Hostage Tower Read Online Free PDF

says: ‘LOAN EXHIBITION. THE T’ANG TREASURES. 38th FLOOR EXHIBITION HALL’.
    Much of the building is in darkness, but the lobby is well-lit, especially the elevators. Two men, both armed and in the livery of security guards, sit and talk and smoke …
    Up the steel-beamed glass wall C.W. crept. He was black-clad and black of skin, his bare toes as prehensile as his gloved hands. He did not have far to go. Twenty feet above him sat a window washer’s gondola, attached to the vertical inset steel I-beam by a wheeled device.
    C.W. reached it without breaking sweat, and climbed in. Slowly the gondola rose, almost to the peak of the building. C.W. scorned to count the floors: he would know the 38th when he reached it.
    He looked down, and from side to side. The avenue, stretching out as far as he could see in one direction, was a ribbon of moving light-specks. The other way lay the dark menace of Central Park.
    The 38th floor exhibition suite was not completelydarkened. Though the exhibition had closed for the night, the choicest masterpieces of Chinese sculpture and metalwork were perman ently illumined; some gaudily, where they needed it, others hardly touched by fingers of light that picked out salient features of wonderful artistry and delicacy.
    C.W. peered through the window, and located the centrepiece – a magnificent T’ang Dynasty Flying Horse. The Black Spider-man drew in his breath. The sculpture was almost too exquisite to handle. But it was his target. He had a commission to steal it, and in any case he would own it for a few brief, precious hours.
    C.W. also noted the other form of illumination in the exhibition suite’s main hall. Light-beams, laser-powered, criss-crossed each other like searchlights, seeking out and protecting the exhibits with a sureness that no human guard could match.
    An intruder had merely to touch one of the glowing rays, and alarm bells rang out – not just in the exhibition suite and the lobby, and in the apartment of the building’s security chief, but also at Manhattan Central and two other police precincts. The Flying Horse sat there, graceful and elegant, but dramatically charged with the suggestion of enormous, coiled power.
    C.W. conceived the loony notion that all he had to do was whistle, and the horse would leap out of its prison into his arms. He tried it, and his warm breath blew back into his face from thewindow. He thought the horse winked, but he wasn’t sure.
    He sighed, and picked up from the floor of the gondola a large rubber suction cup. He clamped the cup to the window, and fixed the cord running from it to the stanchion of the I-beam. Then he took from his belt a diamond-tipped scalpel, and patiently traced a perfect circle around the perimeter of the cup.
    He completed the manoeuvre several times, and replaced the scalpel. With the knuckles of both hands, he rapped the area of glass surrounding the suction cup, which was sitting on the skin of the window like a black carbuncle.
    The ring of glass broke free, and C.W. carefully caught the suction cup and allowed it and its new glass cap to hang by the cord against the side of the building. He crawled through the circular hole, carefully avoiding a low, slanting light-beam, and stood in the exhibition hall getting his bearings and adjusting his eyes and body to the changed lighting and temperature. He breathed in deeply and evenly, and tensed his muscles for what, at best, could be only a ten-second sprint to the horse, and back out to freedom.
    For the Black Spider-man knew that he had not even the remotest chance of stealing the horse and escaping undetected. That might be achieved by an army of electronic experts and technicians, but C.W., as always, was one man, alone. For him, it had to be the hard way.
    His sole aids were his pantherish strength, his astonishing nerve, his natural ferocity, and his boundless contempt for danger.
    He had one other (for his chosen trade)