The Unyielding Future Read online

  “No, I mean yes, it is a surprise.” I remember stumbling over my words.

  “Did he ever tell you what really happened in that school?” He had, but I had the ultimate cloak of protection, the patient-doctor relationship.

  “I can’t talk with you about any of that.” A degree of my confidence had been restored.

  “I figured as much. I’m not a lawyer, but our attorney general is, and she is fairly certain we could compel you to answer that and a whole lot of other questions.” He was bluffing and I knew it. Once again I had the ultimate cloak of protection, the patient-doctor relationship. I had operated on the attorney general of Texas two years earlier. “But I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to level with you and tell you what I know about what really happened in that school.

  “Adis says that he was walking along the running path just behind the school when he happened to look into the lobby just as the gunmen were dragging the body of Mrs. Boon away. It’s possible, barely. I went and walked that path, and you can just make out the front lobby by looking all the way down the east corridor. I’ll give him that, reluctantly. Next, he says he squeezed through a hole in the chain-link to get on to school grounds. Again, I found the gap in the fence. It was pretty small, and I needed someone else’s help to get under and through it. I have no idea how a man in his late seventies did that on his own, but again I’ll look past that. He then manages to walk into one of the only unlocked doors, down a 200-foot corridor, and up a flight of stairs without being detected by any of the six armed gunmen.”

  I had a number of sarcastic comments. Maybe he has really good eyes. Maybe you should lose some weight. Maybe he was wearing hush puppies that day. But my sarcasm would not change the fact that Adis’s entire story was improbable at best, and the worst part of Sharpe’s story was that it perfectly matched the story Adis had told me earlier.

  “We have videotape evidence of him walking up the corridor and then up the stairs. One of the gunmen was within two feet of Adis and never alerted to his presence. But the most bizarre part, the thing we just can’t explain, is how a man in his seventies disarms and kills three men less than half his age in eight minutes. Do you have any theories on how he could do that?”

  “I thought that the snipers shot two of them.” This was the official position and Adis never refuted it. In fact he never discussed any aspect of his more lethal heroics.

  “The snipers did shoot, but only after one of the gunmen fired his weapon. He did that because someone had put a knife in his throat. Care to guess where Adis found the knife?”

  I’ll cover the rest of the interview sometime later when once again it becomes relevant.

  Once the three gunmen had been dispatched (Pinster and Heal with stab wounds to the neck, and Leopolo with a fractured neck—the bastard suffocated to death: it probably took several long agonizing minutes, and it’s likely he was conscious for most of it), Adis walked back down the two flights of stairs, dripping blood along the way, and back into view of the cameras. He looks a little woozy and actually slips slightly on the bloody floor before he reaches a stunned James Monter. The terrorist had been so absorbed with his electronic gadgets, monitors, and the growing police presence that when he turned and found an old man standing over him he slipped from his chair, lost his footing on the same bloody floor, and ended up on his butt.

  Exactly what happens next is obscured by the front counter, but what we do see is Adis moving towards the fallen terrorist with a degree of speed that would challenge a much younger man. An instant later the fire doors, along with all the classroom doors in the west corridor, slam closed, trapping Alan Locke and Eric Jaime. Later, Monter required surgery to remove the fragments of one of the four detonators from his broken hand.

  Before I go on I have to confess that after I had the whole story of April 20, I was somewhat conflicted (I had a momentary break when I felt a twinge of sympathy for the three dead men) and more than a little confused. Like most people, I have a tendency to discount the elderly. We don’t like to think of grandpa as Rambo (and if he starts to act like Rambo he gets put away after being started on some fairly powerful antipsychotics). Old men drive too slow, talk too loud, and generally have an unpleasant odor about them (I may be reaching here); they don’t walk into a building full of armed men and violently kill three of them. I don’t consider myself a wilting flower, but the thought of stabbing two men in the neck with the same knife (the same knife aspect bothers me, pulling it out of one man and then using it on another is so unsanitary) is disconcerting. I think if I found myself in that type of situation I could do it (I would at least wipe down the blade), but I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that I would not knowingly walk into a school being held hostage by armed men with the idea of killing some and capturing the rest, and if I ever do start to exhibit those tendencies I need to be put away after being started on some fairly powerful antipsychotics.

  Chapter Two