Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  One of the campus cops ran up, panting a little as he said, “Agent Graham! We’ve just gotten word that all the hostages in Olmstead Hall have been freed, and the gunmen who took over the building have been killed!”

  Graham’s eyebrows rose. He looked over at Vega and said, “I don’t know who’s doing it, Agent, but it seems like somebody is cleaning house.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Before leaving the fourth floor, Jake told Pierce that he was going to stop one floor below and send Dr. Montambault and the other former hostages down there up to the fourth floor.

  “You’ll have a larger force that way,” he explained, “and a second gun, too, if you need it.”

  Not that Montambault was any sort of fighter unless he was pressured and panicked into it, Jake thought—but that was better than nothing.

  “I’ll see if I can’t get the folks on the second floor loose, too,” he went on, “and if I do, I’ll send them up here to join you. If you have to make a stand, this is as close to the high ground as you’re going to find.”

  “Be careful, Jake,” Pierce said. “You may have whittled down the odds, as you put it, but there are still a lot of guys with guns in this building who would like to see you dead.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” Jake said. He lifted a hand in farewell and stepped into the stairwell.

  He moved quietly and stopped to listen every few seconds, just in case more of Foster’s followers were creeping up the stairs toward him. He didn’t hear anything or run into anybody by the time he reached the third floor. He pulled back the door, but before he stepped out into the open, he called, “Dr. Montambault, it’s me, Jake Rivers!” He didn’t want Montambault getting trigger-happy and blasting away at the slightest movement.

  “Mr. Rivers!” Montambault exclaimed, somewhere to Jake’s right. “You’re alive. We heard more shots from the fourth floor and weren’t sure what to think.”

  Jake stepped out of the stairwell and grinned. He didn’t feel much like smiling after everything that had happened—especially Natalie’s betrayal—but it never hurt to keep your spirits up, and those of your allies, as well.

  “C’mon, folks,” he told Montambault and the other people here on the third floor. Pointing upward with a thumb, he went on, “I want you to head on up to four. There’s a kid named Pierce Conners up there who’s working with me, and he’s forted up with the people who were working on that floor. You can join them.”

  “Will it be safer up there?” the professor asked.

  “Well, I don’t honestly know, but they say there’s safety in numbers. There’ll be more of you in case you have to put up a fight. Some of you guys, gather up guns and ammunition from the men I killed.”

  Nobody moved to accomplish that grisly chore. Jake glared at them and managed to hold in the caustic comments he wanted to make about snowflakes and pajama boys. The stern look was enough to make a couple of the men budge.

  “Head on up when you’ve got that done,” Jake told Montambault.

  “I . . . I’m just not cut out for this.”

  “You’re doing fine, Professor.”

  “You don’t understand,” Montambault said. “I don’t want to do fine. I don’t like knowing that I’m actually capable of such . . . such savagery.”

  “Those guys who are willing to kill hundreds of innocent people to get what they want, they’re the savages, Doc, not us. Just remember that.”

  Jake started on down the stairs, hoping Montambault wouldn’t pass out if he found himself facing trouble again . . . or worse, try to reason with Foster’s bunch. You couldn’t reason with thieves and killers.

  He was moving faster now as his anticipation grew. He had slipped a fresh, fully loaded magazine into the Glock. Once he reached the second floor, he would probably need it, he told himself. No way were any of those bastards giving up their shot at a share of a hundred million dollars without a fight.

  He made the turn at the landing between the second and third floors but froze as he heard a sharply indrawn breath in front of and slightly below him. Someone was coming up the stairs toward him.

  “Jake?” a familiar voice said. “Jake, is that you?”

  She had to have heard him. She knew he was there. But she might not be absolutely sure of his identity. He might have been another of Foster’s men. If he spoke, there was a good chance she would aim at his voice and open fire.

  “Jake, if that’s you, you have to help me. I don’t want to do this anymore. It was all a terrible mistake, and I’m so sorry.” A pleading note entered Natalie’s voice. “Please, Jake, I’m putting my life in your hands.”

  “Natalie,” he said. He couldn’t hold it back. Her name had formed on his lips before he could stop it.

  Muzzle flame ripped through the gloom in the stairwell. The gunshot crashed against his ears.

  The bitch!

  Jake triggered three swift shots before he realized something was wrong. As he heard a soft cry, he realized what it was. The shot fired at him had come from lower down on the steps than Natalie had been when she was talking to him.

  That meant someone else had fired it. The two of them weren’t alone in this stairwell.

  That didn’t mean Natalie actually regretted what she had done and wanted to turn on Foster. Maybe she had just been trying to get him to talk so the other gun-wielder could zero in on him. That seemed more plausible than her having a change of heart.

  He pressed himself back in the far corner of the landing and kept the pistol pointed down the shadow-choked stairs. The shot fired at him hadn’t struck him, and he hadn’t heard the slug hit the wall or ricochet off anything. A cold ball formed in the pit of his stomach as he realized where it might have gone.

  A faint moan came from somewhere down the stairs. Then a grated curse in a man’s voice. Jake heard sounds like somebody trying to climb to his feet. A hand slapped quietly against the wall for support.

  “Bitch,” the man muttered. “Could’ve told Matthias . . . not to trust her. Traitorous slut . . .”

  Unsteady footsteps started up the stairs. Jake stayed where he was and waited, although that was difficult now.

  The steps stopped. Jake made out a shadowy form bending over something on the stairs. Then he heard the man mutter, “The girl! But if I hit her—”

  “That’s right, you bastard,” Jake said. “You missed me.”

  Flame licked from the Glock’s muzzle as Jake fired three more times. The bullets ripped through the man on the stairs and flung him backward. He went down the stairs to the second-floor landing in a wild, out-of-control tumble. When he stopped, Jake didn’t hear him moving anymore.

  Taking the stairs two at a time, Jake went down until he came to Natalie’s crumpled shape.

  A part of him still didn’t want to trust her. A rattlesnake could still sink its fangs in you even after the scaly son of a bitch was dead. But Natalie wasn’t moving, and as Jake stuck the gun behind his belt and knelt on the stairs to take hold of her, he could tell how limp she was.

  But not dead. He moved his hand to her throat and found a pulse there. It was fast but fairly steady. Jake lifted her, held her against him, and explored her body for wounds. His big hand found the wet, sticky spot on her back, a little below her right shoulder. There was no matching exit wound on her front. The bullet was still in her.

  If it hadn’t struck a bone and bounced around to do a lot of internal damage, the wound might not be a fatal one. Natalie needed medical attention, though, and pretty quickly. He gathered her in his arms and stood up.

  As he started back up the stairs, she stirred slightly against him and murmured, “Jake?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got you,” he said. “You’re gonna be okay, Natalie. Lucy. Whichever.”

  “Not . . . Lucy. That was . . . Matthias’s . . . idea. I’m . . . Natalie . . . What happened?”

  “One of Foster’s men shot you in the back. I’m going to get some help for you.”

  “Guess he . .
. didn’t really trust me . . . after all. I told him I’d come after you . . . kill you . . . but I was lying to him. Just wanted to tell you . . . how sorry I am . . . about lying to you. But not all of it . . . was a lie . . .”

  He didn’t want to get into any of that now. This wasn’t the time or place, and besides, he wasn’t sure he would ever believe her again. But he didn’t want her to die, either, if there was anything he could do to save her life.

  She didn’t seem to weigh much in his arms as he climbed the stairs. When he reached the fourth floor, he balanced her against him and opened the door, then called, “Pierce! Doc!”

  Pierce and Montambault came running from somewhere else on the floor. When Montambault saw the woman and the large bloodstain on the back of her shirt, he exclaimed, “Oh, my God! What happened? Is that . . . Dr. Burke? Oh, no!”

  “Hold on, Professor,” Pierce said. “You don’t know what happened down on the lower level. She’s one of them.”

  “I don’t care about any of that right now,” Jake said. “She’s hurt, and I don’t want her to bleed to death.” He carried Natalie over to one of the desks, cleared it with a swipe of his arm, and carefully laid her facedown on it. “One of you get over here and put some pressure on this wound.”

  Pierce and Montambault looked at each other. The professor’s eyes were huge with apprehension. Pierce nodded in resignation and came over to the desk. Jake had already ripped a large piece off the tail of Natalie’s shirt and folded it into a pad.

  “Hold this on there,” he told Pierce. “Don’t be afraid to press down on it. The most important thing right now is stopping the bleeding. Doctor, you take a look around and see if you can find some alcohol, something like that. A bottle of booze will do if anybody’s got one stashed in their desk.”

  “I’m sure that’s not the case,” Montambault said. “But there may be a first-aid kit somewhere up here. I’ll ask the people who work on this floor. Someone will know.”

  Jake nodded and said, “You’re doing good work, both of you. Now I need to get back to what I started.” He reached out, touched Natalie’s shoulder for a second. She appeared to be unconscious now. “Killing the rest of those sons of bitches.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Matthias Foster paced back and forth, his anger visible in the quick, catlike strides. His last radio check had gotten no response from the administration building, as well as two of the other buildings his men had taken over. That could only mean the situation was continuing to deteriorate.

  He was starting to think that he had spread his forces too thin. Maybe it would have been better if he had concentrated on the library and brought all of his men here. He would have had fewer hostages that way, but the chances of holding out would have been better.

  The other scenario had seemed so much more dramatic, though. Taking over an entire college campus and threatening to blow it off the face of the earth . . . ! That was the sort of thing legends were made of. If he was able to pull this off, his name would go down in the annals of terrorism, right next to Osama bin Laden.

  Of course, in reality he was more like D. B. Cooper, he supposed—a guy who got away with a fortune through sheer daring and audacity. And like Cooper, if he pulled this off, he would never be seen or heard from again.

  Now, though, with things going wrong, it felt like all that was slipping away from him, and that angered Foster. He paused in his pacing, lifted the radio to his mouth, and called the language-arts building, where three of his men had been in control of eighty-seven hostages, the last time he had checked in.

  “Marc?” Foster said. “How’s it looking there? Marc?”

  This time there was no response. Foster cursed and was about to lower the radio when it suddenly crackled to life.

  “This isn’t Marc,” a strange voice said.

  The resonant voice belonged to a man. It held just a trace of a Southern drawl, almost indistinguishable but there. Foster’s hand tightened on the radio as he said, “Who’s this?”

  “Somebody you don’t want to know, Matthias. But I have a feeling we’ll be making each other’s acquaintance before the day is over.”

  “Rivers? Rivers, is that you, you son of a bitch?”

  “Not . . . exactly.”

  “Where are my men?”

  “Hell, more than likely,” the answer came. Foster expected that, but it felt like a punch in the gut anyway. Things were getting worse all the time.

  But he still had cards to play. He said, “I guess you got everybody out of the building?”

  “It’s just me now,” the man said. “But I’ll be coming for you soon.”

  “I don’t think so, asshole.”

  Foster’s other hand dived in his pocket and came up with the radio he used as a detonator. Each of the bombs had a specific frequency, ones that were off-limits for normal voice communication. One-handed, Foster changed the switch on the handheld unit to the frequency of the bomb planted next to the language-arts building. He thumbed the transmit key and with satisfaction heard the heavy thump of the explosive going off across campus. That was enough to make the hostages here on the lower level of the library scream and yell again. They probably thought they were next.

  Not yet, but soon, maybe. Foster had long since decided that if he put his plan into action, he would never be taken alive.

  But with any luck, he wouldn’t have to worry anymore about whoever had been disrupting things. There was a possibility the blast hadn’t killed him, but in all likelihood, it had.

  A smirk was forming on his face when the radio crackled again. That same voice drawled, “I never said I was still in the building, Matthias, just that all the hostages were out. I’m still coming for you, once I’ve finished with all your flunkies.”

  Foster jerked the radio up to his lips, but he was too filled with rage to form words. Instead, he let out an incoherent sound that was half-growl, half-shout, and flung the radio away from him. It bounced and slid across the floor.

  He stood there for a long moment, trembling inside from the depth of his anger. He hadn’t heard anything from Natalie since she had gone up the stairs after Rivers . . . or from the guy he’d told to follow her, since he didn’t fully trust her. Had something happened to them? Could things really get any worse?

  Foster took a deep breath and looked around, studying the frightened faces of the hostages. He had only two men besides himself left on this level, and he’d had to pull one of them down from the first floor. Those weren’t good odds. If the hostages ever decided to rush them, it wouldn’t end well for Foster and his allies.

  Fortunately, the chances of that happening were insignificant, in his opinion. These were college students and staff, after all. They had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the same sort of progressive claptrap he had once believed himself. They considered themselves superior, the elite who were too smart, too “woke,” to ever embrace violence. Unless, of course, it was as part of a mob, preferably in hoods so their identity would be safe and they wouldn’t get in trouble with the law or with Mommy and Daddy. The college administration would let them get away with anything, that was a given—the “inmates” had long since taken over these particular academic “asylums”—and chances were, their families would, too, but there was just enough of a chance that wouldn’t happen that they would want to be careful. The resistance was super important, but not at the expense of tuition, housing, and a mega-generous allowance.

  So, not much chance of this bunch risking their lives by fighting back. They were used to being sheep, being told what to think and do every moment of their waking lives by the government and the media, and sheep they would remain. Scared little sheep.

  Foster stalked over to the radio, picked it up, and keyed the mic, saying, “Natalie? Natalie, are you there? Answer me, damn it!”

  * * *

  Jake had taken Natalie’s radio and stuck it in his pocket before he started down the stairs. He heard Foster calling on it and was tempted to a
nswer, just to throw a surprise into the son of a bitch.

  He decided not to. Better to let Foster stew in his own juices for a while and wonder what had happened to Natalie.

  Jake wondered himself how she was doing. Liberal or not, Pierce seemed halfway competent, and Montambault had proven not to be completely worthless. Jake would have hated to place his life in the hands of either of them, but he supposed they were better than nothing. Maybe somebody among the freed hostages had some medical experience. Kelton College had a pre-med program, he seemed to recall.

  He shoved his worries about Natalie out of his head. It hadn’t been much more than an hour since she had shoved a gun in his side and threatened to shoot him in the heart, so no matter what he had believed he was starting to feel for her, he didn’t owe her a damned thing. He could have left her to bleed to death on those damn stairs and not felt a thing.

  Maybe if he told himself that lie often enough, he might come to believe it . . .

  More pressing concerns took precedence. He had cleared Foster’s minions from the third and fourth floors, but that wasn’t true of the first and second. He didn’t know how many gunmen were on those floors.

  The second floor wasn’t that important now, Jake decided. He could afford to bypass it, because whoever was posted there wouldn’t be able to come to Foster’s aid right away if shooting broke out on the lower level.

  The same couldn’t be said of the men on the first floor. They could reach the lower level quickly just by bounding down one of the escalators, which were stopped now because the power was out. If he could deal with them, Jake thought, then Foster wouldn’t have any backup left. He would be alone with however many of his men he had left—and that couldn’t be many by this point.

  But Foster still had guns and plenty of ammunition and dozens of innocent hostages. If he and his men opened fire, they could slaughter many of the prisoners before they were overwhelmed. Jake wanted to prevent that if possible.