Michael Walsh Bundle (12 page)

Devlin fed in the cell phone's information, uplinked, and got back the name of the subscriber: Mrs. Hope Gardner.

He flipped open what looked like a hooded BlackBerry but was in actuality a motion-capture videophone that worked like a TiVo; he could “rewind” to any point in the past hour to see whatever the naked eye had missed: using the field of coverage provided by the school's hidden motion detectors—all newly built schools had them since Beslan, although the public knew nothing about them—he could observe the entire perimeter. He went visual. There:

He could barely make out the blur, but he knew at once it was a human figure, female. Around the back, near the electrical shed. On her hands and knees, disappearing from view just as the chopper settled on the roof. Unfortunately, the video was not real time. The United States had not yet fully descended into Big Brother country, where everything you did was on a live feed, but it was only a matter of time.

He checked the time: four minutes ago. Wherever that woman was, she wasn't there any more.

“Leave your cell phone on, lady,” Devlin breathed to himself. “And don't do anything stupid.”

He knew that was probably a forlorn hope.

E
DWARDSVILLE
—J
EFFERSON
M
IDDLE
S
CHOOL

Charles Augustus Milverton was sleeping. No, not sleeping—half asleep, almost dreaming. In that special state between wakefulness and slumber, when the mind races, leaps, and makes unique connections between different and disparate people, places, and things. The gym bench was hard, but somehow he managed.

Children. That was the key. Childhood. Think back.

The north of England. Geordie country, Tyneside. The Borders, with the heathen Scots just a stone's throw away. And him a vicar's son. The only son, the eldest child, with one sister, so beautiful, so weak, so helpless in the face of Fate.

Anglo-Catholic. The worst kind. Higher than C of E, lower than the Whore of Rome. All the strictures of the Church of England, but without divorce. No way out. One sin, unconfessed and unrequited, and you were damned to Hell for all eternity. It focused the mind even as it corroded the soul.

The sermons. The lectures, unending. The history lessons, that went on forever. What did he care about history? About England? He had better and bigger places to go. England was nothing to him, a place, a climate, a series of vaguely related accents, a semishared history of conquest and kings. Although sometimes, standing here, near Hadrian's Wall, he could feel himself as one with the Romans and their Anglo-Saxon successors, nervously eyeing the Picts to the north, spears and shields at the ready.

Who dares, wins. That was his motto. Perhaps history had a useful lesson or two after all. That was what his father had tried to impress upon him, anyway. One of the few times in the vicar's life that he had not been cowed by ritual and superstition.

Under normal circumstances, he never would have let that raghead hit him. A savage from the outer limits of Europe, a country so weak it has been easily conquered by Islam and, worse, had stayed conquered. Not like France, under Charles Martel. Not like Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, who had chucked out the Muslims and the Jews, for good measure, and then had sent Columbus packing across the Atlantic Ocean, pretty much in a single inning. Not like Austria, with Sobieski defending the gates of Vienna.

That Europe was gone now. Even England no longer had to worry about the Picts and the Scots and Irish. There were mosques in Newcastle, and in Leeds, and in York, and in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and London. England was finished.

And without a fight. That was the bit that still surprised him. When Rhodesia went, he could understand it; Cecil Rhodes was Colonel Blimp, and Ian Smith was a giant pantomime horse for the Fleet Street johnnies of their day, riding high atop their moral dudgeon. He could have sworn South Africa would put up a fight, especially given their nuclear alliance with Israel, but at the end of the day, Johannesburg folded quietly, leaving the Boers and the Huguenots to fend for themselves in the brave new world of Nelson and Winnie Mandela.

He was too young for Rhodesia, but he had fought in South Africa and elsewhere, as a mercenary on the Dark Continent, trying desperately to reclaim not the White Man's Burden but the White Man's Gold; half a century after the end of colonialism, Africa was sliding back into savagery, its infrastructure failing, its farms collapsing, its education and political systems in tatters. And now it, and Britain's former colonies in the Middle East and “Asia”—India and Pakistan—were taking their well-deserved revenge on the Mother Country, exporting their charming native pathologies back to Birmingham and Sheffield and Manchester and Newcastle: female circumcision, “honour killings,” stoning homosexuals, subway bombings, the lot.

He hated them all. He hated them for what they had done to his childhood views of Empire, but most of all he hated them for the lie they had given to what his father had taught him.

And yet he also admired them. Admired them for their audacity to challenge civilization and dare it to defend itself and its so-called “superiority.” Theirs was the rule of the AK-47, not of Article 3, Section 1; the rule of the id, not of the superego. Theirs was the will to power, whether they knew Schopenhauer or not.

And that was the flaw in his father's belief: that he could stand there, watching the oncoming blue-painted Picts and Celts, bones in their noses and the flesh of their enemies between their teeth, with equanimity, and see souls to be saved. Even when his sister had died, screaming in pain from a ruptured appendix, begging for help that had never come because their father had had to attend to his superstition, minister to his flock, while she writhed and bled and died, the lesson had not changed. It was God's will…and there yet remained souls to be saved.

Whereas Milverton saw not souls but enemies to be slaughtered before they breached the Wall. His father's church was an imaginary refuge, a false castle, a hive of fairy tales about Jesus, the Apostles, the Crusades, Urban II, Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Malachy and his prophecies, St. Louis. The Middle Ages was a nightmare, the Renaissance but a dream, a brief respite before Europe too succumbed and slid back into that endless night that had followed the fall of Rome.

That was why he had joined SAS, the 22s, as soon as he was legally able, that was why he had pushed himself, that was why he had passed all the tests, risen through the ranks, punished England's enemies both at home and abroad, taken the fight to the IRA in Belfast and Gibraltar; and after that operation had gone tits up thanks to the gutter press, had moved into the private sector, working across Europe, Africa, and Asia and now in America. It was hard work but it was good work and it paid very well. In fact, it paid top dollar, as well it should: pound for pound, he was best fighter on the planet.

It was the sound of a female voice that woke him from his reverie. The sound of a little girl screaming. The one sound in the world he could not abide.

Milverton shot off the bench. If he had to break character, if he was no longer “Charles” the teacher, so be it.

Upright now, he tensed for trouble. This hadn't been part of the plan, and he had no idea how the men in the balaclavas were going to react, especially with Drusovic out of the gym.

He walked slowly, unthreateningly, through the ranks of the captive kids and teachers. With the example of Nurse Haskell fresh in everyone's mind, no one dared move his or her head to follow him as he went. Still, Milverton could feel the eyes of the boy, Rory, on him. He felt sorry for the spunky little bugger, but in for a penny, in for a pound.

“Charles,” whispered Rory as he walked by him. “He took my sister. He took Emma.”

He kept his voice low. “Don't worry, Rory,” he said, a thought occurring to him. “I'll make sure she's safe.”

Rory managed a very small smile. “Who dares, wins, right?” the kid asked.

“Absolutely.”

Now he noticed the smell. Fear had a stench all its own, and the bodily function by-products were just that, manifestations of the state of mind. He'd had plenty of men beg for their lives before he neutralized them, but this was different. These were children. Not that he cared one way or the other about their fate, but he knew that America was a sentimental country, especially about its kids, and if anything happened to any of them—or worse, a lot of them—the response would be more than they'd bargained for at this point in the operation. The kids were supposed to be very potent and photogenic hostages, nothing more.

That's why he was angry at Drusovic. It was time to sort the bloody fucker out.

And then he heard the girl, Emma, scream again.

 

The lift shuddered to a stop. Even with no light, Hope more or less knew where she was. Moving carefully so as not to knock anything over, bark her shins, or skin her knees any worse than they already were, she felt her way down the long, rectangular supply room, past the copy machines and the boxes of paper, past the supplies, her eyes and ears straining into the darkness and the silence.

Her heart was pounding. She'd always thought that expression was literary license, but now that it was happening to her, rocketing, sending shock waves soaring throughout the building, she knew it was for real. Breath short, sweat glands fully engaged. But hearing preternatural. Sight, even in this Stygian darkness, supernatural. With her children in danger, Hope Gardner was Superwoman.

A door was just up ahead. In her excitement and confusion, Hope wasn't exactly sure where it led to, but she didn't care. Gingerly, she opened it onto a storage room, which she knew led out into a secondary hallway near the back of the school, one that made a T-intersection with the main hall. The gym was nearby.

She reached for the hallway door, praying that it wouldn't make a sound, that there would be nobody on the other side, that…

Then she heard the screams. And she knew, in an instant, the way mothers always do, that it was the voice of her daughter.

The hell with what was on the other side.

The hallway was dark and empty. Only the soft glow of the emergency lights kept it from being completely pitch black. In the distance, at the other end of the long central hallway, she could hear the sound of running footsteps.

Hope hugged the wall as she crept forward. She wanted to run, she wanted to cry out, to tell Emma that Mommy was coming for her, that everything was going to be all right, but she knew a single word from her would probably mean both their deaths.

There were voices, shouting loudly, somewhere beyond the gym. That must be where Emma was.

Hope dropped to her hands and knees, creeping through the darkness. The lights were on in the gym, casting a small patch of light on the hallway floor via the windows. She would have to go right past it.

In the distance, the sound of violence, a body falling. She moved faster, nearing the gym now.

She knew she shouldn't look, shouldn't risk it, but she had to look. Swiftly, she crossed the hall, sidling up to the gym doors, straightening her legs, rising.

She glanced, catching only a glimpse. But what she saw almost made her throw up.

Children, bound; teachers, with guns trained on them. And explosives everywhere. If the cops or the FBI or whoever tried to rush the school, everyone would die. And Rory was in there, somewhere.

She ducked back down and kept moving.

 

It didn't take long for Milverton to find Drusovic and Emma. Under any rational circumstance, he'd never take a bollocks crew like this one into battle, but that was the whole point of the exercise: they were all chattel, born to die and, as far he was now concerned, the sooner the better. Well, he could help move the timetable along.

He ripped open the door. Drusovic was where he had expected to find him, on top of the girl. Milverton's left hand shot out, grabbing the Albanian by the scruff of his neck and yanking him backward. As Drusovic fell, Milverton delivered a punch to the man's right cheekbone; a little higher, on the temple, and it would have killed him, but Milverton needed to keep him alive for the moment. A kick to the groin put Drusovic on the floor.

Milverton turned to Emma. Luckily, the savage hadn't tried to undress her; quickly, he restored some semblance of order to her disheveled clothing and looked into her eyes to see if she was all right. The girl was speechless, her eyes wide and her mouth trying to move, but no sound emerging. Milverton swept her up in his arms, carrying her effortlessly under one arm.

With his free hand, he hoisted Drusovic back to his feet. “You sodding arsehole,” he said, “I ought to rip your fucking balls off and feed them to the nearest pig. And then you can explain to Allah why you won't be shagging any more virgins.” Since he was, in fact, holding Drusovic's balls in his hand, this was not an idle threat. “Now pull your pants up and let's get on with it.”

Milverton carried the girl into the darkened hallway. She had fainted, which was good. He opened the door to one of the classrooms and laid her down on a bench. There was a quilt nearby, so he threw it over her. Then he stepped back into the hallway.

 

Hope saw the door at the far end of the hall open, and she almost screamed when she saw a man emerge with a girl under his arm. Her girl. Her Emma. Unconscious, or…

Don't think about it. Calm down. The man carrying Emma was wearing a suit. He wasn't one of
them.
As she watched, they disappeared into a classroom.

She had to get closer. She rose to her feet—

And then the same door opened again and another man tottered out. From the way he was moving, she thought he might be drunk. There was a small alcove with a couple of public telephones in it; she ducked into it, sliding down and beneath the phones. Nobody used them any more—everybody had cell phones now—but no one had gotten around to removing them yet. Thank God.

The man staggered past her, oblivious. She thought she could hear him muttering something, but it was a language she couldn't remotely understand. Hope watched him as he went back into the gym.

Now!

Hope had no idea what she was going to do. She had trusted in God and luck, and so far neither of them had let her down.

She was at the door now, her ear pressed up against it, desperately trying to catch some sort of sound that might tell her that her daughter was still alive, was okay. Nothing. She pressed a little closer, a little harder, straining…straining…