“I understand. SWAT’s play.”
“What’s he got?”
“Two pistols and a knife, Lieutenant—Jacobs, see if there’s any ammo in the gunbelts.”
“Dump pouches,” the patrolman said. “Pembry’s still full, Boyle’s too. Dumb shit didn’t take the extra rounds.”
“What are they?”
“Thirty-eight +Ps JHP.”
Tate was back on the radio. “Lieutenant, it looks like he’s got two six-shot .38s. We heard three rounds fired and the dump pouches on the gunbelts are still full, so he may just have nine left. Advise SWAT it’s +Ps jacketed hollowpoints. This guy favors the face.”
Plus Ps were hot rounds, but they would not penetrate SWAT’s body armor. A hit in the face would very likely be fatal, a hit on a limb would maim.
“Stretchers coming up, Tate.”
The ambulances were there amazingly fast, but it did not seem fast enough to Tate, listening to the pitiful thing at his feet. Young Murray was trying to hold the groaning, jerking body, trying to talk reassuringly and not look at him, and he was saying, “You’re just fine, Pembry, looking good,” over and over in the same sick tone.
As soon as he saw the ambulance attendants on the landing, Tate yelled, “Corpsman!” as he had in war.
He got Murray by the shoulder and moved him out of the way. The ambulance attendants worked fast, expertly securing the clenched, blood-slick fists under the belt, getting an airway in and peeling a nonstick surgical bandage to get some pressure on the bloody face and head. One of them popped an intravenous plasma pack, but the other, taking blood pressure and pulse, shook his head and said, “Downstairs.”
Orders on the radio now. “Tate, I want you to clear the offices in the tower and seal it off. Secure the doors from the main building. Then cover from the landings. I’m sending up vests and shotguns. We’ll get him alive if he wants to come, but we take no special risks to preserve his life. Understand me?”
“I got it, Lieutenant.”
“I want SWAT and nobody but SWAT in the main building. Let me have that back.”
Tate repeated the order.
Tate was a good sergeant and he showed it now as he and Jacobs shrugged into their heavy armored vests and followed the gurney as the orderlies carried it down the stairs to the ambulance. A second crew followed with Boyle. The men on the landings were angry, seeing the gurneys pass, and Tate had a word of wisdom for them: “Don’t let your temper get your ass shot off.”
As the sirens wailed outside, Tate, backed by the veteran Jacobs, carefully cleared the offices and sealed off the tower.
A cool draft blew down the hall on four. Beyond the door, in the vast dark spaces of the main building, the telephones were ringing. In dark offices all over the building, buttons on telephones were winking like fireflies, the bells sounding over and over.
The word was out that Dr. Lecter was “barricaded” in the building, and radio and television reporters were calling, dialing fast with their modems, trying to get live interviews with the monster. To avoid this, SWAT usually has the telephones shut off, except for one that the negotiator uses. This building was too big, the offices too many.
Tate closed and locked the door on the rooms of blinking telephones. His chest and back were wet and itching under the hardshell vest.
He took his radio off his belt. “CP, this is Tate, the tower’s clear, over.”
“Roger, Tate. Captain wants you at the CP.”
“Ten-four. Tower lobby, you there?”
“Here, Sarge.”
“It’s me on the elevator, I’m bringing it down.”
“Gotcha, Sarge.”
Jacobs and Tate were in the elevator riding down to the lobby when a drop of blood fell on Tate’s shoulder. Another hit his shoe.
He looked at the ceiling of the car, touched Jacobs, motioning for silence.
Blood was dripping from the crack around the service hatch in the top of the car. It seemed a long ride down to the lobby. Tate and Jacobs stepped off backwards, guns pointed at the ceiling of the elevator. Tate reached back in and locked the car.
“Shhhh,” Tate said in the lobby. Quietly, “Berry, Howard, he’s on the roof of the elevator. Keep it covered.”
Tate went outside. The black SWAT van was on the lot. SWAT always had a variety of elevator keys.
They were set up in moments, two SWAT officers in black body armor and headsets climbing the stairs to the third-floor landing. With Tate in the lobby were two more, their assault rifles pointed at the elevator ceiling.
Like the big ants that fight, Tate thought.
The SWAT commander was talking into his headset. “Okay, Johnny.”
On the third floor, high above the elevator, Officer Johnny Peterson turned his key in the lock and the elevator door slid open. The shaft was dark. Lying on his back in the corridor, he took a stun grenade from his tactical vest and put it on the floor beside him. “Okay, I’ll take a look now.”
He took out his mirror with its long handle and stuck it over the edge while his partner shined a powerful flashlight down the shaft.
“I see him. He’s on top of the elevator. I see a weapon beside him. He’s not moving.”
The question in Peterson’s earphone, “Can you see his hands?”
“I see one hand, the other one’s under him. He’s got the sheets around him.”
“Tell him.”
“PUT YOUR HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD AND FREEZE,” Peterson yelled down the shaft. “He didn’t move, Lieutenant.… Right.”
“IF YOU DON’T PUT YOUR HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD I’LL DROP A STUN GRENADE ON YOU. I’LL GIVE YOU THREE SECONDS,” Peterson called. He took from his vest one of the doorstops every SWAT officer carries. “OKAY, GUYS, WATCH OUT DOWN THERE—HERE COMES THE GRENADE.” He dropped the doorstop over the edge, saw it bounce on the figure. “He didn’t move, Lieutenant.”
“Okay, Johnny, we’re gonna push the hatch up with a pole from outside the car. Can you get the drop?”
Peterson rolled over. His .45 automatic, cocked and locked, pointed straight down at the figure. “Got the drop,” he said.
Looking down the elevator shaft, Peterson could see the crack of light appear below as the officers in the foyer pushed up on the hatch with a SWAT boathook. The still figure was partly over the hatch and one of the arms moved as the officers pushed from below.
Peterson’s thumb pressed a shade harder on the safety of the Colt. “His arm moved, Lieutenant, but I think it’s just the hatch moving it.”
“Roger. Heave.”
The hatch banged backward and lay against the wall of the elevator shaft. It was hard for Peterson to look down into the light. “He hasn’t moved. His hand’s not on the weapon.”
The calm voice in his ear, “Okay, Johnny, hold up. We’re coming into the car, so watch with the mirror for movement. Any fire will come from us. Affirm?”
“Got it.”
In the lobby, Tate watched them go into the car. A rifleman loaded with armor-piercing aimed his weapon at the ceiling of the elevator. A second officer climbed on a ladder. He was armed with a large automatic pistol with a flashlight clamped beneath it. A mirror and the pistol-light went up through the hatch. Then the officer’s head and shoulders. He handed down a .38 revolver. “He’s dead,” the officer called down.
Tate wondered if the death of Dr. Lecter meant Catherine Martin would die too, all the information lost when the lights went out in that monster mind.
The officers were pulling him down now, the body coming upside down through the elevator hatch, eased down into many arms, an odd deposition in a lighted box. The lobby was filling up, policemen crowding up to see.
A corrections officer pushed forward, looked at the body’s outflung tattooed arms.
“That’s Pembry,” he said.
CHAPTER 38
In the back of the howling ambulance, the young attendant braced himself against the sway and turned to his radio to report to his eme
rgency room supervisor, talking loud above the siren.
“He’s comatose but the vital signs are good. He’s got good pressure. One-thirty over ninety. Yeah, ninety. Pulse eighty-five. He’s got severe facial cuts with elevated flaps, one eye enucleated. I’ve got pressure on the face and an airway in place. Possible gunshot in the head, I can’t tell.”
Behind him on the stretcher, the balled and bloody fists relax inside the waistband. The right hand slides out, finds the buckle on the strap across the chest.
“I’m scared to put much pressure on the head—he showed some convulsive movement before we put him on the gurney. Yeah, got him in the Fowler position.”
Behind the young man, the hand gripped the surgical bandage and wiped out the eyes.
The attendant heard the airway hiss close behind him, turned and saw the bloody face in his, did not see the pistol descending and it caught him hard over the ear.
The ambulance slowing to a stop in traffic on the six-lane freeway, drivers behind it confused and honking, hesitant to pull around an emergency vehicle. Two small pops like backfires in the traffic and the ambulance started up again, weaving, straightening out, moving to the right lane.
The airport exit coming up. The ambulance piddled along in the right lane, various emergency lights going on and off on the outside of it, wipers on and off, then the siren wailing down, starting up, wailing down to silence and the flashing lights going off. The ambulance proceeding quietly, taking the exit to Memphis International Airport, the beautiful building floodlit in the winter evening. It took the curving drive as far as the automated gates to the vast underground parking field. A bloody hand came out to take a ticket. And the ambulance disappeared down the tunnel to the parking field beneath the ground.
CHAPTER 39
Normally, Clarice Starling would have been curious to see Crawford’s house in Arlington, but the bulletin on the car radio about Dr. Lecter’s escape knocked all that out of her.
Lips numb and scalp prickling, she drove by rote, saw the neat 1950s ranch house without looking at it, and only wondered dimly if the lit, curtained windows on the left were where Bella was lying. The doorbell seemed too loud.
Crawford opened the door on the second ring. He wore a baggy cardigan and he was talking on a wireless phone. “Copley in Memphis,” he said. Motioning for her to follow, he led her through the house, grunting into the telephone as he went.
In the kitchen, a nurse took a tiny bottle from the refrigerator and held it to the light. When Crawford raised his eyebrows to the nurse, she shook her head, she didn’t need him.
He took Starling to his study, down three steps into what was clearly a converted double garage. There was good space here, a sofa and chairs, and on the cluttered desk a computer terminal glowed green beside an antique astrolabe. The rug felt as though it was laid on concrete. Crawford waved her to a seat.
He put his hand over the receiver. “Starling, this is baloney, but did you hand Lecter anything at all in Memphis?”
“No.”
“No object.”
“Nothing.”
“You took him the drawings and stuff from his cell.”
“I never gave it to him. The stuff’s still in my bag. He gave me the file. That’s all that passed between us.”
Crawford tucked the phone under his jowl. “Copley, that’s unmitigated bullshit. I want you to step on that bastard and do it now. Straight to the chief, straight to the TBI. See the hotline’s posted with the rest. Burroughs is on it. Yes.” He turned off the phone and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Want some coffee, Starling? Coke?”
“What was that about handing things to Dr. Lecter?”
“Chilton’s saying you must have given Lecter something he used to slip the ratchet on the cuffs. You didn’t do it on purpose, he says—it was just ignorance.” Sometimes Crawford had angry little turtle-eyes. He watched how she took it. “Did Chilton try to snap your garters, Starling? Is that what’s the matter with him?”
“Maybe. I’ll take black with sugar, please.”
While he was in the kitchen, she took deep breaths and looked around the room. If you live in a dormitory or a barracks, it’s comforting to be in a home. Even with the ground shaking under Starling, her sense of the Crawfords’ lives in this house helped her.
Crawford was coming, careful down the steps in his bifocals, carrying the cups. He was half an inch shorter in his moccasins. When Starling stood to take her coffee, their eyes were almost level. He smelled like soap, and his hair looked fluffy and gray.
“Copley said they haven’t found the ambulance yet. Police barracks are turning out all over the South.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know any details. The radio just had the bulletin—Dr. Lecter killed two policemen and got away.”
“Two corrections officers.” Crawford punched up the crawling text on his computer screen. “Names were Boyle and Pembry. You deal with them?”
She nodded. “They … put me out of the lockup. They were okay about it.” Pembry coming around Chilton, uncomfortable, determined, but country-courteous. Come on with me, now, he said. He had liver spots on his hands and forehead. Dead now, pale beneath his spots.
Suddenly Starling had to put her coffee down. She filled her lungs deep and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “How’d he do it?”
“He got away in an ambulance, Copley said. We’ll go into it. How did you make out with the blotter acid?”
Starling had spent the late afternoon and early evening walking the sheet of Plutos through Scientific Analysis on Krendler’s orders. “Nothing. They’re trying the DEA files for a batch-match, but the stuff’s ten years old. Documents may do better with the printing than DEA can do with the dope.”
“But it was blotter acid.”
“Yes. How’d he do it, Mr. Crawford?”
“Want to know?”
She nodded.
“Then I’ll tell you. They loaded Lecter into an ambulance by mistake. They thought he was Pembry, badly injured.”
“Did he have on Pembry’s uniform? They were about the same size.”
“He put on Pembry’s uniform and part of Pembry’s face. And about a pound off Boyle, too. He wrapped Pembry’s body in the waterproof mattress cover and the sheets from his cell to keep it from dripping and stuffed it on top of the elevator. He put on the uniform, got himself fixed up, laid on the floor and fired shots into the ceiling to start the stampede. I don’t know what he did with the gun, stuffed it down the back of his pants, maybe. The ambulance comes, cops everywhere with their guns out. The ambulance crew came in fast and did what they’re trained to do under fire—they stuffed in an airway, slapped a bandage over the worst of it, pressure to stop bleeding, and hauled out of there. They did their job. The ambulance never made it to the hospital. The police are still looking for it. I don’t feel good about those medics. Copley said they’re playing the dispatcher’s tapes. The ambulances were called a couple of times. They think Lecter called the ambulances himself before he fired the shots, so he wouldn’t have to lie around too long. Dr. Lecter likes his fun.”
Starling had never heard the bitter snarl in Crawford’s voice before. Because she associated bitter with weak, it frightened her.
“This escape doesn’t mean Dr. Lecter was lying,” Starling said. “Sure, he was lying to somebody—us or Senator Martin—but maybe he wasn’t lying to both of us. He told Senator Martin it was Billy Rubin and claimed that’s all he knew. He told me it was somebody with delusions of being a transsexual. About the last thing he said to me was, ‘Why not finish the arch?’ He was talking about following the sex-change theory that—”
“I know, I saw your summary. There’s nowhere to go with that until we get names from the clinics. Alan Bloom’s gone personally to the department heads. They say they’re looking. I have to believe it.”
“Mr. Crawford, are you in the glue?”
“I’m directed to take compassionate leave,” Cra
wford said. “There’s a new task force of FBI, DEA, and ‘additional elements’ from the Attorney General’s office—meaning Krendler.”
“Who’s boss?”
“Officially, FBI Assistant Director John Golby. Let’s say he and I are in close consultation. John’s a good man. What about you, are you in the glue?”
“Krendler told me to turn in my ID and the roscoe and report back to school.”
“That was all he did before your visit to Lecter. Starling, he sent a rocket this afternoon to the Office of Professional Responsibility. It was a request ‘without prejudice’ that the Academy suspend you pending a reevaluation of your fitness for the service. It’s a chickenshit backshot. The Chief Gunny, John Brigham, saw it in the faculty meeting at Quantico a little while ago. He gave ’em an earful and got on the horn to me.”
“How bad is that?”
“You’re entitled to a hearing. I’ll vouch for your fitness and that’ll be enough. But if you spend any more time away, you’ll definitely be recycled, regardless of any finding at a hearing. Do you know what happens when you’re recycled?”
“Sure, you’re sent back to the regional office that recruited you. You get to file reports and make coffee until you get another spot in a class.”
“I can promise you a place in a later class, but I can’t keep them from recycling you if you miss the time.”
“So I go back to school and stop working on this, or…”
“Yeah.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Your job was Lecter. You did it. I’m not asking you to take a recycle. It could cost you, maybe half a year, maybe more.”
“What about Catherine Martin?”
“He’s had her almost forty-eight hours—be forty-eight hours at midnight. If we don’t catch him he’ll probably do her tomorrow or the next day, if it’s like last time.”
“Lecter’s not all we had.”
“They got six William Rubins so far, all with priors of one kind or another. None of ’em look like much. No Billy Rubins on the bug journal subscription lists. The Knifemakers Guild knows about five cases of ivory anthrax in the last ten years. We’ve got a couple of those left to check. What else? Klaus hasn’t been identified—yet. Interpol reports a fugitive warrant outstanding in Marseilles for a Norwegian merchant seaman, a ‘Klaus Bjetland,’ however you say it. Norway’s looking for his dental records to send. If we get anything from the clinics, and you’ve got the time, you can help with it. Starling?”