High Citadel

DESMOND BAGLEY

The bell shrilled insistently.

O’Hara frowned in his sleep and burrowed deeper into the pillow. He dragged up the thin sheet which covered him, but that left his feet uncovered and there was a sleepy protest from his companion. Without opening his eyes he put his hand out to the bedside table, seized the alarm clock, and hurled it violently across the room. Then he snuggled into the pillow again.

The bell still rang.

At last he opened his eyes, coming to the realization that it was the telephone ringing. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared hatefully into the darkness. Ever since he had been in the hotel he had been asking Ramón to transfer the telephone to the bedside, and every time he had been assured that it would be done tomorrow. It had been nearly a year.

He got out of bed and padded across the room to the dressing-table without bothering to switch on the light. As he picked up the telephone he tweaked aside the window curtain and glanced outside. It was still dark and the moon was setting – he estimated it was about two hours to dawn.

He grunted into the mouthpiece: ‘O’Hara.’

‘Goddammit, what’s the matter with you?’ said Filson. ‘I’ve been trying to get you for a quarter of an hour.’

‘I was asleep,’ said O’Hara. ‘I usually sleep at night – I believe most people do, with the exception of Yankee flight managers.’

‘Very funny,’ said Filson tiredly. ‘Well, drag your ass down here – there’s a flight scheduled for dawn.’

‘What the hell – I just got back six hours ago. I’m tired.’

‘You think I’m not?’ said Filson. ‘This is important – a Samair 727 touched down in an emergency landing and the flight inspector grounded it. The passengers are mad as hornets, so the skipper and the hostess have sorted out priorities and we’ve got to take passengers to the coast. You know what a connection with Samair means to us; it could be that if we treat ’em nice they’ll use us as a regular feeder.’

‘In a pig’s eye,’ said O’Hara. ‘They’ll use you in an emergency but they’ll never put you on their timetables. All you’ll get are thanks.’

‘It’s worth trying,’ insisted Filson. ‘So get the hell down here.’

O’Hara debated whether to inform Filson that he had already exceeded his month’s flying hours and that it was only two-thirds through the month. He sighed, and said, ‘All right, I’m coming.’ It would cut no ice with Filson to plead regulations; as far as that hard-hearted character was concerned, the I.A.T.A. regulations were meant to be bent, if not broken. If he conformed to every international regulation, his two-cent firm would be permanently in the red.

Besides, O’Hara thought, this was the end of the line for him. If he lost this job survival would be difficult. There were too many broken-down pilots in South America hunting too few jobs and Filson’s string-and-sealing-wax outfit was about as low as you could get. Hell, he thought disgustedly, I’m on a bloody escalator going the wrong way – it takes all the running I can do to stay in the same place.

He put down the hand-set abruptly and looked again into the night, scanning the sky. It looked all right here, but what about the mountains? Always he thought about the mountains, those cruel mountains with their jagged white swords stretched skywards to impale him. Filson had better have a good met. report.

He walked to the door and stepped into the corridor, unlit as usual. They turned off all lights in the public rooms at eleven p.m. – it was that kind of hotel. For the millionth time he wondered what he was doing in this godforsaken country, in this tired town, in this sleazy hotel. Unconcernedly naked, he walked down towards the bathroom. In his philosophy if a woman had seen a naked man before then it didn’t matter – if she hadn’t, it was time she did. Anyway, it was dark.