“Any movement?”
“Negative. All quiet here.”
Squads covering other stairwells reported the same. The infrared scanner from across the street reported heat signatures inside the office at the southeast corner. Brighton dialed Whales’s number, waited five rings, then cursed loudly when a woman’s voice asked him to kindly leave a message for Mr. Cornwell.
“Son of a bitch,” he growled. Although he had been instructed to report to his superiors before taking any drastic measures, Brighton was by then pretty sick of phone calls.
“All SWAT teams, move in immediately,” he snapped. “Standard ROE. Keep the radio on.”
Glaring at the snug Secret Service agents, he went inside. In his earpiece the doors were being breached and shouts of “Go, go, go!” resounded. No gunfire out right. He knew storming the doors could mean casualties, but the hostages, presumably aside from the fat Mr. Cornwell, had been safely evacuated. If it so happened that they lost the producer… He shrugged and continued to descend, monitoring the chatter.
“This is Rose,” a calm but slightly hurried voice came after a while. “Place seems dead.”
“This is Mauser, Charlie squad. We have noise in the executive office.”
“Go in,” Brighton said hollowly.
“Yes, sir.”
A minute later Mauser reported locating six civilians taped to chairs around a conference table. Two females and four males, one of whom was the office’s owner, Mr. Cornwell, in various state of undress. Brighton switched frequency to Dietrich’s even before the SWAT mentioned the pile of discarded clothing in the corner. He shouted for Dietrich to detain all hostages immediately, and knew Dietrich took off at a run when he hung up, but he also knew by then it would be too late.
Chapter Forty-Six
Thirty hours, give or take a few, passed since we’d escaped the siege with the help of Tiffany’s magic hands. As I watched Iris play in the sand with Brome’s four-year-old, and as beads of sweat collected in the stubble under my nose, I was reminded of the conversation Iris and I had a few days earlier at my place after we made love. Now I felt we all were time travelers from the past. Only instead of an armchair with a lot of mirrors, our time machine had been an underground train, in which we managed to skip seven or eight useless months and emerge under midsummer sun.
If you ever traveled to Florida in winter, you know what I am talking about.
Annie’s bell-like giggles also made it seem like all our troubles were over, but unfortunately that illusion did not last long. I was all too aware of Paul sleeping in fever inside the small cottage behind me, and although Brome and his wife had gone pretty far up the beach, the heat of their conversation was obvious. Grace, Brome’s wife, gestured quite eloquently.
“For what?” I imagined hearing her voice. “Who is he to you? Did you think of Annie? Did you think of me?”
Iris gazed at me, then at the couple in the distance, then back at me. I had nothing to say. Grace was right, of course, but without Brome we would all be dead, so I couldn’t really support her beyond acknowledging that fact. Brome saved our lives. It would be enough to tell Annie her dad was a hero, Grace however… Grace was an adult. To an adult, a hero on TV deserved applause; in real life, up close, a hero, especially a selfless one, was stupid at best. So I shrugged, and Iris returned her attention to the sand castle she and Annie had started to build.
The castle they wouldn’t get the chance to finish. We couldn’t stay at the beach cottage Grace had rented for long. We might have stayed too long already.
I looked up toward where Brome and his wife were talking. I needed him back to begin deciding where to go next, but they showed no sign of returning.
Sighing, I lifted a towel to wipe the sweat off my face. When I brought it back down, a white sailboat rocked on the waves in front of me, three hundred feet off the shore. A lean forty-five-footer, it looked just like the boat I had always wanted but never got around to buying. Three men, all clad in white, seemed to be staring in our direction from its deck.
“Iris,” I said barely audibly, but she heard me and lifted her head. Following my stare she turned and saw the boat, just as a black banner flew up its single mast. Iris and I jumped to our feet at the same time.
“Annie, go inside,” Iris said.
The girl stared in astonishment, and for a moment I thought with dread that I would have to scare her. She studied our faces briefly, gazed at the boat and, thankfully, got up and ran towards me and the porch. I heard her pause in the doorway behind me, then the door closed.
Iris was slowly walking backwards, eyes on the vessel. Taxing my creativity, I assumed what seemed to me a protective position in front of the cottage door. Exactly what degree of protection either me or the old plywood door would provide when it came right down to it remained to be seen. I suspected it wouldn’t be a high degree.
Of course, by then I’d more or less pieced from my companions’ hints what had happened on the roof of the black building. I say hints, because a loud discussion of the event’s origins and implications, the kind we would undoubtedly have commenced back in our dorms a decade ago, had never taken place. I’d simply gathered the witnesses’ statements in a process no more involved than an insurance adjuster’s would be, and everyone was content. I kind of believed it, too, not because it was plausible, but because I didn’t think Iris or any of the others were lying. Either way, the knowledge, if it could be called that without being a memory, of having mysteriously defeated a super-strong alien in hand-to-hand match failed to bring comfort. First of all, I had no idea how I did it. And second, I doubted that my latent wrestling skills, outstanding as they may have been, would stop a bullet or seventy, fired from a rapid-fire machine gun.
Our own hands were empty. All the firepower had been discarded in Jimbo’s office, even the infamous “Silver Killer.”
There was movement in the left corner of my vision. Brome was running. He must have told Grace to stay where she was, because she was running about fifty feet behind him. In the other direction the beach lay barren as far as I could see, aside from an elderly couple taking a nap under a red-white-and-blue umbrella two cottages over. They were close enough to be awakened by gunfire, but so what?
Ten maddening seconds later a small boat appeared from behind the ship and sped towards the shore. In it sat a lone man, and as he came closer, I relaxed and leaned heavily on the door. The man — a kid, really — waved and grinned from under a mess of blond hair. I couldn’t help grinning back. Iris stared, wide-eyed. Brome stopped running and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, but I saw that he was also relieved. Grace, who must have been scared out of her wits, caught up to her husband and hung on his arm, looking up at him for answers.
“A black flag?” I called out. “Why not a warning cannon shot to ease our minds?”
“Someone could have heard it,” Bogdan shouted back. Then, as the boat continued towards the shore, he jumped out and ran the last fifty or so feet beside it. On the water. Even to me it looked spooky. From Brome’s direction came an audible gasp.
“Hey, no freaky stuff,” I managed weakly. “We got a kid here.”
“Sorry.” Both Bogdan and the boat now reached the beach. He went up to turn off the engine. In the following silence he bowed and added with a round gesture, “All aboard.”
“Going where?” asked Brome.
“There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Bogdan said. “And you know who are close. They picked up your trail. They’re angry. We have to leave. Now.”
“Won’t they continue to pick up the trail no matter where we go?” I asked. It never even occurred to me to wonder how he’d found us.