Potter smiled agreeably, pleased that there'd been no confrontation. Usually state and federal negotiators get along well enough but there's invariably tension between negotiators and tactical units from other branches. As Potter explained in class, "There're talkers and there're shooters. That's night and day and it won't ever change."
Tremain stepped into the van. Potter eyed the dozen men. Somber, artful, and oh-so-pleased to be here. He thought of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now and supposed these men too loved the smell of napalm in the morning. Potter finished his conversation with Stillwell. When he turned back he was surprised to find that the HRU, to a man, was gone. When he climbed into the van he saw that Tremain too had left.
LeBow entered the information about Stillwell's skiff into his electronic memory.
"Time, Tobe?" Potter was staring at the "Promises/Deceptions" board.
The young man glanced at the digital clock.
"Forty-five minutes," Tobe muttered, then said to LeBow, "You tell him."
"Tell me what?"
The intelligence officer said, "We've been playing with the infrared monitor. We caught a glimpse of Handy a minute ago."
"What was he doing?"
"Loading the shotguns."
The Kansas State Police Hostage Rescue Unit, led by Captain Daniel Tremain, slipped silently into a stand of trees a hundred yards from the slaughterhouse.
The trees, Tremain noted at once, were not unoccupied. There were a state police sniper and two or three local deputies in position. Using hand signals Tremain directed his men through the trees and down into a gully that would take them around the side of the slaughterhouse. They passed undetected through the small forest. Tremain looked about and saw--fifty yards toward the river--an abandoned windmill, forty feet high, sitting in the middle of a grassy field. Beside it were two state troopers, standing with their backs to the HRU as they gazed warily at the slaughterhouse. Tremain ordered the two men into a line of trees out of sight of both the north side of the slaughterhouse and the command post.
From the windmill, the HRU team walked into a gully and made their way closer to the slaughterhouse. Tremain held up his hand and they stopped. He tapped his helmet twice and the men responded to the signal by switching on their radios. Lieutenant Carfallo opened the terrain map and the architectural drawings. From his pocket Tremain took the diagram of the inside of the slaughterhouse that Derek the Red, Derek the trooper, Derek the spy, had just slipped him inside the van. It was marked with the location of the hostages and the HTs.
Tremain was encouraged. The girls weren't being held in shield positions by the windows or in front of the HTs. There were no booby traps. Derek reported that the men inside were armed with pistols and shotguns only, no automatic weapons, and they had no flak jackets, helmets, or flashlights. Of course the hostages weren't as far away from the takers as he would have liked, and the room in which they were being kept had no door. But still Handy and the others were twenty or so feet from the girls. It would take a full five seconds for Handy to get to the hostages, and that was assuming he'd already decided that he would kill them the instant he heard the cutting charges. As a rule, in an assault, there were four to ten seconds of confusion and indecision while the takers tried to scope out what was happening before they could take up effective defensive positions.
"Listen up." Hands tapped ears and heads nodded. Tremain pointed at the chart. "There are six hostages inside. Three HTs--located here, here, and here, though they're pretty mobile. One checks on the girls with some frequency." Tremain nodded to one trooper. "Wilson."
"Sir."
"You're to proceed through this gully along the side of the building here and surveil from one of these two windows."
"Sir, can you get them to shift that light?" Trooper Joey Wilson nodded toward the halogens.
"Negative. This is a clandestine operation and you're not to expose yourself to the friendlies."
"Yessir," the young man barked. No questions asked.
"The middle window is hidden by that tree and the school bus. I'd suggest that one."
"Yessir."
"Pfenninger."
"Sir."
"You're to return to the command van and your orders are consistent with what you and I discussed earlier. Is that understood?"
"Yessir."
"The rest of us are moving to this point here. Using those bushes and trees for cover. Harding, you take point. All officers move out now."
And they dispersed into the dusky afternoon, as fluid as the dark river flowing past, more silent than the wind that bent the grass around them.
"Let's have a smoke," Potter said.
"Not me," Budd answered.
"An imaginary one."
"How's that?"
"Let's step outside, Captain."
They wandered away from the van twenty feet into a stand of trees, the agent adjusting his posture automatically to stand more upright; being in the presence of Charlie Budd made you want to do this. Potter paused and spoke with Joe Silbert and the other reporter.
"We've got two more out."
"Two more? Who?" Silbert seemed to be restraining himself.
"No identities," Potter said. "All I'll say is that they're students. Young girls. They've been released unharmed. That leaves a total of four students and two teachers left inside."
"What did you trade for them?"
"We can't release that information."
He'd expected the reporter would be grateful for the scoop but Silbert grumbled, "You're not making this very fucking easy."
Potter glanced at the computer screen. The story was a human-interest piece about an unnamed trooper, waiting for action--the boredom and the edginess of a barricade. Potter thought it was good and told the reporter so.
Silbert snorted. "Oh, it'd sing like poetry if I had some hard news to put in. When can we interview you?"
"Soon."
The agent and the trooper wandered down into a grove of trees out of the line of fire. Potter called in and told Tobe where he was, asked for any calls from Handy to be patched through immediately.
"Say, Charlie, where'd that attorney general get himself to?"
Budd looked around. "I think he went back to the hotel."
Potter shook his head. "Marks wants Handy to get his helicopter. The governor told me he wants Handy dead. The Bureau director'll probably be on the horn in the next half-hour--and there've been times when I've gotten a call from the president himself. Oh, and mark my words, Charlie, somebody's writing the script right at this moment and making me out to be the villain."
"You?" Budd asked, with inexplicable glumness. "You'll be the hero."
"Oh, not by a long shot. No, sir. Guns sell advertising, words don't."
"What's this about imaginary cigarettes?"
"When my wife got cancer I quit."
"Lung cancer? My uncle had that."
"No. Pancreas."
Unfortunately the party with whom Potter had been negotiating for his wife's recovery had reneged on the deal. Even so, Potter never took up smoking again.
"So you, what, imagine yourself smoking?"
Potter nodded. "And when I can't sleep I imagine myself taking a sleeping pill."
"When you're, you know, depressed you imagine yourself happy?"
That, Arthur Potter had found, didn't work.
Budd, who'd perhaps asked the question because of the funk he'd been in for the last hour, forgot his dolor momentarily and asked, "What brand aren't you smoking?"
"Camels. Without the filter."
"Hey, why not?" His face slipped and he seemed sad again. "I never smoked. Maybe I'll have me an imaginary Jack Daniel's."
"Have a double while you're at it." Arthur Potter drew hard on his fake cigarette. They stood among flowering catalpa and Osage orange and Potter was looking down at what appeared to be the deep tracks of wagon wheels. He asked Budd about them.
"Those? The real thing. The Santa Fe Trail itself."
"Those're the original tracks?" Potter was astonished.
"They call 'em swales. Headed west right through here."
Potter, genealogist that he was, kicked at the deep, rocklike tread mark cut into the dirt, and wondered if Marian's great-great-grandfather Ebb Schneider, who had traveled with his widowed mother from Ohio to Nevada in 1868, had been an infant asleep in the wagon that had made this very track.
Budd nodded toward the slaughterhouse. "The reason that was built was because of the Chisholm Trail. It went south to north right through here too, from San Antonio to Abilene--that's our Abilene, in Kansas. They'd drive the longhorns along here, sell off and slaughter some for the Wichita market."
"Got another question," Potter said after a moment.
"I'm not much of a state historian. That's 'bout all I know."
"Mostly, Charlie, I'm wondering why you're looking so damn uneasy."
Budd lost interest in the swales at his feet. "Well, I guess I wonder what exactly you wanted to talk to me about."
"In about forty minutes I've got to go talk Handy out of killing another of the girls. I don't have a lot of ideas. I'd like to get your opinion. What do you think of him?"
"Me?"
"Sure."
"Oh, I don't know."
"We never know in this business. Give me an educated guess. You've heard his profile. You've talked to Angie . . . . She's quite a lady, isn't she?"
"Say, 'bout that, Arthur . . . the thing is, I'm a married man. She's been chatting me up an awful lot. I mentioned Meg must've been a dozen times and she doesn't seem to pay any attention to it."
"Consider it flattery, Charlie. You're in control of the situation."
"Sorta in control." He looked back at the van but didn't see the dark-haired agent anywhere.
Potter laughed. "So now, give me some thoughts."
Budd fidgeted with his fingers, maybe thinking he should actually be pretending to hold his glass of whisky. Potter smoked as he had come to do so much else in recent years--not actually doing it, not pantomiming, only imagining. It was for him a type of meditation.
"I guess what I'm thinking," Budd said slowly, "is that Handy's got a plan of some kind."
"Why?"
"Partly it's what Angie was saying. Everything he does has a purpose. He's not a crazed kick killer."
"What sort of plan were you thinking of?"
"Don't know exactly. Something he thinks is gonna outsmart us."
Budd's hands slipped into his rear pockets again. The man's nervous as a fifteen-year-old at his first school dance, Potter reflected.
"Why do you say that?"
"I'm not sure exactly. Just an impression. Maybe because he's got this holier-than-thou attitude. He doesn't respect us. Every time he talks to us what I hear is, you know, contempt. Like he knows it all and we don't know anything."
This was true. Potter had noticed it himself. Not a shred of desperation, no supplication, no nervous banter, no tin defiance; all the things you usually heard from hostage takers were noticeably absent here.
Along with the flattest VSA line Potter had ever seen.
"A breakout," Budd continued. "That's what I'd guess. Maybe setting fire to the place." The captain laughed. "Maybe he's got fireman outfits in there--in those bags he brought in with him. And he'll sneak out in all the confusion."
Potter nodded. "That's happened before."
"Has it?" Budd asked, incredulous that he'd thought of this strategy and, accordingly, very pleased with himself.
"Medical-worker outfits one time. And police uniforms another. But I'd given all the containment officers handouts, like what I distributed earlier, so the HTs were spotted right away. Here, though, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be his style. But you're right on about his attitude. That's the key. It's saying something to us. I just wish I knew what."
Again Budd was fiddling nervously with his pockets.
"Those tools," Potter mused, "might have something to do with it. Maybe they'll set a fire, hide in a piece of machinery or even under the floor. Then climb out when the rescue workers are there. We should make sure that everybody, not just the troopers, has a copy of the profile flyers."
"I'll take care of it." Budd laughed nervously again. "I'll delegate it."
Potter had calmed considerably. He thought of Marian. The infrequent evenings he was home they used to sit together by the radio listening to NPR and share one cigarette and a glass of sherry. Occasionally, once a week, perhaps twice, the cigarette would be stubbed out and they would climb the stairs to their ornate bed and forgo the musical programming for that evening.
"This negotiation stuff," Budd said. "It's pretty confusing to me."
"How so?"
"Well, you don't seem to talk to him about what I'd talk to him about--you know, the stuff he wants and the hostages and everything. Business. Mostly, it seems that you just chat."
"You ever been in therapy, Charlie?"
The young officer seemed to snicker. He shook his head. Maybe analysis was something Kansans didn't go in for.
Potter said, "I was. After my wife died."
"I was going to say, I'm sorry to hear that happened."
"You know what I talked to the therapist about? Genealogy."
"What?"
"It's my hobby. Family trees, you know."
"You were paying good money to a doctor to talk about hobbies?"
"And it was the best money I ever spent. I started to feel what the therapist was feeling and vice versa. We moved closer to each other. What I'm doing here--with Handy--is the same. You don't click a switch and make Handy give up the girls. Just like the doctor doesn't click a switch and make everything better. The point is to create a relationship between him and me. He's got to know me, and I've got to know him."
"Hey, like you're dating?"
"You could say that," Potter said without smiling. "I want to get him into my mind--so he'll realize it's a hopeless situation. So he'll give me the girls and surrender, to make him feel that it's pointless to go on. Not to understand it intellectually, but to feel it. You can see it's working a bit. He's given us two and hasn't killed anyone else, even when that other girl snuck out." Potter drew a final breath of his imaginary Camel. Stubbed it out.
He started to imagine climbing stairs, Marian's hand in his. But this image faded quickly.
"And I do it to get into his mind. To understand him."
"So you become his friend?"
"Friend? Not a friend. I'd say that we become linked."
"But, I mean, isn't that a problem? If you have to order HRT to green-light him, you'd be ordering the death of somebody you're close to. Betraying them."
"Oh, yes," the negotiator said softly. "Yes, it's a problem."
Budd blew air out of his cheeks and again studied the harvesting. "You said . . ."
"What?"
"You said before that you're willing to sacrifice those girls to get him. Is that really true?"
Potter looked at him for a moment while Budd's distraught eyes gazed at the steadfast threshers miles away. "Yes, it is. My job is to stop Handy. Those're my orders. And yes, there may have to be sacrifices."
"But they're little girls."
Potter smiled grimly. "How can you make a value judgment? These aren't the days of women and children first. A life is a life. Are those girls more deserving than the family Handy might kidnap and kill next year if he escapes today? Or the two traffic cops he shoots when they stop him for speeding? I have to keep thinking that those hostages are dead already. If I can save some, so much the better. But I can't look at it any other way and still function."
"You're good at what you do, seems."
Potter didn't answer.
"You think there'll be more deaths?"
"Oh, yes, I'm afraid so. Just an educated guess but I do think so."
"The girls?"
Potter didn't answer.
"Our immediate problem, Charlie--what can we use
to buy another hour with?"
Budd shrugged. "No guns or ammo, right?"
"That's not negotiable."
"Well, he thinks he's getting his imaginary helicopter, right?"
"Yes."
"As long as we're lying to him 'bout that, why don't we lie to him 'bout something else? Promise him something to go along with it."
"Can't give a kid a toy without giving him batteries, is that what you're saying?"
"I guess I am."
"That's brilliant, Charlie. Let's go kick it around with Henry."
As they climbed into the van Potter clapped the trooper on the shoulder and Budd responded with as hangtail a smile as the agent had ever in his life encountered.
They would divide into three teams, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie.
The HRU officers, under Dan Tremain, were gathered in a cluster on the left side, the northwest side, of the slaughterhouse, hidden in a grove of trees. The men were now wearing black assault coveralls over their body armor. Nomex hoods and gloves. Their goggles rested on the crest of their foreheads.
Alpha and Bravo teams had four men each, two armed with Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine guns, fitted with B.E.A.M. mounts and halogen flashlights, two armed with H&K Super 90 semiautomatic shotguns. The two HRU troopers in Charlie team had MP-5s as well but were also carrying Accuracy Systems M429 Thunderflash stun grenades and M451 Multistarflash grenades.
Two other troopers had been deployed. Chuck Pfenninger--Outrider One--was in standard uniform beside the command van. Joey Wilson--Outrider Two--in ops armor and camouflage was beneath the middle window to the left of the main door of the slaughterhouse. He was hidden from view of the command post and the troopers in the field by the Laurent Clerc School bus and a ginkgo tree.
Tremain went over the plan one more time in his mind. As soon as Wilson reported that the HTs were as far away from the hostages as they could hope for, Pfenninger would blow the generator in the command van, using an L210 charge, known informally as a mini-Molotov. It was a small gasoline bomb sealed in a special fiberboard container, like single-serving boxes of grape juice or fruit punch. The container would disintegrate under the heat from the blast and would be virtually undetectable by crime-scene technicians. Properly placed, it would cut off all communications and seal the troopers inside the van. The vehicle had been designed to be driven through flames, was well insulated, and had an internal oxygen system. As long as the door remained closed, no one inside would be injured.
Tremain would officially take charge and "declare" that the situation had gone hot.