“The Phoenix Group would be the last place most people would expect something like this to happen,” the reporter was saying. “Situated on a quiet London street, it has been described as a think tank conducting research on global policies covering myriad social and scientific subjects. Virtually all the people who worked here were scholars and scientists, many of them former academics that one would hardly expect to be the target of a brutal murder rampage. An official list of the dead has not been released pending notification of family. While details remain sketchy it appears that the massacre-”
Massacre? Did the woman say massacre? Katie slumped down on the carpet, her heart thudding against her chest. Her limbs felt dead.
The reporter continued, “As of right now, the authorities are only saying that there are nearly thirty victims inside the building. There has been no indication of any survivors.”
No indication of any survivors? Katie glanced at her watch and did a quick time zone calculation as her reporter mentality kicked in despite her rising panic. It was evening in London now. A few hours for the bodies to be discovered, the police called, and the news people and crowds to get there. It might have happened around three or four that afternoon. Then the panic resumed.
No survivors.
She bolted up, raced to her phone, grabbed the business card Anna had given her, and made the call. It went immediately to voice mail. Katie choked back a sob as Anna’s precise voice came on the line asking her to please leave a message. Katie hung up without saying anything.
Her next thought hit her like a lightning bolt. “Shaw!” she exclaimed.
She called the number he had given her. It rang four times and she thought it too was about to go to voice mail when someone answered.
“Allo?” a woman’s voice said in French.
Confused for a moment Katie said, “Um… can I speak to Shaw?”
The woman at the other end spoke to her again in French.
Katie thought quickly, trying to conjure up her college French and the little she had learned while overseas. She asked the woman if she spoke English and she said a bit. Katie asked her where Shaw was.
The woman did not know that name.
“You’ve got his phone.”
Now the woman sounded confused but asked her if she was family.
That didn’t sound too good, thought Katie. For a surreal moment she wondered if Shaw had been with Anna at The Phoenix Group and been killed too. Yet why would a Frenchwoman have his phone if the massacre had taken place in London? “Yes,” she told the woman. “I’m family. His sister. Who are you?”
The woman said that she was a nurse and her name was Marguerite.
“A nurse? I don’t understand.”
“This man, this Shaw is in hospital,” Marguerite said.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He has been injured. He is in surgery.”
“Where?”
“In Paris.”
“Which hospital?”
The woman told her.
“Will he be okay?”
Marguerite said she didn’t know the answer to that.
Katie ran to pack. Using her millions of frequent flyer miles, she booked a seat on an Air France flight leaving JFK that night.
She tried to sleep on the flight over, but couldn’t. As other passengers dozed all around her, Katie’s eyes were glued to the news channel on her personal monitor. There was a bit more information about the Phoenix Group massacre, as the media had initially termed it, but nothing really enlightening. Katie had tried to call Anna before boarding the plane, but it still went to voice mail.
As the jet zoomed across the ocean, Katie asked herself why she was doing this. She barely knew Anna or Shaw. And as Shaw had made quite clear, and quite correctly too, she had no right butting into their lives.