The patio had stayed dry under its awning. I sat down. I needed to look like I wasn’t standing around waiting for a homicide.
At 10:08 a.m. I checked for Milt. But Milt was no longer there.
He was hustling down the steps toward the middle of the quad. Worst-case scenario getting worse by the minute. There was Goran, and instead of being at the outer edges of the quad, he was walking right down the middle, which meant he couldn’t be more noticed. Yet before I could even begin to strategize a new plan, our frightfully obsolete original plan commenced on its own. Blam! Blam! Blam! The gentle acoustics of campus gunfire.
Chapter 6
The sound of bullets ricocheted off all corners of the courtyard—all—disorienting anyone trying to locate the shooter. Did Milt fire first? I dropped to the ground as two more shots pealed through the air. Crack! Crack!
I looked up to see the chest of the first bodyguard explode forward. But he didn’t go down.
On the far side, I could see Milt spin around to square up against the second bodyguard, just as the girl in the scarf spun around to look in the wrong direction. I got my handgun ready inside the front pouch of my hoodie. Two stray bullets tore into the glass next to us in the window of the café.
“Get inside,” I told the girl in the scarf. “Stay low.”
Operating on pure panic, she ducked inside the bistro. She didn’t take her latte, she didn’t take her laptop. And, most importantly, she didn’t take her phone.
I still had my weapon somewhat hidden. Did the bodyguards spot me or were those bullets that passed me strays? Where was the kid? Where was Tweedledum? I could handle the onslaught of gunfire from the two bodyguards; what I couldn’t handle was the deluge of Cambridge police officers who’d be arriving here oh so soon. Within two minutes eight seconds, if our research held up.
Do we abort?
The goons had spotted Milt across the yard. But they hadn’t spotted me. Distraction might work in my favor. They were concentrating on dealing with him. They had no idea I existed.
I grabbed the phone belonging to the scarf girl and started to rush through the scattered crowd, sowing the seeds of our exit plan. I told each student I passed that there was a lone shooter out on Oxford Street. I kept repeating the phrase. Lone shooter, Oxford Street. Moving from one spot to the next. Didn’t matter what they were actually seeing; they just needed a catchphrase. Crack crack crack crack. Bullets flew over my head as I journeyed from one huddled kid to the next, ducking into whatever makeshift foxhole I saw—a terrace chair, a planter, a bench, a trash can. I’d cower with him or her and bequeath unto them the mantra. Lone shooter, Oxford Street.
The trail I’d left while making my way over to Milt, who was pinned down near a set of steps, would lead to a flurry of 911 calls. Then I made my own call.
“Nine one one. What’s your emergency?”
“I think they detonated a bomb at MIT,” I said into the phone. “I can see it from my balcony window. There’s smoke. This is an attack. This is—”
Then I threw the phone in the wet gutter.
Then I found the next foxhole. A trash can in front of a trembling engineering student. I crouched with him and shared that people had seen three guys shove a girl into a white van, with the license plate number “something something KHR-11.”
“Something something KHR-11,” he parroted back.
“Can you call it in? My battery’s—” I completed my sentence with a shrug.
He understood. He began to call it in.
“You saw ’em, right?” I said. “Unreal, man.”
Then I leapt up and ran around the corner, spotted Tweedledee, and let four rounds of my five-round .38 rip through the atmosphere.
Every kid saw me do it.
“Cambridge PD,” I yelled to them. “Get down.”
The kids got down. I ran to the next post and shed my hoodie. Layer one—shed. Crimson to blue. I went from a Harvard tourist to a Patriots fan. Scrambled eggs.
Milt put his own 911 call in, reporting that two foreigners were on the roof of a tall building shooting at cars and pedestrians.
All designed to tax the system. Resources would be spread out in every direction. Eventually the main catastrophe—our catastrophe—would get lost in the shuffle. Eventually we’d have our escape route smoothly