by Alan Glynn
Lloyd would talk about Lizzie.
His daughter.
Deb and Lloyd have been married for three years, and for two of those Lizzie has been away at college. So what’s he going to say about her?
It’s absurd.
And it’s not just the humiliation of being excluded. Frank feels that for sure. It’s also the question of motivation.
Why would Deb do this?
He doesn’t know.
She’s kept her distance all morning, spending most of it on the phone—but now, just in these last few minutes, Frank has noticed a slight increase in the levels of activity around her, and he can’t help thinking this is it.
She’s going to do it.
When Lloyd Hackler appears a short while later, it’s pretty much confirmed, and Frank’s stress levels skyrocket. Agitated, and only a few yards away, he looks on as a little group forms, Deb, Lloyd, a man he guesses to be some high-ranking TV executive, and Victoria Hannahoe, the preternaturally radiant anchor of a cable news show he can’t remember the name of. He watches as these people talk among themselves, smiling, throwing hand gestures around, and even, on occasion, laughing.
A few moments later, they begin to move away—where they’re going, Frank doesn’t know, but he starts to move as well, to follow them.
His heart pounding.
At which point an arm shoots across his chest and blocks his path.
“Frank, don’t.”
He turns to his left, and exhales in defeat. It’s Lenny Byron.
“Detective.”
“That look on your face, Frank. Bit of a giveaway. I’d stay here if I were you.”
“Yeah … okay.”
Byron lowers his arm.
Frank nods his head, indicating Deb and the others. “Where are they going exactly?”
Byron turns and watches as the group recedes down the street. “One of the trailers back there on Delancey. They’ve set up a temporary little, I don’t know, it’s like a little … studio or something. But—”
He pauses and makes a pained face. Byron is in his late thirties. He’s dark and handsome, but he looks overworked. He could also do with a shave and a haircut and a new suit.
“Yeah?”
“There’s something you should know. It’s not just going to be an interview with Victoria Hannahoe, they’re going to do it like a … sort of on-air appeal, and they’re going to run it directly into the apartment.”
“What?”
Frank feels weak, faint, as if his body is suddenly remembering it hasn’t slept in over thirty hours.
“It’s another … strategy,” Byron says, speaking almost under his breath now, and glancing around, “not necessarily what I’d do, but the Bureau’s running the show here.”
Frank tries to steady himself. “But what about me?” he says, with great effort. “I’m her father.”
“I know, Frank, I know.” Byron looks at him directly and maintains eye contact. “It’s a calculation on their part. They feel … they feel Lizzie is somehow in control in there now. That’s not based solely on the phone call, they have partial sightlines in through the various windows as well, and that’s just how they’re reading it. Julian has more or less folded. Apparently. And Alex is next.” He pauses. “So they think a direct appeal to Lizzie might work.”
“Appeal? Coming from Deb, maybe. But from Lloyd? You’ve got to be kidding me. She hates that prick. It’ll … it’ll backfire, if anything.” He breathes in hard, suddenly fighting back tears. “I should be doing this with Deb.” Then he says it again. “I’m her father.”
Byron nods, doesn’t look away. “Listen, Frank, I don’t know how up to speed you are on what’s been happening over the last few hours … out there.” He waves an arm in the air, indicating … what? The city? The world? “I’m talking about the Internet, Frank. You’ve been pretty much crucified. This guy you worked for, this Paloma guy, the area manager or something? Man, you must have really pissed him off, because he’s been bad-mouthing you a lot, and it’s caught on. Now you’re like some kind of fucking Bruce Banner character, I don’t know, some kind of ticking time bomb, and that’s not who they want in that trailer doing their little live broadcast.”
“But—”
Frank stops. What’s the point? This is a nightmare.
“Look, man,” Byron says, “I don’t know you from Adam, okay, but I know people, and this is clearly bullshit. You still have to be careful, though. So let me give you a piece of advice.”
Frank looks at him. He’s bewildered.
Advice?
“There’s going to be more of this,” Byron says. “One way or the other. And if you want to come through it, you’ll have to get some help. To mount a counterattack.”
“I don’t—”
“A press agent, someone in PR, a journalist who’s got your back, I don’t know. But right now, Frank, you’re a sitting duck for these people.”
A few minutes later, standing at the barrier, still numb from this latest shock, Frank starts patting down his pockets, then searching them one by one.
Ellen Dorsey gave him her card, and he took it. He didn’t throw it away. He put it somewhere.
He eventually finds it in his left back pocket.
He holds the card up to read the number on it. He takes out his phone and calls her.
* * *
The phone vibrating on the glass coffee table is what wakes her. She turns her head, looks at it, and lets it go to message. The phone is on silent, but it makes this low buzzy sound on a hard surface when it vibrates. She reaches out for it, groaning from the effort, and then sits upright on the couch. She looks at the display, doesn’t recognize the number.
She checks to see if there’s a message. There is. It’s from Frank Bishop.
There are messages from other people, too, five in total—that one just now from Frank, one an hour ago from Val Brady, one just before that from Liz Zambelli, and two much earlier from Max Daitch.
Everyone agitated.
But Frank the most, naturally.
All he said, in his shaky, tired voice, was Ellen, this is Frank Bishop. Please call me.
It occurs to her that she has no idea what’s going on. The last she knew of anything was sometime after 5 A.M. when she was in that bar on Norfolk Street with Val Brady.
She checks the time on her phone.
1:25.
That’s more than eight hours.
Is it over? What happened? She slides off the couch, picks up the TV remote, points it, and flicks. Then she goes over to her desk and taps a key on the keyboard.
Before she calls him back she’d better get some kind of an update.
Stiff from sleeping on the couch, she hobbles into the kitchen and puts on some coffee.
Over the next ten minutes, sipping espresso, and dividing her attention between the TV and the computer, she updates herself comprehensively.
The first shock is that it’s still going on. The second is that Lizzie Bishop has supplanted the Coady brothers as the focus of everyone’s attention. And in what seems to be something of an unfortunate sideshow, Frank Bishop himself has come in for a bit of a hammering.
Does that have anything to do with why he called?
She needs more coffee. She goes and makes some. Then she has a pee. Then she takes a quick shower.
Putting it off.
Because what’s she supposed to tell him? What can she do for him? She’s not in a position to do anything.
When she finally calls him, she does it standing at the window, looking out onto Ninety-third Street.
“Frank? It’s Ellen.”
“Hi. Er … just a second.” She hears some sounds in the background, muffled voices, shuffling. Then he’s on again. “Sorry. Thanks for getting back to me.” He pauses. “I … I didn’t see you anywhere last night, after we got here, I—”
“They wouldn’t let me through,” she says. “I guess you got swept up into it all, but I was held ba
ck at the first barrier. And I didn’t have your number. I tried to get a message to you, but … the general atmosphere was pretty crazy. I stayed most of the night, but eventually I just came home.”
“Right.” There’s a pause here as he considers this. “Okay.”
With that settled, sort of, he goes on to tell her about the upcoming Victoria Hannahoe interview and Lloyd Hackler’s involvement and how fucked up it all is. There’s an occasional crack in his voice as he speaks, but there’s a steely quality to it as well.
“So look,” he says in conclusion, “I could use some help. In return, you get exclusive access. Your phrase.”
This time it’s Ellen’s turn to pause and consider.
She’d given up on the story, and with good reason, but it’s funny how things can change in the space of a few hours. Because this is no longer news. That part of the process is over, almost. Now it’s morphing into something different, something that needs to be colored in and dissected and explained before it’s filed away in the public consciousness, archived as the Story of the Wall Street Killers, or the Siege of Orchard Street. With exclusive access to Frank Bishop—and, all going well, to Lizzie—there could be a substantial long-form piece in this.
Pretty much Ellen’s métier.
And it’d be perfect for the next issue of Parallax.
“Yes,” she says, “of course. Give and take. Your phrase.”
The second she’s off with Frank here, she’ll call Max.
“Good. Thanks.” He pauses. “Where are you now?”
She tells him and says that she can be down there in twenty minutes, half an hour.
He tells her that he’ll arrange for an NYPD detective named Lenny Byron to let her through the security barriers. That she should ask for him.
Ten minutes later, chewing on a last bite of stale bagel, she’s out on Columbus Avenue hailing a cab.
* * *
When the phone rings, Lizzie’s heart lurches sideways and she stands up at once from the table. Julian shifts slightly on the floor in the corner and groans, as if the sound of the phone is disturbing his sleep, but not enough to wake him up. On the couch, Alex turns his head. That’s all. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say, “You getting that?”
Doesn’t need to.
Because she’s getting it.
Picking it up, clearing her throat.
Loudly.
She has no script this time, no list, and a lot less adrenaline than she had the last time. The truth is, the waiting has been awful and has effectively drained the life out of her. She knows it’s probably been a deliberate strategy to undermine morale in here, and boy has it worked, but little do they know how fragile morale was to begin with.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Lizzie. It’s Tom.”
Tom.
This pretense of friendship is annoying. It’s patronizing. Standing at the table, next to the chair she’s been sitting in for hours, she sways from side to side.
She actually has nothing to say.
“Lizzie?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Have you reinstated Glass-Steagall yet?”
“Er…”
She closes her eyes. Shit, that was stupid. It was flippant. She wasn’t going for flippant. She’s tired. Tired isn’t even the word for it. She opens her eyes. Alex is looking up at her. She shrugs and turns away.
“Well?”
She’s not backtracking now.
“Lizzie, let’s take it one step at a time, okay? But I do have movement on something you asked about earlier, the communications situation?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, we’d like to get your TV back on. There’s something we’d like you to watch.”
Oh fuck.
“What?”
“You’ll find out in a—”
“Jesus, Tom—”
“Look, bear with me, Lizzie, okay?”
He pauses.
She can picture him, Special Agent Tom, huddled over his equipment. What she imagines his equipment to be. She doesn’t know, headphones, recording panels, displays with dials and gauges. He’d love to move in for the kill here. She can hear it in his voice. She’s not stupid. A little bit of veiled flirting, some white empathetic noise, and then bam—
Lizzie, we know we can count on you, and we know you’re under pressure in there, we do, so tell us, quick, the explosives …
She exhales loudly down the phone.
“It’s an interview,” he says, almost whispering. “I think you’ll respond to it. You will.” Before she can say anything, he adds, “Turn the TV on in about two minutes, okay? Fox News.”
And then he hangs up.
There is silence, and stillness, for probably most of the two minutes. Then Lizzie puts the phone down on the table. She walks around to the front of the couch and looks for the TV remote.
“What?” Alex says, looking up, as though he’s stoned, but making an effort.
And then, shit … holy shit—it occurs to her—these motherfuckers are stoned, on pills, sedatives, diaza-, diazap-, benzoap …
Whatever the fuck those things are called.
She’s seen them in Julian’s medicine cabinet.
What else would explain—
“What?” Alex repeats, shifting a little on the couch.
Lizzie rolls her eyes. This has been going on for nearly a whole day, a whole twenty-four hours, but she feels like she has aged ten years in that time, more—aged and changed and moved on, shed personas, past lives, complete versions of herself … grown, expanded, aged, calcified, atrophied.
In a quiet voice, she says, “They want us to turn on the TV. There’s something they want us to watch.”
Alex shifts again on the couch, wriggles for a moment, and reveals that he has been sitting on the remote.
There is another lurching movement from the corner, as Julian rolls over to face the room for the first time in many hours.
Oh, what? The promise of a little TV is enough to cut through the chemical molasses here? To raise these bozos from their self-administered inertia?
“Turn it on,” she says.
Alex picks up the remote and flicks it.
“What channel?”
Lizzie looks at him. “Fox.”
“Of course.”
The screen pops into life with a commercial for some anti-aging cream. Alex flicks forward through basketball, a sitcom, and a couple of soaps before getting to the cable news channels. He stops at Fox.
It’s America Unbound with Victoria Hannahoe.
“What is this shit?” Julian says.
Lizzie watches as he drags himself over to the couch, crawls onto it, and sits beside his brother.
There’s an item about Iran on at the moment, a filmed report. It seems to be coming to an end.
“Why are we watching this?” Alex says.
“I don’t know. Just … wait.”
They wait.
Then it cuts back to the studio. It takes Lizzie a moment to focus and to realize that the background graphic, which has the word siege emblazoned across it in jagged red letters, is a treated, filtered image of Orchard Street.
In the foreground sits glamorous Victoria Hannahoe, with her extravagant red hair and striking blue eyes.
“We return now to our top story,” she says, “the ongoing siege of a downtown New York City apartment in which three radical students believed to be in possession of bomb-making equipment and a quantity of explosives are caught up in a now nearly twenty-four-hour standoff with the New York City Police Department, the FBI, and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
Lizzie can barely process this. It seems unreal.
“The three radicals—students of Atherton College in upstate New York—have issued a wide-ranging series of demands, which, if carried out, would amount to an effective restructuring of our entire financial system.”
“Yesss.”
“Two of the three—brothers Julian and Alex Coady—are
also believed to be responsible for the recent murders of two Wall Street bankers, Jeff Gale and Bob Holland, and for the attempted murder of another, Scott Lebrecht. However, it is now emerging that the leader of the group, and the ideological driving force behind it, may well be the third student holed up in the Orchard Street apartment, one Elizabeth Bishop.”
“What the fuck—”
Julian struggles to turn around on the couch.
Alex remains completely still.
Lizzie stares at the TV screen in disbelief.
“Elizabeth—or Lizzie—Bishop is the one who issued the demands and is also, according to police sources, understood to be the most in-control and proactive member of the group.”
Julian throws his arms up. “This is … this is BULLSHIT!”
“In an attempt to further our understanding of these events—events that are unfolding before the eyes of the world—we are now going to speak exclusively to the mother and stepfather of Lizzie Bishop, Deborah Bishop-Hackler and Lloyd Hackler—”
“Oh Jesus, oh no.”
Lizzie staggers back toward the wall as the camera pans right to reveal … her mother? And Lloyd fucking Hackler? Sitting together like teenagers, looking all attentive and concerned? This is horrendous, and where’s … where’s Frank?
Lloyd isn’t her fucking father …
“… and let me ask you as well…”
Wh-what was that? Lizzie didn’t hear the first part of the question. She’s finding it impossible to concentrate.
“… as a child, growing up…”
“Fuck this,” Julian says, and starts getting up off the couch. Alex turns and looks at Lizzie, the weirdest expression on his face—this pale, sickly, confused stare—and then he lurches to the side and throws up, a liquid hurl of vomit landing in a splat on the floorboards next to the couch.
“You bitch,” Julian says, one eye on Alex as he comes around the end of the couch, and then directly toward her, “I should have fucking—”
“… what you might call emotional intelligence…”
But he stops … just as—or just after—Lizzie hears a dry phwutt sound. Julian’s eyes roll upward, he stumbles to the left, and the red mark on the side of his head bubbles and spurts into a sudden and rapid trickle down his cheek.