Hostage without a Cause

An unidentified terrorist organization tunnels into an embassy compound in Washington and blasts its way into the furnace room, where Mick Halligan happens to be cleaning the furnace. He sets off the fire alarm with his cigar and the embassy building empties. The two intruding terrorists find themselves with Mick in their net instead of the ambassador, and Mick Halligan the part time janitor becomes Mick Halligan the full time hostage. Mick, or "H" as he is called by one of his captors, begins his long residency in a cell specially designed for the ambassador. The unique element in this cell is the telephone, connected to a device that allows an unlimited number of local, one minute calls, though only one call per day to any one number, a device intended to prevent the hostage's being prematurely forgotten in his captivity. Mick's response to the phone moves through a series of stages from disbelief to awkwardness to frustration to rage and finally to brilliant creativity. During the months of his ensuing captivity, H transforms his insignificance and isolation into a sphere of influence and affection with him at the center. With only his telephone and his imagination, H becomes among other things a syndicated columnist, a radio oracle, and a household word. This is Mick Halligan's story. With his telephone, Mick partly creates and partly discloses the world around him from which he is supposedly cut off. Wittingly or unwittingly, he becomes the catalyst for full-scale transformations in each of the principal characters: his wife, his sweetheart/therapist, his pastor, and his captor. Like a match, he lights the crises in their lives as so much dry kindling. This is a story about H and all the lives he touches. It is about Irish ingenuity, clerical confusion, personal crisis, betrayal, chance, solitude, and friendship.