urbane seminar in an Ivy college. 'That comes later. First things first, don't you think, Mr Quarry?'
'Money.'
'Money.'
'How much?' Quarry's reputation for disconcerting bluntness bad been easily earned.
'One moment, Mr Secretary.' The President had his weaknesses no less than the two 'hundred million people for whom he was the elected head of state and high on the list was an almost pathological dislike of being upstaged. 'What do you want this money for, Branson?'
'What's that got to do with it, supposing it's any of your business?'
'It is my business. I must state categorically if you want it for any subversive activities, for any evil practices whatsoever, and especially for any anti-American activities - well, I tell you here and now that you can have my body first Who am I compared to America?"
Branson nodded approval. 'Stoutly spoken, Mr President, especially considering the fact that you have left your speech writers behind. I hear the voice of our founding fathers, the clarion call of the conscience that lies at the grass-roots of America. The Grand Old Party are going to love you for that. It should be worth another two million votes come November. However, quite apart from the fact that you don't mean a word you say, I have to reassure you that this money is required for purely apolitical purposes. It's for a private trust, in fact. Branson Enterprises, Inc. Me.'
The President wasn't a man to be easily knocked off stride, if he were he wouldn't have been President 'You have just mentioned the word "conscience". You have none?'
'I don't honestly know,' Branson said frankly. 'Where money is concerned, none. Most of the really wealthy men in the world are moral cripples, basically criminally-minded types who maintain a facade of spurious legality by hiring lawyers as morally crippled as they are themselves.' Branson appeared to muse. 'Multi-millionaires, politicians, lawyers-which of them lies furthest beyond the moral pale? But don't answer that-I may unintentionally be putting you in an invidious position. We're all rogues, whether under the hypocritical cover of legalism or out in the noon-day sun, like me. I just want some fast money fast and I reckon this is as good a way as any of getting it.'
Quarry said: 'We accept that you are an honest thief. Let us come to cases.'
'My reasonable demands?'
'The point, Mr Branson.'
Branson surveyed the Arabian oil barons-now without Iman who was in hospital-and the President. 'For this lot, on the hoof, in prime condition and no haggling about pennies -three hundred million dollars. That's a three followed by eight nothings.'
To the many million viewers throughout America it was immediately obvious that there had been a sound transmission breakdown. The silence, however, was more than compensated for by the wide and interesting variety of expressions registered on the faces of those on the screen, which ranged from total outrage through total incomprehension through total incredulity to total shock: indeed, in those few imperishable moments, sound would have been an unforgiveable intrusion. Predictably, in view of the fact that he was accustomed to dealing with figures which contained large numbers of zeros. Secretary of the Treasury Quarry was the first to recover.
'You did say what I thought I heard you say?'
'Three zero zero, comma, zero zero zero, comma, zero zero zero period. If you give me a blackboard and some chalk I'll write it out for you.'
'Preposterous! Lunatic! The man's mad, mad, mad.' The President, whose now puce colour showed up rather well on colour television, clenched his fist and looked round in vain for a table to bang it on. 'You know the penalty for this, Branson - kidnapping, blackmail, extortion under threats 0n a scale -'
'A scale quite unprecedented in the annals of crime?"
'Yes. On a scale quite-shut up! The death penalty can be invoked for treason-and this is high treason-and if it's the last thing I do -'
"That might be any moment. Rest assured, Mr President, that you won't be around to pull the switch. You better believe me.' He produced his pistol. 'As a token of my intent, how would you like a hundred million viewers to see you being shot through the knee-cap-then you really would need that cane of yours. It's a matter of indifference to me.' And in his voice there was a chilling indifference that carried far more conviction than the words themselves. The President unclenched his fist and seemed not so much to sink into his chair as to deflate into it. The puce was assuming a greyish hue.
'You people have to learn to think big,' Branson went on. This is the United States of America, the richest country in the world, not a banana republic. What's three hundred million dollars? A couple of Polaris submarines? A tiny fraction of what it cost to send a man to the moon? A fraction of one per cent of the gross national product? If I take one drop from the American bucket who's going to miss it - but if I'm not allowed to take it then a lot of people are going to miss you, Mr President, and your Arabian friends.
'And to think what you are going to lose, you and America. Ten times that, a hundred times that? To start with the San Rafael refinery deal will fall through. Your hopes of becoming a most favoured nation receiving oil at rock-bottom prices are gone for ever. In fact, if their Highnesses fail to return to their homeland it is certain that a total oil embargo would be placed on the States which would send the country into a bottomless recession which would make 1929 look like a Sunday afternoon picnic.' He looked at Hansen, the energy czar 'You would agree, Mr Hansen?'
Clearly, the last thing that Hansen wanted to do was to agree with anyone. His nervous tics were rapidly assuming the proportions of a St Vitus's Dance. Head darting, he looked around for succour in his hour of need. He swallowed, he coughed into his hands, he looked imploringly at the President and seemed almost on the point of breaking down when the Secretary of the Treasury came to his rescue.
Quarry said: 'I would read the future the same way.'
"Thank you.'
The King raised his hand. 'A word, if you will.' The King was a man of a very different calibre to the President. As one Who had to remove, permanently more often than not, quite a number of his closest relatives in order to get his crown, the rough and tumble of life was hardly a new experience for him: he had lived with violence all his life and would very probably die with or because of it
'Of course.'
'Only the blind have their eyes closed to reality. I am not blind. The President will pay.' The President had no comment to make on this generous offer: he was staring down at the roadway like a fortune teller peering into his crystal ball and not wanting to tell his client what he sees there.
"Thank you, your Highness.'
"You will of course be hunted down and killed afterwards no matter where you may seek to bide in the world. Even if you were to kill me now your death is already as certain as tomorrow's sun.'
Branson was unconcerned. 'As long as I have you, your Highness, I have no worries on that score. I should imagine that any of your subjects who as much as endangered your life far less being responsible for your losing it would find himself rather precipitately in paradise-if regicides go to paradise, which I don't think should be allowed. And I hardly think you're the type of man to run to the side of the bridge now and jump over in order to incite the faithful to come after me with their long knives.'
'Indeed.' The hooded eyes were unblinking. 'And what if I were not the sort of person you think I am?'
'If you were to jump-or try to?' Again the chilling indifference. 'Why do you think I have a doctor and ambulance here? Van Effen, if anyone is as misguided as to make a break for 'it - what are your instructions?'
Van Effen matched the indifference. 'Chop his foot off with my machine-pistol. The doctor will fix him up.'
'We might even - eventually - provide you with an artificial foot. You're worth nothing to me dead, your Highness.' The hooded eyes had closed. 'Well, the ransom figure? Agreed? No objectors? Splendid. Well, that's for starters.'
'Starters?' It was General Cartland speaking and one could almost see the firing squad mirrored in 'his eyes. -' 'To begin with, that means. There's more. Two hundred million dollars more. That's what I want for the Golden Gate Bridge.'
This time the state of traumatic shock did not last quite so long - there is a limit to how much the human mind can take. The President raised 'his eyes from the depths of the bottomless pit 'he was scanning and said dully: 'Two hundred million dollars for the Golden Gate Bridge?'
'It's a bargain. At the price, practically a give-away. True, it cost only forty million to build and the asking price of two hundred million just exactly represents the five-fold inflation over the past forty years. But, money apart, think of the fearful cost of replacing it. Think of the noise, the dust, the pollution, the disruption to all the city traffic as all those thousands of tons of steel "have to be brought in, of the tourists who will cripple the city's economy by staying away in their tens of thousands. Beautiful though San Francisco is, without the Golden Gate it would be like Mona Lisa without her smile. Think - and this is for a period of at least one year, perhaps two-of all those Marin County motorists who couldn't get to the city-it's a long long way round by the San Rafael bridge-or, come to that, the city motorists who couldn't get to Marin County. The hardship would be intolerable for everyone-except for the owners of the ferry-boat companies who would become millionaires. And who am I to grudge the entrepreneur the making of an honest dollar? Two hundred million dollars? Philanthropy, that's what it is."
Quarry, the man accustomed to thinking in rows of noughts, said: 'If we do not accede to this monstrous request, what do you intend to do with the bridge? Take it away and pawn it somewhere?'
'I'm going to blow it up. A two-hundred-foot drop-it should be the most almighty splash the West Coast has ever seen.'
'Blow it up! Blow up the Golden Gate Bridge!' Mayor Morrison, whose normal boiling point was just above freezing, was on 'his feet, his face suffused with ungovernable anger and had launched himself at Branson before anyone realized what was happening, certainly before Branson had realized. In tens of millions of American homes they saw Branson being knocked backwards off his seat, his head striking heavily against the roadway as Morrison, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, followed him down and struck at his face with berserker fury. Van Effen stepped forward and brought the butt of his machine-pistol down on Morrison's neck. He immediately swung round to cover the seated men with his gun but the precaution was superfluous, no one was showing any inclination to follow Morrison's example.
It was a full twenty seconds before Branson could sit up, and then only groggily. He accepted a pad of medical gauze and dabbed -at a smashed lip and a very bloody nose. He looked at Morrison, then at the doctor,
'How is he?'
The doctor carried out a brief examination. 'He'll be all right, he's not even concussed.' The doctor glanced at Van Effen without enthusiasm. 'Your friend seems to be able to judge those things to a nicety.'
'Practice,' Branson explained thickly. He accepted another gauze pad in place of the already blood-saturated one and rose unsteadily to his feet. 'Mayor Morrison doesn't knew his own strength.'
Van Effen said: 'What shall I do with 'him?'
'Leave mm be. It's his sky, it's his bridge. My fault-I just trod on a man's dreams.' He looked at Morrison consideringly. 'On second thoughts you'd better handcuff him-behind the back. Next time he might knock my head off my shoulders.'
General Cartland came to 'his feet and walked towards Branson. Van Effen levelled his gun menacingly but Cartland ignored him. He said to Branson: 'You fit to talk?'
'I'm fit to listen, anyway. He didn't get round to my ears.'
'I may be Chief of Staff but to trade I'm an army engineer. That means I know explosives. You can't blow up the bridge and you should know it. You'd require a wagon-load of explosives to bring down those towers. I don't see any wagon-load of explosives.'
'We don't need them.' He pointed to the thick canvas strap with the conical mounds embedded in it. 'You're the expert.'
Cartland looked at the strap, then at Branson, then at the seated watchers, then back at the strap again. Branson said: 'Suppose you tell them. My mouth hurts, I can't imagine why."
Cartland took a long look at the massive towers and the cables suspended from them. He said to Branson: 'You have experimented?' Branson nodded. 'Successfully or you wouldn't be here?' Branson nodded again.
Reluctantly, almost, Cartland turned to the seated hostages and journalists. 'I was wrong. I'm afraid Branson can indeed bring the bridge down. Those cones you see embedded in the canvas strap contain some conventional explosives - TNT amatol, anyway something of the requisite power. Those cones are called "bee-hives", and because of their concave bases are designed to direct at least eighty per cent of their explosive value inwards. The idea, I should imagine, is to wrap one of those canvas straps with its hundredweight or whatever of high explosive round one of the suspension cables, probably high up near the top of a tower.' He looked at Branson again. 'I should imagine you have four of those.' Branson nodded. 'And designed to fire simultaneously.' He turned back to the others. 'I'm afraid that would be it. Down it all comes.'
There was a brief silence, which must have been very nail-biting for TV watchers, a silence caused by the fact mat Branson understandably didn't feel very much like speaking and the others couldn't think of very much to say. Cartland said eventually: 'How can you be sure they all go off together?'
'Simple. Radio wave that activates an electric cell that burns the wire in a mercury fulminate detonator. Up goes the primer and up goes the bee-hive. One's enough. The others go up by sympathetic detonation.'
Quarry said heavily: 'I suppose that ends your demands for the day?'
'Not quite.' Branson turned a palm up in an apologetic gesture. 'But it's only a trifle.'
'One wonders what you might consider a trifle.'
'A quarter of a million dollars.'
'Astonishing. By your standards, a grain of sand. And what might that be for?'
'My expenses."
'Your expenses.' Quarry breathed deeply, twice. 'My God Branson, you are the piker to end all pikers.'
'I'm used to people calling me names.' He shrugged. 'I don't hurt so easily any more and one learns to take the rough with the smooth. Now, as to payment - you are going to pay me, aren't you?'