Takeover

“Come on!” Bobby didn’t care for the idea. “Let’s just get out of here!”

“We need more money.”

“Send her back upstairs, then!”

“It worked once because the cops had no time to plan. It’s not going to work a second time. Besides, we’ll have all the money we can carry pulling up to the curb outside in less than an hour. Then we can go.”

Next to Theresa, Jessica sighed, either in disappointment at Lu-cas’s decision or in relief at her son’s narrow escape. The phone still rang.

Between Bobby’s scowl and his rough skin, he could have been a villain in a comic book. “I think it’s a mistake.”

“We’re not done here. Do you think we’re done here?”

Bobby didn’t answer.

Lucas turned back to the hostages. “Missy, would you please answer that damn phone?”

21

1:04 P.M.

Lucas got back on the line with Cavanaugh. The pool of Paul’s blood had coagulated, though the humidity from the open door kept it from drying very fast. Theresa rubbed the back of her neck and wondered if Paul had needed a transfusion… Silly thought- of course he would need a transfusion, probably several. She wished Lucas hadn’t taken her cell phone, even if she couldn’t risk using it. Cell phones had become the security blankets of the twenty-first century.

Ethan took a swipe at her with his stuffed dog, as if he didn’t want her to get any ideas about holding him again. He wanted his mother, and that was that.

Theresa tried not to think about Rachael’s reaction, should she die.

Hell, what if she survived? The thought filled her with fresh terror. Rachael was not stupid. Once the shock wore off, her mind would reconstruct the events and come to this conclusion: Her mother had made a choice between her daughter’s best interests and those of a boyfriend, and the boyfriend had come first. There were few crimes less forgivable than a lack of maternal instinct, and Rachael had inherited her mother’s process of anger: slow, cold, and implacable.

Suddenly, dying did not seem the most frightening option.

The little boy continued to watch her, warily. Jessica Ludlow’s breath had not yet slowed to normal.

Theresa leaned toward her. “Cute Browns dog.”

The young woman glanced down at the stuffed animal her baby held. “He loves it.”

“I remember when Burger King gave those away-it was years ago now. My daughter collected the whole set.”

“I think our new neighbor gave it to him.”

Dogs, Theresa thought. The dog with the security guard was trained to sniff explosives, not drugs. It barked up a storm every time Lucas passed by. She’d assumed that the dog had also been trained to recognize a bad guy when it saw one, but what if he scented plastic explosives in Lucas’s aura?

She had been close to the man twice, once when he frisked her, once when he pressed an automatic pistol into her side before escorting her to see Cherise’s body. She had brushed up against his chest, his sides, and felt nothing under the clothing but muscle. Even with the dark colors and the loose jacket, she could not see any suspicious bulges. And the explosives were not in the car. They could be in the duffel bag on the floor in front of her. Or they could have been installed somewhere in the offices behind the teller cages, and that was why he’d killed Cherise. He needed her to open something-what? a vault? a computer server?-so that he could set the explosives, but he couldn’t leave her alive to tell the other hostages, who might panic.

But why not just detonate the explosives, if that was his plan? What he was waiting for?

And why would a target worth blowing up be found in a minimum-security area on the ground floor?

She watched Lucas converse with Cavanaugh. He had to have a plan. She shouldn’t let his super-cool persona convince her that he had more brains than he really had-perhaps his only talent lay in acting-but everything she felt about him gave the impression that he did have a plan. He’d also have a backup plan, and a backup to the backup.

Maybe there was nothing of financial value in the cubicles. Maybe there was only a part of the foundation, a structural support, without which at least a few floors would collapse. She knew that four or five pounds of RDX would turn a good-size truck to pieces of rubble. He could have carried twenty pounds back there in his trip with Cherise, and no one would know. But why set the charges out of sight? There were no cameras back there, and he had killed the only witness.

Perhaps the real hostage here was the Federal Reserve building, a historic landmark built in 1923. Or was it the backup plan? Is that why Lucas had not blown it?

Perhaps he needed the RDX for his escape. A large explosion would make a great diversion. All eyes and rescue personnel would head for the destruction, while Lucas and Bobby and a hostage or two made for the Mercedes.

It could be a booby trap, so that after all the excitement had ended and the workers poured back into the building, an explosion would take some out. But deaths under those circumstances would not help him, and they would produce a relatively low body count if he meant it as some sort of protest. Whatever else he was up to here, politics did not seem to be part of it.

She needed to talk to Cavanaugh.

“Thanks for holding him.” Jessica Ludlow startled her out of her reverie. “He’s getting hungry, is the problem.” Bobby watched them but did not tell them to shut up. Jessica Ludlow had been through an extremely stressful morning and, like most people would, needed to vent. “He’s fussy now, but he’s going to be ten times worse in another half hour. I have his snacks in my bag, but I don’t know what that monster will do if I try to get them.”

Theresa tried to soothe the worried mother. “I don’t think he wants to hurt a child.”

“I think he wants to hurt all of us.” Jessica frowned. “Why don’t these guys just leave?”

“I keep asking myself the same thing.”

“My husband must be frantic.”

Theresa’s chest tightened up for a moment. She had no idea what to say. Jessica’s husband lay on a gurney at the M.E.’s office, but Cavanaugh had been right. She could hardly tell Jessica that now. “I’m sure the authorities will let him know you’re okay.”

“But Ethan-” The young woman ran out of words, no doubt imagining her husband imagining his child’s demise.

Theresa patted her shoulder. Ethan knocked at Theresa’s hand with the Browns dog, pointed at his mother’s floral-print handbag, and said, “Baba.”

“Bottle,” Jessica translated. “I told you he was hungry. We don’t do bottles anymore, remember, baby? You’re a big boy now.”

Maybe we can use that, Theresa thought. Cavanaugh said to keep the hostage takers occupied with details to wear them down.

Bringing in food would do it. She felt amazed that no one yet had asked to use the bathroom, though Cherise’s fate might have put them off asking for anything.

“Theresa,” Lucas called her, as if on cue. “Come here.”

1: 07 P.M.

“What’s he doing with Theresa?” Patrick demanded to know, stalking the monitor. “What did you say to him?”

“I asked if he’d reconsider the two o’clock shipment, since it’s only fifty minutes away now. That’s all.”