The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Jon Land Killing Time from Thriller 2

“We’re glad to have you aboard, Mr. Beechum,” said Roger Meeks, principal of Hampton Lake Middle School, rising from behind his desk.

Fallon thought about how he’d killed the last man he shook hands with and released the principal’s flaccid grip quickly. That man’s name was Beechum and he’d had the misfortune to pick up a sodden, weary Fallon hitchhiking on the side of a lonely interstate. Poor Beechum also had the misfortune of being in the process of relocating to a new state to take a new job and for having a passing resemblance to Fallon. Passing in that they both had dark hair and features, close enough to allow Fallon to effortlessly fool principal Meeks with only minor modifications to his own appearance.

“Your resume is quite impressive,” Meeks continued, retaking his seat and looking up from the pages before him. Their eyes met and for just a moment Fallon thought the principal was studying him, perhaps noticing the anomalies with the face of the now-dead teacher clipped to the top sheet. But then he smiled. “I think you’re going to be very happy at Hampton Lake Middle School. Let’s show you the building.”

The “tour,” as Meeks called it, was important to Fallon. Though he smiled through its course, careful to ask all the right questions, he was actually cataloging various routes of escape and hiding. That his former employers were after him was not in doubt at all, any more than the fact they would eventually be successful. Because

Fallon had failed them. Worse, Fallon had misbehaved by executing those sent to make him pay for his failure.

His former employers would have been wise to let him go and be done with it. But they couldn’t take the chance Fallon would come after them. Here he became a victim of his own well-deserved reputation. His background in Special Forces had taught him to not just accept killing, but embrace it as a skill to be mastered like any other: with practice. The means — knife, gun, bare hand, explosives — mattered not at all, only the result. And with Fallon the result was always the same.

Except once. And now because of that he was on the run. Killing time in the guise of a middle-school English teacher. Or Language Arts, as they called it these days.

Meeks continued the tour of Hampton Lake Middle School in perfunctory fashion, Fallon nodding and smiling at all the appropriate times. The building was T-shaped with two long hallways separated by an enclosed courtyard adjoining a perpendicular two-story wing at the building’s front end located farthest from the road. A gym and presentation room were located in the back end, the cafeteria in the front. Fallon noted a drop ceiling heavy enough to support a man’s weight, accessing a crawl space that ran the length of the building on both sides. The location of the subbasement, containing the electrical and heating elements, was more difficult to pin down at this point.

Normally, Fallon would look for places to stash weapons as well. Here he didn’t consider that to be a factor. If he was found, escape would be the thing, not confrontation.

“Now,” Meeks said, the cursory tour over, “let’s show you your classroom.”

Eighth-grade honors English, Language Arts, was just finishing an abridged, heavily censored version of a book called Catch-22. Fallon rented the movie that night and didn’t really get most of it, except the title concept of a wartime pilot in search of a loophole to be deemed too crazy to fly. Fallon thought parts were supposed to be funny, but didn’t laugh and was glad when it was time for the class to move on to Frankenstein. Fallon hadn’t read that book either, but he’d seen the movie, the old one with Boris Karloff, and figured that was close enough.

His classroom overlooked the front of the building, including an oval-shaped drive that enclosed a parking lot used by teachers as well as visitors. Fallon couldn’t see the main entrance but had a clear view of any vehicle approaching it, which was the next best thing.

“So who do we think is the villain in the story?” Fallon asked his class.

His remark was greeted by shrugs and quick glances cast amidst his young charges. Having no real concept of how to teach exactly, he’d constructed his classes around discussion. Fortunately, he’d come at a time of the semester devoted to literature and didn’t expect to still be around for the next unit. More than a month in any one setting would be tempting fate indeed.

“The villain?” Fallon prompted, leaning back so he was halfway sitting on the lip of his desk.

“Frankenstein,” a boy named Trent said from the rear. Trent had floppy hair and the first signs of acne.

Fallon liked him because he recognized a worn patch in the rear pocket of his jeans as the outline of a switchblade. Fallon looked into Trent’s eyes and saw emotionless, stone-cold resignation. A boy after his own heart.

“Not the monster,” Trent continued, without further prompt. “The doctor.”

“Why?” Fallon asked him.

“‘Cause he fucked with nature.”

The moment froze, everyone staring at Fallon in shock. Trent resumed again, saving him the bother of coming up with an appropriate response.

“So the monster kills all these people, terrorizes the village, scares the crap out of people. But it’s not his fault, not really.”

“So he’s not responsible for his own actions?” Fallon challenged.

“Poor bastard doesn’t even know what he’s doing. Blame Frankenstein for bringing him to life.”

“Like parents,” a frizzy-haired girl named Chelsea chimed in between crackling chomps on a wad of gum, sending a brief laugh rippling through the classroom.

“Maybe that’s Shelley’s point,” someone else said.

“So the monster’s not evil,” Fallon raised.

“No,” came the multiple response.

“But he’s not good either.”

“No.”

“So what is he?”

“The same as everybody else,” Trent said, booted feet propped up on the desk before him.

Five weeks earlier Fallon had received his next job through the usual means. A text message sent to his cell phone dispatched him to a public e-mail website. He logged in at the nearest FedEx-Kinko’s and entered the coded details into his PDA. Fallon never knew the reason for his targets’ selection. He only needed to know who and where; sometimes how and when. His log-on automatically triggered the deposit of half his fee into a previously designated offshore bank account.

Setting up a kill could take considerable time, up to several weeks, a period during which Fallon became intimately acquainted with the habits of his targets without immersing himself into the minutiae of their lives. The last job was different because it specified the target’s entire family be included. Someone out to set an example, obviously, make a point.

Discussion here was not an option. Even if Fallon had wanted, he couldn’t have asked for confirmation and clarification. And if the fact that the target’s family consisted of a wife and three young children bothered Fallon, there was no way to contact his employer to change his mind. The URL from which his assignment had been sent was a dummy site automatically deactivated as soon as Fallon logged off. Declining a job was never an option, once the mechanical triggering apparatus made Fallon an even richer man. Catch-23.

Wiring the target’s house with explosives was easy enough, doing it in a way that would make it look like a tragic accident only slightly harder. The only drawback: he’d have to trigger the blast manually himself. Not an attractive prospect considering he much preferred being somewhere else far away when the explosion ripped lumber and concrete, flesh and blood, apart.

Fallon was not a man prone to question or marred by pangs of conscience. And the early stages of the job progressed without being terribly struck by either. A man like Fallon could not view human beings with any higher regard than, say, crash-test dummies or department-store mannequins. They were his means to an end, though with ample funds for a secure retirement in place he was hard-pressed to say exactly what those ends were. Except he couldn’t retire; he enjoyed his work too much. Catch-24.

And his latest assignment should have gone down like all the others, all in place and on schedule. Fallon following his instructions to the letter to make sure all family members were inside before triggering the blast.

Detonators were a thing of the past mostly, cell phones the thing these days. Simple matter of wiring the trigger chip with a number and then dialing it at the appropriate time. There’d be a brief delay, several seconds or more, but that wasn’t a problem in this case.

Fallon took his throwaway cell phone from his pocket and dialed. Let it ring once and then settled back to wait from his car parked safely down the street, counting the seconds out in his head.

One. . two... three. .

By five, Fallon began to feel edgy, and at ten he redialed, let it ring twice this time. Counted the seconds again.

Same result. Nothing.

Setbacks were nothing new to Fallon; failure something else again. There was no time to consider what had gone wrong. Better to focus on damage control, what to do from here. Fallon had weapons, a bounty of them. But murdering an entire family in the suburbs with guns and knives without a clear plan of access and approach would be a desperate move not befitting a professional of his level. Worse, he’d be acting rashly with the eventual outcome dictated by fortune instead of forethought. Better to come back, rethink the next step tomorrow.

Except tomorrow turned out worse.

The next book on the honors English list was called Johnny Got His Gun. Fallon couldn’t find a movie version, but the book was short and supposedly about war, so he decided to read it.

The book was short. And Fallon understood nary a word, much less what the book was supposed to be about. Antiwar, that much was clear, if nothing else. So he decided to focus the class’s discussion on war itself, something he knew plenty about.

But Mr. Beechum, of course, didn’t, which meant Fallon couldn’t appear to either. He listened to the surprisingly intelligent, unsettling comments made by his students. Unsettling because it made him realize how much he missed that part of his life for its simplicity and clarity. The ability to kill for a cause with impunity. Of course, the cause meant little to Fallon; it was the impunity he embraced with a fervor and passion unknown in any previous segment of his life.

An unpleasant end to his military career was as expected as it was inevitable. Fortunately, there were plenty of private firms willing to pay far more while letting him practice his same skills. That, too, ended badly, in an embarrassing scandal for the company and yet another inglorious dismissal for Fallon. But there was no shortage of work for a man with Fallon’s skills, and he’d been stateside barely a week when a similarly ex-member of the same private firm came calling with an offer to join a network of professionals whose work was appreciated instead of vilified. Fallon didn’t bother himself with delusions of morality, of right and wrong. He did what he did, and he liked it. Simple as that.

The class agreed with the book’s antiwar stance. Fallon wished he’d been able to tell them the true side of things. About the various pleasures a man could derive from watching a face explode to a bullet or the guttural gasps a victim makes when a knife digs deep, shredding flesh and muscle. He wished he could explain that violence was something to neither be shunned nor embraced. It simply was.

Just like him.

To make his point, Fallon decided to stray from the lesson plan and introduce the only story he actually remembered reading as a boy. Read so much the pages actually disintegrated, the words disappearing until there were no sentences left and Fallon reluctantly discarded the handout. He hadn’t thought of that story in a very long time until now, glad to find a copy ripe for photocopying in the school library.

“‘The Most Dangerous Game,’” the librarian said, reading over Fallon’s shoulder as collated copies spit out from the machine’s feeder. “A true classic. But a bit violent, don’t you think?”

When Fallon returned the following morning, the target family was gone, whisked away in the dawn hours by shadowy men in black SUV’, if the neighbors were to be believed. FBI or federal marshals, no doubt, extricating Fallon’s targets into witness protection.

Fallon had never failed before, but there were percentages involved in everything and here the odds had finally caught up with him. He found himself obsessing over every move he had made to retrace where he’d gone wrong. The wiring perhaps. Maybe a bad chip. A reception or transmission problem even.

That was why Fallon was awake in his motel room when they came. Four of them, all well armed and well skilled enough to know not to drive their car too close to his room in the motor court. But they’d left their headlights on a second too long, enough to alert Fallon that someone was coming.

He gauged the distance suggested by the strength of the headlights and counted the seconds again.

One. . two. . three. .

The door blew inward at six, Fallon unleashing a fusillade that was every bit the equal of his four would-be killers. So much passed through his mind as the bullets chewed up the walls around him and the smell of blood mixed with sulfur and cordite. The roar from the three guns he managed to reach drowned out the screams mostly, and Fallon was screeching away from the scene before another light snapped on in any of the nearby rooms.

The reality of the moment struck him, and fast. The fact that his employers wouldn’t stop with these four men, especially since Fallon had so effortlessly executed them, was no less a reality than the fact that his time as a contractor was effectively over. There was no redemption or second chances. He had gone from the very best at what he did to irrelevant in the seconds it had taken him to gun down four men.

Catch-25.

Fallon had effectively prepared for this moment, while never really considering it a possibility. Money would not be a problem; he had plenty of it stashed away. The issue was getting to it safely, making the necessary arrangements with according precautions, and such things took time. He’d have to disappear without the use of any of his various identities, all of which could be compromised now. His employers and conduits knew too much about him, his habits and patterns. Disappearing meant relying on none of them, becoming someone else entirely while laying the groundwork for his permanent departure from parts known.

There were plenty of Third World countries into which he could vanish, only to resurface as a man with a different identity boasting the kind of skills that were always in need. Fallon couldn’t imagine himself wallowing away the time on a beach, no matter how beautiful or plentiful the women. His life had been defined by killing for too long to either risk or want change.

For now going off the grid meant avoiding all forms of security cameras and public transportation, including buses, trains, and airplanes. Rental cars were out as well, and stealing too many cars could leave the kind of pattern he needed to avoid.

That left hitchhiking. Mr. Beechum’s was the fifth car in a week to chance picking him up. Fallon didn’t kill the others and hadn’t expected to kill Beechum until the ditzy man kept speaking enthusiastically of the new job to which he was headed. That’s when the plan unfolded for Fallon, and the best he was able to do for Beechum in return was kill him in quick, painless fashion.

“I love kids” was the last thing the teacher said. “Making a difference in their lives and all.”

In that moment Fallon couldn’t have known the kind of difference he’d end up making.

Fallon saw the two vans creep toward the school’s entrance when he was in the third day of discussing “The Most Dangerous Game.” They were noteworthy first for the fact they drove onto the grounds down the wrong side of the U-shaped drive fronting the building and second because the vans wore the markings of a professional cleaning service. Such markings always allowed for unquestioned access to buildings, public and otherwise, but why would a middle school with a full janitorial staff need a professional cleaning service?

Fallon’s heart began to beat faster as the vans drifted out of his line of sight. Two vans meant a dozen men or more, certainly overkill on the part of his former employers. And if they had ascertained his presence here at Hampton Lake, they’d be much better off laying an ambush instead of storming the building in full awareness of his conceivable escape.

That reality should have made him feel better.

But it didn’t.

Instincts had saved his life often enough for Fallon to learn to trust them, and right now they were scratching at his spine like scalpels peeling back the flesh.

“Rainsford’s my kind of guy,” Trent was saying from his customary perch in the back of the room, biker boots propped up on the desk before him.

“Go on,” Fallon managed to say, not really paying attention. His eyes strayed out the window again, but the vans did not reappear. He moved closer to the glass, hoping to better his angle.

“Dude, he kicks General Zaroff’s ass. And it was Zaroff’s own fucking fault.”

“Why?” Fallon asked, intrigued in spite of the nagging feeling that wouldn’t go away.

“Because he’d been playing the game too long. Hunting men, who knows how many of them.”

“So why stop?”

“Because he should’ve known he’d meet his match. Sooner or later. It’s like, you know, inevitable.”

Fallon moved away from the window, suddenly intrigued. “So why’d he keep doing it? Come on, people, put yourself in Zaroff’s shoes.”

“‘Cause it’s all he had,” said a girl in the front row. “All he knew.”

“What else?”

“He was good at it,” someone else answered. “When you’re that good, you don’t think anybody’ll ever beat you.”

“Was Rainsford better at the game than the general?” Fallon asked his class.

“No,” said Trent. “Zaroff lost ‘cause he got lazy. When you get lazy, you get beat every time. But Rainsford, he was a hero.”

“Why?”

“He saved lives. Of Zaroff’s future victims. Not all heroes mean to be heroes, if you get my drift.”

“May I have your attention please?”

The voice of Principal Meeks boomed over the school’s PA system.

“All students and teachers, please report to the gymnasium immediately. That’s all students and teachers, please report to the—”

The principal’s voice cut off in midsentence, as if he’d accidentally hit the wrong switch. Fallon watched his students begin to rise from their desks, replaying Meeks’s words in his head — not for content so much as cadence. Something all wrong about the tone and import. Fallon knew the sound of a man under duress because he’d put countless men in just that position.

When you get lazy, you get beat every time. .

“No,” Fallon said before the student closest to the door could open it. “Back to your seats.”

“But—”

“Back to your seats.”

The edge in Fallon’s voice had his students returning to their desks without further question. The hallway beyond filled with students spilling out of nearby classrooms, the heavy trampling of feet signaling the approach of those emerging from the two-story wing at the building’s head.

“Mr. Beechum?”

Fallon swung toward the windows again. They only opened inward at the very top, enough to provide ventilation but not escape.

“Mr. Beechum?”

Fallon didn’t answer. Mr. Beechum was gone.

“Trent,” Fallon said, the persona shed, cold eyes boring down on the boy who’d been his favorite, “give me your switchblade.”

“My wh—”

“Now, Trent.”

The voice not raised, just measured and certain.

“It’s a butterfly knife.”

Trent fished the butterfly knife out of his backpack, brought it up to Fallon, and extended it toward him in a trembling hand. Fallon wished he could smile at him reassuringly, the way Mr. Beechum would.

Except Mr. Beechum had left the building.

“Okay,” Fallon said, “everyone line up starting on this wall and wrapping around to the back of the room. Shoulder to shoulder. Very close. Out of sight from the door.”

“Why?” a girl asked, moving to obey.

Fallon didn’t answer. Beyond his classroom, the thick flow of students and their teacher escorts continued down the corridor, oblivious to whatever might be transpiring. Fallon hoped he was wrong, but knew he wasn’t. He had spent his life as Zaroff, the odds stacked heavily in his favor. But now suddenly he found himself as Rainsford, the underdog.

When you’re that good, you don’t think anybody’ll ever beat you.

Well, whoever had come in those vans was in for a big surprise, weren’t they?

The moments passed in silence broken only by the loud breathing of his students. Or maybe it wasn’t loud. Maybe Fallon just heard it that way.

The hallway emptied, a few stragglers passing the windowed door and then no one. A pause, then fresh footsteps crackling atop tile alone followed by the creaking echo of doors being thrust open, each growing louder.

Fallon snapped the butterfly knife’s blade into position.

A boy whimpered. Two girls began to sob, then a third.

Fallon pressed a single finger against his lips, signaling them to be quiet, ducked back so he was out of sight from the doorway.

The heavy footsteps drew closer. The knob rattled, door easing inward.

A student gasped.

A man lurched past Fallon, never seeing him, clearing his route of escape. Fallon’s eyes shifted between the door and the high-end submachine gun the man was now steadying: on Trent who’d started defiantly forward, boots clacking against the tile.

Fallon saw the man’s finger curling round the trigger in the last moment before he pounced. Arm wrapped around the man’s neck to silence him as he drew Trent’s butterfly knife on a sharp upward angle required to slice through bone and gristle, digging into the lungs and shredding them.

The man gurgled and rasped, fighting against Fallon as bloody froth poured from his mouth. Fallon snapped his neck for good measure, studying his face as he dragged him across the room before the horrified stares of his students.

The man was Arab; Fallon could tell that from sight as well as smell. Smells were important to him. You spend enough time all over the world, in the various cesspits of humanity, and you begin to know men by their smells as much as anything. An Arab, all right, and in that moment Fallon realized everything he had been dispatched to Iraq to prevent had finally come to pass. The foreign stink come home.

Fallon was free to escape now. Two vans meant a dozen men at least, the other eleven likely scattered throughout the building. He could flee the building without so much as killing another, or, perhaps, just one. Maybe use one of their vans as his escape vehicle and leave them to whatever debacle they intended to perpetrate on the school and the world. It wasn’t his world anyway, not anymore.

Or was it?

He glanced at Trent and his other students, bunched tighter together now, hugging each other as they stared at him in terror the way they would a monster, like the one Frankenstein had created. Or maybe General Zaroff, mad for the hunt.

Johnny got his gun, all right.

Flee and these students, his students, would inevitably end up in the gym with the others. Perhaps to be made an example of for disobeying. Terrorists like these were not very original, and that awareness sparked a memory in Fallon’s head of Chechnyan terrorists taking a school over in that particular godforsaken nation hostage. The students brought to the gymnasium, just like here. And then the gym was blown up while the whole world watched.

No, not very original, but effective all the same.

Fallon tried to imagine how he’d do it, how many men in the gym versus how many patrolling and securing the building. He settled on four in the gym, eight for the building.

Seven now.

Fallon stooped down and began working the dead man’s jacket free.

“I need you all to stay here,” Fallon told his students. “Don’t make a sound and wait for me to come back for you.” Then, to Trent, “You’re in charge.”

They looked at him as the stranger he had become even before he’d donned the terrorist’s jacket and bandana, squeezed his feet into the dead man’s work boots, and slung his submachine gun from his shoulder. Enough to pass for the dead man from a reasonable distance, which was the best he could hope for. The 9/11 hijackers had never all met each other, but this kind of operation was different, requiring practice and synchronization. They would know the building as well as he did; every crawl space, every nook and cranny. The difference, of course, was he knew the terrorists were here while they had no idea he was.

Wait for me to come back for you...

Why had he said that? Fallon wondered, once he was in the hallway, careful to leave the door open as all the others on the hallway were. It would be so easy for him to flee the building now before the inevitable appearance of the authorities on the scene. That was no longer an option for him, the challenge, the game, before him much too great to consider walking away from.

But was he Zaroff or was he Rainsford?

The building was eerily quiet, save for the din coming from the gymnasium area, where nearly seven hundred students were being crammed in even now. Fallon tried to remember all the details of the Chechnyan school seizing. Those terrorists had waited for the authorities to arrive, waited for them to mount their ill-fated raid, before triggering the explosives and killing hundreds. It would be the same way here, the strategy aimed at drawing the most attention possible. Round-the-clock coverage on the networks for days before the entire country paid witness to a mass murder in prime time.

Fallon made sure to conceal the considerable bulk of his shoulders within the terrorist’s shapeless, now bloodstained, jacket. He tied the dead man’s bandana low over his forehead, hoping it would conceal the differences in their faces and hair from the distance he required. He made sure the walkie-talkie, simple Radio Shack variety, was secured to his belt and started back up the corridor the way the dead terrorist would if he were retracing his steps.

At the head of the hallway, the office directly on his left and the science wing just down the hall to his right, Fallon glimpsed another of the terrorists rushing away from the main entrance with extra chains clanking. By now, all such doors would have been secured and wired with explosives, to deter both escape from within and attack from the outside. Fallon had a clear shot at the man but opted not to take it until he was sure no others were in the vicinity. Instead he made his footsteps just loud enough to be heard. Then swung about, gun leading, back to the stairwell up which number two had rushed.

“Hey,” the man called to him in Arabic, “shoo hada?”

Fallon’s response to the man asking him “What is this?” was to swing and fire. A single headshot that dropped the terrorist where he stood. He crumpled to the steps and slid halfway back down the stairs. Not Fallon’s intention, but by this point instinct had taken over.

Two down.

Fallon heard footsteps converging on the stairwell from opposite directions on the second floor. He crouched over the body, submachine gun angled at the main entry doors as if to suggest that’s where the deadly fire had originated. He could see the plastic explosives layered into place over the glass. Not the way he would’ve done it exactly, but still effective.

The footsteps grew louder, voices in Arabic shouted his way. Fallon swung when the two men were close enough to take in a single sweep. Two shots, both to the head again to be sure.

Four down.

This time his shots coincided with the rattling echo of machine-gun fire coming from the other end of the building. Screams and cries answered the barrage, greeted by a second longer one that drove the students and teachers to silence. Four to six of the remaining terrorists would be down there. Doors chained from the inside, denying him both access and the element of surprise. Without either, never mind both, the game would be over.

Fallon’s Radio Shack walkie-talkie crackled. He snapped it from his belt, listened.

“Shoofi mafi? What’s the matter?”

“Mafi Mushkil,” Fallon replied, hoping he had chosen the right word in Arabic. “No problem.”

“Dilwaati. Hurry.”

Fallon clasped the walkie-talkie back on his belt and headed down the stairs, banking left toward the school’s science wing as the blare of sirens descended on the Hampton Lake Middle School.

The students of his eighth-grade honors Language Arts class were arranged two-by-two, fourteen deep, with Fallon bringing up the rear. After rousing them from the classroom against the tearful protestations of many, he placed Trent at the head of the group to lead the way toward the gym.

He’d encountered another terrorist in the science wing who approached him in the half-light, noticing the ruse too late and making the mistake of trying to right his submachine gun. Fallon was close enough to use Trent’s butterfly knife this time, a single swipe across the man’s throat for silence and surety.

He spent just over a minute gathering up two vials of clear liquid in one of the science labs and ran into another of the terrorists, literally, at the head of the corridor. Their eyes had met; the terrorist’s gaping, Fallon’s steeling as his hands came up, thumbs pressing into the man’s eyes to mash brain tissue and send him spasming toward death.

Six down.

Then back fast to his classroom to enact the final phase of his plan, the students suitably scared and confused. He marched them down the hall toward the gymnasium, pretending to prod with the submachine gun while concealing a capped glass vial in either hand.

A hundred feet away, a pair of terrorists guarding that booby-trapped entry to the building spotted him coming and twisted his way, keeping tight to the wall while shouting instructions Fallon ignored. They approached on either side of his marching phalanx and as soon as they were close enough to realize something was very wrong, Fallon popped the caps off his vials and tossed the acid compound at their faces. Not directly on line, but enough splashing home to send their hands upward to comfort their ravaged eyes.

Fallon took each down with a single, quick burst, then pushed his shocked charges on faster. Through the glass doors and halfwall he glimpsed a nonstop onslaught of police vehicles and media vans, continuing with his charges toward the chained entrance to the gym.

He moved to the front of the apparent stragglers he had rounded up, pounding on the door and then swinging away with gun leading.

“Open up! Hurry!” he screamed in Arabic, desperation forced into his voice. “They’re in the building!”

The chains rattled, locks and explosives being thrust aside. The double-door entrance jerked open by a sweaty man who bled garlic through his pores.

Fallon started shooting, willing to sacrifice a few innocents to get the last of the job done. He felled the three terrorists converging on the door, before turning his attention on the one who had yanked it open because his hands were too full to go fast for a weapon. That man had barely hit the floor when Fallon whirled sideways, scanning the room for motion.

He fired at whatever moved, like a cheap arcade game now, hoping no bystanders got caught in the fire but knowing he couldn’t let that concern stop him. He fired his last spray upward into the sprinkler apparatus, activating a spray of water, which almost instantly doused the cavernous room and drenched its occupants.

His submachine gun clicked empty. Fallon was twisting to retrieve the sidearm of a dead terrorist when a bearded rail of a man came at him, showcasing a detonator as he blithered away in Arabic.

“Maashallali! Maashallah!”

Fallon palmed Trent’s butterfly knife, locked the blade into place.

“Maashallah! Maashallah!” The man’s wild hair a soaked tangle that swept over his face, seeming to merge it with his beard.

“Maashallah!”

Fallon snapped his hand outward, sending the knife whizzing through the air. It took the final terrorist in the eye, buried to the hilt in his brain. He fell to the floor. The detonator rattled across the floor.

Fourteen down, Fallon thought, realizing his initial estimate had been off as he looked up and let the cascading water wash over his face. And not a single bystander with them.

Fallon emerged from the boys’ locker room wearing the uniform and visor of a SWAT officer who’d gone in there to secure the site. Confusion was his ally now, confusion and chaos as the police stormed the building to find bodies everywhere and had to sort through the tales of the mysterious teacher who had killed them. They’d never believe it at first and before they did, Fallon would be gone.

In the foyer beyond the gym, he passed his eighth-grade honors Language Arts class being questioned by an expanding bevy of officers. Fallon kept his head turned low and to the side, cocking his gaze hack just once to meet Trout’s when he was almost to the door.

“So if he wasn’t Beechum, any of you have an idea who he was?” an official in plain clothes was asking his students.

“Rainsford,” Trent said, as his eyes locked and held with Fallon’s through the SWAT visor. “His name was Rainsford.”