Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  In that moment, Jake actually did believe him. He saw that he had misjudged this man. The leader had no cause other than his own, but he wanted that money so badly he was prepared to die if he couldn’t have it. Jake had faced people who were dangerously fanatical when it came to their religion or the political beliefs—and for many on the left, their politics were their religion—but he had never run into anyone whose lust for money could rival this man’s. That might make him even more dangerous.

  But the leader’s anger, as he got caught up in his own ranting, had led him to make a mistake. He had stalked forward, gesturing with the gun in his hand, until he was only about ten feet from Jake now.

  And that was too close.

  Cops had what was called the 21-Foot Rule, developed from a training drill that had a “suspect” charge an officer from inside that distance. That was close enough that in many cases the officer was unable to draw, aim accurately, and discharge his sidearm before the attacker reached him.

  The leader’s pistol wasn’t holstered, but he had flung his arms out while he was yelling, so the Glock wasn’t pointed at Jake. The distance between them was only half of the distance involved in the 21-Foot Rule, as well. In that split second, Jake realized all that and allowed his instincts to take over. If he could get hold of the leader and take that gun away from him, then he’d have a hostage of his own. He didn’t know if that would make the others back off, but the guy seemed charismatic enough it was worth a try.

  Jake lunged forward.

  The guy saw him and tried to swing the gun toward him again, but Jake had already left his feet in a diving tackle.

  Jake crashed into him. He was considerably bigger and heavier than the leader, so the impact drove the man off his feet and toppled him over backward. He landed hard, with Jake slamming down on top of him. Jake hoped it broke every one of the bastard’s ribs.

  He made a grab for the wrist of the leader’s gun hand and closed his fingers around it. As Jake bore that hand toward the floor, he reached across his body and clamped his other hand on the 9mm’s slide so the man couldn’t fire it. Problem was, that meant both of Jake’s hands were occupied, so he couldn’t throw a punch. He drove his right elbow at the guy’s jaw, though, and connected solidly.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to knock him out, and even though Jake was bigger, the leader was wiry and strong. He brought a knee up sharply, aimed at Jake’s groin, but it caught him in the abdomen instead. Hurt like hell and knocked some of the wind out of him, but it didn’t incapacitate him as it might have if it had landed on its target.

  Jake wrenched at the gun. The leader’s grip on it seemed to slip a little, but he didn’t let go of it. He tried to wriggle out from under as Jake attempted to plant a knee in his belly and pin him down.

  Jake was vaguely aware that a lot of shouting was going on around him, but no guns had gone off—yet. He heard one man yell for somebody to stay back, and another cried, “Don’t shoot! Hold your fire!”

  That was what he wanted to hear. They weren’t going to blaze away at him for fear of hitting their boss. If he could just get that gun loose and hold it to the guy’s head . . .

  The leader’s grip slipped again, and this time Jake was able to rip the gun away from him. Because of that, Jake didn’t have to hang on to the guy’s wrist anymore. He balled his left hand into a fist and brought it over in a short but powerful blow that rocked the man’s head to the side. Jake shifted his hold on the Glock and grabbed hold of the leader’s shirtfront with his other hand. He surged to his feet and dragged the guy up with him. He swung the man in front of him and rammed the pistol’s muzzle against his head, just above the right ear. At the same time, Jake’s left arm went around the man’s neck and tightened to hold him in place.

  He caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of his left eye and glanced in that direction to see that Natalie had moved up beside him. The unexpected sight of her made alarm go through him.

  “Natalie, get back,” he snapped. “Find some cover and get down!”

  He turned swiftly, hauling the stunned leader around with him so the man’s body was between him and the other gunmen. Would they drop their weapons, or would they shoot through the man who had planned this operation and brought them here today?

  Jake never had a chance to find out what the other gunmen would have done, because at that moment he felt something hard and round press against the left side of his body. He recognized it as a gun barrel, and as he looked over, shock went through him to his core. Natalie was crowded close beside him with an intense expression on her face the likes of which he had never seen from her before. He could tell from the way the gun dug into his side that she was the one holding it.

  “Stop it, Jake,” she said. “Let him go and drop that gun. I don’t want to kill you.”

  The leader was regaining his senses after that punch from Jake. He turned his head enough so that Jake could see the triumphant grin on his face as he said, “Good work, Lucy.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Jake had never been shocked speechless in his life . . . until now. However, despite his surprise he didn’t let go of the leader or drop the gun as Natalie had ordered. Natalie . . . or Lucy, as the man had called her. All along, she had been deceiving him, Jake thought. Everything that had been between them was a lie.

  Everything . . .

  “Please, Jake,” she said in a half-whisper. “I really don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Too late for that,” he said, finding his voice again. Once he had spoken, it was easier to go on. “That’s not a very big gun you’ve got there.”

  “A .32,” she said, “and it’s aimed right at your heart. You’ll die in seconds if I pull the trigger.”

  “That’s plenty of time for me to splatter this bastard’s brains all over the floor.”

  “Please,” the guy said in a mocking tone, “if you’re going to threaten me, you might as well use my name. It’s Foster. Matthias Foster.”

  He was pretty cool-nerved for somebody with a gun to his head, Jake had to give him that much. He couldn’t admire the guy, of course. But Foster seemed to have ice water in his veins, and Jake acknowledged that.

  “Jake . . .” Natalie said warningly.

  “Just tell me one thing: are you really Natalie Burke, or is your name Lucy?”

  “I’m Dr. Natalie Burke,” she said. “And I really am a professor of criminal justice. Lucy is just . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, as evidently she was at a loss to explain herself.

  Not Matthias Foster, though. He said, “Lucy is what we call her. You know, like Carlos the Jackal back in the old days. And like Carlos, she’ll kill you if you don’t do what she says, Rivers.”

  “You know who I am?” Jake grated.

  “Of course. We’ve been worried about you all along, my man. Why do you think we kept testing you to find out just how dangerous you really are?”

  That explained some of the attacks on him and why no one on campus seemed to know about them. The black-hooded figures hadn’t been Antifa at all. They had been part of Foster’s cell or gang or whatever you wanted to call it.

  “And that’s why we decided it would be a good idea to get somebody close to you,” Foster went on in his smug, mocking tone. “Our little Lucy did a good job, didn’t she? You never suspected that she was one of us.”

  Jake’s gaze cut over to Natalie again. She was pale and clearly upset, but the line of her jaw was resolute. So was the look in her eyes.

  “I’m warning you, Jake—” she began.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, not bothering to try to conceal the harsh note of anger in his voice. “You don’t want to shoot me, but you will.”

  “I won’t have any choice.”

  “We’ve always got choices,” he said. “How long are the rest of you going to carry on with this madness if Foster here is dead?”

  “We’ve all gone too far to back out now,” she said.

  He be
lieved her. And even though he had absolutely no fear of dying, he believed that the best chance they all had of coming out of this alive was if he was still breathing and able to seize another opportunity to turn things around. It made him a little sick to his stomach to do so, but he took the gun away from Matthias Foster’s head.

  “That’s more like it,” Foster said. “I’m glad you listened to reason, Jake. There’s no reason anybody else has to die, anywhere on this campus. We’re not about bloodshed. We just want to make a statement about the cesspool that this country has turned into.”

  “And that so-called statement is going to result in you putting a hundred million dollars in your pocket.”

  “Well,” Foster said, still grinning, “that’ll help average out the income inequality a little, won’t it?”

  “You’re just a crook on a grand scale.”

  Before Foster could respond to that, Natalie said, “Go ahead and put that gun on the floor, Jake.”

  He had already made the decision not to push things right now when he lowered the gun from Foster’s head. If he tried to raise it again now, he had no doubt that Natalie would pull the trigger. He felt a bitter hollowness inside him at her betrayal, but one thing he had learned in combat was that emotions had no effect on facts. The time for them was after the danger was over.

  He leaned to the side just enough to let the Glock slip from his fingers and fall a short distance to the floor. As soon as it had thudded onto the tile, one of Foster’s gun-toting flunkies rushed forward to scoop it up, then backed off quickly while still covering Jake.

  “Now let go of Matthias,” Natalie ordered.

  “How come you don’t have an alias for the revolution, Foster?” Jake asked.

  “Don’t need one,” the man replied. “I’d rather operate out in the open.”

  “More stroking for your ego that way, right?”

  Natalie said, “Just let him go.”

  “Sure,” Jake said. He released his hold on Foster’s neck and stepped back.

  No sooner had he done that than all the lights in the Burr Memorial Library went out.

  * * *

  The explosion somewhere on campus made a mixture of fear and anger boil up inside Frank McRainey. Not fear for himself, but for the students, faculty, and staff who might have been killed in that blast. He was charged with protecting their safety, and that he had failed to do so was what made him mad.

  He started toward the door, but Walt Graham said, “Wait a minute, Chief. We’ll be better off staying here and waiting for reports on what just happened.”

  “This is my campus,” McRainey responded. “I’m not going to just stand here and do nothing—”

  Before he could do or say anything else, the office door opened and Doris said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, Chief, but Jeff just called on his radio.”

  “Don’t worry about interrupting,” McRainey snapped. “What did he say?”

  “The explosion was just outside Oliver Hall. It blew a hole in one wall and set the building on fire. The Greenleaf fire department is trying to put out the blaze.”

  “Casualties?” McRainey asked tersely.

  “No fatalities, Jeff says. Some injuries to the Greenleaf officers who were posted nearby, but he doesn’t know how bad. The building isn’t one that was taken over by the terrorists, so it had been evacuated and was empty as far as Jeff knows.”

  Relief washed through McRainey. He was worried about the Greenleaf officers who had been hurt, but at least no one had been killed outright, at least as far as they knew now.

  “That was a warning,” Theresa Vega said. “Whoever is in charge of this group, he was telling us to take him seriously.”

  “There was no chance of us not doing that,” Graham said. “We need to establish a line of communication into the library. I want to talk to that son of a bitch. But before we do that . . .” He turned to McRainey. “Can we kill the power to the individual buildings, or will we need to shut it down over the whole campus?”

  “That’s not in my department, but I imagine you’ll have to shut it down all over. We have our own power plant with generators, in case the regular electricity goes out for a long time, but it can be taken off-line easy enough, I expect.”

  “Can you make those calls, Chief? I want them in the dark, literally. And since we’ve already had the cell service turned off, they’ll be incommunicado except for the landline going into the library.”

  The FBI agent’s request made McRainey feel a little like he was being shunted aside, but he knew Graham was right. The more they could inconvenience the terrorists, the better.

  He nodded and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Right. I’m going out there and take a look around.”

  Vega said, “More bombs could go off. Perhaps we should evacuate this part of the campus as well and all of us pull back to a command center out of the danger zone.”

  “You go ahead. I want to get a feel for the situation, and I can do that better with my feet on the ground.”

  “And that way the FBI gets credit for anything good that happens, right? As well as most of the media coverage?”

  “I’m too old and tired to give a damn about any of that,” Graham said. “You do what you want, Agent Vega.”

  “I intend to. I’m coming with you.”

  Graham nodded and took a small radio from his pocket. He handed it to McRainey and said, “Stay in touch, Chief.”

  “I’ll let you know when all the power is shut down,” McRainey said. “Be careful. That bunch could have snipers posted that we don’t know anything about.”

  Graham nodded and left the office. Vega followed him without a glance back at McRainey, who sank wearily into the chair behind his desk and pulled the phone toward him to make those calls.

  The first one was to the campus power plant. He thought it might have been evacuated by the Greenleaf PD, but chief engineer Jonas Dietrich answered on the first ring.

  “Yeah, once I heard what was going on, I told everybody else to get the hell out, Frank,” Dietrich said once McRainey had identified himself and asked what the situation was there. “I figured I’d better stay, though, in case I was needed.”

  “You sure are. I’m going to have the electric company shut down the power to campus, and I don’t want those generators kicking on when that happens.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” Dietrich assured him. He unconsciously echoed Walt Graham when he added, “Gonna leave those sons o’ bitches in the dark, eh?”

  “That’s the idea,” McRainey said. “Don’t know if it’ll do any good or not, but it can’t hurt.”

  Another call quickly put him in touch with the manager of the local electric provider. Once McRainey had explained what he wanted, the man said, “Yes, we’ll have to shut off the power to the entire campus. We could turn it off at each building, but I’d have to send crews out there to do that manually, and to be honest with you, Chief, I don’t want to do that. My people deal with danger all the time when they’re working on power lines, but this seems like an unnecessary risk.”

  “I agree with you,” McRainey said. “I’d rather have you turn it off all over.”

  “Give me five or ten minutes.”

  With that done, McRainey hung up the phone, sat back, and blew out a breath. His wounded hand throbbed. Despite that, he wished he was out there on the front lines, so to speak, with Graham and Vega and Steve Hartwell.

  Thinking about the FBI agent prompted him to pick up the handheld radio. He keyed the microphone and said, “Agent Graham?”

  Only a couple of seconds went by before Graham’s deep voice intoned, “I’m here, Chief.”

  “The power all over campus should be shut down any time now.”

  McRainey had just said that when the lights went out.

  CHAPTER 33

  It wasn’t like the lower floor of the library was plunged into stygian darkness when the power went out. There were no windows,
of course, since it was below ground level, but the opening where the escalators came down from the ground floor let in light from above. And since there were a lot of windows up there, it meant that a considerable amount of light slanted down to the lower level.

  But the difference was so sudden, so unexpected, that for a couple of seconds everyone down there, including Jake, couldn’t see much of anything. The shock made several people cry out in alarm. A gun blasted somewhere, deafeningly loud, and that caused more screams of terror.

  Jake didn’t have to see to do what he did. He twisted sharply and lashed out with his left arm. His forearm struck Natalie’s arm and knocked it to the side. He hoped she wouldn’t jerk the trigger and fire the .32, endangering the innocent hostages.

  But he couldn’t stay a prisoner himself and hope to do any good.

  Natalie cried out, but the gun in her hand didn’t go off. Jake planted his hand against her shoulder and gave her a hard shove that sent her flying backward. In the next split second, he drove forward, hoping to grab Matthias Foster again and maybe get the upper hand once more.

  Foster was already gone, though, darting away into the shadows. Jake’s hurried gaze couldn’t find him. More shots roared. Muzzle flame split the gloom. Shrieks of pain and fear ripped the air.

  Somewhere, Foster shouted, “Kill Rivers! Kill him!”

  Instinct sent Jake diving to the floor. A bullet whistled somewhere above him but didn’t come close. He came up on hands and knees, scrambled behind one of the love seats, and heard a slug thud into it. Another lunge carried him into the stacks, those rows and rows of shelves full of old volumes and bound periodicals. The shadows really were thick in those narrow aisles. With each step he took, it grew darker around him.

  He didn’t mind that. Darkness was his friend right now.

  As he ran, he trailed the fingers of his left hand along the shelves beside him. When he came to an opening, he ducked into it. It was a good thing he did, because a second later, Foster or one of his men reached the spot where Jake had disappeared into the stacks and emptied a magazine of 9mm rounds along that aisle.