the castle courtyard. Dennis turned:
'Security lockdown, security lockdown now!' he called to the man on the master control board, and with a mouse click the castle's doors were all dead-bolted.
'Call the police!' Dennis ordered next. That was also preprogrammed. An alarm system fired off a signal to the nearest police barracks. It was the robbery-alert signal, but that would be sufficient for the moment. Dennis next lifted a desk phone and punched in the police number from the sticker on his phone. The one emergency contingency they'd planned for was a robbery of their cash room, and since that would necessarily be a major crime committed by a number of armed criminals, the park's internal response to the signal was also pre-programmed. All park rides would be stopped at once, all attractions closed, and shortly people would be instructed to return to their hotel rooms, or to the parking lot, because the park was closing due to an unexpected emergency… The noise of the machine guns would have carried a long way, Dennis thought, and the park guests would understand the urgency of the moment.
This was the amusing part, Andre thought. He donned a spare white hat from one of his comrades and took the gun that Jean Paul had packed for him. A few meters away, Esteban cut the balloons loose from his hand, and they soared into the air as he, too, took up his weapon.
The children were not as overtly frightened as their parents were, perhaps thinking that this also was one of the magic things to be expected at the park, though the noise hurt their little ears and had made them jump. But fear is contagious, and the children quickly saw that emotion in their parents' eyes, arid one by one they held tight to hands and legs, looking about at the adults who were moving quickly now, around the red-shirted crowd, holding things that looked like… guns, the boys recognized the shape from their own toys, which these clearly were not.
Rene was in command. He moved toward the castle entrance, clear of the nine others who were holding the crowd in place. Looking around, he could see others outside the perimeter of his group, looking in, many crouching down now, hiding, taking what cover there was. Many of them were taking pictures, some with television cameras, and some of those would be zooming in to catch his face, but there was nothing he could do about that.
'Two!' he called. 'Select our guests!'
'Two' was Jean-Paul. He approached a knot of people roughly, and first of all grabbed the arm of a four- year-old French girl.
'No!' her mother screamed. Jean-Paul pointed his weapon at her, and she cringed but stood her ground, holding both shoulders of the child.
'Very well,' 'Two' told her, lowering his aim. 'I will shoot her, then.' In less than a second, the muzzle of his Uzi was- against the little girl's light-brown hair. That made the mother scream all the louder, but she pulled her hands back from her child.
'Walk over there,' Jean-Paul told the child firmly, pointing to Juan. The little girl did so, looking back with an open mouth at her stunned mother, while the armed man selected more children.
Andre was doing the same on the other side of the crowd. He went first of all to the little Dutch child. Anna, her special-access name tag read. Without a word, he pushed Anna's father away from the wheelchair and shoved it off toward the castle.
'My child is ill,' the father protested in English.
'Yes, I can see that,' Andre replied in the same language, moving off to select another sick child. What fine hostages these two would make.
'You bloody swine!' this one's mother snarled at him. For her trouble she was clubbed by the extended stock of Andre's Uzi, which broke her nose and bathed her face in blood.
'Mummy!' a little boy screamed, as Andre one-handed his chair up the ramp to the castle. The child turned in his chair to see his mother collapse. A park employee, a streetsweeper, knelt down to assist her, but all she did was scream louder for her son: 'Tommy!'
To her screams were soon added those of forty sets of parents, all of them wearing the red T-shirts of the Thompson company. The small crowd withdrew into the castle, leaving the rest to stand there, stunned, for several seconds before they moved off, slowly and jerkily, down to Strada Espana.
'Shit, they're coming here,' Mike Dennis saw, still talking on the phone to the captain commanding the local Guardia Civil barracks.
'Get clear,' the captain told him immediately. 'If there is a way for you to leave the area, make use of it now! We need you and your people to assist us. Leave now!'
'But, goddamnit, these people are my responsibility.'
'Yes, they are, and you can take that responsibility outside. Now!' the captain ordered him. 'Leave!'
Dennis replaced the phone, turning then to look at the fifteen person duty staff in the command center: 'People, everybody, follow me. We're heading for the backup command center. Right now,' he emphasized.
The castle, real as it appeared, wasn't real. It had been built with the modern conveniences of elevators and fire stairwells. The former were probably compromised, Dennis thought, but one of the latter descended straight down to the underground. He walked to that fire door and opened it, waving for his employees to head that way. This they did, most with enthusiasm for escaping this suddenly dangerous place. The last tossed him keys on the way through, and when Dennis left, he locked this door behind him, then raced down the four levels of square spiral stairs. Another minute and he was in the underground, which was crowded with employees and guests hustled out of harm's way by Trolls, Legionnaires, and other uniformed park personnel. A gaggle of park-security people were there, but none of them were armed with anything more dangerous than a radio. There were guns in the counting room, but they were under lock, and only a few of the Worldpark employees were trained and authorized to use them, and Dennis didn't want shots to be fired here. Besides, he had other things to do. The alternate Worldpark command post was actually outside the park grounds, just at the end of the underground. He ran there, following his other command personnel north toward the exit that led to the employees' parking lot. That required about five minutes, and Dennis darted in the door to see that the alternate command post was double-manned now. His own alternate desk was vacant, and the phone already linked to the Guardia Civil.
'Are you safe?' the captain asked.
'For now, I guess,' Dennis responded. He keyed up his castle office on his monitor.
'This way,' Andre told them. The door was locked, however. He backed off and fired his pistol at the doorknob, which bent from the impact, but remained locked, movies to the contrary. Then Rene tried his Uzi, which wrecked that portion of the door and allowed him to pull it open. Andre led them upstairs, then kicked in the door to the command center-empty. He swore foully at that discovery.
'I see them!' Dennis said into the phone. 'One man two-six men with guns-Jesus, they have kids with them!' One of them walked up to a surveillance camera, pointed his pistol, and the picture vanished.
'How many men with guns?' the captain asked.
'At least six, maybe ten, maybe more. They have taken children hostage. You get that? They've got kids with them.'
'I understand, Senor Dennis. I must leave you now and coordinate a response. Please stand by.'
'Yeah.' Dennis worked other camera controls to see what was happening in his park. 'Shit,' he swore with a rage that was now replacing shock. Then he called his chairman to make his report, wondering what the hell he would say when the Saudi prince asked what the hell was going on-a terrorist assault on an amusement park?
In his office, Captain Dario Gassman called Madrid to make his first report of the incident. He had a crisis plan for his barracks, and that was being implemented now by his policemen. Ten cars and sixteen men were now racing down the divided highway from various directions and various patrol areas, merely knowing that Plan W had been implemented. Their first mission was to establish a perimeter, with orders to let no one in or out-the last part of which would soon prove to be utterly impossible. In Madrid other things were happening while Captain Gassman walked to his car for the drive to Worldpark. It was a thirty-minute drive for him, even with lights and siren, and the drive gave him the chance to think in relative peace, despite the noise from under the hood. He had sixteen men there or on the way, but if there were ten armed criminals at Worldpark, that would not be enough, not even enough to establish an inner and outer perimeter. How many more men would he need? Would he have to call up the national response team formed a few years ago by the Guardia Civil? Probably yes. What sort of criminals would hit Worldpark at this time of day? The best time for a robbery was at closing time, even though that was what he and his men had anticipated and trained for - because that was the time all the money was ready, bundled and wrapped in canvas bags for transfer to the bank, and guarded by park personnel and sometimes his own… that was
