State of Siege - Tom Clancy [50]
Chatterjee was meeting with Deputy Secretary-General Takahara of Japan, two undersecretary-generals, and her security chief in the large conference room off her private office. The deputy secretary-general of administration and head of personnel was also present. He and his staff were on the phones, updating governments whose delegates were among the hostages. Chatterjee's aide, Enzo Donati, was there as well.
There had been very little talk about actually paying the ransom. Even if the sum could be collected, which was doubtful, the secretary-general would be powerless to deliver it. In 1973, the United Nations had established a policy for dealing with ransom demands if UN personnel were kidnapped. The Security Council had proposed, and the General Assembly had agreed by the requisite two-thirds vote, that in the event of an abduction, the affected nation or nations would be responsible for pursuing their own national policy. The United Nations would become involved only as negotiators.
So far, only one of the nations involved, France, had agreed to contribute to the ransom demand. The other countries either couldn't commit without formal authorization or had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists. The United States, whose delegate, Flora Meriwether, was among the hostages, refused to pay the ransom but agreed to participate if a dialogue were opened with the terrorists. Chatterjee and her staff agreed to check in again with the affected nations when the deadline had passed. The immediate problem that needed a quick resolution was who would be responsible for making decisions in the crisis. If only tourists were being held, then the Military Staff Committee of Colonel Rick Mott would have had sole jurisdiction. But that wasn't the case. According to the charter, decisions affecting the Security Council could only be made by the Security Council or the General Assembly. Since Security Council President Stanislaw Zintel of Poland was among the hostages, and since the General Assembly could not be convened, Chatterjee decided that as the leader of the General Assembly, the secretary-general should decide what moves and initiatives should be taken. Ani suspected that was the first time in the history of the United Nations that an action had not been decided by vote. And it had taken a woman to do it, of course.
That decided, Mott advised the officials that most of the UN police had been pulled from the perimeter and gathered around the Security Council chamber. He briefed them about the possibility of staging an assault by UN forces or with the NYPD'S Emergency Service Unit, which had volunteered personnel.
"We can't work out any kind of military response plan until we have a better idea about what's going on in there," Mott said. "I've got two officers listening in through the double doors in the Trusteeship Council chambers. Unfortunately, the terrorists set up motion detectors in the corridors that access the media, so we can't go up there. They've also disabled the security cameras in the council chambers. Efforts are being made to look into the chambers using wire-thin fiber-optic lenses. We're going to use manual drills to punch two small holes through the floor in closets beneath the room. Unfortunately, we won't have visuals until well past the ninety-minute deadline. We've used an uplink to send copies of the surveillance camera videos of the killers to Interpol offices in London, Paris, Madrid, and Bonn, as well as to law-enforcement agencies in Japan, Moscow, and Mexico City. We're hoping that something about the attack may be similar to what agents there may have seen before."
"The question is, will they really execute one of the hostages?" asked Secretary-General Chatterjee.
"I believe they will," Mott said.
"Based on what intelligence?" someone asked. Ani didn't recognize his voice or his accent.
"My own intelligence," Mott replied. Based on the way he said "intelligence," Ani could picture him pointing to his own head in frustration. "The