The Siege

by Stephen White

  Poe sat forward, his elbows on his knees. “Go on.”

  “I’m not ready to tell you how I know, but the families of the kids have been given a way to identify the . . . mood of the hostage taker. I can recognize that he—the hostage taker—is disappointed right now. So far, each time he’s disappointed he has killed someone’s child. The families knew yesterday that the guy in the tomb was responsible for the sniper scare, and for the dead kid in the hockey rink.”

  “The families were notified about all this when? Even before the first kid died?”

  The fact that Poe asked that question told me how little he knew. I wasn’t ready to give up my knowledge without getting something in return. I said, “I don’t know when the first kid died, Poe. Do you? Was it the kid in the hockey rink? Was it the girl with her throat cut whose body was left outside the door? Which kid died first?”

  “I don’t know that,” he said.

  I said, “The families were initially given an oblique . . . warning about coming events. It was cryptic. That was a few days ago. Earlier in the week.”

  “What form? Phone? Email?”

  “A note, delivered in person. Left anonymously.”

  “Really?” Poe said.

  He had some digesting to do.

  I heard a sudden pop from the TV audio. I focused my attention on the screen.

  Greg Tantalus pitched forward like a gymnast trying not to take a big step on his dismount. His face revealed surprise. I realized that he hadn’t really believed he was going to die.

  He managed to catch himself for a split second before his shackled ankles failed him. He pitched forward a second time. I saw flashes in the shadows behind him. The shots were coming through holes in the doors I didn’t even know were there. I heard more pops. Two? Three? Dark dots appeared on the chest of the orange football jersey he was wearing.

  I counted four dark dots.

  Greg Tantalus’s knees collapsed as he neared the top step. He fell to his side. He fell hard, and fast. His body teetered there for almost ten seconds before it began to roll, awkwardly, down the stone stairs. His head and shoulders were slightly ahead of his feet. Each movement of his body, each rotation, was torturous to watch.

  I wanted to close my eyes. I couldn’t close my eyes.

  He came to rest on the landing midway down the steps, on his side, one knee slightly up in a runner’s posture. The left side of his face had been crushed by the hard stone. His right eye was open wide. If that eye could still see, it was seeing the expanse of the Grove Street Cemetery.

  I glanced at Poe. He looked like he’d just watched a loved one murdered. I saw horror and rage in his eyes. His breathing was shallow. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead. The muscles in his forearms were as taut as cables.

  I could count his heart rate by watching the pulse of the vein in his temple.

  I gave him some time, waiting until the inevitable moment when CNN decided they had to replay the tragedy. The network might have felt compelled to replay it, but I didn’t feel compelled to re-watch it. I turned away from the TV. I said to Poe, “The parents I’m helping don’t want to watch their child die like that.”

  Poe said, “I understand.”

  “I can’t put their child at risk.”

  “I said I understand.”

  I heard a sharp edge in his tone. I said, “I would like to help you. I think that I am able to help you. But I won’t reveal anything that will increase the risk to their child. I can’t do that. I’m sorry.”

  “Then help me. You know there’s more coming. Help me save a kid or two. Help me figure out who this guy is, what he wants.”

  “I know what he wants,” I said.

  “What?” Poe said.

  I looked at him. His eyes were locked on mine. The passion in the man’s gaze was almost frightening.

  “This is a big step for me, Poe.”

  “Something I learned the hard way? That’s the only kind that matters,” he said.

  “He wants ammunition,” I said.

  Poe nodded. In a tone that was almost matter-of-fact, he said, “That’s what I’ve been thinking, too. But . . . the kids aren’t the ammunition. The kids are the keys to the armory. I don’t know what is in the armory.”

  The hotel room felt suddenly smaller.

  Poe, I thought, knew more than he was letting on. I had to be even more careful with him. My phone buzzed. I welcomed the interruption. I glanced at the screen. It was Carmen. I sent it to voice mail. “Personal,” I said.

  Poe said, “When you said ‘ammunition’? Just to be clear—you’re not talking about bullets?”

  “I’m extrapolating. I could be wrong, Poe. I know only what happened between the guy in that tomb and one family. It could be completely different with the other kids. The other parents.”

  “Okay. Tell me about the ammunition.”

  I walked to the window. “I can’t believe he just shot that kid. I knew it was coming and I still can’t believe it.”

  “I might be ignorant about some important things, Sam. But hostage rescue knows whatever you know about the signs of disappointment, or whatever it is. They knew the kid was a dead man the moment he walked out the door. I can’t tell whether the local hostage negotiator knows. But HRT knows.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I repeated.

  Poe moved up behind me. He was close enough that I could hear him breathe. “Want to know something else? HRT knew those holes had been drilled in the door. The ones those shots were fired through. They had a pretty good idea what was coming. Did you notice that one of the HRT suits backed away just before the first shots were fired?”

  I shook my head. I turned to face him. “You know that for sure? They knew the holes were there? How could they—”

  “HRT sniper teams are monitoring every square inch of that building, round the clock. With high-power scopes. If bird shit lands anywhere on that stone, the snipers know the moisture content of the crap. No way they missed those fire holes in the door. Maybe he drilled them while the music was playing. To disguise the sound. Maybe they’ve been there all along and he just had to remove plugs. Either way, they knew.”

  “Shit.”

  “What could they have done? What would you have wanted them to do differently? Warn the kid? Reveal their level of surveillance?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Save the kid.”

  “You didn’t save that kid,” Poe said. “You knew he was about to die.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “HRT didn’t act for the same reason you didn’t. If they save this one, the unsub kills two more in retaliation. You want the FBI to start playing God with these kids’ lives? I have a pretty high opinion of myself, Sam. But I don’t have the credentials for that. I promise you.”

  I walked away from Poe, went to the chair. Poe sat down on the bed. I started talking without looking his way. I said, “The guy behind all this? He thinks big. He’s not interested in massacring those college kids. This isn’t Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois.”

  Poe said, “Bigger? Nine/eleven? Mumbai?”

  I shook my head. “No, this is different.” I needed to change the way Poe was thinking. “This isn’t like Nine/eleven or the London Tube thing or the massacre in India. He doesn’t want to blow up a building, or a train. Or crash a plane. Or sink a ship. Or knock down a bridge. He’s not content to slaughter a few hundred innocents.”

  “I’m not convinced. There seems to be plenty of slaughtering going on,” Poe said.

  I wasn’t sold on trying to convince him. But I was sold on not doing anything to alienate him. “Trust me, he’s not trying to wound us or shock us. He’s looking for ways to bring us down. Cripple us. Bleed us to death. Starve us of oxygen. That’s the kind of ammunition he wants.”

  “Us?”

  “America,” I said. “Us. U.S. us.”

  Poe rubbed his eyes. He said, “He’s an asshole who kills innocent kids. That doesn’t look like evi
dence of some grand strategy to me.”

  “Then he’s managed to distract you with the blood. If we get distracted, ultimately he’ll win.”

  “Who is ‘he,’ Sam? Who is doing this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Extremist?” he asked. “Like McVeigh?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Nut?” he asked. “Like Virginia Tech?”

  “No.”

  Poe got up. Almost immediately, he started walking a little box. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn.

  “A zealot?” he asked. “Like bin Laden?”

  “He may be a zealot. But not like bin Laden.”

  I watched Poe’s confined march for a while, wondering what prison cell he was pacing.

  He said, “You saw that video on YouTube? What did he mean at the end? ‘I am America.’ ”

  “I don’t know, Poe. I don’t know.”

  “Few years ago,” Poe said, in a once-upon-a-time voice, “a state patrol officer in Illinois spotted a guy taking photographs of an industrial building. The patrolman kept his distance—to this day, he probably can’t tell you why he kept looking—and he watched as the guy got back in his truck and then proceeded to set up his camera three more times from different angles. The whole time, all he’s interested in is this one building. Cop writes it up, files a report with a description of the guy and the pickup. License plate. That’s it.

  “A few higher-ups see his report. It gets pushed around. It goes where it goes. Channels. Couple days later, someone makes sure it ends up on my desk.”

  Poe paused his rectangular march momentarily to look at me with his tired eyes. “My desk has a lot of shit on it, Sam. Not ‘lots of shit.’ I’m talking a lot of shit. Every last suspicious piece-of-crap thing that looks a little wacky to some citizen or semiparanoid local cop anywhere in this country, or anything that anyone in the Bureau or anyone with an imagination at HS—fortunately or unfortunately that’s not too many of them—can’t fit into some neat compartment, well, it eventually ends up on my desk.

  “Any half-laughable, far-fetched thing that anybody out there wants to be able to tell some congressional committee that he or she took seriously—sir or ma’am—they eventually send my way. Why? Because that’s my job. Reading their crap reports. Running around the country. Staying in cheap motels. Covering their asses.”

  Poe started walking again. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn.

  “What does that make me? That makes me the man in the FBI who’s supposed to follow up on the story of a guy in a pickup taking pictures of some factory in the Midwest because some state cop can’t figure out why the hell the guy’s so interested. Then what? A few hours or days or weeks later, I’m the special agent man who’s supposed to finish his investigation, close the file, and make everybody feel better by saying ‘All clear. Not to worry.’

  “Well, that was the year that Chiron—they’re the big pharma company in Britain that makes about half the flu vaccine for the Western world—had to shut down production at its biggest plant in the UK because of contamination. Remember that? The shortage of vaccine worldwide that year? Made the news, not the biggest story. Not as big as Britney or Paris, but it was out there for a while. If you read past the headline, the articles made it seem like the contamination in the plant in Britain was accidental.

  “Well, it wasn’t accidental, Sam. It was sabotage. Very clever sabotage. We managed to keep that part kind of quiet.”

  “I remember,” I said. “There was a bit of a panic at first that there wouldn’t be enough vaccine for all the old folks in Florida.”

  Poe nodded his agreement. “This industrial plant? The one the guy was taking photographs of in Illinois? Turns out it was making an additional forty percent of the U.S. flu vaccine supply. Add it together with what Chiron was supposed to produce—and then take them both off-line during the buildup to the same flu season—and the U.S. is suddenly ninety percent short of its annual flu vaccine needs.

  “I had the Center for Disease Control run simulations of the ramifications of that potential shortage. The epidemiologists argued about it for a full week or so. In a normal year, the flu kills thirty to fifty thousand Americans. That’s a lot, and that’s with vaccine readily available.

  “What if there’s almost no vaccine available? Turns out there are lots of variables to consider. How well the evidence matches the virus. Strain virulence—that’s a big one. Prevalance, incidence, rates of contagion. Available hospital beds. Ability to immunize health care workers. Effectiveness of splitting doses. Need to protect the military. Public panic. Efficacy of antivirals. Availability of antivirals. Distribution of antivirals. Impact of air travel. Impact of international air travel. A long, long list of variables.

  “Bottom line? If that had turned out to be an average-to-bad flu year and there was only ten percent of the normal amount of vaccine available for distribution to the entire U.S. population? CDC said one to three million people might have died in this country alone. Hundreds of thousands more in Canada and Western Europe. Many, most, would have been elderly, infirm, or very young.

  “And if it turned out it was a bad year? A particularly virulent strain of flu? A strain for which the population hasn’t developed antibodies? They said that if that happened, ten million people might’ve died. And that twenty million wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It actually happened, back in 1918. The worst flu pandemic on record killed twenty to forty million people around the world. And that was before air travel. That’s more people than died during the Black Death, Sam. More than all the casualties of the two World Wars. Just from the damn flu.

  “World Trade Center collapse took two thousand, six hundred seventy-two lives. The Pentagon? One hundred and seventy-nine. United Ninety-three? Forty more.”

  I didn’t know what it meant that Poe had those numbers at the tip of his tongue. But it meant something.

  Poe went on. “But imagine a different world. A world of evolved terror. Imagine we’re confronting terrorists who are using their brains instead of looking at recipes on the Internet and building fertilizer bombs. Imagine we’re confronting a guy who’s as smart as the brightest one of us. Imagine this new evolved terrorist wants to be as good at wounding America as Google is at search, as Amazon is at online retail. Imagine that this new terrorist has destructive, horrendous dreams that are as grand as our grandest dreams for our children.”

  I said, “That’s what I’ve been imagining since Friday afternoon, Poe, when I got here. It’s so hard for me to—”

  “Yeah. Well, welcome to my world. I’ve been imagining that terrorist since a few weeks after Nine/eleven. I go to bed at night wondering what our world will be like if the next angry man isn’t using all his energy trying to figure out how to get a shoe bomb onto a plane. Isn’t spending all his resources trying to choreograph a way to get shampoo bombs onto ten different planes. I stay up at night petrified that the next angry man will be focused and determined. Innovative and imaginative.

  “What if the next angry man is brilliant? An entrepreneur? An innovator? What if he’s thought up a way to hurt us that we haven’t even begun to imagine?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I did know that my feet had stopped screaming for the first time in hours. That told me something.

  “If that state trooper hadn’t spotted that pickup truck and hadn’t wondered about the guy with that camera, then one small group of terrorists—there were four of them, Sam, that’s all—might have succeeded in sabotaging two highly vulnerable industrial buildings at just the right point in time. If they had managed to contaminate that vaccine lab, and if the right flu virus had popped up that year, that handful of angry men—inventive, angry men—could’ve killed five hundred times, even a thousand times as many people as died on Nine/eleven.”

  I said, “Until this week, I had no idea that sort of thing was possible.”

/>   Poe said, “Is the guy in that tomb the same guy who was in that pickup truck in Illinois? Is he the next terrorist entrepreneur?”

  I saw where he was going. I asked, “Is that what you think he meant? When he said ‘I am America’?”

  Poe’s next words surprised me. He said, “The best of us and the worst of us?”

  My reply might have been “maybe.” Before I could say it, though, I saw that a hooded, shackled young man had just stumbled outside the doors of Book & Snake. This kid wasn’t blindfolded.

  I gestured at the muted TV. Poe flicked on the sound.

  I hesitated before I commented to Poe about the hostage’s fate. I wanted to be certain that there wasn’t something orange below the hood he was wearing.

  After a few moments the young man removed the hood. No orange. I gestured at the television screen. “Poe,” I said, “this kid will be released or pulled back in. He is not going to be killed.”

  “You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  Poe didn’t argue or threaten. He said, “What do you make of it?”

  “Optimistically? His parents cooperated. They had something the guy wanted. They gave it to him. The guy kept his word.”

  “Pessimistically?”

  “Your entrepreneur has even more ammunition,” I said.

  Poe fumbled with the remote to mute the sound on the television. He kept his eyes on mine the whole time.

  We were two middle-aged cops who barely knew each other, sitting hip to hip on the end of a queen bed in an upscale hotel room in New Haven, Connecticut.

  Poe seemed not at all discomfited by either the circumstances or the proximity.

  He said, “Ammunition? We were talking about ammunition? So there’s no confusion, the unsub is trading each kid he releases for information from the parents. The information is the ammunition, right?”

  I couldn’t share space with him any longer. I got up and moved across the room, twirling the desk chair so I could straddle it before I sat back down. I said, “Yeah. That’s what I said. That’s what I meant.”