What a hostage taker gains

A bolt drives through the wall, you can hear it, the graining, twelve soldiers standing on the other side. They’re calling. The floodlight tearing into the blackness of the room-peering in from in-between the blind’s blades.
“this is it then, the dealing, the continuous negotiation. Twelve hours of talk, my shirt drowning in sweat”.
Jack says it quietly as he stares wide eyed into the floodlight, his arm shudders as he tries to balance the gun, the sweat glues his palm to the beretta’s clasp.
“It’s on me Henry, it’s on me isn’t it? The cameras, the guns, the fits and the screams.”
Henry is on his knees with a white bag over his head looking at the floor. Quiet whimpers come from him in random intervals, either through a silent whine or a shiver in his spine.
The continuous sound of the hysterical crowd beyond the glass-it’s the sound of a thousand bees who’ve found their lost honey.
Henry struggles to speak,
“You couldn’t keep it together, could you? You were dead when you brought that thing in here.”
Non je ne regrette rien is eloquently playing somewhere nearby.
“but it just doesn’t matter does it?”
Henry’s still, he’s not shaking now.
Jack hears everything Henry says, he hears everything the crowd outside is yelling, he hears the bolts driving through the wall, he hears it all, he sees it all, when this all began and when it all ended”.
The guns' not Henry now, even though there is a barrel jammed against his damp temple.
Jack’s eyes; they close, the wall comes down, the wailing and claiming, the flashes and bangs, the darkness against the light and it all comes down: Everything the hostage and criminal knew.