Tawney tempered his good humor with the knowledge that two Rainbow troopers were dead, with four more wounded and being treated in this same hospital. People he vaguely knew, whose faces had been familiar, two of which he’d never see again, but the profit of that was Sean Grady, one of the most extreme PIRA members, now beginning what would surely be a lifetime of custody by Her Majesty’s Government. He would have a wealth of good information, and his job would be to start extracting it.
“Where’s the bloody bus?”
“Tim, I’ve talked to my superiors, and they’re thinking about it.”
“What’s to think about?” ONeil demanded.
“You know the answer to that, Tim. We’re dealing with government bureaucrats, and they never take action without covering their own backsides first.”
“Paul, I have six hostages here and I can-”
“Yes, you can, but you really can’t, can you? Timothy, if you do that, then the soldiers outside come storming in here, and that ends the situation, and you will be remembered forever as a killer of innocent people, a murderer. You want that, Tim? Do you really want that?” Bellow paused. “What about your families? Hell, what about how your political movement is perceived? Killing these people is a hard thing to justify, isn’t it? You’re not Muslim extremists, are you? You’re Christians, remember? Christians aren’t supposed to do things like that. Anyway, that threat is useful as a threat, but it’s not very useful as a tool. You can’t do that, Tim. It would only result in your death and your political damnation. Oh, by the way, we have Sean Grady in custody,” Bellow added, with careful timing.
“What?” That, he saw, shook Timothy.
“He was captured trying to escape. He was shot in the process, but he’ll survive. They’re operating on him right now.”
It was like pricking a large balloon, the psychiatrist saw. He’d just let some air out of his antagonist. This was how it was done, a little at a time. Too fast and he might react violently, but wear them down bit by bit, and they were yours. Bellow had written a book on the subject. First establish physical control, which meant containment. Then establish information control. Then feed them information, bit by precious bit, in a manner as carefully orchestrated as a Broadway musical. Then you had them. “You will release Sean to us. He goes on the bus with us!”
“Timothy, he’s on an operating table right now, and he’s going to be there for hours. If they even attempted to move him now, the results could be lethal-they could kill the man, Tim. So, much as you might want it, that’s just not possible. It can’t happen. I’m sorry about that, but nobody can change it.”
His leader was a prisoner now? Tim O’Neil thought. Sean was captured? Strangely that seemed worse than his own situation. Even if he were in prison, Sean might come up with a way of freeing him, but with Sean on the Isle of Wight . . . all was lost, wasn’t it? But-
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“Tim, in a situation like this, I can’t lie. I’d just screw up. It’s too hard to be a good liar, and if you caught me in a lie, you’d never believe me again, and that would end my usefulness to my bosses and to you, too, wouldn’t it?” Again the voice of quiet reason.
“You said you’re a doctor?”
“That’s right.” Bellow nodded.
“Where do you practice?”
“Mainly here now, but I did my residency at Harvard. I’ve worked at four different places, and taught some.”
“So, your job is to get people like me to surrender, isn’t it?” Anger, finally, at the obvious.
Bellow shook his head. “No, I think of my job as keeping people alive. I’m a physician, Tim. I am not allowed to kill people or to help others to kill people. I swore an oath on that one a long time ago. You have guns. Other people around that corner have guns. I don’t want any of you to get killed. There’s been enough of that today, hasn’t there? Tim, do you enjoy killing people?”
“Why-no, of course not, who does?”
“Well, some do,” Bellow told him, deciding to build up his ego a little. “We call them sociopathic personalities, but you’re not one of them. You’re a soldier. You fight for something you believe in. So do the people back there.” Bellow waved to where the Rainbow people were. “They respect you, and I hope you respect them. Soldiers don’t murder people. Criminals do that, and a soldier isn’t a criminal.” In addition to being true, this was an important thought to communicate to his interlocutor. All the more so because a terrorist was also a romantic, and to be considered a common criminal was psychologically very wounding to them. He’d just built up their self-images in order to steer them away from something he didn’t want them to do. They were soldiers, not criminals, and they had to act like soldiers, not criminals.
“Dr. Bellow?” a voice called from around the corner. “Phone call, sir.”
“Tim, can I go get it?” Always ask permission to do something. Give them the illusion of being in command of the situation.
“Yeah.” O’Neil waved him away. Bellow walked back to where the soldiers were.
He saw John Clark standing there. Together they walked fifty feet into another part of the hospital.
“Thanks for getting my wife and little girl out, Paul.”
Bellow shrugged. “It was mainly luck. He’s a little overwhelmed by all this, and he’s not thinking very well. They want a bus.”
“You told me before,” Clark reminded him. “Do we give it to ’em?”
“We won’t have to do that. I’m in a poker game, John, and I’m holding a straight flush. Unless something screws up really bad, we have this one under control.”
“Noonan’s outside, and he has a mike on the window. I listened in on the last part. Pretty good, doctor.”
“Thanks.” Bellow rubbed his face. The tension was real for him, but he could only show it here. In with Timothy he had to be cool as ice, like a friendly and respected teacher. “What’s the story on the other prisoners?”
“No change. The Grady guy is being operated on-it’ll take a few hours, they say. The other one’s unconscious still, and we don’t have a name or ID on him anyway..”
“Grady’s the leader?”
“We think so, that’s what the intel tells us.”
“So he can tell us a lot. You want me there when he comes out of the OR,” Paul told Rainbow Six.
“You need to finish up here first.”
“I know. I’m going back.” Clark patted him on the shoulder and Bellow walked back to see the terrorists.
“Well?” Timothy asked.
“Well, they haven’t decided on the bus yet. Sorry,” Bellow added in a downcast voice. “I thought I had them convinced, but they can’t get their asses in gear.”
“You tell them that if they don’t, we’ll-”
“No, you won’t, Tim. You know that. I know that. They know that.”
“Then why send the bus?” O’Neil asked, close to losing control now.
“Because I told them that you’re serious, and they have to take your threat seriously. If they don’t believe you’ll do it, they have to remember that you might, and if you do, then they look bad to their bosses.” Timothy shook his head at that convoluted logic, looking more puzzled than angry now. “Trust me,” Paul Bellow went on. “I’ve done this before, and I know how it works. It’s easier negotiating with soldiers like you than with those damned bureaucrats. People like you can make decisions. People like that run away from doing it. They don’t care much about getting people killed, but they do care about looking bad in the newspapers.”
Then something good happened. Tim reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. A sure sign of stress and an attempt to control it.
“Hazardous to your health, boy,” Clark observed, looking at the TV picture Noonan had established. The assault plan was completely ready. Connolly had line charges set on the windows, both to open an entry path and to distract the terrorists. Vega,Tomlinson, and Bates, from Team-1, would toss flash-bangs at the same time and dart into the room to take the bad guys down with aimed fire. The only downside to that, as always, was that one of them could turn and hose the hostages as his last conscious act, or even by accident, which was just as lethal. From the sound of it, Bellow was doing okay. If these subjects had any brains at all, they’d know it was time to call it a day, but John reminded himself that he’d never contemplated life in prison before, at least not this immediately, and he imagined it wasn’t a fun thought. He now had a surfeit of soldierly talent at his disposal. The SAS guys who’d arrived had chopped to his operational command, though their own colonel had come as well to kibitz in the hospital’s main lobby.