The Siege

by Stephen White

  I wasn’t in the mood. I said, “Just tell me why you did it.”

  “To get what I want, of course. I learned my lessons from your government. Ask them.”

  “We slaughtered innocent people to get what we want?” I said.

  Immediately, I wanted my question back. I knew we had killed innocent people. At some point. Probably recently. My retort had been defensive and juvenile. I tried to dilute it. I added, “You just murdered six kids in two days.”

  He shrugged. “Yes, I did. Relevance? You killed six of my friends to get what you want.”

  “This was revenge?” I said, in disbelief. I couldn’t accept that the motive was that simple. “Retribution?”

  “Not at all,” he said in a snarky tone that made me want to put my fist through his face. “Revenge would have been easy. I could have had my revenge with a truck bomb in Baghdad or Mosul. Could have given money to the Taliban or al Qaeda or Hezbollah. What we did was difficult. Expensive. Risky to me, to my brother. To the few who helped us. Retribution would have been cowardly. This was brave. Smart. Like America.”

  “‘I am America’? That’s what that meant? We killed, so you killed?”

  He shook his head. “I released many more hostages than I killed. If I were after retribution, that tomb would be full of the corpses of your precious youth. The sniper in the tower would have been real. The campus lawns would be littered with his victims. The library of treasures would be nothing but embers and ash.”

  “I still don’t get it. What were you after?”

  “We had only one goal. To make certain that the United States knows that in the future she will suffer consequences for her acts of callousness. My brother and I now have the capacity to poison the well from which the monster drinks.”

  “What well is that?”

  “The well of hubris. Of invincibility.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I said, “What on earth did we do to you?”

  I didn’t think he planned to tell me.

  But in a few seconds the man began speaking again, his voice suddenly bitter. His words started slowly, but the cadence accelerated as he continued. “You—your government—killed my older brother, two aunts, three uncles, my mother, my sister, four nieces, two nephews, three of my four grandparents, my brother-in-law, his family. And . . . nine of my friends. Not six. Nine.”

  I didn’t like the instantaneous reflex I felt to dismiss his pain, his grief, his anger. But that’s what I felt.

  My instinctive thought was, We had a reason. We must have had a reason.

  Then I looked over at Andrew and at Jane and, for an involuntary moment, imagined how catastrophic the man’s loss would feel.

  “War?” I said. I was hoping that learning the context would provide an explanation for me. Whatever it was my government had done to his family, I was sure we had a rationale. An explanation.

  We had to.

  “A wedding,” he said. “A celebration. You bombed my sister’s wedding.”

  I said, “That’s her dress?” pointing at Jane.

  “My sister was married in that dress. Moments later, she died in that dress.”

  Carlos said, “I think I’m getting it. Almost there.”

  Carlos was talking about the door of the jet.

  “We bombed her wedding?” I said. I really, really needed some context.

  “Yes” is all the man said.

  “An accident?” I asked. It had to be.

  “The bomb was a thousand pounds. A BLU-One-ten. A JDAM. That means it had precision guidance. It hit its intended target. Your government has acknowledged that. Killing my family cannot be called an accident.

  “Two things came together that day. Faulty intelligence? Probably. That’s one. The second? The absolute belief of the United States of America that its strategic interests supersede all other interests. Including any interest my family might have had in staying alive.

  “From the ground, in villages like ours, the world looks like this: When America is threatened, she loses her capacity, or at least her desire, to weigh the plight of others. To see the lives of others.

  “To see us. Our lives. Our rights. Our humanity.

  “That’s what I did here, in New Haven. Because I felt threatened, I determined that the wounds I had suffered were more important, and that my strategic interests were more important, than any U.S. interest. Even any civilian U.S. interest. To do what I did, I had to decide to be as ruthless as your government was the day my family died.

  “For these few days, I had to be America.”

  I wanted to scream in his face.

  I wanted to kill him. With my hands.

  “Where are you from?” I asked finally.

  “A village outside Kandahar,” he said. “I am not al Qaeda. I am not Taliban. I am an Afghan. From this day forward, I am the protector of all innocent Afghans.”

  Carlos said, “Okay, here goes.” He took a full step back, lowered his shoulder, and put all his substantial weight into the door. It creaked open a few inches. “Got it,” he said. He forced it open the rest of the way.

  I looked at the man’s eyes. It was all I could see of his face.

  I wanted to tell the man I was sorry. I didn’t.

  I wanted him to tell me he was sorry. He didn’t.

  All I said was “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  I switched places with Carlos. My big ass body almost filled the doorway.

  Poe has stopped pacing. He, of course, has his gun pointed squarely at my chest.

  I swallow my instinctive fear. I know Poe is aiming the weapon at whomever or whatever he is thinking is behind me. I use my calm cop voice with him. I say, “You got those cuffs of yours, Poe? I have a prisoner for you.”

  Poe’s left hand is balled into a fist. His right hand is gripping his pistol. I assess it. It’s a Goldilocks grip. Not too tight. Not too loose. Just right.

  That’s good news for me.

  He says, “I want to kill him, Sam. Just put him in the doorway. I’ll do it. I don’t care what happens after that.”

  “Hey, I’m with you on that, Poe. A thousand percent. But I’m not going to let you shoot him. Let me give you three quick reasons. First is, well, it’s just not right. Though I admit that argument’s pretty debatable. Second, there are witnesses on board the plane here. Once again though, I admit there’s a big part of me that says so what? Third? The guy? Your unsub? Small problem there. He has a contact switch in his hand. If I let you kill him, the switch opens, and a chunk of my new family dies right along with him. Including the head of household. That would be me.

  “So, all things considered, I think the best plan is for you to stay right where you are and for you to let me know when your homicidal urge passes.”

  I count silently as Poe considers his options. I get all the way to twenty-seven before he reaches behind his back with his left hand. He produces the cuffs. Tosses them up to me.

  Poe asks, “Anybody hurt in there?”

  I say, “Nothing serious. Frankly, my nerves are kind of shot. Pilot’s brokenhearted about busting up his airplane, but . . . we’re good here. Oh yeah, the guy—your unsub—he wants to talk to a lawyer. Has one picked out. He’s already sent out a press release, or something. Says it includes his bio. Wants to make sure there’s no confusion about him and his brother.”

  Poe sighs. He says, “Why am I not surprised?”

  I turn around to face the man in the ski mask. I say, “All done. Did what I said I’d do.”

  The man shows me the screen on his phone before he hits SEND. Aloud, he says, “My brother.” His final message reads: You were right. They showed restraint. We live for now. End of part one.

  I watch him lock the contact switch closed. He removes the device from his fingers. He hands it to me. I hand it to Carlos, who cradles it like it is his firstborn.

  Then the man holds out his wrists for the cuffs.

  My final words to the murderer as I spin him around and bus
t him as hard as I can against the wall of the cabin are “Behind your back, asshole.”

  Sirens fill the air.

  Poe begins to climb the stairs.

  I am still wanting some damn context.

  APRIL 20-21, SUNDAY AND MONDAY

  Sam

  By the time darkness fell that Sunday night, word had leaked out that the government had managed to place an agent on board the Calderóns’ company Gulfstream at Tweed New Haven airport.

  I learned about the leak from one of the taciturn government employees with whom I was having an extended unpleasant conversation at an undisclosed location in Virginia.

  I assumed that the leak had been self-serving. I didn’t see any benefit for either Dee or Poe in revealing my role. The Calderóns certainly had no interest that would be served by outing me. The only other leak suspects I could identify were the cabdriver who had taken me to the airport or the employees of the aviation company at Tweed New Haven. But since the leak had come through an outlet that didn’t pay for news tips, I didn’t consider either the cabbie or the aviation folks to be likely suspects. Anyway, I was confident that all of them had been well taken care of by Señor Ronaldo Angel Calderón, and that he had encouraged their silence with some of his many fastener dollars.

  It never crossed my mind that Carlos was the source of the leak. That wasn’t him. Unless I had misread him badly, he was most definitely a fall-on-his-sword kind of guy.

  I ended up deciding that someone in Homeland Security or Hostage Rescue was guilty of spilling the beans. Whoever had spawned the leak wanted to encourage the perception that the government alphabet agencies had been much more on top of the events in New Haven than they really were.

  If that helped the public digest the tragedy at Book & Snake, I was okay with it. If it encouraged the public to have unwarranted confidence in the government’s capacity to handle tragedies like the one at Book & Snake, I was definitely not okay with it.

  No one at Homeland Security, or at FBI headquarters, or at Langley, was commenting publicly about the government agent on the jet. Nor did they endeavor to correct the mistake in the record.

  See, technically the leak was in error. On the day the siege ended I wasn’t a cop, let alone an agent.

  I was not the special kind of agent—that would be FBI. Like Poe.

  Nor was I the secret kind of agent—that would be CIA. Like Dee.

  What was I? Despite the vague sense of betrayal I felt at the end, I was a friend of the Calderón family. I thought I would be that for a long, long time.

  I turned the suspect over to Poe in the cabin of the Gulfstream. Poe informed me that the siege at the tomb had ended, too, and that the surviving hostages were free and safe.

  Seconds later, a Black Suburban carrying an HRT assault team arrived to whisk me away from the crippled jet. The HRT guys wore matching black suits. They carried a lot of weapons. The weapons seemed superfluous. Each one of them looked like he could kill me with his teeth.

  It was over, just like that. I embraced Poe and Carlos and saluted the still-blindfolded kids.

  The Suburban dropped three of us at a building on the far side of the airport where I was led into an almost empty warehouse, and placed under guard. When I inquired, they called my status “protective custody,” just before they told me to shut the fuck up.

  I was leaking unused adrenaline.

  I had a choice of two magazines to help me pass the time. One was from 2007 and was obsessed with Oprah’s favorite things from the time before the world had been forced to refocus its acquisitive attention on essential things, not favorite things.

  I chose to read the other magazine. It was a copy of Forbes from the late spring of 2008, a few months before the worldwide financial meltdown really picked up momentum. The experts writing in the magazine didn’t look too smart, in retrospect.

  Somehow I didn’t feel so fat and out of shape after I read that old magazine. I’d already come to the conclusion that if our nation’s rocket scientists were as incompetent as our economic gurus, those terrific little rovers we sent to Mars would have ended up scooting around somebody’s backyard in a suburb of Des Moines, and their batteries would have died after about two weeks.

  The next stop in my itinerary was a small jet that wasn’t as nice as the Calderóns’ Gulfstream. No meal service. Once we were airborne, an agent offered me a can of Mountain Dew or a bottle of water. I needed neither the high-fructose corn syrup nor the caffeine. I took the water. Poland Spring.

  I thought it was fancy, imported stuff from Warsaw until I got bored enough to read the label. I laughed at myself. Sometimes my ignorance seems as big as the world.

  The jet landed at a military base in Virginia. Another black Suburban carried me to my debriefing, which lasted an entire day.

  The best part of my twenty-four hours as a guest of the government was that I missed all the news coverage that was pretending to make sense of what had happened at Book & Snake. I wasn’t forced to see any of the kids get murdered again. I didn’t have to listen to any of the speculation from the talking heads or the faux experts on Fox or CNN.

  There were a lot of worst parts of being a guest of my government.

  I was allowed only one brief, monitored telephone conversation with my son, and one with Carmen. With them, I pretended all was normal.

  I didn’t ask to call Ann Calderón. Too risky.

  I quickly grew frustrated with the debriefing process. But I did my best to make sure that the government employees who were hanging with me also grew frustrated with the debriefing process.

  I told them what I could. But I didn’t include anything that might put Jane Calderón at further risk. Despite some heavy-handed attempts at persuasion on the part of my interrogators, I was retaining the right to be the sole arbiter of what information might put Jane at further risk.

  Of course, the stuff I withheld was the stuff the alphabet agency guys were most interested in knowing.

  In addition to my determination to protect Jane’s safety, I had a personal reason to keep my own counsel. I didn’t yet understand what had happened between me and Ann Summers Calderón. Her words just before she’d sent me off to the New Haven airport in the cab still reverberated in my head.

  I haven’t been completely honest with you, Sam. And There are things I couldn’t tell you. For Jane’s sake.

  I didn’t know what Ann had meant. Telling the feds a story that made no sense to me made, well, no sense to me.

  I was not tortured by the interrogators, not even close. The ones playing good cops said nice things to me, called me a hero. The ones playing the bad cops made a lot of oblique threats I knew they wouldn’t carry out.

  Each time they went over the top with their pressure, I would inquire if their video equipment was working well. If I could maybe get a copy for my Facebook page.

  I moved around the room as much as I could during the interview in order to make later video editing more difficult for them. They repeatedly told me to sit still. I repeatedly told them I had a condition. I was daring them to restrain me.

  At those moments the feds would make it even clearer they weren’t happy with me. That’s when I would look directly at the pane of glass that I thought was concealing the camera lens and I would ask if I was free to leave or if I was in their official custody. I probably asked that question ten times.

  A few times I initiated discussions about whether or not it might be prudent for me to involve a lawyer.

  I’m a big guy who likes to dance. What we were doing was a dance.

  We worked it out. I knew I wasn’t the key to understanding the siege. At some point the FBI and the CIA and the DIA would realize it, too.

  At the end of the day, what were they going to do? If they weren’t planning to kill me or lock me up in Guantánamo’s successor, they knew I could eventually spin this story any way I chose. Or not.

  I made it clear to them that no matter how many times they asked, I wasn’t
planning to get all chummy with them.

  Frankly, all things considered, I thought a little more gratitude was in order. Just my opinion. But what do I know? I’m just a schlub from the Iron Range.

  Late Monday, I was told I was booked on a commercial flight back to California. By then I was no longer worthy of black Suburbans. I was driven to the airport in a Ford sedan by a solitary agent in a business suit. No automatic weapons that I could see.

  I was wearing my three-season sport coat from Macy’s. Late April in Virginia, it turned out, was one of its seasons. If I could have told Carmen, which I couldn’t, she would have been pleased.

  My luggage from the Omni was in the trunk of the Ford. When we got close to the airport, the agent handed me a manila envelope with my cell phone and my keys. He pulled my previously empty wallet from his inside pocket. I was pleased to see that it had been refreshed with one hundred taxpayer dollars. Five twenties.

  I felt a little bit like a felon getting out of the pen after completing ten-to-twelve for something I hadn’t done.

  At the curb of the terminal he said, “Thank you for your service.” I thought he’d meant it. He shook my hand. That was cool.

  I had a couple of hours to kill before boarding.

  I called Carmen and told her I was on my way. I called Simon and told him I’d see him soon.

  I didn’t call Ann Calderón. My cell phone indicated I hadn’t missed any attempts Ann might have made to contact me while I was in federal custody. There was a lot I didn’t understand about the end. But I understood that the next move between us was Ann’s, not mine.

  I did not want to insert myself into whatever charade she was trying to maintain. That would be reckless, and recklessness might not be good for Jane Calderón’s continued well-being. I was not entertaining the delusion that the terrorists’ threats had expired simply because they were in custody.