Never in his life had Wyatt seen anything like the Red Trident company jet, aka the Red Trident Spy Plane. As one might expect, it was outfitted with all the technology in San Francisco, but modified with Darsie’s own personal touches: polished leather, gold fixtures, and wall-to-wall screens showing various footage. Inside the cabin, forty thousand feet above the earth, the brightest computer minds in the world were frantically hammering on keyboards, in a very complex virtual game of cat and mouse.
Wyatt sat behind the pilot, his gaze shifting from the clock on his iPhone to the blinking control panels, then back to his phone. Outside, all around them, nothing but white. The jet bounced and jerked, the Red Trident team buckled tight into their seats so as not to be thrown from their makeshift desks by the turbulence.
Darsie’s plane—his secondary form of transportation—had been converted to a mobile NOC. Over the beeps and dings of computers, Wyatt listened to the layered voices: Darsie at Red Trident, Avi in the surveillance van, the comms where his Valor team was waiting for the fake shooting, and even the auditorium where the recorded symphony played.
“All right, you guys,” Wyatt heard his father’s voice over the radio. “She’s in. Be ready.”
“She’s in?” Wyatt said in horror; he tried to scrambled to the front of the plane, but the turbulence knocked him down.
The pilot kept his eyes on the small window of glass in front of him. “I’m sorry,” he called back to Wyatt. “The summer air is so turbulent over the Midwest! It’s going to be tight. Not sure if we are gonna be able to get your boots on the ground by 4 p.m.”
Leigh Ann waited in the stall, looking at her watch, convincing herself she would not run away before the signal. Two signals, in fact. The first from GrievingDad_12 to say that the operation was a go, and the second from the SecDef’s security team, letting her know that they detected Encyte in the network.
GrievingDad_12 came through first, the Wickr message buzzing on her Apple Watch: Good to go.
A second message immediately followed the first: We found the hack. He’s in. Take your time. Follow the plan. God bless.
Leigh Ann took a deep breath and told herself for the hundredth time that this was her penance. With the mind-altering drugs now completely out of her system, she was now painfully aware of her own culpability. Some deeds are so horrific that the very meditation of them makes one guilty.
She left the stall with the huge rifle at her side, feeling what so many killers before her must have felt: a surge of adrenaline, almost disorienting, as she put one foot in front of the other, determined to elaborately act out the evil she’d originally planned.
Unnoticed, her heels clicked down the quiet hall from the bathroom to the auditorium, and she pushed open the doors. The children were on stage on the far side, in midrehearsal of Bach’s March in D Major. The stand-in kids could not play instruments, of course, but they went through the motions as a recording played. Leigh Ann closed her eyes and listened. Only for a moment. The notes so perfect, swirling to heaven like the souls that would be if she failed.
She made it to center court and raised the bump stock to her shoulder. She put her eye to the cold scope, seeing first the stand-in band instructor. A beautiful woman with pinned-up red hair, whipping the conductor’s baton back and forth as though she’d done so all her life.
From there, Leigh Ann shifted her scope until she found the one she was told to hit first: the stand-in for the Henryson girl. A small girl. Dark hair, probably only half the size of her cello.
Leigh Ann breathed, then opened fire. The girl dropped instantly, the squib—a small firework inside a packet of fake blood—exploded and covered the little girl with the sticky red liquid. Around her, other kids began screaming, the music stopped as they flailed around on stage. As she was told, Leigh Ann methodically shifted her scope, moving to the next kid—a dark-skinned boy who stood at a drum set. The squib hit him in the chest, and he dropped alongside the girl. The pattern continued: the gun jumping in Leigh Ann’s hands, the kids banging against the locked double doors below the green exit sign. Leigh Ann had completely lost herself, pulling the trigger over and over, seeing the bodies go down.
A minute and forty-five seconds later, she executed the last part of the plan, and with great relief, she reversed the gun to point the barrel at her own chest. “I’m so sorry for all of this,” she whispered as she pulled the trigger. Instantly, two bags filled with fake blood and triggered by squibs detonated under the clothes at her chest and behind her back as if a bullet had passed through her body. She slumped to the ground.