“They can fucking hear every word you say,” Bayard burst out fiercely, shooting Caroline a furious look. His glance then slid past her to encompass the others in the van. The chain linking his cuffs rattled as he jiggled from foot to foot. “There’s like six of them in here. Fucking butchers. Fucking scum.”
“Chill out,” Ware ordered in a warning tone as the uniforms responded to Bayard’s speech by taking nearly simultaneous steps closer to him. Ware continued, “What I need for you to do right now is just stay cool.”
As he listened to Ware, Bayard looked at Caroline, who stood closest to him because she was holding the receiver. She could feel the nervous heat emanating from his thin body.
“Easy for you to say,” Bayard told Ware bitterly. “You’re a damned cop, too.”
Ware made a sound that was impossible to interpret. “Are you hurt?”
Bayard’s eyes flickered around. Nervously. “They picked Ant up not long after me. Edie got word to me in jail. They got Ant. You hear what I’m saying?”
Caroline noticed that he hadn’t answered Ware’s question.
“Goddamn it.” The sudden anger in Ware’s voice was unmistakable.
Bayard said, “He’s just a little kid. I can’t let nothing happen to him.”
“I know,” Ware replied. “Nothing’s going to happen to him. I got this. Quit worrying about Ant for right now. What I need for you to do is focus on what’s going on here.”
“Yeah.” Shifting from foot to foot, Bayard looked suspiciously at Caroline, then cast another uneasy look around at the others and added to Ware, “So what’s the deal?”
“You come on inside the house here,” Ware told him. “Come in the front door, up the main staircase, and the room right at the top of the stairs is the library, which is where I am. You come up here to me, and then you and I are going to head out to that helicopter waiting down there by the pool and fly on out of here.” He paused. “Got it?”
Bayard’s brows snapped together. He wet his lips as he gave Caroline another hard look and glanced around at the other cops again. “They ain’t going to let that happen. They’re gonna kill us, fool.”
Bayard’s assessment was so right on that Caroline had to work to keep her expression neutral.
“No, they aren’t,” Ware said. “I’ve got this under control. You just do what I tell you.”
Bayard moved his shoulders nervously. “What about Ant?”
Ware said, “You leave me to worry about—”
Dixon interrupted by signaling to the uniforms, who grabbed Bayard by the arms and started pulling him toward the door. “That’s enough,” Dixon snapped. “Conversation’s over.”
“Hey.”
Sounding panicky, the kid yelled back at Ware, “They’re taking me out of here.”
Only then did Caroline remember to release the talk button.
“Hang in, Holly, it’s going to be okay,” Ware called back, then added, in a totally different tone, “That you I’m hearing, Dixon? Just so you know, I’m holding you personally responsible for that kid’s welfare.”
Dixon took the receiver from Caroline and spoke into it. His harsh expression was at complete odds with his voice, which was placating. “We’re getting ready to have somebody escort him in to you right now. You’re getting everything you want, so no need to go on making threats.”
Ware said, “For everybody’s sake I hope that’s what happens. Caroline, you there?”
Dixon gave her back the phone.
“Yes.” Caroline’s throat felt tight as she watched Bayard being hustled out of the van.
“This is all going to be over very shortly,” Ware said. “You’ve been doing great.”
Ordinarily the praise would have warmed her, but the thought that everything really
was
going to be all over very shortly sent an icy slither of dread coursing down her spine. What were the chances that everybody would still be alive in, say, half an hour? What were the chances that Ware would be?
She felt sick thinking about it.
“Surrendering is in your best interest,” Caroline told him. She was all too conscious of Dixon listening beside her: she couldn’t do what she really wanted to do and drop all pretense of professionalism and outright beg. Still, her voice took on an urgent note. “Reed, think for a minute. No harm will come to you or Hollis Bayard or anyone else if you give up now. Just walk out with your hands up.”
The look Dixon gave her was unreadable. He gestured to Caroline to indicate that he wanted to say something, and she held the receiver out so that he could speak into it.
“That’s right,” he said to Ware. “You do that, you walk out with your hands up, you’ll make everybody happy.”
Ware laughed, a brief, harsh sound. “I just bet I would.” Then his tone changed. “Caroline, I want you to bring Hollis Bayard in to me.” His voice hardened. “You hear that, Dixon? I want her to escort the kid, and it’s not negotiable. She’s the only one of you assholes I’m letting near me.”
“I hear you.” Dixon’s face was grim as he looked at Caroline. “You game for this, Wallace?”
Caroline hesitated. Hostage negotiators had a saying: no cop ever got killed on the far end of a phone. She was supremely conscious of the risk of ordinary police work: her first stepfather, her mother’s second husband (her mother was now on husband number three), had been shot and killed while pulling over a guy for speeding. A friend had been badly wounded responding to a convenience store robbery. Another had caught a stray bullet in the leg working crowd control at Mardi Gras. That was the reason she was so conscientious about always wearing a flak vest: in her line of work, when things went wrong they tended to go wrong bad and fast. Escorting Bayard inside the mansion would constitute putting herself in harm’s way. If the situation went south—and the situation was inevitably going to go south—she could get caught in the crossfire. She could get shot. She could get blown up. She could die.
“Yes.” Even as she said it, she knew that the driving force behind her decision was her hope that in the brief time that she could talk to Ware face-to-face, she would get him to see how hopeless his situation was and surrender. If she was forced to choose, the lives of the hostages had to come first, but she was going to do everything in her power to keep Ware alive, too. Not that she meant to let any hint of her intentions show in her face or her manner. She might be prepared to pull out all the stops and plead with Ware on the basis of their long-ago—what, friendship? flirtation?—but she wasn’t prepared to share the fact that she meant to do so with Dixon or anyone else.
“If I do this . . .” she directed her words down the phone line to Ware. Her tone made what she said to him next a challenge. “If I bring Bayard inside, you owe me three hostages.”
“Minute I set eyes on you and Bayard, I’ll let three of them go,” Ware promised.
“I’m going to hold you to that,” Caroline said. The accompanying sinking feeling she experienced was because she knew in her gut that even if he lived up to his promise, it wasn’t going to be enough to save him. Nothing short of his all-out surrender would do it.
“You do that. Come through the front door. From the way people were scooting out of it, I’m pretty sure it’s unlocked. When you get inside, close the door behind you, lock it, and bring Bayard up to the library. Straight up the stairs, first door at the top. I’ll be waiting. Oh, and Caroline? Come unarmed. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. I’m not talking on the phone anymore. This is it. I’m out.”
“Reed—” Before Caroline could say anything more, the sound of a click was followed by the hum of a dial tone: Ware had hung up.
CHAPTER
SIX
D
IXON WAS ALREADY MOVING
purposefully toward the door. Uncomfortably conscious of the increased drumming of her heart, Caroline followed him.
“Ware seems mighty friendly with you.” Dixon waited for her as she descended the steps. “You got some history with him I should know about?”
Caroline looked across the sea of official activity at the beleaguered mansion and shrugged. “I’ve seen him around. He is—was—with the NOPD.” Her tone implied that Ware’s employment with their sister department said it all. It was not a lie. It was, in fact, the absolute truth.
Just not the whole truth.
“He’s probably seen you around, too.” Dixon’s gaze slid over her, assessing her slender figure, her shapely bare legs. “Yeah. A womanizer like Ware—he would have noticed.”
“Hey,” Caroline protested as she followed him. “Think that might be a little sexist?”
“What? I can’t tell the truth? You’re hot stuff, Wallace, and that’s a fact. Sometimes it’s a pain in the butt. Sometimes, like tonight, we might be able to work it to our advantage. If it means Ware’s willing to let you get close to him, that’s a good thing. Come on.”
Caroline opened her mouth to say something, anything, that would sum up her feelings at being assessed in such a way, but wasn’t able to immediately come up with a retort with enough zing to it. Instead, she said, “What about you? Ware recognized your voice. You got some history with him I should know about?”
Dixon scowled at her. “We’ve worked together before. Guy’s a prick.”
She let the subject drop—for now—as they caught up with Villard, who was beckoning to them.
A few minutes later—standing in the middle of a semicircle composed of Dixon, Villard, and Jim Wasserman, who it turned out was one of the strangers she had noticed earlier and was also the EMP guy Villard had been talking about—she was shaking her head vigorously
no
.
“I think it’s a bad idea,” she said, though the words that had first crowded to the tip of her tongue, only to be immediately repressed, were,
Hell
,
no
.
I won’t do it
.
“Here’s the way this is going to go down,” Dixon told her, blatantly disregarding her protest. She used the too-bright glow of the klieg lights as an excuse to pull her cap lower over her eyes for fear her expression would reveal too much, as in, her instinctive, complete disinclination to do what Dixon was suggesting. “We’re going to give you the EMP device. As soon as you’re within ten feet of Ware, all you have to do is push the button. Wasserman will be watching his monitor and will know instantly whether or not it worked to disable the dead man’s switch.”
“And then you’ll—what? Have a sniper blow Ware’s head off?” Caroline couldn’t help the accusatory note in her voice.
“Or SWAT will burst in and take him out.” Dixon gave her a hard look. “Whatever seems most likely to succeed at that time. Our mission is to rescue the hostages unharmed.
That’s
the goal.”
“We should be trying to save Ware’s life, too, if we can,” she argued.
“He’s had plenty of opportunity to surrender,” Dixon retorted. “Instead he’s got a roomful of hostages in there that he’s threatening to blow up if we don’t give in to his demands. I’d say that means he deserves what he gets.”
“It’s our
job
to try to preserve his life,” Caroline said. That wasn’t just her aversion to seeing Ware get killed speaking. It was part of their serve-and-protect directive. “Remember the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics: all police officers will strive to preserve human life whenever possible.”
“Actually, she’s right,” Wasserman said mildly. Tall and lanky, maybe early thirties, he had a long, lantern-jawed face and a brown, military-style crew cut.
“Yeah, yeah.” Dixon grimaced, and waved a dismissive hand. “Fine, we will so strive.”
Caroline wanted to continue pressing the point, but she knew any additional words she might come up with would make no difference.
“You don’t think Ware’s going to notice me aiming some sort of device at him?” she said instead, feeling nervous at the thought. She didn’t like to think of Ware’s possible reaction. “That might be all it takes to make him activate the dead man’s switch. We won’t be rescuing the hostages, we’ll be the reason they’re dead.”
And I’ll be dead, too
. The memory of the shredded corpses in the videos from her bomb training class made her palms damp.
“You don’t have to aim it,” Wasserman reassured her. Caroline looked at him mistrustfully. “It’s not much bigger than a gun. It comes with a holster, so you can conceal it beneath your jacket. You don’t have to draw it to operate it: you only need to get within ten feet of the target and push the button. There’s no flash, no sound. The perp will never even know you have it.”
Caroline’s stomach turned inside out. “What if I push the button and it doesn’t work?”
“Then, nothing,” Dixon said. “Ware won’t know anything about it. It’ll be like nothing ever happened.”
“Here it is.” Wasserman handed her something that looked like a miniature DustBuster. It was made of silver metal and a square black plastic button protruded from the top. The grip felt cool and smooth as her fingers reluctantly closed around it. “All you have to do is hit the button. Here, put the holster on.”
Caroline took the black webbing harness reluctantly and fastened it around her waist. Since she already had given her duty belt and service weapon to Dixon, it fit smoothly over her flak vest. When she slid the EMP device into its holster, then let the windbreaker, unzipped for ease of access, fall into place over it, it appeared to be totally concealed.
“You see?” Wasserman sounded pleased. “Easy-peasy. He’ll never so much as catch a glimpse of it. Practice pushing the button. Remember, you have to be within ten feet of the perp for it to work.”
Caroline practiced pushing the button. “Like Ware’s not going to notice me doing that?” She gave Wasserman a doubting look.
“With any luck, he’ll be preoccupied with other things. Like Bayard’s arrival, and getting the hell out of there,” Dixon told her impatiently. “For God’s sake, pick a moment when he’s not looking at you and just do it. We’ll take care of the rest.”
“What if he frisks me?”
“If he has time to frisk you, it won’t have worked. Remember, pushing the button is the first thing you’re going to do. As soon as you’re within range. Anyway, even if he should find it he almost certainly won’t know what it is. If it comes down to it, tell him it’s a radar gun or something. He’ll be more interested in making sure you don’t have your service weapon on you, I guarantee it.” Dixon looked her over critically. “I can’t see any bulge or anything. This is going to work fine.”