Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  “Who sent you here? Or is it a death sentence just to ask the question?”

  The stranger shook his head and said, “You’ve got me all wrong, Chief. Nobody sent me. I’ve got a personal reason for being here. I just want to help.”

  “The situation is under control,” McRainey said heavily. “The only way civilians can help is by staying out of the way.”

  “Well”—another faint smile and a shake of the head—“that’s not going to happen, so you might as well go ahead and tell me what I want to know.”

  “There’s the map,” McRainey snapped. “If you’re such a hotshot, read it yourself. You’ll be able to figure out everything, I’m sure.”

  “All right.”

  The man stepped over to the map and gazed at it for a long moment while Doris stood just outside the office doorway and looked worriedly at McRainey. Then the stranger nodded as if satisfied and turned away from the map.

  “Thanks, Chief. I really do think you should leave now. I don’t believe that Foster really intends to blow up the entire campus, but in circumstances like this, accidents sometimes happen.”

  McRainey didn’t question how the stranger knew Matthias Foster’s name. He probably had some pretty highly placed sources in the government.

  “Just what is it you intend to do?”

  “Whatever I can to put a stop to this with as little loss of life as possible.” The stranger paused, then added, “I’m sure you know the old saying about cutting off the head of a snake . . .”

  With that, he turned and started toward the door.

  “By God, at least have the decency to tell me your name!” McRainey exploded.

  The stranger paused and looked back.

  “It won’t do you any good,” he said, “but it’s Barry. Barry Rivera. But you can call me Dog. Just Dog.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Jake had taken the pistol being carried by the man he’d knocked out, as well as the extra loaded magazines in the man’s pockets, so he was well armed as he headed up the darkened stairwell toward the fourth floor. It would have been nice to have an AR-15 or something like that in addition to the two 9mm semiautomatics, but a man worked with the tools he had.

  The fourth floor was where all the library’s offices were located. He didn’t know how many people would be up there, normally, but he guessed not many. Which meant that Foster might have sent only a couple of men to round them up. If he could take care of those guys, it would open a path all the way to the roof . . . and that might be how the hostages could get out of here.

  Foster’s men had to have heard the shooting from the other parts of the building, though, so they would be alert for trouble. Jake might not be able to take them by surprise.

  He would deal with that when he got there, which wouldn’t be much longer now, he thought as he rounded the landing halfway between the third and fourth floors and continued upward.

  When he reached the top of the stairs and the door to the fourth floor, he took hold of the metal bar and pressed it slowly and carefully until he heard the latch disengage. Then he pulled on it with just enough force to open the door an inch or so.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t budge. Jake pulled harder, then frowned as the door still didn’t move.

  It wasn’t locked. He had heard the latch click. He wasn’t sure the stairwell doors even could be locked, since the stairs served as the building’s emergency exit. But it wasn’t opening, that was for sure, which meant the gunmen on this floor had done something to keep anybody from coming up the stairs and taking them by surprise, which was exactly what Jake had intended to do.

  He put his ear to the door and listened intently, but heard nothing from the other side. No voices, no one moving around. Someone had to be up here, though. The sabotaged door proved that.

  Somewhere below him on the stairs, something thudded, followed immediately by a gasped “Damn it!” Then a swift shuffle of footsteps before total silence fell.

  Jake pressed his back to the wall beside the door and aimed the pistol in his hand down the stairs. He stayed there for a long moment, silent and motionless. Someone was following him up the stairs. Judging by the sounds he had heard, whoever it was had tripped in the dark, probably had fallen and banged a knee on the stairs, and cursed at the pain. Then, realizing he might have given himself away, he had frozen and was standing down there somewhere, not moving.

  The question was whether the man was a friend or an enemy, and since Jake didn’t have any friends in this building right now, at least as far as he knew . . .

  “Jake? Jake Rivers?”

  The call floated up the stairwell in a strained half-whisper. Something about the voice was familiar to Jake, but he couldn’t place it.

  He didn’t respond, just in case someone was aiming a gun at him right now, just waiting for him to say something in order to pinpoint his position in the thick gloom. He figured that if he was patient, whoever it was might say something else.

  Several long, tense moments dragged by in silence. Then the same voice said, “Jake, if you’re up there, this is Pierce Conners. You know, the guy who gave you that unedited video . . . If nobody’s up there, then I guess I’m talking to myself and I feel really stupid. But if one of those guys with guns is there . . .” Pierce sighed. “I may be dead soon. I think I’d rather feel stupid. But one way or another, I’m not going to turn around and go back down there where everybody else has been taken prisoner. I’m coming on up, and I really, really hope I don’t get shot.”

  Jake didn’t respond, even though he could hear the fear in Pierce’s voice and wished he could reassure the kid. But somebody could be listening right on the other side of that door, and he didn’t want to confirm for them that somebody was in the stairwell. Without making any noise, he moved over to where he was standing beside the top of the stairs. He tucked the pistol behind his belt and waited.

  He heard Pierce coming up the stairs and could tell that the young man was trying to be quiet. However, Pierce obviously didn’t have much experience at being stealthy, because Jake was able to track his progress all the way up the stairs.

  When Pierce reached the top and stepped onto the landing, Jake was ready. He looped an arm around Pierce’s neck and jerked him back against him. Jake moved fast enough, and his grip was tight enough, that Pierce wasn’t able to make a sound before he found himself caught.

  He fought, though, flailing his arms and jerking his body around for a couple of seconds before Jake tightened his grip even more and growled in Pierce’s ear, “Stop it.”

  Pierce went still. Air rasped in his throat as Jake loosened his arm enough for him to breathe. But only for a second before Jake clamped down again.

  “Listen to me,” he whispered. “This is Jake, like you thought. We’re alone, and you’re not in any danger right now, do you understand?”

  He felt Pierce’s head move and recognized it as a nod.

  “If I let you go, you’re not going to yell and you’re not going to fight. Right?”

  Again a nod from the young man. Jake eased off the pressure on Pierce’s throat but didn’t let him go completely. Instead he whispered in Pierce’s ear, “Keep your voice down when you answer me. Are you all right?”

  “Y-yeah,” Pierce managed to say. He still sounded pretty breathless. His chest rose and fell rapidly against Jake’s arm as he tried to recover from being choked.

  “I’m going to let go of you the rest of the way. Just stand there. Don’t try to do anything.”

  “All right.” Pierce’s voice sounded a little stronger now.

  Jake released his grip and stepped back a little. Pierce was still close enough for him to grab in a hurry if he needed to, but he didn’t expect that to happen. Despite any disagreements they might have politically, right now he and Pierce definitely ought to be on the same side.

  “What are you doing here, Pierce? You were down on the lower level the last time I saw you.”

  “I was able to sneak out
of there right after you got loose from them. When you killed those two guys by the stairs, there was nobody right there to see me start up after you.”

  The conversation was conducted in whispers. Jake could tell that Pierce had turned to face him.

  “Yeah, but why did you follow me? You’re not a fighter.”

  Jake didn’t mean any offense by that, just stating a fact as far as he was concerned, but Pierce sounded a little miffed as he said, “I can fight. I was an athlete in high school. I’ve been in a few fights in my life.”

  “Not like this one,” Jake told him. “This is life and death. Foster and his flunkies don’t care if they kill all of us. They just want that money they’re demanding.”

  “I don’t care what that guy says, he’s not trying to make a point about income inequality,” Pierce said with an obvious note of bitterness in his voice. “He’s just a crook.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right about that. Doesn’t make him any less dangerous.”

  “I know, but I’m not scared. Well . . . I am scared, I’m not crazy, but somebody’s got to stop these guys. I’m with you, Jake. What’s your plan?”

  Fate had given him some strange allies, Jake thought. A young black liberal and a middle-aged, snowflake professor. Not much of a fighting force. In a way, Jake would have preferred to be on his own, but he supposed Pierce and Montambault were better than nothing. Maybe.

  “So far my only plan has been to kill as many of them as I can and not get killed while I’m doing it. But I’ve cleared the third floor and got the folks who were taken hostage there hiding until help arrives. If I can deal with the gunmen here on the fourth floor, that’ll give us access to the roof. Maybe we can get in touch with the authorities and have them bring in a helicopter. If a chopper can land on the roof—and I don’t know at this point if it can—then we can evacuate the freed hostages that way and get a SWAT team in here to finish clearing the building.”

  “What about the bombs?”

  “I think that’s mostly a bluff on Foster’s part,” Jake said. He shrugged in the darkness. “If it’s not, I guess we may die a little sooner than we would have otherwise.”

  “I don’t suppose it would be best just to wait and hope they get the ransom money they asked for . . . ?” “Trying to buy off evil never works. It’s entirely possible that Foster doesn’t intend to leave any of us alive no matter what happens.”

  “So I guess we have to fight,” Pierce said. “I never really believed in violence. Maybe we don’t have a choice, though.”

  “You have a choice,” Jake said. “Find a corner away from everybody and everything and stay there until it’s over.”

  “And hope for the best? I don’t know . . . My parents raised me to fight for things I believe in. They didn’t mean it in terms of literal fighting, of course, but sometimes . . .”

  “Sometimes there’s no other way.”

  “You’re right. I’ll say it again, Jake: I’m with you. What do you want me to do?”

  “That door won’t open. It comes in toward us, not out, so blocking it wouldn’t do any good. I think they must have tied a rope or something to the bar and then tied the other end around something that won’t move. We have to get it open, though. There’s nowhere else for us to go. So what I’m going to do is try to budge whatever it is holding the door closed. I’m a pretty big, strong guy. If I can get it open even an inch or so, you’ll be able to look through the gap and see what’s holding it. Think you can shoot a rope in two?”

  “Do I think I can—Wait—What?”

  “Hold out your hand,” Jake said. “I’m going to give you a gun. Don’t shoot me. Keep your finger off the trigger.”

  “Jake, I don’t know about this—”

  Jake reached out, found Pierce’s hand in the darkness, and pressed one of the 9mm pistols into it.

  “Careful,” he warned. “Don’t drop it. You’ve got it?”

  “Yeah, I . . . I guess so. I’ve never fired a gun before. What do I have to do?”

  First Montambault, now Pierce. How did people grow up without ever putting their hands on a gun, Jake wondered? He couldn’t even begin to comprehend that. But now wasn’t the time to ponder such things, he told himself.

  “This is a semiautomatic, and there’s a round in the chamber. That means all you have to do is point it and pull the trigger, and it’ll fire every time you pull the trigger until it runs out of ammunition. Look at what you’re shooting at and point the gun at it like you’d point a finger. There’s not enough time to get any more sophisticated than that. Can you handle it?”

  Jake couldn’t see it, but Pierce swallowed so hard he could hear it. Pierce said, “Yeah, I’ll do my best.”

  “Okay. You can see where the door is, because there’s a little light around the edges. Stand on the side where it opens, just to the left there, and turn so you can see through the gap when I pull on it. You won’t have much time, so be ready. If there’s a rope, shoot at it. If it’s a chain, that probably won’t work and we’ll have to think of something else. Got all that?”

  “Yeah. I’m ready, Jake.”

  The latch had clicked back into place. Jake braced himself, got his feet set firmly on the floor, and pressed down the bar on this side of the door until he heard it unfasten again. Then he heaved with all his strength, putting so much into the effort that he grunted.

  The door shifted toward him a little, just enough so that the latch wouldn’t engage again. He relaxed for a split second, then threw his muscles into it again. Something scraped on the other side. They had tied the door to a desk or a set of shelves, he thought.

  A narrow ray of light slanted through the gap Jake had created. In the glow from it, Jake saw Pierce standing there and gripping the gun with both hands as he aimed it. The young man pulled the trigger three times fast. In the narrow confines of the stairwell, the reports slammed painfully against Jake’s eardrums.

  But the door sprang open, the sudden release of tension throwing Jake backward. He caught himself before he tumbled down the stairs.

  In old movies, guys shot through ropes all the time. In real life it wasn’t so easy. But here at close range, Pierce had managed. Jake yelled, “Stay back!” at him as guns began to go off on the other side of the door. Jake used the door itself for cover and heard slugs thudding into it as he dropped to one knee, pulled the other pistol with his left hand, and fired around the edge of the barrier. He wasn’t as good a shot with his left hand as he was with his right, but he was good enough to plant a couple of rounds in the body of a gunman standing about fifteen feet away behind a desk.

  The man went over backward. His pistol flew from his hand as he fell. Jake held his fire and waited, but no more shots sounded.

  Instead, after a couple of minutes that seemed even longer, a woman’s voice asked in a quavering, frightened tone, “Who . . . who’s there? Are you the police? Is it safe?”

  Jake didn’t answer the question directly. Instead he said, “Was there only one of them, ma’am?”

  “Yes, and he . . . he looks dead. There’s blood all over . . .”

  Jake could practically hear the shudder in the woman’s voice as her words trailed off.

  “Stay here,” he told Pierce, keeping his voice down as he did so. “There might be a guy with a gun to her head, making her say that. Only one way to find out.”

  “And if . . . if I hear shots?”

  “Then I’ll count on you to have my back,” Jake said. Without giving Pierce time to worry about that, he pulled the door open wider and stepped out onto the library’s fourth floor.

  CHAPTER 37

  Things were going wrong, but Matthias Foster had always known there was a good chance that would happen. Good planning could eliminate a lot of unwanted possibilities, but it couldn’t account for everything. There were always flukes in real life.

  There were mistakes that could be made, too, and he wasn’t egotistical enough to believe that he was perfect. Looking
back on it now, he knew he should have had Lucy—Natalie, there was no need for code names now—kill Jake Rivers during one of the many times when she’d had the chance. Rivers had fallen for her; he never would have suspected anything until it was too late.

  Foster had been confident that he and his men could handle Rivers, though, and besides . . .

  He wasn’t sure Natalie would have killed the big son of a bitch even if he had ordered her to. He was beginning to think that maybe he couldn’t depend on Natalie as much as he had believed he could.

  For the moment, though, he had no choice but to depend on her, because he had two men down and only Natalie and two other men to help him keep dozens of prisoners under control. She certainly seemed like she was trying to do her part, holding her gun steady and keeping a menacing scowl on her face as she helped herd all the hostages together.

  When they had swept the entire floor and had everyone huddled together, trembling in fear, in the center of the big room, Foster took out his radio to check with the other floors. It still worked, although it was only a matter of time until the authorities jammed this frequency, too. He had heard what sounded like shots somewhere on the upper floors of the library, and he fervently hoped that meant Jake Rivers was dead.

  “Jimmy,” Foster said into the radio. “Report.”

  “The first floor is under control,” Jimmy responded immediately, which made Foster feel a little better. “We’ve got a campus rent-a-cop here, but he’s not giving us any trouble. What happened down there? We heard a lot of yelling and shooting. I wanted to come help you, but—”

  “But you knew better than to abandon your post,” Foster interrupted him. “That’s good, Jimmy. I knew I could count on you. We had a few problems. Rivers managed to get away from us. He’s loose somewhere in the building, so keep your eyes open.”

  “Rivers! Son of a—I knew that guy was gonna McClane us, Matthias. We should’ve killed him when we had the chance.”

  Natalie was close enough she had to hear what Jimmy said. Foster turned a little, not wanting to see her glaring defensively at him.