Touch & Go (41 page)

“You have eight minutes,” Justin replied crisply.

“We understand. And the account number for the wire instructions is…” Nicole rattled off the long string, repeating it twice. At the computer, Hawkes continued to tap the keyboard frantically, exchanging messages with Denbe’s cellular provider, who would now be working to trace the incoming call. Tessa stood at Hawkes’s shoulder, Wyatt beside her. She found herself holding her breath.

“The insurance company has instructed us to wire one million dollars as a good faith deposit,” Nicole continued. “They won’t release the remaining eight million without further assurances of your safety.”

“In six minutes,” Justin replied tersely, “that account either receives nine million dollars or they blow us up.”

“Are they there, Justin?” Nicole continued evenly. “Can I speak to the person in charge?”

“No.”

“No, I can’t speak…?”

“No, they aren’t here. We’re alone in the control room. We can keep them locked out, meaning we are safe from immediate physical assault. Explosives, on the other hand…” Justin’s tone was droll. He didn’t seem nervous to Tessa. Just…grim. A man who knew the score.

Beside her, Wyatt mouthed the words
control room
. Wyatt studied her. Tessa shrugged.

“Libby and Ashlyn are with you, but not your captors? You are alone?” Nicole continued. While her face remained impassive, one leg trembled beneath her. High-stakes poker, with other people’s lives at stake.

“Five minutes,” Justin said. Then, for the first time, his tone broke. “Look, I know you’re trying to trace this call. They know you’re trying to trace this call. I’m telling you, you don’t have time. For the next five minutes, my family and I are safe. That’s as good as it’s going to get. Now you get that fucking money in that fucking account, or your next visual will be myself, my wife and my daughter being blown to shit!”

“I understand. Your safety is our number one concern. Of course, we have to work with the insurance company—”

“Listen to me. This is not a negotiation. I am not in touch with our captors, they are not on this line. They are standing very far away, holding a detonator. They are monitoring the account. Either the money appears by three eleven, or they flip the kill switch. Those are the options.”

“Control room,” Wyatt muttered again beside Tessa. He was
nudging her with his arm, as if that term should mean something to her. “The pile of personal possessions on the kitchen counter—wallet, jewelry…”

“Justin,” Nicole was saying, “I understand your concerns. Trust me, we’re on your side. But if they have wired your room with explosives, how do we know they won’t activate them either way?”

“Because rich men have incentive to get away. Poor men don’t.”

Then, Tessa got it. She turned toward Wyatt, keeping her voice low even as her eyes widened. “Prison. Prisons have control rooms. But, how could you smuggle a family into a prison unless…”

Wyatt was already one step ahead: “The new state facility,” he supplied grimly. “Completed last year, never been open. Locals still furious over the lost job opportunities, the waste of taxpayer funds. How much you want to bet—”

“It was built by Denbe Construction.”

“Meaning Justin knows exactly where he is. And if he’s still not providing his location…”

“He’s scared.”

“Suspects must really have access to explosives.” Wyatt grabbed a yellow legal pad. Wrote in giant black marker:
WIRE $$ NOW
. And held it up for Nicole.

The special agent never blinked, simply stated into the phone: “Good news, Justin. The insurance company has approved the full nine million. The money is being transferred as we speak. Couple of minutes more, Justin. Then you and your family will be safe.”

Tessa and Wyatt didn’t wait for the rest. They were already bolting from the room, Wyatt on the radio, sending out the request for backup over the preset emergency channel. Then, they were in the parking lot, piling into his cruiser.

“Thirty miles north,” Wyatt declared. “We should be there in twenty.”

He hit the sirens and roared onto the road.

Chapter 38

JUSTIN WAS ON THE PHONE. Talking, talking, talking.

Beside him, Ashlyn was bobbing up and down, looking more like herself, in her old pajamas, and yet not at all like herself, with her tightly drawn features and the anxiety radiating from every taut line of her body.

And myself… Facing the possible final ten minutes of my own life, I didn’t know what to do. I wandered around the room, which was bigger than I would’ve thought, with a broad, horseshoe-shaped control desk plopped in the middle of a larger area lined by charging walkie-talkies and several doors I assumed led to supply closets. I found the infamous key drop, an open metal tube into which, in case of emergency, a corrections officer would drop all keys, rendering them inaccessible to attacking inmates, and thus keeping all ammunition and firearms closets secured.

I turned my attention to the massive control desk, gliding my hands over the plain white Formica desktop, the various flat-screen monitors inlaid at an angled rise, then the half a dozen microphones that sprouted up like weeds. The corrections officers were locked in here, I thought, isolated by their very powerfulness. A mini set of wizards of Oz, seeing all, commanding all, but forever trapped behind the barred curtain.

Above me, mounted from the ceiling, hung a line of four flat-screen
TVs. They were off now, but I bet this was how our captors had monitored us, reviewing various images from the dozens if not hundreds of security cameras. They had watched us cry. Watched us fight. Watched us slowly but surely break down into lesser beings, the total deconstruction of a family.

It made me suddenly furious. That they’d violated our privacy like that. Sat here in this locked room, maybe even took bets on our misery. Ten bucks says the woman cries first, five bucks says the girl can’t pee with an audience.

I hated them. Intensely. Virulently. Which, perversely, made me want to see them. Turnabout is fair play. If they’d once been able to study us like animals in a zoo, well, we had the control now. And there was nothing in Z’s terms that said we couldn’t monitor them.

I bent over, and while my husband cursed out some FBI agent for not having magically done exactly what he’d told her to do exactly when he’d demanded that she do it, I started powering up control screens and exploring the surveillance options.

“Mom?” Ashlyn appeared beside me.

“Just kicking the tires, honey. Now, if we wanted to see the view from the cameras outside the prison, which buttons would you hit?”

Ashlyn leaned around me, tapped the control screen where a white button indicated security and we both studied the menu that came up next.

The screen had a clock in the lower right-hand corner. It read 3:09. Two minutes till our captors gave up and launched a counterattack. Possibly even blew us up, as Justin was alleging.

I didn’t think Z would take out the room. He struck me as the kind of man who’d neatly eliminate the door. That way he could march through the smoking rubble, pull out a Glock 10 and tend to the rest of his business up close and personal. Waste less ammo.

On the monitor, a white van suddenly came into view. Growing larger and larger until it nearly filled the screen. I found myself staring
at Radar, sitting behind the wheel. He was not looking up at the camera, no doubt mounted above the prison’s intake door, but was looking toward the passenger’s side, as if expecting someone.

Picking up. He was picking up Z and Mick, his cocaptors.

But he was supposed to be on the roof. Armed to the teeth and ready to fire upon first responders.

Unless the money had been paid. Wired straight into the account. Justin had been right: Rich men had nine million more reasons to make a quick getaway than poor men.

The clock on the bottom of the screen hit 3:10.

Radar, holding up his phone, saying something I couldn’t hear to a person I couldn’t see.

My gaze, flying up to find Justin. “Did they pay? Is it okay, did the insurance company pay?”

Justin, into the phone: “Have the funds been received? It’s three eleven, tell me the funds have been received?”

The FBI agent, her voice as crisp and authoritative as ever: “Justin, I have word that the money is being transferred right now.”

Radar, still studying his phone, hitting some buttons. Talking to the person I couldn’t see.

“Justin, the funds have been delivered. Can you please advise us as to your location? We have officers standing by for the safe recovery of your family.”

“Mom!” Ashlyn cried, clutching my arm, bouncing even higher at the news. We were safe, funds received, we were safe, the police would be on their way.

Justin, sounding abruptly tired, as if the good news had taken more out of him than our impending deaths: “We are currently at the new state prison. Located—”

Boom!

I turned toward the control room door, breath already catching. Expecting to spot Z, striding through the smoke and rubble like the
Terminator, ready to mow down all the officers in the police station, or, in our case, a helpless family stuck in a control room.

The locked door was intact, the bank of barred windows intact. No Z. No smoking rubble.

“Mom!”
My daughter, yanking on my arm as she screamed hysterically.

I turned back just in time to see Mick come barreling out of the door I’d assumed was a supply closet. He was grinning madly and, true to Z’s words, was armed to the teeth.

“Miss me?” he called out.

Then he leveled his semiauto, and while we stood there, the proverbial fish in a barrel, he opened fire.

WHILE WYATT DROVE, Tessa worked the phone. She got Chris Lopez on the line, demanding to know anything and everything he could tell them about the state prison Denbe Construction had built in the wilds of New Hampshire.

Surrounded by six hundred acres of mountains, marshes and deep wilderness. Closest town twenty miles away. Nearest PD even slightly beyond that. A facility so remote it was set up to house its own security team, except given that the prison was never funded, those barracks remained empty.

Help wasn’t anywhere close. Looking at fifteen to twenty minutes ETA for first responders.

While the police radio crackled to life with fresh reports. Sound of shots fired coming over Justin Denbe’s cell phone. Sound of female screaming. Call now dropped, unable to reconnect with the Denbe family.

“Drive faster,” Tessa ordered Wyatt.

“Now see, this is why you should hang out with sheriffs. We not only know how to drive faster, but we can also drive smarter.”

Abruptly, Wyatt swung the vehicle left. They careened onto a dirt path Tessa would’ve sworn was a deer trail. She grabbed the oh shit handle just as he hit the gas.

The cruiser launched, then settled into a bone-crunching gallop.

“In the state of New Hampshire, the shortest distance between two points is rarely paved. But if you know where to look, you can almost find a dirt road. Ten minutes,” he announced. “Ten more minutes, then we’ll have the prison in our sight.”

“THE DOOR,” Justin was yelling. “The door, the door, the door!”

At first, I didn’t understand what he meant. Justin had gone down, the first shot from Mick’s gun dropping him like a rock, red blooming across his shoulder. Ashlyn had screamed, then instinctively dove behind me, leaving me standing alone, on one side of the vast control desk, Mick, still grinning madly, on the other.

He turned his gun toward me. I ducked, then heard a grunt and watched him rock to the side; Justin, down but not out, had kicked him in the side of the kneecap.

“Door!” my husband yelled again.

Then I got it. We were trapped. In a space this small, Mick would mow us down in a matter of seconds. Escape back into the prison, where we could get out or at least spread out, was our only chance at survival.

I bobbed up, ducking my head as I frantically stabbed at the touch screen, willing myself to stumble upon the door controls. We’d been in the security menu. I’d seen a door lock override. Where, where, where…

Another shot. Two, three, four. My shoulders hunched reflexively and I practically felt the whistle of the last bullet as it whizzed by my ear.

Then my daughter was suddenly standing, her eyes wild, her long
hair a tangled mass as she heaved up a rolling desk chair and threw it at Mick with all her strength.

“I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I fucking hate you.”

A second desk chair went flying and now Mick was ducking for cover, swearing as he tangled briefly in one set of rolling chair legs, went down, tried to recover, got nailed by Justin again in the kneecaps and landed hard.

There! Override. I jabbed at the bright red button. “Are you sure?” a dialogue box squawked at me. Override releases all inner and outer doors…

Override, override, override! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

Ashlyn had found the walkie-talkies. A dozen had sat in a neat row of charging stations around the outer perimeter. Now she turned them into missiles, humming them one after another at the top of Mick’s head. He cursed again, pinned behind the control desk by her relentless assault.

The control room door swung open just as Ashlyn hurled the last walkie-talkie. I couldn’t see Justin, but I heard his voice, commanding clearly:

“Run, goddammit. Get her out of here!”

I didn’t need to be told twice. We had our deal, parent to parent. Either one of us was expendable. It was Ashlyn who mattered.

I grabbed my daughter’s hand and pulled her from the control room.

While behind us, Mick once again opened fire.

WYATT HIT THE CREST OF THE HILL HARD. Briefly, the cruiser was airborne, and in that moment, Tessa spotted it. A vast compound at least ten miles away, perched up on a knoll, dominated by a large, obviously institutional building, and surrounded by miles and miles of razor-wire fencing.

The cruiser landed. They both grunted on impact. Then Wyatt was fishtailing back down the dirt road, hurtling them out of the woods, onto pavement. A hard right, and they were headed north, flying up a newly paved road as trees blurred into a long green tunnel around them.