There was scarcely a corner that did not evoke emotion, for I had been in love here, and had brought into this building my most terrible cases. I had taught and consulted in their classrooms, and inadvertently given them my niece.
“God knows what we’re about to walk into,” Marino said as we got on the elevator.
“We’ll just take it one inch at a time,” I said as the new agents in their FBI caps vanished behind shutting steel doors, He pressed the button for the lower level, which had been intended as Hoover’s bomb shelter in a different age. The profiling unit, as the world still called it, was sixty feet below ground, with no windows or any other relief from the horrors it found, I frankly had never understood how Wesley could endure it year after year, for whenever I sat in consultations that lasted more than a day, I was crazed.
I had to walk or drive my car. I had to get away.
“An inch at a times” Marino repeated as the elevator stopped. “There ain’t no inch or mile that’s going to help this scenario. We re a day late and a dollar short. We started putting the pieces together after the game was goddamn over.”
“it isn’t over,” I said.
We walked past the receptionist and around a corner, where a hallway led to the unit chief’s office.
“Yeah, well, let’s hope it don’t end with a bang. Shit, If only we had figured it out sooner.” His stride was long and angry.
“Marino, we couldn’t have known. There isn’t a way.”
“Well, I think we should have figured out something sooner. Like in Sandbridge, when you got the weird phone call and then everything else.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said. “What? A phone call should have tipped us off that terrorists were about to seize a nuclear power plant?”
Wesley’s secretary was new and I could not remember her name.
“Good afternoon,” I said to her. “Is he in?”
“May I tell him who you are?” she asked with a smile.
We told her, and were patient as she rang him. They did not speak long.
When she looked back at us she said, “You may go in.”
Wesley was behind his desk, and when we walked in he stood. He was typically preoccupied and somber in a gray herringbone suit and black and gray tie.
“We can go in the conference room,” he said.
“Why?” Marino took a chair. “You got some other people coming?”
“Actually, I do,” he replied.
I stood where I was and would not give him my eyes any longer than was polite.
“I’ll tell you what,” he reconsidered. “We can stay in here. Hold on.” He walked to the door. “Emily, can you find another chair?”
We got settled while she brought one in, and Wesley was having a hard time keeping his thoughts in one place and making decisions. I knew what he was like when he was overwhelmed. I knew when he was scared.
“You know what’s going on,” he said as if we did.
“We know what everybody else does,” I replied.
“We’ve heard the same news on the radio probably a hundred times.”
“So how about starting from the beginning,” Marino said. -CP&L has a district office in Suffolk,” Wesley began.
“At least twenty people left there this afternoon in a bus for an alleged in-service in the mock control room of the Old Point plant. They were men, white, thirties to early forties, posing as employees, which they obviously are not.
And they managed to get into the main building where the control room is located.”
“They were armed,” I said.
“Yes. When it was time for them to go through the x-ray machines and other detectors at the main building, they pulled out semiautomatic weapons. As you know, people have been killed-we think at least three CP&L employees, including a nuclear physicist who just happened to be paying a site visit today and was going through security at the wrong time.”
“What are their demands?” I asked, and I wondered how much Wesley had known and for how long. “Have they said what they want?”