Takeover

by Lisa Black

  “What can you see?”

  “Not much.” He stood back.

  Theresa took over the eyepiece, heart pounding. The windows of the two-story Fed lobby were covered with grillwork and reflected the bright street outside. She moved the sharply angled telescope around but saw only a desk here, a chair there. “I don’t see anybody.”

  “They’re gathered in the inner lobby. You have to look at the window right over the entrance. That’s the only one with clear glass on the inside wall. Otherwise we’re just looking at the outer offices, and there’s no one there.”

  She moved the telescope, swinging too far and having to backtrack. “What are we going to be able to do if we can’t even see them? They could have killed them all by—”

  Past the iron grilles, the outer windows and an inner window, over the metal detector and a revolving door, she saw Paul. At least she thought she did. Next to an older black man was the sleeve of another hostage—a narrow band of charcoal gray, the color of the blazer she had given Paul for his birthday, the one he’d been wearing that morning. Still upright. Still alive.

  She watched that sleeve until Frank put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

  “A camera,” she told him. “We need a camera—”

  “Security has cameras in the lobby, remember? We’ll have a feed as soon as Jason here connects the monitor.” He introduced the young man as Chris Cavanaugh’s assistant.

  “Don’t you usually set up in a van or something?” she demanded of him.

  “Usually, but the A/C is on the blink, and we’d get heatstroke if we tried to work out there. And there’s not as much equipment as you’d think—all Chris really needs is a phone.”

  “And where is Chris?”

  “He’s on his way.”

  Theresa wiped her forehead, leaving a streak of makeup on the sleeve of her lab coat. She took it off and pulled her silk blouse away from her wet body to feel the clammy chill of air-conditioning. “Where’s everybody else? I expected a mob scene.”

  “Oh, it is,” Frank assured her. “We have fifteen units on the streets, cordoning off the area and redirecting traffic. The Fed security guys guided the employees from the building to the Hampton Inn; they’re sending most of them home just to get them out of the way. Snipers are picking their spots now. And the higher-ups are in the staff offices.” He jerked his head, indicating the low, constant murmuring that made its way over the headers. “Hashing out who’s in charge here.”

  “Who’s in charge? Paul’s got a gun to his head, and they’re divvying up the glory?”

  The librarian paused, as if only sympathy restrained her from asking Theresa to keep her voice down. Over her head two stylized Greek gods stared at the group disapprovingly.

  “Don’t worry, Tess. It’s better they work it out now so it won’t get in the way later.”

  “So who is in charge?”

  “Technically, the Fed security force were the first responders, but with Paul in there and the possible Ludlow connection, Cleveland PD is involved. However, since it’s both a bank robbery and on federal property, the FBI can take over the whole show if they want to, and they want to. So right now the Feebs are nodding solemnly and promising to work together with the utmost cooperation, and not meaning a word of it. Not that I’m bitter or anything.”

  Theresa had great faith in the FBI—though she was too politic to admit as much to Frank—but found it scant comfort at the moment. The cavalry should be riding to the rescue, not huddled over a table behind stacks of books. “Terrific. And while they’re all making nice, are they paying any attention to what’s happening across the street? Shouldn’t we be calling these guys or something? Finding out what they want? You know, doing something?”

  Jason had sorted out a phone handset, a tape recorder, a large console studded with knobs and buttons, and enough wires to stretch across the city if placed end to end. “We don’t want to do anything right now except let the hostage takers calm down. The first thirty minutes or so of any crisis are the most dangerous.”

  She crossed her arms, both chilled and impatient. “And besides, Chris isn’t here.”

  Jason answered in a diplomatically even tone, “Yes.”

  “Won’t the FBI use their own hostage negotiator?”

  “They’ll fly one in, but you never want to disturb rapport once it’s been established. So if Chris has already opened negotiations, they’ll leave him in place and the FBI negotiator will be the secondary. I just hope it isn’t Laura.” He rummaged through a plastic bin and came up with an electrical adapter and a book, which he thrust into Theresa’s hands. “This is Chris’s.”

  She examined the glossy cover. Secrets of Hostage Negotiation by Christopher Cavanaugh. The artwork featured a ninjalike warrior with an automatic rifle, and she wondered if he was supposed to be the good guy or the bad guy. Either way it seemed more scary than comforting. She glanced up at Jason, whose proud smile turned sheepish.

  “Officer Patrick told me about your fiancé, and…I just thought you might want to see that Chris has a lot of credentials. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “Thank you.” She didn’t know what else to say and told herself that if Chris Cavanaugh was savvy enough to get published, he would be savvy enough to get Paul out alive. He would be.

  Jason returned to the electrical cords, and she opened to a page at random. Chapter 11 began, “The hostage taker will agree to surrender only if he trusts you, trusts you more than his mother or his best friend or even himself. The quickest way to get him to this level of trust is to give him something he didn’t think anyone could give him. This will be different for everyone. It can be as small as a compliment, as average as a perfectly baked pizza, or as unique as the cremains of his childhood buddy’s pet dog. Do this and you might as well call your wife and tell her to start dinner.”

  Humph. No mention of calling your husband and telling him to start dinner.

  She closed the book and went to set it on the table. The librarian followed its progress the way an Audubon Society member watched even a garden-variety warbler, so Theresa handed it to her. Like teachers, librarians were a profession one wanted to stay on the good side of. “I’m sorry we had to take over your offices.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Theresa glanced around at the faded book covers and the ornate paint job. “What’s heraldry?”

  “The study of armorial bearings.”

  “Like family crests?”

  “Yes, and other genealogical records. I’m Peggy Elliott, by the way.”

  Theresa introduced herself, and they shook hands, forming the instant bond that women do when surrounded by men. Peggy Elliott wore subtle blond highlights in her shoulder-length hair, no wedding ring, and a sympathetic expression. That was all Theresa took time to observe before hastening back to the telescope, suddenly panicked that she’d been away too long. Something might have happened. The bodies of the hostages might now lie scattered over the tile. Including Paul’s body.

  But the tableau had not visibly changed.

  Beside her, via his Nextel, Frank pushed an unseen officer to track down Ludlow’s next of kin, to see if they might have a clue as to where Ludlow’s wife and child had gone—and to pull his financial information ASAP. He snapped the phone shut and said, “I’d like to know if this guy couldn’t make his cable payment. He winds up dead, and an hour later the bank he worked at gets robbed? Tell me that’s a coincidence. What’s happening?”

  “Nothing.” One of the hostage takers strolled into view. She could see only the back of his torso. He wore a dark Windbreaker and jeans and carried a very big gun, but his stance conveyed total calm, a commander reviewing the troops. “Why can’t we just shoot him?”

  “Because there’s two hims,” Frank told her. “There’s only that one window, and they’re never both in it at the same time. So supposing we got a clear shot and took out the first guy…”

  “…there’d still be his partn
er left to kill people.” And even if they did stand together, they’d be directly in front of their innocent captives. “Can’t we gas them? I don’t mean tear gas, I mean some kind of nitrous gas that would put everyone to sleep, including the robbers.”

  “The room’s too big. There would be no way to disperse it evenly, so some people might pass out before others.”

  “And one of the robbers might panic and fire.” The man in the telescope’s sight stopped and turned, glanced up at the library windows as if he felt her scrutiny. She began to pull away from the scope, realized how ridiculous that was, and returned to the eyepiece. The man still stared in her direction.

  He had a slender frame, high cheekbones, and light black skin. He wore his hair cropped short and had a small tattoo or birthmark on his neck, slightly behind his left ear. His face seemed as calm as his walk—why? What did he have to feel calm about?

  Armed robberies and hostage crises were out of Theresa’s area of expertise. She had no idea what had happened, what would happen, or what they wanted to happen. She had no way to orient herself, no way to plan a series of examinations or chemical tests that would give her information or direction. She could only stand and watch.

  His partner must have driven the Mercedes; this guy was too tall, so the seat would have been farther back. Unless he had stolen the car and driven it without moving the seat—unlikely, as most men needed to be comfortable while they drove.

  There. An interesting piece of deduction that told her absolutely nothing. It certainly didn’t tell her why they’d tried to rob a bank without a driver, allowing themselves to be separated from their getaway vehicle. That worried her. It meant they were stupid, and stupidity was dangerous.

  She tore herself from the eyepiece and took a moment to run through her usual reaction to any crisis: a mental head count. Where is my daughter? Rachael would be in her eleventh-grade trigonometry class right now, with her cell phone turned off; a final exam had been scheduled, and she’d turned down a date the night before to study for it. My mother? She was at her job at the corner diner, trying to introduce the clientele to whatever she last saw on the Food Network. It was more a restaurant than a diner, and without a TV, unless the staff had a break room—did they have a break room? Tess couldn’t remember. Paul? He was in the bank across the street with his hands on his head. All not present, but accounted for.

  “Shouldn’t we try to communicate with them? Or pretend to, long enough to distract them while the”—she had to make herself say it—“hostages get out through another door?”

  Apparently Frank had already sussed out the lobby’s structure. “No. The Sixth Street entrance is the only way in or out of the public lobby. On the opposite wall, there’s two elevators to the upper floors and a door to the employee lobby. The employee lobby has an exit onto Superior Avenue and the parking garage; however, inside the employee lobby is a heavily armed team of Federal Reserve security officers. So our guys have two choices. They can go out the back door into the arms of the Fed security force—”

  “Or they can come out the front, into the sights of CPD snipers.”

  “Exactly. Either way is okay with me.”

  “Unless they take a hostage with them.” Jason spoke up. He seemed to be hunting for an outlet. “Then the situation would get even worse. Here, you’ll be able to see for yourself.”

  Theresa shuddered, suffering from a mental picture of Paul moving forward, a gun at his spine, serving as a human buffer between the robbers and the snipers. Suddenly, waiting and letting the hostage takers calm down seemed to be a good idea.

  She watched Jason set a small box in the window seat between two paintings, one of Clio, the muse of history, and the other depicting a winged figure with a book. A thin wire connected the box to both the monitor and a laptop on the reading table.

  “Thanks for the use of your monitor, Ms. Elliott,” the young man said. “We have three, but they’re all built into our un-air-conditioned van.”

  “Can you see something?” Theresa moved around the table.

  “In a minute.” Jason tapped the laptop’s keys, and the screen flicked through a number of windows before a black-and-white montage of four pictures popped up. Theresa gasped.

  She saw Paul immediately, in the lower left-hand corner. That camera—labeled “West”—faced the center of the east side of the lobby. A gap there led to a hallway and elevator banks behind a marble reception desk. In front of the desk sat seven people. Paul, in his gray blazer, sat second from the end, between a young woman and that older black man. The picture was small but clear, and he was alive. Definitely alive.

  “He’s all right,” Frank said in a low but firm tone, passing her a handkerchief.

  She realized that the water on her cheeks did not come from sweat, and she dabbed at it as unobtrusively as she could. She did not take her gaze from the monitor.

  With a glance she took in the view from the other three cameras. The east camera faced the entrance from East Sixth Street with its revolving door flanked by inner and outer sets of glass panel doors. The north camera showed the south half of the lobby, with teller cages facing one another along the east and west inner walls. The south camera showed the educational center on each side of the north half and a single door at the end.

  The two men with guns were also visible. One—the taller one—paced in front of the hostages, and the other stayed farther down the south end, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. From there he could not be seen by snipers or hit by an assault force, coming from either the Sixth Street entrance or the employee lobby. But he could stay close enough to shoot the hostages. He wouldn’t even need to aim.

  “Clear picture,” Frank said.

  “That’s the beauty of working with such an august institution.” Jason juggled several cords, then ducked under the desk to retrieve one he’d dropped. His voice grew muffled. “No expense is spared. You should see their security center—they have sensors and monitors up the wazoo in that building.”

  “Why aren’t we over there, then?” Theresa asked. Anything to get closer to Paul.

  Frank had jammed his hands into his pockets hard enough for her to count his knuckles. “We couldn’t see the street from there. If anything happened to the feed, or if they decided to take out the cameras, or if they left the building—we’d be blind. We’re better here.”

  “We can’t see anything except that spot right in front of the door!”

  “We can see them if they move into the offices or the Learning Center. Those windows to the street are clear. Plus, CPD is setting up a camera here, six floors down, directly across from the Fed entrance, to fall back on in case they do decide to take out the lobby cameras.”

  Please don’t, she thought. If she could at least see him, it wasn’t so bad. Yet she wondered. “Why haven’t they?”

  “Shot out the lobby cameras? I don’t know. They’re mounted pretty high…. Maybe these guys have enough respect for the marble not to take potshots at it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Or they’re too hopped up to even notice the cameras.”

  Paul sat cross-legged on the floor, hands behind his head. His arms must be getting tired, and she guessed that he was feeling frustrated. Really frustrated. She watched the slender guy pass in front of him, each step calm and measured. “I don’t think so. They didn’t have someone to stay with the getaway car and they didn’t have a plan for the cameras. These guys really thought they’d be in and out.”

  Jason plugged in his last wire and stood back to admire his handiwork. “Or they’re leaving the cameras in place so that we won’t have a reason to install new ones.”

  “How could we do that?”

  “Down air vents, ceiling tiles—well, not that ceiling,” Jason amended, in light of the intricately painted and vaulted ceiling. “Around a corner. Letting us see them takes away a big reason for us to approach. Oh, here’s Chris.”

  Chris Cavanaugh entered from betw
een two rows of thick reference books, dressed in a sparkling oxford shirt and expensive slacks. He carried nothing but a boyish look and deep dimples, at odds with the receding hairline. And he smiled, actually smiled, which made Theresa itch to grasp his lapels and shake him. Where the hell have you been?

  Everyone turned to her.

  “Did I say that out loud?” she hissed to Frank.

  Cavanaugh’s dimples only deepened. “You did indeed.” In one sweeping glance, he took in Theresa, the Greek gods on the wall above the books, the windows, the communication center spread across the reading table, and the staff office section with its hum of voices, then settled on the monitor. “They’re certainly armed.”

  The quiet concern in his tone worried her. Knowing that the hostage takers had guns was one thing; seeing the long black automatic rifles held so tightly in their hands was entirely another.

  “Any change since you called?” he asked Jason.

  “No.”

  Jason performed quick introductions. Cavanaugh acknowledged each of them with a nod and a smile, though his attention always returned to the monitor; when done, he jerked his head toward the muffled tones and asked his assistant, “Is that the dog and pony show?”

  “Yep. They’re working out how the FBI is in charge but everyone else’s valuable assistance will be greatly treasured.”

  “Good. Then we’ll be up and running before they break for coffee. The stuff looks good. Let’s powwow before we make contact. Please sit, everyone. And I got here as soon as I could,” he added to Theresa. “I had to shower and change.”

  She said nothing, well aware that outbursts might get her evicted. At the moment Chris Cavanaugh accepted her presence as a member of law-enforcement personnel. He might not want her around as a distraught family member.

  Apparently he took her silence for rebuke and explained, “Negotiations can go on for hours, sometimes days. It’s very important that everyone, including me, be comfortable. We eat, we stay hydrated, we take breaks. You’ll see how it goes.”