‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’ll come and find you.’
He must’ve told Rafi where he is; must’ve done.
* * *
Two minutes ago, the young police UAV operator with a headset under her hijab, who’s been hunting for a terrorist drone in the relatively small space of sky above the pottery room, spotted a dark shape amongst the snow but it disappeared. They are taking stills from the footage and enlarging the image to decipher what she saw.
There’s still time, Rose says to herself, thirty-eight minutes until Jamie Alton opens fire.
‘The girl on TV, who saw the glint at the top of the high ropes course, does anyone know where she was speaking from?’ Thandie asks.
‘The library,’ Amaal says. ‘She was trying to get medical help for their head teacher.’
‘Jesus,’ Rose says. She has a sudden glimpse into one of many stories that are playing out simultaneously here and she feels again this sense that she isn’t at the heart of things; that she is skimming surfaces and imposing metallic rationality but what is happening is human and extreme and she wants to leave this vehicle and go into the school itself. Which will accomplish what, exactly, Rose? Bloody hell, stop being so self-indulgent and focus on what you’re here to do.
Rose’s team and other officers have spoken to staff but none of them can give any information on 14 Words, none of them even knew of its existence, let alone that a pupil was involved. The police told them they had to keep the information about 14 Words confidential. ‘But not from the kids inside the school, surely?’ Neil Forbright had said to her. ‘They deserve to know who is attacking them; to be trusted.’ She’d told him that actually, yes, it did include them. But she thinks that the teachers as well as the kids are not used to being obedient, and she likes them for it.
An officer has spoken to the gardener who saw a possible intruder outside the maintenance shed but he couldn’t give a description; the man’s back was towards him, his hood up.
* * *
The stench in the library is stronger: vomit and urine; fear and captivity. The footsteps are coming towards them. They stop outside the door. They are all holding their bodies rigid and still, holding their breaths. Hannah joins Ed and Frank, sitting next to them, with her back to the books and the door, the three of them squashed together. She’s worried about leaving Mr Marr but the main thing is to stop the gunman getting inside, because she thinks the first person he’ll kill will be Mr Marr.
She feels a shove against her back, and she and Ed and Frank push back.
She thinks of people smugglers trying to shove Rafi and Basi down into the hold, where you would be drowned first or suffocated by the fumes of the engine, hundreds of them below deck. Rafi had held on to Basi and pushed back.
The door doesn’t open any further.
He knocks on the door, tap-tap, like he’s asking to come in; a joke.
Soon he’ll realize it’s their bodies pressing against the door and he’ll shoot; splashes of purple, a wrecked time machine, a smashed lighthouse lamp, and everything going dark.
She thinks of Dad’s arm around her and his voice, Courage, mon brave; and she must tell him that she’s had him with her all through this, because they’ve been growing a little apart, not in big obvious ways, but in small important ways, and now she knows they haven’t really grown apart at all.
If she’s going to die, it’s easier to think about Dad. No one can take away the time she’s had with him, years and years together and memories and words handed down like watches.
But she and Rafi have only had four months and the gunman in the corridor and the ones she imagines in the woods, hunting down Rafi, could take away all the unlived months, secretly she’s dreamt of years and ever after, and they could steal it all before it’s even happened. She thinks of the people that they were this morning, running through the woods holding hands like two in-love young skeletons, bones touching, and in love was true, they were, they are, but there’s no future round the bend in the path; no this afternoon, this evening, tomorrow, and all those days after that will disappear before she’s lived them.
The footsteps leave, but he’ll come back again.
* * *
Lysander starts an on-screen briefing.
‘We can’t get any further with the heavily encrypted transactions, not in the time that we have. But Usman’s just got something.’
Usman comes on to the screen. Rose thinks that he is shaking. Bronze Commander and Stuart Dingwall have also joined the briefing.
‘I’ve decrypted another time-delayed announcement,’ Usman says. ‘It refers to Victor Deakin and Old School. It’s scheduled to go public on the Aryan Knight social media accounts at 12.00 midday today, twenty minutes before Jamie Alton’s announcement. I’m sorry, it wasn’t as heavily encrypted, I should have deciphered it faster. It’s really bad.’
He turns the computer screen so they can all read it.
‘Jesus Christ,’ someone says.
The only fucking way this country’s ever going to get turned around is if there’s a fucking bloodbath and at 12.00 it’s a bloodbath in Old School, in the library & classrooms, a nasty, messy motherfucker.
A lot of people are waking up in this country and smelling the fucking coffee and deciding they want this country back from Muslims and all you SJWs and snowflakes and libtards will wake up.
We might be too late, if they do wake up, but I think we can get it done. But it ain’t going to be nothing nice about it.
When we go on operations, there’s no leaving anyone behind. I guarantee when we go on this mission those little fuckers in Old School are going bye-bye. Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill.
I will die but I will become IMMORTAL.
They have fifteen minutes till Deakin opens fire in Old School.
‘I tripped an alarm on the announcement,’ Usman says. ‘They know we’ve seen it.’
Rose sees that Safa Rahman in his grey combat uniform is talking hurriedly to other members of the elite counterterrorism armed unit and she imagines them fast-roping down from their helicopters through the skylights of Old School, bursting in through the windows, but the plans of the building haven’t changed and the gunman is still in an interior corridor without windows or skylights to surprise him.
There are thirteen students in the library, and the badly wounded head teacher, twelve students and three adults in the English teacher’s classroom, and Neil Forbright on his own. If Rahman’s unit storm the building, how many will Deakin kill with his converted semi-automatic before they take him out? She cannot see how this will be accomplished without terrible loss of life.
Not your job. As she told Thandie, they have their job and they leave the armed units and everyone else to do theirs. Her role is to help find out who’s doing this and why they’re doing this. That’s where she might have value, though she thinks there’s precious little she can do now. Not her call to make.
Do your job.
She recognizes some of Victor’s words in the time-delayed announcement: Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill. He’s copied them from Eric Harris’s journal, one of the two gunmen at Columbine High School.
‘Do you recognize any of the message, Stuart?’ Rose asks. ‘He’s lifted some of it from one of the Columbine shooters.’