Slippery Slope

  Chapter 2

  "LISTEN carefully. There is a bomb on Consolidated Airlines flight number 536. Repeat flight number 536, Consolidated Airlines; Kennedy International to Los Angeles airport. Have you got that? The bomb will be detonated by a drop in altitude below ten thousand feet. Relay this message immediately to Consolidated Airlines. Further instructions will be given later."

  Jean replaced the phone, lit a cigarette, and stepped from the booth into the crowd moving through the plaza at Rockefeller Center. She needed a drink. Though she had gone over her part time and time again with Martin until she did not need the sheaf of instructions in her bag, she was still apprehensive.

  "You overestimate the police," Martin had told her. "If you make the call each time from a different coin box and call only travel agencies, they will not trace the calls for weeks, if ever. None of these agencies we have listed have recording apparatus. You could be one of a million New York City women, and that's as close as they'll get to you."

  Still, Jean felt conspicuous. As she came out of the plaza onto Fifth Avenue she tried not to look guilty or to avoid passing the policeman who stood at the corner of Fifty-third Street. She hailed a cab. It was early evening and still hot, but the traffic was light.

  "Westbank Hotel, Forty-sixth and Madison," she told the driver and opened her copy of Harper's. The last thing she wanted was to get into conversation with the driver. Her palms felt moist and she was sure her thoughts were showing plainly on her face. Calm down, she told herself. You're just another New York girl out for an afternoon's shopping.

  Jean paid the driver; she had already sorted out the right amount with a generous but not too large tip before the cab drew up outside the hotel.

  The cocktail bar of the Westbank Hotel was a large, dimly lit room popular with the Madison Avenue crowd, more because of its location and its quiet, roomy atmosphere than for its charm, which was nonexistent. Already about twenty people were scatterered in the room drinking, Jean was pleased to note, in groups of two and three. Luckily there were no singles on the prowl—she had chosen the bar for that reason; it had an atmosphere that discouraged roman- tic contacts. Also outside on the street was a pair of telephone booths.

  She looked at her watch. Forty-five minutes to the next call. Ordering a whiskey sour, she leaned back on the comfortable chair in the rather hidden corner near the door. She paid for her whiskey when it came, opened her Harper's and tried to give an impression of unapproachableness. Behind the magazine she was anything but calm, but she was more confident than she had been earlier.

  The most nerve-racking part was over. She hoped the overworked clerk at the Consolidated Airlines desk in Kennedy had been sufficiently harassed not to remember her. The wait in line had strained her nerves to the utmost. The tall man behind whom she had sheltered until the last moment had been impatient and had given the clerk a bad time, demanding obscure changes of plane at O'Hare and Denver for New Mexico. At least he hadn't wanted to go nonstop to Los Angeles and, with luck, the clerk wouldn't remember her or her destination.

  A ski cap had obscured her auburn hair, and rather severe glasses had taken the place of her contact lenses, which she was now wearing. She had tried to behave normally, though passing over one hundred and seventy-five dollars in cash was not really normality in credit card city U.S.A. Yet the clerk had hardly looked up, as if grateful for simplicity in a day of trials. She had taken her ticket and gone immediately to the baggage hatch to pass over the nondescript brown suitcase that Martin had given her. He had stolen it several months before from a careless passenger in Grand Central, so there was no way it could be traced to her.

  When the bag was safely on the conveyer she turned and made her way across the spacious terminal, out through the swing doors, and into a cab. She felt as though she had stopped breathing in the building, dreading that she be asked back to the counter for some oversight, or more dangerously, that she run into some acquaintance who would recognize her and ask embarrassing questions. It had not happened, but on the way back to the city she was far from at ease. In fact, she doubted if she would ever be thoroughly calm again. She had never before found herself on the wrong side of the law, and if it had not been for Martin she never would have been. She had, however, been surprised at her excitement when he had described the plan.

  Raised in a small Midwest town, Jean's life had been confined by the grocery store that her parents, now dead, had struggled to keep profitable against the onslaught of the supermarket. Her father's death, a short year after her mother's, now seemed to Jean a blessing though i had hit her hard at the time. A vague love of mountains she had only dimly seen in childhood had taken her West to Denver rather than to the more conventional haven of her peers, Chicago. The same undefined and unacted-on love of mountains had made of Martin an attractive, exciting character when he approached her in the small restaurant beneath the monolithic cliffs of Boulder. She had been unable to resist his bubbling enthusiasm and his close knowledge of peaks she had only gazed at in awe from her car. Since they both lived in Denver, that had been the start of regular meetings and a growing intimacy.

  There had been little talk of marriage until the last few months, almost two years after their first meeting. She had introduced the subject after a long weekend, idyllic in comparison with her dreary weekday existence as a secretary to the vice-president of an insurance company. Martin had been enthusiastic but vague, and Jean felt in the core of her being an uneasiness born of a deepening knowledge of the wild nature of Martin's ego. He scorned the normal conventions of middle America—a steady job, a bank balance, and a nicely furnished home. These were not Jean's ideals either, but she sensed that Martin's abhorrence of stability ran deeper than her own. He seemed to her like a cougar they had once seen together as they crested a ridge in a high valley. It had loped away over the green pasture toward the rugged hillside, where its tawny coat blended to an invisibility among the granite rocks. Shy, powerful, and worshiping the solitary freedoms of the high places—that was Martin—and the empathy in his eyes as he had watched the cat betrayed his ideal.

  Nevertheless, she hoped. Without that hope she would never have found herself in this situation, outside the law, immersed in a plot to extort a quarter of a million dollars.

  Martin held the bait of marriage behind his request for help. He had talked of "us" and what "we" would do with the money, of his wish to open a climbing store and become a guide in Idaho, and as she listened, it had seemed her only chance. Martin was not likely to take a normal, steady job and support her as a wife. Her meagre salary could not keep both of them. He had always been a rover, a lumberjack, a ski instructor, a fruit picker. He never spoke of his roots and rarely of where he was headed. He lived for the day, and the farthest he would go into the future was the next expedition, the next climb.

  Jean had never taken to hard rock climbing. Mountain faces were more attractive to her at a distance than when she found herself on them. She had persevered due to her wish to get close to Martin, but she could sense frequently that he would rather be with a male companion of more equal ability. Yet she was drawn to Martin and knew she was the only woman who had managed to touch something in him.

  So that was why she was here in this rather plastic hotel bar, miles from any place she called home and feeling very alone and vulnerable. She glanced at her watch. Five minutes to go. The bar was filling up. She rose, put her cigarettes and the unread Harper's in her bag, and pushed through the swing door, almost colliding with a laughing couple coming in from the street.

  The telephone booth was occupied, but she still had a few minutes to go. She leaned against the shop front, lit another cigarette, and tried to control her impatience. When the day was over she would take the train to Chicago and then fly back to Denver to await Martin. New York was such an impersonal city. Few in the crowds hurrying past her glanced in her direction. She drew confidence from this thought.

  The man in the phone booth was obviously f
inishing his conversation, glancing at his watch and drumming his fingers on the glass. She moved closer to establish her priority.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting. Some people will talk forever."

  He had an open, friendly face and would obviously welcome asking her to have a drink with him, Jean surmised, and she defeated any such possibility with a businesslike "thank you" and a firm movement into the booth. She shut the door, put her handbag on the ledge, and removed her sheet of instructions. This was the most important call, and she must get it right. She lit another cigarette and dialled the number typed on the second page of her notes.

  "Good afternoon, Trans American Travel Agency."

  "Listen carefully. This is vitally important. Relay this message without delay to Consolidated Airlines."

  "We are not a branch of—"

  "Don't interrupt. Listen. This is a life or death message. The bomb on Consolidated Airline's flight number 536, Kennedy to Los Angeles, nonstop, will explode unless you relay these instructions."

  "But—"

  "Shut up and listen!" Jean could feel her tension rise and threaten to overcome her. Her pulse was heating wildly, and she could hear its throb through the receiver clasped to her ear.

  "Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars must be placed in a dark-colored canvas bag and loaded on a light plane in Boise, Idaho. The bills must be used, of one-dollar and five-dollar denominations. The plane must fly on a bearing of seventy-four degrees magnetic, repeat seventy-four magnetic, at an altitude of twelve thousand feet. It will sight a green flare. When it does it must circle the location once and drop the bag by parachute. The plane must immediately return to Boise. Two hours after the drop, if there has been no deviation from these directions, complete instructions on how to defuse the bomb will be relayed. Have you got that?"

  The icy cold voice of the travel agent asked for the repetition of the instructions, and Jean stumbled her way through them again. "Do you understand now?" she asked as she finished.

  There was silence on the end of the line, then the voice said, "Yes, you bastard."

  Jean dropped the phone on the hook, dizzy and quivering. She could hardly push the sheet of instructions back in her bag. The voice of the travel agency girl had been cold and full of hate. Jean leaned back against the booth wall for support, her knees weak and her heart pumping. Through the glass she became aware of a short man inspecting her with a quizzical stare. The booth suddenly felt exposed and threatening, an island of glass in a sea of people. She felt her breath constricted, claustrophobia adding to her already unbearable tenseness. With a desperate motion she pushed at the door. It wouldn't open. She almost surrendered to panic, remembering only in time that it opened inward. She burst onto the sidewalk.

  "Are you all right?" The small man in the Homburg moved toward her, one hand extended to support her. Frantically she ignored him and, oblivious to everything but her need to get away, rushed off.

  She did not see the cab until it was too late. Her vision was a blur of people and cars, strange, disembodied faces and colors. She heard the shriek of brakes and felt herself lifted up without pain and thrown down the street over and over. Everything happened slowly, and she felt detached from the experience. There was no pain, and only as she came to rest, after what seemed like an eternity, did she comprehend her situation.

  Instinctively she felt for her bag, which was still hung around her arm. Her coat, she noticed, was torn, a gaping, ragged slit, and below it blood was beginning to ooze from her scraped arm.

  I'm going to faint, she thought. Oh, God, don't let me pass out. She struggled to rise. Her left knee was red and sore. She felt an arm press her back.

  "Don't get up, lady. Sit still. I didn't see you. You just dashed out in front of me."

  "You should be more careful, driver," said another voice, that of an elderly woman.

  Several faces hovered over Jean, filling the sky. She felt herself losing consciousness but fought against it with all her strength.

  "I'm all right. It was my fault." She managed to get to her feet, breathing deeply. The scene began to focus. I must get out of here, she thought, terror of having to give identification swelling inside her.

  "I'm all right. Truly I am. Please let me go. I have an appointment."

  "No, lady, you'd better rest here till a cop comes." The driver was taking no chances on later lawsuits.

  "I've called an ambulance. It won't be long."

  Hemmed in by well-wishers, their numbers growing every minute, Jean was desperate. What if they traced the call she had made? What if they took her to the hospital and detained her there until they put two and two together?

  "Here's the cop now."

  The crowd parted in anticipation. Jean, her freedom fading fast before her eyes, threw herself at the gap, swerved to avoid a large, heavy gentleman who made to restrain her, and ran for the corner. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the lights of the police car drawing up where she had been and the group that had clustered around her still motionless in amazement.

  Around the corner, her knee hurting but not slowing her, she ran, cannoning from passerby to passerby. Had she been a man someone would most probably have grabbed and held her, but people stepped aside, fearful of involvement with this wild, dishevelled woman.

  Where was she to go? It could only be minutes before the police gave chase. She risked a dash across on a red light, turned hard right the wrong way on a one-way street, her sharp wits racing, improved by the adrenalin being poured into her system. She was near Grand Central Station. A left and a right would bring her there. It was the ideal place.

  She gained the main entrance with no sign of a pursuit. Once inside she slowed her pace to a walk, trying to appear unhurried and covering her torn coat arm with her other arm and her bag.

  Jean made her way across the great hall and into the ladies' room. She ignored the curious glances of passing commuters. Her knee was beginning to ache terribly, and she could feel the congealed blood on her stocking.

  When she reached a mirror she saw that her face was unmarked, though white, its color drained, accentuating her dark eyelashes and the underlying bone structure.

  She shrugged off an offer of help from the attendant, mumbling something about having tripped. Inside the cubicle she removed her tights and washed the blood off her leg. It was ugly, red and blue with grit embedded in the raw flesh, but it had stopped bleeding and was not too noticeable. Her coat and arm were a different matter, but she bound a scarf around her arm and fixed the tear, at least presentably, with a safety pin from her bag.

  She sat on the seat and lit a cigarette. A strange calmness had taken her over. She had had a narrow escape but had coped. She would take pride in telling Martin of her actions.

  Now she had only one last call and she could get out of this city. She must buy a new coat and get something to eat, though she didn't feel in the least hungry.

  She had done her part. The last call, Jean knew, was not essential, only for the peace of mind of the crew of the jet at this moment flying toward Los Angeles and wondering if they would ever make it.

  "Bastard" the girl on the phone had called her. She had never thought of the other side of the matter, of the airline officials responsible for the safety of the airplane, of the crew trying to conceal their fear from the passengers and wondering if at any minute a blinding flash would end all. Of course she knew that there was no bomb on board, but the crew had no such knowledge. All they had was the information relayed by the phone calls that an altitude detonating bomb was aboard and the corroborating knowledge that a Miss Wendy Stark's baggage was being carried on the flight, though she had failed to board.

  She thought of that great jet high above the clouds, three hours in the air by now, with fuel for five more, and of the crew's feeling that these might be its last hours of existence.

  She left the toilet and walked again into the main hall. She looked at the large clock. Ten before eight. Perhaps she was a
bastard, Jean thought, but perhaps you need to be in this world.