Hunted (7 page)

“It’s night,” she replied cautiously.

“That’s good, because the next thing I was expecting you to tell me was that if I saw one and followed it, I’d be finding me a pot o’ gold.”

Her lips re-formed in a thin line. “I’m offering you a way out.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you saying that I can trust you, Caroline?”

Caroline could almost feel the heightening tension surrounding him. Her own nerves were stretching to the breaking point. It occurred to her once again that she didn’t really know Reed Ware at all, and she had no idea what he might be capable of if his demands weren’t met. She had no means by which to judge whether or not he would do exactly as he had threatened. Her gut might tell her he wouldn’t do it, but her gut could very well be wrong. For all she knew, he might be prepared to kill every single hostage in that room.

But even if she didn’t fully trust him, she sure as hell needed him to trust her.

“Yes,” Caroline said, and meant it, at least as far as it was possible within the parameters of the job and the situation. Even though she was prepared to lie to him, trick him, or do just about whatever it took to get him and the others out of there alive, what he could trust in was that she would do the best she could for him, for as long as she could.

Ware looked at her—at the camera, damn it—steadily. “Just how big a fool do you think I am?”

Fair enough
. At least he was thinking logically enough to be wary. She decided to take the risk of upsetting him and probe into what was possibly the heart of the matter with a straightforward question.

“Is this about killing yourself, Reed?” she asked. “Because if that’s what’s on your mind, I’d like to talk to you about it.”

He looked up at the camera, arrested. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. It was wry, faintly mocking, and totally aimed at her. It made her breath catch.

“Are you asking me if I’m suicidal?” he demanded.

This was no time to beat about the bush. “Yes.”

For a moment he stared silently into the camera. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t read anything in his expression at all.

Finally he said, “Believe me, I’m prepared to do what I have to do.”

Caroline’s gaze cut sharply toward the men as a pager chirped: Dixon’s, she saw as he pulled it from his belt and frowned down at it. Looking up to find her looking at him, he narrowed his eyes at her and made a slicing gesture with his hand that she interpreted as,
release the talk button
.

Until that moment, she hadn’t realized that she’d still been holding it down. She lifted her thumb away from the button: Ware could no longer hear her, or anything going on in the van.

“Hollis Bayard’s here,” Dixon said.

CHAPTER
FIVE

C
AROLINE
’
S EYES WIDENED
with surprise. Her first instinctive stirring of hope at the prospect of solving the crisis by giving Ware what he wanted was immediately dashed by what she saw in Dixon’s face. Every instinct she possessed told her that there was no way they were meeting Ware’s demands for any other reason than to pacify him until they could kill him. Talking him out seemed to be no one’s priority except her own.

Her stomach tightened with tension. There was something about this that was just not fitting together properly in her mind.

“Who
is
Hollis Bayard? And what is he to Ware?” she asked.

“He’s a damned street punk who was busted for felony possession a few hours ago. No judge available until the twenty-sixth, so he got tucked away in The Swamp.” Dixon shook his head. “How he got mixed up with Ware I don’t know.”

“You really mean to let him go in there?” she asked.

Before Dixon could answer, Villard’s cell phone rang. Digging it out of a pouch on his belt, Villard looked at the number and said on a note of triumph, “Aha. Here’s our EMP expert at last,” before answering the call and then listening intently.

Caroline remembered from her bombs course that EMP stood for electromagnetic pulse.

She looked a question at Dixon.

“Villard’s got a guy who uses a device that emits EMP signals to disable the connection between bombs and their detonators,” Dixon told her in a low voice. “He thinks he might be able to take out Ware’s dead man’s switch with it. The thing is basically a signal jammer, and it’s been used successfully in situations like this a number of times. If it works for us tonight—” He broke off as Villard said into the phone, “Goddamn technology,” and disconnected.

The disappointment in his face was obvious.

“What?” Dixon said.

“Turns out interrupting the EMP signal is only going to work if we get up close. There’s too much interference,” Villard answered with obvious disappointment. Then he added, “Shit,” and strode toward the door.

Dixon looked at Caroline. “Looks like the answer to your question is yes: Hollis Bayard is really going in there,” he said, and turned to follow Villard. Caroline caught his arm.

“What’s really happening?” she asked, because under the circumstances, believing that the powers that be had folded and Ware was about to be given everything he’d asked for, was right up there with believing in the Tooth Fairy.

“Here’s the deal: unless we can come up with another angle fast, we’re going to let the asshole
think
he’s getting the whole shebang—Bayard, a helicopter, a couple of suitcases full of money.” Dixon’s expression was grim. “Then when he’s out in the open heading for the helicopter, we’ll have our EMP guy in place, along with snipers to take Ware down if our guy succeeds in interrupting the signal. If he can’t, if it doesn’t work—and depending on the circumstances it’s possible that we won’t be able to take a shot even if it does—well, Ware still won’t get very far. We’re not planning to let him take off. If we have to—if he’s got hostages with him, and we think he’s serious about killing them—we’ve got a GPS tracker on the helicopter, and air support ready to pounce the minute it lands. Whichever way this plays out, bottom line is Ware has zero chance of getting away with this.” Pulling away, Dixon followed Villard, saying to Caroline over his shoulder, “Go on and tell him Bayard’s here. The helicopter and money, too.”

“You’re under ten minutes, Caroline,” Ware warned, jerking her attention back toward the monitors.

Feeling slightly nauseated, Caroline registered the action on all the monitors with a glance. On one were Ware and the hostages. On another, she watched as the last member of the SWAT team made his stealthy ascent to the second-story veranda, where around seven team members already waited. On a third, she saw a small helicopter approaching the house, flying lower than the police choppers that were circling, shining its light over the side yard as it sought a place to put down. The smooth waters of the swimming pool gleamed bright blue in the chopper’s strong light. Then the water started to ruffle, and the fronds of the ferns and the leaves and blooms of the flowers in the landscaping flanking the pool started to sway.

The helicopter was landing.

Was Ware’s thinking really so disordered that he actually believed he would be allowed to just climb inside and fly away?

You have no idea what this is about
. She could almost hear Ware saying it.

Caroline wet her lips.

“Hollis Bayard is here,” she said into the phone. For a second there, she thought Ware looked relieved. Then, as she added, “So is the helicopter. And the money,” Ware’s face turned inscrutable while her father closed his eyes.

In that moment Martin looked incredibly old. And tired.

Again Caroline felt a stirring of unexpected feeling for her father. Harsh as he could be, as bullying and occasionally violent as he had been to her and her mother and sisters before his subsequent virtual abandonment of them, their relationship was still apparently not as dead as she had thought. Impossible as it was to fathom, on some level she obviously still cared about him.

I need counseling,
was the acerbic corollary thought that popped into her head.

“I want to talk to Bayard. Get him in there, get him on the phone,” Ware said.

Caroline nodded, forgetting Ware couldn’t see her.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

Putting the phone down, Caroline walked to the door and opened it. The fresh night air was more than welcome after the stale interior of the van. The rattle of a generator was the dominant note in the sea of sound that greeted her. So many klieg lights had been set up that it was now bright as day around the van, and she squinted a little and shielded her eyes as she looked for Dixon. He was standing with a small group beside a police cruiser parked in the middle of the street. Someone opened the rear door behind the driver’s seat, reached in, and, with a hand protecting the top of the emerging person’s head, pulled the backseat passenger out.

The emerging passenger was a young man, Caroline saw at a glance, and if she’d been about fifteen she probably would have found herself thinking he was way cute. Medium height, wiry thin in the way of some still-growing adolescents. Black hair long enough to curl around his neck, a lean face with good bone structure, deep-set dark eyes and a full mouth. Dressed in jeans and a gray zip-front hoodie with a Saints logo that was currently unzipped to reveal part of a white wife-beater. A tattoo—some kind of ornate cross—on the side of his neck, small silver hoops in his ears.

It was immediately obvious that he was a prisoner: his hands were cuffed behind his back.

Hollis Bayard, she had little doubt.

“Wallace,” Dixon greeted her. He and the others—Villard and Esteban were among them—had broken off what had seemed to be an intense conversation as she approached.

She kept her voice low enough so that Bayard, who was being watched closely by the uniforms, couldn’t hear. “Ware wants to talk to him on the phone.”

Dixon and the others exchanged looks. “That works,” Dixon said. “You go on back in there and get Ware on the phone. Tell him Bayard’s coming in to talk to him. And get those monitors shut down before Bayard can get a look at them. We don’t want him telling Ware about our arrangements out here.”

“Will do.” Caroline gave a nod, and returned to the van. As soon as she glanced at the monitors, she saw that something was wrong. The monitor that had allowed her to see Ware and the hostages had gone dark.

“What happened?” she asked the technicians, tapping the darkened library monitor with a forefinger.

“Right after you left, the camera shut down,” Isaacs said. “I’m almost certain Ware did it, but I was working on trying to get eyes inside other parts of the house and I missed exactly what he did. Then he must have noticed the opening in the curtains, because they got closed all the way and we lost that, too. Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. Listen, Dixon wants the rest of the monitors shut down temporarily. Hollis Bayard’s on his way in.” Taking a deep breath, Caroline picked up the phone.

“Reed?” she said. “Are you there?”

“I’m here. Do you have Bayard?”

The sound of Ware’s voice was so welcome that Caroline felt a flutter of relief. She realized that in some shadowy corner of her mind, seeing the darkened monitor had made her fear that he had been killed while she was gone. She realized something else, too: the reason she had felt such instant anxiety was because she was
expecting
him to be killed.

Nothing in Dixon’s or anyone else’s attitude made her believe that they wanted him to emerge from this alive.

Frowning, she replied, “Yes, he’s here. He’s on the way in to speak to you.” Then she added impulsively, “You shut down the camera.”

“Yeah, I did.” He sounded unapologetic.

A sound at the door of the van told her that it was being opened.

“Reed, listen: you need to surrender. It’s the only option you have if you want to live through this.” She stopped talking as the creak of footsteps and the drone of voices told her that whoever had been at the door was now inside the van.

“You’re living in la-la land if you think my surrendering would make any difference at all,” Ware said.

Then Dixon and Bayard and the two uniforms escorting him crowded in behind her. Caroline glanced around at them in acknowledgment.

Dixon said, “Get Bayard up there.”

Bayard was pushed forward just as Ware said, “If Bayard’s there, put him on the line.”

Bayard was standing next to Caroline now, looking sullen. He kept wetting his lips, and his eyes darted around suspiciously. His shoulders were hunched, and he swayed from side to side slightly as if he was too nervous to stand still.

“Detective Reed Ware wants to talk to you,” Caroline told Bayard. “I’m assuming you know who he is.”

For a moment Bayard held her gaze. She saw that his eyes were the color of caramel, that he was still young enough to have downy peach fuzz rather than whiskers on his cheeks, and that he was sweating bullets.

He’s just a boy. And he looks scared to death
.

“Yeah,” Bayard said.

“Is the phone on speaker?” Dixon asked, and Caroline shook her head.

“Not on this end. On Ware’s it is, just like before.”

Dixon nodded. “We’re going to be listening to everything you say, kid,” he warned Bayard, who gave him a surly look. “You go spouting off, and the conversation’s over, understand?” Bayard’s eyes held his for a moment before his lids drooped over them. Then he gave a barely perceptible nod.

“Okay, then.” Dixon gestured to Caroline. “Go ahead.”

Caroline depressed the talk button and said into the phone, “Reed? I have Hollis Bayard for you.”

As she started to pass the receiver to Bayard, she realized that he couldn’t take it because his hands were cuffed. Holding it up so that Bayard could speak into it, Caroline reflected that talking to Ware without being able to see him was as disconcerting as flying blind. What was going on in the library that he’d felt he needed to conceal from the view of the camera? Merely considering the possibilities gave her the jitters.

“Holly?” Ware’s voice filled the enclosed space.