The Siege Page 14

It didn’t turn out to be much of a challenge. The ones I knew about were all marked on the map. Before I’d walked a block from the hotel, I’d checked off the locations of Book & Snake and another secret society-sounding place called Scroll & Key. They were both on the perimeter of Beinecke Plaza. The much more legendary Skull & Bones was a few blocks farther away from Book & Snake on High Street.

  I started walking toward Beinecke Plaza and Book & Snake. After a short stroll from the hotel, I found myself adjacent to Woolsey Hall at the corner of College and Grove.

  What I had no way to know until that moment was that the local authorities didn’t seem to have any better understanding of what was going on than I did.

  I had been assuming that Jane Calderón was one potential hostage of many. I was also guessing that although the authorities were aware they had a situation of some gravity developing inside Book & Snake, they were ignorant that the problem included Jane Calderón.

  Given those assumptions, I thought I’d see evidence of a police presence down the block. I expected to find some indication—a barricaded road, some emergency vehicles, something—that the local cops recognized that they might have a hostage crisis on their hands inside the Book & Snake tomb.

  The first thing I noted as I turned the corner was that most of the Beinecke Plaza side of Grove Street was a continuation of the Woolsey Hall building. The map identified the new section as Commons. I paused on the sidewalk, playing tourist, using the map as a prop while I peered farther down Grove Street. I couldn’t see the Book & Snake tomb, but the map indicated that it was just beyond Commons on the next corner.

  Directly across the street was a large cemetery surrounded by a substantial stone-and-iron fence. Halfway down the block, a solitary Campus Police cruiser was parked alongside the curb. I couldn’t be sure from where I was standing, but I thought there was an officer sitting in the driver’s seat.

  That’s it? I thought in wonder. A solo campus cop parked across the street from the tomb?

  The restrained police response caused me to begin to consider the possibility that maybe it wasn’t the rest of the army that was marching out of step, but that it was Ann and I who had everything wrong. Maybe Jane Calderón had simply done what almost every college kid does at some point in her life—she acted out of character and did something her parents weren’t expecting. Maybe Jane’s temporary silence with her family had nothing to do with the ominous note her mother had received.

  I began allowing for a couple of new possibilities. One—Ann had pegged it at a one percent likelihood—was that Jane wasn’t missing and that there really wasn’t something sinister going on inside Book & Snake. The other was that this situation involved only Jane, and the local authorities were unaware that she was missing.

  I continued down Grove Street until I was steps away from the front of the tomb.

  I immediately recognized it from Ann’s cell phone photo. The colonnade side of the secret society building looked down on the cemetery. The wall on the side that was exposed to Commons was nothing but an uninterrupted plane of stone. The only surprise was that the tomb was much bigger than I had imagined. The photograph had left me with the impression that the building was clubhouse-sized.

  It wasn’t. It was mansion-sized. The interior could be three stories, or four. It might even have an elevator.

  If there were hostages inside the tomb, the large scale would complicate everything from a law enforcement perspective. More square feet to account for, more rooms to search. More stairs to climb. Closets to open.

  I continued walking, turning the corner at High Street. The exposed wall on that side of the Book & Snake tomb was another fortress wall. Solid stone, forty feet high or more. What do these people have against windows? At the back corner, a blue plastic tarp was stretched tight from the ground up about three feet. I thought it might be covering access to a basement door. A basement would mean additional square feet to worry about.

  Across High Street from the tomb was a block-long structure that—were I guessing on a midterm—I would have labeled as Gothic in design. A quick glance at the map told me I was looking at part of the Yale Law School. A few more steps down High allowed me to look back at a row of evergreens and, above them, most of the blank back wall of Book & Snake. That side of the tomb faced a modern building—the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the place where I’d been told I’d find a Gutenberg Bible. Between the two buildings, stairs led from the High Street sidewalk down to a plaza that consumed the center of the block.

  After trying to digest the neoclassical splendor of Woolsey and Commons, the classic Greek design of Book & Snake, and the Gothic flourishes of the law school, I was stopped in my tracks by the contrast posed by the Beinecke Library. My brain said it didn’t fit. The rare book library was a large modern geometrical form—the sides were long rectangular planes composed of dozens of concrete-framed shimmering squares of stone. Marble? Granite? I didn’t know. Stone.

  I like architecture, took a class in college, but my taste runs toward Arts and Crafts. Still, my gut said Beinecke was a wonderful building. Goofy, sure, but wonderful.

  I climbed down the stairs that separated the back of the tomb from the library. The Beinecke Library offered a wall of stone to match the back wall of Book & Snake. No windows interrupted the opposing vertical faces of either structure.

  What was I thinking after checking out all four sides of the Book & Snake tomb? I was thinking that if Jane Calderón was being held inside that building against her will, it was unlikely that it was a location of convenience.

  Someone had chosen it. And chosen it well.

  The building is Masada is what I was thinking. It’s the damn Alamo.

  I wondered how I would do it. Breach the place. I couldn’t figure out an ideal way. The only apparent vulnerabilities I could see were the front entrance doors and maybe that rear basement door. If someone inside was determined to keep authorities outside, the two access points—both on lower levels—wouldn’t be impossible to defend. A rescue assault might work—hell, with enough armor, horsepower, and firepower, it would ultimately work—but good people, hostages or law enforcement, could certainly die during a breach through only one or two lower portals.

  I retraced my steps as casually as I could, heading back around the tomb onto Grove Street. The solo campus police cruiser had cleaved—I saw one campus cruiser and one New Haven Police cruiser. A total of three cops. One of the two city cops was standing at the driver’s door talking to the Yale campus cop. I kept walking, pretending not to pay attention. I sensed no particular urgency from my cousins in blue.

  I turned the corner, walking past Woolsey. I reentered Beinecke Plaza on the opposite corner from Book & Snake. My map said I was between the Scroll & Key tomb and a building called Woodbridge Hall. Diagonally across the plaza I could see the back corner of Book & Snake framed by the much larger and taller walls of Commons and of the Beinecke Library.

  I focused my attention on the Scroll & Key tomb. Scroll & Key had some narrow openings in its walls, though I wouldn’t exactly call them windows. It was much more whimsical than Book & Snake, in a mythical-palaces-of-Baghdad kind of way. The exterior reminded me of the Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves set creations of movies from the early days of Hollywood. During one memorable finals week in college, I’d watched a marathon of them on late-night TV.

  Most important? No patrol car was parked in front of Scroll & Key. Whatever the cops suspected was going on around the corner at Book & Snake, they did not suspect the same thing was going on inside Scroll & Key.

  As I walked away, I continued to ponder the Book & Snake hostage rescue dilemma. If I had to get into that tomb to try to retrieve a kid, or ten kids, how would I improve my odds during a breach of the building?

  The roof? Maybe. A well-equipped SWAT team could use explosive breaching charges to blow down the front doors and maybe that basement door. A simultaneous assault could be set up to breach the roof and drop in
from above. Top down. Bottom up.

  Could work.

  Could be a bloodbath, too.

  I asked a student who was passing by where I could find the campus bookstore. He took the map from my hand and drew a line down Wall Street toward Broadway, then across a plaza. That’s where he put an X.

  I intended to read everything I could find about secret societies, Book & Snake, and Yale architecture. In a perfect world, I’d stumble onto a dirt cheap used copy of something like An Architectural Guide to the Secrets of the Book & Snake Tomb.

  I took a detour first. I headed down High Street past a few residence halls—the map called them “colleges” for some reason that I didn’t understand. I kept walking until I got to the vicinity of the Skull & Bones tomb.

  A campus patrol car was parked at the curb about fifty feet away, almost directly across from a tall stone tower. An officer sat at the wheel.

  The tomb the cop was monitoring was another damn fortress. Squat, blunt, brown, and, although I wouldn’t have considered it possible, even more unwelcoming in design than Book & Snake. I thought Skull & Bones looked more like an abandoned Civil War armory than any kind of fancy-pants secret society meeting hall.

  Like Book & Snake, the Skull & Bones tomb was a building that had apparently been designed to appear smaller than it really was. Unlike Book & Snake, the Skull & Bones tomb had at least two windows fronting the street—though the openings were such narrow slits that their only worthwhile use would be as archer ports.

  The law enforcement arithmetic was simple enough—cops were posted in front of both Skull & Bones and Book & Snake, but there was slightly more police interest at Book & Snake than there was at Skull & Bones.

  What did that mean? Something, presumably.

  I wandered through an iron gate into a large grassy area on the block across the street from the tomb. My map identified the expanse as Old Campus. It took me a while to find a bench that provided a decent view of Skull & Bones. I sat there for almost twenty minutes, alternately studying my map and glancing at the tomb. The building—the place looked not only neglected but also deserted—provided no clue of its interior life. No one went in. No one came out. No lights came on. No lights went off. I was thinking that a cop could continue a stakeout of the place for a day, maybe an entire week, and never see an indication that anything at all was going on inside.

  I reminded myself that the fortresses at Masada and the Alamo had eventually fallen to invading forces, although the sieges had proven to be long and the number of casualties high.

  Were the police to attempt a classic breach in either of these tombs—Skull & Bones or Book & Snake—anyone holding hostages inside would be able to use the time it took for the rescuers to breach the exterior to execute hostages.

  Maybe all of their hostages.

  The invading armies didn’t have hostages to worry about at Masada or at the Alamo. They only had to worry about the invincibility of the fortresses.

  Thousands of years of military history had proven the hard lesson that no fortress wall was invincible.

  But history also proved that many people could lose their lives during a forceful breach. Waco and Ruby Ridge were recent cases in point for law enforcement. It sometimes took a long time to pierce defenses, but fortresses fall. Eventually.

  I began to worry about what I was going to tell Ann. I started to pull my phone from my pocket.

  The sound of a gunshot—crisp, loud, definitive—froze me.

  The clap was followed instantly by the distinctive ping of ricochet, then by the insistent replay of echoes off stone.

  My ears read the initial retort as rifle fire.

  APRIL 19, SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  NEW HAVEN

  Carmody changes her mind about watching the debriefing of the hostages. After Joey Blanks’s comment about the orange clothing on the dead students’ bodies, she decides to detour back to the command vehicle to review the video footage of each of the students who had exited the tomb.

  With HRT in charge, she recognizes an immediate change in tenor inside the vehicle. At the top of the big white board someone has written “TACTICAL OPERATIONS CENTER (TOC)” in six-inch block letters. FBI personnel are manning the computer and communications gear.

  Hade Moody is engaged in hushed conversation with one of the feds. Carmody thinks Moody is acting like a rabid fan who has just scored a pass to visit some rock ’n’ roll legend’s bus. He doesn’t acknowledge Christine as she enters. To him, she is no longer a player.

  She sits down at a spare monitor and locates the video of Jonathan Simmons exiting the tomb. She pauses it the moment Jonathan lifts his shirt to expose the bomb. Simmons was wearing a faded orange T-shirt beneath the striped shirt that was covering the bomb.

  She searches another video file until she finds the footage of the body of the girl with the slit throat. Carmody has indelible visual images of the blood and the wide gash and gray skin and the red hair and the blue eyes. But that’s all. She doesn’t recall any orange.

  It’s immediately apparent to Christine that the department videographer who was handling the camera experienced difficulty managing the shadows. During the initial few seconds of the footage he was trying to nail down the right exposure. The second he found it, the girl’s body popped vividly onto the screen.

  The appearance of the body shocks Carmody all over again—the dead hostage is wearing her own blood as a full body apron.

  She is also wearing orange socks.

  That’s two for two for orange apparel on dead hostages.

  Christine checks the video of Michael Smith III and of the three kids who walked through the gate after him.

  No orange clothing.

  If it’s a pattern, Christine wonders, what does it mean? Clue? Message? Coincidence?

  Christine approaches Hade Moody as though all is forgiven. She wants to ask him for more details about the wedding dress the witness saw on Thursday, but assumes she is not supposed to know those facts. Instead she says, “I’d love to see the dead girl’s family information the second you have it. The others, too. The four survivors.”

  “Yeah,” he says without looking at her. “Jack’ll liaise.”

  She swallows a string of profanities as she heads toward the debriefing.

  The dining hall in Commons is cavernous and ornate. It smells like fifty thousand uninteresting lunches. Michael Smith III is at an oak table in one corner, opposite a man in a suit and tie. An FBI special agent. Carmody takes a chair five feet from him. She is diagonally across from Michael.

  Below Michael’s striped button-up shirt is a blue T-shirt. Not orange.

  She recalls that Smith was barefoot. That means no orange socks.

  The FBI guy glares at her. “Yeah?”

  “Sergeant Carmody, New Haven Police. I was . . . I am the hostage negotiator. Your SAC authorized me to observe the interview.”

  To Christine, Michael Smith III looks as defeated sitting in the fancy dining hall as he had looked standing at the top of the stairs of Book & Snake with his hands in the air. His shoulders are slumped forward. His eyes are down. His fingertips are tracing the pattern of the rifts of the grain in the oak tabletop.

  A sports drink bottle in front of the kid is half-empty. A bottle of water is unopened. A tray of food—fruit, energy bars, cookies—sits untouched a few feet away.

  Michael isn’t talking. All the special agent’s questions are met with silence.

  Michael’s only movement is his fingertips combing the rifts.

  “Tell me what it’s like in there.”

  “How did it all come down? Thursday night? Right?”

  “How many people are involved? Bad guys?”

  “Any of your friends hurt?”

  “Are you all being held together in one room?”

  “Your wrists are red. Were you restrained? How?”

  “Were you threatened if you spoke to us?”

  Michael Smith responds to each inquiry with si
lence.

  After ten minutes, the FBI interrogator stands and takes a couple of steps away from the table. He turns to Carmody. “You got a question?”

  She’s ready. “Michael,” she says. He doesn’t look at her. “Are you wearing your own clothing?”

  His fingers stop moving for two seconds before they resume running the rifts.

  “Carmichael?” the FBI guy says. “Come with me.”

  “It’s Carmody,” she says. But he’s already too far away to hear her. She stands and follows him to the other end of the huge room.

  She waits for him to speak. The man turns his back to the room and rubs his eyes. “ ‘ Is that your own clothing?’ You kidding me?”

  “We have our own styles.”

  “Fucking kid,” he says. “We don’t have time for his games.”

  She almost wants to thank him. Until she met him, all the FBI personnel on the scene had been professional and gracious. This guy was enough of an asshole to remind her to keep her guard up.

  She wants to tell him to give the kid a break, to remind him that Smith had been a hostage for almost two days, and that he had been blindfolded and shackled and almost certainly been threatened. She doesn’t say any of it.

  After ten seconds, he says, “I asked you for your opinion.”

  “I don’t think you did. You called the released hostage a ‘fucking kid’ and said you didn’t have time for his games. I think that’s about all you said to me. On the way in here I received word that there’s a witness from Thursday afternoon. A student saw four or five caterers enter the tomb. They were moving a lot of equipment.”

  “Go on.”

  “Your intel colleagues have the wit now. We don’t know if we are dealing with one subject or five, or more. For all we know there may be ten. He—or they—is acting in a way that contradicts our usual assumptions. He won’t talk with us directly. He is making no demands. He is coercing his hostages not to communicate with us. He is acting as though time is his advantage, not ours.”