Sex Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 6) (18 page)

“How do you know Professor Davis, Laurencia?”

The woman beside her smiled:

“I took a class at the University when I was still a young congresswoman. It was essentially the same class she teaches now. We’re a bit early; she’ll be finishing up her lecture. She told me she wanted to divide the class in two halves; she’ll be lecturing for the first half, and then you’ll have half an hour or so to make remarks and answer the students’ questions. So I hurried a bit more than might have been absolutely necessary. I wanted you to hear Morgana. Ah—here we are, just over there.”

They turned a corner and Nina could see Briarwood Hall.

Her heartbeat quickened a bit.

It was not one of the sterile black and white office buildings they had been passing through. Rather, it had the red brick solidity and ornamentation that one associated with elegance and taste.

One made money in office buildings; after having done so, one lived comfortably in one of these buildings.

“Through here.”

“All right.”

Laurencia led the way into the building, and then up a flight of stairs.

“Now, down this corridor. It’s Lecture Hall 222. The same place she taught in when I took the course.”

It was late in the day, and the corridor before them was almost deserted. But Nina could hear the sound of a woman’s voice from two doors in front of them.

They paused briefly in front of Room 222, then Laurencia opened the door.

A marvelous lecture hall smiled back at them, with concentric rows of seats leading down to the podium around which Morgana Davis was pacing, and a massive wall of windows to the left letting in the last rays of the setting sun.

The woman at the podium was tall, straight, and silver haired. She walked with the aid of cane, which was also tall and straight and silver, and her smile flashed like the sunlight as she raised her head and shouted:

“Hail and well met, my colleagues!”

Laurencia shouted back:

“Room here for two old ladies?”

Laughter from the students who filled the hall.

Laughter too from Morgana Davis, who then continued:

“Please, Congresswoman Bannister, come on down!
Nina Bannister, I’m quite sure, is known to all of you, and especially those of you wearing black shirts.
Please, Congresswoman Bannister, the floor is yours!”

A huge cheer.

Nina could feel herself blushing.

She made her way down to the podium, smiled at Sylvia, and waited for the applause to die down.

“I want to thank you for asking me to speak,” she said. I hardly knew, when I got the invitation, what I was going to say. But I was reading a book the other night…”

She glanced at Sylvia.

The book was one she had been pouring over in the Georgetown Library when she had been drugged.

She had found it again downtown, and had bought it.

“You’re all brilliant students, and you have a wonderful professor. You may already know this book by heart. I didn’t know it, though. And when I began reading it, it made me feel as though I wasn’t crazy. That all of those things I said in that recording—well, that they might really be true. So, if I have your permission, I want to read a few excerpts.”

“Of course,” shouted Morganna Davis, “you have our permission!”

“All right. Here then are some lines from Dee Dee Myers’ book,
Why Women Should Rule the World
.

Cheering.

“Ms. Myers, of course, was the press secretary for President Bill Clinton. She writes:”

“If we were in charge, things might actually change. Instead of posturing, we’d have cooperation. Instead of gridlock, we’d have progress. Instead of a shouting match, we’d have a conversation. A very long conversation.”

And she writes:

“I found myself more and more frustrated by the bitterness that now gripped the capital. Increasingly, it seemed, both sides were more interested in winning the argument than solving the problem. And the result was gridlock, polarization, and cynicism.”

“Was anyone talking and listening to each other?”

“And I realized that
yes,
some people were. And one of the places that that seemed to be happening on a regular basis was among the
women in The United States Senate.”

Pause.

Nina put the book down and pointed to the back row.

“I can tell you that, right now, one of the reasons for that spirit of co-operation is here with us tonight. It’s Laurencia Dalrymple.”

Everyone in the room stood and cheered.

And the cheering kept up until Laurencia forced it to stop by gesturing
enough
.

Hands were waving in the air now, though, and it seemed the right time to take a question.

“Yes?”

“Congresswoman Bannister, how do you answer the accusation that you ‘hate men?’”

Laughter.

Nina laughed to.

She was expecting that.

“I don’t have any worries on that score. For twenty seven years I was married to…”

A movement in front of her and to the right caught her eye.

Sylvia Morales was standing now and screaming:

“Get down! Get down!”

She stared as though paralyzed.

“Dammit, Nina, get down!”

“I don’t…”

But before she could finish, the young agent had rounded the row of stadium chairs, bounded three strides toward the podium, and hurled her body into Nina’s.

She could feel her ribs seem to cave in, and felt her forehead smash against the tile floor just as the entire wall of windows exploded and she was covered by raining pellets of plate glass.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
 
THE LIFE OF THE MIND

Pandemonium.

Everyone in the hall seemed to be screaming and running for the two exits. Around her, Nina was aware of glittering pellets of glass, like hailstones covering the floor.
 

Sylvia Morales lay flat on top of her, so she could neither move nor turn her head. She heard the click of what she assumed was a radio of some sort, and Sylvia’s voice, as calm as the voice of someone ordering groceries by telephone.

“We have a shooter in the office building adjacent to Briarwood Hall! One shot has been fired. No injuries. Repeat: shooter is inside the office building adjacent to Briarwood Hall!”

Suddenly, the weight that had been pressing Nina’s back and face to the floor disappeared, and she corkscrewed around in time to see Sylvia jumping up and shouting:

“Stay in the room! Do not exit! Stay in the room!”

This did not have the effect of keeping everyone in the room, because the doors had been opened and a few people had escaped; but it did slow the mass exodus, and it did seem to quieten the screaming slightly.

Nina got to her knees.

The massive window was gone, or at least transformed into a carpet of glass pellets and shards that covered the area around the podium.

Sylvia continued to shout at the students:

“Stay where you are! Do not leave the room! Take cover, if you can, behind the desks!”

She also continued to speak into what Nina now took to be a kind of two-way transmitter that she had pulled from her purse.

“We need backup immediately! Shots have been fired. Shooter is almost certainly still in the office building immediately adjacent to Briarwood Hall on the campus of George Washington University. Target is unharmed. Repeat: target is unharmed.”

Then she looked down at Nina:

“Are you all right?”

Nina could not speak.

The strangest sensation.

Whatever muscles connected her brain and her mouth had become useless, paralyzed.

She could only move her head uselessly from side to side, and then up and down.

She felt like a department store mannequin.

“Nina, are you all right?”

Again, no speech.

She supposed she was in shock.

But she did have the presence of mind enough to feel her legs, to move her arms, to rub the palms of her hands over her cheeks and jaws.

Finally, words came out.

“I...I…think I’m all right.”

“Just take slow, even breaths. See if you can move your arms and legs.”

She did these things, then said:

“I’m all right. I’m sure of it now.”

“All right. Then don’t stand up. Move—crawl—behind the podium, so that it’s between you and the window, and between you and the door.”

She lurched along on all fours until the wooden podium was blocking her sight of most of the room.
 

She still could peek around a corner of the stand though and see Sylvia, who was making her way up the aisle toward the back of the hall, pushing through sobbing students as she did so.

“Stay in the hall! Do not go out into the corridor!”

Then she began to hear students alternately screaming and shouting out questions:

“My God! My God! What’s happening?”

“We’ve got to get out of here!”

“Let us go; let us go!”

But Sylvia had by this time posted herself against the wall and between the two doors that let out of the room. She reached behind her and pulled out a black, shiny 45 automatic—Nina knew that’s what it was because it was the same gun Penelope Royale carried in her boat.

“Now listen to me. Everybody, listen to me!”

“Who are you?”

“What is happening here?”

“My God! My God, let us out!”

Sylvia merely shook her head and said, as calmly as possible under the circumstances:

“You have to listen to me. My name is Sylvia Morales. I’m an agent of the United States Secret Service. I don’t want you to panic, but you do have to know what is happening. An attempt has been made on the life of Congresswoman Bannister. The shooter apparently was located in the fourth floor of the office building next to Briarwood. Only one shot was fired. Congresswoman Bannister is all right. No one has been hurt.”

“Why can’t we get out of here?”

“What if he comes in here? Why can’t we leave?”

Another shake of the head:

“We don’t know where he is at this moment. If you start running down the halls, you may meet him.”

“He’s coming here?”

“We don’t know that. We don’t know where he is or what his intentions are. We have to assume though that he is still armed and dangerous.”

“But what if he comes in here?”

A short pause and then Sylvia Morales said:

“If he comes in here, I’ll kill him.”

There was very little to be said to that.

Nina could see Sylvia, standing ramrod straight, positioned precisely between the two doors, looking first at one, then at the other.

She had never felt so safe in her life.

The next fifteen to twenty minutes reminded Nina of the time following her escape at the library, except much more so. Sirens were going off all over the campus. Students moved in pairs and other small groups, arms around each other, mouths opened in shocked silence. And everyone seemed to be realizing the falsity of that comforting, but never really true, statement:

“It can’t happen here.”

Columbine.

Sandy Hook.

Different of course, because here no one had been injured.

But still…

“Here, dear. You’ve got to get some coffee in you.”

“Thank you, Laurencia.”

The two of them had been moved by other officers—uniformed guards had been pouring into the building for some time now—and were seated in the front row of what Nina assumed was a regular classroom.

Blackboard.

No windows.

Every two minutes, another officer wearing a different uniform would park himself in front of her, look her straight in the eye, and ask:

“Are you certain you’re ok?”

To which she would merely nod and say:

“I’m fine.”

She was getting a little sick of it.

Finally, the ebb and flow of Protective Personnel stabilized a bit, and Nina realized that she and Laurencia were in something like command central.

Sylvia had re-materialized, and was sitting two seats away from them, smiling reassuringly.

There were three other agents in the room––all men, all dressed in business suits.

These were, Nina assumed, all secret service agents.

And at the front of the room, seated behind the teacher’s desk, was Stockmeyer.

He cleared his throat.

The soft mumblings of conversation stopped.

“All right. Things seem to have calmed down somewhat, and I’d like to be sure everyone knows where we are. First, Congresswoman Bannister: are you all right?”

It would have been improper to smile, so Nina did not do so.

“Yes. I’m fine. Thanks to Sylvia.”

“Senator Dalrymple?”

A nod.

“I’m fine, Agent Stockmeyer. No one was shooting at me.”

“No, but the letters have been referencing you. We have to assume that you are a potential target as well.”

To this, Laurencia actually did smile.

Senators
, Nina mused,
can pull off things Representatives can’t.

At least, temporary Representatives.

“Target,” said Laurencia, quietly. “There’s something so reassuring about that term.”

“I’m sorry to put it that way. It’s just…”

“It’s just true.”

“Yes. Unfortunately. And, I must tell you because you need to know. We were not able to apprehend the suspect. The closest law enforcement officials to the building in question were campus security, and they took about two minutes to get there. That was sufficient time for the shooter to flee the building.”

Silence for a time.

Then Stockmeyer:

“Now, Agent Morales. Tell us what happened.”

Sylvia leaned forward on her desk.

“Nina had been speaking for maybe five minutes. I saw something kind of sparkle out of the corner of my eye. I looked over at the office building and saw the rifle barrel glinting in the sun. I shouted. Then I was able to get around the row of seats and make a dive for her. I covered her just as the window shattered. The next thing I realized, we were on the ground. I don’t know where the bullet went.”

“Did you see that the building was over there, and that there were numerous windows in it…before the Congresswoman began to speak?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you let her proceed?”

“I’m sorry, sir. A rookie’s mistake. A trainee’s mistake. I should have either had the podium moved to a more secure place in the hall, or insisted that the speech take place in a different room, with no windows.”

“We’ll talk about that later.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Then tell me…”

Nina interrupted.

She surprised herself by doing so.

But she had to know.

“Where did,” she asked, quietly, “the bullet actually go?”

Stockmeyer shook his head:

“That’s not really important in our…”

“Where did it go?”

A pause.

Then:

“It went into the wall four feet behind the podium.”

“So it passed through where my head would have been.”

“Yes.”

Nina got up, took two step, bent down, and embraced Sylvia.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

Both of them had tears in their eyes.

Nina’s encounter in the Georgetown University Library had garnered little in the way of public attention. Nothing had actually happened, other than a few books being defaced.