by GM Ford
“We got some nut with a bomb?” he demanded.
“Yes,” Audrey answered. “I’m afraid we do.”
No hesitation. “Any way we can get this on tape. I mean this is…”
Audrey cut him short. “We need get everyone outside of the building.”
Winter opened his mouth to protest, but Craig cut him off.
“I need your cameramen to leave the studio cameras in such a way as to give us a real-time picture of the audience,” Jackson Craig added.
“We can control the cameras from the control booth,” Vickers said. “Come on.”
They followed him to the first door on the right and stepped into a veritable maze of the latest digital video equipment. Six seats. Six separate banks of screens. He put his hands on his hips and turned around.
A nod from Winter and Vickers began whispering commands into his mouthpiece. The original pair of security guys had mutated into eight or nine. One with a gold shield said, “Everyone out the Jefferson Boulevard exit,” and people began to speed walk. Backstage began to fill as the green rooms emptied and puzzled camera crews made their way back behind the curtain.
A line of security officers directed bewildered green-room guests and camera crews down the carpeted hallway and around the corner to the Jefferson Boulevard exit. The whole backstage evacuation took just under four minutes.
The cameras divided the audience into three sections, each section displayed on a separate flat-screen monitor. Craig moved his eyes from one screen to another, moving from left to right and back again, row by row, face by face. Zooming in, zooming out. Two hundred people in the seats. Probably a hundred and eighty of them female. A microcosm of American womanhood. Big, little, old, young, black, white and yellow, from downright fashionable to bag-lady frumpy.
Audrey Williams excused herself and stepped in front of Jackson Craig, walking past the center screen, moving all the way to the monitor at the far left. Craig side-stepped to his right, bending closer to the images on the screen, squinting at each expression, searching for a telltale nuance… something…anything…”
“Nobody stands out,” Audrey groused.
America’s favorite muckraker leaned over their shoulders and squinted at the screens. “What now?” he asked. “We can make an announcement over the …”
“No,” Craig said immediately. “No announcements.” He turned to face Harvey Winter. “No bells, no whistles, no sirens. We’re better off if we surprise him.”
“What, then?” Winter demanded.
“Have your people open up every exit in the building. I want those people to be able to get out as quickly as possible.”
Vickers began to issue orders. A tense minute and a half passed.
“Done,” Vickers said.
Craig pointed to the ceiling. “Turn on the fire sprinklers,” he said.
“They’re synced to a siren and a…”
“Just the sprinklers,” Craig interrupted.
Vickers turned his back and began to whisper urgently into his headset.
A minute passed. “Say when,” he said finally.
“Three, two, one…” Craig recited.
It began as nothing more than a low hiss. And then a gentle mist began to fall…rising in volume and ferocity until, within half a minute it had become a full-fledged summer thunderstorm.
Jackson Craig stepped closer to the TV monitors. The audience was frantic, squealing and flailing indignant arms as they whooped and hollered and covered their heads with whatever was at hand and tottered for the exits.
Half a dozen stubborn souls clung to their seats like barnacles, sneering as their counterparts cringed and shouted and filled the aisles with shuffling feet. Even these stalwart souls, however, eventually gave up the ghost, one here and one there, as the volume of water flowing from the ceiling thundered down unabated, eventually leaving a single soaking woman sitting alone. Big blonde woman. Aisle seat. Third row center.
All three cameras zoomed to close-up. The visage was astounding, harlequin and horrible. Pagliacci on PCP. The blonde baby-doll wig was about to slip from his head. Mascara, rouge, and lipstick and all of it melting down over his face in colored rivulets.
The sprinklers suddenly slowed and then phased off entirely. Solitary beads of water dripped from sprinkler heads all over the studio. Craig stepped closer to the screen, peering intently at the woman in the third row. Now that the veil of falling water had stopped, it was obvious that Colin Satterwaite was crying. Big gasping sobs wracked his body. Craig felt a shoulder brush by his own and looked to his right.
Harvey Winter had, once again, bellied up to the monitors. He studied the face on the screen. “Shoot the son of-a-bitch,” he said.
Craig continued to stare at the image.
“Just blow that shit-head away.” Winter demanded. Whatever he had to say next was squelched by the arrival of Sergeant Leonard, who came jogging down the hallway.
“I’ve got an ATF bomb squad in the lobby and snipers in place,” he announced. He spread his big hands. “Just say the word and we take him out.”
Audrey was aghast. “Aren’t you even going to talk to him?”
Winter was incredulous. “Talk to him? Wadda you think this is honey, a chat room?”
Craig checked the screen again. The blonde wig had made its escape. His buzzed- off hair was dark and thick. Three separate red laser dots danced on Colin Satterwaite’s forehead. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Doesn’t he at least get a chance to surrender?” Audrey wanted to know.
“Take him out,” Harvey Winter growled again. “Guy’s a boil on the ass of humanity.” He gestured angrily at the monitors. “Lookit that piece of shit.”
After an intense moment of silence, Craig finally shook his head. “That’s not what I’d imagined I was chasing,” he said. “Right now, I’m not too sure what I had in mind.” He pointed at the screen. “…but that sure as hell wasn’t it.”
Vickers handed Jackson Craig a wireless microphone. Craig brought the microphone to his mouth, hesitated for a moment, and then thumbed the switch.
“This doesn’t have to end like this,” he said.
His words seemed to come from everywhere at once. The face on the screen opened its eyes and stared into the bank of cameras. “Yes it does,” Colin Satterwaite said in a soft voice. “It has to end right here.”
“Listen…” Craig pressed. “Listen…we can…”
Colin Satterwaite sat forward in the seat. Looked like he was going to stand up. “Nobody came for me. Nobody. They just left me there.”
Craig’s voice took on a harder edge. “Stay in your seat please. Please stay right where you are.”
“They left me there,” Colin said. “For all those years…nobody ever came.”
“They didn’t know,” Craig said quickly. “Nobody knew where to find you. They thought you were dead. If they’d known where you were, they would have come.”
Colin Satterwaite grabbed the arms of the seat and pushed himself to his feet. “That would have been nice,” he mused. “Very nice.”
“Colin,” Craig started.
“Don’t call me that.”
“What should I call you then? Derrik maybe?”
“I don’t have a name.”
“Everybody has a name,” Craig insisted.
“Fuckboy. Call me Fuckboy. That’s what he called me.”
“I won’t call you that,” Jackson Craig said.
“He lied to me.”
“Yes, he did,” Craig agreed.
“He said I’d be a man if I did my duty.”
“You’re already a man,” Jackson Craig said.
Colin looked directly into the camera. “No,” he said.
They watched the monitors as he unbuttoned his long cloth coat and pulled it from his shoulders. The floor length white dress was completely soaked through and transparent. You could clearly see the white brassiere cradling a pair of menacing rectangular breasts. M18A1 stenci
led across the fronts.
“Oh God,” Audrey whispered.
“Listen to me…” Craig began. “This wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have…”
“That boy…” the image stammered. “He’d have learned to please.” He looked directly at the control booth. “He was no better than me. He’d have…” He stopped talking and shook his head, as if to say there was no point in going on.
“We can get you some help down here,” Craig said.
Their quarry didn’t seem to hear and instead began to reach down the front of the dress with his left hand. After a bit of groping, he found what he was looking for, then looked at the camera and smiled.
Every hair on Jackson Craig’s body stood up and tingled. He’d seen that smile once before. Outside the Al-Omari Mosque in Beriut. The morning a sixteen-year-old suicide bomber blew himself and half a dozen of his fellow citizens into the great beyond. His knees went weak.
“Down,” Craig screamed. He threw one arm around Audrey Williams and the other around Harvey Winter and dove for the rug.
A single flat report filled the speakers in the half-second before the front window of the control room threw itself on them. The building shook from the force of the explosion. Hundreds of puncturing impacts sounded around them. Spent projectiles fell to the floor like steel rain. The sound of hissing sparks and the insistent tinkle of broken glass lasted for a full minute as they cringed face down on the carpet. An alarm began to sound.
__
They stood and watched as a trio of Coroner’s Office technicians bagged the scattered remains and wheeled them out through the lobby door.
“Blew him clean in half,” Leonard said. “Parts of him everywhere.”
Jackson Craig looked around. The front half of the studio was shredded. Every piece of glass shattered and twinkling on the floor. Wires and sound insulation hanging down from the shattered ceiling. The black window fronting the control booth had mostly disappeared, leaving a jagged jack-o-lantern mouth that looked to be laughing.
A pair of workman came crunching up the aisle carrying a ragged section of ceiling. Jackson Craig and Sergeant Leonard stepped into the seats as they passed.
“Hell of a job with the evacuation,” Leonard acknowledged. “You saved a lot of lives here today.” He clapped Craig on the shoulder. “Sorry if I was a bit…”
As if on cue, Jeff Vickers came walking out from behind the scenes, talking into his mouthpiece as he walked. “You’ve got an hour,” he said.
He listened briefly, shook his head. “You let me worry about that. You just take care of the network feed,” he said. “Yes. An hour.”
Catching sight of Jackson Craig and Sergeant Leonard, he stopped in his tracks. He surveyed the carnage in the room and smiled.
“Technical difficulties beyond our control,” he said with an ironic grin.
The sound of glass being crunched underfoot pulled everyone’s attention toward the rear of the studio, where the king of shock TV was picking his way carefully down the studio aisle with Audrey in tow.
“They ready to go?” he asked Vickers.
“One hour,” he answered.
Vickers turned his attention to Sergeant Leonard. “Sergeant, we’re going to need to get across the street to the old studio. I was hoping…”
“When?” was all he asked.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes,” Vickers answered.
“I’ll take care of it,” Leonard promised as he pulled his radio from his pocket and headed for the exits at the back of the room.
“I’ll get make-up on the way,” Vickers promised as he headed backstage at a lope, mumbling orders into his microphone as he hustled out of sight.
Winter put his hands on his hips and surveyed the damage. He made a resigned face. “It’s just stuff,” he said as much to himself as anyone else. “Nobody got hurt. That’s what’s important. I should count my blessings.”
“Amen,” Audrey said.
“But….” he sighed. “The show must go on,” he said with an overly theatrical sigh. He nodded toward the back of the room. “Every media outlet in the country is out there,” he said with a sly grin. “I’m told there’s a coupla thousand people milling around out there in the snow.”
“It’s a zoo,” Audrey confirmed.
“We’ve still got the old studio across the street,” Winter said. “The one we used before we built this one.” He paused, rolling his eyes around the ruined room once again. “We’re going to tape over there till this gets cleaned up.”
“If there’s anything we can do…” Craig began.
“As a matter of fact, “ he said, waving a finger, “there is.” He walked around a piece of rubble. “I sure as hell can’t just go on like this didn’t happen,” he said. When nobody disagreed, Winter pinned them with a gaze.
“And who better than you two…” he began.
60
Looked like every single hospital employee must have signed Michael’s cast. Jackson Craig watched as Michael squealed with delight and streaked across the room. Gilbert’s mother Fran followed in not-so-hot pursuit. Jackson Craig leaned against the wall, marveling at the resiliency of children, amazed that, after all that had transpired, the little guy still had the capacity for joy.
The grandparents were on their best behavior. They’d never gotten along particularly well, but circumstances had thrown them together in a way none of them could have anticipated, so they were putting on their best faces for the sake of the kids. Singularly each couple was fine, but the arrival of grandchildren had somehow deepened the gulf of their cultural differences, and the differences between a fiercely proud Mexican family from the barrio and a pair of mid-western dairy farmers constituted a rift of major proportions. Craig recalled how Gilbert used to grouse about the difficulty of keeping everyone satisfied. Particularly around the holidays when having grandparents with wildly different traditions and who lived fifteen hundred miles apart made equity nearly impossible and enmity seemingly inevitable.
Audrey Williams and Becky separated themselves from the Madrigal clan and wandered over Craig’s way. The side of Becky’s face was completely scabbed over and she still had one arm in a sling. Otherwise she looked hale and hardy.
“How you doin’?” he asked.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Thank you for finding my brother,” she said.
“Has he… has he said anything about…” Audrey asked.
“I think he’s alright,” Becky said. “All he says is that the man was very sad.”
Craig said Williams passed a meaningful glance but neither spoke.
“I saw you guys on TV,” the girl said. “It was cool.”
“Who woulda thunk it?” Audrey mused. “Me and the big fella here… guests on the Harvey Winter Show. Boggles the mind, it does.”
Jackson Craig smiled but said nothing.
“My mother had to be sedated,” Audrey joked and then immediately wished she hadn’t mentioned mothers. Becky turned her face away. Audrey silently cursed her own big mouth. Silence settled uneasily over their corner of the room.
“Was he?” the girl asked finally.
“What?”
“Was he sad?”
Craig nodded. “Yeah,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “He was sad.”
Her voice nearly caught in her throat. “I hate him so much,” she said.
Craig thought about it. He recalled a homily about hating what a person does, rather than hating the person, but just couldn’t manage to spit it out.
On the far side of the room, Octavio Madrigal had abandoned his seat under the arched window and had walked over to Bill Fowles, who was seated on one of the flowered couches. Bill had a stroke about ten months ago and didn’t get around so well any more. He sat with his hands on top of a wooden cane and his chin resting on his hands. Octavio sat down beside him. The men began to chat.
Audrey checked her watch. Her expression was pained. “We should be going,” she said. Craig f
licked his eyes at the clock on the wall.
She was right. A car service was picking her up out front in half an hour. Taking her home to Ventura for the duration of her six-week medical leave. Craig was due at Bobby’s office a half hour after that, for what was being called a de-briefing .
“Rrrrrrebecca,” Joanna Madrigal trilled from across the room. She used her hankied hand to beckon the girl to her side.
Becky hugged them both goodbye, and started toward her grandmother.
Jackson Craig and Audrey Williams made the circuit, saying goodbye and making promises they knew they probably weren’t going to be able to keep but promising anyway because that’s what you did at a time like this.
The black Lincoln Town Car was already idling in the driveway when they got downstairs. The driver loaded her luggage and then got back into the car.
She swiveled her neck and as if to check the immediate area, then looped a hand behind his head and drew his lips to hers. For a brief moment Jackson Craig was rigid and uncertain…a reaction which quickly turned tentative and then willing…and then just as quickly morphed into the heat of the moment, as he drew her against his chest, embracing for longer than what polite society considered to be in good taste.
After an extended interval, she took a step back. She watched as Jackson Craig reached to wipe his mouth and then decided against it. She smiled.
He gave her a big loopy grin she’d never seen before and then deadpanned, “I believe we now find ourselves in violation of the ‘anti-fraternization’ clause.”
She laughed out loud. “Over the past few days, we’ve disobeyed the direct orders of our superiors on numerous occasions, disrupted security at the world’s busiest airport to the point where they shut it down for an hour and a half, then appeared on smut television to talk about it…” She paused for effect and rolled her eyes. “Without official authorization, I might add. I’m bettin’ we’ve got way bigger problems than a little kiss.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Hell, if you recall, we weren’t particularly popular to begin with.”