"I'm dealing with you straight, Chris. No games."
"No games."
"So how are we going to get you out of this, Chris? You and Danielle, how are we going to get you to come on out so nobody gets hurt?"
"We're not going to hurt anybody. That's not why we're here."
"You know, I think that you mean that, I really do. Maybe you can do something to demonstrate that to us. Maybe you can hand over some of your weapons, or some of the powder you have up there-"
"And how am I supposed to do that? I just open the door and drop it out front? I don't want you guys coming up here, I don't want you coming near here. I want you to go away, that's what I want."
"That's not going to happen, Chris. We can talk about anything else you want, but we're not leaving, that's not even on the table, it's not even in consideration, you get me?"
"Fuck you," I said, and hung up on him, then moved over to Alena, who was once more back atop the dresser. I braced myself against the furniture, and she put a foot on my shoulder, then stepped up and pulled herself into the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof.
"How's it look?" I asked.
Her voice came back soft, a little muffled. "Cold. There's insulation. The shingles look like composite."
The phone started ringing again.
"We're going to need more time," she told me. "I don't want to talk to you right now," I said.
"Listen, I've got to tell you something." Galloway sounded concerned. "You're not going to like this, but I think you need to hear it, and I'm hoping you'll take it well."
"You don't want to come up here," I said.
"The guys that are running this show out here, they're getting some grief, Chris. It's twenty degrees out here, it's dark, we've got the media watching this play out. You got your television on? You can see it, we're on the television. And my bosses, they're saying they're going to cut your power. No reason you should be comfortable and warm and have light in there when we don't. So we're going to put you and Danielle in the dark, and it's going to get cold up there pretty fast."
"You do what you have to do," I said. "You do what you have to do, but I got over being afraid of the dark a long time ago. I'm hanging up now, I don't want to hear from you right now. You can call me back in an hour, maybe we can talk then."
I hung up, then turned to the gap in the ceiling and said, "They're killing the power."
"About time," Alena said.
The lights went out. So did the television.
"Keep your voice low," she warned.
The phone started ringing again. I checked my watch, saw that it was seven minutes past six. I let it ring. It stopped after three minutes, and silence flowed into the void it had made. I could make out the slight sound of Alena above me, in the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof, trying to remove the shingles one by one. From her bag, I found a sweatshirt she'd picked up in her shopping, sent it up through the hole to her, but she sent it right down again.
"I don't want to sweat," she said. "It'll be cold outside."
I stowed the sweatshirt back in her bag, then went through my bag and put on a couple of extra layers myself. I zipped the bags closed, moved them to the dresser, beside the television, so they would be easy to hand up. Then I went to the door and gave it a listen. No outside noise penetrated, no sounds of traffic, no squawks of radios.
They were waiting, just like we were waiting. In the main, hostage negotiations follow the same patterns as SWAT deployments and the like. Once negotiations have been opened, the guiding principle is to continue them for as long as possible, unless a further development changes the situation. Even though I was refusing to answer the phone, the negotiations were still considered open. Closing them would require a command decision-most likely not to be made until the federal forces arrived-or an act of violence on our part that forced an escalation. If we became an immediate threat to life and limb, they'd have to take us.
But otherwise, they would continue to try to wait us out. With the cold and the darkness and the promise of a very long night ahead of us, they could afford to.
After another fifteen minutes, the phone started ringing again. It rang until a little after half past six, then stopped. At a minute past seven, Alena stuck her head down through the hole in the ceiling. "It's done."
I moved to help her down, and she slid out of the gap headfirst, into my arms, and it was almost like dancing the way I flipped her onto her feet.
"You get a look outside?" I whispered back.
"There's no one on our roof. The grade is severe, and the ice makes it treacherous. We will have to be very careful. But because of the ice, they will think we won't try the roof."
"Anything to secure to, to lower ourselves down?"
She shook her head, then pointed to the queen bed.
We stripped the bed, including the pillowcases and the bedsheet. We tore the linens down to roughly five-inch strips, working as fast as we could. The phone started jangling again, and I stopped my shredding to check my watch. It was six minutes past seven. I waited until the second hand had swept past the twelve, then answered.
"I told you I'd talk to you in an hour, I meant an hour," I said. "Did you not understand me?"
"Just wanted to make sure you knew I was still here for you, Chris. You two still doing all right?"
"It's getting a little cold," I admitted.
"Yeah, nights like this, it can get down in single digits, sometimes even lower. Gets too cold to snow, even."
"I'll take your word for it."
We shared a companionable pause, or a pause that, at least, we both hoped the other thought was companionable. Alena had all our strips piled on the bed now, was beginning to secure the ends one to the other in knots.
"You sure you don't want to talk about Montana?" Galloway asked. "Give me your side of it?"
"You keep asking about that."
"It's confusing, it's not really clear."
I fumbled around for something to say, something that would suit the part, and finally found myself parroting Bowles. "I'm a patriot, I love my country, you understand me?"
"Sure, I understand."
"But part of that, part of being an American is fearing my government. That's my job as a citizen, right? That's what we're supposed to do, to keep them honest, to keep an eye on them."
"I know what you mean."
"Everyone's got their hand out," I said. "I mean everyone, it's out of control, it's greed, it's just pure greed. Everything is about how much they can get from you and me, and the hell with the rest of it."
"Tell me about it."
"I am, okay? I am telling you about it. It's all greed, it's all these government types just taking and taking and robbing us, robbing us of our future and our promise."
"Sure. I mean, utility companies, look at that. That's just another secret tax, right? They're just another arm of the government."
"That's right, that's right exactly."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alena pause in her knot tying, shaking her head in mild amusement at my performance. I shrugged.
"You're making a lot of sense, Chris," Galloway said. "I think there are a lot of people who feel the way you do."
"There are. A lot of us, there sure are."
"But I guess you'll agree that, you know, how things look now, people aren't getting that message. How things look now, you understand, that message isn't coming across."
"What?"
"You and Danielle, you're in that room, the lights are out and the heat's off and we're all out here, and the cameras are out here with us, you understand. And nobody's going to let those cameras go in there, we just can't do that. You're a smart guy, I can tell you know why we can't do that."
"Let me talk to one of them," I said. "One of the reporters."
"My superiors won't allow that, Chris, c'mon. You want to talk to these people, you're going to have to come out of there, that's the only way it'll work. You come out, nobody gets hurt, that's better for you in the long run, don't you think?"