Chapter Six
Elizabeth
Glimmers of orange snuck through the curtains of the seventh floor and suspended the offices in a kind of twilight. Neither night nor day. A place where time had stopped. Elizabeth strode through the main hall, past the abandoned coffee cups, half-eaten pastries and memos stopped mid-sentence that cluttered the rows of desks. The hostage taker walked in front.
Getting a good read is all about paying attention. Look for the clues. What do you see?
He had lowered his gun, his shoulders had relaxed, his arms swung by his sides.
Confident, safe, in control.
He glanced back at her. "This way."
Elizabeth bristled. I know the way to my own office. But she bit her tongue. "There were reports of gunfire," she said. She glanced up at the chandeliers that hung overhead; one now lurched to the side, and as she walked beneath it, grains of glass crunched underfoot. "Was anybody shot?"
The man turned, and walking backwards for six or seven paces, he eyed her from head to toe; the way his gaze dragged was enough to make her skin crawl. Then he gestured towards her office and continued on in silence.
"Not much of a talker, huh?" Elizabeth clicked her tongue. "Well, this should be interesting."
The drone of television mumbled its way out of the office and into the waiting area, where a second man slouched in one of the saffron armchairs. He wore the same uniform of white shirt and black dress pants as the other, and his features were similar too, though his beard was well-trimmed.
Related, maybe?
His own gun rested in his lap. He nodded towards Elizabeth and then said in Arabic, "Did you check her for weapons?"
"Of course," the first man replied. "Did they give you any trouble?"
The second man shook his head, and then he scowled up at Elizabeth and jerked his head towards the door. English this time. "Inside."
Elizabeth paused. She looked between the two men. "How about we all go inside?"
The first man spun to face her. The darkness in his eyes had deepened; asphalt oozed into bituminous swamps. "Perhaps you don't understand the situation here. You don't get to make demands."
Elizabeth took a breath. She wiped the spittle from her face. "You're right; I'm not here to make demands. I'm here to listen to you and to see if we can come to some kind of arrangement. One that suits all of us. Does that sound like a plan?"
The men paused and looked at one another.
Well that confused them.
Elizabeth flashed them a taut smile. "Great." She motioned towards the door. "Shall we?"
The second man pinched his throat, then rose up from the armchair, and at the nod from the first, he stepped inside. Elizabeth followed, the other man a pace behind.
A third man was hunched over a laptop on her desk, his gun lying on the file that she had discarded there earlier. He looked younger than the others, clean-shaven, though the slight dusting along his jaw said it wasn't for lack of trying. When he glanced up, the whites of his eyes flashed, like a fox caught in the headlights. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, a slight tremble in his hand, and as he raised his arm, he revealed the patches of sweat that already stained his pale blue shirt. A second longer, and then his gaze fell back to the screen.
Interesting.
Elizabeth turned to the couch, where Matt, Jay and Blake huddled. They stared up at her, wide-eyed, and she offered them a warm smile. "Hey, guys."
"Um…afternoon, ma'am," Jay said. "Nice of you to join us?"
Elizabeth chuckled. "Questionable choice of adjective, Jay."
Jay tilted his head to one side and shrugged—meh.
"Are Kat and Daisy safe?" Matt asked.
Elizabeth nodded. "They're fine."
"Elizabeth." Henry's voice spoke in her ear.
Her stomach tripped. So he'd decided to stay after all.
"We're running their faces now. We need to get a look at the rest of the floor, focusing on the stairwells in particular."
She turned to the two men in white shirts. Start accumulating yeses. "Is this everyone?"
They nodded.
"Great. Here's what's going to happen. Blake and I are going to take a quick look around this floor to make sure that there's no one up here who's been hurt. Then I'm going to get a coffee and—" She looked to the sofa. "—have you guys eaten?"
Her staff shook their heads.
She turned back to the hostage takers. "And something to eat. Then we can sit down and discuss how we're going to resolve this situation. Okay?" She paused for a fraction of a second. Then—"Blake, come with me."
"Stop." The man with the thick beard and asphalt eyes stepped into her path, one hand held up, whilst the fingers of the other hand fluttered against his gun. "You can't just wander off."
"I couldn't if I wanted to," Elizabeth said. Appeal to the ego. "The building is under your control, the floor is on lockdown. Where, exactly, could I go?"
The men shared a look.
Elizabeth shrugged. "Besides, you're more than welcome to join us."
She took another step towards the door, but the man held his ground, and his knuckles blanched as his grip on the gun tightened.
Elizabeth held her hands up, palms exposed. "Look, maybe you were hoping that I'd come in here and sit quietly, or perhaps just whimper in the corner…if that's the case, you really should have picked a different member of the cabinet." She shook her head to herself. Treasury would have been a good bet. "I came in here because I want to see my staff out safely, and I believe that we can work together to achieve that." Another step. "Now, if I can tell the White House that you're treating us well and that no one's been hurt, that's going to work in our favour. But what do you think will happen if they believe that someone's been harmed?"
Her gaze flitted to the television in the corner; it lingered there just long enough to draw their gazes to it too. The news footage showed the SWAT teams flocked outside the building, only a few metres from the cordon, and the swathes of reporters gathered beyond.
The man shook his head, and his beard wagged from side to side. "They're not going to risk your life; you're the Secretary of State."
"Yeah—" She dallied on the word. "—but I'm also a pain in the ass. Who knows, maybe the next Secretary will be more compliant." She flashed him a smile and then nodded towards the door. "Coffee?"
Henry
Russell groaned and lowered his forehead to his fists. "God, this is worse than the time I dreamt she'd announced a state visit to North Korea." He leant back in his chair and flapped at the screen. "What part of 'Don't provoke the gun-wielding maniacs' does she not understand?"
Director Doherty shook his head. "She's doing well. She's maintaining her authority, working on making them her ally…and getting them to agree to small requests will pave the way for larger concessions. So long as they believe she has the power to give them what they want, she can start a dialogue, and perhaps gain their trust and talk them down."
"And what if what they want is to shoot her?" The words resonated through the room and hollowed out a lull around them.
The pit of Henry's stomach twisted.
Russell swivelled to face him. Gaze lowered, he tapped his fingers against the desk and then muttered, "Sorry, Henry."
"Then in all likelihood, she'd already be dead." Doherty sent Henry an apologetic look too.
Perhaps this was what Elizabeth had felt all those times she had watched on from the Situation Room whilst he endangered himself in Bolivia or Pakistan or Afghanistan. Perhaps this was his penance for all the worry he had put her through.
"The Secretary was right," Doherty continued. "There are far easier ways to assassinate a person, and the fact that they've gone to such extremes suggests that they want something bigger."
"Well, can you at least tell her to tone it down?" Russell looked to Henry, eyebrows raised, the closest he would get to a plea.
Henry snorted. "This is Elizabeth you're talking about. Trust me, this is toned down."
"She knows what she's doing, Russell," Conrad said.
That phrase again. She knows what she's doing. It niggled at Henry's mind. And what had Director Haymond said? Running an op isn't the same as being in the situation itself…you're not in the CIA anymore. Then—Steel something. An operation name, maybe? Whatever it was, it had convinced Conrad to send her in, all because she knows what she's doing.
"Conrad." Henry propped his elbows against the desk and turned to face him. "Was Elizabeth ever kidnapped when she was in the CIA?"
Conrad stared at him hard, and his lips tightened. The pause stretched and stretched. Then he shook his head. "No."
"Then what's this thing with Steel—" He waved one hand, at a loss for the second word.
Conrad steepled his fingers against his lips. Contemplation—so there was something to tell. His frown deepened. He shook his head ever so slightly. "It's not something that you need to know."
"If that's what persuaded you to send my wife into this situation—" Henry gestured towards the screen. "—don't you think I have the right to know?"
"Bess asked me not to tell you," Conrad said, "and I'm not about to betray that trust."
A punch to the stomach. Tell me a secret. If I did that, I'd have to kill you, and the truth is I've grown rather fond of you, Henry McCord. What, exactly, didn't she want him to know? He opened his mouth, but before he could utter a word, Russell cut in—
"Sir." He nodded to the screen.
The footage from the camera showed the hallways of the seventh floor as Elizabeth and Blake walked through. The curtains were all drawn, but the lights from the ceiling and walls filled the passages with their amber glow and illuminated the filing cabinets, mahogany desks and stacks of chairs that barricaded the doors to the stairwells.
"Director Doherty," Conrad said, and he motioned to the barricades, "what are our chances of breaking through?"
Doherty's lips bunched to one side as he studied the screen. He twisted back to face Conrad. "It would be possible, but not without a lot of noise. The hostage takers would have more than enough time to move the hostages elsewhere, or harm them, before we got through. Plus, if they're monitoring the security cameras, they'd notice us long before we reached the seventh floor."
Conrad sighed. "So that's a no go then."
Doherty nodded. "Our best option right now would be for Secretary McCord to talk them down."
Russell bounced his fingers against the desk as he shot Conrad and Henry a sideways glance. "Without giving in to their demands, whatever the hell they might be."
"Sir." Ephraim Ware stood up from his seat near the middle of the table. "We have a positive match on the three suspects." He glanced to Henry. "Dr McCord was right, they are working for the IT firm." He stepped around his chair and towards one of the screens on the side wall, where the images of the men had appeared. He pointed to them in turn, starting with the man who had met Elizabeth at the elevator, the one with the prominent beard. "This is Oliver King, born Omar Khan." Next was the man who had been sat outside the office. "His brother, Harry King, born Hamza Khan." And finally the sweaty man who had been operating the laptop. "And their cousin, Alex Good, born Akeem Hussain."
"Any priors?" Ellen Hill swivelled round in her chair, so that she faced Ephraim and the screen. She rested her notepad in her lap, her pen poised over it.
Ephraim pressed his lips into a line as he shook his head. "Model citizens as far as we can tell."
Russell scoffed. "Then why the change in names?"
"It was shortly after 9/11—" Henry motioned to the dates near the bottom of the monitor. "—Islamophobia was high. Perhaps their parents felt it would be easier for them if they were Americanised."
Ellen Hill jotted down a note and then looked up at Ephraim. "Where are they originally from?"
"American born," Ephraim said, "but of Saudi decent." He stooped over the table and scrolled down on his laptop, and then glanced over his shoulder as he cast another record onto the screen behind. "They recently made a trip back to Saudi Arabia."
"Those dates fit in with the Hajj," Henry said.
"So maybe they went on pilgrimage—" Russell raised his arms to the side and shrugged. "—and got a little bit extra."
Conrad leant back in his chair and clutched the armrest. "Radicalisation, you mean?"
"It's possible," Russell said. "I mean, they are holding State Department employees at gunpoint after all."
Henry shook his head. "Just because they've been to Saudi Arabia doesn't mean that they've been radicalised."
"And some people who lurk down dark alleys are perfectly innocent," Russell said, "but you still wedge your keys between your fingers just in case."
"Hugh—" Conrad looked to Director Haymond. "—let's start digging through their past and looking for any ties to known individuals or organisations." He pursed his lips, and his gaze turned distant. "If it's true, then this situation could be much more dangerous than we thought."
The knot in Henry's stomach tightened. What on earth had Elizabeth gotten herself into?
