Hostage Zero

Venice refused to reward his snarky attitude with an answer. She wasn’t going to reward him with an unlocked door anytime soon, either. The panic button had done something to wipe out all of her prepared codes. All of the door annunciators were showing red, meaning they were locked, but when she glanced up at her screen, she saw the front desk guy typing furiously, and then the annunciator for the front Receiving Area blink to green. The guard was selectively undoing the lockdown protocol to allow guards to respond.

Now it was a race to see who was the better keyboard operator.

Granville tried to push his mind away from figuring out who had overridden the cell-opening protocols in the computer. Neither the who nor the why mattered right now, and they sure as hell didn’t affect the immediate future. Right now, all that mattered was that someone was trying to escape on his watch.

And that, sports fans, was not going to happen.

Back when they’d designed the system, they’d put in a fail-safe mechanism that would lock down all the cells simultaneously in the event of a prisoner disturbance. That done, it would be a simple thing, according to the manual, to mouse-click individual doors to reopen them as necessary. Only that wasn’t working tonight. Whoever had been fucking with the computer system must have screwed up the presets, leaving him with no choice but to enter key codes individually.

There was a manual for this somewhere on the shelf behind his desk, but he only had time to wing it from memory. In the boredom of desk duty, he’d actually read all that shit-probably the only deputy in the department who could say that and not blush. He’d never thought he’d need it, but as a lifelong geek, he’d sort of enjoyed it. Now all he had to do was remember it.

Each door required a lengthy series of keystrokes, beginning with the individual door identifier, followed by command codes. His fingers flew as he tried to enter the number for the air lock between the central security area and A-Wing, the men’s cell block, but when he hit ENTER and saw the RECEIVING AREA icon go green, he realized that he’d fat-fingered the door identifier and opened the wrong one. He spat a curse under his breath.

He settled himself. At least it was one door open. He started on the next.

And then the RECEIVING icon went red again.

Jesus, he was fighting an active enemy live! Someone was undoing every command.

Venice typed in the code to lock all the doors simultaneously. It would undo the progress that the guard was making and also buy time for her to find her cheat sheet with the doorway codes on it.

From the way the guard cursed when the lock turned green, she knew he’d made a mistake, and that now he’d be working on a more useful door. If he got his guards loose before she got her boss loose, this was going to get very ugly.

She found the crib notes on the far right-hand side of her desk and snatched them up. But she’d fallen too far behind in the race. The guard had such a head start that she’d never win without cheating. She once again entered the code to lock all the doors, but she waited to push the ENTER key until she saw the icon for the main administrative office shift to green.

The instant it did, she made it turn red again.

The guard slammed his fist. “Who the hell are you?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jeremy Schuler squinted against the light, bright enough to backlight the tiny blood vessels through his closed eyelids. He tried to roll away, but the light followed. “Quit it,” he tried to say, but his vocal cords were still sleeping, so it came out as a meaningless groan.

A thick hand clenched itself over his mouth. “Make a sound and I’ll cut out your eyes,” a hoarse voice growled from very close to his face. The man smelled of garlic and cigarette smoke. “Do you understand me?”

The pressure from the hand cut off all air, making it impossible for him to answer. He must have nodded, because the pressure eased.

“What’s your name?” the man hissed.

“Jeremy,” he wheezed. He coughed to clear the block in his throat and tried it again. “Jeremy Schuler.” There was a sound of tearing fabric to his right, and a quick glimpse revealed three men clustered by his roommate Anthony’s bed. The other boy was bucking and trying to yell, but it sounded like his mouth was full. After the sound of a hard smack, the kicking and the noise stopped.

“Look at me,” the voice said.

Jeremy squinted back into the light.

“Don’t you look at them. Keep your eyes front. How old are you?”

Jeremy felt himself trembling, his whole body vibrating with an involuntary tremor that wouldn’t stop. “Th-thirteen,” he stammered.

“Well, Jeremy Schuler, if you want to see thirteen and a half, you do everything we say, understand?”

Jeremy nodded.

“Say it.”

“I’ll do everything you say.”

“You’re a smart boy.”

The ripping sound from Anthony’s side of the room stopped, and the men left that bed to surround Jeremy’s. “We’re set,” one of them said.