The Siege Read online

  “What’s your next move, Christine?”

  Fuck you, Hade, she thinks. But out loud, she says, “I heard the feds are on the way. Is that true?”

  Moody mouths the word fuck. He didn’t want to be the one to tell her the FBI is coming to town. “Whether we want them or not, yeah, they are. Supreme Court justice’s kid? Secretary of the army’s kid? Chief fought to keep them away—but he was overruled. We’ll see them soon. Jack probably has their ETA.”

  “We’re history the moment they get here,” Christine says.

  Moody nods. “They’re sending HRT,” Moody says. “The whole shebang.”

  Christine has colleagues in other departments who have dealt with the Hostage Rescue Team, but she has never seen them in action.

  Moody’s voice is beginning to lose its thrust. “When they’re here, they’re here. If we’re history in an hour, so be it. But for now? What are our choices?”

  She decides not to assume he understands the situation. “We’re new to this event. The subject is not. We’ve been set up here for what? A few hours? Watching the building for less than a day? He’s not new to this. He’s been planning this for God-knows-how-long, and he’s been holding those kids—however many there are—for almost forty hours, since Thursday evening. During that time he hasn’t made a single demand. Not a peep. We have nothing concrete to link him to what happened yesterday on campus. Up until a few minutes ago, he’s said not one word to us. Or to anyone else.”

  “He’s fucking talking now,” Moody says.

  Christine is determined not to be distracted by Moody’s too-predictable show. “Actually, he’s not. Talking. Communicating through his hostages puts us at a distinct disadvantage.” She waits for Moody to nod an acknowledgment. “So far, he’s not going public either—there’s nothing online from him that we can find. There’s no propaganda being broadcast. Nothing. He’s been the church mouse. Until he sent Jonathan Simmons out that door, I will admit to you, sir, that I wasn’t even completely convinced we had a hostage situation inside that building. Up until I saw that young man at the top of the stairs, I would have bet my own money that the damn secret society was up to something they’d end up being sorry about.”

  Moody has started glaring at her. It’s one of his leadership things. When he’s stumped, he glares. It drives everybody in his command batshit. Even Jack.

  She looks down, away. She knows he won’t stop glaring until she averts her eyes. The lieutenant is a large guy. Not for the first time, Carmody finds herself amazed at how big his feet are.

  Moody says, “Tell me what you think it means that he’s so quiet?”

  She pulls her eyes from his feet. “With all due respect, what does any of it mean? Where does any of this fit? Hostage situations fall into only a few categories. Some criminal activity has gone bad—a bank robbery or a burglary is interrupted before the getaway—and the bad guy takes hostages to try to gain control over a rapidly deteriorating situation. Is that what we have here? Doesn’t look desperate to me. We don’t have reports of any criminal activity in the tomb prior to this event. Do we?”

  Her question is a challenge. She is asking if he is being straight with her.

  Moody swats away her not-so-subtle indictment. He says, “We don’t know about that stuff yesterday. But it was far away from Book & Snake.”

  Christine continues. “More typical for us? For our team? A domestic situation goes sour. One family member holds another family member. A knife, a gun. We see those. Most of the time cooler heads prevail. That’s me, right? I’m the cooler head. I talk the guy down.”

  “You’re good at that, Christine.”

  She says, “The second this asshole gives me an opening, I can do it here. But that’s not this. No so far. My gut says he’s not going to give me a chance.”

  Moody laces his fingers behind his neck. “Don’t like this. Don’t like this.”

  “Rarely there’s a planned thing—an intentional hostage taking. The subject wants leverage. He takes hostages to trade them for something more valuable. TV time. A cause he wants to spotlight. Politics. A prisoner he wants released. A policy he wants changed. Munich Olympics. Airline hijacking. That school in Chechnya. Like that. I read about those things. I heard about them at Quantico. We’ve never had one here. You know that.”

  “Do we have one now? Is that what you’re saying, Christine?”

  “We don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. My gut says no.”

  “Money?”

  “In this economy? Of course it could be money. People are desperate. I’m thinking it could be revenge, too. We could be giving the guy too much credit. Might be something petty that’s spiraled out of control.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  “Given the building, it could be a student who expected to be tapped, but wasn’t. Feels slighted. Or it could be some secret society rivalry. Could be a student who was a previous member and felt mistreated. Somebody with a grudge.”

  Moody glances at her sideways. “You’re thinking some slow-motion Virginia Tech thing? Is he going to slaughter all those kids?”

  “I’m thinking. That’s all.”

  “Can’t have that here. Can’t. These kids’ parents?” The lieutenant is still tripping over money as a motive. “Jack said half of them pay the freight to send their kids here. That means there’s a fifty-fifty chance the families are well-off. Loaded. Is he doing this for ransom? Is that what this is, Christine? Is he about to ask for a . . . billion dollars?”

  The Hade Moody she knows was the detective who never lost track of his case. Investigating a homicide, he always had the best organized book, but never the most interesting one. Moody isn’t a strategic thinker. Carmody knows she has to spell it out for him. “It’s possible, sir. But if it is about money, where’s the demand? What’s the endgame? What amount? In what form? Delivered how? A gazillion in cash? Come on. What’s he thinking? Electronic funds transfer? That’s trackable.”

  Moody’s face betrays his fear that Carmody might expect him to reply.

  Christine lets him off the hook. “Has he thought it through? Is he winging it? And how the hell does he expect to get away to spend it? Because the most important thing to a hostage taker—to that guy in that building—is his getaway. The book says the subject is thinking endgame from moment one. Not this guy. Important fact: Moment one was two days ago. And—and—where are the damn demands for transportation? Why aren’t we busy pretending to prepare the guy a car, or a plane?”

  Moody shrugs. “You tell me.”

  Christine checks her aggravation level. “We—us, the good guys—the rules say we’re supposed to be the ones acting like we have all the time in the world. But he’s letting time leak away like he’s prepared to spend forever inside that place.”

  Moody recognizes they’ve moved on to territory he understands. “He could, couldn’t he? Stay in there? Indefinitely?”

  “There’s a big kitchen in there. Lots of supplies. Food. This isn’t one of those times when we’re going to sneak a bug in the door in a pizza box.” She points to the computer monitor closest to him. The entire screen is filled with the staid, classical lines of the front of the building. “You don’t see any window,” she says. “That means no dropping a mini-robot in to find the bad guys, search for hostages. We have exactly two access points into that place. Main doors and a basement door. Basement door stairwell is covered by a damn tarp. Want to guess what’s under that tarp?”

  Moody says, “Nothing good.” With false assurance, he adds, “Booby trap.”

  Christine says, “We have to snake a camera under it. Take a look.”

  “Yeah. We’ll do that. I’ll tell Jack.”

  This is painful, she thinks. She returns to her earlier point. “You see any soft spots in those walls?”

  “They look like big ol’ stone blocks to me.”

  “It’s no accident he’s in that building, Lieutenant. We’re not going to breach those walls without a tank or
big-ass explosive charges. This isn’t going to be any wait-till-he-falls-asleep and bust-down-the-door midnight rescue. He knows all that. And it’s no accident who he has in there with him. These aren’t random hostages.”

  Moody stands again, starts pacing in the narrow space. His broad shoulders seem to almost fill it. “Why did he blow the kid up, damn it? Why? Goddamn it. If he won’t tell us what the fuck he fucking wants, what good does any of this do?”

  Christine waits to see if Moody’s eruption is over. She says, “He must need the cell towers to do whatever he’s doing. If he needs the cell towers, we have some leverage. Not much, but some.”

  Moody runs his fingers through his hair again. “Keep talking.”

  “He could be in touch with someone outside the building. He may need information from outside. By cutting the feed, we may have cut him off.”

  Moody says, “We didn’t cut the cell feed.”

  She looks into his eyes to determine if he’s lying to her. She can’t tell.

  He feels the pressure. “You talking a true advantage?” he asks. Moody wants to change the subject and he wants to hear some good news. Even if it’s minor good news.

  Carmody says, “He could have accomplices outside. He could be making calls or receiving them. Using email or text. A bulletin board. The Web. We don’t know. He may be using landlines. He may be wireless. He may be on the campus LAN. We need to get Yale and the wireless providers on board for help. Can you get taps? Warrants?”

  The lieutenant nods twice. “Sewall is on that already,” he says. Fred Sewall is the intel officer on the team. “But if we just shut everything down, the guy will blow up more kids, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “Maybe the fuck just wanted us to know it was game on.”

  Carmody is relieved that Moody has finally spotted the starting line. She says, “Maybe that, Lieutenant.”

  She shifts her attention out the window. Back to the tomb. She is determined not to be ambushed again. “We need someone who can talk to us about that damn building. Every last detail. Floor plans, structure, electrical, plumbing, cable, everything. Fred Sewall needs to track down people who know it inside and out. A super, a member, an ex-member—I don’t care. Sewers, too. Are there tunnels? Do we know if there are tunnels down there? We need a rep from the Yale physical plant to do a briefing about the utilities, the sewers, underground access. Everything.”

  She starts to walk out of the big converted bus. A step before she gets to the door, she detours to the tiny lavatory. The sounds of her retching fill the interior of the vehicle.

  She comes out less than a minute later. She uses the sink on the adjacent counter to wash her face. She grabs the water bottle she’d set down earlier and gargles to rinse her mouth.

  “I didn’t want to do that outside. Damn cameras. We can’t disrespect that kid.”

  “Yeah,” Moody says. “I ordered the network cameras down the block a little. Out of bomb range. Hope to God that doesn’t get another kid killed.” He holds out a sheet of paper. “This came in while you were puking. List of possible hostages is up to nine. Six of them have active ATLs. Four juniors, two seniors. Now that the whole world has seen what just happened to Jonathan Simmons, we’ll get more calls, too. There’re more kids than that in there. You watch.”

  She says, “I’m sure you’re right.”

  Moody says, “Send Jack back in here. I’ll talk to him about the building.”

  Before Christine is able to summon Jack, the door opens and Jack rushes in. He stops halfway between the door and his boss. He points at the monitor.

  He says, “Another kid just stepped outside.”

  APRIL 19, SATURDAY MIDDAY

  Dee and Poe

  Dee waited until Poe was back in the room. Back in the present.

  Back in his body.

  She told him she needed a little time alone. She stepped into the bathroom and started to draw a bath.

  The distance from her was almost too much for Poe. While she bathed, he stood at the door so he could hear the sounds of her ablutions. As his terror subsided to pianissimo, he told her what he had decided to do next.

  Dee cried silently before she returned to him.

  Poe thought she looked wan. He blamed it on watching the kid die. And he blamed it on himself. Poe was hyperaware that once again she’d had to peel him off the floor. He knew he couldn’t keep asking her to do that.

  She stopped just outside the bathroom door with her hands on her hips. She said, “Can I talk you out of this, Poe? What you’re thinking about doing?”

  He forced a smile while he thought about her implied warning. He’d already decided to mount the pretense that he was more stable than he was feeling.

  He was rolling a pair of pants into a fat trouser cigar. Years on the road had convinced Poe of the advantages of rolling over folding. “You know, I don’t think so, Dee. Got a feeling about this one.” He pounded the center of his chest twice with the thumb side of his closed fist.

  She found his gesture amusing. Under her breath she sang, “Macho, macho man.”

  He was gratified that his clowning had earned a chuckle. He filed the memory. He knew it was a keeper.

  “You okay, baby?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she lied. “I’m good.” But she wasn’t trying to disguise her concern about him. “You really think this is . . . your kind of thing? What’s going on in New Haven? It doesn’t fit your . . . usual parameters very well.”

  Dee didn’t use words like “parameters” often with Poe. It got his attention. Nor did Dee make a habit of editorializing on the idiosyncrasies of Poe’s work. She’d been a witness to the damage, physical and emotional, that he had suffered in OKC. The personal and professional recovery he had managed after that April had left him alone on the most distant frontiers of the domestic counterterrorism world. She knew that if he was going to exist successfully anywhere in the U.S. government, it would be safely out on some frontier.

  She was reminding him that his portfolio was a specific subset of domestic counterterrorism, and that his responsibilities—such as they were—did not include either hostage rescue or high-profile threats. The government had special units—the Joint Terrorism Task Force, SWAT, and the Hostage Rescue Team among them—to deal with what seemed to be happening in New Haven. Poe wasn’t part of the FBI’s elite squads. Whatever team player skills he possessed—Dee had come to doubt that they were ever particularly well developed—had vaporized in the rubble of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

  “I’m not sure what’s going on there yet, Dee. At Yale. But it’s not a garden-variety hostage situation. I don’t like that we lost Friday. That means something. I want to go learn exactly what it means. That’s my goal. May turn out to be nothing of mine.” He paused to ply her with another smile. “But you know I have a thing for wild geese.”

  She was immune. His attempt at charm flew past her like a gnat on a summer evening. “Nobody lost Friday, Poe. We saw the stuff that was happening on campus yesterday. It looked awful. So you don’t have all the specifics about what was going on inside that building? Soon you will. Soon we’ll know what happened in there on Friday. And it will make sense. Your colleagues are on this. They are. A full intel squad is already mobilized. They’ll hit the ground in New Haven anytime.”

  Without any deliberation, Poe began to argue his case. “But why so little carnage from the bomb on that kid? Why no shrapnel? Tell me that.”

  Dee said, “Maybe he only wanted to kill the kid, not the bystanders.”

  “Why? That’s not current terrorist thinking, Dee. The mantra is ‘maximize casualties.’ Nine/eleven. Bali. Madrid. London. Mumbai.”

  She said, “He’s not as smart as we think.”

  He stared at her, wondered why she was being disingenuous with him. “That building? Those kids? That’s not it, Dee. You know that better than anyone.”

  “Poe, the Bureau is treating this as a high-profile hostage sit
uation whether you consider it to be one or not. HRT is mobilizing. They may already be in the air. They’ll get there before you do. You’ll be superfluous.”

  “That’s nothing new,” he said. “For me. I’ve been superfluous for—”

  She said, “No! Having compassion for you, for what you’ve suffered, is something my heart does every day, Poe. Unbidden. Don’t start pitying yourself. I find it singularly unattractive.”

  She could see in his eyes that she’d wounded him with her words, that her verbal slap would leave a pattern of fresh petechiae on his soul.

  She didn’t hurt him often. When she did hurt him, she usually did it to create distance. Near the end of one of their weekends.

  They were near the end of one of their weekends.

  She didn’t know what to say next.

  Poe pretended the blow hadn’t happened. He said, “HRT will be there soon, but HRT’s a weapon, not a strategy. If the commanders run out of options and need to breach that fortress, the HRT operators are the best people to do it. I don’t have a problem with that. But I guarantee you that it’s the negotiators that will call the shots at first and they are a long way from making a decision to breach. Days away. Even weeks. I will have some time to figure this out. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I’ve wasted a trip to Connecticut. That’s all.”

  Dee growled at him. Poe didn’t dig his heels in often, but when he did he set them in concrete. She said, “Let the intel teams do their jobs. They’ll find out about Friday. They have resources you won’t have.”

  He shook his head. “The problem is that they believe it, Dee. That the bad guys aren’t as smart as us. It’s why I have to go. What if this one, this one bad guy, what if he’s as smart as us? Huh? What then?”

  She feared it as much as Poe did.

  He scratched his head. He said, “Jesus. What if he’s as smart as you, Deirdre? My God. What if he’s that smart?”

  Dee knew she wasn’t going to sway him. “You’ll never get reimbursed for the charter. It’s going to cost you a fortune to fly up there.” She paused. “You know I’m right, baby.”