The Siege

by Stephen White

  Biker ninjas? That was a tempting diversion. Despite my curiosity, I let it go. “The construction?” I asked him. “Do you know what’s going on at the rink? Any idea?”

  “Rink? I’m really . . . I don’t. . . I mean, ice skating, right? Sorry, man.”

  I found it sad that he didn’t know how special the place was, and that he obviously hadn’t known that the big, exuberant building with the spine of the roof as lovely as the profile of a whale was just a big old hockey rink.

  I thanked him.

  “Yeah,” he said, sticking the buds back into place, walking away.

  The next student to come down the sidewalk was a girl put together like a couple of girls I dated in college. Strong. Solid. Girls I could play touch football with and not be afraid I would break them. Girls who owned hockey skates, not figure skates. Girls who knew how to fish.

  Girls who liked to fish. Since I was the odd guy who actually liked to dance, I never thought it was too much to ask to find a girl who liked to fish.

  “Excuse me, any idea what’s going on over there?” I asked her.

  Her hair was dirty blond and kind of stringy. Her eyes were the blue of the pottery my mom liked to collect. Unlike the fedora-ed one, she had already noticed the police activity across the street. “I do not know,” she said definitively. “I can tell you they weren’t there when I went to class an hour ago. Whatever it is going on, it’s new.” She raised her phone. “I just got an emergency text to stay away from Old Campus. Maybe it has something to do with that.” She shrugged.

  A whole paragraph full of complete sentences. I felt renewed optimism for her generation. But I also felt concern that she seemed less than alarmed by the warning she had received.

  I recognized her accent. She was from Wisconsin. There was a time in my life when the nuances of her spoken words would have allowed me to pinpoint the cluster of counties near the town where she had grown up. My ears no longer had the required fine-tuning, but I would have bet my last few bucks that she’d spent a few hundred predawns hooking cows up to machines in her family farm’s milking parlor.

  “I was hoping to see the rink. It’s under construction?”

  She was carrying a hefty microbiology text. She moved it from her right hand to her left. “For a while, yeah. Major renovation, been going on for a while. They’re making space for the women’s team. Title Nine, ADA stuff. New locker rooms. The place is old—it needed some help. One of my friends is a center—second line. I think they’re almost done with the work. Sorry, though, about your visit.” She smiled. “Maybe you can catch a game in the fall. You’re from up north?”

  It wasn’t really a question. To a practiced ear my northern Minnesota accent provided a whole lot of demographic information.

  “Minnesota,” I said. “Iron Range. Not far from Hibbing.”

  “You play?”

  “Did. Defenseman. I mess around a little.”

  “Cool. My dad’s a center. He still plays a couple times a week. Wicked slap shot.”

  I had to smile again. “Good for him. Hey,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She made me miss Minnesota. I hadn’t had that feeling in a while. Three distinct pops, muted by distance, found my ears. The wind blowing off Long Island Sound was carrying the cracks of the gunfire up the hill from Old Campus.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked me.

  I nodded. “Apparently there’s a sniper,” I said. “People are saying he might be in Harkness. That message you got? You should stay away from Old Campus.”

  “Darn,” she said. “I was just starting to convince my mother that New Haven is safe.”

  I wanted to stick around, strike up a conversation with one of the uniforms in front of Ingalls, maybe try to get one to spill some details about the body that had been discovered inside the Whale. I really would have loved to be free to loiter near the cluster of cops who were waiting for the forensics van and the coroner, to listen in when one of the guys uttered the first inevitable, dark, Jonas-in-the-whale joke.

  But I knew I couldn’t risk hanging around near a fresh one eighty-seven, especially one that wasn’t drawing a crowd. Alert cops notice watchers at crime scenes.

  To have any prayer of finding Jane, I had to stay invisible. I turned to head back down the hill toward Beinecke Plaza, giving the Whale one more long admiring glance.

  I stopped. I couldn’t believe I had almost missed it.

  A line of doors runs across the entire street façade to handle the crowds that exit the Ingalls rink after a game. On one of the two doors in the center of the row, directly below the dramatic spine that runs down the building’s ambling roof, someone had placed an X on the upper half of a glass pane. The mark was about two feet by two feet.

  I crossed the street and walked right up to the crime scene tape. I had to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.

  “That’s far enough,” a uniformed officer told me.

  I made eye contact. I said, “Yes, sir.” The X on the door was made of orange reflective tape. The tape was shiny and new. It hadn’t been up there long.

  Ann’s worst fears for her daughter were now, for another family, the stuff of reality.

  I walked away. The setting sun and my watch told me it was almost six o’clock.

  My stomach told me I hadn’t eaten in a week. I persuaded myself to complete an errand before I went in search of food. On the way, I called Carmen, waking her from a nap. I told her I loved her and that she should go back to sleep. I was stepping up to the door of the campus bookstore on Broadway when my phone vibrated. I thought it might be Carmen calling me back. But it was Ann.

  I said, “Yeah.” Nothing. I said, “It’s Sam. You there?”

  She managed to say, “I—” before a cough intruded.

  I said, “Ann, the sniper seems to have stopped for now. But I need to let you know that the body of a student was discovered in another part of campus. An apparent homicide. It’s a male, I think. I’m trying to get information.” I hadn’t decided whether to tell her about the orange X. About the nature of a certain man’s disappointment.

  It turned out that for the moment Ann wasn’t interested in the dead body in the hockey rink. “I just . . . got . . . another call,” she said. She was trying to talk on a halting inhale. The sound kept catching. “It just came . . . in.”

  “Okay,” I said. I could feel bad news looming.

  “This time it was Jane’s voice. A recording of her voice. A very bad connection. Delays, echoes. It was as though it was routed around the world a couple of times. I’m not sure I caught every word.”

  I’m no tech genius—in my son’s generous appraisal, neither amIa complete tech dweeb—but I had a hunch that the voice recording Ann had received had been sent overseas by the guy inside the tomb as an attachment in an encrypted email, maybe to Namibia. A compatriot there had then routed the recording to Ann in Florida via Internet telephony. VoIP. Skype.

  Tracing the calls would be a nightmare, even for an outfit with the toys of NSA.

  But the bad news Ann had to share wasn’t the crappy connection. The bad news was still to come. I said what was obvious to me, on the off chance that it wasn’t obvious to Ann. “That’s all good news so far. You heard your daughter’s voice. That means she was okay when she made the recording.”

  I didn’t say that in the hostage/kidnapping/ransom business, that’s called “proof of life.”

  Ann said, “Jane gave me instructions on how to leave the information he wants. It involves websites and passwords about our family and downloading encryption software and . . .”

  Here it comes. The bad news is . . . right around the bend.

  She released an exhale that had all the power of an exclamation. Then she said, “I know what he wants, Sam. I . . . understand now.”

  I knew then that what he wanted would be the bad news.

  “Just a second,” she said.

  I waited.

  My phone to my ear, I w
alked past the bookstore onto an adjacent plaza. This one was rimmed by more colleges. Stiles. Morse. One was undergoing some major renovation.

  These two colleges were a whole different world architecturally. The Middle Ages were gone. So was Georgian Britain. I was betting the 1960s for the birth of these babies. Lots of concrete and stone. Many angles. I said, “Ann, you still there?”

  I could hear the background sounds of a yet another gathering. I wasn’t sure how she did it. I’d only lasted for half a day and I was partied out. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be rich. I found that kind of reassuring.

  The background sounds faded, then stopped. “Sam, you with me so far?”

  “Hundred percent, Ann. You okay?”

  “Fine, thank you. Let me catch my breath. Okay. Last year I wrote a letter to the Journal of Geophysical Research. It was in response to another letter that had just been published about a controversy in the field after some television documentaries.”

  Huh? I kept my mouth shut.

  “Part of my letter was redacted on the advice of the Journal editors. They said it was for . . . security reasons. I thought it was silly at the time. The odds of anyone ever being able to use the information are so long that . . . Anyway, I agreed to the editing. Basically, a few facts that were not essential for establishing my point were removed.”

  I didn’t understand. I hoped it would become clear.

  “What I wrote was part of a debate among scientists, Sam. That’s all. Someone with a political agenda on the periphery of the field had made a point that they weren’t really qualified to make. I was correcting the geophysical record. Not a big deal. It’s the sort of thing that happens in journals in every scientific discipline.”

  I was having a hard time seeing a road that ran in the vicinity of the story Ann was telling me that would also end up passing anywhere close to the village of Pertinent. I didn’t have to remind myself that the woman was in the middle of a weekend that was so difficult I could hardly imagine. I would grant her all the latitude I had in my heart.

  I found a bench. My feet hurt. They’d been carrying my too-fat ass around for too much of a too-long day. I smelled Indian food. It smelled like comfort. “Okay,” I said.

  “Do you know much about the Canary Islands?” she asked.

  Like what body of water they’re in? I thought. No, not really. I would have put a couple of bucks on the Atlantic Ocean. I said, “That thing I said before about context? Goes for geography, too. Double. Please tell me what you think I need to know.”

  “The Canary Islands are a Spanish archipelago in the Atlantic, not too far off the coast of Morocco in Northern Africa. The specific island that my letter was about is called La Palma. It’s the westernmost of the seven islands in the chain. The scientific controversy involves a well-known, active volcano on La Palma called Cumbre Vieja that last erupted just after World War II.”

  I’m thinking, This has to do with Jane, right?

  I don’t know much about Indian food other than I like it. The aromas were killing me. I would have gladly traded what was left of my fortune for a plate of basmati rice, some tandoori, and an ice-cold Kingfisher.

  “I think the person who has Jane wants the information that the editors redacted from the letter I wrote to Geophysical Research.”

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “That’s it.”

  “How bad could that be?” I asked.

  Ann’s answer destroyed my appetite.

  APRIL 19, SATURDAY MIDDAY

  Sam

  I woke early on Saturday anxious about money. I was oddly grateful for the distraction.

  The diversion didn’t last long. I soon resumed my rumination that I was missing something crucial about Jane Calderón’s situation.

  I feared that I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. A return stroll past the tombs and the hockey barn just before I went to bed on Friday had revealed that the local police agencies were focusing more of their resources on the sniper and on the murder investigation in Ingalls than they were on the Skull & Bones and Book & Snake tombs. The law enforcement presence outside the secret societies remained cursory.

  I remained concerned that the local cops didn’t recognize what they were dealing with.

  Saturday’s breakfast was the three ninety-nine special at the Copper Kitchen, a café just down the street from the hotel. I read the local newspaper, the New Haven Register, during breakfast to catch up on the events—the Old Campus sniper and the dead student in the hockey rink—of the previous afternoon.

  The Register identified the dead student in the hockey rink as a rumored recent Skull & Bones tap. His name and hometown were withheld. He had apparently been strangled, his body left just about where the penalty box would have stood had the arena had a sheet of ice down and the boards and glass up for a game.

  Because of the ongoing renovations to the building, there was no ice sheet inside the Whale. No boards. No penalty box. Probably no Zamboni.

  Only a dead tap from Skull & Bones.

  Why Skull & Bones and not Book & Snake? I couldn’t make sense of that.

  I had a headache. I asked the waitress at the coffee shop if she had something that might help. She offered a sympathetic smile before she tossed me a sleeve with a couple of Advils. “Here you go, hon,” she said. “On me.”

  She thought I was hungover, bless her heart. The table of fraternity boys slumped forward with their elbows on the table in the back booth? They were hungover. They were also covered in paint. I didn’t really want to know.

  A large color photograph on the front page of the paper showed some of the police activity outside the hockey arena. The paper also provided a nice diagram of the inside of the Whale. A small x marked the spot where the body was discovered.

  Even though it was clearly visible in the full-color front-page photograph, the newspaper article made no mention of the other x, the more poignant and terrifying x, the large taped orange X on the entry door to the Whale. Anyone who noted the orange mark probably assumed that the construction crews had put it there for some benign purpose.

  I was one of a very small cadre of people who recognized that the orange X was one particular person’s way of expressing his displeasure. No. Disappointment.

  The other big story on the front page of the local paper was the Old Campus sniper, which turned out to have been much more and much less than had met the eye.

  The entire crisis had been an elaborate hoax. A sophisticated remote-controlled audio setup carefully hidden in the belfry at the top of Harkness Tower had been rigged to play the sounds of rifle shots echoing off the stone and brick walls of Old Campus.

  There had never actually been either a rifle or a sniper in the tower. Only digital electronics and fine speakers. A student prank was suspected. There were reports that a ski hat had been recovered at the scene. Campus police were investigating.

  I’d actually learned about the hoax before I made it to breakfast. The bellman in front of the hotel—he’s the one who had pointed me toward the Copper Kitchen—volunteered that one of his brother-in-law’s poker buddies was a New Haven cop who said that the Yale campus police were thinking that the tower sniper prank had been pulled off by Cantabs. Or by Princeton or MIT students trying to blame it on Cantabs. He wasn’t sure which.

  I’d said, “Can tabs?” hoping for clarification. I suspected that it was another opaque local colloquialism, like the previous day’s “biker ninjas.”

  “Harvard students,” he’d said. “Cantabs.”

  “Really? They’re called can tabs?” I repeated.

  “Yes, sir,” he said with some exaggerated smugness. “They call themselves Cantabs. What can I say?”

  I let it go. I didn’t believe him. If it were indeed true, it seemed like the sort of thing I should already know. I’d seen Harvard play hockey. They weren’t the Cantabs.

  The local paper did note that the hat discovered in the Harkness Tower belfry was orange, not crimson. I’d w
atched enough college basketball on TV to know that the Ivy League team that used orange as a school color was Princeton, not Harvard. Harvard was crimson. But the Crimson Cantabs? I didn’t think so.

  Although I was still naïvely holding on to the hope that the rumors about Harvard’s—or Princeton’s, or even MIT’s—responsibility for the sniper hoax were correct, I suspected that they weren’t. I was holding tight to my assumption that the hat was orange not because some devious MIT students were trying to lay blame on Harvard by leaving a clue that the hoax had been pulled off by kids from Princeton, but rather because the person who had written the ominous note to Ann Calderón was expressing his continuing disappointment.

  I left two bucks on the counter after I scraped my plate and paid my tab. As I stepped out onto the Chapel Street sidewalk, I had exactly twenty-seven dollars and a Discover card that was as close to its limit as a sloppy drunk at last call. I was not even sure I could use the card to swipe for my lunch at a fast-food joint.

  I had been dreading this day since the moment I learned I’d been suspended from the Boulder Police Department. Here it was, the day that “broke” became more than theoretical. Damn me. Damn suspension.

  Damn economy. Damn credit default swaps. Damn arrogant politicians.

  I really never thought I’d see the day that I was watching my middle-class identity disappearing in the rearview mirror. I put my financial future on the list of things I would worry about when I got back to Carmen.

  The center of gravity at Yale had shifted overnight.

  My after-breakfast reconnaissance revealed that while the solitary patrol car remained parked in front of Skull & Bones, the law enforcement presence outside Book & Snake was growing exponentially. That fact told me that the local cops weren’t completely sure where the action was, but they were beginning to lean decidedly in the direction of Book & Snake.

  I tried to stay inconspicuous as I watched additional resources get deployed. By mid-morning, perimeter barricades had been erected at the ends of the Book & Snake block on Grove Street. The entrances to Beinecke Plaza were taped off. The gates to the cemetery were closed. I watched an incident command vehicle—basically a fine class A motor home with a couple of bump-outs, the whole thing packed with electronics and communication gear—get driven into place down the block. The New Haven PD probably acquired the big bus with a thick tranche of their post-9/11 antiterror funds. A nearby SWAT vehicle was almost as large as the command bus. An aging New Haven Fire Department pumper truck was a little farther down the street, paired with a brand-new fire/rescue rig. A large hazmat van was behind it.