Takeover (17 page)

12:55
P.M
.

Theresa gazed at the dead girl. Auburn curls crowned Cherise’s face, in which a slash of red lips and sightless blue eyes stood out against the paled skin. A screwdriver lay a few inches from her right hand. She had been wearing a shiny cream blouse and dove gray slacks; the slacks were spattered with a fine mist of red dots, but the center of the blouse disappeared into a gaping, bloody hole. He must have fired more than once; Theresa did not know how delicate the trigger on such a weapon would be, how easy it would be to blow away a target’s entire rib cage before the index finger could loosen. It looked pretty damn easy.

“You killed her,” Theresa breathed, the words sounding ridiculous even to her own ears.

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“I had hoped—Why the hell did you
kill
her?”

“She didn’t cooperate.”

Theresa eyed the Craftsman. Did he make Cherise use the screwdriver to pry open the cash boxes, and she pulled it on him? Did he shoot her in a bizarre parody of self-defense?

But what were they doing behind the cages? Tiny dots of high-velocity blood spatter and one neat bullet hole speckled the cabinet doors to the left of the body, so she had been shot right where she lay. “What were you doing back here?”

“What?”

“What did you come back here for? The cash is in the cages, so why come back here?”

“I thought there might be more.”

“That’s why she had the screwdriver in her hand? Because you thought there might be more boxes for her to pry open?”
Not
self-defense, then.

“What are you doing, Theresa? Investigating?”

I look at scenes like this every day,
she wanted to tell him,
and this one isn’t adding up.
Besides, every moment she kept him occupied gave Jessica Ludlow another moment to return. “I want to know why you killed her. What happened?”

“I walked her up to the teller cages and told her to pry open the cash drawers.” He began to guide Theresa out, talking as they walked. “Everything was cool. But when I wanted to check out the areas back here, she turns around and starts to argue. She says this area is just for paperwork, which is okay with me, but she waves this screwdriver under my nose. At that point I felt it both necessary and prudent to shoot her. She also served as a good lesson for the rest of you.” His words, so mocking, did not match his voice.

“You might have gotten out of this without murdering. Now there’s no going back.”

He squeezed her elbow again in a vein-crushing grip as they exited the teller area. “What makes you think I
want
to go back? What do you think is the whole point of this?”

“Good question.” She turned to the security guards this time, taking in their faces, the way their bodies tensed at her passage, as if frustrated that they could not help her. The dog let out one sharp whine. “What
is
the point of all this?”

“The point is that I’m more than willing to kill to get what I want.” He announced this not only to her but to her fellow hostages as they returned to the reception desk. “Isn’t that right, Theresa?”

They turned to her with pleading looks, wanting her to disagree. She could not. Despite the reluctance in his voice, if not his words, Lucas
had
killed without apparent hesitation or remorse. “He killed her. Cherise is dead.”

Missy cried out. Brad and the security guards gasped, a single, unanimous drawing-in of breath.

Lucas released her arm, leaving a tingly sensation as the blood flowed back. “Sit back down, Theresa. Missy, let go of the kid. His mama’s overdue.”

“You can’t shoot this baby,” the receptionist intoned, just as Theresa had a scant ten minutes before.

“I’d set him aside if I were you. The bullets will go right through him into your lap.”

“You ain’t going to shoot this little boy.”

“Theresa,” Lucas said. “Take the kid from Missy.”

She had been scanning the street outside—was that a movement, or a wave of heat distorting the air?—and blurted out without thinking, “Why me?”

“Because Missy wants to be a hero, an inspiration to receptionists everywhere. You, on the other hand, will do anything to get back to your man and your daughter.”

“Not hold up a baby boy as a target for you.”

“You sure?”

Was she? Didn’t she owe it to her own child to stay alive, no matter the cost? Then what the hell was she doing here? Why hadn’t she let Paul go, to be sure she could keep being a mother to Rachael?

But could she sacrifice someone else’s child?

Make your decision,
her grandfather had said.
Stick to it.

“No,” she told him. “I won’t.”

He lifted the automatic pistol, aiming downward at both the young boy and the receptionist. “Suit yourself.”

“It isn’t smart,” Theresa warned.

“Who said I was smart?”

“You did,” she insisted desperately. His finger closed on the trigger.

The phone rang.

The elevator bell dinged. Theresa heard a frenzied rush of footsteps.

Jessica Ludlow threw herself into the lobby, toting a visibly stuffed red backpack. “Stop! Don’t kill him!”

Lucas ignored the phone and pointed his automatic rifle at the floor. “Well, well. Ethan’s mommy has returned.”

The young woman threw the backpack at Lucas’s feet, went to her knees, and pulled her child back from Missy. He clutched his stuffed Browns mascot, crying.

Lucas snatched up the bag with one hand. “Take a look at this, Bobby. The little lady came through.”

“I filled it up.” Jessica’s breath came in gasps. “The bank-loan department had cash in drawers. Hundred-dollar bills.”

“Just lying around?” Lucas said. He crouched on the floor next to the large black duffel and opened the red backpack as if it were a present plucked from under a Christmas tree. Theresa had just seen his handiwork in Cherise, but she felt positive, in her heart of hearts, that Lucas felt relieved to spare Ethan. Most people had a soft spot for children, she thought. It didn’t make him any less dangerous.

The phone continued to ring.

“No,” Jessica Ludlow explained. Stress made her voice bounce off the walls. “The cops met me. You said that was okay as long as I came back.”

“I did. Relax, Jessie.” He had emptied half the backpack when he asked, “Did they fill this bag?” He began to remove the bundles of money and place them in the oversize end pocket of one of the black duffels. He stacked them carefully, perhaps to fully utilize the space.

“No, I did. I told them not to add any dye packs or anything.” She cradled Ethan’s head under her chin. He let out a shout now and then, but, it seemed, more as communication than as notes of distress.

Lucas’s movements slowed. “How much is here?”

“I’m…I’m not sure.”

“Of course you are.” His momentary elation faded before Theresa’s eyes, and his voice turned cold and accusing. “They would have told you, because they’d expect me to ask.”

Jessica Ludlow trembled. “Eight hundred forty thousand. I know you said a million, but—”

“That isn’t good enough.”

“I filled the bag.”

“Not enough.”

Jessica wrapped her arms around her baby and sank back against the marble information desk. Lucas continued to transfer the money in quick, deliberate movements.

“You have over a million,” Theresa said, “with what you got from the teller cages.”

He glanced at her, and somehow the fury in his eyes frightened her more than his gun. “I didn’t ask you.”

After he emptied the bag, he zipped the end compartment closed and folded the now-empty red backpack into a side pocket. Then he stood and whirled in a quick 360, surveying his partner as he spun. “Keep an eye on your car, Bobby. That two o’clock shipment is getting closer. We might as well wait for it.”

“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 Lucas’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?”

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.”

Over the speaker they heard Lucas’s voice, slightly muted as he turned away from the receiver to speak to Theresa, but still clear. “Chris wants me to take the two o’clock shipment and go. This is acceptable to me, provided a SWAT team doesn’t come along with it, provided all the people here cooperate in moving the money for me—got that, team?—and provided no one and nothing comes near that Mercedes parked outside. That’s the deal we’re working on, Theresa, to bring you up to speed. The problem is, like Bobby, I don’t trust cops, and I don’t trust the great Chris Cavanaugh. I think maybe he thinks I won’t strike back when double-crossed. So I just need you to clarify what happens to people who don’t cooperate, like Cherise, because obviously they have no camera feeds in the cubicles behind the teller cages. Understand?”

Silence, but on the monitor, Patrick could see her head move in a small nod.

“So, Theresa, what happens to people who don’t cooperate?” He held out the phone.

A slight brushing sound, then Theresa’s voice. “Cherise is dead. He shot her.”

“Damn,” Cavanaugh muttered.

“Hardly a surprise,” Patrick said.

Theresa asked, “Is Paul all right?”

Patrick dropped his cigarette into Jason’s empty water bottle. He hadn’t even called to check. Cavanaugh caught his eye, and Patrick shrugged. Cavanaugh pushed the “talk” button on the phone.

“He’s at the hospital, Theresa. That’s all I can tell you,” he added before changing the subject. “Did you see Cherise?”

“I did. She’s very, very dead, believe me. It was an explosive sight.”

A second of quiet and then a whistling sound. The receiver made a clanging noise, as if it had been dropped.

Patrick stared at the monitor in disbelief. “He hit her!”

“What?” Cavanaugh stood, moving closer to the screen, though he could see perfectly well from his chair. Lucas had ripped the phone from Theresa’s hand before punching her in the face with his right fist. It had to have been hard; it knocked her completely off her feet, so that now she sprawled across Missy and Brad.

“Shit!”
Patrick screamed.

Lucas picked up the receiver, dangling by its cord against the outer wall of the reception desk. “Excuse me a minute, Chris. Theresa and I need to have a chat.”

He hung up.

Theresa had curled and rolled to all fours, trying to raise herself. With the M4 carbine in his left hand, Lucas grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck and pulled her up, marching her away before she could get her feet underneath her.

“Take the shot!” Patrick shouted, looking to the assistant chief for some backup, but the man merely stared at the TV screen with a dumbfounded expression. “He’s going to shoot her just like he shot Cherise!”

Cavanaugh stared at the monitor. “Don’t panic.”

“Why the hell
not
? Where is the SWAT team? Where’s Mulvaney?”

“He’s not heading for the teller cages,” Cavanaugh pointed out. Indeed, Lucas headed away from the cages, toward the east wall of the lobby.

“There are classrooms there,” Patrick said. “He’s trying to get her off camera.”

“Why? If he wants to force us into a concession by killing someone, why do it out of our sight?”

“That’s how he killed Cherise. Maybe he can’t work with an audience. Take the shot. We have to take the shot.” In another few steps, they would leave the center of the lobby, the small area where the snipers could see through the clear glass.

Cavanaugh hit another button on his telephone console. “Harry, you there?”

“Roger.”

“Target A is taking a hostage away from the others, moving northeast. Anyone got a clear sight?”

“In sight, but chance of deflection too high. Target B not in range also.”

“What’s he talking about?” Patrick demanded, though he knew. A sniper could hit Lucas from across the street without a problem, but shooting through a window was another proposition altogether. The glass would alter the path of the bullet, perhaps a
little, perhaps a lot. The glass in the antique Fed building might be particularly thick, and the two people were a good distance from it, so that any deflection would be amplified by the time the bullet reached them. The odds of its striking Theresa instead of Lucas were much too high.

They continued to move, two silent, dark figures on the screen.

“Oh, God.” Patrick heard his own voice and hated the sound, almost like a whimper. “He wouldn’t rape her, would he?”

Cavanaugh snatched up the phone, hit a button. “I’ll get him back to the phone. It’s all we can do.”

“That’s not all. SWAT has to go in.” He turned to the assistant chief of police. “Viancourt. Send in the assault team.”

“I can’t. FBI’s in charge of this operation.”

“You’re here, and they’re not. You can act before they can stop you.” What Patrick heard himself suggesting was insane, he knew. It did not even slow him down.

Viancourt gave the detective his full attention. “Sucking up to me won’t get you the Homicide chief’s slot.”

Shock silenced him, the idea that he would use Theresa’s imminent murder to get in good with the assistant chief. Patrick put one hand on the man’s shoulder to make his point. Unfortunately, he wrinkled the lapel of the expensive suit by bunching it in his fist and gave the guy a little shake while he persisted in requesting the assault team. Again, déjà vu—he now played the same scene with the chief that Theresa had played with Cavanaugh, and it would have the same effect. He’d be shut out of the operation.

The assistant chief knocked his hand away with more force and speed than Patrick would have anticipated. “Get your hands off me, Detective, and control yourself.”

Cavanaugh’s call went through. On-screen they saw the hostages glance toward the ringing phone, but Lucas did not pause until he reached the other side of the room. Then he spun Theresa around and slammed her up against the marble wall, holding her there with one hand at her throat.

Patrick swallowed hard. He would never be able to explain this to his aunt. “He’s about to kill a hostage. We have to act.”

Cavanaugh answered him. “They go in shooting, we’ll have an instant bloodbath. You told me yourself that Jessica Ludlow said exactly that. We can’t do it, Patrick. Not even for Theresa.”

“We’re just supposed to stand here and let him kill her?”

“He didn’t kill Paul.”

“But he killed Cherise, with a lot less provocation. Who knows what this guy will do?”

Patrick’s hands hurt, and he glanced at them. Bright red semi-circles appeared where his fingernails bit into the flesh of the palms.

She was in sight, and still alive. But for how much longer?

“He’s underneath the air-conditioning duct,” Cavanaugh observed.

How
could
the man be so damn cool? Patrick wondered, then saw the point. “Do we have a microphone in that one?”

Cavanaugh disconnected his phone call to the receptionist’s desk and dialed Mulvaney’s HQ instead. Within seconds they could hear Lucas’s low tones and Theresa’s choked replies.

“What was that all about?” the robber demanded.

Theresa gasped for air. “What?”

“Cute choice of words.”

“You wanted me to tell them about Cherise.”

“What do you know about ‘explosive,’ Theresa?”

A pause. “I can’t breathe.”

Patrick couldn’t breathe either, standing in front of the TV screen.

“She’s stalling,” Cavanaugh told him.

“How do you know?”

“She’s debating with herself. Should she tell him we know about the explosives? Will it make him more likely to give himself up, or less?”

They saw Lucas pull her slightly forward, in order to slam her head once again. Instead she knocked at his arm with her elbow, trying to twist away, and kicked him in the groin. The M4 carbine clattered to the ground.