A burst of gunfire drowned out the sound of her heart, of her whimpering. She screamed into her thumb as wood and plastic chips flew from the door, pelting the floor and garment bags. Then the door squeaked outward and a gun barrel pushed through the neat row of German uniforms. It pushed them to the side and a face peered down at her. A woman's face.
Jody looked from the compact machine-gun-like weapon to the coldness in the woman's liquid gold eyes. The girl was still biting on her thumb.
The woman motioned up with the gun and Jody stood.
Her hands dropped to her sides and perspiration poured down her thighs.
The woman said something in German.
"I— don't understand," Jody said.
"I said pick up your hands and turn around," the woman barked in thickly accented English.
Jody raised her hands face-high, then hesitated. She had read, in one of her classes, about how hostages were often shot in the back of the head.
"Please," she said, "I'm an intern. I was assigned to this movie a few—" "Turn!" the woman snapped.
"Please don't!" Jody said, even as she did what she was told.
When she was facing the window, Jody heard the uniforms being moved aside and felt the warm metal of the gun against the top of her neck.
"Please…" she sobbed.
Jody started as the woman patted her left side from breast to thigh, and then her right. The woman reached in front and felt along her waistband. Then she turned Jody around. The gun was pointing toward her mouth.
"I don't know what this is about," Jody said. She was crying now. "And I wouldn't tell anyone anything—" "Quiet," the woman said.
Jody obeyed. She knew that she would do anything this woman told her. It was frightening to discover how completely her will could be suppressed by a gun and a person who was willing to use it.
The van stopped suddenly and Jody stumbled toward the sink. She hurried back to her feet, hands raised. The woman hadn't moved, didn't look as if her thoughts had been disturbed.
The trailer door opened and a young man walked over.
He stood behind Karin and looked into the bathroom. He had a pale complexion and a swastika carved in his head.
Without taking her eyes off Jody, Karin turned slightly toward the young man and said, "Begin." The man clicked the heels of his boots, turned, and started loading the relics into the trunks.
Karin continued to stare at Jody. "I don't like killing women," the woman said at last, "but I cannot take hostages. They slow me down." That was it. Jody was going to die. She went numb.
She began to sob. She had a flashback to being a little girl, to wetting her pants in first grade when the teacher had yelled at her, to crying and not being able to stop, to the other children laughing at her. Every scrap of confidence and accomplishment and dignity flooded away.
With the trickle of poise that remained to her, Jody fell to the floor. Facing the back of the bathroom, seeing the toilet and sink from the sides of her foggy eyes, she pleaded for her life.
But instead of shooting her, the woman ordered another man, an older man, to remove the uniforms. Then she closed the bathroom door. The girl waited, surprised, half-expecting gunfire to tear through the door. She stood sideways, on the toilet, to make as small and removed a target as possible.
But instead of gunfire, all she heard was a scraping sound followed by a loud whump.
Something had been pushed against the door.
She isn't going to kill me, Jody thought. She's only going to lock me in here.
Perspiration soaked her clothes as she waited. The three hijackers finished quickly in the trailer, and then were gone. She listened. Nothing.
Then one of the hijackers was outside the window. Jody leaned her ear to the wall, and listened. Something metal was turning, followed by clanking, and then the sound of metal being punctured once, twice, and then a third time.
Then she heard fabric being ripped and she smelled gas.
The fuel tank, she thought with horror. They've opened it.
"No!" Jody screamed as she leapt off the toilet. She threw herself against the door. "You said you don't like killing women! Please!" A moment later Jody smelled smoke, heard footsteps running from the van, and saw the orange of the flame reflected against the frosted glass of the window. They were going to burn the trailer with her in it.
The woman isn't killing me, Jody realized then. She's just letting me die.
The girl threw herself against the door. It wouldn't budge. And as the orange grew brighter she stood in the middle of the small room screaming with fear and despair.
CHAPTER TEN
Liz Gordon had just finished grinding up coffee beans and was lighting her first cigarette of the day when the phone rang.
"I wonder who that can be?" the thirty-two-year-old said to herself as she took a long pull on her cigarette.
Ashes fell on her Mike Danger nightshirt and she brushed them off. Then she absently scratched her head through her curly brown hair as she listened to see where she'd left the cordless phone.
Since rising at five, Liz had been going over some of the things she might say when she visited the Striker team later this morning. At their third group session two days before, the elite but very young soldiers were still in shock as they mourned the loss of Charlie Squires. Rookie Sondra DeVonne was taking his death especially hard, sad for Charlie's family and also for herself. Through tears, the Private had said that she'd hoped to learn so much from him. Now all that wisdom and experience was gone. Not passed on.
Dead.
"Where is the freakin' phone?" Liz snarled as she kicked aside the newspapers by the kitchen table.
Not that she was afraid the caller would hang up. At this hour it could only be Monica calling from Italy. And her roommate and best friend would not go away until she got her messages. After all, she'd been gone nearly an entire day.
And if Sinatra calls, thought Op-Center's Staff Psychologist, you want to be able to get right back to him.
For the three years they'd been living together, Liz's workaholic freelance musician friend had done all the nightclubs and weddings and Bar Mitzvahs she could get.
She'd been working so hard, in fact, that Liz had not only ordered her to take a vacation, but had kicked in half the money to make sure she could go.
Liz finally found the phone sitting on one of the kitchen chairs. Before picking it up, Liz took a moment to change worlds. The dynamics between Liz and each of her patients were such that she created separate worlds in her mind for each of them, and inhabited those worlds fully in order to treat them. Otherwise, there would be spillover, lack of focus, distractions. Though Monica was her best friend, not a patient, it was difficult sometimes to make a clear distinction between the two.
As Liz slipped into her Monica world, she checked the message list from under the Chopin magnet on the refrigerator door. The only ones who had called were Monica's drummer, Angelo "Tim" Panni, and her mother, both of whom wanted to make sure she got to Rome okay.
"Pronto, Ms. Sheard!" she said as she clicked on the phone. A telephone hello was one of the two Italian words she knew.
The decidedly masculine voice on the other end said, "Sorry, Liz, it isn't Monica. It's Bob Herbert." "Bob!" Liz said. "This is a surprise. What's happening in the land of Freud?" "I thought Freud was Austrian," Herbert said.
"He was," Liz said, "but the Germans had him for a year. The Anschluss was in 1938. Freud died in 1939." "That's almost not funny," Bob said. "It looks like the Fatherland may be flexing its muscles for a new era of empire-building." She reached for her cigarette. "What do you mean?" "Have you watched the news this morning?" Herbert asked.