“I give you nothing, Watson, and anyone steps on my porch, it’s the last step they take. I’ve done too much talking already. I know why you want me on that phone. So no one else can hear. That’s shady right there, and you want my trust.”
Banish held his mouth with a full hand, slowing down the conversation, picking his shots. The mistakes of New York City weighed heavily on his mind. “I do want your trust, Mr. Ables. And I’d like the chance to prove that to you. Is there anything I can get for you now, anything you need? You must be very low on food and water in there. I’m thinking especially of the infant — clean diapers, baby food?”
“You’d drug the food and poison the water. And nothing you won’t give me without a trade. I know what’s going on. I am through talking now. All I want from you is for everyone to just go away and leave me and my family alone.”
“Mr. Ables, we can’t leave.”
“Well then, neither can I.”
There was a sharp click and then the hiss of dead air. Banish weighed briefly the prospect of trying to get Ables back on the line, then dismissed it and set down the handset.
“He’s canny,” he said, sitting back, nodding. “He’s been waiting for this for a long time.”
Fagin said, “He’s fucking pissed is what he is.”
“He’s grandstanding. He knows he has an audience out there and he wants his side told. That’s good. That’s very good. Twice he said he was talking too much, then kept right on going. And hear him refer to a trial? He doesn’t want to die up there.” Banish gestured at the CB with confidence. “That’s no death wish. He’s thinking about the future.”
“But no deadlines,” Fagin said. “No demands. Nothing to negotiate.”
“He was feeling us out. Trying to get a better look at things down here.”
Banish stood, recharged. He saw Perkins standing behind everyone in that disappearing way he had. “Stupid,” Banish said. “But it got him to talk. He needs more convincing. I want to step up Tactical. More noise, a tighter net. Roving searchlights. Helicopters buzzing the cabin every five minutes.” He turned to Coyle. “Put someone on this CB full-time and keep that channel clear. Anything else comes through, I am to be called immediately.”
He glanced about the tent. This was progress, solid progress, the preliminary pawn-takes-pawn, slow-dance maneuvering finally paying off. Banish paced. He told himself to be patient. There would be no sleep for him again that night, too many things to think about, to review, to prepare. Too many loose ends to consider. He had to get out of these tents. He needed to get out into the open air and settle his head.
He caught Fagin as he was leaving. “Send someone over to suit me up,” he said. “I’m going to sit out a watch tonight.”
Paradise Point
Banish crouched on his knees in a gully thirty-five yards below the cabin. The stadium lights were all off now, a single searchlight trawling the patchwork of pitted scrap wood in the distance, illuminating in roving circular sections the lopsided cabin that was the focus of all their attention. The refuse of their few days there — the bullet casings, half-devoured dog carcasses, tree limbs, the phone — littered the thinning, sloping land in between.
He turned and sat against the dirt wall with his back to the cabin. His radio and a 7mm Remington rifle were on the ground by his side. There had been no cure for the problem of the decomposing dogs — what the coyotes had not already torn off and taken away only a treatment, and Banish decided he needed more of it. He brought out the small glass jar of Vicks VapoRub and smeared himself a generous gel mustache over the greasepaint camouflaging his face.
He was positioned behind and to the left of the loudspeaker. The pleading voices he heard seemed to come from ghosts deep within the trees.
Margie. It’s mother. Your father’s here with me, we’re both praying for you. Margie — enough is enough. Glenn, you too. Just come down now. There’s no point to this anymore. We’ve got four beautiful grandchildren, including little Amos we’ve never even seen. There’s nowhere you can all go, and now your father and me can’t imagine what you’re up there waiting for. The babies’ lives are in your hands. Just come to your senses, all of you. For their sakes. You need to keep them safe now. Then we can make funeral arrangements for Judith.
Silence then. Banish heard a helicopter approaching over the trees.
Marjorie. It’s your father. Come home.
The Huey roared low, ripping apart the thin air overhead and rumbling the ground. Dead leaves fluttered and fell in dozens and the treetops wagged in its wake.
Kearney appeared standing at the top of the opposite side of the gully. His face was obscured by greasepaint and he wore a borrowed, loose-fitting camouflage jumpsuit, vest, cap. Banish looked up at him from where he was seated. Kearney said “You wanted to see me?” with affected toughness, but it was plain to Banish that Kearney was more than a little nervous.
Banish told him, “You’d better come down from there.”
Kearney looked up to the cabin and saw that he was well within the line of fire. He dropped down into the gully, and after a moment of standing there, squatted down and sat back against the dirt wall opposite Banish. From there he looked around. His lips came out a bit and his brow furrowed.
“Dead dogs,” Banish said, tossing him the Vicks. Kearney looked at the small jar with suspicion. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed, the folds in his brow evening out. “Under your nose,” Banish said. Kearney pulled off a glove and began to apply it. Banish said, “How long have you been married?”
Kearney’s eyes shot to the gold band on his bare finger but he managed to check his overall response.
“Almost a year now,” he admitted.
“No kids?”
Kearney shook his head. “One on the way.”
“You hid that ring when I had you in formation.”
“Yes, sir.”
Banish nodded. “Maybe you see why I did that now. This is no, place for a man with a wife and children.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you wanted to be a part of things,” Banish said. “Nothing would have kept you away.”
“I guess that’s so, sir.”
Banish looked at him, nodding. “Why do you think I selected you? Out of all those others.”
Kearney said, “I don’t know, sir.”
“Do you think it was anything more than an efficient way of paring down the number of men?”
Kearney looked at him a while. “I guess I don’t really know, sir.”
Banish slipped deeper into thought. Another disembodied voice in the woods pled with the cabin. Banish looked up and down the darkened gully. “This is where the dead marshal was posted before he was shot.”
Kearney regarded the gully solemnly and set down the jar of Vicks, his white eyes showing respect.
Banish set himself as comfortably as he could against the hard dirt wall. “There’s an old FBI tradition,” he said, “on a surveillance, of telling stories. When I first came up, it was Hoover stories. Everybody had one. J. Edgar Hoover was an idiosyncratic man, he never married, and his assistant, a non agent named Clyde Tolson — well, they were pretty tight. So there was talk. The kind of stories you could only tell to a fellow agent, because if you talked to anybody on the outside, next week your name could wind up on a list in somebody’s drawer.”
Banish folded his arms across his vest. “I was the most successful hostage negotiator of my time. I held the position of Chief Hostage Negotiator for the New York City FBI Field Office from 1979 to 1990. In those eleven and a half years I never once lost a hostage, never once failed to effect a resolution. How? Negotiation. Deception. Intimidation. Things I am not now very proud of. My most effective tactic, the one in certain circles I’m probably best known for, was to bring to the scene the wife, mother, child, whatever — some close relative of the hostage-taker — get some personal information from them, and then go to the phone and make veiled indications to the suspect about what might happen to his family if he didn’t give himself up. “Whatever it takes’ was my motto. He takes a hostage, you take a hostage. By any means necessary.