After a minute, he forced his trembling hands to reach for his phone, open it up, check his email and messages.
Nothing—not so much as a text—from any of his so-called colleagues. Men and women he’d hired and carried along, smirking and cowering in the distance. Then to rub salt in the wound, the first email was from that damned woman at Brendan’s school, sent just minutes after he’d hung up on her to go into the board meeting.
The call itself had been bad enough—first forced to listen to some fatuous tune, and when the principal finally came on, she had the nerve to yammer about how “sorry” she was to hear about his “troubles” before going and sticking her nose into his private business with Brendan. “Difficult patch,” my ass. He’d shut her up fast, by asking if she was maybe not capable of doing her job of keeping the school secure, and ended the call.
And now she wrote a sniveling “follow-up” message to say that he was welcome to cancel if he needed to.
Which might’ve only pissed him off a little, except for the two emails that followed hers. Both from that little bitch from the local paper who’d cornered him at some party a while back, and tricked him into giving her his personal address.
So she wanted to ask him about criminal charges, did she?
He came very close to smashing the phone onto the driveway and leaping out to grind it under his heel—but instead managed to keep his hands steady, turn the phone off, put it away in his pocket.
Jesus. If ever a situation called for a drink, it was this one.
Even the door lock fought him. He tried turning the key in the opposite direction—as if he could forget which way his own door unlocked—and to his surprise, heard the dead bolt slide. But only when he turned it back did the door open. Could the stupid boy have forgotten to lock the door? Given Tom’s current state, it was probably his own distraction.
At any rate, the damn door was open.
Normally at this point he would lay his briefcase on the table, but his briefcase was still in the office (And oh, the memory of his personal assistant—his assistant!—fearfully saying that he had to leave its contents behind!) so he laid his keys there instead. A deep breath. Another.
He could do this.
One drink, then a shower to wash away the filth of the morning, and a thorough brushing of teeth to conceal the smell. After that he’d think about Brendan’s school and how to tell a collection of illiterate children—some of whom were sure to be illegals—that they, too, could make a fortune in the tech world.
After all, it wasn’t like Thomas Atcheson didn’t always have a back door.
The only question was, what to do with the boy?
He stood in the silent office with his Georgian cut-glass tumbler of whisky, musing over the problem of Brendan. Except, he slowly realized, the house was not in fact silent, not completely. There was some tiny noise, nagging over his head, constant and unusual. Almost as if…
Up in Brendan’s bathroom, Tom Atcheson stared in disbelief at the steaming hot water running straight down the hole. It was well after ten o’clock. Had the tap been running more than two hours? And at the top of the sink, dried foam dribbled from the unrinsed bristles of the boy’s toothbrush, down the glass, and onto the porcelain, with a nauseating clot of it covering the brush. And beyond the sink—the toilet lid stood up, its contents stinking the air of the entire house. For God’s sake, was the boy on drugs?
He turned off the tap and stepped over to flush the toilet, grimacing as he lowered the lid. He walked quickly out and down the hall to the boy’s bedroom, half expecting to find Brendan passed out on the floor.
The bed was unmade. Clothing lay strewn about in front of the closet, as if some animal had rooted around inside. All four chest drawers stood ajar. A pair of underwear hung from the side of the laundry hamper. Books and papers lay all over.
Back out in the hallway, Tom made a rapid hunt through the other upstairs rooms. Guest room, laundry, storage closet, even Tom’s own bedroom and bath: nothing.
Puzzled, and caught between irritation and disbelief—had the boy been beamed up by aliens, for heaven’s sake?—Tom’s impulse was to check the garage for Brendan’s bicycle, but he pushed the very thought away. The boy knew better than to leave for school with the house in this state, no matter how late he was.
Don’t tell me Brendan got himself kidnapped? Tom thought. Today’s not a day to ask me for ransom! Back at the chaotic bedroom, this time he walked inside, taking care not to step on any of the debris covering the floor. Please don’t tell me I need to watch my home become a crime scene? Today of all days.
It was all he could do to keep his hands from straightening the books and tugging up the bed cover. Even the chair was a drift of papers. On the boy’s desk stood a glass filmed with milk. It took a moment for Tom’s eyes to focus on the envelope propped up against it (his personal stationery, taken from his office downstairs). Behind it stood a computer disc in a plastic case. He picked both up, shook his head at the childish name of the game—First Person Shooter—then noticed the small sticky-note attached to its front. It read:
FOR YOU AND THE
SAN FELIPE POLICE
DEPARTMENT
Under the note he could see the disc itself—which bore not a commercial game’s label, but three words printed in felt pen. Brendan’s name: his old name.
Frowning, Tom dropped the disc and pulled up the back flap, finding two pages of printout. He unfolded them, and read:
Sir,
I wonder if you know that’s how I think of you? Not Dad or even Father, but Sir. You probably think that’s only right, that’s how a son shows respect, but I’m not your son, I’ve never been your son, your just the man who married my mother. And then killed her. I know you did it, even though they say she killed herself. If that’s true, it was only because you made her life so horrible she couldn’t go on.
But I know things. You’ve always thought of me as too stupid for anything but running down a court and throwing a ball through a hoop, but I’m not. I’ve figured out all kinds of stuff, like the combination of your safe, and the password on your computer.
This is a copy of the disc I’m giving to the police today. You may not know it yet, depending on how fast they move, but by the time you read these words, your life will be headed down the tubes. You can run, or you can wait till they come for you, it doesn’t matter to me either way.
I also want you to know that if you’d let me go live with Uncle Ray back when Mom died, none of this would have happened. I’d have been happy, and you’d have gone on doing what you do.
Instead, you kept on grinding away at me until you made me prove I could outsmart you. When you read this, I’ll be with Uncle Ray. He’ll pick me up from school, after I’ve had my talk with Ms. McDonald, and we’ll go together to the police.
Oh, and something else. Those texts I get all the time from my school friend Jock? That name makes me laugh every time I see it, because they’re actualy from someone who’s about the opposite of a jock.
That’s right: I’ve been talking to Uncle Ray, all along.
Have a good life, Sir. Maybe I’ll see you at your trial.
Brendan James Connelly
Tom read the letter twice. Ray? The boy would choose that shiftless idiot Ray? His eyes lifted from the letter, coming to focus on the litter covering the floor. Brutalized textbooks, abandoned binders, the day’s assignments.
Period 5, Sports Medicine, taunted the page at his feet. Another great choice the boy had made: a physiotherapist, not even an MD, talking about how to patch together injuries, instead of Thomas Atcheson pointing out how to make a difference in the world.
Tom made his feet move out of the room. Downstairs, he tapped impatient knuckles against the player until it woke up and accepted the disc. He stepped back so he could see the large wall screen, absently picking up the half-empty tumbler he had abandoned at the sound of a running tap.
The first part of the recording fo
llowed the same text as the letter, delivered by the boy’s annoying voice, his sneering, two-foot-tall face reciting that list of adolescent grievances, declaring that long-forgotten name.
Then the boy got on (as his smirk made clear) with the meat of the matter: how he’d figured out his stepfather’s passwords, broken into his safe. Raided his computer. Copied a series of incriminating documents and emails. Methodically. For months. Months.
Tom stopped hearing the words. Long minutes later, he realized he was standing in front of a frozen image. The recording had ended. Some time ago.
He hurled the tumbler at the boy’s locked face. Glass flew joyously. Brendan disintegrated into a jagged pattern of intersecting lines. Crystal shards crunched underfoot as Tom leapt across the room to hammer at the EJECT button, snatching the scrap of shiny plastic as it emerged and snapping it across, again and then again. He threw those down and smashed his heel against them, over and over, then stood, panting in front of the broken screen. The fucking little traitor. All I’ve done for him! After a time, Tom became aware of a faraway pain: blood, on his hand. Not only had the damned disc stabbed him in the heart, it had sliced his finger as well.
The house really was silent now. Not that it would be for much longer. Even a small-town police department would know what that disc put in their hands. In no time at all, departments known by their initials—FTC, FBI, SEC, you name it—would be pissing on his shackled form.
Tom was prepared for emergencies, of course he was. But he’d always been aware of a major drawback, depressing as hell: every country without extradition treaties was a moral and social garbage dump. He’d be stuck there, surrounded by people he hated, whose bribes sucked him dry. From the beginning, Tom had known that when it came right down to it, he might actually prefer to put a gun to his head.
If it weren’t for the disc, that’s what he might have gone ahead and done—what had, in truth, been at the back of his mind when he’d come in the front door. Unlock the gun safe, open the fifty-year-old Macallan he’d paid $11,000 for at that charity auction, and drink his way to putting the Glock under his chin.
He heard a tiny pat, and looked down to see a drop of blood on the front of his shoe. He grimaced, and went to the kitchen for a paper towel and a Band-Aid. When he came back to his study—his retreat, his safe place, violated by the ungrateful cuckoo-boy, who might as well have taken a crap in the middle of his priceless carpet—he took the Macallan’s flawless decanter from its glass cupboard, broke the seal, and filled a second of the cut-crystal tumblers with it.
He savored the first swallow, then went back to his desk. The tray on the corner held papers waiting to be shredded or filed. On the top lay that idiotic principal’s inane Welcome to Career Day letter, reminders and guidelines to speakers who clearly weren’t expected to know what they were doing. But there’d been a second page…
He slid a finger under the sheet and lifted, looking at the map below.
Conquering adversity was what Thomas Atcheson did…
Tom had dutifully gone to parent conferences at least once a year since Brendan started at Guadalupe—a school for ordinary kids, chosen by his ordinary mother, Tom’s then-wife. Tom had even attended two or three basketball games, so he knew how the school was laid out. The cafeteria, the gymnasium. The access road up the side.
The layout of the doors.
Studying the map, a dispassionate corner of his mind remarked on how rage could shift from hot and uncontrollable into cold and deliberate. All it took to restore sanity was a step into decision. Once a man had committed to a course of action, the chatter of rage fell away, and life grew simple.
When there was half an inch of the whisky left in his glass, Tom crunched across the broken crystal to the gun safe. Did the little prick figure out how to get in there as well? He couldn’t tell. Nothing was missing. But like everything else in his study, it felt unclean.
Leaving the safe open, he went upstairs. When he came down ten minutes later, his hair was damp from the shower and his $7,000 suit was changed for jeans and a gray sweatshirt. In the black ballistic-cloth bag he carried was a handmade deerskin bomber jacket and Brendan’s Career Day assignment. He dropped the bag on the desk, pulled out the page, laid it next to the school map—and smiled.
Give Tom Atcheson a locked door, he’d find another way out. Show him a dead end, he’d chisel a path through it.
And if the locked door was the only one, the dead end his only choice?
He’d just blow the fucking things up.
That’s what he wanted to do, of course—literally blow the place up. The Atcheson campus was his from its concrete foundations to the trees in its atrium, and he’d love nothing more than to lay charges and level it back to dust and rubble. But he didn’t think he had the time, not if the police were coming to call…
There was another option. Quicker, louder, more immediate—a lesser target, but one the world might regard as being the greater, since it breathed and moved and screamed rather than quietly holding a man’s hopes and dreams.
If he couldn’t have it, he’d be damned if some other man would.
He transferred what he thought he’d need from the gun safe to the nylon bag and started to close it, then paused and took out a smaller weapon. Balancing the Bodyguard in his palm for a moment, he gave it a bitter smile, then loaded it and put it in beside his favorite Glock. The bag across his shoulder, Tom walked over to his trophy wall and took down a black baseball cap awarded to the favored few by one of the software giants. When he pulled it on, the mirrored section of the cabinet assured him that, yes, the brim would keep the security cameras off his face when he drove through the gates of the Atcheson Enterprises loading docks. Just as the sweatshirt would make him invisible to the people working there. Who would think twice about a man confidently taking a van key from the board? And even if they did recognize him, who there would stop Tom Atcheson from driving away in one of his own vans?
Tom dribbled the remaining $9,500 of booze into the drive of his computer, then tipped the last half-inch of the whisky down his throat. He rubbed his thumb over the glass’s engraved surface—how appropriate, to think that he’d bought these for his wife—then tossed it into the fireplace, feeling the music of two-hundred-year-old crystal disintegrating against brick.
Never, ever let people screw you into a corner, Tom thought, and went out to claim back a portion of what the world had taken from him.
12:51
Gordon
(EIGHT) Gordon wrenched the boy a step further away (NINE) from the vulnerable doors (TEN). The boy’s harsh breaths drowned out the siren, continuing through the next pause—a shorter one, this time. When the slams resumed, they punched at the door then went high to shatter the clerestory windows: the bigger gun now.
“Why d’you think it’s your father?”
“Because of the Bodyguard.”
“Your father has a bodyguard?”
“Stepfather. It’s a kind of gun. It’s my gun.”
“The Smith and Wesson 380?”
“Yeah. He keeps it and the Glock in the gun safe at home. The rifle’s at the shooting range. Usually.”
“What kind of Glock?”
“Um, the 40.”
“Fifteen plus one. Ten in the other.”
For the first time, Brendan’s attention left the quad doors as he pulled away to look at the face inches from his own. “How do you—”
Gordon traded his wrestler’s hold for a hard grasp of the boy’s upper arm with one hand and the back of his belt with the other, forcing his captive toward the janitor’s office. “Why would your father shoot up the school?”
“I did something to piss him off.”
“That’s speaking mildly. Brendan, I imagine it’s just a gun that sounds like yours.”
“Both guns? I tell you, he’s fucking psycho.”
“Doesn’t matter—whoever it is, the police will get him. At least he doesn’t have a rifle.”
“He might.”
“If he did, there wouldn’t be any doors left.” If he did, Mina would be dead. This time, Brendan let himself be propelled all the way back to the janitor’s room.
12:51
Linda
There was no way Linda could get her arms around all twenty-eight kids, but she tried. They were in the far corner of the room, her back to the shooter, and she was doing her best to shelter them behind her outstretched arms. Each time the gun went off, a shudder ran through all of them, including her.
Sofia was hard against Linda’s right knee, huddled behind an overturned desk. Linda could feel the girl quivering. She glanced back at the intent lunatic, then whispered to get her attention. “Sofia? Sofia, look at me, Sofia.”
Repetition of her name brought the girl’s eyes up, white-rimmed and moments away from cracking—and if one gave way to panic, the others would follow. Linda put on her calmest mask, used her steadiest voice. “Sofia, I need you to listen to me. I need your help, Sofia. Can you do something for me?”
The trembling localized into a nod and a shaky breath. Linda gave her a reassuring smile, trying not to wince at the blow of another round. “My cellphone is in my jacket pocket,” she whispered. “Right next to your knee. If I try and use it, he’ll see me, but you’re behind the desk from him. He won’t see you. Can you get it out for me, honey?”
The girl’s eyes darted toward the door, but after a few seconds, her hand crept out. Linda shifted to keep the hang of her jacket in the way, and felt the tug as the girl lifted the phone from her pocket.
“Good girl,” she whispered. “The sound is off, so don’t worry. Turn the phone on. The password’s 1987. Got it?” In the corner of her eye, she saw the girl nod. “And kids, don’t anyone look at Sofia, okay? Thanks. Honey, open the messages and find Gordon, then type this for me: Tom Atcheson with two or three guns room B18, nobody hurt here are you all okay?”