“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
-General George S. Patton
George had just managed to get the worst of the stain off of his tuxedo shirt when the sudden explosion of gunfire caused him to jump so hard that he rammed his shoulder hard into the towel dispenser. He instinctively ducked and crawled to the door to get an idea of what was going on. From the bathroom he could see chaos erupting in the ballroom. More gunshots slammed against his eardrums.
Comprehension seemed to come in waves: attack, armed men, gunfire… He didn’t know exactly what was going on, only that something terrible was happening.
George frantically tried to consider his options: if he stayed here, he could try to fight back, unarmed, against an unknown number of men who were probably well trained and certainly armed with automatic weapons. If he ran, he might be able to call for help.
Well, when he put it like that…
Keeping low to the ground, George scrambled across the hall as fast as he could. He stumbled as he passed the corner, but by then he was at least screened from the main ballroom. The view he had glimpsed showed the invaders all focused on subduing the crowd of hostages. It looked like a few of the military guys were trying to fight back, but were being clubbed to the ground by rifle butts. George didn’t try to get a better look. He straightened up and covered the remaining distance to the stairwell at a run.
It had taken Ben a moment to process the fact that he was actually hearing gunfire. By the time he had understood what was happening, Martha had grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him to the floor with an unpleasant bump.
There were at least ten men in the elevator, and they all were carrying compact assault rifles. A few of them had fired over the heads of the crowd to announce their presence, while the rest had spread out and begun shouting orders and subduing the stunned party guests.
Ben pressed his face into the carpet, covering his head with his hands, and feeling more terrified than he had ever been in his life. The sound of more gunshots, then more and louder screams. It all seemed to go on forever.
Then above the screams, there came a single, ear-splitting blast, and everyone fell silent. Slowly, Ben looked up.
Otto Strasser stood in the front of the room, not ten feet away, pointing a huge, heavy pistol at the ceiling.
“Everyone calm down,” he ordered in his slow, precise voice. The room grew still, like boiling water taken off the stove.
Strasser? Ben thought. What is he…
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Strasser. “Distinguished representatives of Centron Farms Incorporated, officers of the United States Military, you came here tonight to express your support of America’s imperialistic adventures against the Socialist Republic of Tanzania. My colleagues and I would like to express a contrary position.”
Ben slowly picked himself up and rose to his knees, looking about him. The invaders had subdued the crowd completely. They looked to be mostly Africans, though he saw a couple white faces among them. All looked hard, rugged, and mean, and all were carrying compact assault rifles.
His eye was drawn particularly to a grim figure standing half-shadowed in the hall doorway. Ben couldn’t see him too well, except that he was big, black, and seemed to bulge in odd ways. His eyes glittered like stars as he watched the crowd. Then Strasser spoke again, and Ben’s attention returned to him.
“It is my sincere hope,” Strasser went on (not sounding the least sincere). “That there will be no more shedding of blood tonight. Remain calm, do as we tell you, and you can all walk out of here unharmed and unmolested.”
His gaze lingered on Martha as he pronounced the last word. She dropped her gaze nervously.
Strasser paused, apparently savoring her distress, then resumed.
“But make no mistake. We are in charge. Attempt to resist, or to disrupt our plans, and there will be dire consequences. So make your choice now; will you leave here on your feet or in a bag?”
He let that sink in for a moment, then smiled and began to walk around the room.
“Now,” he said. “To business. Where is Mr. Calvan?”
Silence.
“Where,” Strasser asked again. “Is Mr. Alexander Norman Calvan?”
No one spoke for a moment.
“He’s not here,” Martha said.
Strasser’s head turned sharply, almost mechanically, back to Martha.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Um…” she looked away, obviously regretting having spoken.
“Yes,” said Ben. “Just like I told you five minutes again; he was late.”
Strasser frowned at him.
“Will you stand up, Mr. Osborne?”
Ben got to his feet, trying to look Strasser defiantly in the eye.
“Now, will you tell me – truly – if Mr. Calvan is here?”
“No,” said Ben. “He isn’t.”
“Perhaps he has a safe room?” Starsser suggested. “A place to retreat in just such a situation as this?”
The repeated questioning, combined with the stress he was already feeling, brought Ben’s temper to the surface.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Strasser!” he snapped. “Are you listening? He isn’t here! He never showed up! What do I have to do you to make you understand that?”
“Ben!” Martha pleaded. “Don’t!”
Strasser blinked slowly.
“That is a good question,” he said. “How can you convince me that you are telling the truth, when you could so easily be lying?”
There was a heavy silence. Ben swallowed hard, beginning to wonder just what he’d brought down on himself this time.
“Any ideas?” Strasser asked the room at large. No one made a sound, except for Martha who groaned helplessly. Strasser sighed, as though he thought they were being deliberately unhelpful. Then he almost casually pointed his gun into Ben’s face.
Ben had never found himself looking down the barrel of a real gun before. It felts as though he had suddenly been plunged into very cold water; his body seemed to constrict, the air was forced from his lungs and he began to breathe in gasps.
“Now,” said Strasser, sounding a long way off. “I am going to count to five. Before I finish, you will have told me where Mr. Calvan is.”
“I don’t know!” Ben gasped. “Really, I don’t!”
“One…”
“Don’t you think I’d tell you!? I don’t have any loyalty to that man!”
“Two…”
“Please…please, you have to believe me…”
“Three…”
Ben’s eyes were wide. He could barely breathe. Tears stung his cheeks. He was babbling senselessly, pleading for his life in a wordless stream.
“Four…”
This couldn’t be happening. Obviously, he was dreaming.
“Five.”
“DON’T!” Martha screamed. “Please! He’s telling the truth; Calvan’s not here!”
Strasser hesitated. Ben felt oddly detached, as was to be expected when you were dreaming.
The gun fired with a roar like the end of the world.
George’s first goal was to put as much distance between himself and the invaders as possible. His second was to call for help right away. To that end, he climbed all the way to the top of stairwell before very cautiously venturing out into the south wing of the forty-fifth floor. This one was mostly devoted to offices for the HR department. Tonight it was dimly lit and seemed abandoned.
Slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible and striving to control his breathing, George eased the door shut and proceeded into the darkened hallway. His heart was thumping madly, and his bad ear seemed to be admitting twice as much ringing as ever. He kept close against the left hand wall as he went, and kept glancing over his shoulder as if he expected someone to come up the stairwell behind him. There wasn’t anything rational about this; he hadn’t had time to start thinking rationally again. This was just the raw, animal fear of being stalked by someone he couldn’t see and who might attack from any direction.
George slipped into the first office he came to, but didn’t dare flip on the lights. It was even darker in here than in the hallway, and at first he could only discern dim shapes in the gloom. Proceeding by touch, he made his way to the desk and picked up the phone. Dead. He swore under his breath and put it down again.
Maybe that phone was simply disconnected? It was worth a try. George hurried across to the next office on the other side of the hall. It was the same here.
Since this was an interior office without windows, George decided to risk the lights. They showed that it belonged to “Mabel Mayberry;” a stout, middle-aged woman with three kids, an even stouter husband, and a golden retriever. He checked, but her phone was plugged in.
That meant that the invaders had cut the phone lines when they took over the building.
George sat down in Mabel Mayberry’s desk chair, took a deep breath, and tried to steady both his breathing and his nerves. He had to think. He was locked in a high-rise building with an unknown number of armed and very dangerous men. For all he knew, he might be the only person left in the building who wasn’t either a terrorist or a hostage. That meant it was up to him to get help and to do whatever he could to protect the other innocents. With the phones out, he wasn’t sure how he could get a message to the outside world, and since the most formidable item he possessed was an epinephrine pen, he wasn’t really in a position to take on a superior force armed with Kalashnikovs.
Where did that leave him?
Stay calm, he told himself. What are you trying to accomplish, what means could accomplish that, and what do you have available?
He was trying to send a signal for help to the police. The phones were out, and he had no radio. That seemed to leave the option of trying to sneak down forty-five floors and out the door. Of course, since the terrorists no doubt had men guarding the entrances and exits, and probably had somehow locked down the stairs and elevators to prevent anyone from doing exactly that, it wasn’t a very practical idea.
George looked through the open office door across the hall to the window in the office opposite. He could see lights in the building across the way. It stuck him as rather pathetic that, in the modern world, he couldn’t get a message for help even as far as across the street.
He began to wonder whether he could create some kind of visual signal, like a fire...that made him think of the fire alarm, and hope briefly flared inside him, but then he realized that no doubt the terrorist had thought of that and if he pulled the fire alarm it would either not work at all, or they’d just call it in as a false alarm and then come up and shoot him.
He went back to the idea of a visual signal, which seemed more practical. He could always throw something out the window: that might get someone’s attention. Or he might actually set a fire, though had the potential to make the situation much worse.
Then it hit him. It was so obvious that he mentally kicked himself for not thinking of it earlier: Morse Code! George knew Morse Code, of course (no one in a family as militarized as his could help learning it), and he could see at least a few lights were on in the building across the street. It was just possible that he might be able to call for help.
He went back to the exterior office, threw open the blinds, and began flipping the lights on and off: three short, three long, three short. Three short, three long, three short. Now the only question was whether anyone on the outside would notice it before anyone on the inside did.
Laura Lotus thought ‘workaholic’ was such an ugly word. She much preferred ‘driven’ or ‘ambitious’ or even ‘diligent.’ As in, she was at her desk at eight PM on a Saturday because she was diligent.
Actually it was because she’d learned at her daddy’s knee that there were two ways to get what you wanted in this world: one was by working your ass off, the other was by cheating. Since he’d also taught her never to cheat, that left the first option, and since what she wanted was her first million by the age of thirty, that meant a lot of nights and weekends at her desk.
Good thing ‘social life’ was pretty low on her list of priorities.
Laura was twenty-four years old; tall, dark, and good-looking enough to have paid for her MBA by working as a lingerie model (a fact she sincerely hoped she would take to her grave), but had never really been that interested in the dating scene. She wasn’t in the least romantic, or even especially sociable. Her motto was ‘fun means getting things done.’ Just saying it aloud was usually enough to scare off any would-be admirers.
Yet, even her ‘diligence’ had its limits, and she had just about reached it for that night. She glanced at the clock: eight-twenty-two. Just enough time left to catch a cab, go home, and be in bed by nine-thirty. Then up again at five and back to work in the morning. God may have rested on the seventh day, but He hadn’t been chasing a career. Laura didn’t take days off any more than she dated. Sailors didn’t get days off, so why should she? The most relaxation she took were periodic breaks to stroll down to the local coffee shop and read detective stories.
She knew she was probably going to burn out soon at this rate, but she only needed to hold on until she got that promotion. Then she’d be able to ease back on the throttle a little. Supposedly, old man Wiley was going to make a decision sometime in the next week or two, so she only needed to keep it up until then. Besides, she enjoyed the intensity of her overstuffed schedule. It was the same kind of rush she got from intense exercise: the fevered sense of pride and achievement that came from pushing yourself beyond the limits of your endurance.
Laura put the finishing touches on the memo she had been working on, tucked it and the rest of her papers safely into the drawer of her desk and locked it. Then she stood up, stretched her stiff back, and leaned against the wall, gazing idly out the window at the Huston Gold. There were lights on there, too. Of course, Xander Calvan probably kept his people working 24/7. She admired that. Calvan was something of an idol to her; a poor farm-boy from Nowheresville who grew to be the richest man in the world by the time he was forty. That was the kind of thing she wanted to do. Not that she’d grown up poor in Nowheresville: she’d been an Ignatian her whole life, and her Dad had made a comfortable living as an electrician and had been able to pay for her undergrad. That, to her mind, meant that she should make it even further than Calvan had; she had a head start.
As she watched the Huston Gold, contemplating her ambitions, she suddenly became aware of something odd. The lights in one of the top floor rooms were flashing on and off, off and on. First fast, then slow, then fast again. Then…
Laura’s brow furrowed. Her dad had been a Navy signalman, and she’d learned Morse Code almost at the same time she learned to read (though she hadn’t needed to use it in years). The pattern of the flickering lights was disturbingly familiar. It almost looked like an SOS.
Since she worked at night, in the city, Laura always carried a flashlight of the long, heavy sort policemen use (i.e. that could double as a club). Now she retrieved it, killed the lights to make the beam show up better and, quickly searching her memory, signaled “CT” (long, short, long, short, long) to acknowledge.
The lights stopped. For a second she dared to hope that was it; that it had been a joke that had gotten out of hand and that whoever it was on the other end would just let it go.
Then the lights began to flick on and off again. Laura hurriedly read off:
“Call police. Building under attack. Terrorists.”
She was sure she must have misunderstood that, so she signaled “Repeat?”
The person in the other building repeated the message.
“Serious?” she signed.
“Serious,” came the answer. “Fortieth Floor. Tanzanians. Send help!”
Laura didn’t know what to do. This was insane. This sort of thing didn’t happen. Tanzanian terrorists didn’t just take over an office building in the middle of San Ignatio.
But, on the other hand, hallucinating psychos didn’t just sneak into office buildings on Saturday evenings and signal for help with Morse Code. Neither did practical jokers. So, compared with the alternatives…
Laura got her phone and brought it over to the window. With one hand she signaled “Calling,” while with the other she dialed 911.
And you’d better not be yanking my chain, she thought.
“9-11, what is your emergency?” said the friendly-sounding man on the other line.
“Yes, hi,” she said. “I’m getting signals in Morse Code from the Huston Gold saying that it’s been attacked by Tanzanian terrorists.”
There was a brief pause.
“Ma’am, is this a prank call?”
“No!” she said. I hope not. “No, seriously; that’s really what’s happening. I’m in the Coronet Building across the street, and we’re communicating with Morse Code using lights. He asked me to call the police because the building has been attacked by terrorists.”
She thought she could hear the dispatcher sighing in disbelief.
“Okay,” he said. “Can you give me your name?”
“Laura Lotus.”
“Are you in any danger, Laura?”
She looked around the darkened office. It struck her at that moment as more than a little creepy. Places that are quiet most of the time are peaceful; places that are normally busy and only fall silent at night are eerie and unnatural, like a corpse. She shivered.
“I…I don’t think so,” she said. “No,” she corrected, shaking off the jitters. “No, I work across the street; they’re not coming in here. I’m fine.”
“That’s good. Can you give me the name of the man you’re communicating with?”
“Hold on,” she relayed the question to her mystery partner.
“He says his name is George.”
“Alright. Is he in any danger?”
There was a brief pause before he answered.
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” said Laura. “He says he is in danger. I think he thought that was implied by the word ‘terrorist’.”
“Of course, Laura,” said the dispatcher. “I just had to make sure. Now, can you tell me who he is, exactly?”
“No,” she said. “At this point all I know about him is that his name is George, he knows Morse Code, and he says he’s locked in a building with terrorists.”
“Can you ask him to identify himself more thoroughly?”
Laura, who didn’t deal well with stupid questions at the best of times, let alone when she was overworked, alone in a darkened office, and possibly in the middle of a major crisis, lost her temper.
“Thoroughly? Did you not catch the part where we’re talking through Morse Code? As in, he’s flipping the lights in one of the offices on and off? What do you want; age, height, and job description? The building is under attack by terrorists! Can we maybe stick to the important details and not waste our time?”
There was a brief pause.
“Okay, ma’am,” said the dispatcher in a display of well-trained politeness. “What would you say are the important details?”
Laura decided she didn’t like this dispatcher very much.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you people need to know while storming a hi-rise full of terrorists?”
“I actually don’t do that, ma’am,” said the dispatcher (Oh, now he’s just being a snot, Laura thought). “But I’d imagine they’d need to know how many terrorists they’re facing.”
She asked the mysterious George.
“Unknown,” came the answer.
“He doesn’t know,” she said.
“Ten or twenty?”
“He thinks maybe ten or twenty.”
“Fortieth floor,” she said, relaying his answer.
“All of them?” asked the dispatcher.
She relayed the message.
“How should I know?” came the answer
“He...he’s not sure.”
“Are they armed?”
Laura didn’t bother relaying that one.
“No, apparently they took over the building by asking nicely. They’re persuasive, but surprisingly polite for Tanzanian terrorists.”
There was another pause.
“Ma’am, this is serious business.”
“Then stop asking stupid questions and just send the damn cavalry already!” she shouted. “Jesus Christ! What part of ‘under attack by terrorist’ is confusing to you?”
“Just calm down ma’am,” he said gently. “The police have been alerted, they’re on their way.”
“Finally,” she muttered. She began to relay the message, then stopped abruptly.
For a brief second, she thought her contact across the street was signaling furiously. The room was illuminated by a series of rapid flashes of white light, and then fell dark again. But it wasn’t the lights he had been signaling her with, nor did it appear to be any kind of flashlight.
If the dispatcher hadn’t asked about the terrorists being armed, Laura might not have realized what it was.
“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. “Someone’s shooting at him!”
Next Week:
Chapter Eight; The Threshold of the Crucible
No comments:
Post a Comment