He shifted in his chair, precipitating sharp lances of pain throughout every joint in his body. Time is definitely running out. Can’t just let it end with me passing out here in this chair and Stafford calling in the cops. At the very least I’m going to take Stafford with me, and somehow that girl. Suddenly he knew just how to make that happen.
Stafford’s stomach was raising hell about all the coffee. The caffeine was keeping him awake, but the acid and stress were churning up his guts. He had been desperately trying to think of something he could do to break the impasse, something that wouldn’t get him or the kids killed in the process. He jumped when Carson spoke his name from the darkness.
“All right, Stafford,” Carson said, his voice coming out in a hollow croak.
“What?” Stafford said.
Carson slid the phone across the table in Stafford’s direction. “Call them. Get whoever’s in charge of the Army people oh the phone.”
“And tell him what?”
“Do it, goddamn it. I’ll tell you what to say.”
Stafford reached across for the phone and picked it up. A voice answered immediately. “Yes? Wendell?”
“No, it’s Stafford. He wants to talk to the Army honcho. That general.”
A new voice came on the line. “He can talk to me. No one else.” — .;
“Who is this?”
“Kiesling, FBI.”
“There are five kids in here, Kiesling. This man isn’t up to playing games just now.”
“Taking his side, Stafford?”
“I’m the guy with a gun pointed at him. Just get the general, would you, Kiesling? I’m sure he’ll let you listen in.”
There was silence on the line for a few minutes. “What’re they saying?”
Carson asked.
“He said you could talk only to him. But I think he’s getting the Army guy.”
“He’d better.”
There was another wait, almost five minutes this time. Then a voice came on the line. “This is General Carrothers.”. “Dave Stafford here, General. Stand by one.” He looked in Carson’s direction. He could make out the white blur of Carson’s face, but not his features. “Well?”
“Give me the phone. Carefully. Push it over here.”
Stafford leaned forward and pushed the phone across the table as far as he could. Carson told him to sit down in the end chair, away from the phone, and then he got up, very slowly, Stafford noticed, and reached for the phone.
“General? This is Wendell Carson.”
Stafford could not longer hear the other side of the conversation, but it wasn’t very long.
“Here’s the deal, General. You want your little toy back, preferably unopened. I’ll give it to you. Then you can disappear into the woods and deny it ever happened. That’s what you people want more than anything, right?”
Carson was silent for a moment, and then Stafford saw him nod his head.
“Okay, then. But here’s the price for that. You bring me the girl — the one that can’t speak. You know the one I’m talking about. You bring her with you, and then you’ll get your cylinder, the nurse, and the kids.
Otherwise, I’m going to open it. Think about how you’ll explain that to your superiors, General. And to the public. Call me back when you have the girl.”
Stafford heard the phone slam down. “They’ll never do that,” he said to the figure in the darkness.
“Won’t they?’ Carson asked. “They get this thing back, and trade two hostages for seven. It’s not perfect, but life’s not perfect. You watch.
This is end game. They’ll do it.”
“Two hostages?”
“Yeah. I want the girl. I’ve already got you.”
It was Kiesling who briefed Carson’s demands to the state and county law-enforcement supervisors in the mobile command center. He didn’t specifically mention the cylinder, focusing on the hostages instead.
There was a babble of negative reactions around the command van. General Carrothers listened to all the simultaneous opinions, the exclamations of ‘No way in hell,’ the outraged fulminations of Kiesling’s FBI men, and then he quietly excused himself and walked through the cordon of police slouching behind their cars to the other side of the Willow Grove fence. When he had heard that the Atlanta media were inbound, he had ordered his people to break down the stone wall in the adjoining field and drive the military Suburbans up into that field and out of sight behind some trees. Fortunately, the television crews and their antenna-studded trucks were being held back down on the road to Graniteville, about a quarter of a mile from the scene.
Carrothers glanced at his watch. It was now almost three in the morning.
With sunrise would come press helicopters, which would spot his vehicles. He wished like hell that sheriff was around, but he had disappeared, and the consensus was that he might have run into Carson.
His deputies had been frantically searching the grounds all night, while trying not to be seen from the darkened house.
He reached the Suburbans. The captain came forward in the darkness. The rest of the soldiers were doing what sensible soldiers always do: sleeping in their vehicles. The captain was the only one awake.
“Yes, sir, General,” he said, saluting.
“Get the satellite link up, Captain. Get me General Waddell on secure.”
Two minutes later, he was patched through to Waddell, and he described the deal that Carson was offering.
“So he definitely has it in the house,” Waddell said.
“Sounds like it, sir. He’s got Stafford, a night nurse, and five little kids. We give him this girl, we get everybody but Stafford out, and we get the cylinder back. It’ll be daylight in three hours or so, and the Atlanta media is already here.” “What have they been told?”
“That there’s a wacko holding’kids hostage in this orphanage. That we know he has a gun, and that he’s claiming to have some nerve gas, which is why the Army is here, although I said we don’t really believe he does. Just a precaution.”
“What do the civilians on scene say?”
“What you’d expect: No way in hell. The problem is, only the FBI supervisor knows what this thing is really all about. The other problem we have is that no one has any idea of where the girl is. She and the woman who runs this place were spirited away by the sheriff, before he disappeared.”
“This is the so-called psychic?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Has Carson ever seen her?”
“Yes, sir, unfortunately. I had the same idea: Get a female FBI agent in here and send her in. But he knows what she looks like.”
At that moment, Agent Kiesling materialized out of the darkness. The captain tried to keep him away from the general, but Carrothers waved him over] “I’ve got Agent Kiesling here, General. Stand by one, please, sir.”
Kiesling stepped close so as not to be overheard. “They’ve found the sheriff,” he said. “He’s dead. Heart shot. He was in the creek below the dam.”
“Jesus,” Carrothers muttered. He had liked the sheriff. “Now what?”
“I’ve talked to my people in Washington. If we can find that damned girl, they’re ready to take his deal. Before daylight and television helicopters, if you take my meaning. But supposedly only the sheriff knows — knew— where they are.”
“I think my boss is ready to do the same thing,” Carrothers said. “But if Carson killed the sheriff, we’d probably be sending the girl to her death. Not to mention Stafford.”
“Why?”
“Because if we retrieve the cylinder and Carson kills them, there’s nothing we can do to him. The government can’t reveal what this has all ben about, and the two witnesses would be dead. So my vote is that we don’t do it.”