Turning Point

by Danielle Steel

  “We don’t know why he’s in there,” Perliot said with a calm voice and angry eyes. This was exactly the kind of situation they had feared for years, involving a building full of children. They had just learned that there were six hundred and twenty children in the school, and approximately eighty adult staff who worked there.

  There were at least a dozen senior police officers on the bus, which served as tactical headquarters for what they were going to do. There were squadrons of riot police and SWAT teams in the street around them, waiting for the order to go in, but no one wanted to sacrifice safety for speed, nor to wait too long. Whatever they did would have a downside. And they had no idea why the shooter was there, if his motives were political or religious, or if he was a random lunatic on a mission of some kind.

  “I want to know who this bastard is,” Captain Perliot said through clenched teeth as two policemen in combat gear stepped onto the bus with an older woman. She identified herself as the school librarian. She had climbed out a basement window where she was putting books in a storeroom when the attack began. She had heard the ranting of the gunman on the PA system and before she left, she had looked for some of the children to take with her. She had approached the gym and said that the doors to the gym were locked, and she thought everyone was trapped in there with him. She said some students and teachers might be hiding, but she had escaped without finding any.

  “I think I know who he is,” she said, her voice shaking. “He was talking about his wife, and said everyone had to pay for killing her. The administration reduced the staff three years ago, and about twenty teachers were let go. If he is who I think he is, his wife was one of them, Élodie Blanchet. She taught history and Spanish. She was a lovely woman. Six months later, she discovered that she had breast cancer, she had surgery and treatments. I visited her in the hospital when I heard about it. She died about a year ago. She told me when I saw her that her husband was very unstable, and he was convinced that she got cancer from losing her job. They were separated when she died. They had a daughter who is fourteen or fifteen now, and lives with Élodie’s mother. We all went to the funeral. Her husband was there, but he didn’t talk to any of us from the lycée. The whole story is very sad. I think he had a history of mental problems and lost his job because of it. That’s all I know about him.” She was certain it was him from his ranting over the PA, and he had mentioned Élodie by name.

  Captain Perliot asked his name and she said it was François Blanchet. The librarian had heard him speaking of his wife on the PA system and then gunshots and people screaming afterward.

  Two policemen got on their cellphones immediately, to the intelligence unit, to get everything they could on François Blanchet. Five minutes later, police intelligence called back. He was forty-nine years old, had a psychiatric discharge from the army, so he knew weapons, and was an unemployed engineer by profession. He lived in a rough part of Paris, and was on welfare. The whereabouts of his daughter were unknown. Ten minutes after that, they had a cellphone number, and, holding his hand up for silence, the captain called him. Marie-Laure sent a policeman to find Valérie, and she came back to the bus at a dead run before the call connected, and stood an arm’s length away from the captain. The call was being recorded.

  There was no answer at first as the gunfire continued from inside the building, and then it stopped and François Blanchet answered. Bruno Perliot spoke to Blanchet in a calm, even voice and said that they wanted to have a conversation with him, and wanted him to come outside.

  “You must think I’m stupid. And then what? You shoot me on the way out? Don’t try to come in here,” he warned him. “If you do, half the children will be dead before you shoot open the doors.”

  “Let’s talk about this. I’m sorry about your wife. That was a terrible thing to happen,” Bruno said in the most soothing voice Stephanie had ever heard. They had been invited to join the French team on the bus, and told where to stand so they wouldn’t get in the way.

  “They killed her!” François Blanchet exploded into the phone, and then started to sob. “They killed her. She got sick almost immediately after they fired her. She was so beautiful, and so sweet, and a good teacher. They made her sick. She would never have gotten cancer if they didn’t fire her. She was never sick a day in her life. They were too cheap to pay her, so they killed her.”

  “I’m sure they’re very sorry now,” Bruno Perliot said smoothly, but the gunman got irritated immediately.

  “I will make them sorry for every day she suffered, and every minute she’s been dead. I loved her so much,” he said, sobbing again. “She was such a good person.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.” As Perliot spoke to the shooter, SWAT teams were exploring the building for points of entry, had found two they wanted to use, and were entering through the basement. “François, I don’t think she would want you to hurt the children. She loved them.” The captain was stalling him, trying to buy time, while they frantically planned their entry into the school.

  “I know she did. And they fired her anyway, and killed her. Now my daughter has no mother and I have no wife.” He cried audibly for a few minutes, and then a volley of shots rang out again.

  News of the school hostage situation had leaked out by then, and the TV news trucks had arrived on the scene, with reporters everywhere being told by police to stand back. The press were waiting for the dramatic scenes at the end, but there was nothing for them to show now. A small cluster of parents was standing in the street, clutching each other and crying, waiting for news of their children. Someone had called them, most of the parents didn’t know yet. A special area had been cordoned off for them, with two policemen in charge. Valérie had gone out to see the parents briefly, and was back on the bus minutes later, in time to listen to the call with the hostage taker. She was standing by with an intent expression, listening to every word he said. The captain was handling it masterfully. Ideally, they would have liked the gunman to give himself up, but the likelihood of that happening was slim to none. He had already gone too far. As they watched, both Stephanie and Bill were thinking of their children, and how they would feel if this happened to them. Their hearts went out to the agonized parents, as one of the riot police handed out police armbands to the four Americans, to identify them as part of the official police operation if things got crazy and rough later on. They slipped them on over their jackets as the drama continued to play out. It had just been on the news that a crazed gunman was shooting children and teachers at the lycée, in retaliation for the death of his wife. The police knew that more frantic parents would begin to arrive.

  Five minutes later, one of the policemen approached the captain and whispered that Blanchet’s daughter was calling in on the main police line, or someone who had claimed to be her. She said her name was Solange Blanchet. The captain pointed to Valérie to take the call, which she did, on a phone someone handed her, and she walked away a little distance so as not to interfere with the captain’s conversation with the gunman.

  Solange said that the hostage taker was her father, and he was very sick. He had been that way since her mother got cancer. She hadn’t seen him since the funeral and didn’t know where he’d been, but she told Valérie that they had to take him to a hospital and not kill him, just stop him from hurting the children at the lycée. She was crying and sounded desperate.

  “How fast can you get here?” Valérie asked her.

  “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes. My grandmother can drive me.”

  “It would help if you could talk to your father,” Valérie said on her own initiative, but she had done things like it before, sometimes with success. It brought a sick shooter’s mind back to reality to speak to his child, or wife, or mother. Sometimes they could do the job better. Valérie knew it would be traumatic for the girl, and she would deal with that later, but for now it was all they had. Bruno was establishing a rapport with B
lanchet, but they could already sense that he wasn’t going to be able to convince him to put down his gun and come out. And shots continued to pepper the conversation. They could hear the screams from inside the gym. Sometimes he shot in the air to demand silence, and at other times he was shooting victims.

  Students who had them were using cellphones to call out of the building by then, lying under the chairs from the assembly. They weren’t supposed to use cellphones in school, but some had them in their pockets, and the police were talking to them, as the students answered in whispers. They said that at least fifty students were dead in the gym, a lot of teachers, and they didn’t know how many were in the halls, and Blanchet was still shooting. One of the teachers in the gym said that he had a sack of loaded Kalashnikovs, and was using them. Blanchet had told them he had enough ammunition to kill them all.

  There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had to go in. The question was when. There were snipers poised to shoot through the windows, but they didn’t have a clear shot at him because the windows were too high. Ladders had been set up along the side of the building, but they were waiting for the order to open fire, and the SWAT teams already in the basement had been told not to advance farther, but to be ready at a second’s notice. Their best marksmen were already in the building. And there were at least two hundred police in various uniforms on the street. Ambulances had arrived, and teams of doctors and paramedics were standing by.

  Valérie handed the captain a note that Blanchet’s daughter would be there in fifteen minutes. She had already left her school, and her grandmother was on the way to her. Bruno decided to wait until she got to them. What he didn’t want was another hundred victims while the SWAT teams entered the room and took him down. If they could get him to give up peacefully, it was worth the wait. And meanwhile they were still studying the best access to the building and the gym.

  Bruno went on talking to Blanchet, while he sobbed about his wife, but he had stopped shooting for a few minutes. And it seemed like an eternity until a slim young girl with her blond hair in a braid climbed onto the bus looking terrified. Her maternal grandmother, with whom she lived, was waiting outside. Solange was fifteen, had already lost her mother, and now her father had gone insane and was killing children. She wanted to help the police, and Valérie explained to her in a quiet corner what they wanted her to say. Just hearing Solange’s voice might subdue him, and bring him back to earth, before more people got hurt. They handed her a phone connected to the same line the captain was on, so he didn’t have to give his up and he could listen to the conversation.

  “Papa,” she said softly, in a tremulous voice, her eyes brimming with tears, “Maman wouldn’t want you to do this. You have to stop now. I love you. Maman loved you.” She and her father were both sobbing as she spoke.

  “They killed her, Solange. You don’t understand, you were too young. She got cancer because of them. They deserve to die for it.”

  “I don’t want you to die too…or the children…” she begged him.

  “It’s the only way they’ll pay attention. There was no other way. I’m avenging your mother,” he said, sounding aggressive again. “It’s only right. And the children didn’t suffer. I shot them in the head.” Everyone on the bus felt sick as they listened, and Solange choked on a sob. Even she understood that her father was never going to come out of this alive. The police wouldn’t let that happen. All they could hope was that no more children would die, but François Blanchet was a marked man. And he knew it too. “I want you to go home now, Solange,” he said firmly, for an instant sounding like any parent of a teenage girl. “You shouldn’t be here, you should be in school.”

  “I wanted to be here with you. Can I come in and see you, Papa?” It might be her last chance to see him alive.

  “No, go back to school. Maman wouldn’t want you here.”

  “I love you, Papa.”

  “I love you too. I have to work now, go home,” he said sternly. Valérie was both listening to the conversation and texting her assistants to send in the post-trauma teams. Some had already come, but she had a feeling they had underestimated the numbers of victims.

  The captain was shaking his head as he listened to the exchange between father and daughter. Blanchet wasn’t coming out, and he sounded like he was about to continue his rampage when he said he had work to do. Captain Perliot indicated to Valérie to take Solange off the bus and she escorted her outside. Once the girl was gone, he gave the order in code to go in. The plan was set. Four teams were going to attack simultaneously to break down the gym doors and free the hostages. Marksmen were already halfway up the ladders, poised just below the windows to shoot Blanchet as quickly as they could. Everything was in place and waiting. They had been there for less than two hours, but it felt like two hundred years. And Bruno Perliot wouldn’t have felt responsible going in any sooner. He wanted everything perfectly set up for the best protection he could get for the students, and so the SWAT teams could act as quickly as possible.

  He gave the final code word with a grim expression, which went through the earpiece of every member of the SWAT teams, and within a split second, the marksmen were up the ladders, the doors exploded into the gym, windows were shattered, bullets flew, children were screaming and François Blanchet lay dead on the stage with six bullets in his head and four in his chest, which had come from all directions. Police and SWAT teams were running and carrying injured children out of the building to paramedics and ambulances, and another detail of police had the grim task of counting the bodies as they moved systematically through the school, also making sure that Blanchet had committed the assault alone, which appeared to be the case.

  Outside, parents were frantic and sobbing, rushing toward ambulances trying to identify their children, and the police couldn’t stop them. Children were clutched, others were missing, people were shouting, and Solange stood sobbing in her grandmother’s arms. She was the daughter of a murderer and her father’s death had been confirmed. Both her parents were dead now, and her father was a monster.

  It was a scene of slaughter and desperation, terror and tragedy that tore at the most hardened policeman’s heart. Some of the parents tried to rush into the building and were stopped. Unharmed children were brought out in groups by the SWAT teams, looking dazed, some screaming, some carried. Valérie was among the first in line to see them as they went by, speaking a word here and there, and she looked up to see a burly member of one of the SWAT teams carrying a five-year-old covered in blood, and she saw someone run past her like a shot. It was Tom Wylie, who took the child in his arms, and ran toward the nearest medical truck. He could see that the child was dying. She had been shot in the chest and was bleeding out. In minutes she’d be dead. A doctor on the scene joined him, saw that Tom knew what he was doing and had noticed his police armband, and together they got an IV line into her, administered a transfusion, and applied pressure to the wound to stop the bleeding. Tom signed to him that he would go with the ambulance, and the doctor nodded and shouted to the ambulance driver to get to Necker Hospital as fast as he could. The ambulance doors closed and they were gone. The child’s parents had never even seen her, although a lone photographer had caught the moment when Tom ran up and took her to save her.

  Tom talked to her in English all the way to the hospital, as her eyes fluttered, her pulse was thready but she was alive. Two paramedics had ridden with him. The three worked on the child together in perfect unison to keep pressure on the wound. Tom was covered in blood and when they got to the hospital she was still alive. A team from the trauma unit rushed her away and Tom prayed they could save her. She was too young to die. He rode back in the ambulance with the EMTs, and when he got to the school, Wendy was on her knees on the concrete holding a boy whose arm had been nearly shot off and who was in shock. He was an upper class student and bigger than she was, and she helped get him on a gurney and they rushed him aw
ay.

  Bill and Stephanie were bent over a ten-year-old boy who had just died. Paul was carrying injured children from the building along with the police, and Marie-Laure and Gabriel were helping to get the walking injured into ambulances quickly as Valérie moved among the parents, consoling, hugging, reassuring, helping them find their children. The children who had not been injured were already on buses to be taken to another school where the post-trauma teams were waiting for them, they would spend several hours being counseled and debriefed, then be reunited with their parents.

  Valérie suggested to Solange’s grandmother that they remove her from the scene quickly, before the reporters spotted her and surrounded her. They drove away a few minutes later. She had given the grandmother her card, and asked her to call later, and bring Solange to see her in the morning. Solange’s grandmother promised she would.

  Once the injured had all been sent to hospitals, the body count began in earnest, and the bodies were removed from the school, as policemen and workers sobbed at what they saw. Some children had been shot in the head, as the gunman had said, but many weren’t and had bled to death in classrooms and in the halls, or in the gym. The final count was horrifying, the worst mass slaughter in Paris ever. A hundred and twenty-nine students had been killed, and thirty-two teachers. A total of one hundred and sixty-one people, a quarter of the population of the school, and more would die in the hours to come. More than fifty children had been injured and even lost limbs due to the assault weapons he used. A single man had done this with a sack of fully loaded automatic weapons, shooting them relentlessly for two hours. He was unpredictable and deranged, no one could have foreseen it. It was a tragedy of mass proportions.

  When all of the children and teachers were gone, Marie-Laure suggested that they all go back to her place. Her children were in school and the combined team needed a place to gather and mourn, catch their breath, and cry over the senselessness of it all. They climbed into the van, filthy, bloodstained, and exhausted. Stephanie and Wendy were crying. Tom didn’t even know the name of the child he had tried to save. Valérie had gone on to the other school to meet with parents and students, and teachers and their families, in the post-trauma operation. But the rest of their team was in the van going to Marie-Laure’s, and Bruno Perliot, the captain in charge, had told her he would be in touch later. There would be countless debriefings, press conferences, and meetings in the coming days to analyze what had happened, what had gone wrong, if anything, and what could have been handled differently. They had lost too many lives, but they all agreed there was nothing they would have changed. It had been conducted with the precision of a Swiss clock. But one mad gunman with a sack full of weapons had beaten them soundly and stolen a hundred and sixty-one souls.