The snowfall has lessened a little and a second UAV shows Jamie Alton in more detail than Rose has seen before, his converted semi-automatic braced against his right shoulder, hand on the trigger, and then the camera turns to the pottery room and for the first time Rose sees Camille Giraud’s face at the window.
Do your job.
Rose stands back at the open doorway, her face frozen by the wind and the snow, separating herself physically and mentally from everyone else. She has to focus on the thing that’s been bothering her, examine it.
It’s not just the question of why Victor, a narcissistic psychopath, would borrow language from other people less intelligent than himself, but another question that arises from it. What is the link between Patrick Stein, a terrorist who hates Muslims, and Eric Harris, a teenager whose agenda was world infamy? Alone in the cold doorway she sees the link.
She hurries inside, the knowledge brutal and physical.
‘I think they have a bomb,’ Rose says.
‘Why? What makes you think that?’ Bronze Commander asks, and he sounds angry but he looks appalled.
‘Columbine was a failed bombing, so was Patrick Stein’s plot in Kansas. That’s the connection between Harris and Stein. That’s why Victor’s been using their words; like a clue.’
‘Stein and The Crusaders had four trucks piled with ammonium nitrate,’ Stuart says. ‘The FBI uncovered the plot in time.’
‘The attackers at Columbine had forty pounds of propane tank bombs, strapped to gasoline cans,’ Rose says. ‘Their home-made bombs didn’t go off because of faulty wiring but they didn’t have a terrorist organization behind them.’
Because now Rose knows why Victor joined 14 Words: not just to get himself a wingman and access to guns – he wanted to get his hands on a bomb.
‘The heavily encrypted transactions that we can’t decipher could well be the acquisition of a bomb or bomb-making materials,’ Lysander says. ‘The level of encryption fits with a paramilitary organization.’
‘Deakin and Alton would have been trained in bomb-making by 14 Words,’ Stuart says.
The small home-made bomb at the beginning was like the rifle shots, a misdirection of the vicious, destructive weapons they actually had; toying with them; a joke even.
‘Victor’s sent a text,’ Dannisha says.
Watch and learn motherfuckers
A taunt to Eric Harris and to Patrick Stein, Rose thinks. To all of them.
‘The bomb is most likely to be in Old School, isn’t it?’ Bronze Commander says, and maybe he’s right. Matthew Marr and Neil Forbright are still there, but everyone else has escaped to the theatre; in a coldly dispassionate numbers game, this isn’t the carnage it would be otherwise.
‘Victor Deakin must’ve brought the bomb into Old School with him when he swapped places with Jamie Alton,’ Bronze Commander continues. ‘Or Alton brought it in this morning as well as the gun, left it in an empty room.’
‘The Columbine bombers had duffel bags that they carried into the school dining room,’ Rose says. ‘It needed two of them. And they also packed their cars with explosives. The Crusader bombers planned on trucks packed with explosives. It’s bigger than something one man could carry on his own. I think he’s boasting about it being bigger as well as succeeding.’
She has to get into Victor’s head, predict what he would want, then how he’d accomplish it.
He’d want to bomb the place that was the most crowded, because he’d want maximum carnage and spectacle. That means he’d choose the place least likely to be evacuated.
Come on, Rose, think. Do better. This is Victor’s masterstroke, his end game, unleashing hell.
He’d think of the place that would be safest.
The safest place in the school is the theatre.
And Jamie Alton, his pal on the inside, his wingman, is responsible for props.
‘It’s in the theatre,’ she says. ‘In a props room. Jamie Alton could have ferried explosives inside for weeks.’
‘Tell them to evacuate,’ Bronze Commander says. ‘Tell them to run in all directions. We risk them being shot in the woods, but just get them out.’
It’s against all rules of hostage evacuation but there are no other choices; again the devil driving.
Amaal is hurriedly phoning Daphne, Thandie phones Jacintha, George phones Sally-Anne, white-faced and shaking; other officers are phoning Donna and Tonya and the kids, they have all their numbers.
But nobody answers.
They try again and again.
Why’ve they switched their phones off? Because they’re performing and watching a play? Jesus.
Officers are leaving messages to evacuate, but when will they hear their messages?
Again and again they try but still nobody answers.
‘Victor’s texted,’ Dannisha says.
Columbine and Kansas – Amateur Hour
Breaking with all protocol and rules, emergency vehicles are racing along the snowy drive towards the theatre despite the danger and the site not being secured; the devil driving but brave people trying to stop him. Rose cannot bear to look at the faces of her young team; to be responsible for what they may have to live with.
Police officers are getting out of their cars and jeeps and running towards the theatre to warn them. They’ll be using megaphones but the theatre walls are thick and they are still too far away to be heard.
Another text from Victor:
B O O M !
Live footage from a police surveillance UAV shows the theatre, a sturdy building in the trees. For a few seconds it is peaceful, snow falling on to the trees and the simple cedar-clad building.
The bomb rips apart the theatre, the percussive force exploding the walls and roof, hurling everything upwards past the treeline into the sky; then a fireball engulfs the whole of the remaining building, flames shooting up, the winter trees alight as the building collapses in on itself.
Part Three
* * *
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour when the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (1936)
20.
12.15 p.m.
Around Rose people stand in silent paralysis; shocked into stillness. She is no longer thinking or feeling, numbed, so that she is aware only of the plastic smell of the inside of the vehicle, as if they should be driving somewhere, instead of this terrible inert uselessness.
Bronze Commander comes on screen, his ruddy face ashen.
‘We all face this, deal with this, later, we have no time now. No time. There are still children in the pottery room. We have young children in the pottery room. We move in now.’
A feed from a police UAV shows counterterrorism specialist firearms officers in their grey uniforms closing in through the woods on the pottery room, the black smoke from the burning theatre a quarter of a mile away hazing around them.
A second police UAV, close to the pottery room, shows Jamie Alton in the same position; converted semi-automatic pointed at the children, finger on the trigger. The UAV’s camera turns towards the pottery-room windows.