Catching Up

As I had intended, we retired to Morocco to compare notes. My chair went from weapon to seat for Ms. Chapman. I don't know if it was the glasses or the polite maturity of her good looks or just her tone but she very quickly took charge of the discussion. Maybe it was because we were standing before her like naughty school children before a teacher. It was a little distracting. As I had less to say than Harry and Larry, this was not a big problem for me. We related our side of the situation, some of us more concisely than others.

Ms. Chapman's story was both grim and incomplete. She had been in the lower level offices, discussing what yet needed to be accomplished this evening, when the gun men had interrupted, led by a terrified young employee that had been forced to bring them inside. The gun men had further forced their way to the main fusebox in an effort to shut off the alarms. The labels proved to out of date on the circuit breakers and the lights were shut off in error. This outage led to a brief struggle between a custodian and a gun man that ended with the power mostly off in the building and the custodian badly wounded from a bullet wound. Unfortunately for the gun men, the electronic door locks were controlled by a separate power supply, as a security measure, and the door to their target was still barred to them. This is what had led to Ms. Chapman being on the second floor and being hassled for the code, which is where I came into her story.

There was much we did not know. Were there any other civilians yet in the building? How many other Museum employees and/or volunteers were still in the building? How many gun men were there in total? We didn't know. There was much we didn't know about our current situation and that was a concern.

My mobile communications device had no signal in this part of the building. Ms. Chapman's mobcomm was in her purse, which was in the offices on the ground floor of the Museum. Similarly, Larry had left his mobcomm in their truck, not expecting to need it. Harry had his mobcomm with him and had a signal but had some issues with the device. He wasn't confident that he could successfully make a call. The history behind these issues soon became clear as he nervously fumbled with the device, dropped it, thanked Larry for picking it up, looked puzzled when it didn't work, finally realized the battery had fallen off, reattached the battery, restarted the device, dialed 911, and the battery ran out of charge. We were returned to square one.