Baptism

by Max Kinnings

  “In order to make sure that the train driver does exactly as he says,” Varick had said as he drove the car, “Tommy’s going to tell him that he has taken his children hostage and any attempt to raise the alarm or release the passengers from the train will mean that they’ll be killed. In his notebook, however, it says that the children will be locked in the trunk of the car they use to get to the tube station.”

  Varick had gone on to explain the other aspects of the planned atrocity but Alistair wasn’t paying much attention. The thought of two children locked in the trunk of a car on a day as hot as this haunted him. As they had parked in a public lot just off Piccadilly Circus, Alistair could keep his thoughts to himself no longer.

  “We should try and find the children,” he had said as they walked through Soho.

  “It’s more important that we find Tommy.”

  “But we can’t leave the children in the boot of a car. They’ll die in this heat.”

  Varick frowned as he said, “Let me think about it.”

  By the time they reached Leicester Square tube station, Varick had reached a decision and he put his hand on Alistair’s shoulder as he said, “We both have a mission here, Alistair. I’ll find Tommy, you must find the children.”

  They had bought tickets and taken the escalators down to the Northern Line. But whereas Varick took up his position on the northbound platform to begin his wait for Tommy, Alistair had taken the first train southbound.

  When he had arrived at Morden station a member of London Underground staff, a man in his fifties with grey hair and a belly grown from too many years seated at a desk was taking questions from members of the public who had arrived at the station expecting to be able to travel into central London. Brother Alistair joined the crowd of people and listened to what was said. There had been an incident on the Underground and the network was closed down. Tommy had clearly managed to put his plan into operation. Whether Brother Varick could stop him from taking it to its ghastly conclusion was something that was in God’s hands now. He felt bad about leaving Varick to try and save the train passengers all by himself but he felt confident that he would succeed. Besides, Alistair now had far more pressing concerns. If he didn’t hurry up, the children would be dead before he found them.

  11:48 AM

  Northern Line Train 037, driver’s cab

  About certain events in his life George had almost photographic recall and his first date with Maggie was one of them. She had worn a striped Breton top with jeans and a leather jacket. Her hair was much shorter than it was now. They both smiled a lot; both had lasagne and drank far too much wine because they were nervous. He had toyed with the idea of asking Maggie if she wanted to come back to his place but decided that if he really was serious about her—and the butterflies in his stomach were testament to the fact that he was—the best thing would be to show a bit of gallantry and make sure that she got home safely in a taxi. When she sat in the back of the cab, he leaned in to give her a goodnight kiss on the cheek and she had pulled him close and kissed him on the lips. He knew then that it was more than just drunken affection. It was obvious that she liked him as much as he liked her. He walked home that night, all the way to Muswell Hill from the West End; he just wanted to keep walking, enjoying the warm summer night and his thoughts of Maggie.

  Ever since that night, Italian restaurants had held a special resonance for them because they were reminded of their first date. Like all couples, he and Maggie had developed their own little conversational rituals and traditions. Whenever the bread rolls were delivered to the table in an Italian restaurant, George would often take two pieces of bread, pop one in each cheek and do his “Marlon Brando in The Godfather” impersonation: “You come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married and you ask me to do murder for money.” She groaned every time he did it but she still laughed all the same.

  They had passed their affection for Italian restaurants on to Ben and Sophie. Mr. Pizza, or Mr. Pieces rather, had become a family favorite. Would they ever go there again? Not if Tommy Denning saw the chewing gum on the handset or if the threat of flooding the train didn’t force the authorities into succumbing to his demands.

  “Okay, George, I want you to kneel with me and pray.” Denning had that expression on his face—the little smile and the raised eyebrows—as though he was a child goading his friend into a dare.

  “I er, I don’t pray.”

  “I know you say you don’t believe but try to open your mind for a moment. Didn’t the psalm that you recited earlier mean anything to you?”

  “It might have meant something to me when I said it.”

  “It might have meant something to you when you said it.” Denning spoke like a barrister, repeating the words of a witness in an attempt to make them sound ridiculous.

  “Yeah, I don’t know.”

  “Well maybe another prayer might mean something to you now.”

  “Maybe.”

  “The thing is, I want to pray now and I don’t want to pray alone. I think you’re very important to this whole—” He looked around the cab trying to find the word. Please God don’t look at the handset, don’t see the chewing gum. George was praying already. Denning found the word: “—occasion, this moment in time. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  An idea was forming in George’s mind. Praying would involve kneeling; it might even involve Tommy’s eyes being closed. What better time to launch an attack on the bastard than when he was in congress with whichever imaginary being he had chosen to believe in? He would be vulnerable. This might be George’s best chance to disarm him. All it would take would be a lucky punch. If he hit him as hard as he could then it might buy him a few seconds, might allow him to hit him again, kick him, grab the gun even. He wouldn’t need to worry about the chewing gum on the radio mouthpiece then.

  “Your faith means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

  Tommy chuckled at the absurdity of the question. “Of course, it means everything. Can’t you see that?”

  “Yes, I can and . . . I envy you. I’ve struggled to believe in the past. I’ve tried but something just always held me back. Until now.”

  “Until now?”

  He shouldn’t overplay his hand but he needed Denning to know that he was serious about his intention to pray. The more relaxed Denning was the better. In addition to being his motivation, religion was also his weak spot, his Achilles’ heel.

  “In a weird kind of way, I guess I respect you.” Was that too much? He didn’t have time to judge. Denning looked convinced—so far. “I’ve spent my whole life compromising my real feelings and beliefs. And look where it’s got me? I’m forty, I’m messed up, I’m in a job that I can’t stand, all my hopes and dreams have turned to dust. Today for the first time in years—and despite the fear that I feel for myself and my family—I actually feel alive.” Denning was watching him, expressionless. Could he tell that he was lying? Was he lying? It didn’t matter, he was engineering an opportunity for himself. A choice had been made—it might not be the right choice but it was a choice. He was going to keep coming at this freak; he was going to keep testing him. He was going to find a moment of weakness and he was going to stop him.

  “You’re serious, are you? You can really feel God’s love?”

  “I don’t know what it is but I can feel something. I feel different.”

  “I thought it would be more difficult than this. I thought you would fight against it harder. You’ve made me so happy.”

  George had not anticipated Denning’s next move. He reached out to George and put his arms around him, hugged him, their cheeks pressed together. Before George could decide whether this might prove a better moment to launch his attack than later on, Denning had released him, put the gun down on the driver’s console and was kneeling.

  “Come, George, let’s pray together.”

  Tommy Denning raised his hands up to his mouth and closed his eyes. George knelt too and did the same—except he ke
pt his eyes open, watching, waiting.

  “Dear Lord, our heavenly father, this is your humble servant, Thomas . . .”

  11:48 AM

  Network Control center, St. James’s

  Ed could hear the distant sound of helicopters as they hovered over the West End. The wailing of sirens on the streets below was a constant. For a moment, it felt as though the barrage of sound was taunting him. Ed was trained to deal with pressure—he trained others how to deal with it too—but this was something else. No one in the negotiating cell could fail to feel it. These people were experts in hostage negotiation. They were experts in establishing psychological profiles and doing so rapidly so that negotiation tactics could be tailored to those profiles. But none of them had been faced with such a meticulously planned and executed scenario involving so many hostages and with so little apparent motive; none of them had come across someone like Tommy Denning before. In every hostage negotiation that Ed had been a part of over the years, he had gone into the negotiation knowing with an unwavering certainty that he had the upper hand psychologically speaking, that he was the one in control. But in this situation Ed knew he wasn’t. Tommy Denning was shrewd, resourceful, calm, confident, and seemingly possessed of an innate understanding of the negotiation process and an ongoing refusal to be drawn into it. What Denning had created here couldn’t help but make all the other situations that Ed had worked on seem low-key, trivial almost, in comparison. The sheer scale of this situation and the numbers of people involved elevated it into a different realm.

  Ed’s negotiating team, Des White, Nick Calvert and Laura Massey, were feeling the pressure—he could hear it in their voices—but they were responding to that pressure as the professionals that they were. Hooper, on the other hand, was an unknown quantity. His responses to the psychological pressure of the crisis were inconsistent. Ed couldn’t read him. To Ed, the pressure felt like vertigo. He used to suffer from it when he was sighted; when blind it seemed to go away. Now it was back. It felt as though the negotiating cell was perched at the very top of a skyscraper of security infrastructure.

  The whole area around the hijack was locked down, the command center was secure. Special forces were on standby while the rapid intervention plan was being devised. The police, the military, and the government—not to mention the victims and their families—were looking to Ed and his team to make the right decisions. Storming the train was always an option but the risks were clear. Over three hundred passengers stood to die if it went wrong, not to mention the SAS soldiers themselves who would have to undertake the operation. One thing he knew for certain—even if he was uncertain of anything else—was that when Tommy Denning said that he would kill everyone on the train if anyone tried to stop him making his announcement, he meant it. The conviction in his voice when he made his threats—whether articulated through George the driver or from his own lips—was unequivocal.

  Without an immediate intervention, Ed and his team were faced with a negotiation with a subject that was going to be about as difficult as they came. To add to that, there was now the issue of the water in the tunnel. “Think of it as an egg timer,” Denning had said over the radio link. George had then said, “So you’re trying to drown us by flooding the tunnel, is that it?” Even though the radio link had been broken for some reason before George could tease any more from his captor, Denning’s intentions were clear. He was going to ensure that everything was stacked in his favor. He held all the cards. Whatever his demands were, he fully expected them to be met. He had set in motion a series of events that could not be reversed. Either the authorities complied or the passengers would end up dead. It was as simple as that. Denning knew enough about hostage negotiation to know that the negotiators’ premium commodity, time, was the one thing that he could turn against them to make it play to his advantage.

  So, what the hell were his demands going to be? What could this evangelical ex-soldier possibly want? As soon as Ed knew what it was, the psychological balance of power in the negotiation would shift. Knowledge of what those desires were would allow Ed to manage them and use them to manipulate Denning and begin the process of securing a positive outcome.

  Laura entered the room—he could tell it was her from her footsteps—and she was pulling pieces of paper from an envelope.

  “We’ve got an interim profile and background on Thomas Denning,” she said.

  “Thanks, Laura,” said Ed. “Can you paraphrase as we’ve only got a few minutes until he’s going to make his speech?”

  “Yes, let’s hear it,” said Hooper. It was clear to Ed that he was trying to reassert himself as a key player within the negotiating cell. He didn’t seem to care about the protocol; you didn’t bark orders at the negotiating coordinator, particularly one with the experience of Laura Massey. She didn’t say anything in response to his comment and nor would he but it was yet another sign that Hooper was working to a different agenda.

  “He’s twenty-five years old,” started Laura. “One of a pair of fraternal twins. The sister’s named Belle. When they were nine years old, they saw their father murder their mother with a bread knife before he hanged himself. After that, Tommy spent most of his childhood in various foster homes in London and the southeast. Lots of petty crime, shoplifting, antisocial behavior.” Laura flicked over a sheet of paper then continued. “Did time in Feltham Young Offender Institution, where it appears he found God. He’s got a high IQ but was diagnosed with a borderline case of dissociative behavior although it was not considered bad enough to prevent him from joining the army. He ended up fighting in Afghanistan. Did two tours there, one in ’08 and one in ’10. And then it looks as though he dropped out and, still big on God, joined up with an evangelical Christian sect located in a remote part of Snowdonia in Wales. The sect is called Cruor Christi. It means the ‘blood of Christ,’ blood as in blood spilled in battle, bloodshed, rather than ‘sanguinis’ which is the Latin for blood which is used in the communion. They’ve been under investigation by the local constabulary following reports of gunfire.”

  Ed said, “I take it the place is being taken apart as we speak?”

  “Welsh Special Branch are on their way there. It’s very remote. What we do know is that in addition to the core members who number about fifteen or twenty brothers and sisters as they call themselves, there’s an ex–New Orleans police officer called Varick Mageau who is under suspicion of having fired on looters after Hurricane Katrina. It seems that Cruor Christi specialize in taking in people who have personal problems, mainly drug or crime related.”

  Laura flicked onto another sheet of paper. “So among the flock we’ve got a guy who did eight years for armed robbery, another one who burned down the family home but got off because of diminished responsibility, and another one here, Brother Alistair Waller, who is a former heroin addict.”

  “Sound like a nice bunch,” said Ed. “So are we assuming until we have further intel that this hijack is the work of Cruor Christi collectively or do we think that Tommy Denning is a rogue element?”

  “In my opinion, he’s a rogue element,” said Hooper.

  “You sound very sure,” said Ed. “And we also have to bear in mind that he has accomplices. This isn’t a lone-wolf operation.”

  Hooper didn’t have an opportunity to respond before Laura Massey said, “Ed, I’d like to introduce Professor Frank Moorcroft.”

  Ed held out his hand and it was taken in the weak grip of a hand that was old and leathery. Ed breathed in the aroma of the man to whom he was being introduced. The main components that he managed to isolate were books, paper, and the still air of musty offices and classrooms. It was the smell of a man who has spent his life within the confines of academia. He had also failed to shower or bathe that morning.

  “Hello, pleased to meet you.” It was the voice of a man who felt nervous and awkward, guilty even, as though he had been caught in the act of doing something shameful.

  “Professor Moorcroft,” said Laura, “is an expert o
n the London Underground’s architecture, construction, and rolling stock.”

  “Glad to meet you, Professor. I’ll get straight to it. As you have no doubt been briefed, we’ve got a hostage situation on the London Underground. Terrorists have taken a train with over three hundred people on board. We also think that they’re trying to flood the tunnel. For the purposes of our negotiation and our understanding of the perpetrators’ psychological profiles, it’s essential that we understand whether it’s possible that they could genuinely flood the tunnel to such a degree that it would threaten the lives of the people on the train.”

  “Well, the thing is, you see, there are numerous water sources in and around the London Underground—water mains, underground rivers.”

  Professor Moorcroft was a man whose opinion counted for a lot in his world. But he was clearly feeling a degree of culture shock to find himself in a situation so raw and urgent. He masked his trepidation with a tone and manner which he might have employed with a student, one in which the respective roles of intellectual and sub-intellectual were accentuated. It was a common trait of academics, Ed had found, but he was happy to indulge it—play the “sub”—if it meant that Moorcroft would give him the information that he required as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  “This particular incident is in the West End I believe?” asked Moorcroft.

  “Between Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road in the northbound tunnel.”

  “Ah, now you see that will be the River Lime. It’s little more than a big water pipe at that section but if it was breached in any way then, of course, you’re looking at quite substantial flooding.”