Stronghold Read online

  I don’t have to answer. He must know from my expression that I believe it.

  By the clock on the kitchen wall, it is twelve unnerving minutes before Janet is brought down to join us, the man called Harve hustling her into the room with a grip on her upper arm that has her wincing with pain. She is in a robe and barefooted, her hair dripping water, her lower lip swollen, her cheek bruised. From her look of bewilderment as she takes us all in, I can see she has not yet been given any explanation of what is going on. And her expression when she observes Flood standing there, gun in hand, is what mine must have been when he woke me with that gun. Utter incredulity.

  She tries to wrench herself free of Harve’s grasp, but small chance of that. “What the hell is going on here?” she demands of Flood.

  He gives her that familiar death’s-head smile. “What a way for a Quaker to talk. Shocking, baby.”

  Digby says angrily, “Enough palaver, man. We have business to take care of.” He shoves Emily and Deborah toward the kitchen table. “Sit down there,” he orders, then says to Harve, “That one, too.”

  Harve thrusts Janet down on a chair. She says to Flood, “Little Jimmy with the big gun. You haven’t changed any, have you?”

  Digby goes to her, grips her chin, turns her face up toward him. “Behave yourself, woman, do you hear?” He digs his fingers into her jaw hard enough to make her groan, and, unthinkingly, I move toward him, a hand out in protest. The next instant Harve drives his fist into my belly. It is like being struck by a sledge hammer. All the breath is slammed out of me and can’t seem to return. Gasping, struggling for air, I go down on hands and knees.

  I am aware of someone screaming, someone else crying out “Stop it!,” both sounds instantly cut off, and then Harve drags me to my feet. I am not a small man, but he hauls me over to the table and drops me into a chair as if I were a rag doll.

  Digby leans over Janet. “Now do you understand?” he says. It almost sounds as if he is pleading with her. “Now do you see what will happen if you do not behave properly?” and Janet, all color drained from her face, nods her head.

  Flood is watching this narrowly. “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes,” Janet whispers.

  “Good.” He turns to me, abruptly all cold business. “This is Monday. Which means that around eight o’clock the Champlain armored-car service pulls up at your bank in town here with the weekend cash from those hotels around the lake. And with last week’s surplus from your bank branches. About ten o’clock Wells Fargo picks up the whole load to bring down to New York. That’s how it works, right? Just say yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Putting it all together and adding on the cash you keep in the main bank here, it means that for two hours—between eight o’clock and ten o’clock—you’ll have over a million and a half right here in the bank vault. Yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how about the three branch banks? How much cash is in their vaults right now?”

  “Eight hundred thousand in each. Around two and a half million altogether.”

  “So between the main bank and the three branches, you can lay your hands on at least four million dollars in cash this morning. And you know what, Marcus? That is what you are going to do.”

  I try to comprehend this. “You mean you want me to turn over every penny of the bank’s cash to you? All of it?”

  “No. The pennies are all yours. The green stuff is all ours. It makes it that much easier to divvy up.”

  “Jimmy, it can’t be done. You must see that. There’ll be at least a dozen people involved in any such thing. They’d know something is wrong. It’ll be impossible to keep the police out of it.”

  Before Flood even answers, I suddenly understand the reason for all those weapons laid out in the foyer. He reads in my face that I understand. “That’s right, Marcus. You’re a weighty Friend. An elder of the meeting. You wouldn’t want to start World War Three right up here on the ridge, would you?”

  “Jimmy, listen to me. You’re asking me to do the impossible.” I try to get my thoughts straight, to do some simple arithmetic. “Look, what I can do is get you enough cash so that no one will take notice until after you’ve gone. Two hundred thousand from my account and some others I can cover with my personal notes. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. That should be worth it to you. And it means no risk to you.”

  Flood shakes his head. “Four million, Marcus. The whole load.”

  “But then the banks will have to be kept closed. My God, we’ll have a panic in the whole area. No matter what explanation I try to make, the authorities will move in immediately. Treasury men and FBI men will be up here as fast as they can make it from Boston and New York. Then what?”

  “Then, Marcus, you will point out to them that we have four hostages in here. Four funerals for the papers to write up if anything goes wrong. Get it into your stupid banker’s head, Marcus, that they might not want headlines about a massacre on Scammons Ridge any more than you do. That is clout. Heavy clout. Use it right, and maybe there won’t be any massacre. So it’s the whole four million, Marcus. All or nothing.”

  “Jimmy, you’re not making sense. Do you really expect to get away from here with that money with every road closed against you?”

  “That is part of the package you’ll be handing over, Marcus. Transportation down to the airport at Glens Falls, then a plane to Boston, then a long-distance jet waiting there. With all the comforts. Because, just to show you how much sense I can make, the ladies will be going with us right to the end of the line.”

  “Man,” Digby says to me, “understand it. If everybody cooperates, there will be no harm done to any of you people.”

  If everybody cooperates. Bob Daniels who runs Vista Airways out of Glens Falls can charter me a plane to Boston. But what airline at Logan Airport can I appeal to? How do you shop for a plane to be hijacked? And the authorities themselves would have to cooperate in this insane business. The police here. The police in Boston. The FBI all over the place. Cooperate? With a kidnapping and hijacking?

  Do they have a choice? Do I have one? Any choice?

  “Look,” I say, “the armored car from upstate will have seven or eight hundred thousand in it. I’ll add two hundred thousand to that. You’ll have a million right there. Drive me down to the bank in the station wagon, and I’ll see that the money is loaded into it without anyone interfering. You get the wagon and the money and a head start to wherever you want to go. A million dollars and no trouble. You can’t ask for a better deal than that.”

  It shakes them up. I can see that. At least, it shakes up Digby and Harve. They are thinking hard, Harve slowly wiping his hand back and forth across his mouth, Digby nervously spinning the cylinder of his gun with a thumb again and again. Only Flood does not react. He waits as if timing his answer for better effect, then shakes his head. “No,” he says flatly.

  “Look, man,” Digby says to him, “I want to talk about this.”

  “Why? How far do you think we’d get that way?”

  I say, “I’ll go with you as hostage as far as you want.”

  Digby says stubbornly to Flood, “Harvey and I both want a meeting about this,” and Flood looks at Harve and says, “Is that a fact?”

  Harve looks embarrassed. “Whatever you say, Jimmy.”

  “I have a say, too,” Digby raps out.

  Suddenly the gun in Flood’s hand is aimed at Digby. Flood’s teeth show. His eyes—somehow they give the impression of having horizontal irises like a goat’s eyes—are very wide and glassy. Digby takes a step back—I think without even knowing he is doing it—and says in open alarm, “Man, you are getting yourself worked up for nothing.”

  “You wanted a meeting,” Flood says. “This is it.”

  Digby tries to smile. “Yes, of course. And it’s over now. Everything is settled, Jimmy. Have it your way.”

  “My way?”

  “The Company way.”

  “Good
,” says Flood. “We’ll put it in the minutes.” His gun moves from Digby, takes unwavering aim at Emily. He nods up at the clock on the wall. “You’ve got thirty seconds to make up your mind, Marcus. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight—”

  What choice is there?

  “All right,” I tell him, “I’ll do what I can.”

  Apparently we have arrived at a truce.

  Not ungently, Digby removes the gag from Deborah, unties her wrists. With somewhat less gentleness, he does the same for David, saying as he pulls the cord loose, “You will not get any tricky ideas in your head, do you hear?”

  “What I’ve got in my head right now,” David says, “is this talk about four hostages. Don’t I make number five?”

  Flood says, “You’re not wanted in here, Davy boy. You’re going along to back up daddy. If he has trouble convincing people all this is for real, you convince them.”

  He leads the way out of the kitchen, Digby following us, gun at the ready, Harve left in charge of the women. In the foyer, all the weaponry is now laid out in an orderly row. In the living room, the other big man is at work pulling the heavy storm shutters closed over the windows and bolting them. Preparations for a siege.

  Flood says, “The same for every room in the house, Marcus. We’re buttoning up tight. And remember, whether it’s bullets or gas anybody wants to try on us, the women don’t get shipped down to the cellar out of range. They stay right up here and take what we take.” He picks up a gas mask from the floor. “Too bad we don’t have extras on these, Marcus. Nothing in a lady’s size.”

  I say, “I’ll do everything I can to keep the authorities from interfering. But what if they do? You must understand it won’t be my fault.”

  “It won’t matter whose fault it is, Marcus, the payoff is the same.” He points at the front of the house. “Those grounds out there are no man’s land. After you two leave here, the only one who can come back up that driveway is you. You, all alone. Nobody else. You park out there on the road and walk to the house. Anybody else gets blasted on sight. And no helicopters over the house, nothing that might make me nervous. There’ll be somebody watching from that sun deck on top of the house twenty-four hours a day, if it stretches out that long. Make the police know all that. Get it through to your pet cop Duffy that if we have to speed up the action by killing one of the women, we’ll do it. Understand?”

  “Yes. But you’re talking about time pressure. How much time do I have to take care of everything? It’ll take hours just to get the money from the branch banks. And travel arrangements have to be made. If I don’t have enough time—”

  Flood glances at his watch. “It’s about six now. You’ll be at the bank at six-thirty. You’ll use the phone there and get all your branch managers out of their beds. You’ll tell them that when the Champlain armored car stops by, they’re to pile everything into it, every piece of green money they’ve got locked away. Just sack it up and throw it in the truck. The truck usually makes it to Scammons Landing about eight, but I’ll allow plenty of extra time for it, another three hours. You’ll be taking the station wagon into town, you’ll unload everything from the trucks right into it. Everything. Got that straight so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And twelve o’clock is your deadline. That means that at twelve o’clock, and no later, you park the wagon out there and bring every sack of cash into the house by yourself. We count the money in here. Then if it adds up right, you load it back into the wagon, we all pile in with the ladies, and you take us for a nice ride to Glens Falls airport, where you have a plane waiting. Simple, isn’t it?”

  “Jimmy, if anything goes wrong while I’m away from here—”

  “Any complications come up at your end, I’ll be waiting at the phone to untangle them. Now upstairs, both of you, and get dressed.”

  David and I are given turns at dressing, Flood and Digby standing there to supervise the process, and on our way downstairs again I am tempted to ask Flood if we can’t see the women before leaving, but the thought seems so much as if I’m arranging a morbid farewell, I put it aside. Then another thought, a troublesome one, strikes me.

  I say to Flood, “You mentioned complications. There may be one very soon.”

  “What kind?”

  “Those people who run the commune—those two you met yesterday, McGrath and Erlanger—know they’re welcome for breakfast here. They sometimes drop in without notice.”

  “Then just make sure they don’t,” Flood says. “Dead sure.”

  Digby brings the station wagon out of the garage, and David, evidently recognizing that I am in no condition to do any driving right now, gets behind the wheel. As the car goes into motion along the driveway, Flood leans in at the window on my side and points meaningfully at his wristwatch. “Twelve o’clock, Marcus. That’s deadline time. One minute after twelve is trouble time,” then we are away from him and Digby, making the loop along the driveway, jouncing onto the road.

  It is a strange feeling being away from those two, a mixed feeling. Relief at no longer being under those guns, qualms that I had not chosen to see Emily before leaving to at least offer her some reassurance that all would be well, guilt that I have departed without insisting we take Sarah Frisch along for medical treatment. But it had all been too much for me, too suddenly. And now there is the sickening question of what lies ahead even when I give Flood all he wants. If I can give it to him without murder being done. The women will still be carted along to some unknown destination perhaps halfway around the world where the authorities might be more anxious to capture Flood and his men than to save the hostages. I have faced trials and terrors and crises before in my lifetime. Nothing in them has prepared me for this.

  A beautiful morning. A golden sunshine, a scattering of clouds, a mild breeze stirring the greenery along the ridge. And my home on the crest of the ridge an armed stronghold, my family captives in it. Impossible to comprehend. Impossible to sort out the fear, anger, frustration in me.

  I take a last look at the house before the car moves into the wooded area that lies between it and the commune half a mile away, and then we are in the woods, and the house is out of sight. I find myself, not weeping, but gasping for air in long, shuddering breaths, each breath a knife-thrust between the bruised ribs where I had been punished for my one feeble act of protest.

  We are halfway through the woods when David brings the car to a halt. I hastily say, “I’m all right. Just get to the commune fast. We must let them know there’s to be no visiting.”

  “Not yet,” David says. “First a meeting.”

  “A meeting?”

  “Sit loose, Friend. A minute in silence, and then a meeting for business.”

  “David, we don’t have time for this!”

  “We’ll make time for it. Because what you intend to do, Marcus, must be held up to the Light.”

  So we enter silence, and I find myself desperately in prayer. I am not one for prayer, never have been since that time in my youth when I discovered that petitioning heaven for favors embarrassed me. Unlike my father, who worshipped a sort of divine tax examiner, I early settled, as Elias Hicks had done, for the belief that true divinity is wholly spirit and is manifest, in greater or lesser degree, in every human being.

  Now here I am supplicating that spirit, feeling, as I do, the comforting I sometimes get from meetings for worship. I am grateful, too, that this man beside me sharing my crisis is a better Quaker than I am. Struck by calamity, I did not think of waiting on the Light for strengthening and guidance, but he did.

  True, he was lately hardened in the crucible, while I might have grown brittle with time. He had given up a career in business to search for some meaning to his life among ashrams and communes and groups addicted to Zen practices, had been a community worker in New York, and had, through his acquaintance with Friends in those movements, been led to attend our meetings. Then, just before his marriage to Deborah, he had joined our meeting.

  That was two
years ago. I suddenly feel I know more about my son-in-law now, have a deeper affection for him now, than in the whole two years of our sharing the same house.

  It is David who breaks the silence. He says abruptly, “It can’t be done Flood’s way, Marcus. You were right when you told him there were too many people involved that way. You’ll never be able to control them all. That means there will be killing before this is all over.”

  “I can try to control them. I don’t have any choice.”

  “You have. Flood is ready for every contingency except one. That’s the one to face him with.”

  I say in bewilderment, “An assault on the house? With the women in it?”

  “I don’t mean that. Matter of fact, I have the feeling Flood wants an assault on the house. He wants to prove to the world how tough he is. He’s machismo gone crazy. But he’s not so crazy he won’t settle for the money and everything that goes with it, including the glory. Those are the alternatives he sees. But there’s still another.”

  I am completely lost now. “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “Simply that Flood’s gang is not any squad of fanatics. They’re not out to martyr themselves for any cause. They’re not freaked out with the Kamikaze spirit. I think they would have settled on the spot for what you offered them, a lot of money and a chance to get away with it, but it was Flood blocked that. If they’re faced with some heavy trouble they don’t expect, they’ll count that against Flood. I say we have to face them with that trouble.”

  “But any move we make against them—”

  “Marcus, that’s what I’m getting at. We don’t make any move against them. Try to understand. Their weapon isn’t really those guns piled up in there. Their weapon is communication. It’s the ability to make the rest of the world know about those guns and react to them. They’re practicing violence just by threatening it, and they expect a violent response to it. But if there is no such response, if we only stand in peace, not responding in any way—”