by Matthew Hart
“Anthony,” I roared. “One team just killed the guard. There’s a second team coming in the back way.”
Cyril had secured the door when he came out. The driver fired a few rounds into it. The lock must have been set into a steel frame. It held.
The second camera had almost reached the back gate. I had a clear view from the dashcam when Luis stepped from the trees and raised a Heckler & Koch MP7 machine pistol. I saw the windshield disintegrate and then the feed went black. At the same time, the first team shot out a window and entered the school.
They headed down the hall. They seemed to know where they were going. There was a central atrium beneath the glass cupola and a broad flight of stairs leading to the second-floor classrooms. They were almost at the stairs when the nun who ran the school, Sister Gene, came hurrying out of the narrow hall that led to the offices at the back, raising her arms. She disappeared from the frame.
A siren made a single whoop beside us as a New York State trooper pulled up and signaled Tabitha to follow. The trooper switched on her roof lights and siren.
“The escort’s here,” Tabitha said into her phone.
“Anthony,” I shouted, “two victims, one fatality and one probable fatality. They are going up the stairs right now to the classroom floor.”
I heard him yell to someone nearby, “Scramble a chopper!”
We hit heavy traffic a few miles south of Croton-on-Hudson. The highway was at a dead stop. The trooper pulled a U-turn. We raced back to the closest exit and headed east. She was making for the same bridge that the second team of attackers had crossed.
I tried to keep my hands steady as I gripped the phone and watched the screen.
The men mounted the stairs. Not hurrying. Giving me plenty of time to watch their assault unfold before my eyes. A blaze of multicolored light appeared as they reached the landing halfway up the stairs and the camera tracked past the stained-glass window. The deliberate advance up the broad stairs, the unhurried pace, gave the display the feel of a ritual enactment in which Annie and I were the only participants who did not know the end. My stomach heaved as I watched the approach.
Nothing could stop them. That was their message. They were going to reach my daughter. They would do what they liked.
At the top of the stairs they turned right. Slowly the camera advanced along the hall. At every classroom door they paused to show me the rows of girls crouching beneath their desks. They didn’t linger. They knew where Annie was.
“Where’s that fucking chopper?” I said into Tabitha’s phone.
DeLucca came on.
“I’m at the UN. We were doing emergency drills on the East River. I’ve detached a chopper. They’re on their way. Ten minutes to Croton.”
“Tell Luis to get back to the school!” I yelled at Tabitha.
She put DeLucca on hold and tried the number. She knew, and underneath my terror I knew too, that he wouldn’t have his phone.
Tabitha’s knuckles where white on the steering wheel as we followed the cruiser fast into a blind corner. The trooper had her siren going. An SUV sailed out of an intersection, the driver’s head bent to his phone as he texted. The cruiser’s steel ramming grid caught him on the rear fender. The SUV spun a full 360 and dumped into the ditch as we gunned past him up a hill and shot across the bridge.
Annie’s teacher had blockaded the door with her desk. They forced it easily, grabbed the nun, and slammed her into a wall. She slumped to the floor.
Annie’s desk was in the row against the windows. The silence of the picture intensified the horror as the men crossed the classroom and went down the aisle. The windows provided plenty of light to illuminate my daughter’s face as she understood that they had come for her.
Where was her tough dad now?
I will find you and kill you I will find you and kill you I will find you and kill you, an animal sobbed in my throat.
The guy wearing the camera reached down and grabbed her hair and yanked her to her feet. The camera held on her face so I could feel her terror and see the last moment of her childhood before he seized her blazer and shirt in his hairy fist and struck her savagely on the side of her face with the back of his free hand. Her head snapped sideways with the force of the blow, and she fell across the desk and into the next aisle. The camera let me have ten seconds of my girl with her knees drawn up, her arms folded above her head and her body wracked by spasms. Then it panned away and they walked calmly from the room.
The camera shooter hung his GoPro on the newel post at the top of the stairs. The last pictures on the feed were the two of them walking down the stairs, then a few minutes later Luis tore by, followed five minutes later by the first cops and the paramedics. Then a shot of me with my eyes popping out of my head like a madman as I stormed up.
* * *
Annie was on the floor, collared and strapped to a board. An IV dripped into her arm. The doctor was a young guy with a crew cut. His glasses kept slipping down his nose. He looked harried, but in control. He knelt beside Annie with his fingers on her wrist. With the other hand he shone a light into her eyes.
I took her fingers in my hand and whispered her name. She gave me a faint squeeze.
“We’re taking her to the ER,” the doctor said. “I need to assess her. She received a very hard blow.” He lifted her hair to show me the bruise that had started to creep onto the side of her face.
Cyril was dead. Sister Gene had a broken jaw. They’d clubbed her with a gun butt. Annie’s homeroom teacher was going out on a stretcher.
The grounds were swarming with the sheer numbers that police commanders order to a scene when they have no idea what to do. Police and dogs poured through the woods. I don’t know what they thought they’d find. The attackers were long gone. We passed their abandoned car at the main gate, where they’d apparently switched vehicles. Crime-scene techs in hooded white overalls were taking swabs from the steering wheel and going through the car with powerful lights. Good luck with that.
Luis had killed one of the team at the back gate and captured the other. He’d shot him in the leg, secured his wrists with plastic ties, and put him in the trunk, where he screamed until he passed out.
At the hospital, the ER doc ran tests to make sure Annie was not concussed. Her blood pressure had dropped, and he ordered a CAT scan of her spleen because she’d fallen so hard across the desk. She checked out OK. He wanted to keep her in for observation, but I knew that if he did, we’d have another trauma to take care of—Pierrette. I’d only managed to keep her from coming by promising that things would go more quickly if she waited at home.
“OK,” the young doc said. “She has no fractures, but she has suffered a technical trauma. Her blood pressure is low. She’s not in shock now, but she was, and that’s a very dangerous condition that can come back fast. You really have to watch her.”
His glasses slid down again as he peered at me.
“Will someone be watching her?”
“Yes,” I said.
He looked at me doubtfully. “I gave her Dilaudid for the pain.” He held up a pill container and rattled it. “If she needs another in four hours, OK, but she’s young and healthy so it’s better if she just gets through it. This is an acutely habituating drug.”
Something about the way I looked made him stop talking. He handed me the pill container. I went away with my daughter in my arms.
9
Maybe it’s true what they say about revenge. That it’s a meal best eaten cold. But you can plan the menu anytime.
As Annie’s head rocked against my chest I rummaged through the possibilities of violence.
It had to be Lime. Lime could have put together a Russian team with a phone call. Russians bring a special viciousness to their work. But the streaming. I understood its purpose—terror—yet it came at a price. Even if they’d engineered the traffic jam and arranged to divert the state police, which we now knew they had, they should have scouted the school first to assess security. Th
ey might have spotted the twins. And anyway, a straight attack on the school, without warning: That would have accomplished the aim of throwing me off balance without the mayhem.
Unless they wanted mayhem.
Tuxedo Park, where Pierrette lived, is a private village for rich people. Mansions dot the wooded hills around three lakes. A private police force keeps out non-residents. A state trooper was parked in front of the stone gatehouse when we drove in.
The property Pierrette inherited from her grandmother was a 4,000-square-foot cedar-shingled house. It had big verandas and an English garden that took a gardener two full days a week to keep in shape, but her grandmother had left enough to cover that too.
Pierrette was waiting in front of the house. Beside her stood a Ralph Lauren ad in dark brown cords and a beige turtle neck. His hair was short and neatly parted at the side. He looked like what he was: a soldier trying to look like a civilian. Those aren’t good reasons to hate a man, but you have to start somewhere.
Pierrette clasped her hands tightly when I climbed from the back seat with Annie limp in my arms. A single wrinkle cracked the porcelain smoothness of her forehead. She was holding herself in check by sheer willpower.
She kissed Annie gently and put the back of her hand against her daughter’s forehead and said we’d better get her upstairs right away.
“Alex, Tim Vanderloo,” she said distractedly. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.
“I think I’d better leave you and Alex alone with Annie,” he murmured.
“Please don’t leave,” she said.
“Of course not. I’ll be here as long as you need me.”
“On the other hand,” I snapped, “we might be a while.”
“Oh, Alex,” Pierrette said, in a voice that really did sound heartbroken. Shaken awake by my hard voice, Annie started to heave as if she were fighting for breath, and then broke down into awful, rasping sobs. I carried her into the house and upstairs.
Her bedroom occupied a corner with a view of Tuxedo Lake. It had been her grandmother’s room. French doors led to a terrace that faced across a side lawn to the water and the forested hill beyond. A sofa and two chairs huddled before a fieldstone fireplace. Annie’s desk with her laptop sat in a bay window bathed in sunshine. The feature of the room that Annie liked best as a child was a door concealed in the paneling. It opened to a servants’ staircase connected to the kitchen at the back of the house. The summer weekends we’d spent there as a family were punctuated by endless ambushes when Annie, having crept from her room and made her way downstairs, would spring out at us, shrieking and laughing as we feigned surprise.
“They had a TV in the hospital that showed the inside of my brain,” Annie said as I tucked her in. The familiar surroundings had calmed her.
“Try to rest now, darling,” Pierrette said.
“Dad, are you going to catch them?”
“Try to be quiet,” Pierrette said, sitting beside her and putting her hand on Annie’s cheek.
Annie lay back but didn’t take her eyes from me.
“Don’t go, Dad.”
Pierrette stroked Annie’s hair. “Now, sweetheart,” she began. “You know Mom and Dad love you very much.”
“He can stay,” Annie said vehemently, squeezing my fingers with all her strength. “He can sleep in my room. On the couch!”
She put her head back then, but kept my hand firmly in her grip. After a few minutes I felt her fingers loosen. Her breathing was even.
“They picked me, Dad,” she mumbled.
That dagger stayed firmly embedded in my heart as Pierrette and I sat there on either side of Annie. Finally I gave her a pill. Screw the habituation. Five minutes later she was fast asleep.
Pierrette and I went onto the balcony and sat on the wicker sofa.
A hawk was riding a thermal along the chain of hills. On the lake, a canoe with a single paddler dragged a widening V of ripples across the glassy surface.
Some women stake out real estate in your heart and own it forever. It didn’t matter how bitter the breakup. Pierrette could still freeze me solid with a glance, and maybe that’s what made her moments of tenderness so devastating. Her eyes could express a warmth that melted me, and that only changed to pity at the end. Now, with our broken daughter sleeping in her bed behind us, I longed to take her hand and hold her and press my face against her fragrant skin. I made that thought go away.
“I’m not going to blame you,” she said. She was wearing a sapphire ring that she kept twisting, the only sign of how upset she was. “I know that can’t have been your fault.”
“Of course it was my fault,” I said harshly. “Who else’s fault would it be?”
She put her hand on my knee to remind me to keep my voice down.
“Please, tell me what’s going on. What does this mean for us? Are we safe? I have to know, Alex. Who is behind this? What have you gotten into?”
“It’s an attack on me.”
“Obviously,” she said, suddenly bitter. “But why not you directly? Isn’t that part of your job, to be attacked?”
“I can only say that it won’t happen again,” I told her, a promise as feeble as it was ridiculous. Pierrette shook her head.
“You look terrible. Your face—it looks so, I don’t know, ravaged. Maybe that’s because you know that you can’t really promise anything. But that’s the life you chose to lead. You never would give it up for us.”
“Let’s not go there, Pierrette.”
The canoeist had reached a wooded point and was disappearing out of sight around it.
“That’s Miss Harrington,” Pierrette said. “She does that every day, and she’s done it every day for eighty years. Am I going to be here when I’m old, too? Doing the same things that I do now for no better reason than that I’ve always done them?”
“Yes,” I said.
She gave her head a brisk shake. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“I won’t keep you,” she said, standing up and leading the way out. We went down the stairs into the main hall.
“State police are putting a permanent detail here until further notice,” I said.
We stopped on the veranda. She cocked her head at me.
“You know, you’re very clever and tough, Alex, but I often wonder how much you really understand about the world.”
I doubted that Pierrette wondered about me at all, never mind often.
“Your world view is cynical because the people you have to deal with are criminals,” she said. “But not everyone is a criminal just because they have money. Being rich is not inevitably bad.”
“Now you tell me,” I said. She shook her head sadly and opened the front door.
Vanderloo was waiting on the porch. He gave Pierrette’s hand a squeeze. She repeated the introduction, this time adding Vanderloo’s rank and referring to him as “our friend.” Annie had used the word “boyfriend,” but I wasn’t sure he’d been hired for the position. He looked like a candidate still in the application phase. The XKE would help, black and polished to a gleam.
“And you’re from West Point,” I said.
“That’s where I’m posted at the moment.”
“What do you teach?”
“I’m not really what you’d call a teacher.”
“Is that right. What would I call you?”
“Colonel,” he said.
And you know, fair enough. I didn’t like him, but in the circumstances, who would I like?
Tabitha was waiting by the Mini. Pierrette looked at her and arranged her face into one of those smiles women learn in combat training. I thought she was at least going to come off the porch and say hello, but she turned and walked back into the house. Vanderloo lifted his eyebrows at me, then followed her inside.
Tabitha and I stood there for a few minutes, looking at the lake and the hills and the mansions peeking from the trees. We got into the car. The Jag was at the top of the circular drive, and I snapped a shot as we ro
lled by.
“I’m forwarding this to you,” I said. “When you get back to the office, run the plates.”
* * *
Tabitha pulled up in front of my apartment. I’d just put my hand on the door handle when she reached across and held me by the arm.
“Would you like to talk?”
“No,” I said.
She didn’t let go of my arm.
“We can sit here for a minute.”
“Why?”
She looked at me with a grave expression. “You’re crying.”
I moved her hand from my arm. I got out and shut the door and went inside with nothing to console me but the murder in my heart.
10
At 4 A.M. I got out of bed, climbed into the shower, and let it run cold. I had a coffee and some toast, then opened the little gun chest in the closet and took out the Ruger. Lightweight, compact, five rounds of .357 Magnum. I laced up the brown suede desert boots with the steel toes. Before I left I grabbed the extendable baton.
The Santa Clara is an ornate fairy tale of a building on what New Yorkers call the Gold Coast—a stretch of Central Park West lined with expensive real estate. John Lennon was assassinated a few blocks from the Santa Clara in front of his own famous building, the Dakota. Celebrities and tycoons shell out fortunes for the views from the Gold Coast’s private terraces, and the Santa Clara is the reigning princess of the strip. Sergei Lime had paid $100 million for the three-story penthouse at the top.
I parked and sat on a bench on the Central Park side of the street and watched the dawn unfasten clumps of darkness from the trees. The feelings churning in my chest settled into an icy ache. I had no plan except to get close to Lime.
In the strengthening light I studied the building. Not the trade entrance, I decided. In buildings like the Santa Clara the trade doors have more security than the main entrance, where the presence of staff provides the illusion of safety. I got up and headed across the street.
A doorman in a scarlet coat with a double row of polished brass buttons stepped to the door and pulled it open. He’d spotted the bill I had folded in my hand.