Whirlwind

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Not the only one,’ another woman agreed.

  Keenan stood up. ‘Couldn’t you organize for us to use the restrooms in the undercroft? We could be escorted, a few at a time.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Reaper said. ‘Sorry for the discomfort.’

  ‘I’m going to pee my pants,’ a teenager halfway back said.

  ‘I already did,’ another male voice said from somewhere.

  ‘Oh, what the fuck,’ a third man said.

  ‘Language,’ Stephen Plain said.

  And almost everyone laughed.

  And then, a moment or two later, a few more of them began to cry.

  Michael looked at Reaper, wondered how Liza was coping.

  Wished, for at least the hundredth time, that he’d never answered that email.

  The house was as handsome as Liza had expected. She’d seen photographs at school, Shiloh Oaks being a building of local historic interest and, after St Matthew’s, the most important structure in the village, but she’d never been inside.

  They were in the library now. The drapes were closed, only one desk lamp lit, but the room was nothing short of gorgeous. Money beautifully spent over a long time, not just on antiques and old leather furniture, but on the books themselves.

  ‘Where?’ Amos asked tersely.

  ‘I wonder,’ Osborn asked politely, ‘if I might be permitted to visit my bathroom?’

  ‘You went in church,’ Amos said. ‘Where’s the safe?’

  ‘Open it, Mr Osborn,’ Nemesis said, ‘and I’ll take you to the bathroom.’

  ‘Good of you,’ Osborn said. ‘I need to fetch some medication from there, for myself and my wife.’

  ‘Where’s the fucking safe?’ Amos demanded.

  ‘No need to get tetchy.’ Osborn pointed. ‘There. In that base cabinet. Open the door, you’ll see.’

  Amos crossed the room in two strides, bent to open the cabinet, and for just one insane instant, Liza wondered if she had any hope of disarming Nemesis while the big man was occupied …

  No chance. The masked woman totally focused, shotgun firmly gripped.

  The contents of the safe clearly as vital to her as the big man.

  ‘Numbers.’ Amos stared at the steel box, its electronic keypad.

  ‘Digits,’ Osborn corrected. ‘Let me see my dogs first.’

  ‘Your dogs are fine,’ Nemesis said. ‘Give Amos the numbers.’

  Osborn glanced at Liza, and she nodded, hoped he’d give them what they wanted before things got out of hand, and no prizes now for guessing why they’d made her leave the camera behind.

  ‘Give me the fucking numbers,’ Amos said.

  Osborn hesitated.

  Nemesis turned swiftly, jammed her shotgun up against his neck. ‘Now.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Bill,’ Liza said. ‘Tell them.’

  Osborn’s smile was grim. ‘Six digits. Three, nine, one, four, one, eight.’

  The masked gunman keyed the numbers in, and Liza held her breath.

  Heard the door open. Exhaled in relief.

  ‘This isn’t it,’ Amos said.

  ‘Sure it is,’ Osborn said. ‘Just as I told you. Go ahead, take the money.’

  Amos stood up, holding a bundle of what looked like fifty-dollar bills. ‘Where’s the real safe, you bastard?’ He came at Osborn, thrust the money in his face, then threw it on the floor. ‘Where’s the real cash?’

  ‘Nonexistent.’ Osborn turned to Nemesis. ‘Will you take me to the bathroom now?’

  ‘Where’s the money, Osborn?’ she said. ‘You don’t want to jerk us around any more, believe me.’

  Liza looked at the telephone on the writing desk, thought that maybe if she said she needed to sit down …

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Amos snapped.

  ‘Why not?’ Liza said. ‘Would you shoot me?’

  That wasn’t brave, she told herself, just idiotic, because she wanted to survive this whole thing, not bleed to death on some Persian rug.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ Amos answered. ‘But I wouldn’t mind shooting this scum.’

  ‘Where’s the real money, Mr Osborn?’ Nemesis asked again.

  Amos returned to the safe, took out a flat leather box and opened it.

  ‘That’s my wife’s,’ Osborn said.

  ‘Not any more.’ Amos took out a diamond and emerald necklace, tossed the box onto the rug, stepped over to Nemesis, stuffed it in one of her jacket pockets and zipped it up. ‘You’ll need to be careful how you sell it, but it might help.’

  Definitely for profit then, in Nemesis’s case, Liza registered.

  ‘It’ll be money,’ Osborn had said hours ago.

  Not necessarily money in Michael’s case, Tilden’s confession surely more important to him. Though she couldn’t be sure, not of that, not of anything, especially as he’d seemed shocked by Tilden’s guilt.

  ‘Unzip another pocket, Nemesis.’ Amos was back down at the safe, pulling out more boxes – Cartier, red and unmistakable.

  ‘Please,’ Osborn said, pleading for the first time. ‘Not that one.’ He pointed to a small square box. ‘Take the rest if you must, but not that one.’

  ‘Sentimental value?’ Amos was sarcastic.

  ‘I’m not explaining myself to you, you piece of filth,’ Osborn said.

  Amos stood up, moved fast, sideswiped him on the side of his head with the butt of his shotgun, and the old man fell onto his knees.

  ‘Jesus.’ Liza got down and put her arm around Osborn’s shoulders. ‘Bill, are you OK?’

  He seemed unable to answer, his eyes glazed, blood trickling down from his right temple, his breathing too shallow.

  ‘My God, what have you done?’ Liza’s heart was pumping hard again, that single brutal act removing any hope that this might still end well. ‘Bill, try to stay awake. I’m going to help you.’

  ‘Bill’s going to help himself by telling us where the cash is.’ Amos took a diamond ring out of the red box that had caused Osborn such distress, tucked it into another of Nemesis’s pockets and zipped it up. ‘Aren’t you, Bill?’

  ‘Can’t you see he’s hurt?’ Liza said.

  ‘He doesn’t look good.’ Nemesis sounded uncertain.

  ‘He’s old and he’s a son of a bitch,’ Amos said. ‘There’s different ways of hurting people, and this bastard’s done plenty.’

  ‘Even if that’s true, please just leave him alone now.’ Liza kept her arm around the injured man’s shoulders. ‘Take what you’ve got – the jewelry’s obviously valuable. Go back to Reaper and tell him that’s all there is.’

  ‘But it isn’t.’ Amos hunkered down in front of Osborn. ‘Here’s a deal for you, fuckface. You tell me right now where the real money is, and I won’t go back into church and cut your wife’s throat. How about that?’

  ‘He won’t do that,’ Liza said softly to Osborn.

  ‘I think you know by now that I would,’ Amos said. ‘Because there’s a fortune somewhere in this house, and Whirlwind has plans for it.’

  ‘Just tell him, Osborn,’ Nemesis said. ‘Please.’

  Osborn said something unintelligible.

  ‘What?’ Amos leaned in closer. ‘What?’

  ‘He can’t speak,’ Liza said, afraid the old man might be having a stroke.

  ‘The hell he can’t.’ Amos pulled a folded knife from his pocket. ‘Tell me now, or this is for your Freya.’

  William Osborn’s eyes were suddenly less glazed, clear with loathing.

  ‘Cellar,’ he said, slurred but intelligible. ‘You were looking right at it.’

  ‘Where in the cellar?’ Nemesis asked.

  ‘Floor. Near the champagne.’

  ‘Come on.’ Amos put away the knife, grabbed Osborn’s right arm, hauled him up off his knees and the injured man cried out.

  ‘Stop it!’ Liza protested. ‘You’ll kill him.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Nemesis said. ‘We don’t need another death.’

  Amos let go of his arm,
and Osborn crumpled to the floor. ‘Then think of your wife now, old man, while you still can, and tell me what kind of safe it is.’

  ‘Not a safe,’ Osborn whispered. ‘Locked hatch.’

  ‘Where’s the fucking key?’

  ‘In this safe,’ Osborn told him weakly, giving up. ‘Over there.’

  Amos was there in an instant, and for such a big man, Liza thought, he moved nimbly, and in another moment he had two keys in his hand. ‘One of these?’

  Osborn didn’t answer.

  ‘Which one?’ Amos yelled.

  ‘He’s passed out,’ Nemesis said.

  ‘Oh, God.’ Liza ripped off her gloves, felt for a pulse in his neck. ‘He’s alive, but he needs help.’

  ‘Leave him.’ Amos bent and pulled her up.

  ‘He has to have help,’ she told him.

  ‘Not from you,’ he said. ‘You’re coming with us.’

  ‘At least let me dial nine-one-one,’ she said. ‘We’ll be gone before they get in.’

  ‘They’ll be blown to fuckdom if they try.’

  ‘You wired this house too?’ Liza stared at him.

  ‘So come on.’ Nemesis took her arm.

  ‘If he’s been lying,’ Amos said quietly, ‘I’ll do what I told him I would.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Nemesis said.

  ‘I don’t think he was lying,’ Liza said.

  ‘Who the fuck asked you?’ Amos said.

  ‘I’ll get you help, Bill,’ Liza said at the door, urgently. ‘Soon as I can. You just hang in there.’

  There was no answer.

  ‘What have you done with my husband?’ Freya Osborn was on her feet. ‘They’ve been gone for over an hour.’

  ‘They’ve been gone for fifty-two minutes,’ Reaper said. ‘Please sit down, Mrs Osborn. I’ve done nothing to him.’

  ‘Not you, maybe, but I don’t trust that big brute.’ She stood her ground in her dark mink, gloved fists clenched, makeup smudged, exhausted but furious. ‘Where have they taken him? He’s an old man and he’s sick. He needs his medication.’

  ‘So long as your husband is cooperating, you have nothing to worry about.’

  Freya Osborn turned to the vicar on the other side of the aisle, back beside his wife. ‘There are offices down there, aren’t there?’

  ‘My office, yes,’ Keenan said.

  ‘So there’s a computer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what they’ll be using,’ Osborn’s wife said. ‘It’s money, just as Bill said, and the rest of it’s hogwash. Some kind of computer fraud. They’re here to steal.’

  ‘Sit down, Mrs Osborn,’ Reaper told her again.

  She sank down, leaned back, shivered, pulled her fur around her, closed her eyes.

  ‘Try not to worry too much, Freya,’ Stephen Plain called to her. ‘Bill’s tough.’

  ‘He’s brave,’ Freya said. Then, close to tears, added: ‘That’s what’s frightening the hell out of me.’

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Osborn had told the truth about the cash in the cellar.

  It took them a while to find it, and Amos was ready to smash every tile, but then Nemesis spotted a square of grouting that looked different from the rest, and there was the hatch, well-concealed and rectangular, and Liza held her breath, desperate for the money to be there, fearing for Osborn and Freya if it was not.

  Amos knelt, opened it with the first key, and a neatly carved lid of six floor tiles came away easily.

  He set it aside and stared down into a crawlspace.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, awed.

  ‘My God,’ Nemesis said, and pulled off her balaclava, her cheeks flushed red.

  ‘Put that back on,’ Amos snapped at her.

  ‘She’s already seen my face.’

  ‘There might be security cameras.’

  Nemesis quickly pulled it back on, and looked around.

  ‘Too late if there are,’ Amos said. ‘Shall we?’

  They got down to business, Liza ordered to help as they began heaving out the money, and there was more cash down there than she’d ever seen in real life, vast quantities of what looked like mostly hundred-dollar bills, some in bundles, some loose, as if it had been carelessly stuffed into the void – and maybe, she thought now, on her knees, this was why they’d brought her down here, just to lend a hand with this robbery?

  Definitely no question now as to why they’d taken the camera from her, and clearly this had been the real motivation for the rest of the gang too. Money. Filthy lucre. Those words from the Bible, Liza thought. Right up Reaper’s alley.

  Watching Nemesis now, she wondered if she’d ever been a bank teller, because she handled the cash so deftly, and they’d come equipped with plastic bags and rubber bands to separate the bundles and facilitate counting, and their backpacks were on the floor now, waiting, Liza guessed, to be filled.

  They worked in silence, lips moving as they counted.

  ‘You see now,’ Amos said to Liza, sitting back for a moment. ‘Only a loan shark – a thief – would have this kind of money. Black, dirty money.’

  ‘Takes one to know one, as they say,’ she said.

  ‘You want a smack?’

  ‘Hey,’ Nemesis said. ‘None of this is her fault.’

  He shrugged and went back to work.

  ‘I get now why you stopped me broadcasting,’ Liza said.

  And then a new kick of fear hit her hard, the sudden realization that if Osborn was dead, that would make her the only witness to this.

  ‘You’ll be able to start again soon enough,’ Nemesis said easily.

  Liza nodded at the mounting piles of plastic bags. ‘How much do you all need? There must be well over a million in those bags already.’

  ‘Lot of good causes out there,’ Amos said wryly.

  ‘I’m taking a cut,’ Nemesis told Liza, ‘and I don’t mind you knowing why.’

  ‘Not in the plan,’ Amos said.

  ‘What difference?’ Nemesis said. ‘I’ve made big mistakes in my life, got in all kinds of trouble, all my own doing. But my brother has spina bifida, and I swore that I’d always take care of him, but he’s stuck in an institution and he needs surgery, which he’s not going to get without a shitload of money. I’m here to see that he gets it.’

  ‘And this was really the only way?’ Liza asked.

  ‘I tried everything else, believe me, but nobody gives a damn, and why would they? I thought it was game over until Reaper found me, and here I am.’ Nemesis snapped a rubber band around another cash bundle. ‘I feel terrible about that little kid, and for Luke, and even for Osborn.’ She regarded Liza through the balaclava’s slits. ‘I should have known we couldn’t pull this off without anyone getting hurt, and yes, I’m ashamed, but I’m just going to have to live with it.’

  ‘Are you done?’ Amos enquired scathingly.

  ‘I wanted her to know,’ Nemesis said. ‘So sue me.’

  At ten after four, Clem Carson was right outside the village, the Wrangler parked up on Shiloh Road, staring through night-vision goggles at Elm Street and the rear of St Matthew’s.

  Still alone, and likely to remain so for a while. The go-ahead given for all kinds of help: CNU (motto Pax Per Conloquium, which meant Resolution through Dialog) and some kind of task force being organized now stat, but the blizzard still preventing choppers from flying any time soon.

  Carson’s orders until a few minutes ago: watch, listen and report back. And though the link with the reporter-on-the-spot was still down, Providence was feeding him info, and they knew a little more now about Joshua Tilden, aka Reaper, the most crucial detail being confirmation from Garthville, where he’d been a long-term psychiatric inmate, that the bastard was dying of cancer.

  Which made it all the more probable that he planned to finish what they’d started inside the church, no matter what. Which gave Clem Carson a sick feeling, because he doubted that these people were simply going to defuse their bomb-rigged doors and let their hostages
walk free. That just wasn’t the kind of decision a dying, deranged bastard was likely to come to at crunch time.

  His latest order was, he guessed, good news. To try to establish communication, to be damned careful, and if he managed to speak to Reaper/Tilden or any of his gang, then Carson was to procrastinate until the real negotiators arrived.

  ‘Just get them talking,’ Balfour had said. ‘Find out what they want to bring this thing to a safe conclusion. Then tell them you can’t guarantee anything, but you’ll pass on their demands.’

  And Clem was ready to start calling, but, since he didn’t remember ever hearing a landline phone ringing in any church nave, chances were it would ring in the office, which they knew was down below, and that was fine, so long as someone heard it, but if no one was in that office, then with this banshee wind still shrieking they probably wouldn’t be hearing much of anything.

  Still, Clem kept an assortment of useful stuff in the back of the Wrangler.

  Including a fully-charged megaphone – his own property, a thing he used now and then when he was coaching his rowing team.

  Hard to be sure, with those heavy walls of snow covering up the high windows of St Matthew’s, if they’d even hear him calling on that.

  But if no one picked up the damned phone, he’d made up his mind to try.

  Happy Christmas, Snowman.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Inside St Matthew’s, Michael, having listened to Reaper coughing for a while now, had offered to bring him water from the undercroft, but Reaper had shaken his head, had pointed, instead, to a veiled chalice of wine on the altar table, and in the front pew, the vicar had suppressed his anger and given his wife a rueful smile.

  ‘Perhaps Dr Plain could help?’ Rosie Keenan suggested moments later.

  ‘No help needed,’ Reaper said.

  ‘None offered,’ Stephen Plain called. ‘I’m not a doctor anymore anyway.’

  ‘Good for you, Doc,’ Mark Jackson said from the sixth row. ‘With a bit of luck, he’ll choke to death and we can all go home.’

  A few sips of sacramental wine, and Reaper’s cough first grew more rasping, then faded away, but Michael felt it had tired him, and thought about whatever he might be dying of, wondered how long he could keep this up.