Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
DAY TWO
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
DAY FOUR
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
DAY FIVE
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
DAY SIX
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
DAY SEVEN
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
AFTERMATH
Chapter Fifty-seven
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DAY ONE
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful.
—MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book II
Chapter One
EDWARDSVILLE, ILLINOIS
The morning school bell was clattering in the distance as Hope Gardner sandwiched her Volvo station wagon between Mrs. Moscone’s Escalade and Janey Eagleton’s Prius. She only nicked the Prius’s bumper, or rather the plastic piece of junk that passed for a bumper these days, and the gentle thump went unnoticed by her two children in the backseat of her car. She wished she had the guts to ding the Escalade a little, just to make it fair, but the Cadillac belonged to Mrs. Moscone, and nobody wanted Mrs. Moscone mad at them. Her husband was from The Hill in St. Louis, the kind of neighborhood where The Sopranos was considered a documentary.
She wondered briefly whether she should leave a note, but that notion flew out of her head as the back door rocketed open.
“Bye, Mom!” shouted Emma, her twelve-year-old. Emma was blond, green-eyed, and filling out with a rapidity that surprised Hope, even though she had gone through the same transformation herself when she was her daughter’s age. One moment a skinny kid, the next…And if she noticed, how much more quickly the boys noticed too.
More than anything, Emma wanted to grow up to be Gwyneth Paltrow, win an Oscar, and marry a rock star, more or less in that order. Hope didn’t have the heart to tell her that the odds were several million to one against any of those things happening. But childhood was for dreaming; Emma would learn about the harsh realities of life soon enough.
Emma was halfway across the schoolyard as Hope turned to Rory. Rory was different. Small for his age, he was skittish, unsure, easily alarmed, especially for a ten-year-old. And right now his nose was running too. “Come on, honey,” said Hope, wiping his face with a clean handkerchief and pulling his zipper up tight. “You don’t want to be late.”
The first snarl of winter had come early to southern Illinois, and there was a stiff, chill breeze blowing into Edwardsville from the Mississippi, just a few miles to the west. Edwardsville was awarm, then walked back toward the car. She made a short detour around the Prius, to see if its bumper was perhaps worse than she’d thought and was surprised to see that it wasn’t Janey Eagleton’s all, but one with Missouri plates. Now she didn’t feel so guilty.
It was not until she was halfway home that she remembered thinking it was odd they were lowering the iron bars on the school windows just as instruction was starting.
Chapter Two
EDWARDSVILLE—JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Mrs. Braverman’s fourth grade arithmetic class opened each school day with a moment of silence. It wasn’t exactly a prayer, which the children all knew would be illegal, but neither was it a chance to sneak in a few more winks of sleep before the day began in earnest. Mrs. Braverman saw to that as she patrolled the aisles between the desks.
Rory offered up some quick thoughts in favor of his parents, his dad going away on business, his mom always rushing around in the Volvo, which she treated more like a ferryboat than a car, locked in an eternal game of Cannibals and Missionaries.
Which was, in fact, one of Rory’s favorite pastimes: trying to figure out how to get various odd numbers of cannibals and missionaries across a river without ever leaving more man-eaters than men of the cloth on either side. It was a frequent subject of his doodles, but on this morning he tried very hard to visualize the scene: scary dark men with bones in their noses looking hungrily upon pale-faced creatures wearing what seemed to him to be full-length black dresses. You didn’t see many holy men around Edwardsville these days, and even though the Gardners were more or less Lutherans, their minister usually wore jeans.
Rory had gotten several moves into his game of mental gymnastics when Mrs. Braverman’s midwestern caw brought him out of his reverie and back to attention. He glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that, as usual, only two minutes had passed. Rory didn’t like math, and of course wasn’t very good at it, but he already had a firm grip on Einstein’s theory of relativity: the forty-five minutes between 8:05 and 8:50 A.M. were the Methuselahs of minutes.
Rory knew the drill, and so he flipped his book open to the homework page even before Mrs. Braverman got the words out of her mouth. Except that, on this morning, the words never came out of her mouth. Most of the other kids had done the same thing, but Mrs. Braverman had left her desk and gone over to the classroom door, a wooden one with a large pane of glass in it, the better for the principal, Mr. Nasir-Nassaad, to be able to glance in and give the class one of those looks he was famous for. Which is why, behind his back, the kids all called him Mr. Nasty-Nosy.
Some said Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was from Lebanon, others that he was really from Cleveland, and still others whispered ominously that they knew for a fact that he was a long-lost brother of Osama bin Laden. The funny part was that Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was actually pretty nice, even if he did remind Rory of one of his imaginary cannibals. It was always a disappointment when he opened his mouth and s
It wasn’t the principal at the door, however. Rory didn’t have a very good view of the door, but from the look on Mrs. Braverman’s face, the visitor was somebody she didn’t recognize. He could tell, because whenever she was unexpectedly interrupted, unless it was by Nasty-Nosy, she got this how-dare-you look, because as far as Mrs. Braverman was concerned, teaching was the most important thing in the world, and not to be lightly distracted.
She opened the door a crack and stuck her face in the opening. Rory could see only the back of her head. She spoke lowly, inaudibly, then took two steps back and opened the door wide.
A man came in—a man Rory recognized at once. It was the same man who had ushered him through the door as he scooted in. The blond man.
“Children,” said Mrs. Braverman. “This is Mr.—what was your name again?”
“Charles,” the man replied. He had an accent. He didn’t sound like he was normal, or like he was from Edwardsville.
“Charles. He’s one of our new substitute teachers, and he’s going to be helping out in class today. So let’s all give him a big Mississippi River welcome on his first day with us.”
The children applauded politely. “I’m just going to run down to the principal’s office for a moment,” said Mrs. Braverman. “Won’t be a minute.”
Mrs. Braverman took a step or two out the door, then staggered back inside the classroom as if profoundly puzzled by something that had just happened. There was an extraordinary look on her face as she turned to the class, and then she fell to the floor—sat down, heavily, as if bearing an in
tolerably heavy burden. She tried to say something, but no sound came out. Instead, blood suddenly poured from her mouth, her head rolled back, and her skull hit the floor with an egg-cracking report that Rory would never forget.
The new teacher, Charles, jumped into action. He leaped over Mrs. Braverman and slammed the door, locking it. Then he turned to the children.
“Everybody down,” he said. “Get under your desks and don’t look up, no matter what.”
Everybody did what he or she was told. Everybody was too shocked to scream. Everybody was real scared.
From under his desk, Rory could hear Mrs. Braverman’s labored breathing, growing slower. He knew she’d been shot, but had no idea who shot her. He wondered whether Charles knew first aid or CPR and, if so, when he was going to start helping her.
From outside the door came the sound of screaming and gunfire. Of running feet and the thud of bodies falling. It went on for only a couple of minutes, but childhood minutes are long, and these minutes were as close as youth gets to eternity.
Mrs. Braverman had stopped breathing. From his spot near the back, on the floor, Rory could see a widening puddle of red that had stained her pantsuit and was now spreading across the floor, toward where An over Mrs. Braverman, and stopped in front of the door. The rest of Charles was obviously listening.
“Boys and girls,” said Charles after a few long moments. His voice was calm. Rory thought that was cool—that Charles kept it together despite what had just happened. Rory’s own heart was pounding like mad. He hoped that when he grew up, he could be cool, like Charles.
“I want you all to stand up, leave your things behind and—very quietly—follow me. Everything is going to be all right. Okay?”
Nobody moved.
“You have to trust me. Stand up, keep silent, and we’ll all get out of here.”
This time, everybody moved and nobody made a sound. All that fire drill practice was finally paying off. As the children began Indian-filing out of the classroom, Rory noticed that none of the girls looked at Mrs. Braverman’s body through their tears, but the boys each sneaked a peek as they shuffled by. Nobody spoke a word.
“There’s a good girl…good lad,” murmured the man. As Rory approached, the man’s free hand reached out and stopped him. “Hold it.”
The line stopped; the children froze. It crossed Rory’s mind that the man was somehow going to blame him for what happened to Mrs. Braverman. “You were almost late for school,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“Rory Gardner.”
“Was that your mother dropping you off?”
“Yes, sir.” He was close enough to Mrs. Braverman’s body that he could have touched her with his foot. He closed his eyes in prayer. He didn’t care whether it was illegal. He didn’t care if they came to arrest him later. He had a good excuse.
When he opened his eyes, Charles was still looking at him. “It’s good to have you on the team, Rory.” Charles held out his hand to Rory. “You know what our team’s motto is?”
“No, sir.”
“Who Dares, Wins.”
Chapter Three
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI
KXQQ billed itself as “the St. Louis Metro Area’s Number One Source for News,” but everyone knew that was bullshit. Most of the reporters were fresh out of Penney-Missouri or BU, young kids in their first jobs, ambitious but lazy, fluent in contemporary psychobabble and absolute masters of the jailhouse-jive hand gestures now de rigueur for all TV reporters, but otherwise illiterate, innumerate, and ahistorical. Deep down inside, they really wanted to be cable news anchors or Hollywood screenwriters. By the time any reporters at KXQQ found out about a story, the story was usually over.
Rhonda Gaines-Solomon stared dully at CNN with one ear cocked at the police scanner and the new issue of Entertainment Weekly in her hand. She was twenty-fated the Midwest, hated the widebodies who inhabited this part of the country, hated the awful weather, and pretended she was really from Los Angeles, if anybody asked.
“What’s hot today, Ms. Solomon?” Mr. Dunkirk always said that, especially when it was she who was hot, which was most days. Like all female on-air talent these days, Rhonda Gaines-Solomon was good looking in that tramp-next-door sort of way that everyone seemed to want lately, and she did the best she could with what God, her parents, and a discreet visit to a plastic surgeon had given her.
Still, she thought, one day she could bust Mr. Dunkirk for sexual harassment if she really set her mind to it. She noticed the way he looked her, had seen his fat wife, and figured him for a possible play if the going got tough, or she wasn’t out of this burg in six months, or both.
“All quiet on the midwestern ’t, weird and guttural and scary. “You are all prisoners of war.”
Rory expected one of the teachers, maybe Mr. Treadway, who was widely regarded as the meanest man in the school, to say something back. Mr. Treadway was always going on about how America was the worst country in history, which made most people in Edwardsville plenty mad, and how the white man was the worst man in history, but since he taught social studies it was more or less okay. Indeed, Rory had wanted to go find some black people to apologize to, but there weren’t all that many of them in Edwardsville, and his parents wouldn’t let him go to East St. Louis, where apparently they were pretty easy to find.
With a shotgun taped beneath his chin, though, Mr. Treadway wasn’t quite as brave as his reputation.
Rory tried to catch his sister’s eye, but as he turned to look her way a blow to the side of his head got his full attention. When the stars stopped shooting, he could see that it was the Top Dog, who had just hit him a glancing blow with the butt of his rifle.
“You don’t move! You don’t move unless I say so! You hear me?”—he was addressing his remarks to the assembly now. “None of you sons of bitches moves unless I say so. Eyes straight ahead! Eyes straight ahead! Or else!”
Everybody froze. The Top Dog turned away from Rory.
Now an unusual emotion began to well up inside him. Practically from birth, Rory had been taught to hide his emotions, to conceal them, suppress them, be afraid of them. It wasn’t nice to feel bad things, and it was even less nice to express them. Boys, his teachers told him, were different now: they didn’t yell, they didn’t fight, even when they wanted to, they got along, even when they didn’t want to. Not to conform was to risk a trip to Mr. Nasty-Nosy’s office or, worse, to the Infirmary, where Nurse Haskell gave you a couple of those pills that supposedly settled you down.
Be nice, they told you. But he didn’t want to be nice any more. He didn’t want to be afraid any more. He wanted to fight, the way Charles had fought.
“Please, please.” It was Nurse Haskell. She was crying, which was making it difficult for her to keep her arms in the right position.
The Top Dog saw her struggles, heard her entreaties. He came over. He took her by the arm and led her toward the center of the gym floor, where Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was lying. He slipped his arms around her waist, propping up her elbows, and waltzed her around a bit.
Then he laughed in her face and released her.
Unsupported, her elbows dropped. She twisted her head just in time—so instead of blowing off the top of her skull, the force of the blast took off the lower half of Nurse Haskell’s jaw, sending her teeth showering over those unlucky enough to be close by.
She fell across Mr. Nasir-Nassaad, writhing. Several of the female teachers screamed. But the children were stock-still, as they had been ordered.
The terrorists just laughed. And nobody laughed louder or longer than the Top Dog.
“Okay, okay,” he shouted. “Now you see. You see what happens when yAugie Willson. Willson didn’t much like Hartley, and even with a Secret Service poker face, he was somehow always able to let his personal disdain for the man shine through. “Go ahead, Augie,” he said.
“It all started a few minutes ago,” the Secret Service man explained, switching on the video screen. The big type at
the bottom of the screen was all too familiar:
SCHOOL HOSTAGE SITUATION.
Illinois middle school crisis.
Senator Robert Hartley glanced briefly at the screen, then returned his attention to notes. He was trying to explain to Tyler that his poll numbers were dropping precisely because he was seen as a weak leader by a majority of Americans. The liberal social agenda he had campaigned on—universal health care, hate-crimes legislation, state-sponsored day care for all working mothers—had been largely enacted, and so a fickle country had become restless, which is why it was so difficult to be a two-term president these days: the country craved change, even when it didn’t need it. America was an entire nation suffering from attention deficit disorder.
As far as Hartley was concerned, President Tyler was the one who really needed a change: a change of attitude, a change of image. Tyler needed to “rebrand” himself, as the ad men said, as a strong, masculine leader; even the women who had voted him into office and supported his social programs had tired of his metrosexual persona, and were craving something more along the lines of a lumberjack, a biker, or a serial killer.
Hostile Intent Page 1