Hostage Zero

CHAPTER SIX

Granville George looked up from his daily log reports and leaned back in the medieval torture device that posed as his chair. He swore that the sheriff had specially ordered this uncomfortable piece of crap just to make his six-month sentence as miserable as possible. As if the mind-numbing work weren’t painful enough.

As he arched his back and stretched, he caught a glimpse of himself on the security monitor. Without paying attention, he scanned the other monitors as well. In the women’s wing he saw Terry Milan strolling her patrol, just as she was supposed to, while in the men’s wing, the hallway remained empty-not unexpected, given the fact that Rob Shenton would be babysitting Agent Harris for the time being. Meanwhile, three other guards attended to their various admin duties in the center security section.

But that didn’t really add up, did it? Granville shifted his gaze to the interview room, and sure enough, there was the Henry kid sitting at the interview table across from his Fibbie visitor. So where was Rob? He must have been standing in the corner where there was no camera cover.

Only, that didn’t make sense either. Chase Battles had told him during shift change that the asshole from the FBI was very specific about wanting to talk to his prisoner alone.

In fact, there was Chase Battles on the screen right now, leaving the interview room and beginning his patrol.

Not Rob Shenton. Chase Battles. From evening shift.

“Oh, shit!” Granville spat. “Oh, fucking shit!” He snatched the phone from its cradle and mashed the emergency alert button with his palm.

Venice knew something was wrong from the way the desk attendant launched upright. She shot a look to the feed monitor, and right away saw what had happened. He recognized the guard.

As he reached for the phone, she was a step ahead of him, and she typed in the code to shut the phone system down. It was one of the emergency precautions she’d planned for.

“Scorpion, we have a problem,” she said into her boom mike. As she uttered the words, she saw the desk attendant reach for something on his console, and an instant later, her monitor speakers erupted with an earsplitting squeal.

“What the hell is that?” Jonathan barked.

She ignored him, because she hadn’t a clue what to tell him.

“The fuck?” Jimmy Henry said, though his voice was lost in the squeal of the alarm.

He’d articulated Jonathan’s thoughts exactly.

The radio on Shenton’s belt crackled to life. “Emergency. Emergency in A-Wing.”

Jonathan planted his hand in the center of Jimmy’s chest. “We’re still on plan,” he said, feigning calm. “We’re just on a tighter schedule. Stay close to me.” He reached for the door and pulled.

It was locked.

“Mother Hen?” Jonathan asked over the radio. Venice recognized the concealed rage. “The door is locked.”

None of this had been built into their contingencies. “The panic button must have locked everything down,” Venice said.

“Then how about you un lock something?”

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?”