The Siege

by Stephen White

  Why?

  The other half of the screen was a long shot of commotion, people scrambling, officers waving, pushing.

  People were running, but they didn’t know why. Someone yelled, “Bomb! Run!”

  Poe looked at his watch.

  4:54.

  4:55.

  4:56.

  The explosion caused the screen to flash white and the sound to roar into static before it went quiet.

  Poe’s first reaction was unfiltered PTSD. Reflexes on overdrive. A molten hammer whacked at supersonic speed onto the tendon on the front of his knee.

  He jumped to his left, covering Dee with his body. Together they crashed to the floor. He shrouded her face with his head and his hands, waiting for the ceiling to fall, for the walls to tip. For gravity to enforce its domain.

  For the fabric of the universe to rip.

  Poe’s five senses collapsed onto one another in a vortex of stimuli overload. His brain tried to filter through the chaos and cacophony of quadraphonic Oklahoma City immersion.

  Drowning, suffocating, gasping.

  BP rocketing. Pulse rocketing. Palms sweaty. Vomit in his mouth. Instincts in rapid waves.

  He had to get to the stairs. Had to. Not a plan, an imperative. Stairs. He had to get down. Fast as he could. Had to get to four.

  Had to get to—

  With Dee.

  With Dee?

  He caught himself. Breathe, breathe.

  Dee?

  He recognized the anomaly.

  Dee.

  He fought the panic. Corralled the instinct.

  Tried to move. He could. Huh?

  He breathed. Exhaled before he inhaled.

  Tasted the air for smoke.

  Instead of fumes he tasted Dee’s hair directly below him. He inhaled the aroma. He knew that smell. He loved that smell.

  It calmed him as though she had shampooed it in Xanax.

  Dee was under him, his full weight almost crushing her slight body. She didn’t fight to push him off. She held him tightly, her arms crossed behind his back. She was desperate to keep him from falling through her into some abyss in the earth.

  Finally, he rolled off of her onto the carpet, onto his back, his arms splayed to the sides.

  She straddled him. “Poe? Poe?” she cried. When he blinked a few times and she could feel his chest rising below her, she leaned down into him, her arms around his neck. Her voice became a whisper. She said, “Oh, baby baby. It’s okay. Everything . . . is . . .”

  “The kid is dead?” Poe asked.

  “Yes, yes,” she said.

  “What day is it, Dee? Is it Saturday?”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “What happened on Friday? All day Friday?”

  “Bad things in New Haven, baby. But we were together, baby. We were together. Remember?”

  “No, inside that building. What happened in there all day Friday?”

  APRIL 18, FRIDAY MID-MORNING

  Sam

  Ann didn’t have to say a word.

  I’ve been a cop for a long time. The transformation I saw in her face as she processed the first sounds in her ear from the call she’d received on her cell is a thing I’ve seen on a dozen or so other faces over the years. In the fleeting moment that it takes for life’s routine to be replaced by the disarray of despair and for hope to be swapped with horror, the eyes seem to learn the news before the rest of the face suspects a thing.

  It’s a cascade of anguish as the rumor spreads. The eyes go wide before the brows rise in protest. The corners of the mouth flatten before the cheekbones drop even a millimeter. Tears form before the skin closest to the lips begins to quiver.

  At some point there is an audible gasp, then a catch as the lungs revolt at air that is beginning to feel toxic. For that moment, oxygen stops flowing in, carbon dioxide stops flowing out. Moments later, when the respiratory system kicks into gear with its determined preference for toxic air over no air at all, some people exhale before they risk another inhale. Some suck a packet of air in a quick little rush before their lungs begin to constrict and collapse all over again from the weight of what they’ve just learned.

  I’m accustomed to being the bearer of bad tidings. I will introduce myself, usually at the front door. In the reception office at their job. I’m a police detective, I say.

  Sometimes it’s in the ER. Worst option is on the phone.

  But that’s all prelude.

  “There’s been an accident,” I might say next. “There was a shooting,” I might say instead.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I always, always say at some point before I’m done.

  On those days, I hate my job.

  Ann placed the phone on the table in front of her. When she looked back up at me, I saw sparks of fear and an inclination to cower spilling from her eyes like slag leaching from steel. What was left in her eyes was rage and determination.

  I have a friend in the town of Loveland, back in Colorado. He’s an ex-cop who walked away from the job the day before his seventeenth anniversary. He apprenticed to become a blacksmith, laboring primarily for the many sculptors who have transformed Loveland’s cultural landscape from Valentine’s Day cutesy-pie to serious art. I love to hang with him while he works, watch him in his foundry. He loves to explain how the steel he pounds gets stronger the more he stresses it. As he fires and hammers and works the raw metal, as he heats it, pounds it, heats it, shapes it, pounds it more, he slowly squeezes the impurities from the steel.

  That’s the slag.

  Ann was getting worked like my friend’s steel. And like his steel, she was getting stronger.

  She extended her left index finger and touched the screen on her phone. A voice came alive for me to hear.

  She pulled her hands back toward her chest, away from the phone, as though another touch might cause it to ignite, or to explode.

  “. . . wondering, this call means exactly what you think it means.” A pause—three seconds, four—was intended to allow Ann to digest the first reality. “You have ten seconds to move to a place you can listen without interruption.”

  Ann said, “I can talk right now. Is she okay? Is my daughter all right?” At that point her composure cracked. “Oh God. Dear Lord. Is she okay?”

  Ann, I recognized, didn’t realize she was listening to a recording. Not to a live person.

  I didn’t interrupt to tell her. That could wait. I was holding my breath while my brain arranged the data. It was a male voice. Accent? I wasn’t sure. But . . . maybe. Tone? Authoritative without being overtly threatening.

  Did I hear fatigue? I thought yes. I knew it might be wishful thinking on my part.

  The message was generic, not specific to Jane. If other kids were involved, their parents would listen to this same recording.

  Ann? Surprisingly composed.

  “The next time you hear from me, you will be prepared to discuss what you have to offer. The value of your offer must be commensurate with what is at risk. We both know what is at risk.”

  Commensurate? Well, I thought.

  “I don’t understand. Tell me what you want,” Ann pleaded.

  The man spoke over her words. “This is not about money. I am uninterested in your riches.”

  Ann jumped in. “I don’t want to guess. A clue, please. Some guidance. Please! Whatever you want.”

  “A reminder: Tell nobody. You do not want to disappoint me.”

  That was how the phone call ended.

  My heart was thumping.

  Ann’s mouth hung open. Her eyes were wide and wet. Lingering in the background, above the horizon of her corneas, I was relieved to see the continued glint of steel.

  From behind us, from the direction of the door that led back to the house, a full tenor chimed in, startling me. “Tell no one what? Bunny? What is it? Is there another surprise? How could this get any better? My parents? They couldn’t be more proud.”

  Ann looked at me. Without missing a beat, sh
e said, “Sam Purdy? You remember my husband, Ronaldo? The proud father of the groom-to-be.”

  “Samuel, Samuel, of course,” he said. “Dios mío. What on earth did you do to your wrist?”

  I slid Andrew’s phone into my pocket as I stood up to shake Ronaldo Angel Calderón’s hand. “I am missing a chance for one of the best golf experiences of my life, unfortunately. Your kind wife has been generous enough to set me up so I can catch up on some work. A small consolation. I’ve never felt so well taken care of in my life.”

  He smiled graciously. “We are honored at your company. Anything you need. Our house is yours.”

  “And now,” Ann said, “I do have to get back to my other guests. Ronnie, will you be long here?”

  He made a dismissive gesture with his right hand. “A couple of calls. I may need to stop by the office. I will be back at the club before the first group finishes the front nine. Any word from my Jane? Her grandmother is so eager to see her.”

  Ann smiled at her husband with a degree of warmth that confounded me. “Not yet. I’ll let you know the moment I hear from her. You go, take care of business. I’ll see you at the club.”

  She still had the rebar.

  APRIL 19, SATURDAY MIDDAY

  NEW HAVEN

  The New Haven police lieutenant—Haden Moody—summons Christine Carmody to the Mobile Command vehicle that is parked on Grove Street across from the law school. Joey Blanks delivers the message to her.

  She is reluctant to leave her post. She feels cemented to the spot where she was standing before the explosion, before she took cover behind the cruiser. She fears that walking away before the last drop of blood had been photographed or the last speck of Jonathan’s tissue has been identified and retrieved would be an act of disrespect.

  Evidence markers form a rough semicircle in front of the tomb. The cones and tents identify the locations where human remains and explosive debris have been discovered. The coroner is directing collection of the remains. Forensic detectives are cataloguing each precise spot where nonhuman debris is located.

  Every spare officer is helping to set up portable screens to block the view of the death scene from the eyes and long lenses of the curious crowds. Onlookers have been pushed back to a more distant perimeter. The cemetery has been cleared of everyone who is not already buried.

  Joey Blanks waits a respectful interval before he repeats the lieutenant’s order to Carmody. She closes her eyes, hoping to find some composure. Finally she acknowledges Joey and begins the march toward the big vehicle.

  Someone hands her a bottle of cold water the moment she gets in the door. She sets the bottle down two seconds later.

  “Tough start,” says the lieutenant, noting her entrance. “Nobody could have seen that coming.”

  She counts seven people in the bus. She knows all but one. She thinks she smells fed. She eyes the stranger until the woman looks away.

  I saw it coming, Carmody is thinking. Maybe not the speed that it happened, but I felt it going south, saw the bad outcome.

  “Yeah,” she says. She’s tempted to wonder aloud, in front of the witnesses inside the command center, who the hell had ordered the cell towers to be turned off in the first place. She resists. That would be her rage talking. There would be time for that later.

  Lieutenant Haden Moody turns away from the computer monitor. On the screen is a shot of the front of the building. He could see the same thing by looking out the window.

  Carmody literally bites her tongue.

  A forensic detective enters the vehicle. “Sir?” He’s holding a digital camera. “You should see this.”

  Moody nods at the image on the camera’s screen. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Carmody can tell that Moody has no idea what he’s seeing.

  The forensic specialist saves him. “It’s part of an earpiece. The curved part there fits over the ear. The rest is . . . We haven’t found it yet. It’s a good one, maybe Bluetooth. It was located sixty-three feet from the blast site. On the edge of the sidewalk. Right there.” He changes the image on the screen and then uses the tip of a pencil to focus the commander’s attention on a detail in the new photograph. “We think that smudge on it is blood. The victim’s. We think the kid was wearing the earpiece when he . . . died.”

  “Which means what?”

  Carmody waits two seconds for someone to walk her boss through the evidence. No one volunteers. She is far from surprised. She says, “It means those weren’t his words he was speaking to me. He was being fed.”

  “The guy in the tomb?” the lieutenant says.

  In his long history on the force, Haden Moody has never been the guy with the quickest answer. But he’s rarely been the guy with the wrong answer. That’s why he’s the one driving this bus this day. He’s the tortoise. All the hares came up lame at least once along the way.

  Moody’s reputation as a detective was that he was a successful plodder. Since his promotion to lieutenant, though, almost all the troops think he was a better detective than he is a boss.

  Moody rubs his forehead with the heels of both hands. The three people inside the vehicle who know him best recognize the warning sign, and take involuntary steps back. He barks, “Give us a moment. Everybody.”

  Almost everyone starts to exit. Moody says, “Wait.”

  They all stop.

  “The earpiece you found? That news doesn’t leave this command center. Are you clear on that?” He directs his next comment to the forensic detective. “Make sure your guys keep this quiet.”

  “Sir.”

  “Go on. Get out of here.” Everyone but Jack Lobatini moves to the door.

  Moody says, “Jack?” Everyone stops again. Statues. It’s beginning to feel like an absurd version of Simon Says. “Everybody is everybody. You, too, Jack. Watch the tomb for Christine. Couple of minutes.”

  Lobatini is surprised. He’s not accustomed to being excluded from Moody’s orbit. But he nods and follows his colleagues. He pauses one more time before he pulls the door closed behind him.

  When Moody looks up at Carmody, his eyes are fire. “What is this, Christine? We go five minutes into this mess and we have a dead kid? Live fucking cable. What the hell we got on our hands here? What the fuck in hell do we got on our hands here?”

  His fury is on the loose. She catches her own retaliatory rage as it rears up trying to escape its quarantine. She wrestles it silently until she subdues it. Even if her boss’s anger won’t wait, hers must. “I don’t know, sir. I’ve never seen one start this way.”

  “Ever heard about one starting this way?”

  “Never,” she says.

  “What’s he want? Now that the cell towers are up maybe we’ll get some demands from him? You think? Is that the way this goes down?”

  “Sure,” she says. The prediction makes perfect sense to her, but something tells her that a fresh demand isn’t what is coming next. In Carmody’s current universe “perfect sense” has exploded along with Jonathan Simmons.

  Moody knows Carmody well. He can sense her reluctance. “You’re not buying it, Christine. How come?”

  “Contain is now a major problem, sir. The guy even thinks we cut off his cell access? He kills a kid. So how do we manage contain going forward? What if we shut down his access for real? God knows what he does. He’ll kill another kid.”

  Moody stares at her. He didn’t call Carmody in so she could enlist him to deal with her problems. He called her in so she would deal with his problems.

  She tightens her lips, drawing them inward for a second or two before she releases them. She says, “He could have had that young man—Jonathan Simmons—make a demand, ask us for something, anything, a gazillion dollars, a tricked-out seven-forty-seven, a magic carpet, a harem, world peace, anything. He could have used the kid to start negotiations with us. Right then, right there.

  “He had our attention, that’s for sure. We’ve been waiting to hear from him, right? But he sends the kid out to tell
us to flip a switch and, what, that he wants the cameras to stay? That’s it. He doesn’t tell us what he really wants. He wasn’t starting negotiations with us. I’m not convinced he’s ready to start negotiations. He sent Jonathan Simmons out only to give us a warning.”

  “What? Don’t mess with my cell phone?”

  “No, sir. The message was ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ ”

  Moody whips his arm forward, hurling a Sharpie against the wall. He pops to his feet. “God in heaven. He blew that kid away to say ‘Don’t fuck with me’? The fuck. I’ll fucking find a way to fuck right back with him.” The lieutenant kicks a plastic trash can against a desk before he sits back down. He slumps in the chair. He runs four fingers through his hair.

  Hade Moody is more than a little vain. He straightens his tie. Lifts his chin. Checks his chin with his palm for stray spittle.

  Moody lowers his voice. “What then? What’s our next step? We wait? Is that it? What are our options? We wait? Do we have any fucking choices here?”

  Carmody answers as though the question isn’t rhetorical. “Tactically, sir, our hands are tied. At least for the moment. We don’t have reliable intelligence. We don’t know the number of hostages in that building. We don’t know their condition. We don’t know how they’re being held, what rooms. Together? Separate? We don’t know the number of hostage takers. We don’t know what we’re facing in terms of weaponry.”

  He glares at her. “We know they have fucking bombs.”

  “Yes, sir. We do know that. Now. Despite all we don’t know, there are a number of safe assumptions we can make about our subject. We have an organized subject, sir. This is not an impulsive or opportunistic hostage taking. He is demonstrating effective control of the circumstances and of his hostages. We have a sophisticated subject, sir. He was using wireless electronics to communicate with us through the young man. We have a subject with knowledge of explosives. We have a subject with access to explosives. We have a ruthless subject. He killed an innocent young man for no apparent reason other than to show us he could, and that he would.”