"By shooting a hostage in cold blood?"
LeBow said, "This's the hardest kind of negotiation there is, Charlie. After a killing up front, usually the only way to save any hostage is a flat-out assault."
"High stakes," Derek Elb muttered.
Extreme stakes, Arthur Potter thought. Then: Jesus, what a day this's going to be.
"Downlink," Tobe said, and a moment later the phone buzzed. The tape recorder began turning automatically.
Potter picked up the receiver. "Lou?" he said evenly.
"There's something you gotta understand 'bout me, Art. I don't care about these girls. They're just little birds to me that I used to shoot off my back porch at home. I aim to get outta here and if it means I gotta shoot nine more of 'em dead as posts then that's the way it's gonna be. You hear me?"
Potter said, "I do hear you, Lou. But we've got to get one other thing straight. I'm the only man in this universe can get you out of there alive. There's nobody else. So I'm the one to reckon with. Now do you hear me?"
"I'll call you back with our demands."
1:25 P.M.
This was tricky, this was dangerous, this was not about re-election. This was about decency and life. So Daniel Tremain told himself as he walked into the governor's mansion.
Standing upright as a birch rod, he headed through the surprisingly modest home into a large den.
Decency and life.
"Officer."
"Governor."
The Right Honorable Governor of the state of Kansas, A. R. Stepps, was looking at the faint horizon – fields of grain identical to those that had funded his father's insurance company, which had in turn allowed Stepps to be a public servant. Tremain believed Stepps was the perfect governor: connected, distrustful of Washington, infuriated about crime in Topeka and the felons that Missouri sloughed off into his Kansas City but able to live with it all, his eye no further than the low star of a retirement spent teaching in Lawrence and cruising Scandia Lines routes with the wife.
But now there was Crow Ridge.
The governor's eyes lifted from a fax he'd been reading and scanned Tremain.
Look me over if you want. Go right ahead. His blue-and-black operations gear certainly looked incongruous here among the framed prints of shot ducks, the Lemon-Pledged mahogany antiques. Most frequently Stepps's eyes dipped to the large automatic pistol, which the trooper adjusted as he sat in the irritatingly scrolly chair. "He's killed one?"
Tremain nodded his head, which was covered with a thinning crew cut. He noted that the governor had a tiny hole in the elbow of his baby-blue cardigan and that he was absolutely terrified. "What happened?"
"Premeditated, looks like. I'm getting a full report but it looks like there was no reason for it. Sent her out like he was giving her up and shot her in the back."
"Oh, dear God. How young was she?"
"The oldest. A teenager. But still…"
The governor nodded toward a silver service. "Coffee? Tea?… No? You've never been here before, have you?"
"The governor's mansion? No." Though it wasn't a mansion; it was just a nice house, a house that rang with the sounds of family. "I need some help here, Officer. Some of your expertise."
"I'll do whatever I can, sir."
"An odd situation. These prisoners escaped from a federal penitentiary – What is it, Captain?"
"With all respect, sir, that prison at Callana's like it's got a revolving door in it." Tremain recalled four breakouts in the last five years. His own men had captured a number of the escapees, a record better than that of the U.S. marshals, who in Tremain's opinion were overpaid baby-sitters.
The governor began cautiously, like a man stepping onto November ice. "So they're technically federal escapees but they also're lined up for state sentences. Won't be till the year three thousand maybe but the fact is they're state felons too."
"But the FBI's in charge of the barricade." Tremain had been told specifically by the assistant attorney general that his services would not be required in this matter. The trooper was no expert on the hierarchy of state government but even schoolchildren knew that the AG and his underlings worked for the governor. Executive branch. "We have to defer to them, of course. And maybe it's for the best."
The governor said, "This Potter's a fine man…" His voice seemed not to stop but to deflate until it became a dwelling question mark.
Dan Tremain was a career law enforcer and had learned never to say anything that could be quoted back against him even before he'd learned how to cover two opposing doors when diving through a barricade window. "Pride of the FBI, I'm told," the trooper said, assuming that a tape recorder was running somewhere nearby, though it probably wasn't.
"But?" The governor raised an eyebrow.
"I understand he's taking a hard line."
"Which means what?"
Outside the window, threshers moved back and forth.
"It means that he's going to try to wear Handy down and get him to surrender."
"Will Potter attack eventually? If he has to?"
"He's just a negotiator. A federal hostage rescue team's being assembled. They should be here by early evening."
"And if Handy doesn't surrender they'll go in and…"
"Neutralize him."
The round face smiled. The governor looked nostalgically at an ashtray and then back to Tremain. "How soon after they get there will they attack?"
"The rule is that you don't assault except as a last resort. Rand Corporation did a study a few years ago and found that ninety percent of the hostages killed in a barricade are killed when the situation goes hot – when there's an assault. I was going to say something else, sir."
"Please. Speak frankly."
The corner of a sheet of paper peeked out from under the governor's repulsively blue sweater. Tremain recognized it as his own re'sume. He was proud of his record with the state police though he wondered if he wasn't here now because the governor had read the brief paragraph referring to a "consulting" career, which had taken Tremain to Africa and Guatemala after his discharge from the Marines.
"The Rand Corporation study is pretty accurate as far as it goes. But there's something else that bears on this situation, sir. That if there's a killing early in the barricade, negotiations rarely work. The HT – the hostage taker – has little to lose. Sometimes there's a psychological thing that happens and the taker feels so powerful that he'll just keep upping his demands so that they can't be met, just so he'll have an excuse to kill the hostages."
The governor nodded.
"What's your assessment of Handy?"
"I read the file on the way over here and I came up with a profile."
"Which is?"
"He's not psychotic. But he's certainly amoral."
The governor's thin lips twitched into a momentary smile. Because, Tremain thought, I'm a mercenary thug who used the word amoral?
"I think," Tremain continued slowly, "that he's going to kill more of the girls. Maybe all of them ultimately. If he goes mobile and gets away from us I think he'll kill them just for the symmetry of it."
Symmetry. How do you like that, sir? Check out the education portion of my resume. I was cum laude from Lawrence. Top of my class at OCS.
"One other thing we have to consider," the captain continued. "He didn't try very hard to escape from that trooper who found them this afternoon."
"No?"
"There was just that one officer and the three takers, with guns and hostages. It was like Handy's goal wasn't so much to get away but to spend some time…"
"Some time what?"
"With the hostages. If you get what I'm saying. They are all female."
The governor lifted his bulky weight from the chair. He walked to the window. Outside the combines combed the flat landscape, two of the ungainly machines slowly converging. The man sighed deeply.