Again the voice of quiet reason.
'You said you're a doctor?'
'That's right.' Bellow nodded.
'Where do you practice?'
'Mainly here now, but I did my residency at Harvard. I've worked at four different places, and taught some.'
'So, your job is to get people like me to surrender, isn't it?' Anger, finally, at the obvious.
Bellow shook his head. 'No, I think of my job as keeping people alive. I'm a physician, Tim. I am not allowed to kill people or to help others to kill people. I swore an oath on that one a long time ago. You have guns. Other people around that corner have guns. I don't want any of you to get killed. There's been enough of that today, hasn't there? Tim, do you enjoy killing people?'
'Why-no, of course not, who does?'
'Well, some do,' Bellow told him, deciding to build up his ego a little. 'We call them sociopathic personalities, but you're not one of them. You're a soldier. You fight for something you believe in. So do the people back there.' Bellow waved to where the Rainbow people were. 'They respect you, and I hope you respect them. Soldiers don't murder people. Criminals do that, and a soldier isn't a criminal.' In addition to being true, this was an important thought to communicate to his interlocutor. All the more so because a terrorist was also a romantic, and to be considered a common criminal was psychologically very wounding to them. He'd just built up their self-images in order to steer them away from something he didn't want them to do. They were soldiers, not criminals, and they had to act like soldiers, not criminals.
'Dr. Bellow?' a voice called from around the corner. 'Phone call, sir.'
'Tim, can I go get it?' Always ask permission to do something. Give them the illusion of being in command of the situation.
'Yeah.' O'Neil waved him away. Bellow walked back to where the soldiers were.
He saw John Clark standing there. Together they walked fifty feet into another part of the hospital.
'Thanks for getting my wife and little girl out, Paul.'
Bellow shrugged. 'It was mainly luck. He's a little overwhelmed by all this, and he's not thinking very well. They want a bus.'
'You told me before,' Clark reminded him. 'Do we give it to 'em?'
'We won't have to do that. I'm in a poker game, John, and I'm holding a straight flush. Unless something screws up really bad, we have this one under control.'
'Noonan's outside, and he has a mike on the window. I listened in on the last part. Pretty good, doctor.'
'Thanks.' Bellow rubbed his face. The tension was real for him, but he could only show it here. In with Timothy he had to be cool as ice, like a friendly and respected teacher. 'What's the story on the other prisoners?'
'No change. The Grady guy is being operated on-it'll take a few hours, they say. The other one's unconscious still, and we don't have a name or ID on him anyway…'
'Grady's the leader?'
'We think so, that's what the intel tells us.'
'So he can tell us a lot. You want me there when he comes out of the OR,' Paul told Rainbow Six.
'You need to finish up here first.'
'I know. I'm going back.' Clark patted him on the shoulder and Bellow walked back to see the terrorists.
'Well?' Timothy asked.
'Well, they haven't decided on the bus yet. Sorry,' Bellow added in a downcast voice. 'I thought I had them convinced, but they can't get their asses in gear.'
'You tell them that if they don't, we'll-'
'No, you won't, Tim. You know that. I know that. They know that.'
'Then why send the bus?' O'Neil asked, close to losing control now.
'Because I told them that you're serious, and they have to take your threat seriously. If they don't believe you'll do it, they have to remember that you might, and if you do, then they look bad to their bosses.' Timothy shook his head at that convoluted logic, looking more puzzled than angry now. 'Trust me,' Paul Bellow went on. 'I've done this before, and I know how it works. It's easier negotiating with soldiers like you than with those damned bureaucrats. People like you can make decisions. People like that run away from doing it. They don't care much about getting people killed, but they do care about looking bad in the newspapers.'
Then something good happened. Tim reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. A sure sign of stress and an attempt to control it.
'Hazardous to your health, boy,' Clark observed, looking at the TV picture Noonan had established. The assault plan was completely ready. Connolly had line charges set on the windows, both to open an entry path and to distract the terrorists. Vega,Tomlinson, and Bates, from Team-1, would toss flash-bangs at the same time and dart into the room to take the bad guys down with aimed fire. The only downside to that, as always, was that one of them could turn and hose the hostages as his last conscious act, or even by accident, which was just as lethal. From the sound of it, Bellow was doing okay. If these subjects had any brains at all, they'd know it was time to call it a day, but John reminded himself that he'd never contemplated life in prison before, at least not this immediately, and he imagined it wasn't a fun thought. He now had a surfeit of soldierly talent at his disposal. The SAS guys who'd arrived had chopped to his operational command, though their own colonel had come as well to kibitz in the hospital's main lobby.
'Tough day for all of us, isn't it, Tim?' the psychiatrist asked.
'Could have been a better one,' Timothy O'Neil agreed.
'You know how this one will end, don't you?' Bellow offered, like a nice fly to a brook trout, wondering if he'd rise to it.
'Yes, doctor, I do.' He paused. 'I haven't even fired my rifle today. I haven't killed anyone. Jimmy did,' he went on, gesturing to the body on the floor, 'but not any of us.'
Bingo! Bellow thought. 'That counts for something, Tim. As a matter of fact, it counts for a lot. You know, the war will be over soon. They're going to make peace finally, and when that happens, well, there's going to be an amnesty for most of the fighters. So you have some hope. You all do,' Paul told the other three, who were watching and listening… and wavering, as their leader was. They had to know that all was lost. Surrounded, their leader captured, this could only end in one of two ways, with their deaths or their imprisonment. Escape was not a practical possibility, and they knew that the attempt to move their hostages to a bus would only expose them to certain death in a new and different way.
'Tim?'
'Yes?' He looked up from his smoke.
'If you set your weapons down on the floor, you have my word that you will not be hurt in any way.'
'And go to prison?' Defiance and anger in the reply.
'Timothy, you can get out of prison someday. You cannot get out of death. Please think about that. For God's sake, I'm a physician,' Bellow reminded him. 'I don't like seeing people die.'
Timothy O'Neil turned to look at his comrades. All eyes were downcast. Even the Barry twins showed no particular defiance.
'Guys, if you haven't hurt anyone today, then, yes. you will go to prison, but someday you'll have a good chance to get out when the amnesty is promulgated. Otherwise, you die for nothing at all, Not for your country. They don't make heroes out of people who kill civilians,' he reminded them once again. Keep repeating, Bellow thought. Keep drumming it in. 'Killing soldiers, yes, that's something soldiers do, but not murdering innocent people. You will die for nothing at all-or you will live, and be free again someday. It's up to you, guys. You have the guns. But there isn't going to be a bus. You will not escape, and you have six people you can kill, sure, but what does that get for you, except a trip to hell? Call it a day, Timothy,' he concluded, wondering if some Catholic nun in grade school had addressed him that way.
It wasn't quite that easy for Tim O'Neil. The idea of imprisonment in a cage with common criminals, having his family come to visit him there like an animal in a zoo, gave him chills… but he'd known that this was a possibility for years, and though he preferred the mental image of heroic death, a blazing gun in his hand firing at the enemies of his country, this American doctor had spoken the truth. There was no glory in murdering six English civilians. No
