Patriot acts ak-6 Page 18

  "Not from where I'm standing."

  "That's the thing, there are always two sides to every story."

  "You want to help me so much, why do I think that if I open my curtains and look out the window I'm going to be seeing the SWAT team surrounding this hotel?"

  "Well, Chris, unfortunately things have gone beyond where I can just come over there and chat with you. We're going to need to bring you down to the station, try to sort this out there."

  "You're going to arrest me?"

  "I'm not going to lie to you, we do have a warrant for your arrest, Chris. We also have a warrant for Danielle's arrest. We've been told that she may have been wounded, is she doing okay, does she need any medical attention, anything like that?"

  I took a second, trying to get my thoughts ordered as quickly as possible. So far, Bobby Galloway was proving himself to be a very good negotiator, better than I'd expected given the circumstance and the location, and that meant I was going to have to be very careful in what I said to him. Asking about Alena was mining, trying to gather intelligence.

  Galloway had the potential to become our greatest ally, if I could convince him that he had control of the conversation, that he could keep me talking, and more, keep me willing to talk to him. That would be ideal, because it would allow him to turn to his superior, his chief of police or whoever, and say the same, that he could keep us from being a danger to ourselves and the community, that he could keep us stable until HRT or whoever arrived. That maybe he could get this resolved peaceably, without needing to storm the room.

  He could buy us the time we needed to get away.

  "Chris? Is Danielle doing okay?" Galloway asked.

  "She's fine," I told him. "She's more than fine, she's never been better."

  "How about you? Are you injured at all? Do you need any medical assistance?"

  "I'm doing fine," I said. Then I added, "I've got everything I need right here with me."

  It was a deliberate opening, and he took it, but he took his time. A worse negotiator would have jumped on the line like a politician on a vote, but Bobby Galloway waited almost three seconds before speaking.

  "Yeah? What do you have in there that's so helpful, Chris?"

  "Don't you worry about what I have or what I don't," I snapped. "I've got everything I need, that's all you need to know."

  "All right."

  I let a pause start, then, trying to sound pissy, said, "Can I ask you a question? Am I allowed to ask questions, here?"

  It was as calculated on my part as anything he had said on his, because I was giving him exactly what every good negotiator wants to hear: I was giving him power. Three minutes into the conversation at the most, and psychologically-at least from where Galloway was standing with his headset and his paper cup of coffee at the mobile command post across the street-I'd turned the first corner he wanted me to take. I had asked his permission, and that meant that I'd put him in control.

  "Sure, Chris," Galloway said. "Go ahead."

  "You guys want to arrest me, why don't you just come up to the door and come and get me?"

  "Thing is, the information I've been given says that you two have some dangerous stuff up there. That you've got some firearms and ammunition, like that, maybe even something that could make a lot of people really sick."

  "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, coming up here would probably be a bad idea, Bobby. It would probably make a whole lot of people a whole lot more than just sick."

  "There you go, that's what's got us where we are, here," Bobby Galloway said. "You want to tell me about what happened in Montana? You want to talk about that?"

  "No."

  "This is a good opportunity, Chris, this is a good chance for you to tell your side of things, you hear what I'm saying? There are always two sides, it's like I said, and from where we're sitting out here, I mean, it looks like you're the bad guy, so it would be good to hear your side. You sure you don't want to talk about it?"

  "I'm sure," I told him. "I've got nothing to say about Montana."

  To my side, Alena had finished clearing the hole in the ceiling, just wide enough now that I could fit through it. She quietly dropped from the bureau, took the last chunk of debris and set it on the floor, then began clearing off the other pieces she'd pulled from where they rested on the bed.

  "All right, Chris," Galloway said, after a moment. "I'm going to take a couple minutes here and consult with my superiors, maybe use the bathroom, get another cup of coffee. You should think about what I've said, see if we can't work this out."

  "Sure," I said, but it went into dead air, he'd already disconnected. I did likewise.

  "He hung up?" Alena asked.

  I nodded. "He's pretty good."

  She motioned to the remote control. "Shall we?"

  "Yeah, let's see if that brings him back."

  I handed Alena the remote and she moved to the window, crouching down to one side before sliding it between the fabric and the glass. She pressed several of the buttons together, as if trying to control some distant television.

  The phone began ringing again.

  "Guess they're wearing night-vision," I said.

  "I guess they are." She came off her haunches and set the remote back on the dresser beside the television. Remote controls use infrared light to send their commands to whatever it is they're commanding. By its nature, it's outside the visible spectrum, but not when using night-vision. When using night-vision, it shows up like what it is-a nice, bright pulse of light. Multiple buttons meant that there had been multiple pulses at multiple frequencies.

  Seen by someone on the perimeter, maybe by several someones, it had made an unexpected and potentially alarming light show, because there was a very good chance they had no idea of its source. Galloway, maybe getting himself his cup of coffee, but just as likely reviewing his notes and consulting with his bosses, had been urged to get back on the phone and find out just what the hell we were doing in there.

  "Goddammit," I said when I answered. "What?"

  "Just checking that everything's all right in there," Galloway said. "You two still okay? Something happen?"

  "Why wouldn't we be?" I demanded. "This is bullshit. I want to talk to somebody in charge. That's what I want. You put your boss on. I want to talk to him."

  Over the phone I could make out voices speaking in the background. None of them sounded like Galloway.

  "Don't ignore me, Bobby," I said sharply. "Don't ignore me, man, you don't want to do that."

  "I'm not ignoring you," he said. "I'm afraid you're stuck with me, Chris, there's no one else available. You're sure everything's all right in there?"

  "Everything's just fine. Everything's just great, why are you asking, you think everything's not fine and great?"

  "Just checking with you, that's all."

  "We've got everything we need in here, I told you that. Don't play games with me, Bobby, I don't like it. I don't want you playing games with me."

  "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 s
tepped 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?"

  "Don't talk to me like that, don't do that," I said, getting angry. "You're pissing me off again, Bobby, don't do that."

  "I didn't mean-"

  "No, no, I'll tell you what, I'll talk to you in the morning," I said. "I need to think, I need some time to think."

  And I hung up, then moved to where Alena was coiling our makeshift rope on the bureau. I hoisted her up again, this time just lifting her from the hips, and she pulled herself the rest of the way into the crawl space. I climbed atop the bureau, handed up the two bags, then the rope, then took hold of her outstretched arm and followed her into the cold and musty darkness.

  Leaving the phone to ring in the room alone.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  It was bitingly cold and it was treacherously icy and the drop from the edge of the roof to the shadows along the rear of the hotel was easily thirty feet. As Alena worked quickly to conceal the hole she'd made in the roof, I scanned the sky above
us. I'd heard the distinctive sound of a helicopter doing fly-over while I'd been talking to Galloway, but now there was no sign of the bird. It was possible it had been ordered down for the night, maybe to preserve fuel or to give the pilot a rest so he'd be ready when really needed. Whatever the reason, it was luck, and dawdling on the roof would be a good way to squander it.

  We stayed on our bellies, sliding as much as crawling along the shingles. Now that we were outside, the sounds of the siege became audible, the distant crackle of radios, the sound of the occasional vehicle coming along the road. There wasn't much noise coming from Lynch, and not a hell of a lot of light, either. Either it was a sleepy little town on a late winter's night, or, more likely, everyone was at home watching what was happening in their backyard on their televisions.

  We moved carefully, sliding ourselves towards one of the many vents that had been cut into the roof. I had to clear some of the snow away to make room for our rope, and it was so hard it cut my hands. Once again, I felt the ache of the cold. If I got frostbite a second time so soon after the first, I'd end up losing my fingers. While I readied the improvised rope, Alena took the opportunity to eyeball the surroundings, using the elevation to our advantage.

  "It's not deep," Alena murmured in my ear. "The perimeter seems confined to the hotel lot, patrol cars running out the next couple of blocks. The streets have been closed."

  I nodded, finished looping the rope around the vent, then handed it off to Alena. She took the two ends, rolling onto her back and then back onto her belly to stay low, wrapping them together rappelling style around her waist and crotch. Then she let gravity slide her towards the edge of the roof, and, without any hesitation or pause, simply continued over the edge. I waited to hear the sound of her impact, the smack of a body landing wrong on the ground, but it didn't come, and as soon as I saw the rope turn from taut to slack, I followed her.

  We were at the rear of the hotel, the side furthest from Elk, in a narrower and shallower extension of the parking lot that dominated the front side. Most of the light had been coming from the other side of the street, and the shadows were adequate enough to be comforting. A fence, wooden, perhaps seven feet high, marked the edge of the lot on this side. From above, I had seen that it butted up against the lot for a fast-food restaurant on the other side, then another street that seemed to run parallel to Elk.