“Who are you?” the voice demanded, while his partner moaned with increasing pain.
“What d’ya mean?” the inspector asked in nervous reply. Look dumb and scared.
‘Whose child is that?” He pointed at Megan.
‘She’s mine, okay? I don’t know who that one belongs
to.
‘ the FBI agent lied.
‘She is the one we want, she is President’s child, yes?”
‘How the hell should I know? My wife usually picks Megan up, not me. Do what you gotta do and get the fuck outa here, okay?”
“You inside,” a female voice boomed from outside. “This is the United States Secret Service. We want you to come out. You will not be hurt if you do. You have no place to go. Come out where we can see you, and you will not be hurt.”
“That’s good advice, man,” Pat told him. “Nobody’s gonna get out of here, you know?”
“You know who this girl is? She is daughter of your President Ryan! They will not dare shoot me!” the subject proclaimed. His English was pretty good, O’Day noted, nodding.
“What about all the other kids, man? That’s the only one you want, that’s the only other one that matters–hey, why not, you know, like, let some out, eh?”
The man was partly right. The Service guys wouldn’t shoot at one target for fear that someone else might be in here, as one surely was, his rifle leveled at Pat’s chest. And they were smart enough that they were never less than five feet apart. Shooting them would take two separate moves.
What really scared O’Day was the casual, reflexive way he’d killed Marlene Daggett. They just plain didn’t care.
You couldn’t predict that sort of criminal. You could talk to them, try to calm them down, distract them, but beyond that, there was only one way to deal with them. “We give them children, they give us car, yes?” “Hey, that works for me, okay? I think that’s just fine. I just want to get my daughter home tonight, y’know?” “Yes, you take good care of your little one. Sit there.” “No problem.” He relaxed his hands, bringing them closer to his chest, right at the top of the zipper on his jacket. Undo that and the leather would hang better, concealing his gun.
“Attention,” the voice called again. “We want to talk.”
CATHY RYAN JOINED her children in the helicopter. The agents’ faces were grim enough. Sally and Jack were com-,ing out of the initial shock and sobbing now, looking to their mother for solace as the Black Hawk leaped into the sky again, heading southwest for Washington with another in trail. The pilot, she saw, was not taking the usual route, but was instead going directly west, away from where Katie was. That was when SURGEON collapsed into the arms of her kids.
“O’DAY IS IN there,” Jeffers told her.
“You sure, Norm?”
“That’s his truck. I saw him going in right before this went down.”
“Shit,” Price swore. “That’s probably the shot we heard.”
“Yah.” Jeffers nodded grimly.
THE PRESIDENT WAS in the Situation Room, the best spot to keep track of things. Perhaps he might have been elsewhere, but he couldn’t face his office, and he wasn’t President enough to pretend that–
“Jack?” It was Robby Jackson. He came over as his President stood, but they’d been friends much longer than
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that, and the two shared an embrace. “Been here before, man. It worked out then, too, remember?”
“We have tag numbers off the cars in the parking lot. Three are rentals. We’re running them now,” Raman said, a phone to his ear. “Should be able to get some kind of ID.”
HOW DUMB MIGHT they be? O’Day asked himself. They’d have to be pretty fucking stupid to think they had any chance at all of getting out of here… and if they didn’t have that hope, then they had nothing to lose . . . not a damned thing . . . and they didn’t seem to care about killing. It had happened before, in Israel, Pat remembered. He didn’t recall the name or the date, but a couple of terrorists had had a bunch of kids and hosed them before the commandos were able to …
He’d taught tactics for every possible situation, or so he’d thought, and would have said as recently as twenty minutes before–but to have your only child next to you . . .
They’re all our kids, Dom’s voice told him again.
The unhurt killer had Katie Ryan by the upper arm. She was only whimpering now, exhausted from her earlier screams, almost hanging from his hand as the subject stood there to the left of the wounded one. His right hand held the AK. If he’d had a pistol, he could have held that weapon to her head, but the AK was too lengthy for that. Ever so slowly, Inspector O’Day moved his hand down, opening the zipper on his jacket.
They started talking back and forth again. The wounded one was in considerable discomfort. At first, the adrenaline rush had blocked it out, but now things were settling down somewhat, and with the release of tension also went the pain-blocking mechanism that protected the body in periods of great stress. He was saying something, but Pat couldn’t tell what it was. The other one snarled a reply, gesturing to the door, speaking with passion and frustration. The scary part would come when they came to a decision. They might just shoot the kids. Those out-
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side would probably rush the building if they heard more than a shot or two. They might be fast enough to save some of the kids, but. . .
He started thinking of them as Hurt and Unhurt. They were pumped up but confused, excited but undecided, wanting to live but coming to the realization that they would not. . .
“Hey, uh, guys,” Pat said, holding his arms up and moving them to distract them from the open zipper. “Can I say something?”
“What?” Hurt demanded, as Unhurt watched.
“All these kids you have here, it’s like too many to cover, right?” he asked, with an emphatic nod to get the idea across. “How about I take my little girl out and some of the others, okay? Make things easier for you, maybe?”
That generated some more jabbering. The idea actually seemed attractive to Unhurt, or so it appeared to O’Day.
“Attention, this is the Secret Service!” the voice called yet again. It sounded like Price, the FBI agent thought. Unhurt was looking toward the door, and his body language was leaning him that way, and to get there he had to pass in front of Hurt.
“Hey, come on, okay, let some of us go, will ya?” O’Day pleaded. “Maybe I can tell them to give you a car or something.”
Unhurt waved his rifle in the inspector’s direction. “Stand!” he commanded.
“Okay, okay, be cool, all right?” O’Day stood slowly, keeping his hands well away from his body. Would they see his holster if he turned around? The Service people had spotted it the first time he’d come in, and if he fucked this one up, then Megan … there was no turning back. There just wasn’t.
“You tell them, you tell them they give us car or I kill this one and all the rest!”
“Let me take my daughter with me, okay?”
“No!” Hurt said.
Unhurt said something in his native tongue, looking down at Hurt, his weapon still pointed at the floor while Hurt’s was aimed at O’Day’s chest. “Hey, whatcha got to lose?”
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It was almost as though Unhurt said the same thing to his wounded friend, and with that he gave Katie Ryan a yank on the arm. She cried out loudly again as he walked across the room, pushing her ahead of him, blocking Hurt’s field of view as he did so. It had taken twenty minutes to achieve. Now he had one second to see if it would work.
The drill was the same for O’Day as it had been for Don’ Russell. His right hand raced back, whipped inside the jacket, and pulled the pistol out, as he dropped to one knee. The moment Unhurt’s body cleared the target, the Smith 1076 loosed two perfect rounds, both of the stainless-steel cases flying in the air, as Hurt became Dead. Unhurt’s eyes went wide in surprise, as the children’s screams erupted again.
“DROP IT, ” O’Day bellowed at him.
Unhurt’s first reaction was to yank again at Katie Ryan’s arm, and at the same time the gun started to move up, as though it were a pistol, but the AK was far too heavy to be used that way. O’Day wanted him alive, but there wasn’t the time for chances. His right index finger pushed back on the trigger, then pushed again. The body fell straight down, behind it a red shadow on the white walls of Giant Steps.