Teresa barely had time to adjust to the shift into Mary~ jo's identity. She took four steps along the street, then Santiago appeared in the doorway. Maryjo turned towards him in horror and surprise, saw the gun he was holding, and Teresa's instincts took over. She ducked away, and Santiago shot her. This time it took two bullets to kill her.
Teresa finally got it right on her seventh extreme. She allowed Maryjo to react as she would, turned in surprise as Santiago appeared, faced him, then raised an arm and stepped forward.
Santiago fired at her, but because the instin ctive attack by an unarmed passerby took him by surprise, he missed. Teresa felt the heat of the discharge on her face, was stunned by the loud report of the gun, but the bullet went past her. At last she ducked, and as she fell to the ground she saw Santiago sprinting away in the brilliant sunshine. A few moments later two bank security guards appeared: one of them stooped to help her. Shortly after this the extreme experience scenario ended, and Teresa had survived with her description.
Over the next few weeks the extreme experience course continued, and Teresa was steadily progressed by Kazinsky and the other instructors from one type of event participant to the next: from witness to nonwitnessing bystander, to victim, to security guard, to perpetrator, to police officer or federal agent. In one case she was a hostage; in another she had to negotiate.
The hardest cases to deal with were the ones in which the developing incident was not at all obvious, and the instructors set the scenario to run for a long time before the main event occurred. In one notable sequence Teresa was in the role of undercover police Officer, staking out a bar in suburban San Antonio in 1981. She had to sit in wait for nearly two hours, knowing that the first chance would be
the only one. When the gunman burst into the bar he was a man from Houston called Charles Dayton Hunter, who was at the time one of the Bureau's Ten Most Wanted Teresa got him with her first shot.
Later, she moved on to direct access with some of the surviving participants. For instance, she was taken to Cleveland to meet Maryjo Clegg a month after completing the Santiago extreme. Maryjo was by then in her late sixties, a retired city employee who clearly welcomed the opportunity to earn a few extra dollars working for the Bureau in this way. She appeared refreshingly untraumatized by her horrific experience back in 1962, and minimized her contribution to the arrest and execution of Willie Santiago, but Teresa found it disconcerting to have shared so intimately this woman 1 s terror and, several times, death.
CHAPTER 4
Nick Surtees was living in London at the time of the Bulverton massacre. In the trauma of subsequent events he later found it difficult to remember what he had been doing during the actual day, except that he knew he would have been working as usual at his office near Marble Arch.
At the end of the afternoon he was driving home along the elevated section of Westway, part of the A40, heading out of London towards his house in Acton. It was a sweltering day in early June, and he drove with the car windows open and the cooling fan blasting at him. The radio was on, the volume adjusted as he preferred it, just below the level of perfect audibility.
He liked to think when he was driving: not great or important thoughts, but a general state of reflectiveness, helping him wind down after the stresses of the day, half his mind turned inwards, the other half coping with the car and the traffic conditions. If the radio was loud it interfered with this, whether it was with music, the blathering of disc Jockeys or the more urgent tones of newsreaders. So he had just enough sound on for a relevant word or a phrase to catch his attention: 'drivers in West London' and 'the elevated section of Westway' were common ones anything that he was already mentally tuned into.
That evening one word came unexpectedly out of the background noise: 'Bulverton'.
He reached immediately across the dashboard to turn up
the volume, but another telling phrase struck before he could do so: 'the quiet seaside town in Sussex has been devastated . . .'
Then he heard it at full volume: the newsreader said news was coming in that a gunman had gone berserk in the centre of town, shooting at anyone he saw, or at any vehicle that moved.
The situation was still unclear: police had so far been unable to disarm the man, or prevent him from carrying on, and his present location was unknown. The death toll was thought to be high. The news was still breaking; more would be brought as soon as possible. Meanwhile, members of the public were warned to stay away from Bulverton.
Another presenter then launched into an obviously unscripted talk on the state of gun control in the country, the blanket prohibition on most types of gun, how sports shooters' lobby groups had failed to get the law changed, and the unsuccessful appeals that had been made to European courts. He was interrupted by a phonedin report from a BBC reporter described as 'on the spot'. In reality she was phoning from Hastings, several miles away, and in spite of her compelling tone of voice had little to add. She said she thought the number of dead had reached double figures. Several policemen were believed to be amongst the casualties. The presenter asked her if any children were thought to be involved, and the reporter said she had no information on that.
A scheduled traffic report followed, but this too was dominated by the news from Bulverton.
Drivers were warned to keep away from the A259 coast road between Hastings and Eastbourne, and generally to avoid the area until further notice. Bulverton was closed to traffic from all directions. More information, they said, would be made available soon.
All through this Nick continued to drive along in the
slowmoving rushhour traffic, his gaze fixed blankly on the back of the car in front of him. He was on a kind of emotional autopilot, suspending his feelings until he was convinced that what he was hearing was true. The programme switched to another topic, so he took the mobile phone from the glove compartment and punched in his parents' number. After a brief delay for cellular connection, the number rang and rang without answer.
He switched the phone off and on, then tried again in case he had keyed in the wrong number. There was still no answer.
He knew it could mean anything, and that their absence from the hotel could have a mundane explanation: they sometimes drove into Bexhill or Eastbourne during the afternoon to do a little shopping, and such expeditions were so much a part of their lives that he rarely phoned them before he arrived home from work. However, he also knew that it was unusual for them to stay out this late. Another explanation could be that they were simply outside the building. Or that he had in his anxiety dialled the wrong number; he had to wait for the traffic to halt for a few seconds, but then immediately punched the keys again, being extracareful
