The Standoff

Command Tent

Banish entered from the light morning rain and wiped the bottoms of his shoes on two muddied towels set down inside the flap door. Kearney was there already, seated at the switchboard and wearing a telephone receiver headset, manning the outside lines. He did not look up. Banish turned to Coyle, who was ready for him.

“The road should be finished later today,” she reported. “Nothing yet on the CB. Do you want to try and raise him?”

“No,” Banish said. “We have to get him on that phone.”

“Excuse me.” It was Kearney’s voice. He was swung toward them, the single earphone pulled off his ear. “A woman on the telephone just said, “Stand by for Alpha Four’?”

Banish looked at him a moment, then told Coyle to order everybody out of the tent.

Coyle made the announcement, moving with the rest of them up and out of their chairs, setting down coffee cups and pencils, leaving work unfinished on desks and filing out past him through the door. Kearney looked around and followed suit without question, removing the headset and leaving it on the console and walking out with the rest.

Banish moved to Coyle’s desk. He punched the button on her telephone and took up the receiver, standing and waiting patiently through the silence. Alpha Four was the transmission code name for the Director of the FBI.

“Jack,” the Director said, his rich, senatorial voice coming on the line without a click. “What’s the good word?”

“We finally made contact with the individual last night.”

“I know,” said the Director. “I read the transcript in this morning’s Post. It’s not going very textbook, Jack, is it.”

“No, sir,” Banish said.

He envisioned the Director nodding on the other end. “A funny world sometimes, Jack. What the general public will latch on to. What the media will pursue. But you know there’s great interest in a case when you’re at a breakfast meeting and the President asks you how it’s going in Montana.” A pause then, but not dramatic; the Director was a deliberate man. “I know things are escalating out there, Jack. Administration tells me you’re up over a million dollars a day. People are watching this very closely.”

Banish said, “Yes, sir.”

“I’ve already had the Governor of Montana on the phone this morning. He’s going to declare a state of emergency. He was also ready to call out the National Guard, but I scotched that. I was able to convince him how serious a mistake that would be. Just to give you some idea of what’s going on out here, Jack. People are beginning to lose their heads over this. I’d say it’s the death of the girl, chiefly.”

Banish nodded. “Yes, sir.” He saw then what was coming.

“Jack, Sam Raleigh’s just gotten off that Port Authority situation in L.A. You may know, he was with the first negotiating team in Waco, the one that had so much success in getting the children out before Tactical took over. I know that he was your number two in New York before SOARs was established, and Carlson says he still speaks very highly of you.”

Banish nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The Director said, “I have a decision to make here, Jack. I was wondering if you could make it any easier for me.”

Four days after his reassignment, here it was finally. The arrow pointing home. A few quiet words to the Director, as smooth as an easy handshake, and he would fade back into the woodwork again, perhaps walk off the mountain that very afternoon, without fear of penalty and without disgrace. The Director was making it very easy for him. He could return to Skull Valley and continue the regimen he had set for himself there, and ride out his last few years to retirement and a full government pension.

But the situation. Recently, and in spite of himself, ever since hearing from Ables the day before, he had been thinking more and more about the children inside the cabin. Not so much as hostages, but as children. Three girls and an infant boy. He wanted them safe. Perhaps more than he should have. He wanted them well. It was a new sensation for him, seeing a hostage as anything other than a marker to be bargained for and won, although it was a common enough affliction and something he had witnessed numerous times before. Like a fever, it would strike even the most disciplined of men in the heat of a negotiation, becoming a hindrance only when manifested in the form of desperate acts committed out of frustration or anger misdirected at fellow agents. Either case warranted immediate dismissal. But other than that, this syndrome, Banish’s affliction, now seemed to him entirely reasonable. You don’t ask a man to carry around plutonium for a week, then have him hand it off to the next man and walk away and wait for the poison. Banish looked around at the vacated command tent. He felt strongly the drag of the small community he had created there. Its purpose had become his purpose. Leaving was no longer a viable option. He must not merely remain on the mountain; he must succeed.

“Sir,” he said, “I don’t think I could respect myself if—”

“Jack, I’m behind you. I’ve always been behind you. I think you know that. But my concerns are necessarily broader. I have faith in your talents, Jack, I do, but this operation has become much too significant for us to risk it being bungled. I need reassurance. Besides, Carlson says that as he understands it, you resisted the assignment from the beginning.”

Banish was recalling the day almost three years ago when he was told to walk away from his wife and daughter and never return. This assignment was his second chance at redemption, both personally and professionally, and perhaps his last.

“Sir,” Banish said, straightening when there was no one to see him there, “I’d like to stay on.”

Staging Area

The rain was falling harder and the wind was picking up, and Fagin stood waiting in it, his plastic poncho blown flat and wrinkled against his broad back. Two of Fagin’s men stood under nylon rain jackets near him, while a few yards away six members of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team were huddled together in their traditional black ninja uniforms. Banish was late to the meeting as usual.

Fagin turned. Two of the eight HRT agents stared at him coldly. Fagin shook his head a little but did not expend much effort. Stupid fucking mind games. Junior league interagency sandbox shit.

HRT was the FBI’s elite paramilitary force, trained to capture terrorists, hostage-takers, and violent criminals in life-threatening situations. Their team was made up of fifty volunteer agents split into three revolving units, with one unit on alert at all times and available for emergency assignment within a few hours anywhere in the country. They were assault specialists and top-flight snipers whose training regimen included what Fagin referred to as the Bayer drill, the ability to snipe an aspirin tablet at two hundred yards. In terms of prestige, equipment, and their five-million-dollar annual budget, HRT made the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group look like Double-A ball, and Fagin was man enough to admit this professional envy, but only to himself.

He found resentment a much more pleasurable emotion. HRT agents were largely range-taught, not war-trained like himself. Honing their talents by picking off over-the-counter pain medicine at Quantico’s Hogan’s Alley test range, a five-acre simulated town of pop-up targets, seemed to Fagin like not much more than a parlor trick. Fagin had seen them misused by their commanders, trotted out before the cameras during high-profile but nonessential situations, and media-hyped to no end. That budget game that Congress played. It made men in the USG sing and dance like women in the USO.

Banish finally showed, head ducked to the rain, shoes sinking into the muddy ground. He eyed the two segregated groups of BOLOs. Fagin made no move to cojoin. He was expecting a nice clean whitewash here.

“Who fired that first shot?” Banish said above the downpour.

One of the HRT agents spoke up, name of Renke. Plump-faced but solidly built, big hands. “We spotted a suspect exiting the side of the residence armed with a rifle of some kind, crouching in a furtive manner.”

Banish said, “Adult figure?”

“Affirmative. I had the suspect in my Weaver scope.”

Banish stopped him there, turned. “Fagin?”

“I saw someone come out, but couldn’t make the object as a weapon until they started firing up at the NG helicopter. I was at six o’clock, head-on. The glare off the searchlight fucked my NVD.”

Renke stepped in, saying, “SA Banish, Marshals Service has no command or say-so over HRT.”

Banish’s response was quick. “That’s my determination, SA Renke. As your senior SOARs agent on this mountain, HRT answers to me, answers loud and answers clear. Deputy Fagin has been with this operation from the beginning, and if I so determine in the interests of convenience and/or mere whim that you men are to be placed at his disposal, then so shall it be.” Banish got in Renke’s face then. “Or do you feel the need to seek a second opinion from Quantico?”

Renke turned his eyes straight ahead. “No, sir.”

“Good,” said Banish, backing off. “Let me review for you men the rules of engagement on this mountain. Do not fire unless expressly fired upon. And even then: with extreme and diligent caution. Do not get drawn into an exchange. Every man will be held accountable for his actions here. If you had been with us over the past few days, you might have known that just last evening we received our first communication from the suspect. That alone renders your initial warning shot ill-advised at best. There are young children in the residence and they are armed and possibly dangerous, and that is what makes this operation such a challenge. And I know how you men like a challenge. That is all.”

The HRT agents looked at each other and went away. Banish was showing some spark here. He came back to Fagin through the rain.

“Listen,” Fagin said. “I’ve been giving it some thought. Last night. That side door didn’t close right away.”

Banish immediately shook his head. “Don’t tell me that,” he said. “I don’t want to hear that. I just got off the phone with the Director and the subject of a gunfight did not come up.”

“Well, I’m telling you. Now you know.”

“What are you saying?” Banish said. “You hit somebody?”

“I was taking heat. I popped back high and hit the door once. That’s all.”

Banish looked away, then looked back. “You mentioned night-vision,” he said. “Judith Ables was killed in the initial skirmish. How did they get her body all the way over to the barn without your men seeing anything?”

“We assumed they did it in the hour or so after the cease-fire, before we were moved into position.”

“Right.” Banish nodded. “But this is their twelve-year-old daughter. This is a child. They’ve been living together in that same five-room shack for two years now. You think they could get rid of her corpse in less than an hour?”

Fagin thought about it, shrugged. “What I’m telling you is, we’ve had that cabin under twenty-four-hour surveillance since the original shootout. There is no way they could have carried a dead body over to that barn without me and my men knowing about it.”

Banish nodded again. He was rubbing the burn on his face and looking up at the wet mountain.

Barn

A cloudburst on the way up, and the woods darkened some more and thumped with heavy rain. Marshals Taber and Porter stood posted outside as Fagin and Banish entered the run-down barn shaking off their coats. It still smelled of human death, rain rapping on the collapsing roof, piddling through to the ground. Fagin scanned the barn and moved directly to the far-left corner. Banish remained somewhere behind him, near the center, looking around.

There was a stack of old fruit crates in the corner, the only area of the barn where a section of floor was well concealed. Fagin tugged on the top crate with a gloved hand and met resistance. He checked it and saw that the bottom slat was nailed tightly to the top slat of the crate below, and so on. He bent over and stretched to reach the bottom crate farthest to the rear. It slid out freely without moving the rest. Fagin turned it over. No bottom slats. He examined the dirt there and saw that it was looser and finer than in other places and reached out and brushed the top layer aside, then dug in deeper with his gloves. The soil below was also loose. He stepped in beside the crates and dug some more and hit something hard about ten inches down. His fingers found a latch. He pulled on it and there was a rush of foul air and the entire section of dirt came up and out.

Fagin straightened up pissed off. “Fucking tunnel,” he said, too loudly, and Banish came over beside him and Fagin lowered his voice. “Sneaky fuckers,” he said.

Banish said angrily, “Jesus Christ.”

“Fuckers,” Fagin spat. “Motherfuckers. We go in there now with night-vision, take them by surprise—”

“No,” Banish said. “Even if it isn’t booby-trapped, they’d hear you halfway through and be waiting.” He looked around. “Put two men in here, grab whatever crawls out. Why wasn’t all this broken down in the first place?”

“My fuck-up,” Fagin said. “Overlooked. Fuck.”

Banish looked around the barn, nodding. “He’s been waiting for this,” he said, then stepped away. He had said that a few times before.

Fagin checked the area around the tunnel hole. The opening was two feet square, the tunnel below much larger and the dirt walls brown and dark. He was thinking out loud, only half-talking to Banish. “They pulled the girl through here wrapped up in something else besides those sheets, then cleaned her up and took it back with them.” He kicked at the hard ground. “Dirt here’s tough. Must be the only tunnel. Took them all of two years just to push this fucking thing through.”

He dropped the wood board back down with the chunk of dirt on top and kicked the loose soil over it and slid the crate back into position. Then his voice rose, directed at Banish somewhere behind him. “I’ll have my people check the other buildings just in case. Can’t run too deep. Fucking tunnel rats,” he said, stepping back to shake his head. “Picked that up in Nam, huh? What do you say? Charlie could fucking dig. Honeycombs, they were, like those fucking ant farms you see into — storage rooms, kitchens, sleeping quarters. Had to be deep enough, though. I remember these cowboys in one of the units I was hooked up with, they’d take down a village rough, then pull aside all the remaining locals and bring in heavy equipment. They’d go riding in these big trucks, slow, all around the rice huts. That was how they celebrated. The weight of the trucks would cave in the shallow family tunnels, the local routes. You could hear the trapped VC screaming up through the dirt. Fucking ready-made graves, claustrophobic death traps.”

He was shaking his head, remembering the war-whooping farm boys wheeling around in circles. He turned in annoyance when Banish did not respond. Banish was standing across the barn, near where the Ables girl had been found. He was looking down. Fagin moved aside a rusted-out lawnmower and started across to him.

He saw that Banish was holding the corner of a cracked sheet of black tarp in his right hand. The tarp was caked with heavy, dark dirt. A good-sized body lay below.

Fagin stopped behind Banish’s shoulder, looking down. “Oh, fuck,” he said.

Banish dropped the tarp and walked away. He walked right out of the barn and into the rain.

Fagin picked up the tarp again. Charles Mellis’s eyes were still open. His face was drained white and his lips were wrinkled gray and curled back. There was a neat hole in his forehead and a dark spit-spray of dry brown blood on his cheek and much of his beard. Exit wound. Fagin tried to roll Mellis’s head over but rigor mortis was setting in. His neck turned as much as a board. Fagin felt the dead arm and found it still soft. He knelt down low and eyed the crusted, bloody pulp behind Mellis’s right ear, the burnt red hair and dislodged flap of exploded scalp.

Taber and Porter came in behind him, and Fagin stood. “Stay off the radio,” he said. “This one’s dead twelve hours. I’ll start back down and notify.” Then he pointed. “There’s a rat hole in back. Keep your eyes on it and stay fucking alert, both of you.”

Fagin exited into the blowing rain, the trees bending, his poncho whipping out hard. Banish was standing downhill from the barn.

“Flash burn at close range,” Fagin said, coming up behind him. “It wasn’t me. Whoever did it was standing right like I am here with you.” Fagin fashioned a gun with his fingers and pointed it at the back of Banish’s head above his right ear. Banish did not move. “Why would he do his own man?” Fagin said.

Banish said nothing. Fagin went around to see his face. Banish was looking far down land into the trees.

Bridge

Blood was headed back to his Bronco through the rain when he saw Banish standing up on the mountain road just at the point where it began to curve and climb. Blood watched him a moment — Banish seemed to be watching the clustered umbrellas of the hundreds of protesters beyond the bridge, his face shadowed by the ashen burn — then tucked the papers he was holding into his sheriff’s coat and started along the slicked road toward him.

“Just missed the show,” Blood said, coming up. “Someone from WAR and some others came to the bridge for you. Wanted to make a citizen’s arrest, they announced. Here’s the warrant.” He pulled out the papers. “I accepted it on your behalf. Not just you, though, it names as well the Director of the FBI, the head of the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the President of the United States, the Director of the CIA, the Governor of Montana, and, proud to say, yours truly.”

Banish looked from the crowd on the other side of the bridge to the typed papers getting wet in Blood’s hand.

Blood said, “That’s some pretty fast company for me. But it was all just a big show of foolishness for the cameras. The arresting party all shook hands afterward.”

Banish was looking straight at him. “Mellis is dead,” he said.

Blood’s lighthearted mood plummeted. His soul, what he thought of as the character of his person, seemed to vanish suddenly and his throat clucked under a swallow. The rain turned up a notch at that point, lashing him, finding a way through his clothes to his skin, raising gooseflesh. He was holding Banish’s gaze because there was nowhere else to look. The rain slapped on his hat and it was all he could hear. It fell between them in lines as they stared. It fell all around. Puffs of their breath swirled. Mellis was dead. Blood didn’t need to ask how.

He began to shiver. He experienced a weakening chill. He had tasted Banish’s world and now felt sick. For the first time in his forty years, Blood wanted to be somebody somewhere else entirely.

“What do we do about this?” he said.

Banish shook his head. “You don’t have to do a thing.”

Blood looked away. The sound of the rain smashing his hat and the trees and the road grew louder in his ears, and he grew heavier beneath it. He turned back. “Why did your wife and daughter leave you?” he said.

“What?”

“I need to know what kind of man I am dealing with. I don’t know anything about you beyond what I read in the papers. Why did your wife and daughter leave you?”

Banish’s eyes became distant, pulling away, as though either making up an answer or trying to fit the unsay able into words.

“They were afraid of me,” he said.

Any number of questions might have followed, but Blood found neither the strength nor the inclination. None of them anyway would have been delicate enough to broach that admission without breaking something that was already quite fragile. That was what Blood had tasted here. The sway of absolute power and the havoc it wreaked.

There were shouts now and then from the disorganized civil disturbance thriving beyond the bridge, yells sent up like bright flares. Then all at once the calls came in tandem and in force. Banish turned his attention past Blood, looking out over the vast mob with dark consternation.

“Ables,” he said.

Blood turned. The umbrellas were beginning to scatter. A marshal was starting off the gloomy bridge toward them at a brisk jog. Banish said behind Blood, “Have the marshal take a Jeep and pick me up on the way.”

He said the last of it as he was sloshing off. Blood put the silly papers back into his coat and met the marshal, related the instructions, then continued on to his original, dry destination, the Bronco. He climbed inside and pulled the door shut on the rain, removing his plastic-covered hat and shaking it out over the passenger floorboard. The rain thumped on the roof and hood. He sat watching the various umbrellas collapsing and figures disappearing into cars, wet parkas and hunting mac ks and raincoats retreating.

He unzipped his coat and switched on the CB. He worked the squelch. He started up the Bronco for the heat, to keep the car un fogged and warm. Then it hit him again that Mellis was dead.

The realization, the truth of it, came like shivers, in waves. That Blood had helped to kill him. That Mellis had tried to kill Blood. These feds were probably used to killings and death, living with it as they did from time to time. But Blood had never before been a part of anything like that. He had never felt so bad or so stained. He sat there and wondered what would become of him.

This swirl of increasingly troubled thought was broken by the crackling of the car radio. “Watson,” it said his singly Blood recognized the voice from the mountain woods. That seemed like years and years ago.

Command Tent

Banish sat down at the console and Coyle called for quiet in the tent. Banish reached for the handset and flipped the switch. “This is Special Agent Bob Watson,” he said.

“Watson,” Ables said. “You son of a bitch.”

“Mr. Ables?”

“You bastards shot my wife.”

Banish stared at the radio. When he looked up, he found Fagin standing nearby, his stern face mouthing curses. Banish tightened his grip on the handset. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “someone stepped outside your house and warning shots were fired. It was never our intention—”

“Your assassins missed their mark.”

“How bad is she wounded, Mr. Ables? Can you give me some indication of where she was shot?”

“You sound concerned now, Watson.”

Banish licked his lips and took a steadying breath. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “why don’t you just come out now? We can end this thing right here before anyone else gets hurt. Your wife will receive immediate medical attention.”

There was a pause then, brief but unmistakable. “No,” Ables said.

Perkins, behind Banish, said “He hesitated” as Banish’s left hand darted out to shut him up.

“Mr. Ables, I can have an ambulance at your front door within thirty seconds. We have emergency medical technicians here, and helicopters equipped to airlift your wife to the hospital of your choosing.”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you just release her, Mr. Ables? Let your wife go.”

“Release her to the men that want to murder her? The men that slaughtered her daughter? You listen to me, Watson. I want bandages. I’m run out. Gauze and disinfectant and antiseptic and tape. And Percocet, something for the pain. And fresh water. Or do you want more blood on your hands?”

Banish removed his thumb from the handset. Fagin was already moving toward the tent exit. He did not need to be told where to go. The protesters down below were getting this word for word.

Banish resituated himself, fighting for concentration. It was still a negotiation like any other. He asked himself what he wanted most.

“Mr. Ables,” he said, “first of all, for your own protection, until and unless you are ready to come out for good, I would advise you and your family not to leave the cabin again under any circumstances. Now, I am most certainly willing to provide your wife with the medical attention she requires, right away.”

“No doctors,” Ables said. “Just supplies.”

“Whatever you want. But it has to be a two-way street. Mr. Ables, I know you know that I cannot simply give you something for nothing.”

Another short pause. “Sons of bitches,” he said.

“Perhaps through a fair and equitable exchange, Mr. Ables, we can begin on a course of reestablishing trust. Why don’t you release one of your daughters?”

“No.”

“The youngest, Esther. She can be properly cared for out here. We have a nurse standing by, and food, toys.”

“No.”

“Your infant son, then. Amos. His grandparents are here.”

Ables said, “You will never tear this family apart.”

Banish released the handset then, instituting a pause of his own. He waited deliberately. Behind him Perkins swallowed and cleared his throat noisily, small sounds of impatience and doubt. Banish turned the handset on again.

“The telephone, then, Mr. Ables,” he said. “I want to privatize our conversations in the interest of public safety. If you can give me your word that you will use it to communicate with me, rather than this broadcast channel—”

“I told you, Watson. No men on my porch.”

“Your word, Mr. Ables.”

“No men on my porch!”

Banish nodded, satisfied. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “I think we can work around that.”

No-Man’s-Land

Fagin took a Humvee and drove himself right up the side of the mountain. The dirt road was cleared and completed, but blocked near the top by a traffic jam of ambulances and fire equipment, mainly caused by a Bradley fighting vehicle being loaded off a flatbed truck. The one vehicle that Fagin could not ID was a small white unmarked van, open in back, a metal ramp leading down and footprints and other tracks in the wet ground around it.

He parked and stepped out into the mud. The rain had let up after midday, leaving a hanging dampness that brought out the fucking bugs again. Fagin crossed the short distance to the no-man’s-land through the thinning tree cover, swatting flies.

No music now, no recorded messages. Just the hushed voices of agents hiding in the trees. He found them spread out along the edge of the no-man’s-land, crouching behind tall, folding bulletproof shields set up like bedroom screens people dress behind. Banish was peering over one, looking through the shredded tree cover across thirty short yards to the cabin.

A robot, maybe three feet in height, a six-tractor-wheel base supporting a raised metal spine and a long, jointed mechanical arm, was wandering through the trees toward the phone. A remote console was set on the ground next to Banish, operated by a pale-looking agent with a dark crew cut. A monitor showed the machine’s camera-eye view.

“The fuck is this?” Fagin said, though he knew full well. He was a practical man with a natural aversion to technology.

Banish did not answer. He wanted to know what had happened down below.

“We took away some guns and rifles, then stumbled onto something big. A cache of plastic explosives and egg cartons of hand grenades, souvenirs from the jungle.”

Banish turned. “Veterans?”

“A counteroffensive. They were planning on taking out our microwave communications equipment. They see another brother being screwed by the government all over again. We were very fucking lucky this time, practically falling over them. Sixteen total arrests. But it raises a major concern.”

“Post guards around the generators,” Banish said. “If an attack comes, it will come there first.”

Fagin nodded. “Already done.”

It was too crowded behind the shield, so Fagin stepped out into the open and looked on with arms crossed. Severed tree limbs lay dead on the ground, the woods ripped apart, trunk bark scarred with ivory and greenish-white wood showing through. That had been a serious demonstration of artillery.

The robot had the phone case handle in its claw now and was grinding toward the cabin. Two containers were strapped to its base. “He’s getting everything he wanted?” Fagin said.

“Except the painkillers. Could be fatal if administered improperly. He didn’t ask for blood or plasma, so maybe it’s not too serious.”

“Water?”

“It’s clean,” Banish said.

“You can’t mickey him?”

“Unreliable. Could be fatal if taken by a child.”

The robot pulled up alongside the slanted front porch, its spine straightening hydraulically, arm extending out. Banish said to the pale agent working the controls, “A little closer.”

Fagin watched the robot roll back and forth into position. “Hope he doesn’t kidnap your robot too.”

Banish said to the pale agent, “Not too close.”

Fagin grinned briefly. Bureaucrats with their toys. He went and watched on the black-and-white monitor as the robot dumped its gifts on a stack of logs piled underneath a boarded-up window, then pulled back slowly. They watched and waited, Fagin growing impatient. Banish sent someone off to get his bullhorn. Then the boards moved, swinging open a few inches. A sleeveless male arm appeared. It snatched up the first-aid kit, then the satchel of water, then finally the telephone. Then the boards swung shut again.

The pale agent let out a long, gusty breath. In Fagin’s experience, whether on bomb squad or crisis intervention teams, these robot controllers were all a little fucking fruity. Talking to themselves while they worked, calling their machines little names, like Buddy or Hal. Fucking ventriloquists without an act. This one mumbled to himself as he worked the slide gears up and down, easing the robot back to him.

Banish peered over the top of the shield again, probably waiting for something to go wrong. After all their waltzing back and forth, the actual exchange itself had been nothing. Secure communication had finally been established, but at a great goddamn cost.

Fagin stepped away from the screen, watching Buddy the Robot return home through the slaughtered woods. “That fucking telephone better be miked,” he said.

Banish waved off a mosquito. “Don’t worry.”

Sound Truck

Banish pulled the sliding door open. The sound man was at his console, dials and recorders along the van walls all up and running. Banish said, “Anything?”

The sound man flipped a switch and a hollow sound came on over the speakers inside the van. Vague, distant noises, echoes reflected off walls, sounds of people moving around. “Mainly footsteps,” he said. “Different sets. Some chatter about bandages. Not clear enough, though. He must have left the phone in front and gone into one of the rooms in the rear, possibly the kitchen.”

“We’re in,” Banish said. It was all that mattered.

“You want me to ring him?”

The phone would ring abruptly twice like a bicycle bell, as opposed to a long ring or beeping noise, as different as possible from the sound any sort of bomb might make. The throw phone was just that, in most situations lobbed in through a door or window, and hostage-takers were notoriously paranoid and hypervigilant.

“No,” Banish said, easing himself into the other chair, feeling his exhaustion. “We’ll wait, and listen. Let him call us.”