The Siege

by Stephen White

  Some of them lived. Some were killed.

  Earlier that evening, she was standing on that spot on Grove Street when the IED exploded, killing Reginald Oshiro.

  Later, she watched Greg Tantalus shot to death from that spot on Grove Street. And when the next kid was released in his underwear.

  Christine could be a little superstitious.

  She was telling herself that the spot hadn’t been all good luck.

  But that it hadn’t been all bad.

  At twelve minutes past midnight, the Zulu sniper on top of the Beinecke Library calls in a report to the command vehicle. He has detected the reflection of light off a glass surface inside the gable vent. He cannot confirm it was the glint of light off a scope. He is allowing that the brief reflection may have been from eyeglasses.

  He also confirms infrared signature in the attic space.

  FBI intel immediately begins to assemble a roster of the possible hostages who may be wearing glasses.

  An agent is sent to re-interview the solitary witness. Were any of the caterers wearing glasses?

  Christine has always been an accomplished sleeper. Front seat of a car, middle seat on an airplane, crosstown bus. Movie theater during a bad action flick. Shea Stadium bleachers when the Mets are down seven in the eighth. She’s proven she can sleep almost anywhere.

  On a hard cot in the middle of a street in front of a serial crime scene with half the world tuned in? For Carmody, it’s not a problem. She rests on the cot on her side, her face to the tomb. She manages fifteen minutes of sleep here, ten there. The noise of the police presence behind her doesn’t bother her too much. She’s raising two teenagers in eleven hundred square feet. She has a Ph.D. in noise.

  It is the pain in her calf that keeps jolting her awake.

  Hade Moody and Jack Lobatini have gone home to their own beds.

  When she is tapped on the shoulder and summoned to the TOC a little after three A.M., it is by one of the FBI comm operators on behalf of the second-shift HRT talker. Christine follows the woman to the command vehicle.

  Christine doesn’t have a feel for the second-shift FBI hostage negotiator. She grows more wary when he sends a few colleagues outside so he and Christine are alone in the fancy RV.

  The place is starting to look like a dorm room after a tough weekend.

  He offers her coffee, something to eat. She declines the coffee. She is still hopeful about getting a few more winks in before morning. She’s shocked to see a carton of LäraBars among the sugar and white flour crap that is spread on the counter in the galley.

  She stuffs three in her pockets.

  “Sit,” he says. His tone is friendly, which immediately heightens her suspicion. She sits. “Think the unsub’s asleep in there?” he asks.

  Christine weighs his words for meaning in some alternative universe. She can’t spot any nefarious translation. She says, “I’m thinking no. That would be predictable. He’s not predictable. I think he can go for a while sleeping in short bursts.”

  “A catnapper?”

  “I guess. I can do it. Sleep in . . . increments.” She hates the word “catnap,” but that’s a quarrel for another day.

  “You? How many days could you go? Sleeping like that, a little here, a little there?”

  “A few. When both of my kids had croup and my husband was at his parents’ in Florida, I did it for three, four days. This guy’s only had to do two so far.”

  “We need intel. We need it badly,” he says. “Want you to be aware we’ve been trying to insert crap cams into the building. You know what those are?”

  Christine thinks, I’m a little tired, but I’m not stupid. “Yeah. You’re trying to get cameras into the building through the sewers. Sinks, toilets.” She considers the roof. “Vents, too? I didn’t see anyone up there.”

  “Just the sewers so far. Based on what we heard earlier about what he has in the attic, we have to assume he’s monitoring the roof.”

  “Probably the sewer lines, too. He’s thorough.”

  “Yeah.”

  Christine impulsively shows a card. “Although I’m always grateful for information and all the up-to-the-minute tactical headlines, do you mind if I ask why you want me to be aware of all this? Usually I’m kept a little more in the dark.” She knows it’s far from routine to keep an active hostage negotiator apprised of the behind-the-scenes efforts to free hostages.

  He shrugs. She interprets the shrug to mean that he has a reason, but he’s not going to tell her what it is. Her suspicion about the nature of his motivation gets jacked up a notch.

  Christine asks, “So? How’s it going in the sewers? You get video? Audio?”

  “Got nothing. That’s the point. Toilets? You ready for this? It appears he fucking pulled all the toilets in the building and bolted steel plates over the drains. Have you ever heard of that? I’ve never heard of it. I been doing this for most of my adult life and I’ve never seen anything like it. He opened up the p-traps below all the sinks and fitted metal covers over the exposed pipes. Shower and bathtub drains, too. All plugged with something. Rags? Who knows? What it means is we can’t get access to the building through any of the usual waste lines.

  “Maintenance guy for the tomb says there are a couple of floor drains in the building that the unsub may not know about. He’s shown us on the building’s plans where they should be, but we haven’t been able to locate them with our equipment. We’re continuing to look, but we’re worried about making noise with the snakes if we fish around too much.”

  “You don’t sound hopeful.”

  “Not about that. We got our microphones in as far as we could—we’re in the walls behind the sinks—but we’re getting no useful audio through the plates and pipes and plaster. He’s obviously sequestered the hostages far away from the plumbing.

  “We even tried to get in using the fresh water lines. All the supply lines in the building—faucets, toilet supplies, showers—are completely closed off, too. He shut the valves. Water meter shows zero use of water inside that building since Thursday. Even though it would have been a much more difficult approach for us no matter what, that means we can’t get any access through any of the building’s hot or cold water lines.”

  Christine says, “And that also means he’s not using the local water supply for consumption so you can’t use the tap water to deliver any . . . let’s say, medicine. The bad guys could even be wearing chemical masks. We don’t know, do we?”

  “That’s right. We don’t know.”

  Christine says, “We have to assume that he has his own food and water. I’d like to say I’m surprised. But I’m not. He’s been ahead of us from the beginning.”

  The FBI talker turns his back on her. “Really? That’s what you got after two days? That you’re not surprised?” His voice is modulated, but she can tell that he’s unsheathed his blade.

  She’s tempted to write off his reflexive strike to frustration, but she’s too tired to allow his derision to go unnoted.

  She blurts out, “What? Excuse me? You are—I want to make sure I got this right—actually taking offense at that? Kids are walking out the door of that tomb getting slaughtered one after the next—blown up, shot, cut up, blown up again—and you’re taking offense that I may have noted that our subject has been a step or two ahead of us?”

  Christine watches the man’s back expand as his lungs fill. She prepares herself. She wants to be ready to step forward when he turns on her. She wants to be right in his face and bounce his anger back at him so that it packs his airways and he can’t breathe.

  He says, “Difficult night. Sorry.” He continues to look away from her. He asks, “Are you a Pepe’s person or a Sally’s person?”

  Christine, who is never speechless, is speechless.

  “Come on? Nobody’s neutral in this town. Which is it for you? Pepe’s or Sally’s?”

  Christine considers explaining the restrictions of her vegan diet. Rejects it. She answers based on Ray’s we
ll-defined Wooster Street ardor. She says, “Sally’s Apizza. It’s not a contest.”

  He makes eye contact with her. He says, “Maybe I’m no expert, but I vote for Pepe’s.”

  She waits until he looks away again before she shakes her head dismissively at the man’s obvious lack of judgment about Wooster Street pies.

  She’s waiting for him to ask her what she thinks of a Wenzel.

  He goes back to business instead. He says, “You’ve been staring at that building longer than any of us. You got any thoughts?”

  She’s not buying his act. The FBI doesn’t do casual calisthenics with local cops. Her suspicion is getting near “MAX” on the dial.

  “Thoughts on what? Access?” she asks.

  “Sure, on access.”

  She gets up and walks to a window that faces the illuminated front of the tomb. The two explosions and the subsequent carnage have ravaged the once pristine facade of the building. Her mind wants to be elsewhere. It starts jumping like a stone skipping on a glassy lake.

  The tomb. Athens. Rome.

  Ruins.

  Ray.

  Costa Rica. Trees.

  Damn. Ray.

  She says, “Last month was my twentieth anniversary.”

  He hesitates. Her segue has him stumped. He makes a guess. “On the job?”

  She likes that she has him off balance. Whatever. “No, my marriage. My man, Ray, and I have been married ‘dos equis,’ that’s what Ray says. Double X? Roman numerals? Last month—seems like five years ago to tell you the truth—Ray and I did an anniversary trip to Costa Rica. Best part? Other than Ray, of course? By far? The canopy tour of the rain forest. Ever done anything like that?”

  “No. Haven’t.” The special agent’s patience is running thin.

  Christine is fine with that. She’ll tell him what she thinks. Then she has a cot waiting outside.

  “Too bad for you. Canopy tour is something.” She pauses long enough that he gets the impression that she’s done. The moment his face begins to screw up in consternation, she adds, “I think the same principle would work here. A zip line.”

  He closes his mouth. His eyes narrow. She sees the faintest hint of a nod.

  She says, “We would have to do it at night. Given how sharp this unsub is, it would be risky as hell, but it may be one low-tech thing he hasn’t anticipated.”

  The FBI agent looks at the tomb, then back at Christine. He locks onto her gaze. “Go on.”

  She walks to the narrow conference table on the side of the vehicle. On it is a big aerial photograph of the Yale campus.

  “Come here,” she says. She waits for him to move next to her. She points to Book & Snake. “This is us.”

  He sighs. “I know.”

  “Since you’re from out of town, I’m going to pretend you don’t . . . know. Try not to take offense. We have exploitable high ground on each side of the tomb. Commons is on one side”—she uses an unsharp ened pencil as a pointer—“this building here is Commons. It’s the one where your intelligence friends have set up shop. I assume you’ve noticed that Commons is taller than Book & Snake. On the other side of the tomb, Payne Whitney—that’s the college gymnasium—is over this way, over a block away. Right here.” She moves the tip of the pencil to a huge building that fills a large block on the far side of the law school. “Payne Whitney isn’t only tall, but it has a tower that’s even taller. This part right here is the tower. You with me?”

  He nods. Christine isn’t looking at him but she feels the nod. It isn’t sufficient for her. She wants a verbal acknowledgment. She looks at him. Waits.

  He says, “I’m following you.”

  You are indeed. “What I’m suggesting is that we”—she stresses the inclusive pronoun—“could shoot a zip line from the top of the tower at Payne Whitney all the way to the roof of Commons. That entire run is gravity assisted. We send agents down the zip line from the tower. They’d be able to hover right above the roof of the tomb.”

  She pokes at the roof of the tomb with the pencil eraser. She can tell that the agent is intrigued by her idea.

  She goes on. “The unsub’s contact sensors and glass breakage monitors won’t be able to detect your agents if they don’t actually touch the roof, which they won’t because they don’t make mistakes like the rest of us humans. His motion detectors don’t have the capacity to sense body heat outside the attic space. The attic gables face Beinecke Library and the cemetery. Even if he has a lookout or a camera pointing out those vents, he won’t spot an approach from the direction of the Payne Whitney tower. Unlike a helicopter hovering above the building, the zip line will generate no noise that will alert him we’re up there. The agents should have no trouble inserting the cameras and cables down into the roof vents. The only possible tell would be any sound the cables might make as they’re snaked through the vent pipes. We would have to create a distraction so the sound wouldn’t be detected.” She thinks about it. “Yeah, I think we’d use a distraction. That’d be the way to go.

  “Like I said before, we would have to do the operation at night. If we pulled everything back before dawn—the zip line, everything—the unsub wouldn’t even know we’d been there.”

  “What if he has exterior cameras we haven’t found yet?”

  “You have twenty-four hours to find them.”

  The agent ponders her suggestion for a few seconds. He finally turns to face her. “It’s smart. I like it. I think it could work.” He pauses.

  Christine thinks, Shit, here comes his shiv.

  “Except for one thing.”

  The asshole, she thinks, is enjoying this. He wants her to say And what is that? She’d rather not.

  He waits her out. Finally, she says, “And what is that? The one thing?”

  “The only problem with your plan is the nature of plumbing. If he’s blocked the toilets and showers and tubs at their drains and he’s blocked the p-traps outside the interior walls, the roof vents don’t provide any better access for cameras and microphones than the sewers do. Using your idea, we could get our snakes into the pipes, but we still have the same problem we have coming in from the sewers—we can’t get into the rooms. Our access is still blocked.”

  Christine concludes that he isn’t being condescending. She tries to translate what he said. She can’t. She doesn’t really speak plumbing.

  Christine manages a small smile. She’s no girl’s girl. She can talk offensive line trap blocking with her husband all day Sunday from September until the Super Bowl. But she knows she can’t talk p-traps with anyone who understands plumbing.

  She says, “Where plumbing is concerned, I’m a bit of a girl. What do I know? Not enough to be of any help. I’d like to go back to my post. Any objections?”

  He shakes his head. He’s fighting a smile.

  She detours to the lavatory. After she pulls the door shut and lowers herself to the toilet seat, she’s already looking a few moves down the pike. The FBI hostage negotiator should not have included her in the discussion they just had. To Christine it either means he is careless, which worries her, or that Christine’s job is already over and that no one has told her about it.

  That leaves open the possibility that she is about to be sacrificed. Or that HRT is about to breach.

  The FBI hostage negotiator waits as Christine uses the toilet.

  Once she is outside the door of the vehicle, he hits a couple of buttons on his cell. He says, “Sir? Couple of things. Intel just reported that only one known hostage is wearing eyeglasses. That’s the secretary of the army’s son, sir. The one who came out briefly earlier. He’s the only one.” The agent listens for a moment. “I agree, sir. I think it is likely that the secretary of the army’s son is in the attic, behind that vent . . . Yes, the unsub wants us to know that he’s being held there . . . What else? I may have a way to get the penetrating radar in place so it won’t be detected by the unsub.” He listens to the commander’s reply. He says, “No, it would have to be night only, s
ir. We’ll need to bring in some equipment. I’m not confident we could get it in place, train our people, and test it in time to get it done before morning. It will be Sunday night.”

  He pauses to allow a brief tirade.

  He says, “Yes, sir. Do you know what a zip line is?”

  APRIL 20, SUNDAY MORNING

  Poe and Sam

  Deirdre had bad dreams almost all night. Still, she managed more sleep than Poe.

  Despite the prurient promise of the purple bra, they did not have sex.

  He didn’t offer; she didn’t ask. She didn’t offer; he didn’t ask.

  Poe held her all night. He held on to her even after she kicked him hard, twice. He wasn’t sure what to make of her heel cracking against his thigh. Poe thought she was running away from something. He hoped it wasn’t him, but he wasn’t certain.

  Poe usually held Dee because he required the connection with her. That night he held Dee because he sensed she needed the connection with him.

  His eyes were open as dawn’s light crept around the perimeter of the curtains. He was out the door early to keep his appointment with Sam Purdy.

  Purdy was waiting. He’d left the door cracked open. Poe strolled in without knocking. “You’ve been in town longer than me. Know any place for breakfast? I have to start the day with some food in my stomach. Hot, if at all possible. Wish it wasn’t true sometimes, it’s not always convenient, but . . .”

  Sam noted that Poe had switched hoodies. The new one was a navy blue Yale model.

  “You mean outside the hotel?” Sam asked. “What about all the super-surveillance?”

  “Word is they’re off you.” Poe had no fresh information about what SSG was doing or not doing. But he remained determined to find out. If that meant sacrificing Purdy, Poe was willing to take that risk. Purdy was of little further use to Poe if he was being tracked by SSG. “I’ll go out first so I can get in position to see if you’re followed. One favor? If they do pick you up, please don’t mention my name. Small thing.”