Takeover

me.”

“I’m sure you’re a great guy, Chris, but why should I waste my time with you? You put the lucky winner on the phone, and I’ll put my gun in the ear of one of these people here, and we can work this out fast.”

His words brought scenes of carnage to Theresa’s mind, so that she got up and returned to the telescope. Paul had moved as the line condensed in front of the reception desk, but he still breathed. His hands were in his lap, and he stared straight ahead. Look up, honey. I’m here.

Footsteps padded over the low carpeting. Two young men, too well dressed to be anything but FBI, entered the reading area and stopped short to observe Chris Cavanaugh and his conversation with the hostage taker. Their eyes glowed with excitement; they were clearly tickled to death to be in the thick of it. After a flash of anger, Theresa confessed to herself that she would feel exactly the same way if all the players were strangers to her, if she weren’t in love with one of the hostages, if the man who had jolted her emotions from their self-imposed hibernation didn’t sit across the street with a gun to his head.

The young men hurried back the way they’d come, no doubt to let their higher-ups know that CPD had started without them.

“There’s reasons for this,” Cavanaugh was explaining. “I can’t concentrate on you and make decisions at the same time. Also, we might talk for a while, and there’s always the chance I could start to like you, and then any decisions I made would be biased.”

“Oh,” the voice drawled, “I don’t think there’s going to be much chance of that, Chris. As soon as I kill one of these hostages, I bet you’ll cross me right off your Christmas-card list without a second thought.”

It worried her that the man called Lucas referred to them as “hostages” instead of “people.” Killers often tried to dehumanize their victims, to make their murders seem more reasonable. It would be up to the negotiator to make Lucas see his captives as human beings, with jobs and families and dreams worth living for.

Cavanaugh must have had the same thought. “Speaking of which, could you tell me who-all you have in there with you? We know the receptionist is there, Missy, and the three security guys, Greg, Antoine, and-”

Lucas interrupted. “Four million. In hundreds. And while you’re coordinating that, let me tell you something about the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. It’s big. It’s pretty, really- paintings on the ceiling and all that shit. But big. We will always be closer to our hostages than you are, and we can kill them before you get to us. You throw tear gas in here or try to smoke us out, we can kill them before you get to us. You got that down?”

“I understand. Four million is a lot of money, Lucas. But you know what? It’s doable. We can do that. It’s going to take some time, though-certainly more than an hour.”

“We’re in a building full of money, Chris. There’s a lot more than four million in cash in this place, and we all know it. So it shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, really. I’m only giving you an hour so that you can get the car here from wherever you took it. Either drive it or put it on a flatbed, by the way. Do not use a tow dolly. You got that?”

“Lucas, I don’t know much about the Federal Reserve building, but-”

“You got it down about the car? Just have someone drive it here. No towing.”

“No towing, got it. But about the money. That place is like Fort Knox. You need to cooperate with us in order to go get your money, because there’s a lot of security measures in place to pass through-”

“Don’t be stupid, Chris.”

Cavanaugh stopped.

“I’m not going to go and get anything. There are robots downstairs that move cash around, and we have elevators. Have it brought to me. One hour. Or someone dies. And don’t screw up and use a tow dolly.”

8

9:46 A.M.

The click of his hang-up filled the room, and then everyone began to talk at once.

“He didn’t mention his partner,” Theresa observed.

Frank lit a cigarette, and Theresa resisted the urge to snatch it from his fingers and take a few puffs. “Have the money come to him,” Frank said. “These guys aren’t as dumb as I thought they were.”

“And they know something about the Federal Reserve. Please don’t smoke in here, Detective,” Cavanaugh added, nearly in unison with the librarian, Ms. Elliott.

Theresa watched while Frank stared at the smoke curling up as if wondering how it got there, dropped the cigarette into his water bottle, and gave the librarian a sheepish smile. She also wondered why the librarian had been allowed to remain, but then they might need further assistance from the building, and after all they were occupying her workspace. Besides, she wouldn’t become emotional. Her fiance wasn’t one of the hostages.

Cavanaugh addressed the Fed executive. “Mr. Kessler.”

“Yes?” It seemed to require physical effort for the man to tear his gaze from the television monitor.

“How long would it take to bring up the money from the vault?”

“Actually, he’s right,” Kessler admitted, his voice steeped in misery. “We could do it in about ten minutes. The paperwork would take two days, but I assume he means for us to skip that step.”

“I think that’s a reasonable assumption. Can a robot really deliver the cash?”

“Not to the lobby. They won’t fit on a passenger elevator. They’re designed to use the freight elevators at the back of the building, and they don’t go to the lobby.”

“I wonder if he knows that,” Cavanaugh said.

“But I suppose it could install the pallet in the passenger elevator and send it to the ground floor. I’m not really sure-it’s never happened.”

Theresa spoke. “He knows about the robots but not that there’s eight million piled downstairs to be shredded instead of four. It’s possible these two guys don’t have anything to do with Mark Lud- low’s murder.”

“That’s true.” Cavanaugh wiped the phone receiver down with a disposable alcohol swab as he talked. “Or maybe they couldn’t carry eight million. Wouldn’t that take up a football field or so?”

“In ones,” Kessler said. He spoke firmly and calmly once on a familiar subject. “If they took only the hundreds, four million dollars in hundreds would weigh about eighty pounds and fill six hundred forty-three cubic inches, or four good-size briefcases. Between the two of them, they could carry it out. Or they could make more than one trip.”

“They’d have to let go of the hostages.” Frank fingered his water bottle as if he regretted using it as an ashtray. “They couldn’t keep a gun on them and carry all that at the same time.”

Theresa found it hard to take her eyes off the TV screen. “That looks like a duffel bag on the floor. They could fill that up, sling it across their backs, and still be hands-free. Or they could make the hostages help them carry it.”

Cavanaugh murmured, “That’s another good point. We keep forgetting they have a ready supply of labor in there with them.”

Theresa thought of something else. “What if Ludlow was their inside man? That’s why there’s no signs of coercion on his body- he gave them the information freely. Then they decided to cut him out.”

“Leaving them short one getaway driver. But Ludlow’s only been here a month. Not much time to hook up with a team.”

“He’d be an unlikely suspect for that very reason, and a month’s long enough to get the layout.”

Kessler stirred. “Mark Ludlow came with an excellent recommendation and has-had-worked for the Federal Reserve for a long time. At least ten years, I think.”

“I’m sure he did,” Cavanaugh soothed. “Why did he want to move here from sunny Atlanta?”

“I don’t know. The weather, maybe. It can get miserable there in the summertime.”

“Do me a favor-most of the employees should have been evacuated to the Hampton Inn. Would you call whoever recruited Ludlow and the Human Resources person who coordinated his hire and get them over here? Maybe they’ll know how Ludlow came to transfer here, and why, and something about his wife.”