Calhoun had never been shocked speechless in his life---until now. But despite his shock, he didn't let go of the leader or drop the gun as Brooke had ordered. Brooke---or Jade, as the man had called her. All along, she'd been deceiving him, Calhoun thought. Everything that'd been between them was a lie.
Everything....
"Please, Cal," she said in a half-whisper. "I really don't want to hurt you."
"It's too late for that," he said, finding his voice again. Once he'd spoken, it was easier to go on. "That's not a very big gun you've got there."
"A .32," she said, "and it's aimed right at your heart. You'll die in seconds if I pull the trigger."
"That's plenty of time for me to splatter this bastard's brains all over the floor."
"Please," the guy said in a mocking tone, "If you're gonna threaten me, you might as well use my name. It's Barlow. Lark Barlow."
He was pretty cool-headed for someone with a gun to his head, Calhoun had to give him that much. He couldn't admire the gun, of course. But Barlow seemed to have ice water in his veins, and Calhoun acknowledged that.
"Cal...." Brooke said warningly.
"Just tell me one thing: are you really Brooke Tucker, or is your name Jade?"
"I'm Dr. Brooke Tucker," she said. "And I really lam a professor of criminal justice. Jade is just...."
Her voice trailed off as evidently she was at a loss to explain herself.
Not Lark Barlow, though. He said, "Jade's what we call her. Y'know, like Carlos the Jackal back in the old days. And like Carlos, she'll kill you if you don't do what she says, Weaver."
"You know who I am?" Calhoun grated.
"Yup. We've been worried about you all along, dude. Why do you think we kept testing you to find out how dangerous you really are?"
That explained some of the attacks on him and why nobody on campus seemed to know about them. The black-hooded figures hadn't been Bloods at all. They'd been part of Barlow's cell or gang or whatever the hell he called it.
"And that's why we thought it'd be a good idea to get somebody close to you," Barlow went on in his smug and mocking tone. "Our little Jade did a good job, didn't she? You never suspected that she was one of us."
Calhoun's gaze cut over to Brooke again. She was pale and clearly upset, but the line of her jaw was resolute. So was the look in her eyes.
"I'm warning you, Cal...." she began.
"Yeah, I know," he said without bothering to try to hide the harsh note of anger in his voice. "You don't wanna shoot me, but you will."
"I won't have any choice."
"We all have choices," he said. "How long are the rest of you going to carry on with this madness if Barlow here is dead?"
"We've all gone too far to back out now," she said.
He believed her. And although he had absolutely no fear of dying, he believed that the best chance they all had of coming out of this alive was if he was still breathing and able to seize another opportunity to turn things around. It made him a little sick to his stomach to do so, but he took the gun away from Lark Barlow's head.
"That's more like it," Barlow said. "I'm glad you listened to reason, Cal. There's no reason anybody else has to die, anywhere on this campus. We're not about bloodshed. We just wanna make a statement about the cesspool that this country has turned into."
"And that so-called statement is going to result in you putting a hundred million dollars in your pocket."
"Well," Barlow said, still grinning, "that'll help average out the income inequality a little bit, won't it?"
"You're just a crook on a grand scale."
Before Barlow could respond to that, Brooke said, "Go ahead and put that gun on the floor, Cal."
He had already made the decision not to push things right now when he lowered the gun from Barlow's head. If he tried to raise it again now, he had no doubt that Brooke would pull the trigger. He felt a bitter hollowness inside him at her betrayal, but one thing he'd learned in combat was that emotions had little to no effect on facts. The time for them was after the danger had past.
He leaned to the side just enough to let the Glock slip from his fingers and fall a short distance to the floor. As soon as it had thudded onto the tile, one of Barlow's gun-toting flunkies rushed forward to scoop it up, then backed off quickly while still covering Calhoun.
"Now let go of Lark," Brooke ordered.
"How come you don't have a nom-de-guerre for the revolution, Barlow?" Calhoun asked.
"I don't need one," the man replied. "I operate out in the open."
"More stroking for your ego that way, right?"
Brooke said, "Just let him go."
"Sure," Calhoun said. He released his hold on Barlow's neck and stepped back.
No sooner had he done that than all the lights in the Hamilton Memorial Library went out.349Please respect copyright.PENANAB2cuXhj0qi
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The explosion somewhere on campus made a mixture of anger and fear boil up inside Neil Holt. Not fear for himself, but for the students, faculty, and staff who might've been killed in that blast. He was charged with protecting their safety, and that he had failed to do so was what made him mad.
He started toward the door, but Jonell Boone said, "Wait a minute, Chief. We'll be better off staying here and waiting for reports on what just happened."
"It's my campus," Holt responded. "I'm not going to just stand here and do nothing...."
Before he could do or say anything else, the office door opened and Jenda said, "Sorry to interrupt, Chief, but Alan just called on his radio."
"Don't worry about interrupting," Holt snapped. "What'd he say?"
"The explosion was just outside Creed Hall. It blew a hole in one wall and set the building on fire. The Brookhedge fire department is trying to put out the blaze."
"Casualties?" Holt asked tersely.
"None, Alan says. Some injuries to the Brookhedge officers who were posted nearby, but he doesn't know how bad. The building isn't one that was taken over by the terrorists, so it'd been evacuated and was empty so far as Alan knows."
Relief washed through Holt. He was worried about the Brookhedge officers who had been hurt, but at least nobody had been killed outright, so far as they knew now.
"That was a warning," Regina Ferrant said. "Whoever's in charge of this group, he was telling us to take him seriously."
"There was no chance of us not doing that," Boone said. "We need to establish a line of communication into the library. I want to talk to that son of a bitch. But before we do that...." He turned to Holt. "Can we kill the power to the individual buildings, or will we need to shut it down over the whole campus?"
"That's not in my department, but I imagine you'll have to shut it down all over. We've got our own power plant with generators in case the regular electricity goes out for a long time, but it can be taken offline easy enough, I 'spect."
"Can you make those calls, Chief? I want them in the dark, literally. And since we've already had the cell service shut down, they'll be incommunicado except for the landline going into the library."
The FBI agent's request made Holt feel a little like he was being shoved aside, but he knew Boone was right. The more they could inconvenience the terrorists, the better.
He nodded and said, "I'll get on it."
"Right. I'm going out there and take a look around."
Ferrant said, "More bombs could go off. Maybe we should evacuate this part of the campus as well and all of us pull back to a command center out of the danger zone."
"You go ahead. I want to get a feel for the situation, and I can do that better with my feet on the ground."
"And that way the FBI gets credit for anything good that happens, right? As well as most of the publicity?"
"I'm too old and tired to give a shit about all that," Boone said. "You do what you want, Agent Ferrant."
"I will. I'm coming with you."
Boone nodded and took a little radio from his pocket. He handed it to Holt and said, "Stay in touch, Chief."
"I'll let you know when all the power's turned off," Holt said. "Watch it. That bunch could have snipers posted that we don't know anything about."
Boone nodded and left the office. Ferrant followed him without a glance back at Holt, who sank wearily into the chair behind his desk and pulled the phone toward him to make those calls.
The first one was to the campus power plant. He thought it might have been evacuated by the Brookhedge PD, but chief engineer Donald Marsh answered on the first ring.
"Yeah, once I heard what was going on, I told everybody else to get the hell out, Neil," Marsh said once Holt had identified himself and asked what the situation was there. "I figured I'd better say, though, in case I was needed."
"You're needed now. I'm going to have the power company shut off the electricity to the to whole campus, and I don't want those generators kicking in when that happens."
"Don't worry, I'll take care of it," Marsh assured him. He unconsciously echoed Jonell Boone when he added, "Gonna leave those sons o' bitches in the dark, huh?"
"That's the idea," Holt said. "Don't know if it'll do any good or not, but it can't hurt."
Another call quickly put him in touch with the manager of the local power company. Once Holt had explained what he wanted, the man said, "Yes, we'll have to shut off the power to the whole campus. We could turn it off at each building, but I'd have to send crews out there to do that manually, and, well, I'm not gonna lie to you, Chief, I refuse to do that. My people deal with danger all the time when they're working on power lines, but this seems like a chance we shouldn't take."
"I hear ya, man," Holt said. "Best if you turned it off all over."
"O.K. Gimme five or ten minutes."
That done, Holt hung up the phone, sat back, and blew out a breath. His wounded hand throbbed. Despite that, he wished he was out there on the front lines, so to speak, with Boone, Ferrant, and Mud Wallace.
Thinking about the FBI agent prompted him to pick up the handheld radio. He keyed the microphone and said, "Agent Boone?"
Only two seconds went by before Boone's deep voice intoned. "Boone here? Chief?"
"The power all over campus should be going off any time now."
Holt had just said that when the lights went out.
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