Hostile Intent Read Free

would be Mr. Kelleher and Ms. Gomez. Mr. Dunkirk started to say something, but held his tongue. Young people these days were on a first-name basis with the whole world, as if last names didn’t matter, or didn’t exist at all. That’s why he insisted upon the use of the honorific for himself, and called all his young charges by their last names, just to remind them that they had one.
    “See if one of you can get me something better than a weather story, will you?” said Mr. Dunkirk. He looked around the shabby newsroom—the only part of it that shone was the plastic set—and sighed. This was not where he had envisioned himself twenty-five years ago, when he got his first job at a small television station in upstate New York, with dreams of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite dancing in his head.
    And yet here he was, stuck in the dead-end job of news director at the lowest-rated local station in one of the worst television markets in the country. Nothing good was ever going to happen to him again. His life was over.
    He wondered if he should make a play for Solomon at some point, just to see what would happen, then decided to table the notion and start thinking about Christmas shopping for his wife.
    “How about a cat up a tree? A homeless guy in a cardboard box?” Rhonda shouted after him as he disappeared into his office and closed the door. Every now and then she almost felt sorry for him, if it was possible to feel sorry for somebody that old and hopeless. She would never turn out that way, she promised herself; she’d kill herself long before things came to that.
    A crackle on the police scanner seemed promising for a moment but it turned out to be only a hit-and-run with no fatalities.
    Then the phone rang. “Newsroom.”
    A pause, then a voice. Low, modulated, cultivated: a grownup’s voice.
    “To whom am I speaking?” There was a hint of an English accent, although truth to tell Rhonda probably couldn’t distinguish among English, Australian, New Zealand, or South African if she had a gun at her head. Foreign, in any case.
    “Rhonda Gaines-Solomon.”
    “You will do.” A pause. “Do you know what’s going on at the school?”
    This might be promising. She grabbed a pen, knocked some junk on her desk out of the way, and found a scrap of paper. “What school?”
    “Edwardsville Middle School. Jefferson. Do you know what’s going on there?”
    She glanced at the monitors to see if any of their rivals had anything about Edwardsville: nothing. A glance at the local AP wire on her laptop screen: nothing. “Far as I know, there’s nothing going on at the Jefferson Middle School.”
    A short pause, then a challenge—“What do you know?”
    Suddenly, she realized that she’d misunderstood the question. The tipster wasn’t asking her for information. He was giving her information. Rhonda’s mind kicked into high gear as the import of what he was saying sank in. Frantically, she waved at Mr. Dunkirk behind the glass, but he was sipping his coffee and reading the paper.
    “What is it?” she asked, her voice rising “A school shooting? What is it you’re telling me?”
    “How fast can you get over here?”
    She was out the door so fast that Mr. Dunkirk never even saw her leave. One moment she was there—
    And the next moment she was gone.

Chapter Four
    E DWARDSVILLE —J EFFERSON M IDDLE S CHOOL
    The hallway was silent. Unless you looked carefully, you couldn’t really tell there was anything wrong, except that the lights were out.
    Charles led the children as noiselessly as possible. Rory thought they’d be heading for the front door, but when he pointed in its direction, Charles just shook his head and gestured toward the gym. Rory understood immediately—the gym lay at the rear of the main hallway, and behind it was the loading dock. They’d be able to sneak out that way.
    They were about halfway down when a man stepped out of one of the classrooms. He was carrying a gun. Rory didn’t