by Daniel Cole
Curtis was forced to leave the car two hundred meters from the station due to the endless crowds spilling out through the main entrance and into the road. They sprinted between the gridlocked traffic on 42nd and toward the sound of an automated evacuation announcement. They passed three police cars, abandoned at varying distances from their destination, and then hurried inside through the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance.
Rouche led the way, cutting a path through the fearful faces. As he did so, the disquieting realization that nobody was saying a word to one another dawned on him. He spotted an NYPD officer guarding the entrance to the main concourse and fought through the silent evacuation to reach him.
He took out his ID: “Rouche, CIA.”
The young man held a finger to his lips and gestured through the archway before whispering almost inaudibly: “He’s right there.”
Rouche nodded and matched his volume: “Who’s in charge?”
“Plant.” He pointed them down the corridor. “East Balcony.”
The group made its way around to the opposite end of the hall to find a flustered officer on the radio to the control room. His graying mustache twitched in time to his quietly delivered diatribe.
“Keep me updated,” he said, curtly bringing the transmission to a close before looking up at the newcomers.
“Plant?” asked Rouche. The man nodded. “Special Agent Rouche, CIA.” He gestured to his colleagues: “Curtis, FBI. Baxter . . . don’t have time to explain. What’ve we got?”
Baxter stole a brief glance into the grand main hall, the cerulean ceiling an artificial sky to the vast expanse of deserted marble below. She scanned what she could see of the upper level, where the stairs up to the West Balcony merged before their final ascent toward three enormous arched windows.
Her eyes were drawn to the iconic brass clock atop the information booth in the center. Suddenly, there was a flash of skin, distorted through the kiosk’s glass windows, gone as quickly as it had appeared. She stepped back behind the wall, heart now racing, her eyes wide and alert, because what she had seen had frightened her.
“Four shots fired,” Officer Plant informed them, “none at us, all up at the ceiling. He’s”—Plant stared into space for a moment—“he’s got someone, a man, who’s . . . He’s got someone sewn onto him.”
A pause.
“Can you elaborate?” asked Rouche, showing no reaction whatsoever, acting as though he were taking any other description of a suspect.
“He has a deceased white male stitched onto his back.”
“‘Bait’ carved into his chest?”
Plant nodded.
Rouche unconsciously glanced at Baxter.
“Has he said anything to you?” he asked the officer.
“He was distressed—crying and muttering—when I arrived, but we had to pull back when he started firing rounds into the air.”
“And do we know how he got here in this . . . condition?”
“Witnesses saw him climbing out of a van in front of the main entrance. I’ve passed details on to dispatch.”
Rouche nodded: “Good. Where are your men?”
“One west, one upper level, two on the platforms keeping people on trains.”
“OK,” said Rouche decisively after a moment’s deliberation. He removed his crumpled jacket and unclipped his firearm. “Here’s what we’re going to do: you tell your men not to fire on this suspect under any circumstance.”
“But what if he—” started Plant.
“Any circumstance. Understood?” Rouche reiterated. “He is far too important.”
“Rouche, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” asked Curtis. She looked appalled as he took out his handcuffs and locked his wrists together.
“Do it now,” Rouche instructed Plant, ignoring her.
“I’m not letting you go in there,” she told him.
“Look,” whispered Rouche, “believe me, I like this plan even less than you, but we can’t catch dead people. This could be our only chance at working out what’s going on. Somebody needs to go out there. Somebody needs to speak to him.”
Curtis looked to Baxter for support.
“He might just shoot you before you even open your mouth,” said Baxter.
“Good point,” said Rouche. He considered his options for a moment. He awkwardly pulled out his mobile phone and called Curtis’s number. After setting it to hands-free, he dropped it into his shirt pocket. “Keep the line open.”
“Go ahead,” said Plant, replying to a voice in his ear. “10-4.” He turned to Rouche. “ESU are three minutes out: full tactical team.”
“Which means he’ll be dead in four,” Rouche told them. “I’m going out there.”
“No!” whispered Curtis, reaching for him but grasping only air as he stepped out into the cavernous hall.
Rouche raised his restrained hands above his head and very slowly started to approach the clock in the center. With the exception of the evacuation announcement triggering every thirty seconds, the lonely echo of his footsteps was the only discernible sound.
It was just them.
Not wanting to startle the man from whom he so desperately needed answers, he started to whistle the first tune that came into his head.
Curtis was holding her phone up for them all to listen to, the slow clicking of Rouche’s heels against the marble delayed through the tinny speaker. She half expected to hear the roar of a gunshot after every step.
“Is he whistling that Shakira song?” asked Plant, now seriously questioning the sanity of the man whose orders he was following.
Curtis and Baxter chose not to answer him.
Rouche was halfway to the clock. The expanse of shiny marble that surrounded him was growing in all directions, as if he were floating out to sea. He realized that the distance to safety had not seemed quite so far, judged while standing in it. He spotted one of the other officers watching in awe from the wings, which did nothing to calm his nerves as he approached whatever horror awaited him.
Almost level with the information kiosk, Rouche ceased whistling and faltered in his step . . . because a dead man stood facing him. Twenty paces away. He had been stripped completely naked, the word “Bait” still bleeding from his chest, his head slumped forward as if trying to decipher the carelessly carved tattoo. Obscured from Rouche’s sight, the man to the rear began to cry, animating the mutilated body before him, shoulders shaking in time to the sobs.
It was, without doubt, the most terrifying thing that Rouche had ever seen.
“Yeah . . . No, thank you,” mumbled Rouche, suffering an abrupt change of heart. He casually turned on the spot to commence the return journey when a distraught voice finally addressed him:
“Who are you?”
Rouche winced. He sighed heavily and slowly turned back to face the dead man.
“Damien,” answered Rouche. He took a few tentative steps closer.
“You’re police?”
“Of sorts, yes. I am unarmed and handcuffed.”
Rouche continued to approach a step at a time, confused as to why the man had not turned around to verify his claims. But he was staring skyward, transfixed by the night sky a hundred and twenty-five feet above. Rouche followed his gaze up to the incredible ceiling sparkling with stars, constellations realized as fully formed entities painted in gold: Orion, Taurus, Pisces . . . Gemini.
The twins were depicted sitting beside one another, almost twisted together. Four legs extended confusingly, unclaimed by either brother: a single entity, inseparable.
Distracted, Rouche realized that he was now only a few paces from the celestial imitation. He felt bile rising in the back of his throat as he heard the “dead” man whimper between wheezy breaths.
“Jesus Christ . . . Hostage is still alive,” he whispered as loudly as he dared, praying that his colleagues would hear him. “Repeat: hostage is still alive!”
Curtis’s hand was trembling as she turned to Plant:
“We need
EMTs. And make sure ESU know the situation before they come storming in here.”
Plant moved away to do as he was told.
“We’re too far away,” said Baxter, feeling as shaken as Curtis looked. “If anything goes wrong . . . We need to get closer.”
Curtis nodded: “Follow me.”
Rouche had drawn level with the double-man. A thin layer of dark blood looked to bond the faux twins as much as the huge black stitches threading their tented skin together. He forced a neutral expression onto his face before finally regarding the person responsible for the atrocity.
His naked skin was waxy and pale, tears merging with sweat despite the chill. He was a little overweight, eighteen years old at most, with scruffy, childish hair like the Gemini twins above. The word etched into his chest looked healed, a part of him now. His sleep-starved eyes slowly descended from the heavens to rest upon Rouche, a pleasant smile on his face despite the loaded weapon in his hand.
“Mind if I sit?” asked Rouche, attempting to appear as nonthreatening as possible.
When he did not respond, Rouche slowly got down onto the cold floor and crossed his legs.
“Why ask a question and then not wait for the answer?”
Rouche instinctively glanced at the gun in the man’s twitching right hand.
“I can’t talk to you. I . . . I shouldn’t,” he continued, becoming agitated. He held a hand to his ear and looked around the empty concourse as if he’d heard something.
“I feel rude.” Rouche smiled apologetically. “You were polite enough to ask me my name, yet I still have no idea of yours.”
He waited patiently. The man looked torn and held a hand up to his forehead as though he were in pain.
“Glenn,” he said, bursting into tears.
Rouche continued to wait.
“Arnolds.”
“Glenn Arnolds,” Rouche repeated for the benefit of his colleagues. He had no idea how clearly they were picking up the conversation. “Gemini,” he said conversationally, staring up at the ceiling. He was aware that he was taking a huge risk broaching the subject but sensed that they were just about out of time.
“Yeah,” said Glenn, smiling through the tears as he treated himself to another look up at the stars. “It’s always nighttime to me.”
“What does it mean to you, Gemini?”
“Everything.”
“In what way?” asked Rouche with interest. “That . . . you aspire to be?”
“That I am. That he made me.”
The “dead” man facing the empty hall made an anguished groan. Rouche willed him not to regain consciousness, unable to imagine anyone ever recovering from the trauma of waking up stitched onto another person.
“He?” asked Rouche. “Who is he?”
Glenn started shaking his head violently and hyperventilating. He gritted his teeth and pressed his hand against his forehead:
“Can’t you hear that?” he yelled at Rouche, who remained quiet, unsure as to what the correct answer would be in the man’s eyes. Eventually, the discomfort appeared to ease. “No . . . I can’t be talking to you about this. Especially not about him. I’m so stupid! This is why he told me to just walk in and do it!”
“It’s OK. It’s OK. Forget I asked,” said Rouche soothingly, so tantalizingly close to the name of the person pulling the strings and, at the same time, one wrong word away from a bullet in the head. Members of the Emergency Service Unit flickered past the entrances as they surrounded the hall. “He wanted you to just walk in and do what?”
Glenn did not even hear the question as he sobbed, unconsciously raising and lowering the gun as he chastised himself for being so weak.
Rouche was losing him.
“Is this your brother?” Rouche raised his voice desperately, gesturing to his victim, who was becoming increasingly vocal.
“No. Not yet,” Glenn answered. “But he will be.”
“When?”
“When the police officers free us.”
“Free you?” asked Rouche. “You mean kill you?”
Glenn nodded. A red dot appeared on his bare chest. Rouche’s eyes tracked it until it settled on his forehead.
“Nobody wants to kill you, Glenn,” he lied.
“But they will. He said they would. They’ll have to . . . after we kill one of you.”
Again Rouche’s gaze was drawn to the gun.
“I don’t believe you want to hurt anybody,” Rouche told the distraught man. “Know why? Because you could’ve done it already, but you didn’t. You started firing into the air to scare people away from you . . . to save them. Didn’t you?”
Glenn nodded and broke down.
“It’s all right. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you. Put the gun down.”
A moment’s deliberation and then Glenn leaned forward to drop to his knees, but as he did so, he cried out in pain, tearing one of the deep stitches out of his skin. The man to the rear screamed in horror as the pain dragged him back to consciousness. He began to thrash about, straining the remaining links between them, the red dot dancing over their bodies as they struggled.
Rouche saw the look of betrayal on Glenn’s face as he watched the laser cross his chest.
He knew what was coming.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Rouche yelled, getting back to his feet. He took a step closer to the forced-twins, the red dot appearing on the skin of his own raised arm, blocking the officer’s shot.
Glenn glanced up at what he was about to become one final time and then raised the gun toward Rouche.
“Don’t shoot him!” Rouche shouted again: the information was worth so much more than his life.
As Glenn was pulled off-balance by the thrashing man, a sharp crack transformed the red dot into a bloody hole through his throat. Having missed its mark, Rouche heard the click of the rifle reloading too late as the dying man took aim.
He closed his eyes, held his breath, and let the hint of a smile form across his face.
The gunshot was deafening.
Chapter 12
Saturday, 12 December 2015
11:23 A.M.
The watery vending-machine coffee in Curtis’s hands had gone cold over twenty minutes earlier. She was staring up blankly at the muted television as it failed to distract its audience from the pains and miseries that had led each of them to the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center. Baxter was sat beside her, still trying to compose the brief text message that she had been working on for the previous half hour. She gave up and put her phone away.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” mumbled Curtis. “If he dies . . .”
Baxter sensed that she was supposed to respond with something, but wasn’t sure what. She had never been much of a shoulder to cry on. So she attempted a sympathetic smile, which seemed to do the trick when Curtis looked across at her.
“I should never have let Rouche go out there,” Curtis continued.
“Wasn’t our decision to make,” said Baxter. “It was his. He made a call, for better or worse.”
“Worse . . . definitely worse.”
Baxter shrugged: “That’s the job. We find ourselves in these screwed-up situations and all we can do is make a call.”
“Yeah, well, I made a call too,” said Curtis. “You sound like you’re talking from experience. Was there a decision that you regretted?”
Baxter had not been ready for the intrusive question. Had she been, she would have forced herself not to conjure the smell of wood polish, the feeling of blood-sodden material clinging to her skin, the vibration through the floor as the Armed Response Unit approached . . . Wolf’s bright blue eyes . . .
“Baxter?” Curtis asked, snapping her out of the memory.
She was unsure how long she had been lost in it this time, imagining herself choosing differently, torturing herself as she did so often by watching these theoretical scenarios play out to far favorable resolutions . . . to happy endings.
She laughed a
t herself for being so naive. There are no happy endings:
“I’ve made decisions that I don’t, and probably never will, know were right,” Baxter told her. “You just have to live with them.”
“For better or worse,” said Curtis.
Baxter nodded: “For better or worse.”
A woman at reception was pointing a doctor in their direction. They got up and followed him through to a private room.
“We couldn’t save him,” was the flustered man’s sledgehammer of an opening line.
Curtis walked out, leaving Baxter to finish up. When she came back out into the waiting room, Curtis was nowhere to be found. She took out her phone and held it up to her ear:
“Rouche? It’s Baxter. He didn’t make it. We need to talk.”
It was almost impossible to get lost in Manhattan; however, as Curtis walked aimlessly down First Avenue, she was struggling to decide on the best route back to the field office. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the streets, alleyways, and landmarks spanning a huge area around Midtown did not extend this close to the borders of the island.
The unsettled sky was still resisting the urge to snow, but the bitter wind was making everyone’s life quite miserable enough in its absence. She braced herself against it and walked on, positive that she was going to be sick at any moment. She could feel the guilt eating away at her insides, a tangible and toxic weight that she just wanted cut out and dropped to the bottom of the river that reappeared in her peripheral vision at every intersection.
She had killed an innocent man.
Her stomach twisted as she admitted it to herself for the first time. She ran into the darkened entrance of an underground car park to vomit.
As if it had not already been the worst day of her life, she and Rouche had had an enormous argument only minutes after pulling the trigger, even though he had been the one to force her hand. He had chosen to confront Glenn Arnolds unarmed and unprotected. He had inexplicably remained out there rather than retreating to safety when the situation deteriorated. It was his fault that she had been left with an impossible ultimatum: she could watch her colleague die or risk killing an innocent person.