Lisa Black - Takeover

“It’s about ten feet away,” Patrick told him. “I assume from your silence that this situation is less than ideal.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself, Detective.”

Patrick eyed the monitor. “I’m going over there.”

The air hung still, without even a fishy breeze from the lake to lift the sand-colored strands of hair from Patrick’s forehead. He took the long way around, down East Third and up Rockwell to the rear of the Federal Reserve building. Beyond the sawhorses blocking the roads, Clevelanders were going about their daily business, working, eating lunch, ducking out of the heat and back into the air-conditioning before their ties wrinkled and their makeup ran.

He passed the corner where Pat Joyce’s Tavern used to sit and found himself wishing for his younger years, when whether or not to write out a parking ticket would be the toughest decision he had to make the whole day.

Unless he wanted to walk all the way around the Hampton Inn to the Superior entrance, Patrick needed to enter the building via a plunging vehicle ramp overseen by a guard turret encased in glass, which Patrick assumed to be bulletproof-and air-conditioned, or the poor guy in it would have passed out by now.

His badge got him inside without getting shot. One of the many Fed security SRT responders, sweating in his assault gear, escorted Patrick up to Mulvaney’s office on the sixth floor. The chief of the Fed security force wasn’t happy.

“What the hell did she do that for? Driving that car up to the door! One of my guys got shot at in order to take their wheels away, and she gives it back to them?”

“Trying to save a cop’s life.”

“And did she?” Mulvaney’s head bobbed from side to side as he studied his mosaic of surveillance videos. “Did he live?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“There she is, that other girl.” Jessica Ludlow appeared on one of the monitors. She had just stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t seem to care, or even notice, if Patrick tagged along.

They caught up with her in the hallway-the young mother no doubt further terrorized to have a group of large, heavily armed men descend upon her, but that could not be helped. Mulvaney identified himself.

“You have to let me go back,” she said. Her entire body shook, the jumbled blond hairs quivering like plucked harp strings. “If I don’t go back, he’ll kill my son.”

Without thinking, Patrick reached out to pat her shoulder, and she jumped away like a startled rabbit. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Ludlow. We’re doing everything we can.”

“You know who I am? Is my husband here? Where’s my husband?”

Patrick kept his expression neutral. The woman seemed close enough to collapse; learning of her husband’s murder would finish her off. “We’ve evacuated the building.”

“All the employees are next door or sent home,” Mulvaney added.

“I have to go back,” she repeated. “You can’t stop me from going back to the lobby. He’ll kill Ethan-”

Mulvaney stepped forward, which only made her retreat farther until she bumped into the glass door labeled BANK LOANS. “We understand, Mrs. Ludlow. We’re not going to stop you from delivering the money if your child’s life is at stake. I hate to let you go back there, but we don’t appear to have any choice.”

She breathed in a huge sigh of relief; it seemed to fill her entire body with air. After she let it out, she spoke a good deal more calmly. “He wants me to pack this bag with money, like a million dollars or something.”

Mulvaney extended a hand for the backpack, but she held it to her chest. “No, he wants this exact bag back. He’s going to make me or one of the other hostages unpack it and repack all the stuff, so we can’t put any dye packs or locators in with the money. If there is, he’ll kill my son.” Her moment of relief, of trust that the cavalry could ride in and save her, had passed. The pitch of her voice rose with each word, and she seemed more afraid of them than of the robbers in the lobby.

“Okay,” Mulvaney soothed.

“You have to help me get the money.”

“It’s okay,” the security chief told her. “That, we can do. Come this way.”

“I’ve never even been on this floor.” She followed him, flanked by Patrick and four security guards. “When I got in the elevator, I went to the eighth floor because I pushed the wrong button. But then I used the restroom. I had to. I thought I was going to pee my pants.” She sniffed. “I had to. But if I’m not back in twenty minutes-”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Ludlow. You have eleven minutes left, and this won’t take that long.”

Patrick longed to ask her… what? How Theresa was doing? He could watch that himself on the monitors, and Jessica Ludlow had barely met Theresa; the young woman wouldn’t have any insight as to her mental state. Ditto the robbers, but he had to try. “We’ve been watching on the lobby cameras, Mrs. Ludlow, but is there anything you can tell us about those two men? Anything they might have said to each other?”

“No.” She answered Patrick without taking her eyes off the security chief as she followed him through the glass door, nearly tripping in her haste. “They don’t talk much. He says more to us than the other guy.”

“Anything stand out about them? A tattoo? A smell?”

“No. I can’t think of anything, I’m sorry. All I can think about is Ethan and that big gun.”

Mulvaney led her and her escorts past a grouping of desks to a set of double doors too narrow to lead to a room. The metal latch system in the middle of the two doors had a thin gap for a magnetic card, and a numbered keypad. Mulvaney punched in six numbers in quick succession.

Despite his agitation Patrick found himself curious about the Fed’s building security. It seemed pretty thorough. Lucas must know something about it, at least enough to know better than to try to get around it. “You have the code?”

“The director of this department whispered it over his cell phone about five minutes ago,” Mulvaney said as he gave the latch a twist. The heavy metal doors opened to reveal a set of drawers, each with its own lock. “As soon as this crisis ends, he’ll come in and program a new code, known only to himself and the board. You know how it goes. They don’t let us cops near the money, only the guns.”

Jessica Ludlow stared in dismay. Set into the wall were twelve drawers, three across, four down. Each seemed as wide as paper money was long. Each had a smaller version of the card swipe/ numeric keypad latch on its face. “Is that where the money is? How are we going to get in there?”

“Ten minutes.” One of the security guards, who held a stopwatch, announced to Mulvaney.

“That was the second thing the director whispered in my ear,” Mulvaney said in answer to Jessica Ludlow. “I think he found it personally painful.” He opened three drawers with what seemed to be the same numeric code, sliding each one out and setting it on the carpeted floor. Each had been filled to the top with one-hundred-dollar bills, held in bundles with paper bands.

Jessica Ludlow sank to her knees and opened her backpack. One of the security guards tried to pull it away gently. “I’ll fill it for you.”

She wouldn’t let the nylon bag out of her hand. “No! It has to be me… It’s my son’s life. Please.”

“Of course,” the young man placated. “But it will go faster if I help you.”

She held the bag open as the young man dropped in the bundles. “There can’t be any dye packs, you know, or whatever other security things you might have.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Ludlow,” Mulvaney assured her. “We don’t put anything like that in these drawers. We’ve always assumed a robber would never get this far.”