Time Bomb(64)
“You?” Z yelled as he struggled to get to his feet. Blood oozed through the fingers that he had clamped over his arm where she’d shot him.
Tad shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Of course it didn’t. Because Diana, with her practiced smiles, wouldn’t do anything like this.
“Why? Because you think you know me?” she asked Tad. How could he know her when she wasn’t even allowed to know herself? She looked at Frankie, who had limped another step forward. “How about you, Frankie? We’ve gone to school together for years. We dated until you backed off. Did you figure out I was smart enough to do this?”
“It isn’t about being smart,” Frankie insisted.
“Sure it is,” she said, wiping the sweat dripping down her cheek onto the shoulder of her shirt, trying to keep her hands and the gun steady—like she’d been able to do when she and Tim were putting the gunpowder in the pipes. Slowly. Carefully. Checking to make sure there was no stray gunpowder on the top of the pipe when she closed it. Otherwise, one spark and—
“I’m smart enough to realize that my father needed help and that I could help him. Only he didn’t want to let me work with his staff, because I’m just his daughter. To him, I’m only supposed to look perfect and smile at the camera. But I know I can do more, so I came up with my own plan. How many people who opposed the Safety Through Education bill will decide it’s necessary after today? Just look at how dangerous schools can be. We need to do more to help empower teachers and students to keep the country safe.”
“You blew up the school so your father could pass his stupid bill?”
She leveled the gun at Z, who looked at her with narrow eyes. He thought he understood her. He didn’t. Not like Tim. Her father’s aide understood that sometimes being a patriot meant using any means necessary to persuade people to follow the right path. She’d only had to say how the hate mail she was receiving made her want to go blow something up to prove to people how necessary the bill was to catch Tim’s attention. “People don’t always understand why something is necessary until you show them.”
“So you blew up the school with you inside it to prove your father’s point?” Frankie asked.
“I wasn’t supposed to be inside,” she snapped. The first explosions were supposed to be set off two hours later—when the yearbook meeting was originally supposed to take place. The building should have been empty by then. She’d changed the meeting time to earlier so that her father and his staff could claim that she was the target and that she escaped only because of the last-minute scheduling adjustment. But something had gone wrong. She’d done everything exactly the way she and Tim had planned, and still, here she was. And Tim had been caught, and now . . . now they would know it was her. She wouldn’t be standing at her father’s side, telling everyone how she believed his bill would have helped prevent the destruction. Tim wouldn’t be around to direct the press toward the evidence he’d planted that was supposed to point at one of the students who had previously been suspended for making threats. Diana had even suggested it should be Z, because he was never in school. And he was here. She’d actually thought that maybe Tim had figured out a way to get him here. But that wasn’t the case.
She thought Tim must have screwed up the timers. He was the one who had insisted on handling that part. The bombs were all supposed to go off later, and in three waves, to make people think that the person behind the attacks was somewhere near the school, setting them off with a cell phone. Tim and Diana were supposed to be far away from it all. No one was supposed to suspect them.
But maybe the timers hadn’t been screwed up at all. Maybe Tim had wanted her to die so her father could cry and claim that his bill could have saved her life. She could see how he could make that work. Her father would become the brave senator who continued to work to make sure everyone else in the country could be protected the way his daughter had not been.
Everything she had planned was falling apart. She had to find a way to keep it together. But even if she shot Tad and Frankie and Z and then set off the bomb she had in the bag—the one that she had intended to leave near the entrance on her way out of the school so that it would go off with the others—nothing would be as it was supposed to be. Her father would be ruined. He would never get reelected or be able to run for another office. Diana would face a trial. People had died. She hadn’t wanted them to, but they had. She would be blamed. There would be a trial. She’d go to jail.
If she hadn’t gotten caught in the blast . . .
If Tim hadn’t gotten arrested . . .
If . . .
“So now what?” Z took a step toward her, and she swung the gun toward him. “You’re going to kill us and then just waltz out of here, pretending none of this ever happened?”
When she’d left the classroom, she’d set the timer for fifteen minutes. She was going to finish what she’d started.
Smoke billowed down the hall.
“Diana.” Frankie looked down at the gun and then back at her face, “you don’t have to do this.”
Yes. She did. She had done what she believed had to be done—what Tim told her that her father secretly wished would happen. Yet somehow she’d ruined it all. Her father’s career. Her life. And there was no going back from that.