Three Hours(83)

But she and Rafi have only had four months and the gunman in the corridor and the ones she imagines in the woods, hunting down Rafi, could take away all the unlived months, secretly she’s dreamt of years and ever after, and they could steal it all before it’s even happened. She thinks of the people that they were this morning, running through the woods holding hands like two in-love young skeletons, bones touching, and in love was true, they were, they are, but there’s no future round the bend in the path; no this afternoon, this evening, tomorrow, and all those days after that will disappear before she’s lived them.

The footsteps leave, but he’ll come back again.

*

Lysander starts an on-screen briefing.

‘We can’t get any further with the heavily encrypted transactions, not in the time that we have. But Usman’s just got something.’

Usman comes on to the screen. Rose thinks that he is shaking. Bronze Commander and Stuart Dingwall have also joined the briefing.

‘I’ve decrypted another time-delayed announcement,’ Usman says. ‘It refers to Victor Deakin and Old School. It’s scheduled to go public on the Aryan Knight social media accounts at 12.00 midday today, twenty minutes before Jamie Alton’s announcement. I’m sorry, it wasn’t as heavily encrypted, I should have deciphered it faster. It’s really bad.’

He turns the computer screen so they can all read it.

‘Jesus Christ,’ someone says.

The only fucking way this country’s ever going to get turned around is if there’s a fucking bloodbath and at 12.00 it’s a bloodbath in Old School, in the library & classrooms, a nasty, messy motherfucker.

A lot of people are waking up in this country and smelling the fucking coffee and deciding they want this country back from Muslims and all you SJWs and snowflakes and libtards will wake up.

We might be too late, if they do wake up, but I think we can get it done. But it ain’t going to be nothing nice about it.

When we go on operations, there’s no leaving anyone behind. I guarantee when we go on this mission those little fuckers in Old School are going bye-bye. Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill.

I will die but I will become IMMORTAL.



They have fifteen minutes till Deakin opens fire in Old School.

‘I tripped an alarm on the announcement,’ Usman says. ‘They know we’ve seen it.’

Rose sees that Safa Rahman in his grey combat uniform is talking hurriedly to other members of the elite counterterrorism armed unit and she imagines them fast-roping down from their helicopters through the skylights of Old School, bursting in through the windows, but the plans of the building haven’t changed and the gunman is still in an interior corridor without windows or skylights to surprise him.

There are thirteen students in the library, and the badly wounded head teacher, twelve students and three adults in the English teacher’s classroom, and Neil Forbright on his own. If Rahman’s unit storm the building, how many will Deakin kill with his converted semi-automatic before they take him out? She cannot see how this will be accomplished without terrible loss of life.

Not your job. As she told Thandie, they have their job and they leave the armed units and everyone else to do theirs. Her role is to help find out who’s doing this and why they’re doing this. That’s where she might have value, though she thinks there’s precious little she can do now. Not her call to make.

Do your job.

She recognizes some of Victor’s words in the time-delayed announcement: Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill. He’s copied them from Eric Harris’s journal, one of the two gunmen at Columbine High School.

‘Do you recognize any of the message, Stuart?’ Rose asks. ‘He’s lifted some of it from one of the Columbine shooters.’

‘A whole load’s taken from Patrick Stein again, with a few personalized tweaks,’ Stuart says.

And it bothers her again, because it makes no sense that a narcissistic psychopath would use other people’s words.

‘14 Words have tweeted part of the bloodbath announcement,’ Lysander says. ‘Again it’s via proxies and aliases. They’re using bots to get it to trend.’

‘Jesus,’ Bronze Commander says. He takes a moment and his voice is calmer. ‘We’re taking it down?’

‘Yes.’

But it will already be growing exponentially on the internet with humans now retweeting.

‘Why are they making it public?’ Bronze Commander asks.

‘Maybe because they have nothing to lose now,’ Rose says. ‘They know we saw the timed announcement so they’re trying to take back some ground. Or maybe they want it out there.’

‘To create more terror?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’

*

In Matthew’s office, Neil Forbright has received an email from Frank in the library. The gunman tried to get in again; then he knocked at the door, like a joke. He is no longer human to Neil but satanic; a demon hunting for souls. Psychiatrists can dress him up any which way in scientific terms but he is something evil, connected to times when the devil roamed the world and came knocking at your door. Only now he has a gun and the door is in a school with kids the other side. And it makes it worse, it does, the kids’ courage.

Tonya has just sent him a link on his phone. He clicks on it. It’s a tweet.