by Sophie Lark
“I do know that,” Black said, nodding.
“Gemma would have been very proud of him, I’m sure. She adored that boy. That’s what we mostly talked about—her son, and my girls.”
“Did she ever say anything about his father?”
“No, he wasn’t in the picture. Just a boyfriend from university, I believe.”
“And Gemma worked on data entry? The same as you?”
“That’s right. It wasn’t very interesting work, but it was regular, therapeutic even. You get in a kind of Zen state after a while, plugging in the numbers.”
“Gemma didn’t have any other special duties? Any proprietary projects, or security clearances?”
“No, nothing like that. Remember that she was a new employee, relatively speaking. She had a secretarial job before. Data entry was a step up for her.”
“Do you remember exactly what happened when the hijackers came into the room?” Black asked.
Pamela stopped pulling weeds and sat back on her heels. She closed her eyes, thinking back.
“Well,” she said at last, “it was early in the morning. The workday had only started maybe an hour earlier. Some people were still getting coffee and settling down at their desks. The door slammed open and five or six men streamed in. I saw the guns first, and the military-style clothing. I thought they were police, but then when I saw those awful bandanas on their faces, I thought they couldn’t be police or military.”
“The skull bandanas,” Black said.
“That’s right. The look of those, and their sort of dead eyes above it, it scared me, and I think I screamed. A few people screamed, from the guns and the shock of it all.”
“Then what happened?”
“They shouted at us to lay down on the ground. One of them fired a few shots into the ceiling. That’s when I knew it was serious—that the guns were loaded, that it wasn’t some kind of joke. I grabbed Nora—she’d been sitting right at my desk with me. And I pulled her down onto the ground and tried to lay on top of her.”
“Had you ever brought Nora to work with you before?” Black asked.
“Yes, once or twice, and the other girls, too. It was a very family-friendly company. They had a “take your child to work” day every year, as well as company Christmas parties and barbecues in the summer and so forth. You could even bring your children on school holidays, if you didn’t have a babysitter.”
“Was Gemma next to you when this happened?” Black asked.
“Yes, she was sitting at her desk, right next to mine. She tried to lay down on the ground with her son, with Tom, but one of the men grabbed her off the ground and pulled her up and dragged her to the other side of the room.”
“Which man?” Black asked.
“The main one.” Pamela gave a little shudder. “Wright. He yanked her up, and she told Tom to stay where he was, but of course he didn’t listen. He followed her; he didn’t want to be away from his mother.”
“What did Gemma say?” Black asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Did she say anything to them? Was she screaming or fighting?”
“No. Almost as soon as they picked her up, she went kind of limp and silent. She was crying, but not loud. I think she said something like ‘Please, let Tom go,’ but they didn’t listen to that. They didn’t let any of the children go, those beasts.”
“And then what happened?”
“Then they put the bomb on her. A lot of people started screaming then, when they saw the bomb. One of the other men said to shut up. He said he’d shoot the next person that made a sound. So, we all put our hands over the kid’s mouths, to keep them quiet. God, we were so terrified.”
She took a few steadying breaths, then continued.
“They put the explosives on Gemma, and they put that big wool coat on her and buttoned it up. It was Charles Peterson’s coat—he worked in accounting. It had been hanging by his desk. Then they pulled the chair out of Graham Beemer’s office—he was the program director. They put his chair in the middle of the room and they made Gemma sit on it, and handcuffed her hands behind her, and wrapped her around and around with tape. They brought the tape themselves.”
Pamela gave these details rapidly. The had the sound of statements that she’d made many times, probably to the police in the aftermath of the incident, when they’d interviewed all the hostages.
“And what happened after that?”
“Then we lay there for what seemed like forever. Some of the men left the room, while others took up positions around us. I could hear Wright calling down to the police, making demands. They kept threatening to kill some of us if the demands weren’t met. I was so scared that I’d be the next one grabbed, or Nora, since they’d just taken Gemma from right next to me. It was awful of me, but I was praying that they’d take someone else instead, I didn’t care who. That’s what it does to you, being in that kind of position. It makes you so desperate. I’ve never forgotten what it felt like, laying there with my little girl under me. I thought, hostage situations never end well. I thought, they brought those bombs, and there’s no way they’re not going to use them.”
“Did they say anything else about Gemma?” Black asked. “Did they say anything to her?”
“Not that I could hear,” Pamela said. “But I was quite far away. And it wasn’t very quiet, even though they kept telling us to shut up. People were crying and moaning.”
“Where was your desk? Relative to the door where they came in?” Black asked.
“We were sort of in the back, left corner,” Pamela said. “If you picture the room as a square. Though it wasn’t really a square, it had a more irregular shape.”
“But you definitely weren’t the closest people to the door.”
“No,” Pamela said, shaking her head.
Black considered this. Morris said he thought Wright had grabbed his mother because she was the closest hostage. That didn’t tally with Pamela’s recollection.
“Do you remember anything else?” Black asked. “Did the hijackers say anything to each other?”
“Just basic orders. It was obvious that Wright was in charge. The other men seemed nervous, but Wright was so strangely calm. That scared me almost more than anything. I could see he wasn’t rational. Wasn’t normal. The other men were getting agitated, as time was passing. One of them said something like, ‘They’re not going to do it,’ meaning that the police weren’t going to meet the demands. And Wright just said, ‘Keep waiting.’ Cool as a cucumber.”
“And then?”
“And then the police knocked on the door. And you know what happened after that.”
“I do,” Black said.
“I never said thank you,” Pamela said. “For what you did for us,”.
“No need,” Black said.
“You saved our lives, I’m sure of it.”
“I got lucky,” Black said. “I was very inexperienced.”
“I knew you were a good man,” Pamela said, looking up at Black. “You looked young, and scared, but as soon as you all came in the room, I thought, These are good men. They’re going to help us.”
Black couldn’t help but feel a chill at her words.
He had experienced so many nightmares where he lunged for Wright’s hand and missed. And he could only watch while Wright released his grip on the switch and the whole room exploded in a burst of brilliant heat and light.
He couldn’t help but feel that Pamela’s faith in him had been misplaced. They all could have died so easily.
“I’m just glad it worked out,” Black said gruffly. “Anyway, thank you for agreeing to meet with me. Is it alright if I call you, if I have any more questions?”
“Of course,” Pamela said. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you looking for now? After all this time?”
“I just want to know what happened to Gemma. Or really, why it happened,” Black said.
“Isn’t it just what you said?” Pamela said, sadly. “We got lucky.
But she didn’t.”
“That may be it,” Black agreed.
But somehow, he didn’t think so.
8
At 7:40 p.m., Black met Holly, Morris, and Cara outside the Houses of Parliament to share a cab to the Dorchester Hotel. Black had put on a suit a little nicer than his usual and actually shaved for once. Holly gave him an approving smile when she met him on the steps.
Black would have liked to tell her how absolutely stunning she looked, but he didn’t want to say too much in front of her boss. She looked like a goddess in her one-shouldered gown made of a deep, shimmering bronze fabric that looked as if the whole thing was liquid metal that had been poured down over her body, then set in place.
She had half pinned her hair up, so the long sheaf of reddish-copper curls lay over her bare shoulder. She looked taller than ever in her fancy stilettos.
“That's a very pretty dress,” Black said quietly.
Morris heard his comment and smiled over Holly’s shoulder.
“Isn’t she a dream?” he said.
He didn’t say anything about his other employee, Cara, who had her hair twisted up in a topknot, her granny glasses low on her nose, a bohemian shawl wrapped round her shoulders, and a large pair of earrings dangling from her lobes that looked like they’d been hand-made out of clay. Cara didn’t seem to notice the slight—she was typing away madly on her phone while walking, something that Black could never watch without feeling concerned that the person was about to tumble into a fountain or walk into traffic.
“Your tweet about cultured meat got a lot of traction,” Cara said to Morris.
“Have you tried it?” Morris said to Black.
“Fake meat?” Black shook his head.
“It’s almost indistinguishable now. Maybe a little softer in the middle and crisper on the edges, when you make it into a burger.”
The idea of a hamburger grown in a jar seemed off-putting to Black, but he thought that was probably old-fashioned of him.
“I guess if a steak tastes good, what does it matter where it comes from?” Black said.
“Well, they’re not quite there with steak yet. Hard to get the marbling of the fat. But for mince, it works well.”
The cab pulled up to the curb and they all got inside, the ladies carefully lifting the hems of their gowns away from the damp leaves in the gutter.
Black felt old, next to all these young idealists. They were trying to shape the world of tomorrow, where cattle ranching would be obsolete, and probably taxi-cabs too.
He was more like a moral janitor, just trying to clean up some of the worst messes of the human race.
But somebody had to do it.
Morris sat up front in the cab so he could chat with the driver. Black saw that he never missed a chance to influence a potential voter.
Holly slid into the middle seat in the back, right next to Black. He could smell the fresh scent of her skin and feel the warmth of her thigh pressed against his. He longed to touch the smooth, glowing skin of her bare shoulder, just inches away from him.
Holly glanced over at him, biting her lip ever so slightly. He was sure she was thinking exactly the same thing.
“How many confirmed guests do we have for tonight?” Cara asked, interrupting their shared thought.
“One hundred and forty-two,” Holly answered promptly. “We’ve got some great prizes for the silent auction, so I have no doubt we’ll reach our goal for the children’s hospital. And probably more than a few donations for Morris’s next campaign as well.”
“What’s the best prize?” Morris asked from the front seat.
“Getting your name on the new burn unit, probably,” Holly said. “You know rich people love stamping their brand on things. Can’t beat that PR. Second-best is probably lunch with Piers Morgan.”
Morris made a face.
“I thought we were getting Daniel Radcliffe?”
“He’s filming in Australia.”
“I met Dan; did I tell you that?” Morris said.
“About a hundred times,” Cara said, still tapping away on her phone.
“He’s very short. Brilliant, but short.”
“They’re all short,” Holly said. “Actors. Musicians, too.”
“Not cops, though,” Morris said, casting a glance back at Black. “How’d they ever get a uniform in your size?”
“They didn’t,” Black said. “They had to let out the hem on the trousers, and even then, they were about two inches too short.”
Morris roared with laughter.
He was in high spirits, full of energy and excitement for the night ahead.
Black supposed that was prerequisite for politics: you had to have an endless appetite for socializing, talking, glad-handing, demanding attention. You had to be energized by it, instead of drained. Or else you’d never survive the constant grind.
Once they reached the hotel and entered the ballroom, Morris started circulating at once, speaking to as many people as quickly as possible. Holly went the opposite direction to make sure everything was in order for the silent auction, the speeches, and the slideshow.
Cara sat down at their assigned table right in front of the podium, still glued to her phone. Black hadn’t seen her look up once from it. He thought her peripheral vision must be excellent.
Glancing around the room, he saw Holly on the opposite side, speaking with a hotel employee. And then, after some searching, he saw Daniel Clark as well, standing over by the doorway, speaking to someone just out of sight. Black began to maneuver through the crowd, to get a better look at whoever Clark was conversing with.
Before he could cross the room, he was intercepted by Cunningham, a beefy, red-faced blowhard who Black had known at the Met years back.
“Black!” he said, standing directly in his line of sight and clapping him on the shoulder. “I heard you were back in town. It’s been a long time. Did you—”
“Excuse me,” Black said, stepping around him. Cunningham looked affronted, but Black kept walking toward the far wall. It was too late though. Clark had already finished his conversation and was moving toward the bar to refresh his drink. Whoever he’d been speaking to had disappeared.
Frustrated, Black kept moving slowly around the perimeter of the room, checking for any nervous-looking figures, or any suspicious packages. It was difficult in such a densely packed crowd. A dozen waiters moved through the room, carrying trays of canapés and drinks. Food had also been laid out on long tables with low-hanging drapery that could have concealed anything. The same was true of the stage and the ornate drapes hanging all around all the windows. It was a labyrinth of hiding places, and a constantly shifting crowd of strangers.
Black knew that Morris had instructed the hotel security to make a sweep of the room before the party started, but with all these guests and employees, and so little security, it hardly meant anything.
If Black had been running the event, he would have done things differently. But he hadn’t agreed to take on that task. Now he regretted it.
He kept glancing nervously over at Holly. She looked radiant, chatting to the potential donors. As she spoke to a group of portly men in suits, Black saw them all guffawing at something she’d said. She was very clever. She always had been. He remembered she won a prize in public speaking at school.
It scared him, knowing that she was next to Morris day in and day out, when he’d become such a target. It could just as easily have been her opening that exploding package, instead of the poor secretary. Next time, it might be.
After the guests had been given plenty of time to get tipsy on the free alcohol and write down their bids for the silent auction, Morris got up to make his speech.
Black stood against a side wall, still sweeping the audience with his eyes. As much as he would have liked to join Holly at her table, he wanted to keep a good view on the room.
Cara still sat in the chair next to Holly’s, but Daniel Clark’s seat was empty. Black squinted in the dim lig
ht, trying to see if he’d sat at a different table instead.
Morris stood behind the podium up on the stage, sweeping back his sandy-colored hair with his hand. His blue eyes looked brighter than ever under the stark spotlights.
“Thank you all for coming!” he said. “You could hardly find a better cause than St. Stephen’s Children’s Hospital. They’ve been doing top-notch work for thirty-four years now. And you’ll be glad to hear that my assistant Holly has just informed me that we’ve already reached our donation goal via the silent auction! So thank you all for that.”
There was a round of applause from the audience.
“Don’t think that means you’re off the hook though. We’re still accepting checks and will continue to do so through the rest of the night.”
Laughs, and a couple of encouraging cheers.
“As you know, the Children’s Hospital is currently building a new burn unit. I’d like to congratulate Martin Harrison, CEO of Brooks Pharmaceuticals, who has won the bid to have his name put up on the new wing!”
More applause, particularly from Harrison’s table.
“We’ve put together a little slide show to show you all the good work they’ve done this last year at the hospital. So, take a look.”
Morris descended the steps from the stage, and all eyes looked upward toward the screen as the projector began to run.
Right at that moment, as Morris’s foot left the bottom step, there was an explosion. The stage erupted in fire, the screen catching instantly alight, as well as the drapes along both walls. The podium where Morris had been standing moments before was completely disintegrated.
Morris was flung forward, crashing into Holly’s table, upending it entirely.
The room filled with screams, and there was a stampede toward the door. Black ran the opposite direction, to the stage.
He couldn’t help looking first to see if Holly was alright—her table had been only twenty feet back from the explosion. He could see her crouched down on the opposite side of it, looking around fearfully, but apparently unharmed.
Only then did he run toward Morris.
Morris was sitting up on the ground, looking dazed.
