The Siege

by Stephen White

  “I can’t ever repay you.”

  “You don’t ever need to.”

  APRIL 19, SATURDAY LATE AFTERNOON

  Poe

  Poe watched the guy without the shoulder holster loiter on the edge of Beinecke Plaza for a few minutes before the man stuffed his hands into his pockets and turned up Wall Street in the direction of the law school.

  The man’s route kept him within a block of Book & Snake at all times. Poe didn’t consider that to be a coincidence.

  Poe waited thirty seconds before he began walking in the same direction. He was maintaining a good hundred feet of separation between him and his new prey, well aware that it was neither an ideal time nor location to attempt to tail someone, especially solo.

  The man slowed. He pulled an iPhone from his pocket.

  Poe slowed, too, mirroring his pace to that of his target. He was surprised at the man’s choice of electronics—he hadn’t made the out-of-town cop as an iPhone kind of guy.

  The man stopped. He pulled an old-school flip phone from another pocket.

  Poe thought, He carries two phones. Why?

  The man didn’t dial the phone. He opened it and put it to his ear. He was answering a call. Within seconds he was shaking his head, forcefully.

  Poe kept walking, closing on him. He got near enough to hear the man say, “Really? Right now?” Seconds later, not as clearly, Poe thought he heard, “Damn. Okay, I’m on my way there.”

  Poe was only ten feet from the man when the guy took off at twice the earlier pace.

  Poe followed him around the law school, past the campus power plant, and then across the street to a small crescent-shaped park that was formed as Grove Street curved away from the cemetery. Poe knew from his earlier reconnaissance that the park and the power facility both offered a vantage from which to see the front of the tomb.

  He was working under an assumption that the man had heard something on that phone call that made him determined to be able to see the front of Book & Snake.

  Poe edged closer, attaching himself to a trio of students heading in the same direction. Across the street from the little park, he broke away from the group and stopped in the shadow of a tree near the power facility.

  Poe texted Dee. Whererud?

  Still PHL.

  On board?

  In line.

  Poe knew the favor he wanted to ask of Dee. He thought he knew how she would respond. He figured it was best to ease into it.

  He typed, What happened to those hostages? From earlier?

  The one I thought was dead is dead. Total of four were released.

  Four? That’s progress, right? This could be over soon.

  Don’t misread it. I doubt it’s a good sign.

  Poe wasn’t able to see how releasing hostages could be a negative indicator.

  He typed, Why is that not good?

  It means this isn’t about carnage, baby.

  He typed, Then maybe he wants out. He’s ready to end it?

  Dee replied, And maybe he’s planning something worse than carnage.

  Poe felt a chill on his back. He realized what Dee was telling him.

  He typed, I need your help. Don’t go, be my eyes and ears.

  Qué?

  He scrolled for her name. Called her.

  “Listen to me for a second. Don’t say no before you hear me out. I need help. Professional help.” Poe laughed. “That didn’t come out right. I need your assistance. I need you to sit in front of a television and tell me what’s happening in New Haven in real time. Right now, this second. With the perimeters so far back there’s no way to get a good view of the building, certainly not within earshot. I’m working blind. Please, Dee. Something important is happening right this second in front of the building. Maybe another kid, I can’t see it from here.”

  “Poe, you’re a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Check in at the perimeter. They’ll let you watch. Professional courtesy.”

  “I can’t, Dee. You know that. The commander on the scene will box me. I’ll be anchored to a babysitter or sent packing.”

  Dee needed Poe to understand she was fencing with her own demons. “Poe, I have to go home. It’s . . . time for me to . . . go home.”

  To Poe’s ears that was not a no. He almost said, Jerry can wait. He caught himself in time. He pressed her. “Take the next flight, Dee. What? Another hour or two? What’s that? I’m tracking an out-of-town cop who’s curious in ways he shouldn’t be curious. I may be beginning to figure this out. But I can’t do it blind.”

  She asked, “Can’t you get CNN or Fox on your BlackBerry?”

  “I can’t get video to stream. The local networks are swamped. Anyway, I need—”

  He stopped himself before he said, you.

  He said, “—your perspective.”

  Dee growled at Poe for the second time that day. For her, that didn’t even approach a personal record.

  From the boarding line where she was standing she could see a concourse monitor playing the CNN news feed. The ongoing New Haven hostage saga was the day’s big story. Even thirty feet away from the TV, Dee could tell that another kid was indeed standing at the top of the stairs of the tomb. Holy, she thought. Please don’t blow that young man up. Please. She didn’t want to watch that again. Ever. Not for Poe, not for anyone.

  She knew what Poe wanted and she knew why he wanted it. “If I step out of this line, Poe, I’m going to regret it, aren’t I?”

  You are such a doll. “It’ll be our first case together. We can save the world.”

  “No, Poe. I think it’ll be our second case together. You and I? We can’t save the world. We tried once. How did that work out?”

  Poe didn’t know how to respond. He considered it to be a perfect topic for them to toss around between cocktails two and three in their next dive bar rendezvous.

  She said, “I can see a monitor, Poe. So you know, I’m still in line. It looks like there’s another student in front of the tomb. The camera angle is poor, the shot is from far away, and it’s partially blocked by a tree. I would say it’s a black kid. His arms are in the air. Just like before. He’s wearing glasses.”

  For Poe, the presence of another hostage confirmed his suspicion that the out-of-town cop was getting real-time feeds on his cell phone about the situation at Book & Snake. The question was, from whom?

  Inside the tomb? Outside the tomb? And why?

  Poe said, “I knew it. What’s the kid saying? What’s going on? I can’t see from here. If I try to get a better vantage, I’ll risk losing the guy I’m after.”

  Dee growled again. She stepped out of the boarding line and walked until she was standing beneath a speaker transmitting the TV sound. “There’s no live audio from the scene, Poe. It’s just the studio anchors. More pap, like before. Wait—oh my God—CNN says this kid is the secretary of the army’s youngest son. The kid we got the email about on Friday morning.”

  “Damn it,” Poe said.

  “I have to go, baby. I’m getting back in line. But now I’m going to be at the back of the line. If there’s no room left for my carry-on, Poe, I’m going to—”

  Poe had started walking in a little box pattern on the sidewalk. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. He tried to stop. He couldn’t stop. The pressure was building in his chest. His legs were beginning to smolder.

  He smelled smoke that wasn’t there. Experience taught him that was never a good sign.

  He kept walking the box. The panic inside him was swelling. The acidic sting was budding into his bones. Infiltrating his marrow.

  “What about—Can you access the live feed, Dee? There are law enforcement video cameras right across the street from the tomb. I can see them from here. That means there’s a feed. Can you get hold of that signal?”

  “On an airport television? Have you lost your mind?”

  “On your laptop, baby. From Langley? The airport has Wi-Fi. Given the identity of the kids in that build
ing, and what happened yesterday on campus, you know that the Company is getting that video. Can you, I don’t know, just tap into the feed somehow?”

  “What? Poe, please, I—”

  “Deirdre,” he said. He rarely called her Deirdre. He knew it would get her attention. “This isn’t about us. This isn’t about you and Jerry.” He gave her a chance to bicker. She didn’t. He considered that an omen. “This isn’t about the weekend we just had, or about you feeling guilty, and it’s not about you needing to get home, or about me not wanting you to go home. This is about—”

  “Don’t tell me what this is about, Poe. You do not know what I’m dealing—”

  “It’s about the work we do, Dee. What we believe. This is about what really happened inside that tomb on Friday while the world outside the damn doors was distracted. This is about Nine/eleven and London and Chechnya and Madrid and Bali and Mumbai, and it’s about what makes this time different. This is about what is new, and what is next.”

  She didn’t reply right away. She used a knuckle to hijack a tear.

  He added, “Dee, this is the evolution of terror. Right now, in New Haven, Connecticut. This is the adaptation you’ve been predicting. This is the adaptation we’ve been fearing.”

  She was silent for at least ten more seconds. Poe found the pause interminable. He covered his mouth with his free hand to enforce his silence. He feared he’d already overstepped, that Deirdre would be livid that he had co-opted her words.

  He continued to pace the box, because he couldn’t stop. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. His femurs were in danger of melting. His brain entertained an image of himself as the Wicked Witch devolving into a mercurial puddle.

  Finally, Dee said, “You don’t know what you’re asking. You don’t, Poe. God, I’ll call when I know something.” She killed the connection.

  Aloud he said, “Thank you.”

  He typed, I love you. He didn’t hit SEND.

  Not on April 19. Maybe he could send that message in May.

  It took all his will, but he exited the box.

  He just stepped out of it. It felt like a miracle to him, something a superhero might be able to do in the movies.

  Poe couldn’t see the front of the tomb from where he was standing, but he could still see the man he was following just fine.

  The man without the shoulder holster pulled a throwaway map from his pocket and glanced at it for a few seconds. He turned away from the tomb and began marching up the sidewalk that led around to the other side of the cemetery.

  Poe surmised that whatever had been going on outside the Book & Snake tomb had concluded, or was on intermission. The out-of-town cop had also inadvertently given Poe some new data: The map the man consulted was bordered with the logo of the Omni Hotel.

  Poe allowed himself a tiny fist pump. Even after a decade and a half of mostly futile effort chasing largely invisible and often imaginary foes, Poe continued to adore new intelligence data the way a chef loves seasonal food. For Poe, the feeling of discovery was doubled if the new data was something he had farmed. Data from soil he had tilled always tasted better to him than data that someone else had produced and delivered to his door.

  He would put some distance between them by giving the shoulder-holster cop a head start before he followed him around the cemetery.

  Poe stepped sideways. Almost incidentally, his eyes settled for a few seconds on a young woman fifteen yards away. She was on the sidewalk adjacent to the pocket park, about halfway between where Poe was standing and the departing back of the out-of-town cop. She was of graduate student age, mid-twenties or so, and dressed like many of the other young women he’d seen near campus since he arrived in New Haven. Jeans, sneaks, a blousy top, shoulder bag. She was on a step, on her toes, and—like half the people in the vicinity—craning to see over the crowd and around the obstacles. Like almost everyone else she was looking in the direction of the Book & Snake tomb, hoping to see something interesting or tragic, or both.

  Poe didn’t focus his attention on the woman because his secret agent instincts were magical or because his spy craft was particularly well honed. He noticed her because she was built like Dee, and because his instinctive assessment of her looks was that she was slightly on the pretty end of the plain-to-pretty spectrum.

  Poe tended not to get too distracted by girls who fell on the gorgeous end of the pretty-to-stunning spectrum. Yes, he would notice, but those women typically failed to hold his interest for a couple of reasons. One was because decades of experience had informed him that those women had never shown a grain of reciprocal curiosity about him. The other reason gorgeous women didn’t captivate Poe was because he felt their attractiveness had nowhere to go, no realm in which to develop. On those rare days when Poe admitted to optimism about anything, he acknowledged that one of his favorite things in life was discovering how much more beautiful a woman became as he fell in love.

  Deirdre was an attractive CIA analyst on the day she walked into his hospital room to interview him in Oklahoma City in April 1995.

  She was damn near dazzling only one April later.

  He watched the young woman who had caught his eye as she lifted her right hand to tuck her blond hair behind her ear.

  That casual gesture was what caused Poe to freeze.

  He froze in place like a day hiker who had just heard a rattle in the nearby grasses. A backcountry skier who had just spotted a fresh fault quake in a massive slab of snow.

  The freeze was instinct. Survival.

  Poe swallowed. Then he reminded himself to breathe, because he had stopped doing that right in the middle of an inhale. On the deliberate exhale he told himself to concentrate. He had to use all his will not to rotate his head to scan the rest of the crowd to see if the young woman was alone.

  He knew she wasn’t alone.

  In a three-second span his training started to kick in. The practiced response was familiar, an old friend. Like riding a bike, he thought. He allowed the focus of his vision to expand from near to far. In the distance, he watched the out-of-town cop disappear behind a curve in the graveyard wall.

  Poe knew in his gut that he couldn’t follow the cop. Not with his eyes. Not on foot. Not after what he’d just seen the blond girl do.

  He brought himself back, permitted his focus to return to near. The blond girl touched her hair again.

  She wasn’t wearing earrings.

  He registered other observations: Her pretty hair fell past her shoulders. Natural color. A little thin. Straight, with bangs. She had wide-set, green-gray eyes. A slightly crooked nose.

  Has her nose been broken? Maybe. Huh.

  Nothing else struck Poe as remarkable or memorable about her features.

  That, he knew, was important.

  The specific act she’d performed that had frozen Poe in place was a small thing. Both times she hooked her pretty hair behind her ear, her lips moved almost imperceptibly. She was using the hair-tuck gesture as a way to camouflage the fact that she was speaking a few quick words into the underside of her right wrist. Into the blousy cuff of her trendy, blousy top.

  The absent earrings guaranteed that there would be no inadvertent clunking of metal or plastic on the well-concealed microphone.

  Poe waited until she made her next move. He tried not to be obvious. He knew that if his suspicion was on the money, he wouldn’t have to wait long for her to do something.

  If his appraisal about her proved accurate, her next move would not include following the out-of-town cop down the path behind the cemetery. That would be too blatant. That wasn’t her role. She was too well trained for that.

  She didn’t disappoint. Once the out-of-town cop was barely out of her sight, and after she had sent along the verbal confirmation of his progress to her unseen colleagues, she took three quick strides directly into the thickest part of the crowd gathered behind the nearby barricades. In seconds, she disappeared from Poe’s view amid a dense forest of shoulders and heads.


  Her brief presence in front of Poe had been like the trail of smoke from a cigarette in the wind. Here, then gone.

  Poe intuitively understood the choreography. Her pass was complete. She was rotating off the field, heading to the bench. She would get fresh direction, would receive an update on the out-of-town cop’s progress from a compatriot. She would prepare to return to the game later, fresh and ready.

  The next time she stepped on the field she might be wearing a hat, or sunglasses. A jacket in a neutral color. Her hair might be in a pony-tail, or up under the hat.

  Poe refocused his attention on the path the out-of-town cop had chosen toward the rear of the cemetery. Poe was determined to locate the receiver who had caught the pass the young blond woman had tossed.

  The sidewalk that the out-of-town cop had just been on was empty. No one was following him on foot. Poe saw no activity in the cemetery in that vicinity.

  Where, where?

  He thought, Damn. He knew someone was there. Or had been there. Some other member of the SSG team would have caught the toss—would have picked up the tail of the out-of-town cop after the blond girl had marked him and checked off. Poe moved his eyes between three cars driving past the power plant. No. He checked the cars that were parked along the curb. No. No.

  He was afraid that he had somehow missed it. Missed him. Missed her. Missed them. Missed the receiver.

  He scanned more slowly. Once more, twice.

  There. There?

  A jogger was just beginning to climb the gentle hill in the late-day shadows on the other side of Ashmun Street. A middle-aged guy. Indian or Pakistani ancestry, maybe. A practiced runner. A man with decent form.

  To Poe, the man looked like he was faculty, by age probably an associate professor, squeezing in a run before the end of his week. Absent the blonde talking to her wrist a few minutes before, Poe wouldn’t have given that particular jogger even a moment’s consideration.

  But because Poe had spotted the blonde talking to her wrist, Poe also noticed the guy who was jogging into the shadows across the street. Poe noted the direction the man was running—toward the rear of the cemetery, where the out-of-town-cop had been heading—and he noted what the running man was wearing. The outfit was standard jogger’s garb: shorts, sneaks, T-shirt.