The Siege Page 13

  Ronaldo Calderón’s fastener company had a plane. I wasn’t surprised by that news. Ann said, “I’ll get the jet fueled and the crew ready.” She started touching the front of her phone to connect the call.

  I put the brakes on her impressive efficiency.

  “Ann, that won’t work,” I said. I told her that she couldn’t risk sending the company plane, that it would be too easy for someone to track an aircraft to New Haven. I told her that I’d fly commercial.

  “That’s too slow and too unreliable. We’ll arrange a charter,” she said. She began to make a fresh call with her mobile phone. She was a person who had an airplane charter company in her cell’s contact list.

  I was a person who didn’t. I stopped her again.

  I held out my cell. “Use my phone to make the call, Ann. Again, just in case this guy is plugged in. And . . . I don’t know how these things work, but can you delay the billing, or have a friend arrange this in her name? I don’t want it to show up on your credit card . . . or your account for a few days. Is that possible?”

  “Thank you, Sam. Of course.” She took my phone, made a call, and took care of business.

  Once she completed the call, I said I needed to go back to the hotel and get my things.

  She said, “Time is precious. Money, for me, is abundant. Buy what you need for tonight once you get there. Julio will FedEx your things to the hotel in New Haven.”

  Yeah? That’s how this works for rich people?

  Within minutes—five, six—I was in the front seat of the Suburban with Julio. We were on our way to Kendall-Tamiami Airport.

  I was flying to Tweed New Haven Airport in Connecticut to be Ann’s eyes and ears.

  I called Carmen. I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to worry her about the change in my itinerary. She laughed at the story of me playing golf.

  After the call to Carmen, I took the Ace bandage off my wrist.

  Julio noticed. He said, “I am glad your arm is feeling better, señor.”

  APRIL 19, SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  NEW HAVEN

  A swarm of New Haven PD SWAT officers takes Michael Smith III down as soon as he reaches the hard stone of Beinecke Plaza.

  He is hit at the chest and at the knees by two different cops, then gang tackled by four more. He doesn’t struggle.

  The book says he has to be restrained and searched.

  So Michael Smith’s wrists are shackled for the second time in his life.

  Carmody almost decides to abandon her post. She’s tempted to follow her impulse to chase with other officers after Michael Smith. Instead she returns to her position on Grove Street.

  Because she doesn’t yield to that reflex, she is still in position when the front door of Book & Snake opens yet again. A young woman walks out. The door closes behind her. She hesitates for a split second before she continues forward until she is roughly in line with the row of pillars. She stops and immediately turns her back to Christine and to the other cops gathered out front. Unlike Michael Smith III, her arms are not up in the air.

  It’s unclear whether she notices all the weapons pointed in her direction.

  Carmody is contemplating her first move with this young woman. She suspects that the choreography is just beginning.

  Seconds later the door opens again. A young man backs out. He is carrying something. He is slightly bent at the waist and his shoulders are rounded forward from the physical effort.

  A second later another young man appears in the doorway.

  Carmody feels some restrained joy. Is this over? she wonders. Is he letting them all go?

  The second young man is facing forward. He, too, is carrying something heavy. He, too, is bent at the waist, stooped over. Because of the columns and the shadows and because the position of the young woman is impeding her view, Carmody can’t see what the two men are carrying.

  Her spirit deflates as she guesses.

  The door closes.

  That’s not all of them, Carmody reminds herself. There are more kids inside.

  The two men place whatever they are carrying on the stone right in front of the doors. They are gentle. Not just careful, but gentle.

  The tenderness they display extinguishes any embers of hope for Carmody.

  The two men step forward, one on each side of the young woman. She turns around. The three of them nearly fill the space between the two pillars closest to the doors.

  Whatever they were carrying is hidden from Carmody’s view from the street. She is sure that is intentional. We are supposed to know, but we’re not supposed to see.

  Carmody clears her throat. She says, “Stay right where you are, please. Stop.” Her voice is loud enough for them to hear, but it is not demanding.

  The young woman reaches out on each side of her, grabbing a hand of each of the men. Her lips move.

  Carmody thinks the girl said, “Okay.” She imagines the word in her head and decides that the girl didn’t mean “okay” as in “good.” She meant “okay” as in “now.”

  The trio begins to move forward, descending the steps in unison at a measured pace, as though they’re making an entrance at a cotillion. Their heads are up, their eyes straight ahead.

  Carmody confirms with Joey Blanks that his volunteers remain ready.

  She calls out to the hostages on the steps. She says, “For everyone’s safety, please stop right now. Please.” She knows enough already to be certain that they won’t stop, unless that is what they’ve been told to do by the unseen man in the tomb.

  She has to go through the motions.

  Without turning her head, Carmody orders everyone behind her to take cover one more time. Almost everyone already has.

  As the three young people make it to the first landing on the stairs, Christine can see what the boys left outside the doors. It’s a body.

  The kids continue their peculiar march until they reach the bottom of the stairs. They pause there. Christine notices that the girl squeezes the hand of each of the boys. They start again, continuing together toward the gate without hesitation. The young man on the left opens the gate. The two men step back, allowing the young woman to pass through first. The men follow her.

  “Ready?” Carmody asks Joey one more time.

  “That’s a yes, Sarge.”

  “On my order.”

  As the young woman reaches the sidewalk in front of the tomb, she drops suddenly to her knees and then lowers herself to a prone position. She stretches her arms at her sides.

  One at a time the men take the same position on each side of her. Less than a foot separates one of them from the next.

  Carmody says to the officers behind her, “Everyone keep your positions. I’m going forward.”

  Jack Lobatini attempts to block her path. His tone is crisp. He says, “Christine, the bomb squad should do this. Any of them could be wired.”

  She walks through him, almost knocking him down. She doesn’t believe the three kids are walking bombs. If these kids are wired with explosives, she has already concluded, having them lie down makes no sense. The ground would absorb the charge.

  Then again, she admits, it could be a trap to lure me into the blast zone.

  She stops her march one step away from the three hostages. In a conversational tone, she says, “I’m Christine Carmody. I’m a negotiator with the New Haven Police. I need to search you. Once I do that, we will take you to safety. Do you understand?”

  None of them replies.

  She starts with the young man nearest to her. As she pats him down and lifts his shirt to check his waist for explosives she can hear the young woman whimpering. Christine lowers her head. Her hair hangs down, providing a screen around her face and mouth. She whispers to the man she is searching, “Slowly close your hand into a fist if the person you carried outside is already dead.”

  The young man hesitates. After three seconds, he begins to close his hand.

  “Keep it closed if the body is booby-trapped.”
/>   He slowly opens his hand.

  Christine is thorough. It takes her about a minute and a half to search all three students. She does the girl last. She is confident they are not armed or wired.

  Carmody remains in a crouch, her hand resting on the girl’s back. In a voice loud enough that all three students can hear her, she apologizes but explains that each of them is going to have to be restrained before they are escorted to safety.

  Then she turns toward Joey Blanks and the other two volunteer cops. She says, “All clear here. Joey, make sure the snipers cover me and cover that door. Hold your positions until I’m done checking the . . .” Body? Door? She doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “If they run?” Joey asks.

  “Restrain them. When I signal, remove the hostages and send the bomb squad.”

  She stands and walks through the gate. She begins to ascend the stairs of Book & Snake for the first time. She is aware that behind the doors, the hostage taker—the murderer of Jonathan Simmons—is likely watching her through a peephole.

  She knows she shouldn’t be getting too close to that door, especially alone. Becoming a hostage herself would be a major fuckup.

  She is in no hurry to look at the body in front of the doors.

  She keeps her eyes up until she is between the pillars. She exhales slowly to rein in her anxiety. She prepares herself for the worst.

  As she lowers her eyes, she recognizes that she was not sufficiently imaginative.

  The amount of blood on the body shocks her. It shocks her until she sees the blue tint to the girl’s skin and then the inch-wide, inch-deep gash carved in the young woman’s throat.

  With that big a hole, she thinks, there has to be a lot of blood.

  She raises her hand above her head, extends one finger, and makes a small circle in the air. “Let’s get going,” she is saying.

  After Michael Smith III is searched, a quick medical check determines that he has suffered nothing worse than bruises during the SWAT takedown. The young man is taken to the dining hall in Commons to be debriefed about his captivity. That’s where FBI intel agents are waiting for him.

  The three kids who came out next are separated from each other to be interviewed individually.

  Jurisdiction concerns are being sorted out inside the Mobile Command Center between Lieutenant Haden Moody of the New Haven PD, the special agent in charge of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, and representatives of the Yale Police and the Connecticut State Police.

  Christine Carmody is not invited.

  The jurisdictional negotiations are protocol. The result isn’t in doubt. The FBI is taking over. After that fact is made clear to all, the special agent in charge announces that the New Haven PD Mobile Command vehicle will function as the FBI’s temporary Tactical Operations Center. FBI operations personnel have already begun creating the necessary communication and computer links.

  An HRT mobile village is being erected on the nearby New Haven Green. HRT will stage out of sight inside Commons and Woolsey. Discussions have started about the best location to rehearse a potential assault on Book & Snake.

  The early favorite is another tomb—the one diagonally across Beinecke Plaza: Scroll & Key.

  The FBI HRT special agent in charge steps outside his new Tactical Operations Center. He introduces himself to Christine Carmody on the street in front of the tomb. He is six-three, two-ten, and looks to her like he sleeps in a bronze casting of Atlas. He is the star high school quarterback gone good.

  She greets her new Bureau colleague with as much grace as she can muster. After half a minute he introduces her to the lead HRT hostage negotiator, the man who will replace her in front of the tomb.

  Christine is pleased that the hostage negotiator isn’t the physical specimen that his boss is. Once the SAC steps away, Christine briefs her successor succinctly. She is done in less than five minutes. The man makes an obvious effort to swallow his there’s-a-new-sheriff-in-town attitude. She gives him points for trying. He is not as much of a jerk as she expected him to be.

  His only specific question to Christine is about the blue tarp at the rear of the building. She explains that New Haven PD is preparing to snake a camera into the space for an initial look.

  “We’re on that,” he says politely. “Notify your people. They can stand down.”

  She thinks, I don’t have people. I have The Sun and The Moon. She requests permission to observe the interviews of the kids inside Commons. He says he’ll check.

  Christine takes the first reluctant step away from her post. She begins to walk down Grove Street toward the entrance to Commons. Joey Blanks, the uniformed officer who had been assisting her outside the tomb, touches her shoulder. “Sergeant?”

  “Joey? Yes?” She doesn’t turn her head. “Thanks for your help earlier. Appreciated. I mean it. More than I can say.”

  “Not a problem. Wanted you to know we finally got a wit.”

  When Joey has news to share, his resonant voice makes it sound like a shout-out from God. She turns her head. Stops walking. She asks, “Besides the kids who were just released?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A student who works at Beinecke—that’s the library behind the tomb—was on the plaza taking a smoke break Thursday, early afternoon. Said she saw caterers going into Book & Snake, setting up for something. She thinks there were four, maybe five people. A big white van on High Street. Lot of supplies and equipment. Mostly into the basement. Some around front. They were using carts and dollies. The stuff looked heavy to her. She was thinking she’d love to be invited to the party.”

  “Any descriptions?”

  “It was raining Thursday, if you remember. She said that they all had hoods on, were covering their stuff with plastic. She thinks maybe one was a woman, only because of her size. She was small.”

  “Anything distinctive about the van?”

  “She thinks it was unmarked. Doesn’t recall seeing any lettering. Says she wasn’t really paying attention. Oh, almost forgot—she did say there was a dress bag, the clear plastic kind like my daughter had to carry her wedding dress in. She said the one she thought was a girl carried the dress into the tomb on a hanger.”

  “A wedding gown?”

  “That’s the story.”

  “Are there any surveillance cameras that might have picked up any of this?”

  “Detectives are checking. Appears negative. Feds have the wit now. I wanted you to know the latest.”

  “Joey,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “What happened out there . . . I like what you did, how you handled it, Sarge. And I’m not alone. There’s no way any of what went wrong earlier is on you. The guy inside, he was gonna do what he was gonna do. Right from moment one. Cell phone stuff was bullshit.”

  Christine nods. She resumes her march toward Commons. Joey stays half a step behind her.

  He says, “Can I ask a question, Sarge? The orange? Is it a club thing? A club color or something? From the secret society? Like a uniform? None of us, well, we don’t know much about that stuff.”

  Carmody is perplexed. She stops, faces him. “What? Is what—”

  “The orange? The two kids who were killed were both wearing something orange. The four kids who walked away—they aren’t. Are all the kids members of that place? Or were some like . . . guests? Pledges? Is it like a fraternity? How does it work? We’re all trying to figure out how he’s choosing who . . . dies.”

  APRIL 18, FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  Sam

  The cab from the airport had dropped me at the Omni Hotel. Ann’s idea. Place was way out of my budget. But then Tom Bodett’s guest room was way out of my budget. Ann had called me while my private little Maverick Jet was just beginning to taxi on the New Haven airport runway, marking the end of my own once-in-a-lifetime Top Gun moment. Ann let me know that nothing was new on her end, and that I had a reservation at the hotel under my own name. I should take a cab to town and u
se my personal credit card—she hoped that was okay. She would reimburse me later.

  Using my personal credit card was a potential hitch. My extended suspension from the Boulder Police Department had nearly run its course. So, unfortunately, had my financial resources. First I had plodded through my not-too-substantial savings. When that cushion was gone, I started living on plastic. My Visa had butted up against its credit limit about three weeks before my trip to Florida, and my Discover was perilously close to the same fate. The trip east subbing for Carmen at the Calderóns’ engagement extravaganza hadn’t helped my budget. Did I have enough left under the limit on my Discover to cover the Omni for a night?

  I was about to find out.

  I asked for a room with a view of campus. When questioned about luggage, I explained that the airline had lost my bag. The desk clerk wasn’t the least bit surprised. I held my breath as she swiped my card.

  It cleared. I exhaled, but I didn’t feel any richer. With tax, I felt two hundred and fifty bucks poorer. I’d already felt broke. I was broke minus two-fifty.

  Once I received my key card, I stepped down one desk and asked a young African-American woman for directions to campus, specifically the location of Beinecke. “The library? Stunning building,” the con cierge told me. “One of my absolute favorites.” She circled its location on a giveaway campus map. “Take a tour if you get a chance,” she advised. “The treasures in there? You won’t believe it, will not. Takes your breath away. Ever seen a Gutenberg Bible? You will in there. My momma cried like a baby. I took her in, she stood in front of that Bible staring for a full minute. Then she got down on her knees and she just cried, cried, cried.”

  I almost asked her to circle the location of the nearby secret society tombs on the map. But my question would have told her more than her answer would have told me. I’d have to figure out the location of the tombs myself.