Baptism

by Max Kinnings

  “All we’ve done since he stopped the train in the tunnel is act like his facilitators. We’re like a bunch of television producers. We’re giving him everything that he wants.”

  “I’m not arguing with you, Mark. My vote is that we keep the line open. Until we know more, I don’t think it’s a good idea to antagonize him any further. We need to negotiate ourselves into a better position before we start taking away his toys.”

  When the sound of a gunshot came through the speakers and headphones, it made them all jump.

  “What the hell was that?” said Calvert.

  “Someone’s shot him,” said White in a tone of voice that he might have used to comment on a particularly spectacular run at goal in a football match.

  “What are you seeing?” asked Ed.

  Calvert responded: “Because of the angle of the webcam, it’s impossible to see him but, before he disappeared from view, a speck of blood splashed onto the webcam lens.”

  Ed waited, sick with anticipation, listening intently just as countless others around the world did the same.

  12:19 PM

  Northern Line Train 037, second carriage

  A man cheered behind him in the carriage but Varick didn’t look back, didn’t acknowledge the growing hubbub of hope. The lead hijacker was shot; it was a message that spread through the train. Varick pulled the window down as far as it would go in the two adjoining doors and dragged himself through the gap to drop down onto the floor of the first carriage. Hunkered down on his knees, he looked along the row of seats. He could see Tommy’s legs on the floor but, due to his angle of vision, the remainder of his body was concealed behind the laptop and its supporting bed sheet. He aimed the Smith & Wesson at the computer and squeezed off a shot. The bullet ripped through the back of the screen and sent it crashing to the floor. Now he could see that Tommy’s head was marooned in a puddle of blood. The driver was watching it, motionless.

  “Friend,” Varick called to him, “is he dead?” There was no reply, or none that he could make out. It was difficult to hear above the voices in the remainder of the train that were growing in volume and excitement. He shouted louder. “Friend, is he dead?” Still no reply. There were gurgling sounds but nothing specific that he could make out. Tommy’s head was moving. It could be nerve activity. An armed robber he’d seen killed back when he was in the NOPD had trembled for minutes after he’d been shot. The human body often behaved in curious ways following massive trauma.

  Varick pulled himself to a standing position and made his way down the carriage, pointing the gun in front of him according to the standard police procedure he had learned almost thirty years before.

  His eyes flicked from the body on the floor of the carriage to the driver sitting in the row of seats. Perhaps the driver was catatonic with fear. Perhaps he had passed out with his eyes open. He kept the gun sight aimed at Tommy’s chest. The slightest movement and he would squeeze off another shot. Should he squeeze one off anyway, just to make sure that Tommy was on his way to the Lord? It was a question that he didn’t get to answer as his attention was drawn to a strange sound. It could be the hissing of pressure in the train’s pipes. It was rhythmic, breath-like but inhuman. As he stood not ten feet from the body on the floor of the carriage, he realized where the hissing sound was coming from. It was Tommy’s ruptured face; it was his breath whistling through the shredded tissue of his right cheek as he held a walkie-talkie radio to his mouth and muttered into it.

  Movement in his peripheral vision made Varick look up. It was the driver. He was shaking his head. No, not shaking—there was less movement than that—it was more of a tremble. The man’s eyes were wide and unblinking, imploring, as they bored into Varick’s. His face conveyed the message as well as if he had shouted: it’s not safe. Varick’s eyes flicked back down to Tommy—who was watching him.

  “Varick,” he said. But the voice wasn’t human. It was uttered from a shattered face, gurgling blood. Varick could see everything now with infinite clarity and as Tommy raised the gun in his hand and fired the shot that speared his thigh, shattering the bone and sending him sprawling to the floor, he couldn’t help himself. Despite being faced with an immediate and urgent need to avoid death, he couldn’t prevent the thought forming in his mind. In all the years he had fired the Smith & Wesson, this was the one and only time that it had not pulled to the right. That had to mean something. That had to have come from somewhere. That had to have come from God.

  The pain was intense but the fact that it emanated from his leg was a source of hope. He was still alive and one shot away from achieving what he had set out to do when he hurried from Madoc Farm in the early hours of the morning.

  Dragging himself onto his front, he pointed the Smith & Wesson. The bullet would have less than six feet to travel. It wouldn’t matter whether the gun pulled to the left or to the right. But as his finger began to squeeze the trigger, a bullet from Denning’s gun struck his wrist, severing all the tendons that wired his fingers around the revolver and sending it thudding to the floor of the carriage. The pain and trauma from his bullet wounds—his very own stigmata—rendered him mute. Was this how it had felt that day at Calvary?

  A force composed of pure animal rage crashed into him and slammed him against the floor, knocking the air from his lungs. What remained of Tommy Denning loomed over him, gasping and slathering blood.

  Varick had failed; he had tried to be a good man, tried to do the right thing at all times but he couldn’t fight this. It was too much for him. It was God’s will. He would surrender himself to it.

  As the demon began to strangle him, he closed his eyes and shut it out.

  “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, I commend my soul, the soul of your humble servant, Varick Mageau . . .” But the words in his head petered out as the electrical activity in his brain came to an end.

  12:19 PM

  Northern Line Train 037, first carriage

  The bullet had ripped off half of his right cheek, taking with it a large quantity of gum tissue. It was a vicious wound that had shattered all the teeth on the right-hand side of his upper jaw. George could see the place where the teeth should have been through the hole in Denning’s cheek from which blood sluiced across his face. An expression came to mind: “That’s got to hurt.” He had used it a few weeks before when Maggie had stubbed her toe on the corner of the coffee table. “That’s got to hurt,” he had said and smiled. But it hurt too much for Maggie to find it funny. She scowled at him and hobbled off. But here it was again: “That’s got to hurt.” He wanted it to hurt. He wanted it to hurt so much; he wanted it to be the most debilitating physical pain that anyone had ever felt. A bullet in the face. That’s got to hurt.

  These bizarrely jovial feelings had a dark flipside of agonizing indecision and cold paralyzing fear. Denning lay still on the floor. There was so much blood on his head that it looked as though he had been dipped in crimson and it took a moment for George to realize that from out of this bloody mess, Tommy was staring straight at him.

  From the end of the carriage came the sound of someone climbing through the window in the connecting doors. A quick glance confirmed it. A middle-aged man with a strong build was approaching with certainty and purpose. Here he was, the savior, the man who would make them all safe. Denning must have known this but all he did was stare into George’s eyes with no hint of the extreme shock and pain that he must have been experiencing.

  Shoot him again. George nearly said it. But the way Denning looked at him stopped him.

  There was another shot—for a moment George felt certain that his subvocal request had been answered but the laptop computer crashed to the ground and Denning continued to stare at him. George had to do something; he had to act. Denning was on his way out. This was the end for him. There was no way that he could survive this.

  “Friend, is he dead?” It was an American accent, Deep South if he wasn’t mistaken. Answer h
im, George, tell him the truth. He isn’t dead; he needs another bullet. Put one through his heart this time or right between his eyes; it wouldn’t really matter which but whatever you do, shoot him again.

  Denning fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the walkie-talkie radio. Holding it to his mouth, he said, “If I don’t get back to you in five minutes, kill the train driver’s kids.”

  George froze.

  “Friend, is he dead?” Louder this time, more urgent. George had to answer him, had to say something, had to do something, had to shout, “No, get back,” and rush from his seat. Denning was less than six feet away from him. If George threw himself on him there wouldn’t be time for him to pull the pistol from his pocket. The distraction would allow the man to put another bullet into him. Denning couldn’t shoot two people at the same time, could he?

  But George couldn’t move. His would-be savior had become his children’s potential murderer. If George had had a gun, he would have shot the man himself.

  “Varick.”

  Denning said it just before he took the gun from his pocket and shot the man in the leg. What did it mean? Was it some sort of twisted salutation or was it a name? It didn’t matter. The man slumped to the floor but he wasn’t going to give up without a fight. Even as his leg gave way he pointed the revolver in his hand. But Denning managed to squeeze off a shot first, a shot that struck the man’s wrist and the revolver dropped from his hand.

  Denning was in control once more and George felt relieved. He watched motionless, frozen, paralyzed, as Denning hurled himself at the man and closed his hands around his neck. Denning could have shot him, the gun was in his hand, he could have shot him in the stomach or the chest or the head but he had shot him in the leg. His intention was not to kill. Not yet.

  Denning straddled him, knees pinning his arms to his side as he drove his thumbs into the man’s throat. The gun was back in his pocket and he stared at the man—at this Varick—with the same blank expression with which he had stared at George only seconds before.

  “This is meant to be,” he said, spitting blood onto the man who struggled beneath him. “Can’t you see it? No one can stop me. This is the will of God. Look, you tried and you failed. You did well, Varick, I’ll give you that. You did your best and you got close. You are a prophet and you’ll join me on the other side. But you have to know that this is meant to be. I am meant to be. And you can’t stop me. No one can.”

  Varick. A man’s name. Named by his proud parents all those years ago and now about to die. George thought that he still might be able to save him if he tried. If he rushed Denning now, hit him with as much force as he could muster, he might be able to knock him off balance. But it was a straight choice now between Varick’s life and his children’s. Which meant that Varick was a dead man.

  There was a gristly tearing sound as Denning crushed Varick’s throat. Varick’s legs kicked out and his final breath was a sigh that sounded almost contented in its finality.

  Denning pulled himself to his feet and looked at George.

  “Do I look pretty?” His pained smile was one of two openings in his face through which his bloody teeth were visible. It was like he had two mouths, one on the front of his face and one on the side. George was unlocked from his paralysis.

  “That’s got to hurt,” he said.

  One of the mouths closed.

  “You bet it hurts. It hurts like crazy. But only on the surface. On the inside, I don’t feel a thing.”

  The laptop had been destroyed by the bullet that had struck it. It lay on the floor of the carriage. Putting his head to one side, Denning looked at it dispassionately.

  “My kids . . .” George’s voice trembled.

  “In a minute.”

  Pulling the gun from the pocket of his jacket, he aimed it down the carriage through the adjoining doors and into the second carriage. George couldn’t tell how many shots he fired, they came one after the other so quickly, the brass bullet casings clattering to the floor. He only took his finger off the trigger when there were no more bullets, at which point, he released the empty clip from the handle and let it drop to the floor before he stabbed in a full one and locked and loaded. There were shouts and screams from further up the train; people were shot. There were injuries, deaths.

  “Never underestimate the power of indiscriminate killing to instill terror in people. It’s a winner every time.”

  “My children,” said George again, more urgently this time.

  For the first time since he had received his wound, Denning raised his hand up to his face and ran the tips of his fingers around the rim of the crater that the bullet had created.

  Denning raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth: “It’s me. What I said about the kids—forget it. For the time being.”

  Movement in George’s peripheral vision distracted him and he looked down to see water seeping from between the cracks in the doors and racing along the floor of the carriage in rivulets that rapidly merged with one another. As though in recognition of this invasive flow, the lights in the carriage flickered and dimmed.

  12:20 PM

  Network Control center, St. James’s

  “We’ve lost the feed,” said White. “And there’s no response on the radio.”

  “Someone must have taken him out,” said Hooper. He sounded more hopeful than he had done all day but Ed wasn’t ready to share his optimism.

  “Let’s hope someone has because, if they haven’t, it could mean that he’s set off the explosives.”

  “I’ll get straight on to GCHQ,” said Laura. “Let’s see if it’s just him we’ve lost or whether there’s any other chatter from the train.”

  Despite his suggestion that the news might not be as rosy as they all hoped, Ed could feel the mood in the room change. Gone was the doom-laden tension and in its place was a buzz of nervous expectation. Could this really be the end? Had someone managed to get at Denning? If so, how would the other hijackers on the train react? Without their leader, their figurehead, there was every chance that they would throw in the towel. The train passengers could be out of the tunnel in under the hour. Maybe the biggest and potentially most difficult hostage negotiation that he had ever been involved in would also turn out to be the most quickly resolved. Ed, however, couldn’t share his colleagues’ nervous optimism. Of course it was possible that someone might have got lucky and taken Denning out—all the evidence pointed that way—but Ed couldn’t help but feel with every second that passed that Denning was still very much alive.

  Just from the sound of Laura’s footsteps on the floor as she entered the room, Ed could tell that the news wasn’t good. If it had been, she would have been in more of a hurry. Her tone of voice as she started to speak was enough for Ed to know that the situation was very far from over.

  “Messages and Internet calls from the train indicate that there have been further shots fired in the first carriage and people in the second carriage have been hit and injured, some of them fatally. It would appear that the person doing the shooting is a wounded Tommy Denning. Whoever it was that managed to attack him in the first instance has failed and been killed.”

  “Shit!” Hooper smashed his fist down on the desk. It was a golden rule of hostage negotiation that personnel within a negotiating cell should keep a check on their emotions. That Hooper was failing to do that was further testament to Ed that he was allowing personal feelings to trespass on his professional behavior. If he had been a cop and Ed his superior, Hooper would have been long gone.

  “Okay, let’s concentrate,” said Ed. “Is this now the right time to send in the special forces to storm the train? Do we hope that Denning is hurt badly enough and so rattled that he can be taken out?”

  “I’m not sure that sending in special forces at this moment in time is even a possibility,” said Laura. “Boise tells me that they’re working on potential scenarios at the moment but, with the water rising, they’re having to send for specialist equipment. We do now have the tra
in driver George Wakeham’s mobile number but our technical coordinator tells me that with only wireless access we’re not going to be able to get to him because his phone isn’t Wi-Fi compliant.”

  “Can’t we arrange for phone reception in the tunnels?”

  “We had enough trouble getting the Wi-Fi sorted out,” said Laura. “It’s going to be impossible to get phone network reception down there in the time necessary for it to make any difference.”

  “What about the passengers? What are we telling them?”

  “Generic e-mails are being sent to those we’ve managed to make contact with, reassuring them that we’re doing all that we can to get them out of there.”

  “Maybe we should be telling them to do whatever it takes to try and escape.”

  That no one even deigned to respond was all the proof Ed needed that this was never going to be a viable plan. It felt as though the temperature in the room had jumped a few degrees. A portable air-conditioning unit had been wheeled in and was humming away in the corner but it was having little effect, and a couple of desk fans that churned up the air only accentuated the heat by providing the occasional waft of cooler air against which the hot air was contrasted. Ed took off his sunglasses and dabbed at his face with a handkerchief before covering his eyes once again.

  “Well, of course, there may be a way to drain the water out of the tunnel.”

  Ed had forgotten about Professor Moorcroft, who was sitting at a nearby desk, and he suspected that everyone else in the room had as well. By rights, he shouldn’t have been in the negotiating cell. But the situation with Denning’s speech and his subsequent attack had rendered him invisible.

  Ed turned toward him. “How?”

  Moorcroft’s can-do demeanor of a few moments previously took a knock from the sudden attention that it attracted. He cleared his throat nervously. “Well, I was looking at the plans and charts for that section of the Northern Line. I was hoping that the southbound tunnel might have been adjacent to the northbound tunnel, or at least close to it, but sadly it’s not at that point, they’re set quite well apart.”