The Standoff

Command Tent

The tent was in an uproar. Phones buzzing, men yelling. Fagin on his radio, spitting curses, and Perkins shaking his head into a telephone. Facsimile machines tonguing out sheets of paper, and men spreading maps on desks and scribbling onto the elaborate glass-wall diagram. The stale smell of dry sweat and the rumble of helicopters circling overhead. And Blood sitting quietly in the middle of it all, without pants, his wounded leg resting on one of the EMT’s chairs, the gash being washed and sewed.

They tied off the black thread and clipped it short. One EMT remained to bandage him while the other two gathered their emergency aid cases and moved through the crowd to the office where Banish was. Blood noticed Fagin coming off his radio across the tent room.

“Fucker got clean away,” Fagin said, looking around as though he wanted to hit something.

Perkins turned from the desk he was sitting on and spoke away from his phone. “Where did he get the gun?”

Fagin was pacing between desks, grinding a black-gloved fist into his opened hand. “All a setup,” he said. That aspect of it seemed to rile him most.

Perkins said, “But how could they know in the cabin—”

“A setup,” Fagin said, pacing faster, “the whole fucking thing. Swift and surgical. He releases Mellis with the in-laws. Shoots out the lights. Then in the downtime confusion before my men can get their NVDs on, he gators out twenty meters and plants the gun. Mellis false-flags Banish with his bullshit mine story — if there was a claymore mine on this mountain, it would be command-detonated and Ables would have lit it off with the rest of his fireworks — then leads him up to the gun site and fucking drops him cold. All fucking planned.”

A noisy crash from within Banish’s office then, like something being roughly overturned, and a raised, angry voice — Banish, swearing venomously. The two EMTs came hustling out. Only one still had his first-aid kit with him, holding it together awkwardly as though it were a suitcase come unlatched. Behind them, Banish’s continuing voice and the fluttering bird-wing sound of papers being hurled. The EMTs met the stunned glances of everyone turning to look their way, then tried to avoid all eyes and moved quietly off to the side.

Then Banish was standing in the canvas office doorway. He appeared strangely calm and stiff, hands open and empty at his sides and his feet spaced evenly apart. His black jumpsuit was off now and his clothes beneath were rumpled, his hair mussed from the removed helmet. The black spray pattern from Mellis’s gunfire speckled the right side of his face like soot.

“Perkins,” he said, speaking flatly, “have the girl’s body airlifted to Helena for autopsy, then begin contacting local hospitals. Have them call in off-duty help and start preparing disaster plans. There’s going to be trouble down below. Then call AD Richardsen at home. Give him a full situation report and tell him we need to double our number here ASAP, including Hostage Rescue, and then inform him that it is my recommendation that I be relieved of duty immediately.”

He looked over at Fagin. “Nobody fires on that cabin again without prior authorization from me as long as I am in charge,” Banish said. “I don’t care what the situation is. There are hostages in there.”

Fagin smiled, not happily.

Banish said, “Coyle.”

She was standing at the desk by the entrance of the tent. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“Get in here,” Banish said, and stepped back behind the fold.

Coyle crossed the tent to follow. Perkins looked quickly over at Fagin, who was still looking in the direction of the office and shaking his head. “That fucking kid,” Fagin said, drawing his weapon suddenly and inspecting the clip. “They’re all gonna go ape shit when this comes out.”

Blood lifted his leg off the chair and stood. He pulled his pants up over his bare legs and boxers, taking his time buckling the heavy black leather gun belt, testing his weight. The leg felt good. He fit his cowboy hat back onto his head and walked with a slight limp over to where his Browning was propped up against a desk near Fagin. He took the weapon up by the barrel, knowing he had Fagin’s attention now, and therefore that of Perkins, who was still sitting on the desk holding the telephone receiver away from his ear. “Who are the hostages now?” Blood said, and left them to chew on that, heading out of the tent and across the dark clearing to the government Jeep that would take him back down the winding dirt road to the foot of Paradise Ridge.

Office

[PARASIEGE, p. 44]

SA Banish’s office was in disarray. The floor space was littered with papers thrown off his desk, and bandages, scissors, and other medical kit supplies lay scattered about the room.

SA Banish himself, however, appeared reasonable and well tempered, even sharp, following his outburst. Except for the gunpowder spray pattern burned into his right cheek and forehead, his appearance and manner actually appeared improved. His queries, as recalled, were succinct and professional.

SA BANISH: We are monitoring the mountaintop for broadcast activity?

SA COYLE: Yes, sir, we are.

SA BANISH: That facet of the operation will be stepped up. I want citizens band radios brought in and monitored on every channel until such time as we can take delivery of scrambling devices. When that happens, I want every channel blocked except emergency channel 9. Reassign personnel as necessary.

SA COYLE: Yes, sir.

SA BANISH: Where precisely was Mellis allowed in the staging area?

SA COYLE: Just one of the holding cells, sir, briefly, before meeting his parents. Aside from your trailer, that is.

SA BANISH: Send down to the bridge barricade for Police Officer Kearney. I want to see him here immediately.

SA COYLE: Yes, sir.

SA Coyle then returned to her desk. SA Banish departed the command tent not more than two minutes later.

Trailer

Banish entered the trailer without a sound. He eased the thin door shut on the overnight activity behind him and stood still, relieved, facing the dead room. The buzzing in his head persisted, fainter now, more remote, but enduring. He indulged himself in it, as well as in the thickened thumping of the pulse in his temples. He fed off the droning rhythm. Its regularity seemed to have the effect of shortening and constricting his physical movements while at the same time freeing his mind for more speculative thoughts. He began prowling methodically about the room.

First to the table, silently, on one knee, examining the unstained underside and each knicked leg. The rust-colored carpeting below was muddied. He could smell Mellis there. He had no anger for him anymore. Mellis was just a pawn and Banish’s anger for him had dried up and died. Banish was all determination now. No anger even for himself, or even pity, for being so handily duped. His one crippling flaw had been his overriding concern for his men’s safety. He had been much too cautious and too restrained.

He moved to the flat-backed headboard of the bed, carefully probing the unstained side facing the wall, then the paneled wall itself. He slipped a penlight out of his shirt pocket and thumbed the tip, and a narrow, yellow light flared noiselessly. He placed it between his teeth and lay down on his back to explore the dusty underside of the bed.

He ought to have been killed. For being caught flat like that with his pants down around his ankles and his belt buckle clanking behind him, he deserved the ultimate humiliation. Mellis ought not to have missed. But he had — though for this Banish felt neither particularly grateful nor, again, angry. What he felt was engaged. He felt invigorated. As he slid back silently from underneath the bed and continued at the wooden night table, pulling out a small, empty drawer and probing it with the stealth of a cat burglar, he felt a quiet, businesslike ecstasy. Offering his sword to Richardsen had been mere good form, pure bureaucratic chivalry, as he knew that it would take much more than a bungled, nonfatal recon up a mountain to warrant his removal. Banish was well acquainted with the inner workings of the machine. Washington, despite whatever misgivings they may have had about him, would already be moving to shift the blame. Ables was much more dangerous than had originally been anticipated. He was a Vietnam veteran set to kill as many federal agents as possible in order to avenge the death of his daughter. Faulty knowledge from the U.S. Marshals Service had prompted the Bureau to dispatch a negotiator to do what would normally be a strict tactician’s job. Now the troops would march in behind him. Now the mountain would be held and bled. Now the hammer would fall.

He also foresaw whispering within the ranks. His men’s confidence had certainly suffered and Banish’s next order might be questioned. A bold stroke was needed to restore their faith, both in him and in the operation. He was dug in there now, with no reasonable expectation of getting free. Ables had reached out from the cabin and attempted murder. He had taken the battle to Banish, dispatching an assassin to do his bidding. He had failed.

The night table yielded nothing. Banish stood and eased the yellowed shade off the bedside lamp for inspection. The nature of a hostage negotiation dictates that the negotiator begins necessarily two or three steps behind the hostage-taker. Success therefore turns upon the acquisition of knowledge, knowledge of the suspect and complete knowledge of the situation at hand. In every successful negotiation there is a point at which, whether through the astute gathering of information or through timely and significant action, the negotiator overtakes the criminal in terms of control. Because the negotiator is withholding what the suspect ultimately demands — his freedom this translates into a transfer of dependence wherein the negotiator assumes power. The rest is just patience and allowing the suspect to talk himself out. Banish knew he was not quite there yet. But his renewed stealthiness was showing him the way.

He was as though reborn. He had climbed to the top of the mountain and now saw the situation lying open before him, the stripes of the beast, the task at hand. He was making leaps of pure intellect, as though following a mental map through a minefield. He could anticipate, and counter. He could have the upper hand. He could take significant action.

He left the lamp, turning in the room, and found himself facing himself in the dark trailer, and suddenly the answer was plain. The mirror he had earlier pulled down off the wall. It had been replaced for Mellis’s brief occupancy. Banish moved to it, silently, buzzing inside, running his fingers down along the smooth plastic frame, then raising the mirror gently an inch or two off the wall.

The homemade device was no larger than his thumbnail, no thicker than three or four coins. It was black and beetle-shaped and attached to the mirror backing with a small patch of regular adhesive tape, its thin, bare antenna wire rising vertically to the top of the frame.

Banish eased the mirror back against the paneled wall and moved to stand in front of it. The prescience of his actions charged him. Everything was falling together now. Ables’s military electronics background. It was the only way the cabin could have known when they were coming.

Banish examined and touched lightly the black powder burn coloring the right side of his face. He ran his fingers through his thick tangle of hair, smoothing it back, then stared deeply into the glass. He recognized that game look, his true command presence. After two long years of slumber. He was his old self once again, full of confidence and cleverness and cold capability; but of self-doubt, and caution, and the cancer of fear — void.

Office

All of a sudden Brian was in the FBI command tent. It was one in the morning but the place was full of activity still, certainly having to do with the shooting that had gone on up at the ridge. The crowd below was worked up, what with the gunshots going off and the helicopters spinning overhead. All Sheriff Blood said when he came down was that Mellis had somehow escaped.

Agent Banish had sent for him specifically. Brian couldn’t think of anything he had done wrong and so was going in blind. The command tent inside was exactly the kind of highly charged place he expected it to be. He went in past the agents behind desks, past a glowing wall-sized diagram map that had to be seen to be believed, and past Agent Perkins, sitting on the edge of a desk, staring up at the tent ceiling and speaking into a telephone. Agent Perkins called his wife “honey.” He was telling her that he was going to be gone a few more days at least.

Brian reached the dark rear of the tent where there was light coming from under a section of canvas fold. He set himself and straightened up. There was nothing on the canvas door, no name and no bell to push or solid place to knock, so he edged the flap open a bit and stuck his head in.

Agent Banish was sitting back in his chair behind a desk across the small office. He was talking into a speaker telephone, one of those “hands-off” jobs. He saw Brian and nodded and motioned for him to come inside.

It looked as though there had been a fight. Brian moved ahead, nudging aside some important-looking papers with his shoe toe to make a clear space of floor to stand on. The upper right side of Agent Banish’s face was singed black, as though he had been burned with something. Still, though, he seemed to be at ease talking to the man on the other end of the telephone.

Agent Banish was saying, “No, Sal. Nothing from the cabin since.”

“Damn shame, Jack,” said Sal, the volume low, his voice sounding mechanical through the speaker box. “What would you say, then? Would you say we got a Rambo on our hands?”

“I would say we need to be ready for anything here, Sal. Hostage Rescue airborne yet?”

“They’ll be there, ready for deploy, by oh-nine-hundred your time. Get them in tight around the cabin and fast. Keep those trigger-happy marshals away. It’s big now, Jack — but you know that. Just get him on the phone. Get him talking. We’re all rooting for you back here.”

Agent Banish nodded and said, “I know you are.”

He sat forward and punched a button and hung up. “Kearney,” he said, standing and coming around his desk. “Come ahead.”

Brian nodded politely but couldn’t go any farther without clearing himself a path first. Agent Banish crossed to him instead, stepping boldly over the papers.

“What happened to your face?” said Brian.

Agent Banish waved at his own cheek. “Should work itself out of the skin in a couple of days. How’s the situation down at the bridge?”

“Edgy, sir. Tense. They want to know what happened up there.”

He nodded. “A mix-up,” he said, “but no time to go into it right now.” Whatever did happen seemed not very important. Agent Banish got right to the point. “I called you up here because there’s something I need you to do.”

Brian nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, buoyed.

“Something I need you to do for me.”

Brian strengthened his posture. “Whatever you say, sir.”

Agent Banish studied his face, then nodded once with a dry kind of satisfied certainty. “Good,” he said. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “A bottle of whiskey. Whatever brand you can find around here. Royal Canadian, I guess.”

He pressed the bill into Brian’s hand. Brian stood there, looking at the twenty, then looking at Agent Banish again. Brian saw that he was different now somehow. His composure, his expression, the way he was talking. The sharp blue eyes he was holding Brian with.

“It’s the middle of the night, sir,” Brian said.

Agent Banish nodded coldly. “I figured you would know the area.”

This was why he had called Brian in. To run an errand. Brian looked into the agent’s eyes, watching him trying to act official and uncaring. Brian realized that those marshals had been right. Agent Banish’s face held the pose, but there was clear, devious desperation in his eyes. He was starting to sweat a little.

“Agent Banish, I don’t think—”

“Take one of the government cars,” he said, talking over Brian. “You’ll get through the crowd more easily.”

Brian was trapped. He tried to come up with something to say, but Agent Banish sucked the will right out of him.

“When you get back,” the agent continued, “we may be needing another man up here in the command tent. Someone who’s proven himself to be responsible.”

Brian felt a draft run over him. It was like a chill feeling of collapse. Those marshals had been dead-on right and it was killing Brian, standing there in front of Agent Banish. He knew what was being said. Agent Banish was dangling everything he wanted right in front of his face. Either the agent had guessed it somehow, or he was able to open Brian up like a rotten ear of corn and look right into him and see it. Brian couldn’t even look Agent Banish in the eye, but the agent didn’t seem to care. When Brian swallowed and felt himself wince, he knew that Agent Banish could see whatever sour ambition there was to see in his crushed face. Here was the secret of this agent’s strange power. Bargaining and manipulation. His treating Brian like a nothing. It made Brian want to do this thing for him and be recognized. There wasn’t anything about it that was fair or right, but it was Brian’s big chance and he was signing off on the dotted line by just nodding to the agent there in his office. Agent Banish wanted a bottle of whiskey. Brian saw a long, cold ride ahead of him.

Holding Tent

As directed, Blood entered with Deke, up from the front lines. The leg felt pretty good now and Blood limped only slightly. Banish was already there waiting for them. He was seated at the rectangular table in front, his bent right elbow on the tabletop, cheek and chin resting in his hand. He was in profile, sitting back, looking impassively across the tent at the blank inside of the left canvas wall.

There was a single standing iron-bar cell beyond the table, five or six feet in from each of the three nearest walls of the small tent. It stood about six feet tall and the bars, Blood noticed, were dug or somehow driven into the solid dirt floor. So were the legs of the heavy wooden table Banish was sitting at, and the poles supporting a thin handcuff bar running the length of it behind. Light was provided by two shaded bulbs hanging overhead, and there were two unlit ceiling spotlights turned toward the empty cell.

Deke started off by crowing a little, gesturing toward the mountain. “Some running around there up top,” he said to Banish. “Helicopters and such. A good lot of shooting.”

Banish turned to look at Deke then, his sooty face revealed. “Nothing for you to be worried about,” he said.

Deke whistled and stepped back in surprise and an unchecked bit of pleasure. “Looks like you got the worst of it. Turpentine ought to bring that right off.”

Banish said, “I appreciate your concern.”

Deke nodded rapidly, slyly. “Glenn got the best of things, didn’t he? He’s a polecat, I told you. I warned you don’t step on his toes. I said he weren’t afraid. What happened up top of Paradise? Hellfire, weren’t it? Wild stories spreading down below, folks starting to whisper. Near to bursting waiting for some word.” He looked at Banish and then at Blood.

“I’ll ask the questions,” Banish said.

Deke resumed his frisky grin. “You want to know what the talk is down there.” He nodded. “Something happened, something you’re worried about now, and you want to know what folks are thinking.”

Banish shook his head slowly. Blood was noticing now a change in Banish’s countenance, a darkening in the man’s manner. It included the sullen way in which he regarded old Deke.

“I want to know about Ables’s daughter,” Banish said. “The oldest one, Rebecca. I want to know if she’s developed.”

His words put a cold, strange needle into Blood’s side, so that Blood couldn’t even imagine how the words fell upon Deke’s ears, except that, for once, the old fool was at a loss even for chatter.

“Come again?” Deke sputtered.

“Developed,” Banish said. “She’s fourteen years old. Puberty, breasts. Coming of age. I need to know from you whether or not she is developed.”

Blood watched Deke’s face redden in disgust. The old man’s jaw started to shake before he could get any words out, then the angry quaking spread to his neck and shoulders and chest. “I don’t know what the hell you federal boys think—” His rage prevented him from finishing; his face showed him imagining the worst. “That what you spend all your damn time up here thinking about?” he said.

Banish stood up out of his chair. He crossed slowly to Deke and reached out and took the collar of the old man’s shirt and twisted it up under the loose flap of his fleshy neck, walking him backward and up against the tight wall of the tent. The old man grabbed at Banish’s fist with both hands. He gripped him with his dirty nails, looking up at him widely, but it was all in vain. Banish showed no anger, no haste. Only deliberateness. Deke’s eyes gaped as Banish leaned in close.

“You think I’m in this for kicks?” he said. The canvas wall was rippling from Deke’s kicking resistance. “One word from me,” Banish said, showing him a forefinger up close, “one word, and your little shack up there, everything you own in your rotten little world — ashes. Rubble. And not a thing you can do about it. Now you answer my goddamn question, and goddamn fast.”

Deke was shaking and staring like a small creature about to be consumed. It was Banish’s cool restraint that made the encounter so threatening. Blood decided that he had had enough. He stepped back without excusing himself and turned and exited through the tent door.

Two marshals waiting there snapped to attention when Blood emerged, then saw that it was only the sheriff. He acknowledged them with a nodding glance and turned to look off the other way. Blood wasn’t so genteel that he couldn’t stomach a little law-minded intimidation, but this particular encounter represented a philosophical difference. Blood saw that the way to deal with these people was not to confront them. A direct challenge to them was like questioning a religious man’s faith or calling his wife a whore. These were not reasonable people; they were proud people, and their ridiculous pride made them blind. The only way to lose a fistfight with a blind man was to come straight at him.

Banish exited the tent holding Deke ahead of him like a scarecrow. “Take him away,” he told the marshals. He turned to Blood then, his face hard-set but otherwise blank.

“It’s called COINTELPRO,” he said. “Counterintelligence program. Designed to disrupt and discredit the opposition.”

Blood looked into his eyes. “What happened to you up on the mountain?”

Banish shook his head, matching Blood’s gaze. “You know Mellis was sent down here to kill us.”

“He was sent down here to kill you.”

“Just follow my lead,” Banish said, close enough now that Blood could see the tiny ridges the burnt black powder made in the skin on his face. Banish’s expression was clear and commanding and hard as plated steel, as with a few simple words he brought Blood into his great reserve of confidence. “Ables thinks Mellis killed Watson,” he said.

Trailer

Banish jiggled the knob of the open door, stepped firmly inside, then pointed at Blood behind him, a prompt.

Blood said, “Do you think he really would have tried to kill us?”

Banish nodded and closed the door behind them with a click, flipping on the light. He held up a hand to hold Blood where he was, then pointed across the trailer to somewhere near the bed.

“I don’t see how he could have gotten away with it,” Banish said.

Banish nodded deferringly at Blood. Blood looked at him, shrugged lightly, then went with it.

“True enough,” he said.

They were moving farther inside. Banish went first, pulling a chair out from under a table, knocking pieces of wood together. He did not sit but instead continued forward, Blood following. Banish turned his head back toward him.

“Well,” Banish said, “immunity is a small price to pay to get Ables.”

He was walking around the bed, quietly now, circling to the far wall. Blood was behind him.

“True enough,” Blood said again, his voice raised a little. “But can you trust him, Agent Watson? What about his wife?”

Banish stopped and indicated with his chin a hanging wall mirror.

Banish said, “I guess Mellis has a thing for the daughter.”

They stopped at the mirror. This wasn’t exactly what Blood had had in mind. He didn’t so much mind a little revenge — Mellis had tried to shoot them both — but Banish’s particular brand left a sick feeling in his gut. Still and again, he complied.

“So that’s why he wants the others out of the way,” Blood said.

He was looking at Banish’s reflection. The agent’s face showed no change, but the mirror, as with any clear reflective surface, distorted his features ever so slightly, like a wrinkle in an otherwise fine fabric, so that Banish’s sooted face took on a kind of hidden snarl. Banish nodded his head in a pleased fashion.

“I guess twelve months together in a cabin will do that,” he said.

Outside, Blood stood away from the trailer with his hands deep in his coat pockets while Banish closed and locked the door. There was no sense of victory in Banish’s person, no deviousness, no haste. In control and simultaneously out of control. Blood watched him coming toward him through the cold night without a coat on, without even his arms crossed, breath swirling whitely across his face. They were about to go their separate ways.

“What have we done?” Blood asked him quietly.

Banish said, “We just shot their lights out.”

Office

He paced. He ran a flat hand across his dry mouth. He had given up trying to work and took instead to walking back and forth and tapping his leg, with frequent side trips to the door flap. He had issued various busying assignments to the remaining overnight personnel to keep them away from the tent, and now that they were all gone, his window of opportunity was wide open and Kearney was nowhere to be found. Banish ran his left hand back through his thick hair and felt the hum rising again in his head. His great and immense thirst.

The old mastery. Things were moving now and he was in complete control. The drink itself meant nothing to him. A small reward. A squirt of grease to lube the few remaining creaks. It would leave him refocused and refreshed for the return to work the next morning. He nodded as he paced, routinely patting his right hand against his leg.

He checked the outer tent again, still empty. Time, time. It had been so long. The cool smoothness of the glass bottle. The snap and paper crinkle of the government seal. The twisting crack of the plastic cap — the genie escaping, the perfume released. The glug of it being poured. He was coming out of the desert. He felt himself finally rising out of the stasis that was Skull Valley. His tongue was a dry bucket in the stone well of his deep and immense thirst.

Footsteps in the outer tent. Quiet footsteps, and Banish started fast toward the door, then retreated instead to stand waiting casually before his desk. The flap was shrugged aside.

Dutiful Kearney. Banish crossed to him, fighting eagerness, fighting joy, but surely smiling and widely, ready to relieve Kearney of the burden of his plain brown package and feel the comforting shift of the liquid inside. Delicious fuel.

But Kearney had a soft look on his face, and when he raised his hands, they were empty. Banish blinked. He looked up at Kearney to see if he had realized his mistake, but Kearney was standing there, that hangdog look on his face, and Banish realized that there had been no mistake.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Kearney said, sheepish but resolute. “I couldn’t do it. It’s not right. Maybe you need help.”

Banish went after him. He put him in a choke grip, his forearm pressed against Kearney’s neck and pinning him back against a tent pole. It took Kearney by surprise, before he could even save a breath, and his mouth gaped empty.

“Goddamn Boy Scout,” Banish said. Kearney put his hands up to Banish’s quivering arm but did not fight back, except with his eyes. “I give you a direct order, I don’t care, you carry it out to the letter—” Kearney’s face turned pink, then red from the strain, lips blue, mouth twisting. Choking, deer-eyed.

“Get off my mountain!” Banish railed, releasing him finally and pulling back. Kearney slumped off to one side, stumbling away from Banish, reeling, his hand at his neck. The young cop stood there sucking air, face pained and twisted and red.

“GET OFF MY MOUNTAIN!”

Kearney pushed aside the canvas flap and stumbled out of the office. Banish turned fast. He went to his desk. He put one hand on the edge and held on, looking about feverishly, his head raging, buzzing.

He cursed Paradise Ridge. He cursed Montana. He flashed on his favorite liquor store in Manhattan, the fifths kept in dark bottles on shelves behind the counter like exotic medicines, neat rows of more than ten deep. He could drive off the mountain right now, he thought, in search of some. But how to explain it. They would be coming back to the command tent any minute.

The command tent. A cold ripple of salvation straightened him up. The beer. The drugged Pabst Blue Ribbon — he didn’t care — tall, chilled cans of blue and gold. If Coyle hadn’t gotten rid of them yet—

He went out roughly through the canvas fold and into the tent room to the small, humming refrigerator, ripping open the door and rooting through the clinking bottles of clear water and the scattered pieces of fruit. They were gone. The cans of beer were gone. He stood there a moment, frozen, cursing Coyle — then slammed shut the door, rattling the refrigerator, grabbing and shaking the appliance bodily, upsetting its contents, and then, defeated, he slumped over its top, gripping it finally for balance. He swore into his shirtsleeve. His great goddamn immense thirst. He closed his eyes and felt nothing but emptiness, recalling in the poisoned darkness of his mind the insects that had plagued him throughout his first blurred weeks at the Retreat, the bugs of hysteria — chewing on his skin, racing under the flesh of his arms, feasting on the soft pulp of his brain.

Office

It was a chilly morning after. Perkins crossed the staging area briskly, wearing a navy-blue jacket and a bold necktie for television. Agents had been shipping in hourly from nearby field offices and the busy clearing bore their presence. Rumors abounded as to the previous night’s fiasco. While there was great concern over what the reaction to the impending announcement might be, Perkins himself was humming with contentment. He would be the Bureau point man that morning, the vessel through which the FBI’s version of the night’s events would be presented over the airwaves throughout the country and the world.

He passed the wide mouth of the new mountain road. The contractors had cut deep into the rising timber and torn up and flattened the ground soil in a straight, upward path, and they were now working unseen beyond the crest of Perkins’s sight line. He could hear them, though — great noisy machines — and see the dark exhaust smoke puffing. He watched as a treetop high above shook its top branches and then fell. The road was nearly completed. They were closing in on the mountaintop.

Perkins entered the command tent and went straight to the back office and inside, prepared for whichever Banish he would find. The office was cleaned up, papers stacked neatly on the desk, calm order restored. Banish was so intent on his work that he did not notice Perkins’s entrance. He looked disheveled, hair tugged-at and roughened, the black powder stain on his face already starting to gray. He was hunched over his work, eyeglasses low on his nose, writing not on white sheets of notepaper, Perkins noticed, but on a separate yellow, leather-bound, legal-sized pad. Perkins advanced and waited for acknowledgment. It was not forthcoming.

“Been here all night?” Perkins said.

Banish looked up fast in surprise and saw him standing there, then returned wordlessly to finish whatever he was working on. When he was done, he set aside the notebook and handed Perkins some typed pages. He coughed into a loose fist, clearing some of the phlegm from his throat and reaching for a glass of water.

“Briefing and Q and A outline,” he said, setting the glass back down. “That’s as far as we’ll go.”

Perkins flipped through the pages, nodding. “Right,” he said. “Everything else is set for later.”

Banish nodded, distracted. “What time is it?”

Perkins checked his watch. “I go on in twenty minutes.”

Perkins turned and headed back out of the tent and across the clearing to the waiting Jeeps, covering the pages as he went. It was good work. Perkins couldn’t fault the preparation, nor the expertise. It was Banish’s sense of procedure that worried him, the way he was handling the cabin, the staging area, and the press, all by remote control these were dishes he could keep up and spinning only so long. Any spectacular failure following this new escalation — millions of taxpayers’ dollars spent, thousands of man-hours committed — would surely touch Perkins as well. He could protect Banish only so far, but if in the end Banish was to topple like one of those unlucky trees, Perkins would make certain he himself was in a good position to yell timber and jump clear.

Sound Truck

Banish entered the sound truck cleaned up and shaved and wearing a fresh white shirt. He was moving slowly, though not because of the buzzing in his head, which remained but no longer compelled him. Morning found him penitent. It was like coming off a powerful drug.

The sound man eyed him as he stepped inside, saying nothing about Banish’s burnt face.

“Anything overnight?” Banish said.

The sound man was chewing peppermint-smelling gum, shaking his head. “Not a thing.”

“The microphones? Nothing?”

He shook his head. “All quiet on the western front.”

Banish took a seat at the other workstation. He stared blankly at the controls. He was thinking about Mellis. “I need my trailer swept for bugs,” he said.

The sound man turned and looked at him sideways, chewing. “You mean,” he said, “real bugs?”

Banish picked up the handset and flipped the control switches himself, taking in a good, deep breath. “This is Special Agent Bob Watson...”

He ran through the speech, changing very little. Best to remain constant, to keep his vocal persona separate from the fury of the previous night’s assault. He finished and there was predictably no response. He hung up the handset, noticing a small color monitor playing behind the sound man. It was flashing bits of the press briefing down below: Perkins speaking from behind a podium, various agents flanking the bridge, the angry, stirring crowd.

“I had them bring out a satellite dish from the Seattle office,” the sound man said. “CNN was carrying a live feed of the briefing.” He glanced at the black-and-white bridge area monitor. “But it looks like he’s into the Q and A now.”

The monitor shot was too wide. “Can you move that camera?” Banish said.

“Twenty-to-one zoom ratio,” the sound man said, turning a dial and tightening the monitor view to frame the bridge and Perkins’s back and shoulders at the bottom of the screen and the press corps and the twelve-wheelers and camera towers at the top. Protesters packed the area between. Fists and effigies and signs were raised: FBI BURN IN HELL! FBI: GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY! BABY KILLERS.

Suited agents with fingers touching their ear wires filtered conspicuously through the jostling crowd, standing out even on the black-and-white monitor. That was their job this morning, to be a visible presence. Banish said absently, but with a detached certainty as he watched the scene, “There’s going to be a disturbance as soon as this ends.”

The sound man looked again at the monitor, as though for some explanation, then turned back to the color satellite screen. “They’re cutting it down now,” he said, nodding, “that’s what they’re doing. Breaking it down into bites to send out to the affiliates around the country to be folded into feature stories.”

He turned up the sound. The screen went dark between broadcast bursts, then a rainbow stripe appeared and a digital counter beeped down from three. There was Perkins behind the Department of Justice/ FBI podium, voice weighty, expression grave. “Judith Ables appears to have died of a gunshot wound. It appears she was hit in the initial exchange of gunfire with U.S. Marshals on the fourth of August and died instantly.” Then blackness.

“Died instantly,” echoed the sound man. Anybody who was ever mistakenly killed by law enforcement had died instantly and painlessly.

Three, two, one: a middle-aged woman with curled brown hair pointing threateningly at the camera. “They killed a twelve-year-old girl over a single gun! We won’t stand for it!”

Blackness. Three, two, one: a young close-eyed man in a hunter-green parka shaking an unseen sign. “This right here is the site of the massacre. This is the blood of our children. This is Concord Bridge and they have fired the first shot. What you are seeing right here is the beginning of a great American civil war.”

Blackness. Three, two, one: Perkins again. “It must be understood that Glenn Alien Ables and Charles Mellis are charged with serious crimes and pose an immediate threat to the community. Efforts to apprehend them must and will continue.” Heard clearly over his voice, from the bulging crowd, defiant cries of “Murderers! Assassins!”

Blackness. Three, two, one: the Mellises, Mrs. Mellis straining to be heard. “We don’t know what is happening. The FBI won’t tell us. When we saw Charles, he was fine and just anxious to come on home. I don’t know what they’re doing to him up there...” The picture lingered as Mrs. Mellis wilted and began to cry. Mr. Mellis, in a suit jacket and no tie, tried to comfort her.

Blackness. Three, two, one: Perkins looking stern, elaborating on a question. “We have had reports, unconfirmed at this time, of possible abuse in the household, ongoing over a period of many months.”

A reporter yelling, “Sexual abuse?”

Perkins saying, “I can’t comment on that at this time,” and pointing to another reporter.

Blackness. The sound man said, “Jesus Christ. Is that true?”

Banish’s face was hard and tight with disbelief.

Three, two, one: Deke Belcher standing facing the camera, holding a sloppy cardboard sign across his chest: YOUR HOME IS NEXT.

Banish turned away, Perkins’s foolish ad-lib ringing in his head. “What the hell is he thinking?” he said.

The sound man said, “That was off-card?”

“Goddammit.” Like sand through his fingers. In that one instant it had gone out to television stations in every city in the country, and probably overseas.

The sound man was back watching the black-and-white monitor. Banish saw that Perkins had since stepped down from the podium and agents were now converged on a disturbance near the front of the crowd. Two men were being pulled out and wrestled facedown onto the bridge, and taken into custody.

Banish stood and turned to leave, stepping out of the open van door and hearing the suspension give a bit, creaking. “Hey,” said the sound man after him. “What’s it like,” he said, “being God?”

That stopped Banish, stopped him dead in his tracks ten feet away from the van. He looked up at the new road carved fresh into the mountainside, a helicopter rumbling over the ridge. The clearing overrun with men and machines.

He turned back to the sound man, who was standing in the doorway of the van and smiling offhandedly, merely impressed. Banish shook his head. “I’m just a federal employee,” Banish told him. Then he walked away.

Holding Tent

Banish was outside waiting for Perkins as he walked up. “What the hell was that?” he said.

Perkins’s satisfied smile dipped in surprise. “Improvisation,” he allowed. “Strategy.”

Banish was furious. “If I had wanted that card played, I would have played it myself. You had the goddamn outline right there in front of you.”

Perkins raised a flat hand. “You’re right in the thick of things now, so you can’t see,” he said. “But I’m looking at the larger picture.” His voice lowered then in confidence and he stepped even closer. “You need an out,” he said. “We need an out. The Bureau needs an out if this thing goes wrong. If decisive action has to be taken. This way we’re all covered.”

Banish nodded. “I see,” he said. “You’re protecting me now. You’ve only got my best interests at heart. Otherwise, why would you start making things up off the top of your head like some first-office agent? Why would you raise all our stakes on a wild bluff?” Banish shook his head and pointed. “I don’t want to be covered, not by you or anyone else. I don’t want any politicians on this mountain. You’re losing faith in the operation, Perkins. And you are being insubordinate. If I hear you deviate from that script one more time, I don’t care — I’ll have Fagin conduct the briefings.”

Banish turned and entered the holding tent. Perkins followed soon after but remained out of sight behind. One of the two arrestees from the bridge disturbance sat alone at the heavy table before the empty cell, two agents standing behind him on either side. He was a white male in his mid-to-late thirties, with a shaved head that was strangely pockmarked, probably the result of a childhood disease, hidden sores idly picked off a then-covered scalp. He wore raw black skinhead tattoos on each of his hairless arms, a sleeveless black T-shirt to feature them, blue jeans, black boots. Handcuffs hung empty on the iron bar behind him and he was rubbing his chafed wrists. A thin line of fresh cherry-red blood ran from a half-inch gash over his right temple down to below his bruised right cheek.

Banish brought out his ID. “Banish,” he said. “FBI.”

The arrestee squirmed, shifting often and shooting side glances up at the agents on either side of him. The bones supporting his face were jagged. A wiry little weasel. “A little rough,” he said, dabbing at his face with a tissue, “don’t you think?”

Banish said, “You received our message.”

“Got myself arrested, didn’t I?”

One of the agents beside him said, “He punched a black SA in the mouth, sir.”

The arrestee said, “Now listen — I need a plane ticket this time and some seed money. I want outta here for good.”

Banish said, “We’ll get to that. What are they planning for us?”

The man shifted in his seat, shrugging. “Lots of talk down there. You know — little action. Some kind of presentation, they’re calling it.”

“Nonviolent?”

“A presentation,” the man stressed, then shrugged again. “For now anyway. That’s all I know.”

“Who?” Banish said. “Locals? WAR? Truth? What?”

“The Aryans,” the man said. He was impatient. “Who else, how would I know? They all feed off each other, wackos and patriots alike. Kremmer is supposedly visiting the front tomorrow.”

Franklin Kremmer was the sixty-eight-year-old minister of the WAR church. “That’s it?” Banish said. “Nothing else being planned?”

“If it is, they don’t tell anybody who don’t need to know until they need to know. There’s no newsletter or nothing. But Kremmer ain’t gonna be near no real violence. His shit, it don’t stink. Trucks coming in, though, past two days. Ammunition off-loaded.”

“Ammunition,” Banish said.

“Large caliber, and shells. All legal,” the man said. “Just in big amounts, and pricey. Supplies like flashlights, batteries, sleeping bags, first-aid kits.”

“What does it mean?”

The man shrugged. “It means they’re laying off a lot of money on this shit, how the hell would I know? A lot of Truth boys driving off with it.”

“Members of The Truth.”

“Hanging around the place the past couple of days. So there. That’s something for you, ain’t it? That ought to be worth something to you.”

Banish held his official gaze. “What about Ables?” he said. “You know him?”

“Seen him around. He’s known.”

“For selling guns?”

“Yeah, for selling guns. Wants to be an Aryan arms merchant worldwide, that’s his kick.”

“Everybody has a dream,” Banish said. “What did the others think of him?”

“Some laughed. But most were more afraid. Weird fucking guy. If they laughed, it wasn’t when he was around.”

“What did you think?”

The man scoffed and looked off a moment. “A nut. Like a lot of them, believes in UFOs and shit. Drove a nice truck, though. Until I bought it off him after he got pinched. Said he wouldn’t be needing it no more. Now look, man — that’s all I know.” He sat up straighter, opening his hands on the table as though he were presenting something. “So how about it?”

Banish said, “How about what?”

“A plane ticket, man. Get me the fuck outta here.”

“A plane? Where would you go?”

“Somewheres south. Then east. Too many kooks around here.”

Banish nodded, pretending to deliberate a moment. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “We need you here.” He said to one of the agents, “Give him a hundred dollars.”

“Whoa, hey,” said the man, raising his arms, looking around, stopping things. “The fuck is this?”

“We need an informant inside the WAR camp,” Banish said. “You’re it.”

“Informer?” The man’s small eyes flared suddenly. “Hey, man. Hey, hold it right there. Get one thing straight. I ain’t no informer.”

Banish looked at him, looked around the holding tent. “What do you call this, then?”

“This?” he said. “This is nothing. This is a weirdo and a couple of nut cases. But I ain’t no twist, man. I never turned out my friends. Those ATF fucks stood me up under a drug rap and rolled me — OK, fine, so I’m fucked, good. But that’s that.”

Banish nodded and said again, “One hundred dollars.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” the man said, swallowing his aggression. “Listen to me. Just listen, OK? You know what they’ll do to me, they find out I was in here? They’ll slice my fucking tongue out, man.”

Banish shook his head. “You know as well as I do you’ll walk off this mountain with more respect than ever before. You assaulted an FBI agent. You and your unwitting friend in the other tent will be great heroes once we let you go free.”

“Fuck that, man.” He was excited again, belligerent. Pleading his case. “They know. Someone’s talking and they fucking know. I know they know. So I’m up against it here. I’m fucked everywhere I turn. But I ain’t no twist, man. I ain’t nobody’s whore. You do what you gotta do in life, right? You do what’s gotta be done. But I ain’t spreading for no one, man.”

Banish said again, “One hundred dollars.”

The man’s face washed white and he almost made it to his feet before the agents shoved him back down in the chair. “Fuck you!” he screamed, nearly crying. “I ain’t nobody’s whore, you fucking pansy-ass, nigger-loving, federal fucking faggot!”

Banish stood still and looked closely at the man, watching his dark eyes stare out from inside his face, his thin chest huffing great breaths. Banish looked at the agent behind him.

“Seventy-five dollars,” he said.

“Oh, man,” the informant whined, deflating. “Fuck you, man!”

Banish said, “Fifty.”

“Fucking wait,” said the man, hands thrust out now, eyes closed. “Wait. Wait a fucking minute here, all right?” He opened his eyes again, looked around. “The fuck happened here, man? What the fuck is going on? ATF said you’d set me up good, like they did before.”

“What was that?”

“Three hundred bucks.”

“No,” Banish said. “What did you give them?”

“Ables, man,” he said, still bitter and unsure, but now fishing around for more money. “They were looking for somebody else they could roll. You know, roll me, roll him, moving higher up.”

“But Ables wouldn’t buckle.”

“And look what it got him. I told you, man, they got me like a motherfucker—”

“Why Ables?”

“How would I know? Somebody who was outside, but inside. They had a hard-on for him, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were pissed at him. They wanted him — I don’t know. I said I could get to his truck and they gave me a gun to plant.”

Banish was silent a moment. “A Beretta submachine gun.”

The man nodded. “And they said it would be my last job. That was two fucking jobs ago, including this bullshit one right here. So they got me by the balls, all right? So I’m in it up to my eyes, all right? So fuck you, assholes! I ain’t your fucking whore, man!”

Banish spoke after a moment. “No,” he said, nodding slowly. “You’re ATF’s whore.” He looked to the agent. “Give him one hundred dollars, grill the other one for an hour, then let them both go.”

Banish waited for more abuse. The informant expelled an empty breath of protest, then looked off to the side. His face showed hard-bitten dismay, lips moving in near silence as he swore bitterly to himself. Then he crossed his marked arms on the table. He lay his head down on top.

Banish wondered then why he had allowed it to get so ugly. He looked once more at the man with his head down on the table, then turned and went out past Perkins into the cool daylight of the clearing.

Office

When he entered his office, Coyle was standing behind his desk looking through some papers. She sensed someone entering and stepped back too sharply, then saw that it was Banish. Her face went from shock to embarrassment to guilt.

“What are you doing?” Banish said, advancing.

She gestured at the desk. “It was open,” she said. Then, reining in her nerve, she offered confusion as an excuse for her interest. “A poem,” she said.

It ripped through him. He had left his notebook open on top of his desk.

“Not a poem,” he said, taking a step forward. “An exercise. Focuses the mind.”

He heard himself being defensive, and felt her respond. “ ‘The Hornet’s Nest,’ ” she said. “It’s about this, isn’t it?” Then within the framework of her shortcut hair, her face — worn dry from days of mountain living — relaxed its fatigue for a fleeting blush of discovery. “The words,” she said, “the images—”

Banish stood fast. “You came in here for something?”

She sputtered. “Seattle special detail releases. And small equipment consignments.”

“Did you find them?”

There were two sheets of paper in her hand. She looked up and examined Banish’s face from across the room, then her eyes fell. She started the long walk out of his office. She went past him without looking up and exited through the canvas flap.

Sheriff Blood almost walked into her, entering with a stack of newspapers under his arm. He tipped his hat to her back as she left. Banish crossed to his desk before Blood could and closed the notebook and went about straightening up some other items. He had hoped to avoid Blood that day. He did not want to be made to discuss the previous night.

Blood set the papers down on the desk. “You saw the briefing?” he said. Banish gave a half nod. “It’s getting pretty unfriendly down there.”

Banish said, “I would prefer specifics.”

“Well, you killed a twelve-year-old girl over nothing. That’s what they’re saying. You, meaning everybody up here. You killed her to get back at Ables, and now you’re going to pick off his family one by one until you get to him. Or until the protesters can get to you.”

Banish expected as much. “Just talk?”

Blood shrugged. He was back on his heels. “Two calls I got on my car radio this morning,” he said. “The proprietor of Huddleston Sporting Goods called to let me know by manner of curiosity that he had sold out, within one hour of opening this morning, of batteries, flashlights, camping and hunting equipment, and other such supplies. All gone.”

“Sold them to Truth members,” Banish said.

Blood’s eyebrows arched. “And some locals too. He’ll sell to anybody who’s buying, of course, that’s his business. But he thought enough about it to let me know. Then after that I get a call from the bank manager over at the Huddleston Dime. Two men went in there first thing this morning and put in a change order for fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of pennies and nickels.”

“Two men?”

“Two bald men,” said Blood. “They left cash for it. More than that, though, he said people were lining up at his tellers, regular residents, pulling out all their money. Even cashing in IRAs and taking twenty percent penalties. They want it now and they want it in cash.”

Banish looked at him. “Meaning?”

“I was hoping you’d know. What comes to my mind is survivalist activity — we’ve seen some of that around here before. Comes in waves. End of world type thing. But why the urgency, I can’t say. Could be some people took the death of the girl as a sort of sign.”

“But the protesters below,” Banish said. “They’re stable.”

“Stable because they’re still unorganized, each with their particular gripes and views. But if that mob ever pulled itself together,” Blood said, shaking his head, “those folks could just about overrun this place. And if it comes to that, I’d say the tree cover is in their favor. Don’t you want to push them back any farther?”

“Too far along for that. It would only raise more suspicion. We can control them where they are.”

“Can’t control everything,” Blood said, picking up a thin, brightly colored, half-sized newspaper off the top of the stack on the desk. “Even these tabloids have taken it up. ‘Mystery Mountaineer Foils FBI Arrest Plot,’ ” he read. “They’ve taken to calling him ‘Grizzly Ables.’ Here, there’s even a UFO angle.”

Banish busied himself.

“I don’t know,” Blood continued, opening to a page. “Folks around here tend to take these things pretty seriously. If it’s printed in a newspaper, then they accept it as the truth. You do wonder where these reporters get their sources, though.” He started to read some of it. “ ‘On the other side of the confrontation tearing this family apart, observers are now questioning why federal officials have put responsibility for the standoff — now estimated to be one of the largest non disaster relief law enforcement undertakings ever witnessed on American soil — in the hands of a mysterious federal agent with a record of criminal violence himself.’ ”

Banish stopped and stiffened. His chest went cold. His eyes fell and came to stare at a fixed point of nothingness as Blood continued. “ ‘Veteran FBI agent John T. Banish was fined $1200 in February 1991 for being drunk and disorderly aboard a Washington, D.C.-to-New York flight on Thanksgiving Day, 1990. Through a plea bargaining agreement, more serious charges of assault and making terroristic threats were dropped. “He went berserk,” reported an unidentified steward who was on that flight. “He hit me and gave me a black eye when I refused to serve him more alcohol. He was very drunk, waving his badge around.”

“ ‘Banish was also the agent in charge of the World Financial Center hostage-taking in which three people died.

“ ‘New York District Court records show dual restraining orders filed against Banish in December 1990 by his wife and daughter, who have renewed those orders every ninety days since then and remain estranged from him to this day. “He’s sick,” said a person close to the family. “John is very dangerous.” ’ ”

Blood stopped reading. He closed the paper.

Banish remained still. Regret tugged at the muscles of his face and he straightened as much as he could and slipped one stiff hand inside his pants pocket.

“Very well,” he said.

Blood set the tabloid down. This was his payback for the previous night, to watch Banish slowly twist.

It was as though Banish had heard his own obituary read to him. He saw that this was how he was to be remembered. This was the sum total of his life. Flames of regret burned in his gut, but not new flames. They were a raging, ceaseless thing that even the satisfying of his immense thirst never did quite douse.

“Very well,” he said again.

Blood said, “Something happened to you in the woods last night.”

Banish nodded. “Fine,” he said.

He was certain that there would be no discourse. There was nothing in that for him. Talking was his profession and he knew better than anyone else its limitations. It could take you only so far, and Banish had been there, and he had come back, and here he was now.

He looked at the floor. “We will begin to allow relatives and friends up one at a time to record messages to the family,” he said. “Those urging surrender and peaceful resolution will be broadcast to the cabin. Those which do not, won’t. There will be no conversations.”

He found his chair and managed to sit at his desk. He pretended to go about his work. Blood said, “Fair enough” — to no acknowledgment from Banish, not even an answering glance upward. Then he turned and left without having to be asked.

Alone, Banish allowed himself to stare off again at a fixed point somewhere beyond his consciousness. The telephone was right there on his desk next to him. He recalled the few times during the past two years, the low times, when he had dialed the number in Cincinnati just to hear a familiar female voice say, “Hello.” The last time, following a prolonged silence on both their ends, Molly had said fearfully, “John?” and then hung up. He could see her in a long nightshirt, standing back from the telephone in a darkened kitchen, looking at it, wondering if it would ring again. Short, layered hair, lighter than it used to be, as in the hundreds of different photographs he had commissioned. Her left hand near her mouth. Her mother’s garnet the only ring she still wore.

He felt for the thick band on his finger. He pictured Nicole in a white wedding dress and veil. But he could not see her smiling. Despite all the photographs, his only daughter’s face was suddenly unclear to him. He could not conjure her up. As hard as he tried, he could not get his image of her to lift its lace-covered arms and raise that veil.

Staging Area

Fagin turned away from the Salvation Army truck, hot tray of food in hand. He was one of the last to be served that evening. A bonfire crackled strong in the cleared area before the trailers and most of the marshals and agents were eating their slop there. At a single picnic table separate from the rest he saw a man eating alone. Fagin went there.

He set his tray down without Banish so much as looking up. On the tray was a piece of thick-crust bread covered with chipped beef in a thin, lumpy brown sauce, a serving spoon’s worth of beans still settling into its rounded section, a separate cup of sulfur like bouillon, and a small square of cornbread.

Fagin said, “Shit on a shingle. Jesus H. Christ.”

Banish sat up a fraction then, no longer able to ignore him. He was bent over his plate, eating efficiently like a kid in his last days of BT, as a light wave of laughter went up from the direction of the blaze.

“Didn’t think you’d OK a bonfire,” Fagin said with his mouth full, gesturing with his fork.

Banish swallowed, still watching his food. “No reason not to,” he said. “Good for morale. After six days, fatigue becomes a factor.”

“Yeah,” said Fagin. “Six fucking days. That World Financial Center thing, how long was that?”

“That was an overnight,” Banish said.

An agent came up then with papers for Banish, who looked them over and initialed each page. He returned to his plate and started in on the beans.

Fagin said, “So, you married?”

Banish stopped chewing. He stared at the table. “You don’t read the papers?” he said.

Fagin gave a small grin of concession. He cut into his food. “Separated or divorced?”

“Waiting for annulment.”

“A Catholic.” Fagin nodded. He had guessed that, long ago. “Funny because you don’t seem to me like the marrying type. And also funny because, I guess you could say, now my own marriage is hanging by a fucking thread.”

“Maybe it’s your language,” Banish said.

“No,” Fagin said, “that’s the part of me she likes.”

Fagin let a smile surface, and then even Banish broke down and bared some teeth. Fagin shook his head amusedly, then looked at his food again and soured on it once and for all, dropping his fork and knife onto the tin plate and pushing the thing away except for the cornbread. Fucking disgusting.

“We met at a Dodgers game,” he said. “She was working in their front office there, still does.” He looked up at the top of the mountain, orange with the last of the dusk. “In fact, tonight’s our seventh anniversary. Yeah.” He nodded. “I’m thinking about spending it up in a tree. Sitting up in the branches pointing a sniper rifle at some fucking guy I don’t even know, holed up in a dink-water shack on top of a fucking mountain in the middle of nowhere fucking Montana.”

He was shaking his head slowly in disgust, wiping an already clean hand on the front of his uniform shirt. He wanted to spit, but could not from the table. It was his upbringing. “Now she wants a divorce,” he said. “She’s younger than me, couple of years. She’s white. It catches me a lot of shit. But who knows, you know? I’m not around much. You know how it is, the job. Maybe she’s fucking a ballplayer.” He looked down then, thinking he had gone too far. He didn’t want to look weak. “Maybe,” he said matter-of-factly. He was concentrating on one finger of his right hand, his trigger finger, dry and pinkish on the underside, rubbing as though to get something off it. “I’m gonna need an outside line later on.”

Banish was looking across at him. “OK,” he said.

Fagin nodded, looking back up, then skyward again. “What’s with these fucking stars?” he said, meaning to change the subject. “Jesus. It’s like Vegas.”

Banish nodded. “You get used to it.”

The bonfire snapped loudly and they both turned their attention toward it. The blaze had lost some of its strength, blowing more white smoke than before. Fagin’s men were obviously lingering at that point, done with their meals and just shooting the shit, hanging around the bonfire to kill time and delay the inevitable return to duty. Fagin let them. This brief fire was their whole Saturday night and he wanted his men to have it.

He saw then the rookie cop crossing in front of the bonfire and heading toward the mess trucks, alone. He noticed that Banish saw the cop too, then turned right back around to the table. He seemed angry, maybe with a bit of surprise. Then it seemed as though he was reconsidering it or thinking of something else. Gradually he came to look heavy-eyed, staring down at the table. He might even have looked sorry. It was a strange look for Banish.

“That rookie cop,” Fagin said with a jab of his chin. “What’s his name?”

Banish was looking at his plate. “I think, Kearney,” he said.

Fagin nodded. “There’s a story there. The short version is: A couple of my men were making noise over dinner last night about you Fibbies, and also a little about how you yourself were handling things here. Just talk, right?” Fagin leaned forward, pointing toward the fire and grinning wide. “Kearney here was the only one who stood up for you. With all the GS grades on this fucking mountain, the only one willing to take on the entire nail-chewing, bad-ass U.S. Marshals Service SOG was him. A traffic cop from North Bumfuck. I don’t know — tough, or just shit out of brains? What do you think?”

Banish gave no response. He was staring at the square of cornbread left on his plate. He seemed to have been saving it, but now he looked as though he didn’t want it at all.

Fagin was about to ask him for it when another agent came rushing up to Banish’s side. Coyle, her name was, the librarian from the command tent.

“Sir,” she said, talking fast. “Agent Banish. We received a transmission signal from the mountaintop and a voice on the CB. I think it’s Ables, sir. He says he wants to talk to you.”

Command Tent

Banish entered, Coyle in front of him, Fagin behind. Perkins was there already with the other command tent agents, including a few technicians, standing around the CB radio at the switchboard desk. “Hook up the recorder,” Banish instructed one of them; to another, “Get this all down.” The technician went to work on the CB wiring, the agent grabbing a pad and pen. Banish looked over at Perkins and said, “We’re sure it’s him?” and Perkins was about to answer in the affirmative when a hiss of static came on over the CB, then the voice.

“Watson. I know you’re out there.”

It was breathy and not too heavily accented, slight, not deep. Banish licked his dried lips, watching the agents hurrying around the CB. It was a broadcast channel and therefore unsecured. The entire county could be listening in, but too much time had passed and Banish needed to talk to Ables now. He realized he would be playing to two audiences.

It was respectfully quiet in the tent. He set himself mentally as he watched the technician work. He reviewed some must-ask questions and fleshed out a rough preliminary strategy. Ables was catching him off-guard but not unprepared. The technician switched on the recorder and the tape reels began to turn. He backed out of the way and Banish sat down and picked up the handset, thumbing down the trigger.

“This is Special Agent Watson,” he said. “Mr. Ables?”

The voice came back. “Watson.”

“Mr. Ables. Is everyone all right in there? I want you to know first of all that your family’s safety is our primary concern.”

No response. Nothing over the CB but the hitch of dead air.

“What happened with Mr. Mellis?” Banish asked.

“Don’t worry. He made it back safe and sound. We’re all here together.”

Brick wall. Banish bore down.

“Mr. Ables, listen. I was not injured, and neither was the county sheriff with me. Now I want to work with you to end this thing as soon as possible, before someone on either side gets overanxious and there’s a loss of life.”

Ables said, “There already was.”

Banish said, “We’re still not entirely clear on what happened to the marshal.” It was thought displacement — Banish feeling Ables out. An isolated suspect could often be made to believe what he wanted to believe through simple suggestion, even when the truth facing him was certain and contradictory.

Ables said, “I’m talking about my Judith.”

Banish looked up. He saw the tape reels slowly turning, then glanced beside him and found Fagin. Fagin said simply, “Fuck.”

Banish returned to the CB, pressing the thumb switch down. “That is exactly what I’m trying to avoid more of, Mr. Ables. I was actually, however, referring to future charges possibly being brought against you.”

Ables’s flat voice rose for the first time. “I couldn’t get a fair trial in these Jew courts.”

“Mr. Ables, I have no bearing or opinion on your current case. I am here simply to expedite your safe delivery over to the proper authorities.”

“What’s that?” Ables said, as though he hadn’t heard correctly. “You out there are the authorities. You’re the FBI. You’ve got orders to shoot and kill me. It’s all one big cartel of freedom oppression come over from the East. You people are the murderers here.”

“Mr. Ables, let me say that we regret, deeply, the initial altercation and subsequent misfortune that has befallen you and your family—”

“I don’t want your words, Watson. You listen to me now, phone cop. Don’t you talk about my daughter.”

“Mr. Ables—”

“Shut up. Don’t you talk to me about Judith, Watson. Just shut up out there and listen. Here is why I am talking to you at all. You stinking sons of bitches lie. You talk and you double-talk, and all of it lies. You think I’d listen to you now? I got a radio up here. I know what they’re calling me on it. They’re calling me a child molester. All up and down the dial. I keep hearing it over and over and over.”

Banish shut his eyes again. He could feel Perkins standing behind him, but it was not worth the effort to turn around.

Ables kept going. “You dirty sons of bitches. This is how you want me to go out. You’re clearing the way for the kill. You, the child murderers, calling me sick—”

“Mr. Ables,” Banish said, “the FBI has no belief, knowledge, or reason to suspect you of any criminal or immoral activity whatsoever involving your family.”

“I have a radio,” Ables said.

“Mr. Ables — you have to understand the situation down here. I am but one man. When you don’t talk to me, the other personnel here have a job to do, to try and induce you into giving up your family and coming out, and I have no influence over their actions.”

“Then put on someone who does. Put on the son of a bitch who called me a child molester.”

“No, Mr. Ables — your talking to me now gives me some leeway. If we can make progress together working things out through a dialogue, you and I, then this whole thing can proceed a lot more smoothly and safely. Which is why I am encouraged that you finally contacted me. Why haven’t you taken the telephone inside, Mr. Ables?” Banish was trying to regain control over the conversation.

Ables said, “If I step one foot out of this house, you will blow me away. You proved that.”

“Mr. Ables — if you give me your word that they will not be harmed, I can dispatch men immediately to deliver that telephone right up to your front porch—”

“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.

“I was a hotshot and I got results, and that was all anybody cared about. Nobody questioned it, least of all me. Nothing else mattered so long as the job got done. And I was a pretty good drinker those days. Never on the job, always after. Interesting thing about a hostage situation: you can never walk away cold. There’s a downtime afterward when you have to get together with the other men involved and toss back a few, to relieve that tension, that adrenaline, whatever it is, to flush it out of your system for good. Primitive therapy, but absolutely necessary, because there is no one else you can share it with except those who went through it with you. Not your wife. Not your kids, your clergyman. And that was when I really held court. Those were exciting times — heady — and I guess I came to live for them, situation after situation, triumph after triumph. Like a drug, over and over. I was at the top of my game then. In other words, I was pretty well primed for a long fall.” He nodded, surprising even himself with his candor. It relaxed him to tell it. Didn’t it all seem so clear to him now. “Ever heard of the World Trade Center?” he said.

Kearney nodded. “Seen pictures. Where that bomb went off in New York City.”

“This was almost three years before that. A huge place it is, with two zip codes of its own, millions of people passing through it every week. A large complex of buildings and tunnels and walkways. This was at the World Financial Center, which is part of the complex but separate from the twin towers. Tuesday night late in June. Raining hard, I remember, because this was lower Manhattan down near the Hudson, and Vesey Street was flooded and shiny black when we pulled up outside.

“A Cuban national had taken his wife and daughter and thirty-seven other people hostage on the Fixed Income Trading Floor of one of the largest brokerage firms in New York, seven stories up. We were called in as feds because it was thought initially to be some sort of Free Cuba ploy or other act of terrorism. Turned out later it was just the messy end of a simple domestic dispute. He was a maintenance worker in the building, a heavyset guy who had been beating his Cuban-born wife for more than a year and had started in recently on their twelve-year-old daughter. For this, and various other reasons, the wife had become very unhappy with her life in America and decided to steal the child away from him and move back in with her mother’s family in Cuba. But for some reason, she decided to go to his work to tell him of her intention, and brought along the daughter. Two policemen responding to initial reports of a disturbance in the lobby of the World Financial Center were overpowered. The Cuban took their guns, chemical Mace and car keys, went out yelling into the street, got the shotgun from the trunk of their cruiser, then retreated back into the building with his wife and daughter up to the seventh floor, where he took over.

“Logistics were a problem from the beginning. The seventh-floor trading area was wide open, an L-shaped football field of rows and rows of desks spaced by white rectangular columns, and two stories high. For security reasons, the elevator did not stop there after six at night, so the only way you could get in was if you had permission — Capital Markets salesmen catching up on work after the markets closed — or were a maintenance man with keys. There was no eighth floor, except for a side flight of stairs leading to a catwalk elevation of desks and offices above the trading area. He had barricaded that entrance and said it was rigged to a bomb. That was nonsense, but forced entry was an operational no-go regardless, as the upper area was visible from almost anywhere on the trading floor below.

“The next lowest floor was the fifth, the Equity Trading Floor, which was also two stories high and therefore prohibitive in terms of gaining access through the ceiling. The floor above Fixed Income Trading, the ninth, the Public Finance Trading Floor, was just one story tall, but too far above the seventh floor to be effective. Even if we broke through the floor itself, Hostage Rescue would have had to rappel unprotected down forty feet of wide-open space.

“The one thing the seventh floor did have was telephones. Hundreds of them, on every desk throughout the trading area. We established a control base on the fifth floor below and evacuated and sealed off all the floors above the seventh. By this time it was late at night, so the evac went quietly and smoothly. I got him on the phone right away. One ring. He was too distraught for English, so we used an interpreter. I made progress quickly, getting some hostages released in exchange for meals he had requested from a small Cuban restaurant off Fulton Street. We had to locate the proprietor in Bedford-Stuyvesant and get him to come in and open up the place in the middle of the night. He said the suspect had eaten lunch there every day for more than two years. The waitresses all knew him by name.

“We negotiated through the night. I said yes to everything he wanted in exchange for more hostages, while at the same time moving Hostage Rescue snipers and assault specialists into position, filling the stairwell with guns and men and working on rewiring the elevators. I talked him down finally to just thirteen hostages, seven male and six female, including his wife and daughter.

“The suspect was clearly unbalanced. One moment he was demanding to talk to his mother in Cuba, and the next, Castro himself. He was unstable. His life had somehow gotten away from him, he felt powerless, and he said many times that he had nothing left to live for. That was my main concern. You have to give a hostage-taker some sense of responsibility, some meaning to his actions. Otherwise, there is nothing stopping him from executing the hostages and you’ve lost him. I remember I convinced him at one point to put his wife on the phone. I can’t recall now what she told the interpreter. But I do remember her crying. I remember her praying.”

Banish stopped a moment to collect his thoughts.

“The problem with using a public phone line in a hostage situation is that anybody can call in. This was a major concern, as we had been through recent scenarios where television reporters telephoned hostage-takers for interviews in the heat of a standoff. For that reason alone, I wanted to shut down all the phones on the Fixed Income Trading Floor, save one. This was met with resistance on three fronts. First, the World Financial Center managing group had made numerous legal guarantees to the brokerage firm, among them the provision that WFC could secure their offices and operating space against unlawful intrusion and provide adequate communications service at all hours. New York Telephone had made a similar agreement with the firm, and was having trouble anyway locating a technician who could circumnavigate the complex WFC branch exchange at that late hour. Then representatives for the firm itself arrived on the scene. Lack of telephonic access to the Fixed Income Trading Floor during normal operating hours would be devastating enough, they said, but a Wednesday morning shutdown of the Equity Trading Floor, which we were currently occupying, not only meant the instant loss of millions of dollars in business, but would have serious repercussions on the opening of the New York Stock Exchange and various financial markets around the world.

“So I listened to them. And I held off. I sent someone down to talk to the news media camped out in the lobby below, to play up the risk to the hostages and get them to agree not to attempt to contact the Cuban under threat of arrest. I should have just gone ahead and cut the cords and let everybody fight it out afterward, but I did not. I let it go. The phone lines remained open while our people scrambled to get a court order, and I sat back patiently to wait.

“There was this morning radio personality in New York City. Very popular in that market. About six in the morning he comes on, reads the news off the overnight wire, and gets the bright idea to try and call the Cuban. He gets through and puts the Cuban on the air live. We didn’t know it was happening until they were about halfway through. The DJ was asking the Cuban questions and drawing him out about his family and his troubles, and basically trying to talk the man down — but using pop psychology. There is nothing more dangerous than that. The Cuban was getting all wound up again and starting to lose his English, after I had worked all night to stabilize him. Then we started hearing phones going off upstairs. One after another, and by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. This DJ’s listeners had figured out that they too could dial the firm’s exchange, plus four random numbers, and have a chance to talk directly to the hostage-taker themselves. I sent men down to the communications center with fire axes but it was too late, there were already a hundred telephones going off all around this guy, and every other caller telling him, Kill them.

“Then we start hearing gunshots. The Cuban is losing it, firing wildly, at the floor, up into the air. Then he comes back on our phone. He’s screaming about executions. He says he’s going to kill all the hostages one by one. My people begin to scramble and I get into the elevator at this point. I do not know why. The negotiator never participates in any arrests, but the situation was starting to slip away from me — me, you see — so in the confusion I grabbed a portable phone and went inside the elevator. We were jammed in there — myself, a technician, and six HRT members, all just two floors below him. The elevator had been rewired and was ready to go. I called up to the ninth floor, and our sonar equipment placed him not ten feet away from the elevator doors, some forty feet away from the hostages. More wild shooting then. I didn’t have any choice. I pushed the button for the seventh floor. I gave the order to fill the room with gas and sent my men in.”

Banish was staring straight ahead. He was watching the elevator door slide open, seeing it all happen again through the smoky plastic shield of a gas mask. The confusion, the yells, the pushed bodies. Gunshots, screams.

He heard the single shot. He saw the prone legs kicking, blood darkening the floor. “The Cuban took his own life. A single round to the temple, just as we broke in.”

People in business suits screaming, wailing, lying on the floor. “The firm’s employees were traumatized but each of them got out OK.”

Banish remembered running up to the side wall of the smoky room. He watched it all happening. He saw them there. “But the wife and daughter — he had stood them up against a wall away from the rest of the hostages, tied with a thin wire cord around each of their necks to keep them still. I had sent the gas in. They both lost consciousness just as we arrived. Their own weight dragged them down.”

He saw them sagging forward from the wall by their necks, throats sliced open ear to ear. Dangling hands twitching spasmodically, run red with blood. His own men trying frantically to cut them loose from the wall. Mother and daughter dying right there in front of him.

A dark woman in a sundress with a black eye and bruises on her arms. A twelve-year-old girl.

Roaring thunder approached his consciousness and then a helicopter buzzed over them, its spotlight running past, and Banish saw where he was again, the ground and the gully before him, and for a frozen instant everything glowed white. Then the helicopter passed and the shaken leaves drifted like regrets to the dirt around them. Banish cleared his throat.

“So we went out afterward. It was different, of course, all different. And when it was over I could not go home. I didn’t, until three days later. And I did not stop drinking from that day on. Gradually, and then rather spectacularly, I fell apart.”

Banish was quiet for a while.

“And the freed hostages. More than half of them quit their jobs within six months. That’s standard following a crisis like that; people yanked out of their daily routines, isolated, terrorized. One night can last you a lifetime. But one young woman, the first to leave the firm, refused to cooperate with her appointed psychiatrist. Eventually she disappeared altogether. It’s what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome. She came to identify her captor as her savior — rather than the police, with whom she had no contact — because her captor held the power of life and death over her and she had been spared. She got my name somehow and tracked me down at a hospital I was staying at. She had a gun and she tried to kill me. Fair trade, I’d say, except that she bungled the job. But that is what you get for playing with other people’s lives.”

He looked at Kearney then, across the cold mountain gully surrounded by the pleading woods. Banish said, “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

Kearney hesitated, then nodded.

“I am nobody’s hero. I don’t like some of the things I have to do. I have too much power, too much responsibility. Too many hands. That’s why these protesters — I could have pushed them all the way back to the Pacific if I’d wanted to. But I need them here. They will keep me from doing things I might otherwise do. Whatever their motives for being here, that is what they are: eyes, to watch me. Because I am not to be trusted. Because I am a gambler — that’s all I am. And a pretty good one. That’s my curse.”

Kearney was blinking at him. He started to say something, censored himself, then went ahead and said it anyway. “But it wasn’t your fault.”

Banish smiled weakly at the sentiment. Familiar words of counsel. They must have tasted warm on the tongue. But hearing them again did have the effect of sobering him.

“We talked to Ables tonight,” Banish said. “I’m reassigning you to the command tent, starting oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.”

Kearney’s white eyes cleared then. He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Banish realized he was leaning forward. He sat back against the hard dirt wall again. There was an awkward moment of nodding silence on both sides, then a muffled pop. Banish turned his head to listen, uncertain. When nothing followed immediately, he crouched and turned fully to look up through the trees at the cabin. The searchlight was still. Then a crack out of the night like a cap being fired, and a hiccup burst of light — a shot from somewhere high in the trees above. Banish grabbed for his radio on the ground next to him. “Fagin,” he said.

Sniper’s Nest

Fagin scanned the compound with his NVD. Like looking into a fucking aquarium. He answered the voice in his ear.

“Wasn’t me,” he said. “Is that fucking HRT?”

Banish said, “Situation report.”

“Warning shot. Something moving out there, don’t know what the fuck it is.”

Banish’s voice came back. “Fagin, warnings only. Everyone else hangs back. I’ll get someone on the lights.”

Fagin clicked off. It was fucking Hostage Rescue. He slipped his ringer back in over the trigger and stayed alert. He could see nothing clearly because of the goddamn spotlight burning into his NVD — there was glare, although the light being still now made things easier. A second light came on low then and swept the woods. The stinging odor of the Vicks put a throb in his head. He heard the whup-whupping of the Huey returning. The whining of Ables’s family on the speakers down below. Another cold wind wheezing through the trees. He frowned hard. Happy fucking anniversary.

Something moving again in the greenness. He blinked several times, scoping the area.

A figure outside, an adult, standing just beyond an open door at the right side of the cabin where the land began to drop off. Something in its hands, maybe a gun, but impossible to confirm. Fagin heard the helicopter coming faster, the treetops starting to bend. He cursed the glare of the spotlight. The side door was still wide open. He fired once more, another generous warning, this time low and wide to the figure’s right. Whoever it was, Fagin wanted the person back inside pronto.

Banish’s voice again in his ear, “Fagin.”

The Huey roared and whupped right overhead, cruising in on a low sweep. Fagin saw the figure looking up. He saw it raising the object in its hands as the Huey floated over the trees.

He saw a burst pattern of gunfire from the dark figure.

Fagin said, “What the fuck—”

The helicopter was bailing out. Fagin tapped on his radio. “Fucker’s shooting at the Huey.”

Banish’s voice came back. “Who?”

Fagin dropped two more rounds and watched two patches of green ground jump black near the figure’s legs.

The figure ducked and swung around toward Fagin, returning fire. The Huey was gone and Fagin could hear the shots accompanying the fire burst as the figure moved back toward the open door. “Stupid fuck,” he said. He took aim and paced the running figure with trailing shots.

Rounds strafed the leaves above Fagin’s head. He ducked and re aimed “Mother fucker,” he said, angry, squeezing the trigger, plugging away.

Banish said, “Fagin.”

Fagin picked surgically at the ground by the figure’s feet, chasing it back to the door. It let go one final volley and then ducked inside. Fagin came up on the last one, depositing a single black chip hole in the glowing green door.

The door was slow to close.

“Fagin.”

He pulled the Remington off his cheek and clicked back on. “What the fuck!” he said.

Banish said, “Sit-rep.”

Fagin was near breathless with anger, but Banish wanted control on the network, a concise situation report. “Hostile gunfire, unprovoked,” Fagin said. “One individual. I moved it back inside and left a round in the fucking door. That’s all.”

Banish said, “This is for everyone: we’re hitting the lights.”

Fagin pulled off his NVD and slammed the helmet down against the wood planking of the perch. “Fuck!” he said. He was thinking about how long it had taken that fucking door to close.

When the stadium lights clanked on and bleached the cabin, there was nothing left to see.