The Siege

by Stephen White

  They had never talked about money. She assumed he lived on his agent’s salary. He had never given her a reason to think otherwise.

  “I can afford it. I’m a frugal guy,” he said. It was true, he was. Other than spending a couple of nights a week drinking alone in dive bars, he had no indulgences. Even fewer vices.

  Unless you counted his days and nights with Dee in April. Some might consider that a vice. Others might consider it an indulgence.

  Poe considered it oxygen.

  Anyway, he was thinking, if my hunch about all this turns out right, they’ll reimburse me.

  He was almost done stuffing the last of his clothing into his duffel. Deirdre had started flicking dust off the shoulders of his dark suit with her fingernail. Satisfied, she straightened the coat on its hanger and zipped it into the cheap vinyl thing that Poe called his garment bag.

  It gave Poe goose bumps that she was helping him pack. It felt like the most generous thing for a woman to do.

  He didn’t tell her that. He knew it would make her cry.

  They had muted the sound to the TV. It was still tuned to Fox News. Since the kid’s explosive death, cable news had gone into all-New Haven-all-the-time mode. It was early in the crisis—Fox was still at the stage in their coverage where they felt compelled to replay the video of a pixilated Jonathan Simmons exploding at least twice a minute.

  They had two angles recorded. The network alternated between them as though they were waiting for the replay officials to make a ruling on a disputed call.

  Poe found the footage more appalling each time they ran it. They were using human tragedy as video wallpaper. Naked people aren’t pornographic, he thought, this is pornographic.

  He kept hoping that a grown-up would show up at the network and take over the programming. That it was daytime on a weekend was no longer a sufficient excuse for the repetitive display of carnage.

  The text at the bottom of the screen indicated the anchors were doing phone interviews with people whom they had designated as “experts,” hoping that the public might confuse these people with professionals who were actual experts on the blowing up of college students held hostage inside impenetrable buildings owned by secret societies.

  Each expert noted it was too early to know who was responsible. Then each one named a fresh possible suspect. Domestic. Foreign. Religious. Agnostic.

  The anchors interviewed a cop who had been at Virginia Tech. Then the father of a kid who died at Columbine.

  Poe couldn’t figure out the point.

  He stared at the screen. He said, “Killing the kid like that? Blowing him up. The unsub plans to die in that tomb.”

  Dee knew that. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. This is a . . . stop-action suicide bombing.”

  “From a hostage negotiation perspective, it changes everything. Do they know that? In New Haven? That the unsub is already dead?”

  Dee had more faith in the Homeland Security apparatus than Poe did. “Yes, baby. They know that.”

  “I hope so,” he said. He stood up. “I should wash my face.”

  “Where do you go to catch it?” Dee asked Poe when he returned from the bathroom.

  He recognized her question as conversation. That meant she knew the end was near. He felt it, too. His core felt hollow, as though all of his organs had been replaced by inert gas. “Pier Thirty-six. I have no idea where that is. I should probably get going.”

  He smiled at her with a softness that almost paralyzed her. The grin he deployed was the one that he hoped would liquefy all of Dee’s anxiety. She’d succumbed to that smile once or twice before. She called it his “Botox grin.”

  She tried to smile back. Her mouth did its part. Her eyes failed miserably.

  He caught her gaze. “You saved my life this weekend, Dee. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Poe,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

  He slid his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. He took a half step toward her. “I get to where I’m barely hanging on sometimes. You’re my lifeboat. You’re always my lifeboat. You’ve kept me from drowning ten times since Oklahoma City.”

  She loved hearing it and didn’t want it to be true. She said, “You’re fine without me, Poe.”

  He shook his head. “Some days I don’t exist without you, baby. You know what I do? I store memories of you in my brain. Sounds. Smells. The dimples above the hipbones on your back. The way you taste on my tongue. The way your hand feels when we weave our fingers together. What I do all the time we’re apart is that I play them back, a little at a time. I ration them . . . stretch them out and get them to last me for the whole year.” He bit his lower lip. “But sometimes I get greedy. Before this weekend, I swear I was almost out.”

  She turned her back to him and wrapped her arms around herself. “I can’t stand this,” she said. “I can’t stand to watch you go.”

  “It’ll be okay,” he said. “It will.” He knew his words were unconvincing. He wasn’t sure how convincing he was trying to be.

  Dee said, “You shouldn’t go to Connecticut, Poe. The unsub is using bombs, baby. Bombs.” She sounded like the concerned mother of an eight-year-old child with food allergies warning her son that the birthday party he was desperate to attend would have cookies and cakes with nuts in them.

  Poe spun her back around so that she was facing him. He unpeeled her arms and replaced them with his. After a long, strong embrace—her head beneath his chin—they kissed like it was their first, and then like it was their last.

  Dee ran back into the bathroom. She couldn’t say good-bye to him.

  The helicopter trip to New Haven from Philadelphia lasted over an hour. Poe’s administrative assistant in D.C. finagled emergency landing permission at the Yale New Haven Hospital heliport.

  Poe’s assistant had chosen a hotel on Chapel Street. The Study at Yale. He had instructed her to pick a place where his colleagues were unlikely to stay. The name gave Poe pause. He wasn’t sure he could handle a surfeit of tweed and corduroy. Poe asked the taxi driver to wait while he dropped off his bags. The cab carried Poe the few additional blocks across town to the corner of York and Elm.

  The GPS in his BlackBerry let him know he was close. He walked from the corner, eventually coming up near the location of the tomb from the rear.

  If he had rented a car and fought the incessant traffic out of Philly, he would probably barely have cleared New York City by the time he was stepping into position behind the tomb. And he knew that if he’d driven to New Haven he’d be in a bad mood. I-95 always put him in a bad mood.

  I-95 was not a road designed to lift anyone’s spirits.

  Crime scene tape was strung the length of the block adjacent to the sidewalk. Two campus police sentries were patrolling the perimeter of the adjacent plaza. Poe didn’t know the landmarks, didn’t know what building was what. He asked a Chinese woman for help. She had a plastic vinyl Hello Kitty bag slung over one shoulder. Poe got temporarily distracted wondering why a Chinese woman in America would be carrying a bag emblazoned with a Japanese cultural icon. Cradled in the woman’s other arm were two mathematics texts. The titles were in English. Poe couldn’t decipher either of them. He wasn’t even sure what branch of mathematics she was studying, only that it was one in which he was not conversant.

  He forced himself to focus. He told her he had heard there was a problem, and asked her where everything was happening. She nodded across the adjacent plaza in the direction of the blank back wall of a building on the opposite corner of the wide plaza. She said something in Chinese, caught herself, and said, “Over there. That one, the building with the plain wall.” Her English was heavily accented. She provided the directions without pointing.

  Poe spotted a cluster of special unit officers congregating near the building with the blank wall. The cops were local SWAT. City or county, he couldn’t tell, but they were prepped for action. Despite their obvious weaponry and their helmets and body armor, the Chinese student had not m
entioned their presence. She had not said, “That building there, near those police.” She was either accustomed to this kind of authoritarian posturing, or just uninterested.

  Poe added China to the roster of places he wanted to go someday with Dee.

  He decided to walk the long way around the block until he got to a checkpoint. At that point, he would come up with a plan. The plan might be to flash his FBI credentials to the local cops and hope that things went smoothly.

  More likely it would be something else.

  That’s the point in his preparation when he saw the SWAT officers start running.

  The two sentries closest to Poe reacted to the sudden commotion behind them. They stepped away from the tape.

  Poe saw opportunity. At the first sound of trouble, the sentries should have redoubled their vigilance on the perimeter, anticipating a breach. Instead, their insufficient training caused them to turn to the noise.

  Poe stepped under the yellow tape and walked between two buildings. The one to his right was an elegant, small stone building adorned with ornate Oriental flourishes. While he walked, he hung his FBI credentials around his neck.

  One downside of his new position was that he could no longer see what had happened with the SWAT team behind Book & Snake.

  He was about to try to find a way to sneak into the plaza in front of him when a woman barked, “Stop.”

  He raised his hands. He stopped walking. In a conversational tone, he said, “I’m FBI.”

  Poe recognized that he had apparently spotted only two of the three sentries on the plaza. He promised himself he would be more careful in the future.

  The woman was a uniformed campus cop. She moved slowly in front of him, keeping a distance of ten feet. Her weapon was pointed at his chest.

  “I’m FBI,” he repeated. “My ID, my badge.” He gestured with his chin.

  The campus cop—a black woman with dark, sparkling eyes and cheekbones other women would kill for—was much more terrified than Poe.

  Guns didn’t scare him much.

  Deirdre? Dee scared him. God, Dee scared him.

  Bombs, too. Bombs scared him. Dying didn’t scare him, but bombs did.

  Poe heard SWAT members yelling, “Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!”

  He wondered if they had the unsub. He resisted an impulse to turn his head.

  “You with HRT?” the cop asked him.

  Poe exhaled. “Thank God. Where are they? That’s who I’m looking for.”

  It wasn’t exactly untrue.

  She lowered her weapon.

  He kept his hands up. “Which way?” he said.

  “They just got here. They’re setting up a whole tent city over on the Green. The guys with the black suits and automatic weapons are staging on the other side of Woolsey. I heard they’re getting ready to move into Commons, take it over.”

  Poe said, “They’re the ones I want. The assault teams—the guys in the black suits. May I lower my hands?” She nodded. “Thank you. I’m from headquarters. In Virginia?” She nodded again. “Commons? Where is that?”

  “This big building? That side is Commons. This side here is Woolsey.” With her non-gun hand, she gestured at the largest building on the plaza, an ornate Harry Potter-ish thing that towered above them. The Woolsey/Commons combination formed an L-shaped structure that consumed a huge section of the block.

  To Poe the building appeared to have been built during the Middle Ages, by serfs. More important to him, Commons seemed to be the nearest structure to the building where the hostages were being held.

  “Best way for me to meet up with HRT?”

  “Go back outside the tape. Walk past Woolsey to the corner. You’ll find your FBI friends.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He retraced his steps to the sidewalk. He paused there, waiting until the young cop turned her attention away from him. Instead of going left to make it around Woolsey, Poe turned right to go around the block the other way.

  He stuffed his ID back into his pocket.

  Poe didn’t want to find his FBI friends.

  APRIL 19, SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  NEW HAVEN

  If the first act was played out in front of a full audience, this act is going forward on a closed set.

  The crowds have grown much larger, but the swelling throngs are restrained beyond more distant perimeters. Police video cameras are mounted on tripods directly across Grove Street from the tomb. News cameras that had been set up on the sidewalk across the street from Book & Snake are farther down the block.

  Reporters and producers are bitching about access. Hade Moody has already told Jack Lobatini that it didn’t matter who in the media was asking, that he didn’t care about their problems. But Jack knows his boss well enough to know that if Brian Williams or Katie Couric is on the line, Hade Moody will want to take the call.

  The cemetery is locked off to the public, providing a wide buffer between the tomb and the surrounding community. Cops on horses are patrolling the graveyard’s many acres.

  Hade Moody stares at the latest hostage on the computer monitor for ten seconds before he looks at Christine. “You got a plan to handle this second kid?”

  She hears the implied criticism: Better than you handled the first kid.

  She says, “I always have a plan.”

  He says, “What about contain? We continue to allow him cell access?”

  She knows that decision is his, not hers. “You want to bet another kid’s life on that one, Lieutenant?”

  “Just tell me you got a plan that will work.”

  “I’m open to suggestions, sir. Always grateful for your counsel.” She gives him a few seconds squirming time. After he straightens his tie, she says, “You coming out, or are you staying in here?”

  “Here for now. Jack’s still your second. He’ll liaise.” Moody has long had a thing for the sound of that peculiar soft verb. His love for the word is almost a fetish. He sometimes mangles simple sentences in order to find a way to insert it. He turns back to the monitor. “Jack, you have the log? Time from the . . . explosion until now?”

  Jack lifts his clipboard, looks at his watch. He says, “One hour, fifty-four minutes.”

  Carmody has no idea why the timing matters.

  “Feds?” Moody asks.

  Jack knows his role. He says, “Full response is on the way.”

  “But not here?” Moody is thinking out loud. Stringing together small facts, his favorite kind.

  Jack checks his watch again, as though he has forgotten the time. “No. ETA is . . . twenty, twenty-two minutes into Tweed. Another thirty or so here. Then some time to orient and get set up. I’ve never seen them deploy, don’t know how efficient they are.” He looks at Carmody, then at Moody. “Either of you know how long it takes for Hostage Rescue to get up to speed?”

  Carmody wants to scream. She ignores his question. “This is ours for now and we have work to do. The asshole could kill half the junior class before the FBI gets in position.” She turns to leave the vehicle. She stops. “Any surprises still waiting for me, Lieutenant? Anything I don’t know as I go out there and say howdy to that kid? You know, like maybe . . . that the cell phone towers are turned off again? You have people I don’t know about who have maybe started screwing with the plumbing or the electrical? Anything I’m going to get ambushed by this time?”

  She knows she has let the rage escape, just a little leakage under the door.

  Hade Moody stands, steps forward. He dwarfs her. His voice is measured. “We didn’t do anything to the cell towers, Christine. The providers can’t explain what happened to the signal. But it wasn’t us.”

  “Coincidence?” she asks. She knows her sarcasm has squeezed under the same door that allowed her rage out. She also knows that her sarcasm can be toxic enough to require hazmat response. She has to watch it.

  Moody turns his back on her. “Do your job, Christine. You don’t have to worry about me doing mine.”

  As she
moves past Jack toward the door, he holds up a body armor vest for her. “Your size,” he says.

  She shakes her head and pushes open the door.

  When Christine Carmody marches out of the Mobile Command vehicle she deliberately returns to the precise position she vacated in the middle of the street. She is on the tomb side of the car that caught the remains of Jonathan Simmons’s left hand.

  Between her post and the stairs that lead up to Book & Snake are dozens of tiny, numbered evidence markers.

  One tent, number forty-three, rests on the hood of the car behind her. It marks the spot where Jonathan’s thumb fell from the sky.

  The thumb has been collected.

  In case someone inside the building is looking for a target, Christine is happy to appear to be a good one. She doesn’t feel vulnerable. Although she knows nothing about the subject’s plans, she is confident that, thus far at least, his strategy involves wasting college kids, not cops. She also knows that could change.

  We didn’t do anything to the cell towers, Christine. She allows herself to consider the possibility that Moody was telling her the truth. And what that might tell her about the guy inside the tomb.

  One of them, either the man inside the tomb or Hade Moody, hasn’t lied to her yet.

  She isn’t sure which one.

  She lets her eyes settle at the top of the steps. She softens her focus. See, don’t look, she reminds herself.

  The second young man to emerge from the building has his hands in the air. They are empty, the fingers extended. He is wearing baggy chinos and a navy Yale zip-up hoodie. He is barefoot. He hasn’t shaved for a few days. His wrists are red.

  She has the sense he has been waiting for her to get into position because his instructions are to wait until she gets into position.

  Christine goes through the motions of introducing herself and seeking the young man’s cooperation.