Ware bared his teeth in what could only be described as a snarl. “You ever think that maybe I don’t want to live, Superintendent? And that maybe I’d be real happy to take all you people with me when I go?”
Caroline’s mouth went dry. Her heart gave a weird little kick. If this was the answer, if he really was suicidal, the hostages were in even more danger than she had supposed. She could almost feel the anxiety level in the room rising right along with hers. If the hostages were to lose their nerve, try to rush Ware, or make a break for it, it could precipitate something catastrophic. The situation would deteriorate in a hurry. Which begged the question: how much time did she really have?
Pouring oil on troubled waters was her specialty, she reminded herself. So get on with it.
“We’re working hard to get you all out of there,” Caroline said loudly, hoping to be heard throughout the room. Whether she was successful or not, she couldn’t tell: there was no visible reaction from the hostages, as far as she could see. Ware definitely heard: his eyes shifted toward the camera, and it was like he was looking right at her again. Her father heard, too: she could tell by the way his eyes also flickered in the camera’s direction, and the deepening of his scowl. “We’re committed to doing whatever it takes to keep everybody safe, so stay cool.”
“Nobody’s going to do anything stupid,” her father answered. “Except for Ware, of course, who already has.”
Ware’s mouth twisted. “I thought I told you to shut up.”
Caroline missed whatever Martin might have said in reply because her attention was distracted by the sudden movement of the SWAT team. The unit was getting into some kind of formation on the ground to the left of the house, apparently just awaiting word to ascend to the second story via the ladder: she could see them on a monitor. She knew that ideally they liked to wait until the sniper team assessed the situation first, but whether a sniper would even make the attempt tonight would depend on several factors, the most important of which was whether such an action might set off a bomb or bombs. Her eyes ran over Ware again. He was talking to her father now, his voice too low for her to decipher the words, his expression as ugly as her father’s was stony. It was obvious that there was crackling animosity between the two. Again, if Ware was wearing an explosive vest, as she’d been advised he was, she saw no sign of it. But from the way his left hand was fisted, and the position of his thumb, she was increasingly convinced that he was indeed holding a dead man’s switch. Which meant, of course, that there was indeed a bomb.
A cherry picker with a sniper in the bucket was positioning itself so that, Caroline realized as she watched the action on a monitor, it could potentially get a shot off through the gap in the library curtains.
Her heart thumped in her chest.
“You still there, Caroline?” Ware asked, his eyes shifting toward the camera again as though he could feel her looking at him. They were as shiny black as jet. His mouth was tight. He appeared to be growing increasingly restless and Caroline wondered if the hopelessness of his position might be starting to sink in. If so, and he was suicidal, that could be very bad news.
Looking at those gleaming eyes, she wondered again if Ware was on something.
“I’m here,” she replied, trying her best to sound reassuring. What she said next was part of the game plan: stall for time. “We’re still working on locating Hollis Bayard.”
“There’s a deadline on that,” Ware said. “In case I forgot to mention it. You tell Dixon and whoever else is running the show out there that I gave ’em an hour. For all of it. Starting from the time I first told you what I wanted. Which means”—he glanced to his left, and from his next words Caroline presumed he was checking with a clock—“you have forty-five minutes left.”
“That’s not enough time,” Caroline protested automatically, both because it was true and because that was the classic negotiator’s gambit.
Ware said, “It’s all you’ve got.”
“I want to help you,” Caroline said. “I’m doing everything I can to see that this works out and you get what you want and everyone gets out of there safely. We all are. But you need to be realistic about how difficult this is, and give us a reasonable amount of time.”
Again, Ware seemed to be looking right at her through the monitor. “You really think you can bullshit me, Caroline?”
Forgetting that he couldn’t see her, Caroline shook her head. “I’m not trying to bullshit you. It’s the truth.”
“Well, you better figure out a way to speed things along. Because I’m starting to get a little antsy here.”
With that Ware laid his pistol down beside him on the desk, leaned sideways, and pulled a wheeled leather desk chair into view. In it sat New Orleans’ mayor Harlan Guthrie, his portly, tux-clad body secured to the chair with bungee cords and zip ties. A strip of duct tape covered his mouth. His pale eyes bulged angrily. The rest of his pudgy face was as red as a chili pepper beneath his shock of dyed black hair, which was usually worn in a pompadour and was now wildly disheveled. His brow glistened with sweat.
In his lap rested a big, black backpack.
Caroline’s heart leaped. Dixon made a sharp sound.
She knew they were both having the same thought.
Bomb.
The sensation Caroline experienced was akin to having a cold hand grip the back of her neck. She shivered. Cradling the hard plastic telephone receiver, her palm felt suddenly damp. There was nothing—no protruding wires, no telltale bulge—that she could see to help identify what the backpack contained. But combine the dead man’s switch, which she was now certain was what was in Ware’s hand, with the expressions on his and the mayor’s and her father’s faces, and the very fact that the backpack had been brought into play at all, and she was pretty damned sure she knew.
They all were pretty damned sure they knew.
There’s no way back from this. No possible happy ending.
The best she could hope for was that nobody would die tonight.
If that backpack really did contain a bomb, and every sign indicated that it did, all it would take would be one slipup from any of them and it could easily be game over for everybody in that room.
“I’d hate to see the mayor here—and your dad, and the rest of these people—get vaporized,” Ware said, in what was an almost uncanny echoing of her thoughts. She’d missed it—too busy ogling the backpack—but he’d picked up his weapon and once again had it in hand. “But that’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get what I want.”
“You are going to get what you want. You just need to give us some time,” Caroline assured him, as, cursing under his breath and shooing Miller before him, Dixon turned and strode toward the other end of the van.
Ware’s eyes seemed to bore into hers. “Like I said, you got forty-five—no, make that forty—minutes.”
“Do what he says, Caroline,” her father said. He was breathing more heavily than before, and white lines bracketed his mouth. That look in his eyes—was he afraid?
Of course he was afraid. He would be a fool not to be afraid.
Caroline’s chest felt tight with dread. She had barely noticed what cramped quarters she was in until now, when the walls of the van felt like they were closing in around her. The air seemed to thicken, making it difficult to breathe. For most of her life, she would have said that she didn’t give a damn if her father lived or died. Now, she realized that wasn’t true: for all their differences, for all the hurt he had caused her and her sisters and their mother, there apparently was still some vestige of family feeling there. During her training, she’d seen the effects of a bomb detonated at close range: in one hideous instant, bodies were reduced to shredded meat and blood spatter. If Ware carried out his threat, death would be instantaneous, and gruesome, for everybody in that room.
For the hostages. For her father.
And for Ware.
At the involuntary image that planted in her mind, she got momentarily light-headed.
Was Ware prepared to carry out his threat? She couldn’t be sure, but it might well be a deadly error to assume that he was not.
She took a deep, steadying breath.
“You don’t want to hurt anyone, Reed,” she said. To hell with stirring up Ware’s memory where their past was concerned: the situation had just ratcheted up a couple of hundred notches on the desperate scale. Anyway, she doubted that he’d forgotten any excruciating detail of her teenage crush: she knew she hadn’t. To anyone else who was listening, she hoped she would just sound like a hostage negotiator trying to establish a closer relationship with a perp.
“I don’t want to,” Ware agreed. “So don’t make me.”
Holding up his clenched left fist, he waved it at her almost casually. Caroline was sure, now, that what she was seeing was a dead man’s switch: he had his thumb on the small flat disk that was the detonator, holding it down.
“Better call off your snipers,” Ware added, and smiled at the camera. It was an almost malicious smile, and it caused Caroline to wonder again if he was quite sane. “I take a bullet, and this whole place and everyone in it goes boom.”
A voice beside her said, “Damn it,” and with a sideways glance Caroline saw that Dixon had returned with Villard and that both men were staring at Ware on the monitor.
“He has a dead man’s switch,” Caroline pointed out, just in case they’d missed it.
“It sure looks like it,” Villard agreed, then asked the technicians, “Can you get me a close-up look at that backpack?”
“Nobody wants you to take a bullet,” Caroline said to Ware, maintaining her even tone with effort while the technicians worked to zoom in on the backpack. With the clock ticking, she needed to pick up the pace on winding her way up the behavioral change stairway, which was what negotiators called the process of building trust with a perp, until she reached the point where she could persuade Ware that surrendering was in his best interest. “We want you to come out of this alive, along with everyone else.”
“I doubt your colleagues there agree with you.” Ware’s tone was sardonic. “In fact, I know they don’t.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “Nobody wants you to die tonight.”
His mouth twisted. “You don’t know much about much, do you, cher?”
Caroline frowned. “It’s the truth.”
“You trying to fool yourself or me?” he asked.
“I’m not trying to fool you. I’m trying to help you,” Caroline replied even as her eyes darted from monitor to monitor, trying to pick up clues about what was going on outside. Dixon and Villard were huddled together a little apart from her, conferring about the close-up of the backpack that the technicians had pulled up on one screen. “You can still walk away from this. All you have to do is release the hostages and come out. No one will hurt you. No one has to get hurt.” She stressed that last part for emphasis.
“So I can just walk away like none of this ever happened, right?” The skepticism in Ware’s voice was unmistakable.
“You’ll face some charges.” Her voice was steady. “But at least they won’t include murder. And at this point, even the severity of the charges is on the table.”
“Is there a rainbow out there anywhere?” he asked. Caroline was mystified: the question made no sense at all.
“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
CAROLINE’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 s
ignal 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.
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