The Siege Read online

  Overall authority for the hostage situation is Lieutenant Haden Moody’s. Sergeant Christine Carmody is the primary negotiator for the current incident. Her responsibility is direct communication with the hostage taker. The lieutenant will tell her what he thinks she should know. He will withhold information that he doesn’t want her to consider while she does her job. He will also withhold any intelligence that he fears she might inadvertently communicate while she is in contact with the hostage taker.

  If her experience is any guide, Carmody expects that The Sun will do his communicating through The Moon. The Moon is Jack Lobatini. He is the secondary negotiator on the team. During this incident he will act as Carmody’s backup. Her scribe. A third negotiator is functioning as an intel officer, gathering information.

  Carmody has been negotiating in pressure situations for the department for seven years. She knows the way things work.

  Where Moody and Lobatini are concerned, things don’t always work well. She knows that Lobatini sometimes proves to be more interested in keeping Moody happy than he is in assisting his colleague on the front line.

  “What is your name?” Carmody calls out to the young man standing in front of the tomb.

  He doesn’t reply. She is disappointed but not surprised. She is quickly learning the rules of her unseen subject, the man inside the tomb. Apparently one of those rules is that the young man doesn’t say anything he hasn’t been told to say.

  She isn’t enamored of the rule. One of her short-term goals in the negotiation will be to change it to her advantage.

  “How many . . . people . . . are inside? Students?” she asks. Seven or eight kids are unaccounted for, most with active ATLs. There may be more kids inside than that. On a weekend at a college it’s not easy to do a head count. Yale PD is worried that fifteen or sixteen students might be inside the tomb. Caterers? Custodial staff? No one is sure.

  Carmody has received estimates from Yale College officials that range all the way from seven or eight hostages to thirty-two.

  Thirty-two? God. Carmody doesn’t want there to be thirty-two.

  The young man is breathing through his mouth. His chest is rising in quick quakes. She no longer really expects him to answer her question aloud, but she is hoping for some extended fingers or a rapid series of eye blinks. Some indication of a number. Give me something, she’s begging silently. A clue.

  Nothing.

  “Earlier you said, ‘He.’ Is it only one man in there?”

  The young man blinks twice.

  Does that mean there are two? She doesn’t know.

  She waits for the kid to double-blink again, or communicate some other way. Carmody needs confirmation. She doesn’t get it.

  “What does he want? The man . . . inside? Is there something we can provide?”

  The hostage looks down.

  The hostage is at least six-three. His hair is already receding on his temples. His ears are too small for his head. But he is a handsome kid. In other circumstances his confidence and presence would probably command a room.

  She reminds herself that she doesn’t have to be worried about the kid’s smarts. To be a student at this college he has already demonstrated that he possesses a few million neurons above the mean.

  She watches him rotate his red wrist so the watch face is toward her. He taps it with his finger.

  “Two minutes,” he says. After the second word his lips continue moving. He extends a finger on each hand for a fleeting second.

  She wonders if he is praying.

  “We’re working on it,” she says. “The cell tower thing. We are. As I speak. Everything we can do. We’re on it.” Her words aren’t tactical. They’re maternal. Her heart is ripping apart at the boy’s clear anguish. She’s wondering who the hell had the bright idea to kill the cell towers in the first place. That sure helped her with the whole building-rapport thing. “Apparently, getting them working is not just throwing a switch. Things have to be rebooted. It will all be okay.”

  Christine has no idea if anything has to be rebooted, or how long it will take somebody to solve the problem and make the local cell towers active again. She is hoping it will not take long.

  She risks another quick glance at her mobile. No bars.

  A uniformed officer steps into place right behind her. His name is Joseph Blankenship. Everyone on the force calls him Joey Blanks. She knows Joey well. He was a five-year vet when she was a rook. He begins to speak to Christine in his distinctive bass tone. Joey is one of those guys who, when he sings, people stop to listen. And when Joey talks, Joey still sings a little. He can’t help it. Even when he whispers, the low notes rumble and his words find melody.

  She shakes her head at what she’s hearing, disagreeing. Joey Blanks talks some more. Finally, she glances at him and nods reluctantly. “Yes, okay,” she says. “Okay, go. Thanks, Joey.”

  Before she turns back to face the young man in front of the tomb, he again begins to speak.

  In a tone full of wonder at his own predicament, the young man says, “I will die in one minute.”

  Christine is struggling to lock on to his elusive eyes. She feels like she’s grasping at air the way she did as a girl in Wantagh when she would try to corral fireflies in her cupped hands. She says, “No, no. You won’t. We’ll get it done. You’ll be—It will be—”

  Her words are almost swallowed by the growing commotion behind her, as the assembled cops belatedly mobilize. They start to hurry the crowds away from the perimeter. Retreating spectators scramble as they begin to digest the potential danger. They run down the sidewalks. A few scream. A woman trips and falls.

  Other people run past the fallen woman, over her.

  The younger of the two men wearing suits—The Moon—taps Carmody on the shoulder. He says, “We think we have an ID. The kid is Jonathan Simmons. A student. You should take cover, Christine. Just in case, you know, it’s a real bomb.”

  Carmody considers the information even as she ignores the suggestion. She consciously plants her feet. “Jonathan,” she says to the student. “Can I call you that? Any second. Any second, the cell towers will come back up. Tell him that. The man inside. Tell him that it’s all happening. That we’re doing what he asked. What he wants. We’re showing good faith, Jonathan. Good faith. Give him a signal. Whatever you need to do. Do it now. The phones will be working any second. Hold on. Stay with me. I’m not leaving. Keep your eyes on me. Right here.”

  She keeps her focus on Jonathan Simmons as she allows Joey Blanks to steer her to cover behind the nearest vehicle—a campus police patrol car parked at the curb. Joey is wiry but no one in the department can beat him at arm wrestling. When Joey puts his big hand on someone’s back, people tend to step forward whether they were thinking about stepping forward or not.

  The crowds are being pushed even farther away, beyond the street corners. All of the nearby cops have scrambled to shelter. Some are close to Carmody, kneeling behind official vehicles or crouching behind cars parked along the street. Some are in the shadows of buildings. Other officers have taken defensive positions behind the brownstone section of the cemetery wall.

  Jonathan Simmons is standing alone at the top of the steps of the building that looks like a Greek temple.

  He gazes at his watch once more.

  His shoulders drop. He raises his eyes. He blinks rapidly. He mouths, Mom, I love you.

  The explosion is loud enough and forceful enough, it seems, to stop the world.

  A segment of Jonathan Simmons’s left hand that includes his entire thumb plops onto the hood of the cruiser in front of Carmody. A six-inch smear of blood shaped like the Nike swoosh tracks the carnage’s final path across the sheet metal.

  Christine doesn’t see or hear the fragment hit the car.

  Joey Blanks puts his lips next to her ears. He’s holding his cell phone in his hand. “The phones are working. The towers are back up. I have bars,” he says.

  She can’t hear him. She hadn’t thoug
ht to plug her ears as the clock ticked down. She hadn’t allowed herself to believe that the device on the kid’s waist was a bomb. Or that the man in the building would really set it off.

  The concussion from the blast is reverberating in her brain. The meaning of the explosion isn’t even beginning to settle in her consciousness.

  Her eyes are darting left and right in desperation.

  She is trying to locate a piece of Jonathan Simmons that is large enough to rescue.

  APRIL 17, THE PREVIOUS THURSDAY AFTERNOON

  Sam Purdy

  I thought the plane had landed in the wrong country.

  Miami’s airport was my first experience with international air travel, and I didn’t even have to leave the good old U.S. of A. to do it.

  After a ground hold at LAX for fog and an extra hour in the air dodging spring storms that were carpet-bombing most of Texas and Oklahoma with tornados and hail, the plane arrived way late in Miami. I stepped off the Jetway into a concourse brimming with an effervescent energy that almost buckled my damn knees. At first I felt assaulted by the sounds and the smells and the colors and the people and the languages, but by the time I’d meandered past a couple of dozen gates full of travelers flying to or arriving from exotic destinations and finally began to find my bearings on the sidewalk in front of the terminal, the place was beginning to infuse me with something that I had to admit was making me kind of happy.

  It was possible that the next four days would be all right. Okay at least, maybe not a disaster.

  I had a message waiting on my cell phone. A woman with a gorgeous island voice had apparently been tracking my flight.

  I returned the call. She let me know, with a swell of apology in her tone, that if I wanted to make the first party—I didn’t, but I was expected to, and this trip was all about meeting expectations—I didn’t have time to check into the hotel. I had to go straight to the marina. Did I mind taking a cab?

  I mentally counted the twenties in my wallet, and hoped the marina was nearby.

  I said, “No problem.”

  I’m not exactly a marina kind of guy. In my life I’ve tended to get into boats from a rickety dock near a buddy’s crappy summer cabin on the shore of some Lake Noname in Minnesota. Or from a boat ramp. I’d done boat ramps a few times. The boats I’ve been in were never anything special. Outboards mostly. They held maybe two or three guys—two if the other guy was as big as me—our tackle, and a couple of coolers. One cooler was for our catch, the other was for our beer.

  I went waterskiing once in high school. On the Mississippi, of all places. The water was cold. I never quite made it up on the skis.

  That’s the complete and true history of me and boats.

  Oh, I took a ferry once, too. But I didn’t get out of my car and spent most of the time sleeping in the backseat. So I don’t think that counts.

  No marinas. I promise.

  The taxi driver was from El Salvador. I gave him the name of the marina. He said, “Sí.” Traffic was god-awful the whole way, but he displayed no impatience. He pulled into the marina, stopping the car near a building. He looked at me in the mirror. He said, “Dónde? Aquí?”

  I knew both words. He would probably be disappointed to learn that he and I had just covered about thirty percent of my usable Spanish comprehension, excluding nouns related to food and drink, of course.

  I said, “Why not?”

  He laughed, exposing a set of sad yellow teeth. He said, “Por qué no?”

  I laughed with him. I gave him a thirty percent tip and threw in an extra ten bucks that I figured would soon be making a Western Union journey to El Salvador. I watched him drive away.

  Almost immediately, I regretted my largesse. I was unemployed and basically broke. I should have maybe given him an extra five instead, I thought.

  I looked around the marina. There were like a million boats.

  Only one had a live band playing thumping Latin music on its spacious stern.

  I pulled up the handle of my borrowed carry-on suitcase and began walking toward that one.

  It was only April. But it was already hot in Florida.

  A tent was set up on the dock beside the boat. A crisp white tent. Two attractive people, both with some Latin blood, sat in the shade at a table with a crisp white tablecloth. The young woman who greeted me was wearing a white skirt and a soft watermelon blouse. The flawless triangle of skin exposed on her chest was the color of a perfectly baked dessert.

  “Mr. Purdy?” she said. Her voice was unaccented.

  “That’d be me,” I said.

  We shook hands. She then offered me a choice of a chilled towel or a warm one for my face.

  I wondered if this was the first question of a weekend-long etiquette test that I was doomed to fail.

  I chose chilled.

  The other person who’d been sitting at the table delivered the tightly rolled towel on a silver tray. He looked like a guy who was moonlighting from his night job as a headwaiter. A cool headwaiter—the guy who’d end up owning his own trendy club before he was thirty.

  The icy cloth felt great on my travel-grimed face. I didn’t, of course, know what to do with the thing when I was done cleaning myself. It seemed rude to give it back, but I could hardly stuff it in my pocket. The young man held out the tray.

  Fold it? Plop it? I plopped it. Another failure? I was certain I’d get my grade later, when I was least expecting it.

  The young woman said, “We are delighted you could make it in time, Mr. Purdy. Everyone is on board now. I am so sorry about your long flight. The spring weather? It’s always so unpredictable, especially in the South. May I take that bag for you? Please? Perhaps you would like to visit a cabin to freshen up a little? Change for the welcoming event? We have a lovely evening planned.”

  The “welcoming event”?

  She took the bag from me and rolled it to a stop under the canopy. I suspected that someone else was charged with actually taking custody of it.

  “That would be terrific,” I said. “Much appreciated.”

  I didn’t really know about changing. Into what? Or freshening up. I certainly wouldn’t admit it if I was back home in Boulder, but I considered freshening up to be a girl thing. The honest truth was that my well-worn Fruit of the Looms had started riding up the crack of my butt shortly after the seat-belt sign went on over the Gulf of Mexico. A private moment to coax them back into position a little farther south of my continental cleft would be a welcome thing indeed.

  I would also be more than appreciative of a chance to pee.

  The young woman took me by the elbow and led me toward the boat. “Welcome aboard,” she said as we climbed the gangway. “Please allow me to escort you to a guest cabin where you can, you know . . . as you wish. I will let the captain know we are ready to sail. Everyone, as you can see, is gathering on the stern.”

  If I had been paying better attention, I would have realized at that point that her repeated offers to steer me to a cabin were due not only to her graciousness but also to her assumption that I must certainly be planning to switch out my travel attire for something that would be more appropriate to attend the “welcoming event.”

  Oh well. What I lacked in sartorial sophistication I would have to make up for in charm. Story of my life.

  I prepared myself for some novelty. This would be my first boat with a captain. Or a cabin, for that matter. Or a method of relieving myself on board that didn’t involve fighting to keep my balance and worrying about the direction of the wind.

  At the top of the gangway, the young lady handed me a name tag that read, “Samuel Purdy,” in calligraphy that appeared to have been scrolled by a pirate. Or his secretary.

  My name’s not Samuel. It’s Sam. Just Sam. My parents were simple people who didn’t want to burden their offspring with extraneous syllables. I kept that news to myself.

  At the top of the gangway a waiter, well, waited with a tray balanced on his manicured fingertips. On the tray r
ested a frosty, solitary glass of champagne. The champagne bubbled vigorously. He said, “Sir?”

  I made good eye contact with him and said, “Got a beer maybe?” He nodded, briefly closed his eyes, and said, “Cerveza, sí,” before he added, “Sir,” one more time.

  I said, “I’ll find you in a few minutes. How’s that?”

  He smiled a smile that wasn’t quite a waiter’s smile.

  No matter how the party went—hell, no matter how the whole weekend went—I knew I’d get along with the help.

  Unless they made me for a cop.

  In recent years, I’d found that rarely ended up being a good thing with the Spanish-speaking help.

  The boat was more like a ship, and everyone else at the party apparently had a much better idea about how friggin’ hot it was in Miami in April than I did. In terms of style, I was underdressed. My wardrobe not only lacked any benediction to fashion, but it also lacked color. In terms of weight of fabrics, I was overdressed. My crotch and my pits were already moist enough to qualify for federal wetlands protection.

  We had begun motoring on a waterway. North. The sun was setting on my left. The city looked nice. Better than nice. Stunning. Miami was like five times bigger than I’d expected.

  I found some shade as far as I could get from the three-piece band—I liked the music, it screamed Miami like a good polka announced the upper Midwest. But the beat was too frantic for my mood, and the bass was vibrating the bench on which I was sitting in a manner my bowels found not altogether pleasant. I finished my beer in two long pulls and began contemplating socially acceptable exit strategies.

  I recognized that the fact we were on a boat limited my options.

  I knew one person at this party—that would be my girlfriend Carmen’s daughter. From the moment she and I met, Dulce had made clear that she not only was wary of me but also distrusted my motives regarding her mother. The last time I had seen Dulce, Carmen and I both feared that the young lady was edging close to reaching two conclusions: first, that I was a jerk, and second, that I was people’s exhibit five or six in proving the case that her mother had congenitally bad taste in men.