“I think we might have a problem.” Abby looked up at the high-rise. “What do you know about the new whole-house system from Sterling Security?”
“The new one?” Kat raised her eyebrows, impressed. “It’s good. I mean…really good. A friend of mine’s dad designed it, and there’s really no way around it unless…” Kat let her voice trail off, and Abby must have read her mind.
“Somebody cuts the power,” Abby said, and Kat looked up at the too-dark building. “The authorities turned off all electricity to the building five minutes ago.”
“What about—” Kat started, but Abby was already shaking her head.
“Backup generators too.”
“That’s why they needed the hostages,” Kat said, and in spite of herself she had to smile. “That’s why they weren’t in a hurry. This had to be big and public and scary enough to get the cops to black out the whole building. It’s genius.” She suddenly remembered who she was speaking to. “I mean it’s awful. But it’s also kind of genius.”
Suddenly, the hostages made sense. It wasn’t a holdup, Kat realized. It was a diversion. It had a purpose. And purposes made Kat happy.
Abby smiled and never asked how a fifteen-year-old girl could be so good at doing very bad things. “They’re past the security system, Kat. And now they’re working on the safe.”
“Whose safe is it?”
“Have you ever heard of the Calloway Canary?”
“Is Mrs. Calloway in there?”
“She’s in the ballroom now,” Abby said. “With a fake necklace that our gunmen evidently knew was a fake, because they went straight for the safe.”
“So someone is slipping them inside information,” Kat said, and Abby nodded. “What do you know about the gunmen?”
“Not much. According to our source—”
“You mean Macey?” Kat asked, but Abby didn’t answer.
“They’re Eastern European, probably muscle for hire,” Abby said. “There’s some big boss we haven’t identified yet. Someone’s calling the shots, but these guys are just here to do a job.”
But Kat was shaking her head. “There isn’t any honor among thieves, Abby. Not among that kind, at least. And right now they’re trying to get into a safe they can’t crack while holding on to over a hundred people they no longer need.” Kat watched the woman’s eyes, her worried posture and hasty glances toward an empty balcony.
“What is it?” Kat asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Kat, can you blast your way into that safe?”
“Technically, yes,” Kat started slowly. “But in a private residence with close quarters and utilities you’d have to be crazy to try.”
“So we can’t let them try.”
“No.” Kat shook her head. “We can’t.”
Then Abby seemed to remember that she was the adult and Kat was the teen, the civilian, because she patted the younger girl on the back and said, “You don’t need to worry about it, Kat. You’ve done enough.” She turned away.
But there was something inside of Kat that was alive, thinking, planning, knowing that it wasn’t over and it wasn’t okay—that there were codes to her world and her life and anyone who would pick up an automatic weapon and take a hundred hostages wasn’t going to live by them.
Whoever these men were, they were not members of the family, and that more than anything made Kat yell through the darkness, “Abby!” The woman turned, studying her, as Kat said, “There’s something else that I can do.”
Chapter 6
“STOP PACING,” Hale said in the manner of someone who was used to giving orders. Sadly, Macey wasn’t used to taking them.
“No thank you,” she said, and kept on walking. Too bad there was no real place to walk to. The storage closet they’d found was small and crowded with dirty laundry and old housekeeping carts. But it was also private and far away from the eyes and ears of the men in the masks.
“Macey, calm down. We don’t know why they brought the C4,” Hale said.
“Well, we do know that there is a gas line running behind the Calloway safe. The bad guys with the big explosives don’t seem to care that there’s a gas line. Let me do the math for you. Gas plus explosions equals boom!”