A Maidens Grave

marked off four likely routes to get from the slaughterhouse to the chopper. LeBow drew them on the map. D’Angelo said, “I’ll set up snipers in the trees here and here and here. Put the ground men in deep camouflage along all four routes. When the takers go by, the snipers’ll acquire. Then we’ll stun the whole group with smokeless. The agents on the ground’ll grabthe hostages and pull ’em down. The snipers’ll take out the HTs if they show any threat. That sound okay to you?”
    Potter was staring down at the map.
    A moment passed.
    “Arthur?”
    “Yes, it sounds good, Frank. Very good.”
    D’Angelo stepped outside to brief his agents.
    Potter looked at Melanie’s picture and then sat down once more, staring out the window.
    “Waiting is the hardest, Charlie. Worse than anything.”
    “I can see that.”
    “And this is what you’d call your express barricade,” Tobe offered, eyes on his dials and screens. “ ’S’only been about eleven hours. That’s nothing.”
    Suddenly someone burst through the open doorway so quickly every law enforcer inside the van except Potter reached for weapons.
    Roland Marks stood in the doorway. “Agent Potter,” he said coldly. “Do I understand you’re going to take him down?”
    Potter looked past him at a tree bending in the wind. The breeze had picked up remarkably. It would bolster the lie about the river being too choppy to land a helicopter.
    “Yes, we are.”
    “Well, I was just speaking to your comrade Agent D’Angelo. He shared with me a disturbing fact.”
    Potter couldn’t believe Marks. In the space of a few hours he’d nearly screwed up the negotiations twice and almost lost his life in the process. And here he was on the offensive again. The agent was a few seconds away from arresting him just to get the pushy man out of his life.
    Potter lifted an eyebrow.
    “That there’s a fifty-fifty chance one of the hostages will die.”
    Potter had assessed it at sixty-forty in the hostages’ favor. But Marian had always chided him for being an incurable optimist. The agent rose slowly and stepped through the burnt doorway, motioning the attorney general after him. He took a tape cassette from his pocket, held it up prominently then put it back. Marks’s eyes gave a flicker.
    “Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Potter asked.
    Marks’s face suddenly softened but just for a moment, as if he recognized an apology forming in his throat and shot it dead. He said, “I don’t want those girls hurt.”
    “I don’t either.”
    “For God’s sake, put him in a chopper, have him release the hostages. When he lands the Canadians can come down upon him like the proverbial Assyrians.”
    “Oh, but he has no intention of going to Canada,” Potter said impatiently.
    “I thought . . . But that special clearance you boys put together . . .”
    “Handy doesn’t believe a word of that. And even if he did he knows we’d put a second transponder in the chopper. His plans are to head straight to Busch Stadium. Or wherever his TV tells him there’s a big game tonight.”
    “What?”
    “Or maybe a parking lot at the University of Missouri just as evening classes are letting out. Or McCormick Place. He’ll land someplace where there’ll be a huge crowd around. There’s no way we can take him in a scenario like that. A hundred people could be killed.”
    Understanding dawned in Marks’s eyes. And whether he saw those lives jeopardized, or his career, or perhaps was seeing nothing more than the hopeless plight of his own poor daughter, he nodded. “Of course. Sure, he’s the sort who’d do just that. You’re right.”
    Potter chose to read the concession as an apology and decided to let him be.
    Tobe pushed his head out of the doorway. “Arthur, I just got a phone call. It’s that Kansas State detective Charlie told us about. Sharon Foster. She’s on the line.”
    Potter had doubts that Foster could help them. Introducing a new negotiator in a barricade can have unpredictable results. But one thing Potter had decided might be helpful was her gender. His impression of Handy was that he was threatened by men—the very fact that he’d gone to ground with ten female hostages suggested that he might listen to a woman without his defenses raised.
    Inside the van Potter leaned against the wall as hespoke. “Detective Foster? This is Arthur Potter. What’s your ETA?”
    The woman said that she was proceeding under sirens and