The Siege Read online

  Hazmat? Probably a precaution. I knew that when law enforcement doesn’t know what to expect, we tend to plan for almost everything.

  A block farther down the street in the other direction—beyond Commons—four husky microwave trucks had rolled into sight, beaming signals for the network affiliates broadcasting from the scene. The stations’ cameras were mounted on tripods on the sidewalk across from Book & Snake, lenses aimed at the front of the tomb.

  After the previous day’s sniper drama and the discovery of the murdered student at the hockey rink, the local community was rife with rumors that something was going on in the secret society tombs. A crowd of a couple hundred people were gathered behind the barricades at Book & Snake. About half were of student age; the rest were folks from town. The people from town were mostly African-Americans. Young, old, everything in between.

  I got the sense from wandering through the crowd that town and gown weren’t exactly chummy. Whether or not that meant anything in regard to the current situation, I didn’t know. I added it to the list of variables for which I had not yet assigned a value.

  Determination earned me sole possession of a narrow stone podium at the base of a section of the cemetery wall. I was on the back side of a tiny park about fifty feet past the cops’ command vehicle, not far from Book & Snake. I could see most of the front of the tomb from my perch.

  People around me were talking about “hostages.” Plural. Local knowledge, or rumor? I didn’t know.

  I counted twenty-two uniformed cops in the vicinity of the building. Some were campus, some were city, some were county. Most were in riot gear and helmets. Many were carrying weapons. I didn’t see any sign of SWAT, but I assumed they were nearby doing their get-ready thing. If hostages were a concern, SWAT would be involved.

  I didn’t spot a state police presence. I didn’t know how things worked in Connecticut, but assumed that if New Haven PD wanted help, the state police would provide it. Nor did I see any feds. If New Haven cops were like Boulder cops, they wouldn’t reach out to the feds until the situation was clearly beyond their tactical capabilities. Even then, they would call in the cavalry with great reluctance.

  When someone did call in the FBI for support, agents from the local field office could get on-scene quickly. But if the FBI Hostage Rescue Team—HRT—was mobilizing, they would be traveling north from their base in Virginia, probably by air. That would take time.

  I figured Saturday morning was still for the local boys and girls in blue.

  A solitary woman about my age—black? Latin? I wasn’t sure—with a badge hung around her neck was pacing on the sidewalk across from the tomb. She was in plainclothes and wore shoes that told me she was prepared to be on her feet for a while. One moment she would look serene and self-assured. The next time I looked at her she would be on her toes ready to jump right into the game.

  I pegged her as the hostage negotiator. Local, probably New Haven PD, probably a sergeant or lieutenant on a designated hostage negotiation team. For now, she was warming up on the sidelines. At some point, when and if contact was made with someone inside Book & Snake, she would be sent into the game to take over the action. She’d be the quarterback. She had to be ready.

  The presence of a hostage negotiator on the scene told me that the local cops had reason to believe they had a hostage. Ann had not received a call from anyone in New Haven law enforcement, which meant that the local cops had not yet identified Jane Calderón as a potential hostage. If the New Haven cops weren’t aware that Jane was missing, the presence of the hostage negotiator in front of me meant that Jane Calderón was not the only possible hostage inside the Book & Snake tomb.

  Ann and I had been working under the assumption that Jane was one of many students being held inside Book & Snake, but I was wit nessing the first confirmation that supposition was true. Simple law enforcement calculus also told me that the higher the number of hostages, the greater the likelihood that feds would show up, and that the higher the profile of the suspected hostages, the greater the likelihood that feds would show up.

  Thus far, no feds.

  The presence of the hostage negotiator also indicated that—if the same MO had been used with the other kid’s family as had been used with the Calderóns—some other kid’s parents had not been as assiduous as Ann about not sharing the contents of the communications they’d received from the guy in the tomb.

  Orange will show my disappointment.

  Ann had explained to me that the meeting Jane was planning to attend on Thursday evening could have included fifteen to thirty-two students. That was a lot of potential hostages. I wondered how many of those students were officially unaccounted for, and how many were, like Jane, only missing in the eyes of their families.

  What did the local cops really know on Saturday morning? Time would tell.

  During my first hour and a half of observation outside the tomb, I called Carmen a couple of times. She was bored. She had gas. She was constipated. She had a hemorrhoid the size of a walnut. Her ankles were fat. She was worried about the baby. He kicked too much. He didn’t kick enough.

  Mostly she needed to talk. I was grateful I was able to listen.

  I watched the hostage negotiator’s futile attempts to initiate contact with someone inside the tomb. She tried on three different occasions, about thirty minutes apart. She was proceeding according to the book. She used a bullhorn. She identified herself as a New Haven police officer. She asked the subject to come out the door with his hands in the air, or to contact the New Haven Police by telephone.

  Her tone was even. Nonconfrontational. Businesslike. License and registration, please. She expressed an eagerness to talk and a willingness to work things out.

  The person or persons in the tomb didn’t respond to any of her entreaties.

  My impression was that she was going through the motions. She wasn’t really expecting anyone to respond. I didn’t know whether that was because she had some intelligence that I lacked, or because she had a gut feeling no one was inside. I would have loved to know whatever intelligence the New Haven PD had.

  I spent most of the morning doing the same thing the local cops were doing—waiting for the person who was holding Jane, and at least one of her friends, to make his next move.

  Carmen called me again just before noon. Before I had a chance to get my phone open, the call failed. My strong cell signal had suddenly devolved from five bars to none.

  Being a suspicious guy, I wondered if the local cops were up to something.

  My feet were growing numb from maintaining my balance on the stone pedestal. I was about to relinquish my coveted high ground when a kid—a tall male—suddenly appeared outside the door of the tomb. I wasn’t in position to see the front doors open—the pillars blocked the doors from view—but when the young man stepped forward I could see him clearly.

  We have contact, I thought. Shit. Here we go. Game on.

  Cops began to move toward him from each side of the tomb. He called out, “Don’t shoot! Don’t fucking shoot!”

  The reactive murmurs in the crowd prevented me from hearing the next couple of lines he spoke.

  The crowd quieted just in time for me to hear him say that he was a bomb.

  A bomb.

  The approaching cops stopped. Then the kid showed off the bomb.

  It was a small, square pack taped to his body. Despite my dependence on Kmart readers, my distance vision is pretty damn good. The pack, I thought, was conveniently labeled “BOMB” in cartoonish lettering.

  I wondered if the marking was a joke, but I was preoccupied by something else. For me, at that moment, the bomb was a secondary development. Primary was that, beneath his wrinkled dress shirt, the young man was wearing an orange T-shirt.

  Which either meant the kid liked orange or the man in the tomb was suffering yet another episode of disappointment. I wouldn’t have bet the contents of my full bladder on the former conclusion.

  I thought of the kid in t
he Whale, and winced at the indication that more of the unseen man’s disappointment was coming.

  The bomb is no joke.

  The next few minutes passed in a split second that took a year.

  Stephen Hawking could have debated it with the ghost of Albert Einstein, the whole thing moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

  Then maybe Tyson could explain it to us, in English, on Nova. Yeah, during my suspension I’d been watching a lot of PBS.

  As much as the space/time cosmology was throwing me, it wasn’t sufficient confusion to prevent me from seeing the near future. I saw the end clearly and kept anticipating that the local cops would see it, too, and act.

  But the cops kept not acting. Can’t they see? I wanted to scream at them to do what they had to do. I knew that if I spoke up—if I intervened—I would cease to be of any use to Ann. Worse, I would put Jane in increased danger.

  I clenched my jaw. A piece of my soul died with each tick of the clock. I could feel the decay as the young man counted down the minutes.

  “I . . . will die . . . ,” he said, “in three minutes.”

  When he said, “Two minutes,” he extended the index finger on each hand for just a moment.

  Who counts that way? I thought. Why not two fingers on one hand?

  The young man in front of the tomb felt the end coming. When he said, “I will die in one minute,” he extended those two index fingers one more time. Barely. But he did.

  Why? Why not one finger for one minute? I didn’t know that.

  I did know that he believed that his end was coming.

  It was as though those words—I will die in one minute—finally flipped a switch for the authorities. Cops started moving. Civilians began running. Emergency personnel raced for cover. The cops were forced to accomplish in one chaotic minute what they could have done in three or four semi-orderly ones.

  I stayed where I was. As people sprinted past me, I pushed myself back against the fence so that eighty percent of my body was shaded from the front of the tomb by the thick stone pillar. I comforted myself that the twenty percent of me that was left exposed was mostly fat.

  The cops pushed the crowd farther down the street.

  My attention was locked on the young man’s face. I convinced myself that I saw his eyes soften into bewilderment and his jaw set into iron as he tried to digest the indigestible—the fact that he was about to die.

  I watched his lips move but heard no sound come from them.

  A burly cop yelled at me to run. He was hustling past me as he communicated his order.

  I wasn’t going anywhere.

  Someone with a bullhorn said, “All personnel, take cover.”

  I heard the explosion. I was able to keep my eyes open during the aftermath.

  It didn’t matter. Some events happen so quickly that they are not actually seen in real time. The eyes can’t do it. The brain is either unable or unwilling to process all the data.

  It was, I knew, just as well. There was nothing that happened that I wanted to remember.

  And nothing I’d be able to forget.

  Gravity dropped me off the pillar. I walked slowly away from the tomb. I felt heavy and light, a two-ton man floating in one-tenth gravity.

  The smoke hadn’t cleared.

  Sirens shrieked. People were screaming. Running. Cops were shouting orders at the bystanders who had become immobilized—their mouths open, their eyes unblinking—by the insanity that their brains were trying unsuccessfully to comprehend.

  The aftermath of the explosion didn’t interest me.

  I felt my phone in my hand though I didn’t remember taking it from my pocket.

  I checked the screen. I had four bars.

  I would give Ann thirty seconds to call. If she called me first, it would mean she had been watching television and had seen what just happened on Fox or CNN. If she didn’t call me, I would phone her and I would tell her to sit down, and then I would tell her what had happened to the young man in front of the Book & Snake tomb.

  After I described it, I would try, but fail, to explain it.

  I prayed that the young man’s parents had not been watching. I prayed that Ann had not been watching. I knew my version of the kid’s death would be more palatable than cable’s, my rendition would be more compassionate than theirs.

  Unlike cable, I wouldn’t demand that she watch the replay of the explosion again, and again, and again. I wouldn’t show old footage from Lower Manhattan and Virginia Tech and Mumbai, for no other reason than because I had it.

  The facts I needed to share with Ann were these: This thing in New Haven was real. The man who was holding her daughter hostage had again revealed his disappointment at the parents of one of Jane Calderón’s fellow hostages. As he had the previous day at Ingalls rink, the man had framed his disappointment in orange and expressed it by murdering someone’s child.

  He’d done it this time with a bomb. He’d done it coldly and cruelly on national television.

  The thirty seconds passed. I allowed ten more to float away before I scrolled for Ann’s name in my phone and hit SEND.

  She answered after half a ring. She didn’t bother with a greeting. She didn’t wait for me to try to console her. She said, “I am at the hotel. I am walking to the elevator. When I get to the suite, I will go to my computer and I will follow his instructions. I will give that man exactly what he wants. Everything he wants. Anything he wants.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “I’m making a deal with the devil, Sam. I know that. I wish I didn’t have to, but I do. I love my daughter too much . . . to lose her.”

  “I can’t imagine being in your position, Ann. How it must feel, seeing what you just witnessed. I am so sorry.”

  My words weren’t quite true. I could imagine. The previous year I had taken a not-so-innocent life to protect my child when I felt a killer’s dark shadow looming over him. I’d had second thoughts about it, and third, before I’d taken that person’s life, but I took it.

  I hadn’t yet lost a night’s sleep over what I did. My lack of remorse didn’t trouble me.

  But there was a crucial difference between the threat that Jane was facing and the one that had faced my son, Simon: I had been able to save Simon that day without putting anyone at risk other than myself and the person who was threatening him.

  Ann did not have that luxury. To save Jane, Ann would have to knowingly increase the risk to many, many other parents’ children. She would go to bed each night knowing that there was a tiny but real possibility that other parents’ children might someday have to pay the price that Ann was unwilling to let her daughter pay.

  Perhaps so that I might understand her decision, or maybe so that I might forgive her for making it, Ann said, “I’m sorry. Jane is not a soldier, Sam.”

  “She is not,” I said. “She is an innocent.”

  “What are the odds that anyone could ever use the information I have?” Ann asked me. “It’s absurd. One in ten million? Higher?”

  The odds aren’t zero, I thought. We are having this conversation because the odds aren’t zero. I didn’t know Ann Calderón well, but I knew her well enough to know that the reason she hadn’t followed the man’s instructions when she had first received them on Friday was because Ann Calderón knew that the odds of someone using her information, although infinitesimal, were not zero.

  But I kept my appraisal to myself. Ann didn’t need that reminder.

  Ann’s words—Jane is not a soldier, Sam—underscored the great divide between the parental experience she and I shared, and the parental experience of so many others. But she didn’t even begin to cross it.

  The bridge between the two camps was crowded with strangers.

  Millions, literally millions, of sons and daughters who were Jane’s age—some maybe a little younger, some maybe a little older—were, in fact, soldiers, or sailors, or airmen, or Marines. They were volunteers in the Armed Forces of the United States of America who h
ad taken oaths to sacrifice—including the real possibility of making the ultimate sacrifice by giving their lives—in order to protect our country.

  Jane was not one of those soldiers. She had not volunteered to be among those who would serve and protect. And sacrifice.

  Jane was one of the majority. She was one of the protected.

  Did that free her from personal responsibility to guard our shores with her life?

  I didn’t know. I knew that Simon, my son, was—like Jane—not a soldier. Not yet, anyway. As his father I would not, I could not, volunteer to sacrifice him for the greater good.

  Was that selfish of me?

  Yes. Of course it was.

  I added the conundrum to the tally of things I’d ponder some other time, once I was no longer in New Haven.

  I said, “Ann, how are you supposed to . . . How do you . . . reply to him? Send the information?”

  The line was silent for a few seconds. She said, “Is it crucial that you know, Sam?”

  I understood what she was asking me. What she was telling me. “No, it’s not. Of course not.”

  “I trust you, Sam. That’s not it.”

  “No explanation is necessary. The less I know about that the better it is for you. And for Jane.”

  “Thank you, Sam.”

  “You know I’m here until she’s free. Until she is in your arms.”