Time of Terror Read Online Free

does get to talk to the President, he might warn him that if there is too much delay I might send him a little girl’s ear on toast for his lunch break in the Oval Office.”
    I had the feeling he wasn’t kidding.
    “How do we know the Cleaves children are still in one piece?” I asked him.
    “The last part of your tour,” he said. “Come with me.”
    The suite consists of the living room we were in, and down a short corridor were two bedrooms and two baths. Coriander took me to one of the bedrooms and there were the two little girls and their governess. I had seen the children in the lobby of the hotel, beautifully turned out, almost ethereal in their looks. One of them was golden blonde and the other reddish. They wore their hair well down below their shoulders. Nice bones, wide friendly mouths, and eyes which, when they looked at me, were dark with fear.
    Coriander, despite his comic mask, adopted a manner of almost formal courtesy. “Mr. Haskell, may I introduce you to Miss Elizabeth Cleaves and Miss Mariella Cleaves.”
    The little girls’ mouths moved, but I didn’t hear any sound. Then the undertones of laughter came back into Coriander’s voice. “And this gorgeous dark lady of the sonnets is Miss Katherine Horn, who bears the unglamorous official title of governess.”
    Katherine Horn was something to look at, dark hair and eyes and a luscious mouth and figure. She stood, very erect, between the girls, an arm around each of them. She was staring intently at me.
    “Mr. Haskell is a messenger boy from the powers-that-be,” Coriander said. “If you want to send some kind of word to your parents, girls, I’m sure he’ll be glad to carry it for you. And you, Miss Horn, if there is some pining boy friend who craves your flesh, word might be gotten to him, too.”
    “Can you help us?” Katherine Horn asked me in a low, husky voice.
    “I’ll do my best,” I said.
    Without looking at Coriander, she said: “This man is quite mad, you know. No one on earth will meet his demands.”
    “Things are in motion to see what can be done,” I said.
    “God help us,” Katherine Horn said.
    “Is there something I can tell your mother and father, girls?” I asked.
    “That we love them,” Elizabeth said, in a small voice.
    “That we’re all right, not hurt,” Mariella said, in a stronger voice. She was the redhead.
    “That we’ll try to be brave,” Elizabeth said.
    “That we’re not afraid,” Mariella said.
    “That it would be nice to see them.”
    “That we’re sure they’re doing whatever is necessary to have us released.”
    “I’ll pass all that along to them,” I said.
    “Thank you, sir,” they said, together.
    Coriander took me back to the living room. I felt even more shaken than I had been before I saw the girls and Miss Horn.
    “Miss Horn creates something of a problem,” Coriander said, laughter behind the words again. “There are more than twenty of us up here who have not taken the monastic vows of celibacy. It would be so much easier if she would opt for pleasure instead of heroism.” He shook his head as though it was beyond him. “So, you have seen our fortress, Mr. Haskell, and you have seen the little lovelies who are our leverage. I think you can assure Mr. Chambrun that we can hold off any kind of attack, and that if we are driven to it, we can blow his hotel to hell and gone.”
    “I’ll tell him what I’ve seen,” I said. I wanted to get out of there. I had come up to 15 A a little scared, but certain that we were being confronted by some kind of massive bluff. I was convinced now that Coriander wasn’t bluffing, and that he was, as Katherine Horn had said, quite mad, quite capable of carrying out any threats he made.
    “There are one or two small points I would like you to pass on to Chambrun,” Coriander said. “I have explained to him that we must have room service at all times. Just in case anyone got the wild idea that we could be poisoned by what we eat