“It’s Emmy. You okay?”
“There’re two of them on the platform,” he whispered. “They’ve both got guns.”
“Where are you? Dan told you to hide.”
“I did, but then I snuck back to look.”
“Stay the hell out of sight.”
“I am.”
That kid… When you first met him, he came across as quiet, even timid, but he had more courage than most grown men. And he felt no fucking fear. Secretly, I thought Dan was going to have her hands full in a couple of years because Race wasn’t a boy who shied away from trouble.
“Did you hear them say anything?”
“The older guy was talking to someone at the front of the train, but I couldn’t hear the words. Are you coming? Is Mom there?”
Sweet how quickly he’d started calling Dan that.
“I’ve got my stuff, and I’m on my way back. Your mom’s trying to find a way in. They’ve locked the main door, but don’t worry—that won’t stop us.”
One of Blackwood’s jobs was penetration testing of major US installations, including the White House. I’d managed to sneak past security twice last year. The sphere wouldn’t be a problem.
“Okay.”
“Go and hide now.”
Race hung up, and I knew he’d do whatever he damn well wanted. Brilliant.
CHAPTER 5
“THE FRONT ENTRANCE is a no-go,” Dan told us when we got back to the Steampunk Saloon. “The doors are solid, and people keep walking up to them to read the sign.”
“What does it say?” I asked.
“That there’s a temporary closure due to a power outage.”
Mack glanced up from her laptop. “The power’s down, all right. The cameras inside aren’t working, and the control room’s gone dark. SciPark has an internal message board, and a guy called Jeffrey Monteith posted to say he’s evacuated the riders and stayed to keep an eye on the place. According to the staff directory, he’s a supervisor.”
“Interesting.”
“You know what else is interesting? The directory also lists a Kelbyn Monteith. He’s a ranger in the space sector.” She angled the screen towards me. “See?”
Oh, I saw. I saw the same wavy brown hair, the same slightly protruding eyes, the same narrow jaw. Jeffrey looked to be in his late forties, and I put Kelbyn at twenty-two or twenty-three. The family resemblance was all too obvious. What were the chances that father and son were in this together?
“Find out everything you can about them.”
“Luke’s already doing that.” She pressed a few keys. “We’ve got a better recording of him. Listen.”
The voice came through my earpiece, and the unsub still sounded nervous. Edgy. “Why is this seat empty?”
“The kid sitting there got scared just before the ride started,” Vine told him. “He ran back outside.”
“Check the wormhole,” the man ordered an accomplice. “Make sure he left.”
“Ah, fuck,” I muttered.
“It’s okay,” Dan told me. “Caleb’s hiding, and he’s good at that.”
“It’s not okay. He called me, and he’s moving around in there. I told him to stay hidden, but…”
Fear flickered in Dan’s eyes. “We need to get in. I found another door on the far side of the sphere, but it’s got no handles on the outside. Looks like a fire exit. There’s also a moveable camera on a pole near the snack kiosk over there.” She pointed to a small building shaped like a flying saucer. “It points towards the rear door.”
“Is the camera manual or automatic?”
“On a timer, I think. The motion arc covers the door, but the camera sweeps back and forth at regular intervals. There are two points where the door’s invisible to the all-seeing eye—the shortest gap is only five seconds, but the longest gives us twenty-seven seconds to open the door and get inside between passes.”
Less than half a minute? Great. Plus we’d need to avoid arousing the suspicions of the employees at the kiosk or any punters who happened to be hanging around.
“Can you stop the feed?” I asked Mack.
“Still working on it. Whoever set up the security cameras used a different password, and that one isn’t so easy to crack.”
“Guess we’d better keep our fingers crossed for the monkeys, eh?”
“There might be a way to lever the door open,” Ana said. “The mechanism on the pod thing was easy to bypass.”
“So let’s take a look.”
The Steampunk Saloon was getting busier, but a few drops of rain had encouraged people to eat indoors, leaving Mack in relative solitude as she huddled under a huge umbrella outside. We borrowed the bathroom to change our jackets and stash extra weapons about our persons, and a quick rummage through Bradley’s bags of crap revealed a bunch of scarves we could use to cover our faces. The only downside? They were multicoloured and decorated with dinosaur silhouettes. I picked out the T-Rex and passed Ana the velociraptor. It seemed appropriate.
Mack had patched Vine’s device into the comms system, and every so often, we heard another demand to stay still or be quiet. The remainder of the speech was too garbled or too far away to make out, although the hum of voices in the background told us people were talking.
The few drops of rain turned into a steady drizzle as Dan, Ana, Carmen, and I crossed the plaza towards the sphere, the four of us hurrying as if we were looking for shelter. Unfortunately, a bunch of other people had come up with the same idea, and where the sphere bulged outwards, they’d huddled beneath the overhang.
“I hate having an audience,” Ana muttered.
“You and me both.”
But the situation was what it was, and we had to make the best of it.
Over the years, we’d all learned enough about security cameras to understand their fields of view. We stood just out of range, pretending to discuss where to go next as we waited for the right moment.
“Now,” I said, and Mack started a countdown.
We moved as one to
