The Day Before Midnight

Peter said, “Well, we think we know who compromised South Mountain. I’ve told the FBI. All right?”

“Yes?”

“Now, we think this person was photographing documents and plans in my own home. I was very sloppy, it was—”

“Just go on,” said Puller.

“Well, this person left my house before the planning was quite complete. Do you understand?”

Neither of them did, apparently. They stared at Peter as if he were stupid. Military men, he told himself, be patient. Explain it slowly. Connect all the dots for them.

“She left before the key vault was designed. So whoever planned whatever’s going on up there never knew about the key vault. Until—”

“Until when?”

“She came back two weeks ago. She came back to tell me she’d thought it over and she just wanted to see me — well, I’ll spare you the pitiful details. But she was in the house. I slept with her a last time. The vault had been improved, it was designed, they were implementing it, and they sent me the dope. She could have seen it.”

“Dr. Thiokol, in all due respect, I don’t know what the hell you’re driving at here,” said Puller, glowering furiously at him, almost rigid with impatience. “We already know there’s been an intelligence leak of—”

Asshole! Peter thought. Stupid asshole!

“If they know about the key vault, they found out very late. Two weeks ago! Probably, maybe, possibly too late to figure it into their original operational plans. If that’s the case, they probably didn’t bring a welder along. So they would have had to pick one up here. Don’t you see? They would have had to hire one or kidnap one or something like that. Now, if they did that, they wouldn’t try and hold him for two weeks. They’d do it right before they jumped and they’d do it close by. I’m saying, maybe we can trace it.”

“All right.”

Their eyes remained abstracted, unfocused, lacking that primal spark of inspiration. They still didn’t quite see it.

“Look, if you were going to force a man to perform a job for you, how would you get him to do it? Think of a bank president robbers take in order to get him to open the safe. How do they do it? Well, they find hostages. They leave somebody at his house with his wife and kids, right? Now, maybe that’s what they’ve done here, maybe there’s a wife and some kids and some very bad baby-sitters not too far from where we stand. And suppose —”

“Prisoners!” said Skazy, getting to it first. “Yes, prisoners. We get prisoners, we find out what and who we’re up against.”

But Dick Puller was already on the move. He hurried into the command post and quickly located his young assistant from the FBI, James Uckley, who for the past several hours had been ripping teletype info and filing reports himself to the Bureau on the operation and feeling sorry for himself for incurring Puller’s wrath.

It didn’t take Puller long to explain what he wanted, and from then it didn’t take Uckley long to find what they were looking for. He began with the Yellow Pages and started calling welding services. At the fifth entry — Jackson Hummel, 19 Main Street, Burkittsville, 555–2219—there was no answer. He then called the Burkittsville police station, talked to a sergeant and had a request; the sergeant returned the call almost immediately. No, it did not appear that Jack Hummel had opened his service for business that day. The cop had asked on both sides and found that Jack was expected in Boonsboro that day at the Chalmers plant. Uckley called Chalmers, to discover that no, goddammit, the welder had not showed up, nobody knew where he’d gone, maybe he was sick. He called the cop back and asked if Jack could be sick. The cop didn’t know but said he could stop by Jack’s house which was just up the road. It would be real easy, the cop said.

No, said Uckley. They’d handle it themselves, but please stand by in case further help was needed. His next phone call was to the elementary school, where it only took him a few minutes to learn from the principal that Jack Hummel did have two daughters, Elizabeth called Bean and Phyllis called Poo, and that indeed both of them were unexpectedly absent today.

Uckley thanked her and got off the phone.

“I think we’ve got a Condition Red,” he told Dick Puller. “It looks like they’ve got this guy Hummel in the mountain—he’s their cutter — and his wife and kids in his house.”

Puller nodded.

“All right,” he said. “Major Skazy, I want four of your best operators.”

“Yes, sir, I can—”

“Just go get them, Major. Get them now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Skazy, clearly irked at how summarily he was being dismissed.

Puller pulled Uckley aside, out of the hearing range of the others.

“I think you’ll have to handle this one. He’ll get you those Delta specialists and you ought to have police backup, but don’t let the police get too close. They might mess things up. You never know how well these little country-town cops are going to handle heavy business. Besides, you’ll do better with fewer rather than more people. But we need to take that house down and we need to talk to those people.”

He looked at his watch.

“And we need to do it fast.”

“Yes, sir,” said Uckley, swallowing.

He looked hard at Uckley. The young man returned the stare, but seemed scattered, his thoughts not quite together.

“You’ve had SWAT training, I assume?”

“Yes,” Uckley said, barely remembering the frenzied week four years earlier at Quantico.

“All right, good. You’re clear? I mean, absolutely clear? There’s a mother and two little girls in that house. I’m sure they are lovely people. But you must understand what’s important, you and the men you take into that house.”

Uckley looked away, through the window. The mountain gleamed.

“The men in that house are important. The mother, the two girls—” Dick hesitated a second, then plunged ahead in full adult awareness of the ruthless thing he was about to do. Did he have to say it, actually put it in words? Uckley shot a squirrely look back at him. Dick could tell from the hurt and confusion lurking in his eyes that yes, he did have to say it.

“Look, I have two daughters myself. There’s nothing more precious to me in the world than the two of them, and certainly that’s true for this Hummel too. But you’ve got to think hard here, Uckley. You have to see through to what’s important. You have to weigh the potential immediate loss against the other, far greater, far more devastating loss. That’s what we’re paid to do.”

Like an idiot, the young federal agent simply looked at him.

“The mother and the two girls aren’t important. You may have to lose them. If it comes to it, you’ll have to lose them rather than risk losing the prisoners. The Delta people are very good; they’ve been trained to take down a building and set free the hostages. But they’ll shoot for the head, and you’ve got to stop them. You’ve got to take prisoners, Jim. Do you understand that?”

Uckley said he did.

The answer to all problems is vodka, Gregor Arbatov had decided. It was Russia’s main contribution to the culture of the world, more important than Tolstoi, more passionate than Dostoevski, more lasting than world communism.

He now sat with a glass of it in a dark bar called Jake’s on Route 1 in the seedy little Maryland town of Laurel, not far from Columbia. He was exceedingly happy. A beautiful American lady of perhaps sixty with perhaps half her own teeth and none of her own hair and a tattoo had just brought him a refill, with a golden smile and a hearty laugh. He loved her. She was a saint. Saint Teresa of the Order of the Vodka. She reminded him of his wife, whom he hadn’t seen in years.

But what he loved most was what the vodka did to him. It blurred his terrors, it mellowed his brain. It seemed to leak straight through his skull and penetrate to the very center of the organ itself, mollifying,