From the windmill, the HRU team walked into a gully and made their way closer to the slaughterhouse. Tremain held up his hand and they stopped. He tapped his helmet twice and the men responded to the signal by switching on their radios. Lieutenant Carfallo opened the terrain map and the architectural drawings. From his pocket Tremain took the diagram of the inside of the slaughterhouse that Derek the Red, Derek the trooper, Derek the spy, had just slipped him inside the van. It was marked with the location of the hostages and the HTs.
Tremain was encouraged. The girls weren't being held in shield positions by the windows or in front of the HTs. There were no booby traps. Derek reported that the men inside were armed with pistols and shotguns only, no automatic weapons, and they had no flak jackets, helmets, or flashlights. Of course the hostages weren't as far away from the takers as he would have liked, and the room in which they were being kept had no door. But still Handy and the others were twenty or so feet from the girls. It would take a full five seconds for Handy to get to the hostages, and that was assuming he'd already decided that he would kill them the instant he heard the cutting charges. As a rule, in an assault, there were four to ten seconds of confusion and indecision while the takers tried to scope out what was happening before they could take up effective defensive positions.
"Listen up." Hands tapped ears and heads nodded. Tremain pointed at the chart. "There are six hostages inside. Three HTs – located here, here, and here, though they're pretty mobile. One checks on the girls with some frequency." Tremain nodded to one trooper. "Wilson."
"Sir."
"You're to proceed through this gully along the side of the building here and surveil from one of these two windows."
"Sir, can you get them to shift that light?" Trooper Joey Wilson nodded toward the halogens.
"Negative. This is a clandestine operation and you're not to expose yourself to the friendlies."
"Yessir," the young man barked. No questions asked.
"The middle window is hidden by that tree and the school bus. I'd suggest that one."
"Yessir."
"Pfenninger."
"Sir."
"You're to return to the command van and your orders are consistent with what you and I discussed earlier. Is that understood?"
"Yessir."
"The rest of us are moving to this point here. Using those bushes and trees for cover. Harding, you take point. All officers move out now."
And they dispersed into the dusky afternoon, as fluid as the dark river flowing past, more silent than the wind that bent the grass around them.
"Let's have a smoke," Potter said.
"Not me," Budd answered.
"An imaginary one."
"How's that?"
"Let's step outside, Captain."
They wandered away from the van twenty feet into a stand of trees, the agent adjusting his posture automatically to stand more upright; being in the presence of Charlie Budd made you want to do this. Potter paused and spoke with Joe Silbert and the other reporter.
"We've got two more out."
"Two more? Who?" Silbert seemed to be restraining himself.
"No identities," Potter said. "All I'll say is that they're students. Young girls. They've been released unharmed. That leaves a total of four students and two teachers left inside."
"What did you trade for them?"
"We can't release that information."
He'd expected the reporter would be grateful for the scoop but Silbert grumbled, "You're not making this very fucking easy."
Potter glanced at the computer screen. The story was a human-interest piece about an unnamed trooper, waiting for action – the boredom and the edginess of a barricade. Potter thought it was good and told the reporter so.
Silbert snorted. "Oh, it'd sing like poetry if I had some hard news to put in. When can we interview you?"
"Soon."
The agent and the trooper wandered down into a grove of trees out of the line of fire. Potter called in and told Tobe where he was, asked for any calls from Handy to be patched through immediately.
"Say, Charlie, where'd that attorney general get himself to?"
Budd looked around. "I think he went back to the hotel."
Potter shook his head. "Marks wants Handy to get his helicopter. The governor told me he wants Handy dead. The Bureau director'll probably be on the horn in the next half-hour – and there've been times when I've gotten a call from the president himself. Oh, and mark my words, Charlie, somebody's writing the script right at this moment and making me out to be the villain."
"You?" Budd asked, with inexplicable glumness. "You'll be the hero."
"Oh, not by a long shot. No, sir. Guns sell advertising, words don't."
"What's this about imaginary cigarettes?"
"When my wife got cancer I quit."
"Lung cancer? My uncle had that."
"No. Pancreas."
Unfortunately the party with whom Potter had been negotiating for his wife's recovery had reneged on the deal. Even so, Potter never took up smoking again.
"So you, what, imagine yourself smoking?"
Potter nodded. "And when I can't sleep I imagine myself taking a sleeping pill."
"When you're, you know, depressed you imagine yourself happy?"
That, Arthur Potter had found, didn't work.
Budd, who'd perhaps asked the question because of the funk he'd been in for the last hour, forgot his dolor momentarily and asked, "What brand aren't you smoking?"
"Camels. Without the filter."
"Hey, why not?" His face slipped and he seemed sad again. "I never smoked. Maybe I'll have me an imaginary Jack Daniel's."
"Have a double while you're at it." Arthur Potter drew hard on his fake cigarette. They stood among flowering catalpa and Osage orange and Potter was looking down at what appeared to be the deep tracks of wagon wheels. He asked Budd about them.
"Those? The real thing. The Santa Fe Trail itself."
"Those're the original tracks?" Potter was astonished.
"They call ' em swales. Headed west right through here."
Potter, genealogist that he was, kicked at the deep, rocklike tread mark cut into the dirt, and wondered if Marian's great-great-grandfather Ebb Schneider, who had traveled with his widowed mother from Ohio to Nevada in 1868, had been an infant asleep in the wagon that had made this very track.
Budd nodded toward the slaughterhouse. "The reason that was built was because of the Chisholm Trail. It went south to north right through here too, from San Antonio to Abilene – that's our Abilene, in Kansas. They'd drive the longhorns along here, sell off and slaughter some for the Wichita market."
"Got another question," Potter said after a moment.
"I'm not much of a state historian. That's 'bout all I know."
"Mostly, Charlie, I'm wondering why you're looking so damn uneasy."
Budd lost interest in the swales at his feet. "Well, I guess I wonder what exactly you wanted to talk to me about."
"In about forty minutes I've got to go talk Handy out of killing another of the girls. I don't have a lot of ideas. I'd like to get your opinion. What do you think of him?"
"Me?"
"Sure."
"Oh, I don't know."
"We never know in this business. Give me an educated guess. You've heard his profile. You've talked to Angie – She's quite a lady, isn't she?"
"Say, 'bout that, Arthur… the thing is, I'm a married man. She's been chatting me up an awful lot. I mentioned Meg must've been a dozen times and she doesn't seem to pay any attention to it."