Chapter 42
Arthur
My palm lay flat against the door, as though I could will it to open. A foot of steel hung between Gwen and me. How was I going to get her out?
Seven knelt over his demo bag three feet away, det cord half out of its spool.
He insisted he could place his ordnance where it would carve out the wall around the door, one blast and inches at a time, until we were through.
He swore it was possible without injuring a woman secured to the inside wall.
I’d worked with a lot of breachers in my time, but none of them were trying to blow a door with my woman on the other side.
The charge had stopped being an option the second Rick issued his little threat, but I let Seven keep playing along. Maybe someone inside would come to their senses.
Behind Seven stood men with nothing left to shoot. Two and Six on the stairs, Eight covering the passage we’d opened behind the great-hall fireplace. The assault had lasted twelve minutes, start to finish. This part would run longer.
I took my hand off the plate.
Work the problem.
“One, Lance, on me.” I moved up the corridor, out of the intercom’s pickup, past the ornate sconces over the stairs. Lance came down the final steps with his carbine slung. One followed him. “Closed net.”
“House is ours,” One said. “Eleven men cuffed, all breathing. We’re moving them into the room with the false wall so we can keep watch more easily.
The men on the exterior are being brought in too.
Three and Five hold the wall, Four has one bird on the perimeter, and the other’s recharging. Nobody’s come up the drive.”
“Good.” I should have deployed men to the safe room sooner. We’d been thirty seconds too late at the most. Rick—it had to have been Rick—had opened fire on them. At least the flashbang had gotten us a couple of stragglers.
Lance asked, “Architectural plans indicate a way in?”
The specs should have been my ace in the hole, but they confirmed we were in for the long haul. “The installers didn’t leave obvious gaps.”
“Torch?” Lance asked.
“The door’s a sandwich. Steel plate, ceramic fill, then more plate. A torch would take us two days of cutting.”
“Hinges? Frame?”
“The hinges are encased in the concrete, and the door is framed by it all the way around. Seven thinks he can blow it, but Rick’s threatening to put Gwen wherever the explosives go.”
Lance made a sound low in his throat. The sound I wanted to make, but couldn’t while I was pretending to have this under control. “That’s a big fucking no.”
“Air?” said One.
“Self-contained. Scrubbers and bottled backup. They can seal themselves in and breathe for weeks. No ventilation run reaches the surface, so we have nothing to pump through and nothing to plug.”
“Power? Water?”
“Both independent. Kill the mains and their generator picks up before the lights finish flickering.”
It was as solid as the safe room at the cottage. Because of course it was. My father didn’t install shitty products.
Part of me wanted to start cutting anyway, two days be damned—the same part that had considered how much Seven’s work would scare them all. But if Rick was threatening to put her in the blast’s path, he for sure would force her against a torch-heated door.
“So we hold the house,” One said, “and they hold the room.”
“For now.”
Lance set a shoulder against the concrete. “Weeks of air, you said. We could order in. Bore them out.”
“They’ve got more food than you’ve got jokes.” I gave him a small nod, thanking him for trying to steady me.
Visions of Gwen circled my brain—standing in front of the door, with Rick’s hand on her throat while the metal went cherry red and she screamed.
He’d turn our tools against us. I couldn’t let that happen.
The vision shifted to Gwen in the car on our way to the ferry, before we’d reached Caen.
She hadn’t yet picked up the condoms she’d hidden in her bag, still hoping to pull me out of my self-pity.
‘You’ve got a reserve of love built up inside of you. ’
She was so fucking right, and I was going to do everything in my goddamn power to shower her with it.
The intercom clicked, and a voice I didn’t recognize came over the speaker. “The authorities have been called. The local constabulary are on their way. I suggest you use what time remains to remove yourselves.”
It wasn’t Rick, nor was it Hopkins. It belonged to someone older, someone whose lazy confidence reminded me of my father.
But for all his confidence, his police threat didn’t worry me at all.
In Prague, I’d reached for the police first, when we had to rescue Galahad’s girlfriend. I’d believed they’d go inside a large estate, find the kidnapped woman, and put everyone in cuffs. Instead, they’d left with a wad of cash.
We’d invaded that house, and I’d wound up in custody. My father made one call from wherever the hell he was at the time, and within minutes, the charges had thinned out to nothing more than a warning. It had been so fucking easy to call Daddy to fix things.
That night, money hadn’t found justice. Money had paid the law to turn around and leave.
I’d spent my adult life refusing to run my father’s playbook. But I had to admit, sometimes it worked. Tonight’s team backed me up because of it, and I was only getting started. My father’s words from this afternoon returned: ‘Get her back first. Decide what she is to you after.’
Half right, Dad.
Because the deciding was done.
I marched back to the thick steel door, thumbed over to the open channel with my team, and faced the camera for Mr. Unhurried. “I anxiously await their arrival.”
Nothing from the speaker.
“However, we both know you haven’t called them, nor will you.
” I kept my voice casual, obviously glancing at Seven and his det cord.
“Whatever this place is, whatever you all are, the discovery of a kidnapped American historian in your basement will bring it all down. Sure, we’re breaking at least a dozen laws—”
“Two dozen, I think,” added Lance.
“There you go.” I nodded at him. “We’re breaking at least two dozen laws, but at worst we go to jail. You? You’ve been working too fucking hard to keep this place hidden from the world to survive any scrutiny.”
“We’ve survived for—” started the man, but I cut him off.
“And if a patrol car ever does roll up the drive, I’ll pay the cops to turn around and leave, the same as you would have paid them if I’d called about a kidnapping. So let’s skip the call. We can end this right now, and I’ll give you every penny I’d give the police.”
Seven paused in his coiling work. I could feel his eyes, and probably everyone’s brains, click over to me. If any of them had wondered if I was the Arthur—their boss’s son—they likely knew it now.
“Five million dollars.” I said the words clearly, aiming each one at the woman beyond the door.
She was listening. I’d have bet my life on it.
Let her hear the terms. Let her hear that it wasn’t about the money for me, that she was worth more.
“Five million, US, moved tonight to any account on earth. Dr. Lyons walks out unhurt, my men and I are off the grounds before the transfer settles, and nobody ever learns about this house from us.”
The old man answered without hesitation. “We are not for sale, Mr. Penn.”
The name stung. It shouldn’t have, and I should have expected it. Rick would have handed them everything but my shoe size.
Rick laughed somewhere deeper in the room, the sound ugly through the intercom pickup. “What’d I tell you? The Boy Scout negotiates.”
Lance leaned in, off-channel. “Should’ve opened with three. Five’s a pretty high starting offer.”
I whispered back, “I’d pay a hundred.”
The intercom changed hands. The next voice was smoother, rounded at the edges. The voice of a man who discredited anyone who got too close to his secrets. Dr. Theodore Hopkins. “Mr. Penn, your brutes have shot up my home.”
“Check your cameras, Hopkins. Every shot fired in this house tonight came from your men, not mine.”
“I have a civilized alternative. Remove your men, all of them, off the grounds entirely. When the last of you has gone, Dr. Lyons will walk out the front door of this house, whole and free.”
Bullshit she would. “No.”
“You might do me the courtesy of considering—”
“I don’t need to. The man in that room with you offered, minutes ago, to stand her in front of this door if we tried to blow it.
Your word she walks isn’t worth the speaker it’s coming through.
” The second I left was the second Rick would tear into her.
She was still alive, so she must have told them about her scheduled email.
Rick had another day and a half to torture her into deleting it. “My men stay. I stay.”
The intercom went quiet, long enough that I’d have paid another five million to listen to the argument on the far side of it.
No more than twenty minutes ago, I’d led six men over a wall. Now the job was standing in a basement talking. All of my training covered the first part of tonight. But this part? No amount of hostage rescue prepared me for… for Gwen to be the one on the other side of the door.
I crossed to the door and set my palm where it had been.
They had eyes and ears on us, but I was flying blind.
I couldn’t hear her breathe. Couldn’t touch her skin.
Couldn’t look into her hazel eyes. So I did the next best thing and looked directly into the camera over the door.
“I’m not going anywhere without you, Gwen. ”