Chapter 44: Gunfight
"They looked like they were in trouble," Meg said. She was watching the direction Chuck, Sarah, and Casey had gone — purposeful, tight, the opposite of people enjoying a football game. "Are you going to help them?"
Simon tracked them for a moment.
"They're professionals," he said. "They should be able to—" He stopped. Reconsidered. "Yeah. I'm going to go check."
Meg was already nodding. "Coffee shop on the south side of the quad. Come find me when it's done."
"It won't take long."
"It never does," she said, which was true and slightly pointed. She kissed him once and walked away toward the south side of campus.
Simon went the other way.
He followed the direction they'd gone — past the stadium overflow parking, toward the science complex on the east end of campus. The buildings there were the kind of architecture that said function over aesthetics: large, connected, the kind of space that made it possible to move a significant distance inside without being visible from the street.
If something was happening and they needed to keep it off the open quad, this was where you'd go.
The hall of the first building he entered was empty in the way that buildings went empty quickly when something was wrong — not the comfortable emptiness of a space between classes, but the specific absence of people who had recently left in a direction away from something.
Then he heard it.
Gunshots. Not nearby — somewhere above him and ahead, the sound traveling through the building's structure in a way that made pinpointing difficult. He pressed against the wall, let his senses run, and identified the direction.
Stairwell. Up two levels.
He moved.
The lecture hall on the third floor had tiered seating descending to a stage-level presentation area — the kind of room where five hundred students sat in assigned rows for large-format courses. The door at the top of the seating area had a small rectangular window.
Simon looked through it.
Four men with weapons. Moving positions, keeping Sarah and Casey — who were behind the lecturer's desk at the front, using the solid oak as cover — from advancing. The shooters had spread into the aisle seating, which gave them elevation and angles.
He counted ammunition management from the firing pattern: semi-automatic, controlled pairs, not burning through magazines. Experienced. Not panicking.
He did not have his Beretta. It was in the Mustang, which was parked three buildings away, which might as well be on the moon.
He looked at what was available.
The corridor outside the lecture hall had the standard institutional infrastructure: emergency lighting, a water fountain, a circuit breaker panel he might be able to use for something, and — at the end of the hall — a red fire cabinet mounted on the wall.
Simon looked at the cabinet.
Then at the gap at the bottom of the lecture hall door.
Then back at the cabinet.
He went.
The fire hose inside the cabinet was the standard type — linen-jacketed, one and a half inch diameter, connected to a standpipe system that fed directly from the building's main. He pulled it out, connected the hose to the standpipe fitting, threaded the brass nozzle onto the delivery end, and fed the nozzle end through the gap at the bottom of the lecture hall door, pushing it as far under as it would go.
He went back to the standpipe valve.
He turned it to full open.
The hose went from limp to rigid in about four seconds as the pressure built. The nozzle on the other side of the door had nothing pointing it — under building water pressure with no one controlling the nozzle, it would thrash.
It did.
The sound from inside the lecture hall shifted immediately — the controlled firing stopped, replaced by shouting, the specific chaos of four people trying to deal with a fire hose going fully berserk in an enclosed space at roughly fifty gallons per minute. Water hit walls, ceiling, seating, people. You couldn't aim a weapon at something you couldn't see and couldn't stand still long enough to target.
Simon let it run for three minutes.
Then he shut the valve, picked up the fire extinguisher from the cabinet bracket — dry chemical, standard size, full — shook it once, pulled the pin, and pushed through the door.
The lecture hall was comprehensively soaked.
The four gunmen were in various states of waterlogged confusion — two were slipping on the wet tiered flooring, one was trying to clear his weapon of water intrusion, one was moving toward the door and therefore directly toward Simon.
Simon aimed the extinguisher nozzle and fired.
The dry chemical cloud went out in a dense white expansion that covered the front third of the room. In a space that was already chaotic, adding zero visibility to the equation was decisive. The men couldn't see each other, couldn't see their targets, and couldn't orient.
Simon moved through the cloud.
He swung the extinguisher into the first man he reached — solid contact, the man went sideways into the seating. He dropped the empty extinguisher, climbed up onto the nearest desk surface, and launched himself at the second man in the aisle. His knee connected with the man's shoulder, driving him down across two seats.
He landed, used the desk height to generate elevation, and came off the table with a spinning kick that found the third man's head as he was coming up from a crouch.
The fourth man — the one who'd been near the door — was trying to regain his footing on the wet floor. He didn't.
Simon helped him not regain it.
Four men down.
The extinguisher chemical was settling. Through the dissipating cloud, Simon could see Sarah and Casey emerging from behind the lecturer's desk — both operational, neither hit, Sarah with her weapon up and Casey with the expression of a man who had just been rescued from a difficult situation by fire safety equipment and was still processing how he felt about that.
Simon looked at them.
"You're welcome," he said. "Also, I'll send an invoice."
Casey's mouth opened. Closed.
"Where's Chuck?" Simon said.
"We got separated on the—" Sarah started.
The door at the far end of the lecture hall opened.
Four people came through it fast, weapons up, in the tactical formation of a team making entry on a known-hostile room.
"Drop the weapons — hands—"
"CIA — standby—" Sarah had her badge out before the last word finished. "Senate Barbecue — that's the countersign—"
One of the new arrivals — a woman, late thirties, moving with the authority of someone running the team — lowered her weapon and raised a hand to stop the others.
"We received a support request," she said. "Looks like the situation's been handled."
"By a civilian with a fire hose," Casey said, in a tone that communicated complex feelings.
"Contractor," Simon said.
The woman looked at him with the assessing attention of a field officer evaluating an unexpected variable.
"Your call sign?" she said.
"I don't have one," Simon said. "I'm on loan from Burbank."
She accepted this with professional inscrutability and began directing her team through the room.
Sarah stepped away and called Chuck's number. The call was short — twenty seconds — and when she ended it the specific tension she'd been carrying since the lecture hall resolved slightly.
"He's clear," she said. "He found a room on the second floor and locked himself in."
"Smart," Simon said.
"Uncharacteristically," Casey said, which was probably the most affectionate thing Simon had heard him say about Chuck.
The cleanup crew were moving through the room with the efficiency of people who dealt with this kind of aftermath regularly. Simon watched them work for a moment.
"I'm going to assume the paperwork on this doesn't include my name," he said.
"Contractor work is off-book," Sarah said. "Standard practice."
"Then I'm going to go find Meg." He looked at Casey. "The rate for today—"
"You'll get it," Casey said.
"Including the fire hose and extinguisher?"
"The university's insurance will handle those."
"Good." Simon picked up his jacket from where it had ended up on the wet floor. "One more thing."
"What?" Casey said.
"If you're going to follow me on vacation," Simon said, "you could at least tell me in advance so I can plan around it."
Casey looked at him.
"We weren't following you," Casey said.
"You happened to be at Stanford on the same weekend I was visiting Stanford."
"It's a large campus."
"Casey."
"Operational coincidence," Casey said. "It happens."
Simon looked at Sarah.
Sarah looked at the ceiling.
"Okay," Simon said. "I'm going to find Meg now."
He left the lecture hall, went down three flights of stairs, and walked out into the Stanford afternoon.
The coffee shop on the south quad was exactly where Meg had said it would be. She was at a corner table with a flat white and a copy of a Stanford psychology department pamphlet she'd apparently picked up somewhere on the way over, and she looked up when he came through the door.
She read his face. "Done?"
"Done." He sat down across from her. "Nobody hurt who wasn't involved, everything's stable, and Casey is going to have a very complicated feeling about fire hoses for the rest of his career."
Meg looked at him. Decided not to ask about the fire hoses.
"The rest of the day is ours," Simon said.
She closed the pamphlet. "I looked through this while I was waiting. The forensic psychology program here is genuinely excellent. I think I want to apply."
"You should," Simon said.
"I'm going to."
"Good."
She reached across the table and took his hand. "Buy me dinner."
"Yes."
"Somewhere with tablecloths. Not a stadium vendor."
"Absolutely."
"And then—" She lowered her voice in a way that suggested the coffee shop was not, in fact, where she planned the evening to end.
"Also yes," Simon said.
She smiled.
Outside, the Stanford campus continued its football-week celebration — red banners, rivalry energy, the specific joy of a place that knew what it was and was comfortable with it.
Simon thought that it was genuinely a good school, that Meg would be good here, and that whatever came next for both of them — whatever the diverging paths looked like from the outside — this moment was uncomplicated and good.
He held onto it.
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