Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

“How fast can you get here?” Valérie asked her.

“I don’t know. Fifteen minutes. My grandmother can drive me.”

“It would help if you could talk to your father,” Valérie said on her own initiative, but she had done things like it before, sometimes with success. It brought a sick shooter’s mind back to reality to speak to his child, or wife, or mother. Sometimes they could do the job better. Valérie knew it would be traumatic for the girl, and she would deal with that later, but for now it was all they had. Bruno was establishing a rapport with Blanchet, but they could already sense that he wasn’t going to be able to convince him to put down his gun and come out. And shots continued to pepper the conversation. They could hear the screams from inside the gym. Sometimes he shot in the air to demand silence, and at other times he was shooting victims.

Students who had them were using cellphones to call out of the building by then, lying under the chairs from the assembly. They weren’t supposed to use cellphones in school, but some had them in their pockets, and the police were talking to them, as the students answered in whispers. They said that at least fifty students were dead in the gym, a lot of teachers, and they didn’t know how many were in the halls, and Blanchet was still shooting. One of the teachers in the gym said that he had a sack of loaded Kalashnikovs, and was using them. Blanchet had told them he had enough ammunition to kill them all.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had to go in. The question was when. There were snipers poised to shoot through the windows, but they didn’t have a clear shot at him because the windows were too high. Ladders had been set up along the side of the building, but they were waiting for the order to open fire, and the SWAT teams already in the basement had been told not to advance farther, but to be ready at a second’s notice. Their best marksmen were already in the building. And there were at least two hundred police in various uniforms on the street. Ambulances had arrived, and teams of doctors and paramedics were standing by.

Valérie handed the captain a note that Blanchet’s daughter would be there in fifteen minutes. She had already left her school, and her grandmother was on the way to her. Bruno decided to wait until she got to them. What he didn’t want was another hundred victims while the SWAT teams entered the room and took him down. If they could get him to give up peacefully, it was worth the wait. And meanwhile they were still studying the best access to the building and the gym.

Bruno went on talking to Blanchet, while he sobbed about his wife, but he had stopped shooting for a few minutes. And it seemed like an eternity until a slim young girl with her blond hair in a braid climbed onto the bus looking terrified. Her maternal grandmother, with whom she lived, was waiting outside. Solange was fifteen, had already lost her mother, and now her father had gone insane and was killing children. She wanted to help the police, and Valérie explained to her in a quiet corner what they wanted her to say. Just hearing Solange’s voice might subdue him, and bring him back to earth, before more people got hurt. They handed her a phone connected to the same line the captain was on, so he didn’t have to give his up and he could listen to the conversation.

“Papa,” she said softly, in a tremulous voice, her eyes brimming with tears, “Maman wouldn’t want you to do this. You have to stop now. I love you. Maman loved you.” She and her father were both sobbing as she spoke.

“They killed her, Solange. You don’t understand, you were too young. She got cancer because of them. They deserve to die for it.”

“I don’t want you to die too…or the children…” she begged him.

“It’s the only way they’ll pay attention. There was no other way. I’m avenging your mother,” he said, sounding aggressive again. “It’s only right. And the children didn’t suffer. I shot them in the head.” Everyone on the bus felt sick as they listened, and Solange choked on a sob. Even she understood that her father was never going to come out of this alive. The police wouldn’t let that happen. All they could hope was that no more children would die, but François Blanchet was a marked man. And he knew it too. “I want you to go home now, Solange,” he said firmly, for an instant sounding like any parent of a teenage girl. “You shouldn’t be here, you should be in school.”

“I wanted to be here with you. Can I come in and see you, Papa?” It might be her last chance to see him alive.

“No, go back to school. Maman wouldn’t want you here.”

“I love you, Papa.”

“I love you too. I have to work now, go home,” he said sternly. Valérie was both listening to the conversation and texting her assistants to send in the post-trauma teams. Some had already come, but she had a feeling they had underestimated the numbers of victims.

The captain was shaking his head as he listened to the exchange between father and daughter. Blanchet wasn’t coming out, and he sounded like he was about to continue his rampage when he said he had work to do. Captain Perliot indicated to Valérie to take Solange off the bus and she escorted her outside. Once the girl was gone, he gave the order in code to go in. The plan was set. Four teams were going to attack simultaneously to break down the gym doors and free the hostages. Marksmen were already halfway up the ladders, poised just below the windows to shoot Blanchet as quickly as they could. Everything was in place and waiting. They had been there for less than two hours, but it felt like two hundred years. And Bruno Perliot wouldn’t have felt responsible going in any sooner. He wanted everything perfectly set up for the best protection he could get for the students, and so the SWAT teams could act as quickly as possible.

He gave the final code word with a grim expression, which went through the earpiece of every member of the SWAT teams, and within a split second, the marksmen were up the ladders, the doors exploded into the gym, windows were shattered, bullets flew, children were screaming and François Blanchet lay dead on the stage with six bullets in his head and four in his chest, which had come from all directions. Police and SWAT teams were running and carrying injured children out of the building to paramedics and ambulances, and another detail of police had the grim task of counting the bodies as they moved systematically through the school, also making sure that Blanchet had committed the assault alone, which appeared to be the case.

Outside, parents were frantic and sobbing, rushing toward ambulances trying to identify their children, and the police couldn’t stop them. Children were clutched, others were missing, people were shouting, and Solange stood sobbing in her grandmother’s arms. She was the daughter of a murderer and her father’s death had been confirmed. Both her parents were dead now, and her father was a monster.

It was a scene of slaughter and desperation, terror and tragedy that tore at the most hardened policeman’s heart. Some of the parents tried to rush into the building and were stopped. Unharmed children were brought out in groups by the SWAT teams, looking dazed, some screaming, some carried. Valérie was among the first in line to see them as they went by, speaking a word here and there, and she looked up to see a burly member of one of the SWAT teams carrying a five-year-old covered in blood, and she saw someone run past her like a shot. It was Tom Wylie, who took the child in his arms, and ran toward the nearest medical truck. He could see that the child was dying. She had been shot in the chest and was bleeding out. In minutes she’d be dead. A doctor on the scene joined him, saw that Tom knew what he was doing and had noticed his police armband, and together they got an IV line into her, administered a transfusion, and applied pressure to the wound to stop the bleeding. Tom signed to him that he would go with the ambulance, and the doctor nodded and shouted to the ambulance driver to get to Necker Hospital as fast as he could. The ambulance doors closed and they were gone. The child’s parents had never even seen her, although a lone photographer had caught the moment when Tom ran up and took her to save her.