Takeover - Lisa Black [12]
“Hey.”
Patrick looked up. A uniformed cop stood next to a section plaque reading GENEALOGY AND HERALDRY.
“Are you Patrick?”
“Yeah.”
“Got a lady here who needs to see you. Come on,” he prompted over his shoulder, guiding his charge forward. “She says she’s—”
“I know her,” Patrick assured him. “You find anything in the car, Tess?”
CHAPTER 4
9:04 A.M.
“Remarriage,” she had said to Paul only two weeks earlier, “is ‘the triumph of hope over experience.’”
“Says who?”
“Dr. Samuel Johnson.”
“Then perhaps I should hold on to this check.” He had dangled the piece of colored paper over the railing, letting the loose end flutter. The ship beneath their feet rocked gently in the waves. The Goodtime II ran charters and lunch cruises, and they were booking it for their wedding reception. They had discussed all its features with the manager and now stood at its bow, letting the crisp, slightly fishy air caress them. The heat wave had not yet hit, and the sun felt good as it bounced off both the water and the glass pyramid of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Hope over experience. Paul had lost his first wife to acute myeloid leukemia, a disease that attacked with such speed and ferocity that grief arrived before shock had settled in. Theresa had lost her husband to another woman, and then a different other woman, and then several more other women until she’d lost track.
Their experiences had been different, but she believed that their hope remained the same. That this time no lies would be told, mistakes would not be repeated, the fates would give them a break; this time it would work.
She had pulled the check from his fingers. “Let’s give the man his money.”
Now she could glimpse the blue water only by pressing her cheek to the library window and peeking straight north along the narrow street. The pier sat two city blocks from them, the wedding date two months. Both seemed impossibly far away.
She looked down cautiously, afraid she might see Paul’s broken body on the sidewalk, but the buffer zone between the two buildings remained calm. If it weren’t for the eerily empty street, the day would appear to be following business as usual.
“We evacuated this half of the library, in case they come out shooting.” Her cousin Frank did not ask how she felt, or tell her not to worry, or even look up from the telescope. Like Don, he knew better than to disturb her preternatural self-control. “Ticked off a lot of students and homeless people. And her.” He hitched a thumb toward an older woman in a well-cut suit; she hefted a flat-screen monitor onto the reading table as a young man filled the surface with telephone equipment. “The head librarian of the reference wing. She hasn’t shushed me once, though.”
“What can you see?”
“Not much.” He stood back.
Theresa took over the eyepiece, heart pounding. The windows of the two-story Fed lobby were covered with grillwork and reflected the bright street outside. She moved the sharply angled telescope around but saw only a desk here, a chair there. “I don’t see anybody.”
“They’re gathered in the inner lobby. You have to look at the window right over the entrance. That’s the only one with clear glass on the inside wall. Otherwise we’re just looking at the outer offices, and there’s no one there.”
She moved the telescope, swinging too far and having to backtrack. “What are we going to be able to do if we can’t even see them? They could have killed them all by—”
Past the iron grilles, the outer windows and an inner window, over the metal detector and a revolving door, she saw Paul. At least she thought she did. Next to an older black man was the sleeve of another hostage—a narrow band of charcoal gray, the color of the blazer she had given Paul for his birthday, the one he’d been wearing that morning. Still upright. Still alive.
She watched that sleeve until Frank put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”
“A camera,” she told him. “We need a camera—”
“Security