Stunned, I walked slowly toward them, my hands up, my fingers spread wide. He was leaning against the door to hold it wide, and as I passed them in the doorway, entering the lab, he shifted the barrel, pressing it hard beneath her ear, causing her to grunt in pain. “We were just about to call you, weren’t we, Miranda? But you saved us the trouble. Very thoughtful of you.”
“This place is crawling with cops,” I said. I turned to face him, my knees weak, halfway sitting on the table at the center of the lab for support. “If I’m not back in my office in five minutes, they’ll start looking for me.”
“And I’ll be part of the search party,” he said, a cold, smug smile on his serpent’s face. “In fact, I’m going to be the one who finds you.” On the desk just inside the door sat a matching helmet, and I realized with horror that once he put the helmet on, Satterfield would look exactly like all the other SWAT team officers. “And then I’m going to lead you and your teacher’s pet back onto the field—we’ll have to call a time-out—and we’ll get a microphone. And then you’ll tell all those people that you’re a fraud. That you pose as a good man, but you’re not.”
There was the sting of truth in his words. I’d gotten Waylon killed, and now I’d led Miranda into deadly peril. And as the implications of what I’d seen through the window continued to sink in, I realized that perhaps I had led thousands of people—no, tens of thousands—to their deaths. If Satterfield had rigged the stadium’s supports with demolition charges, the entire upper deck could come crashing down. “You’ll tell them you’re an evil man, and you’re about to prove it.”
I snuck a glance at Miranda. She was motionless and silent, but tears coursed down her face, and the sight ripped my heart open. Stall, Brockton, I thought. Keep calm and stall. Get him talking—isn’t that what they do on TV? “And how am I going to prove it?”
“By pressing this button,” he said, holding up a gizmo that resembled a cell phone or a garage-door opener.
“And how will pressing that button prove I’m an evil man?”
“By killing everyone in this stadium, while you watch from center field, untouched by the carnage happening all around you.”
Do something, Decker, I prayed. “You’re insane,” I said. “You can’t possibly kill everyone in the stadium.”
“I won’t,” he said. “You will.”
“Bullshit. I don’t believe you.” I saw Miranda’s eyes flicking back and forth, from me to Satterfield and back again, and my sense of helplessness was maddening.
“Oh, but you will soon,” he told me. “Seeing is believing. You will see, and you’ll believe, and you’ll wish you were never born.”
“Can’t be done,” I said. “You can’t kill all those people unless you’ve managed to hide a nuclear weapon in the stadium. And you don’t have the ability to do that.”
“I don’t need a nuclear weapon. The stadium is my weapon.”
“You’re bluffing. You aren’t capable of it,” I said, hoping my face didn’t betray the fact that I knew he was.
“Oh, but I am,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter if you believe me. But I’ll explain it, so you can start dreading it in detail. There are demolition charges—cutting charges—all around the stadium. When you press that button, they’ll slice through every support, every girder, and the entire stadium will collapse. And there you’ll stand, untouched, like Joshua at the battle of Jericho, as the walls come tumbling down . . . and everybody around you dies.”
“Why would you do that? You want to kill me—I know that. I even understand it. But why try to kill all those innocent people instead of me?”