“’Cause it’s all he had,” said a girl in the front row. “All he knew.”
“What else?”
“He was good at it,” someone else answered. “When you’re that good, you don’t think anybody’ll ever beat you.”
“Was Rainsford better at the game than the general?” Fallon asked his class.
“No,” said Trent. “Zaroff lost ’cause he got lazy. When you get lazy, you get beat every time. But Rainsford, he was a hero.”
“Why?”
“He saved lives. Of Zaroff’s future victims. Not all heroes mean to be heroes, if you get my drift.”
“May I have your attention please?”
The voice of Principal Meeks boomed over the school’s PA system.
“All students and teachers, please report to the gymnasium immediately. That’s all students and teachers, please report to the—”
The principal’s voice cut off in midsentence, as if he’d accidentally hit the wrong switch. Fallon watched his students begin to rise from their desks, replaying Meeks’s words in his head—not for content so much as cadence. Something all wrong about the tone and import. Fallon knew the sound of a man under duress, because he’d put countless men in just that position.
When you get lazy, you get beat every time….
“No,” Fallon said before the student closest to the door could open it. “Back to your seats.”
“But—”
“Back to your seats.”
The edge in Fallon’s voice had his students returning to their desks without further question. The hallway beyond filled with students spilling out of nearby classrooms, the heavy trampling of feet signaling the approach of those emerging from the two-story wing at the building’s head.
“Mr. Beechum?”
Fallon swung toward the windows again. They only opened inward at the very top, enough to provide ventilation but not escape.
“Mr. Beechum?”
Fallon didn’t answer. Mr. Beechum was gone.
“Trent,” Fallon said, the persona shed, cold eyes boring down on the boy who’d been his favorite, “give me your switchblade.”
“My wh—”
“Now, Trent.”
The voice not raised, just measured and certain.
“It’s a butterfly knife.”
Trent fished the butterfly knife out of his backpack, brought it up to Fallon and extended it toward him in a trembling hand. Fallon wished he could smile at him reassuringly, the way Mr. Beechum would.
Except Mr. Beechum was gone.
“Okay,” Fallon said, “everyone line up starting on this wall and wrapping around to the back of the room. Shoulder to shoulder. Very close. Out of sight from the door.”
“Why?” a girl asked, moving to obey.
Fallon didn’t answer. Beyond his classroom, the thick flow of students and their teacher escorts continued down the corridor, oblivious to whatever might be transpiring. Fallon hoped he was wrong, but knew he wasn’t. He had spent his life as Zaroff, the odds stacked heavily in his favor. But now suddenly he found himself as Rainsford.
When you’re that good, you don’t think anybody’ll ever beat you.
Well, whoever had come in those vans was in for a big surprise, weren’t they?
The moments passed in silence broken only by the loud breathing of his students. Or maybe it wasn’t loud. Maybe Fallon just heard it that way.
The hallway emptied, a few stragglers passing the windowed door and then no one. A pause, then fresh footsteps crackling atop tile alone followed by the creaking echo of doors being thrust open, each growing louder.
Fallon snapped the butterfly knife’s blade into position.
A boy whimpered. Two girls began to sob, then a third.
Fallon pressed a single finger against his lips, signaling them to be quiet, ducked back so he was out of sight from the doorway.
The heavy footsteps drew closer. The knob rattled, door easing inward.
A student gasped.
A man lurched past Fallon, never seeing him. Fallon noted the high-end submachine gun he was steadying with a second hand in the last moment before he pounced. Arm wrapped around the man’s neck to silence him as he drew Trent’s butterfly knife on a sharp upward angle required to slice through bone and gristle, digging into the lungs and shredding them.
The man gurgled and rasped, fighting against Fallon as bloody froth poured from his mouth. Fallon snapped his neck for good measure, studying his face as he dragged him across the room before the horrified stares of his students.
The man was Arab; Fallon could tell that from sight, as well as smell. Smells were important to him. You spend enough time all over the world, in the various cesspits of humanity, and you begin to know men by their smells as much as anything. An Arab, all right, and in that moment Fallon realized everything he had been dispatched to Iraq to prevent had finally come to pass. The foreign stink come home.
Fallon was free to escape now. Two vans meant a dozen men at least, the other eleven likely scattered throughout the building. He could flee the building without so much as killing another, or, perhaps, just one. Maybe use one of their vans as his escape vehicle and leave them to whatever debacle they intended to perpetrate on the school and the world. It wasn’t his world anyway, not anymore.
Or was it?
He glanced at his students, bunched tighter together now, hugging each other as they stared at him in terror the way they would a monster, like the one Frankenstein had created. Or maybe General Zaroff, mad for the hunt.
Johnny got his gun, all right.
Flee and these students, his students, would inevitably end up in the gym with the others. Perhaps to be made an example of for disobeying. Terrorists like these were not very original, and that awareness sparked a memory in Fallon’s head of Chechnyan terrorists taking a school over in that particular godforsaken hostage situation. The students brought to the gymnasium, just like here. And then the gym was blown up while the whole world watched.
No, not very original, but effective all the same.
Fallon tried to imagine how he’d do it, how many men in the gym versus how many patrolling and securing the building. He settled on four in the gym, eight for the building.
Seven now.
Fallon stooped and began working the dead man’s jacket free.
“I need you all to stay here,” Fallon told his students. “Don’t make a sound and wait for me to come back for you.”
They looked at him as the stranger he had become even before he’d donned the terrorist’s jacket and bandana, squeezed his feet into the dead man’s work boots and slung his submachine gun from his shoulder. Enough to pass for the dead man from a reasonable distance, which was the best he could hope for. The 9/11 hijackers had never all met each other, but this kind of operation was different, requiring practice and synchronization. They would know the building as well as he did; every crawl space, every nook, every cranny. The difference, of course, was he knew the terrorists were here while they had no idea he was.
Wait for me to come back for you….
Why had he said that? Fallon wondered, once he was in the hallway, careful to leave the door open as all the others on the hallway were. It would be so easy for him to flee the building now before the inevitable appearance of the authorities on the scene. That was no longer an option for him, the challenge, the game, before him much too great to consider walking away from.
But was he Zaroff or was he Rainsford?
The building was eerily quiet, save for the din coming from the gymnasium area, where nearly 700 students were being crammed in even now. Fallon tried to remember all the details of the Chechnyan school seizing. Those terrorists had waited for the authorities to arrive, waited for them to mount their ill-fated raid, before triggering the explosives and killing hundreds. It would be the same way here, the strategy aimed at drawing the most attention possible. Round-the-clock coverage on the networks for days before the entire country pa
id witness to a mass murder in prime time.
Fallon made sure to conceal the considerable bulk of his shoulders within the terrorist’s shapeless, now bloodstained, jacket. He tied the dead man’s bandana low over his forehead, hoping it would conceal the differences in their faces and hair from the distance he required. He made sure the walkie-talkie, simple Radio Shack variety, was secured to his belt and started back up the corridor the way the dead terrorist would if he were retracing his steps.
At the head of the hallway, the office directly on his left and the science wing just down the hall to his right, Fallon glimpsed another of the terrorists rushing away from the main entrance with extra chains clanking. By now, all such doors would have been secured and wired with explosives, to detour both escape from within and attack from the outside. Fallon had a clear shot at the man but opted not to take it until he was sure no others were in the vicinity. Instead he made his footsteps just loud enough to be heard. Then swung about, gun leading, back to the stairwell up which number two had rushed.
“Hey,” the man called to him in Arabic, “shoo hada?”
Fallon’s response to the man asking him “What is this?” was to swing and fire. A single headshot that dropped the terrorist where he stood. He crumpled to the steps and slid halfway back down the stairs. Not Fallon’s intention, but by this point instinct had taken over.
Two down.
Fallon heard footsteps converging on the stairwell from opposite directions on the second floor. He crouched over the body and angled low, submachine gun angled at the main entry doors as if to suggest that’s where the deadly fire had originated. He could see the plastic explosives layered into place over the glass. Not the way he would’ve done it exactly, but still effective.
The footsteps grew louder, voices in Arabic shouted his way. Fallon swung when the two men were close enough to take in a single sweep. Two shots, both to the head again to be sure.
Four down.
This time his shots coincided with the rattling echo of machine-gun fire coming from the other end of the building. Screams and cries answered the barrage, greeted by a second longer one that drove the students and teachers to silence. Four to six of the remaining terrorists would be down there. Doors chained from the inside, denying him both access and the element of surprise. Without either, never mind both, the game would be over.
Fallon’s Radio Shack walkie-talkie crackled. He snapped it from his belt, listened.
“Shoofi mafi? What’s the matter?”
“Mafi Mushkil,” Fallon replied, hoping he had chosen the right word in Arabic. “No problem.”
“Dilwaati. Hurry.”
Fallon clasped the walkie-talkie back on his belt and headed down the stairs, banking left toward the school’s science wing as the blare of sirens descended on Hampton Lake Middle School.
The students of his eighth-grade honors Language Arts class were arranged two-by-two, fourteen deep, with Fallon bringing up the rear. After rousing them from the classroom against the tearful protestations of many, he placed Trent at the head of the group to lead the way toward the gym.
He’d encountered another terrorist in the science wing who approached him in the half-light, noticing the ruse too late and making the mistake of trying to right his submachine gun. Fallon was close enough to use Trent’s butterfly knife this time, a single swipe across the man’s throat for silence and surety.
He spent just over a minute gathering up two vials of clear liquid in one of the science labs and ran into another of the terrorists, literally, at the head of the corridor. Their eyes had met; the terrorist’s gaping, Fallon’s steeling as his hands came up, thumbs pressing into the man’s eyes to mash brain tissue and send him spasming toward death.
Six down.
Then back fast to his classroom to affect the final phase of his plan, the students suitably scared and confused. He marched them down the hall toward the gymnasium, pretending to prod with the submachine gun while concealing a capped glass vial in either hand.
A hundred feet away, a pair of terrorists guarding that booby-trapped entry to the building spotted him coming and twisted his way, keeping tight to the wall while shouting instructions Fallon ignored. They approached on either side of his marching phalanx and as soon as they were close enough to realize something was very wrong, Fallon popped the caps off his vials and tossed the acid compound at their faces. Not directly on line, but enough splashing home to send their hands upward to comfort their ravaged eyes.
Fallon took each down with a single, quick burst, then pushed his shocked charges on faster. Through the glass doors and half-wall he glimpsed a nonstop onslaught of police vehicles and media vans, continuing with his charges toward the chained entrance to the gym.
He moved to the front of the apparent stragglers he had rounded up, pounding on the door and then swinging away with gun leading.
“Open up! Hurry!” he screamed in Arabic, desperation forced into his voice. “They’re in the building!”
The chains rattled, locks and explosives being thrust aside. The double door entrance jerked open by a sweaty man who bled garlic through his pores.
Fallon started shooting, willing to sacrifice a few innocents to get the last of the job done. He felled the three terrorists converging on the door, before turning his attention on the one who had yanked it open, because his hands were too full to go fast for a weapon. That man had barely hit the floor when Fallon whirled sideways, scanning the room for motion.
He fired at whatever moved, like a cheap arcade game now, hoping no bystanders got caught in the fire but knowing he couldn’t let that concern stop him. He fired his last spray upward into the sprinkler apparatus, activating a spray of water, which almost instantly doused the cavernous room and drenched its occupants.
His submachine gun clicked empty. Fallon was twisting to retrieve the sidearm of a dead terrorist when a bearded rail of a man came at him, showcasing a detonator as he blithered away in Arabic.
“Maashallah! Maashallah!”
Fallon palmed Trent’s butterfly knife, locked the blade into place.
“Maashallah! Maashallah!” The man’s wild hair a soaked tangle that swept over his face, seeming to merge it with his beard.
“Maashallah!”
Fallon snapped his hand outward, sending the knife whizzing through the air. It took the final terrorist in the eye, buried to the hilt in his brain. He fell to the floor. The detonator rattled across the floor.
Fourteen down, Fallon thought, realizing his initial estimate had been off as he looked up and let the cascading water wash over his face. And not a single bystander with them.
Fallon emerged from the boys’ locker room, wearing the uniform and visor of a SWAT officer who’d gone in there to secure the site. Confusion was his ally now, confusion and chaos as the police stormed the building to find bodies everywhere and had to sort through the tales of the mysterious teacher who had killed them. They’d never believe it at first and before they did, Fallon would be gone.
In the foyer beyond the gym, he passed his eighth-grade honors Language Arts class being questioned by an expanding bevy of officers. Fallon kept his head turned low and to the side, cocking his gaze back just once when he was almost to the door, to meet Trent’s.
“So if he wasn’t Beechum, any of you have an idea who he was?” an official in plain clothes was asking his students.
“Rainsford,” Trent said as his eyes locked and held with Fallon’s through the SWAT visor. “His name was Rainsford.”
RIDLEY PEARSON
Not only is bestselling author Ridley Pearson a master of forensic detail but he also plays in a rock band with other bestselling writers like Amy Tan, Mitch Albom and Stephen King. “We play music as well as Metallica writes novels,” he said, so it’s good news that Ridley agreed to contribute a story to this collection rather than an original song.
“Boldt’s Broken Angel” opens with one of the most haunting and powerful scenes you’ll ev
er read. The reader follows detective Lou Boldt on the trail of a serial killer who is as twisted as Ridley’s brilliant plot. Fight the urge to skip ahead, because you won’t want to miss a single word. This is a model thriller by a modern master, the perfect story to complete the collection.
BOLDT’S BROKEN ANGEL
Erastus Malster—they called him Rastus—hooked both feet beneath the large gray cleat on the bow of the fishing trawler Sea Spirits and, holding himself fast, lifted his arms straight out at his sides like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. The salt spray peppered his wide-mouthed grin, stung his eyes and seasoned his fourteen-year-old tongue.
It was his uncle’s boat, his uncle’s idea to wave to his mother in the jet as it took off from SEATAC. They had no real way to track the flight, bound for Israel where she was set to join up with a two-star cruise ship tour of Israel ports and Egyptian treasures, so Rastus waved at all the planes, while his uncle drank beer and laughed from the wheelhouse. His uncle loved to laugh.
His uncle had also judged wrong. They were far too distant from the airport to catch any of the planes taking off. In fact, they could barely seen any metal in the sky. A flicker or a flash as the aluminum skin caught the retreating sun.
Rastus saw one blaze in particular as he rode the bow: a brilliant white-and-orange glint that held the intensity of a camera’s flash. He pointed up to it and gasped.
“Uncle! Uncle!” he called out.
His uncle only laughed and hoisted the beer.
At first, he thought they were salmon, or seals or even Orca whales surfacing—an exciting splash a hundred yards to his left. Port, as his uncle called it. Why they couldn’t just call it left Rastus wasn’t sure.
The moment that first splash occurred, his uncle cranked the wheel in that direction, so severely that the cleat was not enough to hold Rastus, and he fell to his right, barely catching hold of the wire rail at the last possible second. He regained his balance, righted himself and looked back at his uncle in the wheelhouse.