by Elise Noble
“We need camera feeds. And we also need to find a way inside the sphere. Look for staff maps, floor plans, anything. And find out who the supervisors are. One of them informed the rangers there’d been a power failure over there, and we’re not sure if that genuinely happened, or whether he was forced to say it, or if he was even involved somehow.”
“What if the power failure at the wheel was a distraction?” Dan asked, and I was pleased she’d got her head back into the game. “The monkeys would make a convenient scapegoat.”
“Anything’s possible. But we can do the post-mortem later. Let’s get our kit.”
A scream from below made me swivel in a heartbeat. A quick scan of the plaza around the sphere didn’t reveal the source, but then Carmen elbowed me in the side.
“¡Qué hostia! She’s insane.”
Now what? When I turned, I saw Ana had pried open the hatch on the glass pod she was in, and now she was halfway along one arm of the wheel with her arms stretched out to the sides like a high-wire artiste. Bloody hell.
“Can’t disagree with you there.”
Bradley was busy sealing the pod with what looked like neon-pink washi tape while Josh and Tabby sat on the bench seat. Bradley may have been a lunatic, but in a situation like this one, he’d step up to the plate. And I was glad Ana would have my back when we went into the sphere. We connected. I knew how she’d react in any given situation and vice versa. If I couldn’t have Black by my side, then Ana made a worthy substitute.
Gasps came from below as she slid down a vertical support pointing to six o’clock as if it were a fireman’s pole, and she neatly sidestepped when a ranger tried to speak to her. Moments later, she disappeared into the milling crowd. Nicely done.
Of course, she didn’t come in our direction. No, she’d drawn too much attention to herself and we didn’t need any extra scrutiny, not with what we were about to do. The lack of activity around the sphere suggested nobody except us had realised what was going on in there. That gave me hope that we could do a quick smash-and-dash. Get in, get our kids, get the hell out of there, then leave the cops to clear up the aftermath.
Dan’s phone rang.
She already had it in her hand, and I caught a glimpse of the name on the screen. Vine was calling. Dan didn’t put him on speaker for obvious reasons, but I squashed in close enough to hear.
“Vine?” she whispered. “You okay?”
He didn’t answer, but we did hear another voice in the background. Male but shrill. Agitated.
“Shut up. Shut up! Everybody shut up and we won’t need to hurt anyone.”
Smart kid. Vine, who was suspiciously proficient at being sneaky and also had enough guts to disobey the kidnappers, had managed to open a line so we could hear what was going on. Had he used his smartwatch? Dan had gifted it to him for his birthday last month so he could listen to audiobooks—his dyslexia meant reading was a chore rather than a pleasure for him, and she didn’t want him to miss out—and I suspected the investment had just paid off big time. We’d have ears for as long as his battery lasted.
“Keep your hands where we can see them! In the air. Higher!”
That was the second time the unsub—the unknown subject—had referred to “we.” There was an outside chance he was bluffing, but for now, we had to assume we’d be dealing with more than one person when we got inside. And if this guy’s demeanour was anything to go by, they’d be nervous and slightly unstable.
“Stay here and listen,” I told Dan. “I’ll take Carmen with me. Plus if you can, have a mooch around the sphere while you’re waiting. See if you can spot another door.”
“What if Caleb tries to call again?”
“I’ll text him and tell him to call me instead, and if he does, Carmen can phone Mack with any news. Once we get back, we’ll have proper comms gear. Mack, can you get onto the research team and find out who owns this place? If we’ve got hostages, then I’d expect some sort of demand. Money is the obvious one, but they may have a different objective. We need to know what it is.”
“I’ll call Luke.”
“I thought he was sick? Practically on his deathbed, you said.”
“Uh…”
“You fibbed?”
Mack raised a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Bradley, okay?”
I just rolled my eyes and set off for the car park.
Black had been drilling the importance of being prepared into me for sixteen years, and good little Girl Scout that I was, I’d brought enough gear to start a small war and finish it too. Ana had done the same, and Carmen’s trunk resembled a sporting goods store. Dan’s kit wasn’t quite so useful today, but if you ever needed to do a forensic investigation, she was your girl. Ana was already packing goodies into a slim black backpack when we arrived.
“Claustrophobia got to you?” I asked.
“I don’t do singalongs.”
That was probably for the best. Dan could hold a tune, but for the rest of us, a karaoke session would breach the Geneva Conventions.
We loaded up with what we needed, fitted covert earpieces and linked to Mack via the headset she was already wearing, then trekked back to the park. We’d got our hands stamped for re-entry on the way out, but Sod’s Law dictated we got checked by the jobsworth who wanted to search our bags again before we went back in.
“It’s park policy,” he said, attempting to stare me down.
Amateur. I locked my gaze onto his until he took a step back, then I glanced over his shoulder.
“Is that a monkey?”
He whirled around. “Where?”
“In that tree over there. Looks as if it’s wearing some sort of harness. A green one. Is it supposed to be running around like that?”
Just as I’d hoped, he forgot all about the bags and got on the radio, calling for reinforcements. Super—the fewer people near the sphere, the better. Wherever Jimbo was, I liked to think he was enjoying himself.
I was jogging past a life-size T-Rex when my phone buzzed with an incoming call. Race’s name flashed up on the screen, and my heart lurched. We couldn’t afford to fuck this up, not for his sake or for Dan’s. I’d been there when she lost her first son, and burying another child would break her.
“It’s Emmy. You okay?”
“There’re two of them on the platform,” he whispered. “They’ve both got guns.”
“Where are you? Dan told you to hide.”
“I did, but then I snuck back to look.”
“Stay the hell out of sight.”
“I am.”
That kid… When you first met him, he came across as quiet, even timid, but he had more courage than most grown men. And he felt no fucking fear. Secretly, I thought Dan was going to have her hands full in a couple of years because Race wasn’t a boy who shied away from trouble.
“Did you hear them say anything?”
“The older guy was talking to someone at the front of the train, but I couldn’t hear the words. Are you coming? Is Mom there?”
Sweet how quickly he’d started calling Dan that.
“I’ve got my stuff, and I’m on my way back. Your mom’s trying to find a way in. They’ve locked the main door, but don’t worry—that won’t stop us.”
One of Blackwood’s jobs was penetration testing of major US installations, including the White House. I’d managed to sneak past security twice last year. The sphere wouldn’t be a problem.
“Okay.”
“Go and hide now.”
Race hung up, and I knew he’d do whatever he damn well wanted. Brilliant.
CHAPTER 5
“THE FRONT ENTRANCE is a no-go,” Dan told us when we got back to the Steampunk Saloon. “The doors are solid, and people keep walking up to them to read the sign.”
“What does it say?” I asked.
“That there’s a temporary closure due to a power outage.”
Mack glanced up from her laptop. “The power’s down, all right. The cameras inside aren’t working, and t
he control room’s gone dark. SciPark has an internal message board, and a guy called Jeffrey Monteith posted to say he’s evacuated the riders and stayed to keep an eye on the place. According to the staff directory, he’s a supervisor.”
“Interesting.”
“You know what else is interesting? The directory also lists a Kelbyn Monteith. He’s a ranger in the space sector.” She angled the screen towards me. “See?”
Oh, I saw. I saw the same wavy brown hair, the same slightly protruding eyes, the same narrow jaw. Jeffrey looked to be in his late forties, and I put Kelbyn at twenty-two or twenty-three. The family resemblance was all too obvious. What were the chances that father and son were in this together?
“Find out everything you can about them.”
“Luke’s already doing that.” She pressed a few keys. “We’ve got a better recording of him. Listen.”
The voice came through my earpiece, and the unsub still sounded nervous. Edgy. “Why is this seat empty?”
“The kid sitting there got scared just before the ride started,” Vine told him. “He ran back outside.”
“Check the wormhole,” the man ordered an accomplice. “Make sure he left.”
“Ah, fuck,” I muttered.
“It’s okay,” Dan told me. “Caleb’s hiding, and he’s good at that.”
“It’s not okay. He called me, and he’s moving around in there. I told him to stay hidden, but…”
Fear flickered in Dan’s eyes. “We need to get in. I found another door on the far side of the sphere, but it’s got no handles on the outside. Looks like a fire exit. There’s also a moveable camera on a pole near the snack kiosk over there.” She pointed to a small building shaped like a flying saucer. “It points towards the rear door.”
“Is the camera manual or automatic?”
“On a timer, I think. The motion arc covers the door, but the camera sweeps back and forth at regular intervals. There are two points where the door’s invisible to the all-seeing eye—the shortest gap is only five seconds, but the longest gives us twenty-seven seconds to open the door and get inside between passes.”
Less than half a minute? Great. Plus we’d need to avoid arousing the suspicions of the employees at the kiosk or any punters who happened to be hanging around.
“Can you stop the feed?” I asked Mack.
“Still working on it. Whoever set up the security cameras used a different password, and that one isn’t so easy to crack.”
“Guess we’d better keep our fingers crossed for the monkeys, eh?”
“There might be a way to lever the door open,” Ana said. “The mechanism on the pod thing was easy to bypass.”
“So let’s take a look.”
The Steampunk Saloon was getting busier, but a few drops of rain had encouraged people to eat indoors, leaving Mack in relative solitude as she huddled under a huge umbrella outside. We borrowed the bathroom to change our jackets and stash extra weapons about our persons, and a quick rummage through Bradley’s bags of crap revealed a bunch of scarves we could use to cover our faces. The only downside? They were multicoloured and decorated with dinosaur silhouettes. I picked out the T-Rex and passed Ana the velociraptor. It seemed appropriate.
Mack had patched Vine’s device into the comms system, and every so often, we heard another demand to stay still or be quiet. The remainder of the speech was too garbled or too far away to make out, although the hum of voices in the background told us people were talking.
The few drops of rain turned into a steady drizzle as Dan, Ana, Carmen, and I crossed the plaza towards the sphere, the four of us hurrying as if we were looking for shelter. Unfortunately, a bunch of other people had come up with the same idea, and where the sphere bulged outwards, they’d huddled beneath the overhang.
“I hate having an audience,” Ana muttered.
“You and me both.”
But the situation was what it was, and we had to make the best of it.
Over the years, we’d all learned enough about security cameras to understand their fields of view. We stood just out of range, pretending to discuss where to go next as we waited for the right moment.
“Now,” I said, and Mack started a countdown.
We moved as one to the rear entrance, which was barely visible against the silver skin of the sphere. Whoever designed the place had made the door curved, almost seamless. Even the hinges were hidden. The rest of us shielded Ana as she probed for a weak point, somewhere she could insert the blade of a knife.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Nothing yet.”
“Ten seconds,” Mack reminded us.
With my team and several escaped monkeys as witnesses, I was never visiting an amusement park again.
“Prepare to move away,” I ordered, but the faintest scrape from inside made me pause.
I checked the angles again. If I flattened myself against the wall, my gut told me the camera should miss me by a whisker. Hopefully. It would be damn close.
“I’m staying. Get back.”
Nobody asked questions. We’d worked together for long enough that the others knew I wouldn’t make a decision like that without a damn good reason. I tried to look casual while I did my best impression of a dolophones spider. One of those creepy little suckers had wrapped itself around my arm when I was working surveillance in Australia not so long ago, and I’d had to lie there and let it when what I really wanted to do was flick it over to New Zealand. My lovely colleague Mimi had just chuckled under her breath and pointed out the huntsman spider in the tree opposite. Thankfully, I hadn’t heard of any arachnids escaping at SciPark yet.
Another scuff from inside. Somebody was definitely on the other side of the door, but who? Friend or foe?
No racing pulse for me, just the tiniest hit of adrenaline, enough to keep me focused as a clunk made the door vibrate. Our mystery person had pushed down on the exit bar. The door swung outwards, slowly, slowly, and I watched the arc of the camera. The five-second gap was coming right up.
I watched.
Waited.
Burst through the opening the instant the camera got out of range, then yanked the door shut behind me. The pitch-black robbed me of one of my senses, but four was enough. Five if you counted the instincts I’d spent the best part of two decades honing. I forced my opponent to the floor, found his shoulders, worked my way to his hands and twisted them behind his back. That took me a second, two at most, and he hadn’t yet got around to screaming. I replaced one of my hands with a knee and clamped the free hand over his mouth.
“Shhh.”
He complied and went limp.
Hmm. He was kind of small. And he smelled vaguely of Dan’s favourite perfume.
Ah, shit. I loosened my hand.
“Race?”
“I found you a door,” he whispered.
At that moment, I knew Race would end up working for Blackwood one day whether Dan liked it or not. I rolled off him and checked him over by feel. He seemed intact.
“Are you hurt?”
“Nah, I’m tough.”
I got to my feet, but as I pulled Race up, my spidey senses tingled. We weren’t alone. I put a hand over his mouth again, gently this time, a signal rather than a threat. He nodded, and I tucked him behind me.
A narrow flashlight beam played over the wall to my left. Amateur. That made the owner a sitting duck. But so were we. The passage curved to the left, but a few more seconds and whoever it was would be on top of us. The light flashed again, catching the edge of a slim metal cabinet. A yellow zigzag graced the front along with a warning: Danger of Death. No fucking kidding. There was nowhere to hide. Nowhere for us to go but outside, and we couldn’t do that. Not only would it be a pain in the ass to get back in again, but if whoever was coming was as unhinged as unsub number one sounded, then I wouldn’t put it past him to panic. And gunshots in the plaza weren’t something I wanted to contemplate.
Nor did I want to start shooting in the sphere myself.
It could be a stray member of the public ahead, or an escaped hostage, and if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to alert anyone on the platform to my presence by making a noise.
Fortunately, I had the perfect bit of kit with me. I slipped my Fenix PD35 out of my jacket pocket and held it above my head in my left hand, and when our new friend rounded the bend, I hit him with a thousand lumens. In near darkness, the burst of light would be like an explosion behind his eyeballs, and it disoriented him for a couple of seconds—plenty of time for me to close the distance, twist the semi-automatic out of his hand, and dump him on his ass.
Score one point to Blackwood. I cuffed his wrists and tightened two interlinked zip ties just above his knees, allowing him enough movement to shuffle but not to run. Race, bless him, pulled off one of his socks and stuffed it into the asshole’s mouth. I hoped it was nice and sweaty.
Time to let the others in.
“Guys? One down, and Race is safe. Let me know when to open the door.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Dan said, the relief evident in her voice.
“Race, can you open the door for your mom when I tell you?”
He nodded. By then, I’d turned the flashlight onto its economy setting, and I took a moment to study our captive. He’d cut his hair, but there was no doubt about his identity.
“Hi, Kelbyn.” His eyes widened at the mention of his name. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to play with guns?”
“Three… Two… One…” Dan said in my ear, and I half turned to Race.
“Now.”
Light flooded in from outside, but only for a moment. Then the whole team was beside me. Dan hugged Race while Ana moved a little way along the passage to watch our six.
“Are you okay?” Dan asked. “Did anybody hurt you?”
“Nah, they didn’t see me. I don’t think they’re all that smart.”
Race may have been young, but he’d already faced more shit on the streets than most people would see in a lifetime. I trusted his judgement. And if the bad guys were dumb, that was both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because we could out-think them. Bad because stupid people were unpredictable.