Pavel Kravchenko: Project Antichrist

“Luke, why me?”

“It’ll be fine,” I told him. The crowd looked livelier now. Things were clearer. They’d already forgotten my monologue. This was more exciting.

Iris and Brome stood together in the rear, watching me. They heard the conversation too; I’d spoken loudly enough to make sure of that. I gave them a thumb up and scanned the crowd until my eyes located Tiffany. Wearing my most charming smile, I motioned for her to come closer.

Special Agent Brighton spent forty-two minutes following his conversation with Whales on the ninetieth floor, pacing and giving orders. Now he returned to the roof, where the FBI helicopter had dropped him off earlier, to meet the Secret Service.

They had just landed their fancy black civilian DFC-4300, and two of the four agents disembarked. The only difference between them and the FBI, as far as the attire went, were the silly shades. True, FBI agents favored sunglasses also, but they occasionally took them off. These guys likely slept in them, if they slept at all.

The pair who got out of the chopper stood twisting their necks and holding their chins so high, you’d think they couldn’t see through the lenses, but only from under them. As one of the lesser agents went to greet them, dragging a parka-clad cameraman along, Brighton couldn’t help but think about his idea to simply put shades on a few feds and fetch fake IDs for them. The only reason he hadn’t gone through with it was Brome. Whales was a fool — this notion of surrendering to Secret Service, as if that would make any difference, was a good indication enough of that — but Brome would know if there was a ruse. He also knew Brighton well enough to expect something of the sort. Besides, there was really no point in taking chances. Bringing a few bored SS agents from their Chicago branch hadn’t been hard. A single phone call.

The IDs were shown to the camera.

Brighton dialed the number.

“Hello,” Whales answered.

“The Secret Service are on the roof. Release the hostages and come out.”

“All right, Brighton. The hostages are on their way down. Clear the Eastern Stairwell. I don’t want to see anybody in there. I will come out in exactly fifteen minutes. Tell the Secret Service to keep the engines running.” He hung up. Brighton grimaced.

No matter, he thought. This was the last time Whales told him what to do. He would soon learn how Secret Service protects.

But another unpleasant thought suddenly entered his mind. Whales was a fool, but if Brome was on his side he would see that this idea of extraction by Secret Service was stupid. So why didn’t he…? Was Brome on Whales’s side? Or did he see the situation for what it was and decided that anything Whales came up with was fine, as long as he would surrender without getting himself or anybody else killed? That sounded like Brome, yet Brighton was not convinced. He wished he had surveillance, but all the cameras on the seventy-seventh floor were out of commission. He had watched Brome and Whales smash every single one. He still had the infrared scanners from across the street, but those weren’t too helpful.

There was an audible click in his ear and Dietrich’s voice. He had send Agent Dietrich down to the foyer to take charge of the cops there.

“Agent Brighton? We have three elevators on the move. I think it’s the hostages.”

“A fine observation, Dietrich. Tell the local police to escort them to safety and wait for further instruction.”

“Yes, sir.” Dietrich signed off. Brighton switched to SWAT team in the Eastern stairwell.

“Sergeant Rose here.”

“Sergeant, move your men down to the seventy-sixth floor and stay alert and quiet. Do not engage anyone going up, but I don’t want a soul to descend. Is that understood?”

“It’s done. Rose, out.”

Brighton nodded. He liked SWAT. They didn’t talk much and they didn’t talk back.

Soon, Dietrich reported twenty hostages evacuated. The next ten minutes went by very slowly. Super slowly, if one took into the account the below-freezing wind chill on the roof of a Chicago skyscraper in November. Secret Service retired back to the helicopter to escape it. Brighton stubbornly watched the western vista.

Finally, it was time. Then it was one minute, then two minutes past time. Brighton dialed SWAT.

“Rose,” a whisper came.

“Any movement?”

“Negative. All quiet here.”

Squads covering other stairwells reported the same. The infrared scanner from across the street reported heat signatures inside the office at the southeast corner. Brighton dialed Whales’s number, waited five rings, then cursed loudly when a woman’s voice asked him to kindly leave a message for Mr. Cornwell.

“Son of a bitch,” he growled. Although he had been instructed to report to his superiors before taking any drastic measures, Brighton was by then pretty sick of phone calls.

“All SWAT teams, move in immediately,” he snapped. “Standard ROE. Keep the radio on.”

Glaring at the snug Secret Service agents, he went inside. In his earpiece the doors were being breached and shouts of “Go, go, go!” resounded. No gunfire out right. He knew storming the doors could mean casualties, but the hostages, presumably aside from the fat Mr. Cornwell, had been safely evacuated. If it so happened that they lost the producer… He shrugged and continued to descend, monitoring the chatter.

“This is Rose,” a calm but slightly hurried voice came after a while. “Place seems dead.”

“This is Mauser, Charlie squad. We have noise in the executive office.”

“Go in,” Brighton said hollowly.

“Yes, sir.”

A minute later Mauser reported locating six civilians taped to chairs around a conference table. Two females and four males, one of whom was the office’s owner, Mr. Cornwell, in various state of undress. Brighton switched frequency to Dietrich’s even before the SWAT mentioned the pile of discarded clothing in the corner. He shouted for Dietrich to detain all hostages immediately, and knew Dietrich took off at a run when he hung up, but he also knew by then it would be too late.

Thirty hours, give or take a few, passed since we’d escaped the siege with the help of Tiffany’s magic hands. As I watched Iris play in the sand with Brome’s four-year-old, and as beads of sweat collected in the stubble under my nose, I was reminded of the conversation Iris and I had a few days earlier at my place after we made love. Now I felt we all were time travelers from the past. Only instead of an armchair with a lot of mirrors, our time machine had been an underground train, in which we managed to skip seven or eight useless months and emerge under midsummer sun.

If you ever traveled to Florida in winter, you know what I am talking about.

Annie’s bell-like giggles also made it seem like all our troubles were over, but unfortunately that illusion did not last long. I was all too aware of Paul sleeping in fever inside the small cottage behind me, and although Brome and his wife had gone pretty far up the beach, the heat of their conversation was obvious. Grace, Brome’s wife, gestured quite eloquently.

“For what?” I imagined hearing her voice. “Who is he to you? Did you think of Annie? Did you think of me?”

Iris gazed at me, then at the couple in the distance, then back at me. I had nothing to say. Grace was right, of course, but without Brome we would all be dead, so I couldn’t really support her beyond acknowledging that fact. Brome saved our lives. It would be enough to tell Annie her dad was a hero, Grace however… Grace was an adult. To an adult, a hero on TV deserved applause; in real life, up close, a hero, especially a selfless one, was stupid at best. So I shrugged, and Iris returned her attention to the sand castle she and Annie had started to build.