Under Siege

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The first man the soldiers killed was Larry Ticono. At the age of sixteen he had dropped out of the seventh grade after failing it three times. In spite of the nine years he spent in the public school system, he was illiterate. On those rare occasions when he was asked to sign his name he used an illegible scrawl.

Larry Ticono had been arrested three times in his short life — twice for possession of illegal drugs and once for burglary — but he had spent a grand total of only five days in jail. After each arrest he was released on his own recognizance. He returned to court only when the police picked him up again. One of his possession arrests had apparently fallen completely through the cracks and been forgotten. He had pleaded guilty to the other two charges and had received probation.

The wonder was that he had lived so long. He had a two-hundred-dollar-a-day crack habit and his welfare check was only $436 a month. The shortfall he made up by stealing anything that wasn’t welded in place. Cameras, radios, televisions, and car stereos were his favorite targets. He sold his loot to fences for fifteen to twenty percent of their market value — not retail value when new, but market value used. He tried to avoid muggings, which were dangerous, but did them when nothing else readily presented itself.

Larry Ticono’s life defined the term “hand to mouth.” He slept under bridges in good weather and in abandoned buildings in bad. He rarely had more than twenty dollars in his pocket and was never more than three hours away from withdrawal.

This afternoon Larry Ticono’s three-hour margin had melted to zero. He was on the edge with only $17.34 in his pocket. The corner where he usually purchased crack was empty. Although Ticono didn’t know it, his suppliers were the retail end of the distribution network of Willie Teal, who had been forcibly and permanently retired from the crack business the previous night. So the street-corner salesmen had no product and were not there.

Frustrated and desperate, Ticono walked a half mile to another neighborhood that he knew about and tried to make a deal with a fifteen-year-old in a pair of hundred-dollar Nike running shoes. That worthy had not received his morning delivery from his supplier, an employee of Freeman McNally. The streetwise dealers sensed that something was wrong although they had no hard information. They had seen the troops coming and going and had heard the news on television, and they were worried. Many of them were drifting away, back to the welfare apartments and ramshackle row houses they called home.

When Larry Ticono approached the fifteen-year-old, that youngster had only four crack bags left and no prospect of readily obtaining more. So that young capitalist demanded forty dollars a hit.

The thought occurred to Larry Ticono that he should just mug the kid, but it vaporized after one look at the corner boss, a heavyset man standing by a garbage can watching. Larry knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the guard had a weapon within easy reach and would cheerfully kill him if he so much as touched the youngster.

After trying futilely to bargain, he reluctantly turned away.

Two blocks later Larry Ticono threw a brick through a window of an electronics store and grabbed a ghetto blaster. He was promptly shot by a convenience-store salesclerk wearing a National Guard uniform. The blaster was just too large and heavy to run with at any speed.

The fifty-five-grain .223 bullet from the M-16 hit Larry high up in the center of the back, a perfect shot, which was pure luck because the clerk was wearing a pair of fogged-up glasses and had barely qualified with the M-16 in training. Before he threw the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger the clerk had never killed any creature larger than a cockroach.

Still traveling at over three thousand feet per second when it pierced Larry Ticono’s skin, the jacketed bullet expended a major portion of its eleven hundred foot-pounds of energy shattering his backbone and driving the fragments through his heart, exploding it. The slug then exited his chest and buried itself in a parked car sixty yards away.

Larry Ticono, age nineteen, was dead before his body hit the pavement.

The convenience-store clerk vomited beside the body.

Jack Yocke took in the scene at a glance a half hour later when he arrived. He busied himself taking names and trying to think of something to say to the clerk-private, who was sitting on the tailgate of an olive-drab pickup staring at his hands.

“I shouted for him to stop, but he didn’t,” the private said so softly Yocke had to strain to hear. “He didn’t stop,” he repeated wonderingly, amazed at the perverse ways of fate.

“No. He didn’t.”

“He should have stopped.”

“Yes.”

“He really should have stopped.”

The reporter wandered over to a sergeant standing near the body smoking a cigarette. Some fifteen feet away a group of army or National Guard officers were conferring with a uniformed policeman. Yocke had yet to learn the nuances of the shoulder patches on the uniforms, which as far as he could see, were the only way to tell which service was which. The sergeant glanced at Yocke and continued to puff leisurely on his cigarette. He was thoughtfully surveying the faces of the watchers on the sidewalk across the street.

“I thought,” Jack Yocke said, “that your people were supposed to fire their weapons only in self-defense.”

The sergeant appraised him carefully. “That’s right,” he said, then went back to scanning the crowd.

“Yet as I understand it, the victim was running away when the private shot him?”

“Something like that, I suppose.”

“So why’d he shoot?”

A look of disgust registered on the sergeant’s face. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Jack Yocke, Washington Post. I didn’t mean—”

“Shove off, pencil pilot. Before I lose my temper and ram that notebook up your ass.”

“I’m sorry. No offense,” Yocke said, then turned away. He shouldn’t have asked that question. Why had he done it? Now he felt guilty. It was a new experience.

Disgusted with himself, he looked again at the private slumped on the tailgate and the body covered with a sheet, then walked to his car.

He had always been so confident, so sure of himself and his perceptions. And now …

Six blocks away a group of people outside a closed liquor store — the military authorities had ordered them all closed — were throwing rocks at passing cars. One of them thudded into the side of the Post’s little sedan.

It’s started, Jake Yocke decided. The supply of crack has dried up and the addicts are getting restless. He pointed the car toward the National Guard armory adjacent to RFK Stadium.

He didn’t get very far into the building, of course. He showed his credentials and the soldier on duty let him into the press room, the first door on the right. There he found a half dozen government-issue steel desks, some folding chairs, and one telephone. And over a dozen of his colleagues, two of them from the Post. They were waiting for the press briefing scheduled for five p.m., fifteen minutes from now.

Yocke muttered at the people he knew — and he knew three or four of them — and found a corner to sit in. He sat there musing, thinking about the private who had killed a man when he shouldn’t have, wondering if he, Jack Yocke, would have done any better. Maybe he wasn’t really cut out to be a reporter. Stupid. He had made a stupid, insensitive remark, and now it rankled.

The reporters were waiting for Dan Quayle when he came out of Bethesda Naval Hospital. He could have avoided them but he didn’t.

Ignoring the shouted questions, he stood still and waited until a battery of hand-held microphones were waving before him. “The President regained consciousness this afternoon for a short period of time. Mrs. Bush is with him. He is asleep now. The doctors believe his recovery will be rapid. He’s in excellent health for a man his age and we have high hopes.”

“Did you discuss the hunt for the assassin with him?” someone shouted.

“No,” said Dan Quayle. Actually the President wasn’t well enough to discuss anything, but he didn’t say that. He thought about it and decided to let the monosyllable stand alone.

“Mr. Vice-President, what about the claim that the Colombian Extraditables are making, that they are responsible.”

Quayle ignored that one. Then he heard a question he couldn’t ignore.

“The Extraditables say that the terrorism will stop if you release Chano Aldana. Could you comment on that?”

“Said when?” Quayle asked, silencing all the other reporters.

“About an hour ago in Colombia, Mr. Vice-President. It just came over the wires.”

Quayle thought about it. “We’re not going to bargain with terrorists,” he said. The crowd waited. The red lights on the fronts of the television cameras stayed on. “Chano Aldana is going to get a fair trial. As long as I am acting for the President, I promise you, I will use the full might and power of the United States government to accomplish that come what may.”

“Are there any circumstances where you might release Aldana?” someone pressed.

“If the jury acquits him.”

“Before trial, I mean.”

“Not even if hell freezes over,” Dan Quayle replied, and turned away.

“You know,” Ott Mergenthaler said to Senator Bob Cherry, “the man has the personality of a store dummy, but I do believe there’s some steel in his backbone.”

Ott was in the senator’s office and the two of them had just finished watching Quayle’s performance. The senator reached for his remote control and killed the picture and sound after Quayle walked off camera and the network analysts came on.

Cherry sneered. “He’s a medical miracle. He’s got the brain of a penguin and the jawbone of an ass.”

“Come off it, Senator. Say what you will, this crisis is not hurting Dan Quayle’s reputation one whit. The public is getting a good look and I think they’re liking what they see. I do, anyway.”

“Ott! Don’t kid around! You don’t really believe this National Guard move was wise? For God’s sake, man, I thought you had some sense.”

“I do have, Senator, but I found out years ago that it does no good at all to proclaim the fact.”

Had Cherry known Mergenthaler better, he would have stopped right there. When the columnist retreated to dry, edged retorts, he had been pushed as far as he was willing to go. Cherry pressed on: “Bush could control Dorfman, but Quayle can’t. Dorfman is a shark and Quayle is a damn little fish. You don’t seriously think that Dan Quayle is making the decisions over there, do you?”

“I hear he is,” Ott said mildly, cocking his head slightly.

“Don’t you believe it! Dorfman’s pulling the strings. And I guarantee you the last thing Will Dorfman cares about is the U.S. Constitution. When is the Army going to leave? What about people’s rights? Why hasn’t the Congress been asked to authorize all this extracurricular military activity? The legalities — they’ve got the troops outside the federal district, out in Maryland for God’s sake. The government will get sued for—”

“What’s your real bitch?”

Cherry looked blank. “What do you mean?”

“You’re blowing smoke. I’ve been writing a column in this town for fifteen years, Bob.”

Senator Cherry took a deep breath and exhaled. “Okay, okay.” He shrugged. “Quayle scares me. Real bad. If Bush dies we are in big big trouble.”

“Next presidential election is in two years. Look at it as the Democrats’ big chance.”

Cherry writhed in his chair. “This country can’t afford to drift for two years with a clown on the bridge. The only damn thing Quayle knows how to do is play golf.”

“Bob, you’re making a mountain out of a manure pile. True, Quayle’s had a lot of bad press, some of it his fault, some of it because he’s such an easy target to pick on and he’s a darling of the conservatives. The man has an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing. But this country is over two hundred years old! We can survive two years with anybody at the helm, be it Dan the Bogeyman or Hanoi Jane or my Aunt Matilda.”

Cherry wanted to argue. After a couple more minutes Ott Mergenthaler excused himself. Out in the corridor he shook his head sadly. Assassins and terrorists and wholesale murder everywhere you looked, and Bob Cherry wanted to mutter darkly about Dan Quayle. Worse, he expected Ott to print it.

Cherry looks old, Mergenthaler told himself. His age is telling. Querulous — that’s the word. He’s become a whining, querulous old man absorbed with trivialities.

The news conference at the D.C. National Guard Armory had barely gotten under way when it was abruptly adjourned. A junior officer announced that someone had attacked the crowd at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station. The brass hustled out. Among them was Captain Jake Grafton.

Jack Yocke fought through the press crowd to get to the door and charged for the street at a dead run. He ran along the sidewalk toward the entrance to the Guard’s parking lot, just in time to see a government car coming out. He bent and scanned the passengers. Nope. The next one? Nope again.

Grafton was in the third car. Yocke jumped and waved his arms and shouted “Captain Grafton! Captain Grafton!” at the top of his lungs. The uniformed driver locked the brakes. Yocke jerked open the rear door and jumped in.

As the car accelerated away Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington looked the reporter over.

“Riding your thumb today?” Grafton asked.

“I’m really glad you stopped, sir. Thanks a lot. If you don’t mind, I’d like to tag along with you.”

“The press regulations—”

“Yessir. Yessir. I know all about them. We have them stenciled on our underwear. Still, I’d like you to bend the rules a little and let me tag along with you for a few days. If you like, I’ll even let you comment on the stories.”

Jake Grafton’s brow wrinkled and he looked ahead at the traffic the driver was threading through. Toad Tarkington gave Yocke a big grin.

Grafton held a walkie-talkie in his hand. The instrument was spitting out words too garbled and tinny for Yocke to understand. Grafton held the device to his ear for a moment, then lowered it back to his lap.

“You’ll have to agree,” Grafton said slowly, “not to do any stories at all until this is completely over.”

Tarkington’s grin faded.

“That’s the only condition?” the reporter asked incredulously. “You don’t want to comment on the story?”

“No. Just don’t print anything until this is all over.”

“No catch, eh?” Yocke said, still skeptical. Actually, all he wanted was a ride to L’Enfant Plaza. He sat now slightly stunned at Jake Grafton’s willingness to go along with his spur-of-the-moment proposal. What was that old rule of thumb — if you ask ten women to go to bed with you, you’ll only get your face slapped nine times?

“We can always let you out at the next corner,” Toad told him sourly.

“Captain, you got a deal.”

“Umm.”

“What’s happening now?”

“Some gunmen opened fire in the Metro Station at L’Enfant Plaza. Lot of people down, some of them soldiers. A real bloodbath.”

“Colombians?”

“I don’t know.”

Yocke fished his notebook from an inside jacket pocket and flipped it open. As he scribbled and the car jolted, Toad said, “It’s T-A-R-K-I-N-”

“I got it, Frog. What’s your hometown?”

“Intercourse, Pennsylvania.”

“Dry up, you two,” Jake Grafton said, and held the walkie-talkie to his ear.

He was going to have to mention this little arrangement to General Land at the first opportunity. But he thought the general would approve. Just this afternoon the subject of the presidential commission had arisen, forced to the fore by a request from Congresswoman Strader for a military district headquarters pass, which was granted. The career officers who had been watching Ms. Strader’s act for years suspected that she would be diligently searching for butts to kick at a postmortem later on, when both she and her colleagues would have the luxury of hindsight to enhance their wisdom. Alas, being second-guessed by Monday-morning quarterbacks went with the job.

When he saw Jack Yocke jumping up and down on the sidewalk, it occurred to Jake Grafton that it just might help to have an independent observer keep Ms. Strader et al. from playing fast and loose with the facts.

Jack Yocke was young and brash, but Jake Grafton had been reading the articles on Cuba and he was impressed. Yocke was a good reporter. He was observant and cared about people, and he could express himself well. He just needed seasoning. And a good reporter, Jake believed, would know a fact when he tripped over one. Yocke would do nicely.

These thoughts occupied Jake Grafton for about ten seconds, then he returned to the business at hand, a terrorist incident at a subway station. The general in charge was giving orders on the radio to the officer at the scene to storm the place as soon as possible. That struck Jake Grafton as logical. If these were suicide commandos like those who had shot up the Capitol building, the sooner they were killed the fewer the number of innocent people who would die.

The driver brought the car to a halt outside the main entrance to L’Enfant Plaza and the occupants jumped out and trotted toward a huddle of soldiers by the doors. The major general, Myles Greer, was conferring with a major. Jake could hear the sound of gunshots through the door, the ripping of automatic weapons fire. “How long?” General Greer asked.

“Another two minutes. I’ve got three men at the west entrance and I want ten there.”

General Greer glanced at Grafton, who met his eyes. Greer had a tough decision to make and Jake Grafton knew it. And he was not about to use his position as General Land’s liaison to influence that decision. The choice was simple and brutal: more soldiers meant more firepower, and the more firepower one accumulated, the fewer soldiers one was likely to lose. On the other hand, the shots they were hearing were being fired by the terrorists at unarmed civilians, and every second of delay meant that more of those civilians would die.

It took Greer about three seconds. “Let’s go now,” he said. The major gestured to the army lieutenant in battle dress and used the walkie-talkie.

Grafton spoke to the general, a question so soft that Jack Yocke almost missed it. “You got the subways stopped?”

Apparently satisfied with the answer, Grafton turned to two soldiers who were standing to one side. “You guys going to guard the doors?”

“Yessir.”

“Gimme your rifle.”

The young enlisted man looked toward his sergeant, who nodded. Toad Tarkington relieved another man of his weapon.

“I’m going with you,” Yocke said.

Grafton didn’t argue. The soldiers were moving out, the lieutenant in the lead. “Stay between me and Toad,” Grafton said over his shoulder to Yocke as he trotted after them.

The men ran along a corridor of shops empty of people. The Army had already evacuated them. The corridor twisted and made several ninety-degree bends. The running men spread out, their weapons at the ready.

The sounds of gunfire were louder. As the corridor came to another bend the men came upon a soldier lying prone, his rifle covering the blind corner.

The lieutenant used hand signals. When his men were ready he leaped around the corner and two men followed him. Then the others, cautiously.

They were facing an open double door, and beyond it, escalators down. The popping of gunfire was louder, made painful by the echoes from the concrete walls.

At the head of the escalator the sergeant opened fire on an unseen target below. He was firing single shots.

A spray of bullets from below showered sparks off the overhead and shattered one of the neon lights.

The sergeant fired a fully automatic burst, then charged down the escalator. Two men followed.

The lieutenant eased up, took a quick look, and with a gesture to the men behind him, followed.

Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington, with Yocke between them, followed the soldiers.

The first dead gunman lay twenty feet beyond the end of the escalator. An Uzi lay beside him. Around him were seven more bodies. Jack Yocke paused and watched as Jake Grafton went from body to body, checking for signs of life. Three men and four women. Several lay in little pools of blood. One of them had crawled for ten or twelve feet, leaving a bloody streak. As Grafton felt for the pulse of the last person he shook his head, then went off after the soldiers, keeping low. Yocke followed.

They were on a wide pedestrian walkway now, with the ceiling arching high overhead.

The walkway ended in a T-intersection, with walkways going right and left. The soldiers split up, running both ways. Jake Grafton looked over the edge, then ducked as bullets spanged pieces out of the chipped concrete.

Jack Yocke fell flat right where he was. The gunfire rose to a crescendo, then ceased. Yocke lay still in the sudden silence, waiting, his heart hammering.

Finally the reporter looked around. Toad was squatting nearby with his rifle at the ready. He was listening. Grafton was nowhere in sight.

Toad began to move.

Yocke followed him. They went to the rail and cautiously looked over. Grafton was below on one of the station platforms, listening to the Army lieutenant talk on the radio. Bodies lay scattered about. As they stood there looking at the carnage, Yocke heard the pounding of running feet behind him.

He dropped flat. Then he looked. Medics wearing white armbands displaying a red cross ran by carrying stretchers.

“Let’s go down there,” Yocke suggested. Toad shrugged.

Jake Grafton was sitting on the concrete with his back to a pillar, his rifle across his lap. If he noticed Yocke he gave no sign.

“Any of your guys hurt?” Yocke asked the lieutenant, who was assembling his men.

“One. Flesh wound. But two National Guardsmen charged in when the shooting first started and they got zapped.”

“How many gunmen were there?”

“Five, I think.”

“And the civilians?”

“Seven wounded, forty-two dead.”

Yocke was poised to ask another question when the walkie-talkie squawked to life and the lieutenant walked away with the device to his ear.

The reporter looked around helplessly. Twisted and bloody bodies lay everywhere. Packages and attaché cases scattered about, here and there a shopping bag. He walked over to one woman and carefully picked up the wrapped Christmas presents that lay strewn randomly around her. There must be something, some gesture he could make to the arbiter of man’s fate that would commend this woman’s humanity. A prayer? But the grim god already knew. He placed the packages in a neat, pathetic pile beside the slack body.

She had been shot in the back, apparently as she tried to run from the obscene horror behind her.

Forty-two! My God!

Where will it end? Yocke wondered gloomily as a wave of revulsion and loathing swept over him. He averted his eyes and turned away.

Henry Charon stood in an empty third-floor office on L Street and scanned the traffic on the street below yet again. From where he stood he had an excellent view of the streetlight and the cars queuing there waiting for the light to turn green. And he could see the drivers.

The drivers sat behind the wheels of their vehicles waiting for the light to change with the look of distracted impatience that indelibly marked those who endured life in the big city. Some of them fiddled with their radios, but most just sat staring at the brake lights on the car ahead and occasionally glancing at the stoplight hanging above the intersection. When the light turned green they crept across the intersection and joined the block-long queue for the next light.

This was a good place. Excellent. A stand, like that one above the red-rock canyon where he had killed seven elk over the years. The elk would come up through the canyon from the aspen groves every evening about the same time.

He would be along soon. He was a creature of habit, like the elk. Regardless of traffic or weather, he always came this way. Or he had on the four evenings in the past that Henry Charon had watched. Yet even if he chose another route this evening — there was a chance that would happen, although slim — sooner or later he would again come this way. That was inevitable, like the evening habits of the deer and elk and bear.

Beside Charon was the rifle. This one was less than perfect; no doubt the stock was poorly bedded. But it would do. This would not be a long shot. No more than sixty yards.

A round was chambered in the rifle and the magazine contained three more. Henry Charon rarely needed more than one shot but he was ready, just in case. Although the habits of living things were predictable, random events happened to us all.

Henry Charon didn’t move and he didn’t fidget. He stood easily, almost immobile, watching. His ability to wait was one of his best qualities. Not waiting like the urban commuters, impatiently, distractedly, but waiting like the lion or the fox — silent, still, ever alert, always ready.

His eyes left the cars and went across the pedestrians and the people looking at headlines and making purchases at the sidewalk newsstand on the far corner beside the entrance to the Metro station. The vendor was warmly dressed and wore a Cossack hat with the muff down over his ears. His breath made great steaming clouds in the gloomy evening.

Charon’s restless eyes scanned the cars yet again, then watched them creep across the intersection. One man blocked the crosswalk with his car when the light changed on him and he sat unperturbed staring straight ahead as pedestrians walked around the car, front and back, and glared at him.

Now he saw it — the car he was waiting for. Henry Charon lifted the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. Yes. It was him.

Charon looked at the cars ahead of his man with a practiced eye, estimating how many would get through the next green light. About six. That would bring this car down to third in line. Perfect.

Henry Charon laid the binoculars down and picked up the rifle. He checked the safety. Still on.

He looked again at the pedestrians, at the other cars, at the bag lady on the far side of the street rooting through a trash can.

The light changed and the traffic moved. One, two, three … six! Yes. The car he wanted was right there, third one back.

Henry Charon raised the rifle to his shoulder as he thumbed off the safety. The crosshairs came immediately into his line of vision without his even tilting his head. He put them on the driver, on his head, on his ear. Automatically Charon breathed deeply and exhaled. He was squeezing the trigger even before all the air had left his lungs.

The report and recoil came almost immediately. Charon brought the scope back into line and looked.

Good shot!

He laid the rifle down and walked briskly to the door, pulled it open and closed it behind him, making sure it locked. He passed the elevator and took the stairs downward two at a time.

Out onto the street — around the corner from where the victim sat dead in his car — and away at a diagonal. Charon stripped off the latex gloves from his hands and thrust them into the first trash can he came to. His car was in a garage five blocks away. He walked briskly, unhurriedly, scanning the faces of the people on the sidewalk with his practiced hunter’s eye.

With all of the wounded and most of the dead removed from the underground Metro station, Jake Grafton, Yocke, and Tarkington went back the way they had come in. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hayden Land, was standing with the major general in the middle of a knot of people in uniform by the main entrance.

Grafton went over to the group and stood where General Land could see him and he could hear everything that was said.

Toad Tarkington stood near the door to the mall. He pointed the rifle he was carrying at the sky and examined the action. His face was intense, grim.

A question popped to mind as Yocke watched Toad. Would the naval officer have used it? No, he had made the mistake of asking the wrong question once already today, and as he looked at Toad, he thought he knew the answer. Yocke was still feeling the aftereffects of the adrenaline. Somehow, for a reason he couldn’t quite fathom, Toad seemed the proper person to tell. “I was pretty pumped up back there.”

“Uh-huh,” Tarkington muttered and glanced at the reporter, then resumed his scrutiny of the weapon.

Yocke couldn’t let it alone. “You know, you can watch a hundred movies and see the carnage every night in the hospital, but nothing prepares you for that feeling when the bullets are zinging by and you realize that every second could be your absolute last.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that, life for you might stop right here. Like it did for all those folks down there on those subway platforms.”

Toad finished his inspection of the rifle and held it, butt on his hip, pointed at the sky. He surveyed the knot of senior officers and the smooth-faced soldiers in battle dress and glanced up at the steel-gray sky. “I don’t know how much life insurance you got,” Toad said, “but if you’re going to trail along behind Jake Grafton, you’d better get some more.” Without waiting for a reply Toad wandered off to find the soldier who had lent him the rifle.

Yocke watched him go.

The brass was still in conference. And here comes Samantha Strader, as I live and breathe. She marched over to the group and joined it. His reporter’s juices flowing, Jack Yocke managed to squeeze between the shoulders of two aides.

One of the men talking was not in uniform, although he had that look. Yocke whispered to the man beside him, who whispered back, “FBI. Guy named Hooper.”

That would be Special Agent Thomas F. Hooper. Yocke made a note as Hooper spoke to General Land. “… they came in on a freighter last week. At least twenty of them, armed to the teeth, paid to commit suicide.”

“So there’s probably going to be more of this?” General Land said.

“Yes,” Hooper told him.

“Do your sources have any feel for their targets?”

That was Jake Grafton speaking.

“Anywhere there are people,” Hooper replied. “The more people, the better for them.”

“Well, Captain?” General Land said.

“If we could just get everybody to stay home for a couple of days, sir, and use the time to search house-to-house — every building, every store, every apartment — a couple of days would do it. If we shut down all the public transportation and forbid everyone to use their cars, we could do it.”

“FBI?”

Hooper pulled at his earlobe. “That’s my recommendation too, General.”

“General Greer.”

Greer was the general in direct charge of the National Guard and army units, which had been integrated into one command. He considered for ten seconds. “That’s probably the only way, I think. We’ve got to find these people and keep crowds from congregating while we do it. Those are the priorities.”

“We’re only four days away from Christmas,” Congresswoman Strader noted aloud.

Land glanced at her, then back to Greer and Hooper. “Okay. You’ve got two days to find these people. Nothing moves inside the beltway unless it’s a military or emergency vehicle. I want a concrete plan on how you’re going to do this on my desk in three hours.”

“General, I suggest we shut everything down at midnight,” Jake Grafton added. “Be a nightmare trying to do it any other way.”

“Midnight it is,” said General Land. He didn’t get to be a four-star general by being indecisive. “That’ll give us eight hours to figure out how we’re going to get this unscrewed.”

Jack Yocke scribbled furiously, bitterly aware of the irony of his position. He was hearing the scoop of the decade only because Jake Grafton had made him promise not to print anything.

Then he became aware that somehow he was no longer in the circle of people. Apparently the group had moved, almost ten feet, no doubt because General Land had moved. Wherever the chairman was was going to be the center of the action. Yocke rejoined the conference.

“… that negotiation is key to resolving situations like we had here today without bloodshed,” Strader was saying, her voice firm and businesslike. Lecturing to the anthropoids, Yocke thought, and jotted the impression down.

General Land’s reply was inaudible.

Strader’s voice carried. “Why haven’t you consulted with the FBI crisis-response team? They’re expert at negotiating with terrorists and criminals in hostage situations.”

This time Yocke caught the reply. “This was not a terrorist or a hostage situation, ma’am. These men were out to kill as many people as possible. This was an atrocity pure and simple and the men who did it knew they were going to die.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I know a war when I’m in one, madam.”

“And I’m telling you that you don’t know what those men wanted because General Greer didn’t take the time to talk to them. Those men might be prisoners if General Greer had talked instead of charging in willy-nilly shooting everybody in sight.”

“Madam—” General Land began icily.

Strader chopped him off and bored in for the kill. “The aggressive behavior of your troops may be the reason those men shot all these civilians.”

“General Greer did exactly the right thing. These people didn’t want to talk.” Land’s voice had a razor-sharp edge. “They were too busy chasing down unarmed men and women and slaughtering them like rabbits. They might have laid down their arms, it’s true, after they killed everyone in sight.”

“… lives at stake here.”

“When are you goddamn dithering fools gonna figure out you can’t negotiate with people who don’t want to negotiate?” The general’s voice was a roar, the anger palpable. “Now I’ve listened to all of the free advice I can stomach. I’ve got better things to do than stand here and shoot the shit with some civilian! Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“I’m Congresswoman Strader. I’m on the presidential commission to—”

“You can do your investigation later. Not now! Not here!”

“You wouldn’t say that if I were a man! I’ve got a pass signed by—”

“Major,” the general barked, “get her political ass out of my face, right fucking now.”

“Yes, sir!”

Infuriated, her face the color of a scalded lobster, Sam Strader was firmly escorted away.

When Jack Yocke had the last of it in his notebook in his private shorthand, he looked up, straight into the bemused face of Toad Tarkington.

“What we got here,” Tarkington said, “is a total entertainment package. Write that down too.”

“Tarkington!” It was Grafton calling.

Yocke followed the young naval officer.

“Let’s go,” Jake Grafton said. He began trotting toward the military sedan. “Someone just shot the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”

“Is he dead?”

“Apparently.”