Plans Well Broken – By Natalie Tay
PLANS WELL brOKEN
BY NATALIE TAY
I dropped to the floor the second I heard the gunshots.
Screams filled the air as I peered around the aisle, mentally filtering out the noise as I searched for the source of the chaos.
What kind of moron shoots up a library?!
Literally everything here is free, from the books to the Wi-Fi. I suppose you have to pay a couple cents for printing, but if you can’t afford that, there’s always a nice librarian willing to work around things and help you out. So what on earth could the people with the guns and the masks want?
I hit the panic button on my bracelet, alerting the Agency that I was in trouble.
I mean, I was fine. As a seasoned CIA officer, I had zero worries about my ability to sneak through a back exit or find an oversize air vent.
But there were at least a few dozen civilians in here with me, and I was gonna need some extra hands if I wanted to get everyone out safely.
“Everyone up!” one of the men in the masks bellowed as I slipped an earbud out of my purse. “Backs against the windows. Now!”
I switched it on and pulled out my ponytail, letting my chestnut waves conceal any signs of the communication device as I backed further into my hiding place.
“Princess?” a voice said in my ear, and I smiled to hear my favorite tech woman, Sadie, using my call sign on the other end of the line. “We got your SOS. What’s going on?”
Her breathing grew louder at my lack of response, but silence was my greatest ally as I peered between the bookshelves. I had one extra mag for my gun, a pair of knives in my boots, and a fifty-thousand-volt taser in my other bracelet. Not exactly a match for half a dozen thugs with machine guns.
“Okay,” Sadie continued. “I tracked your location and … wait, why would you press your panic button at the library ?”
I wished I knew the answer myself, but I couldn’t tell her right now even if I did.
“I’m pulling up the cameras … Shit, someone turned them off. Let me see if I can turn them back on remotely.”
She went quiet for a few seconds, and I saw a door to my right. The gunmen were busy rounding up the hostages, taking phones and wallets—the usual bits—and I slipped into the office just before the closest one rounded my stack.
“Okay, Arwen,” I murmured, using her call sign. “I’m here. We’ve got half a dozen perps shooting up the library. At least twenty hostages—probably more.”
She cursed under her breath, and I nodded at her assessment. Yes, I’d been through a hell of a lot worse. Just last week, my partner Scott and I had narrowly escaped a shootout at the Chinese embassy in Prague. But it was much easier when we only had to look out for ourselves.
“The police have already been alerted,” Sadie said. “Looks like someone tripped the silent alarm. But Scott and Jake are closer. I’m sending them.”
“No way,” I protested. “What about?—”
“Stop it,” she cut me off. “Jake’s backstopped FBI badge will let us take control of the scene, and Scott is your partner. I know things are still a bit awkward between the three of you, but they’re the best people for the job. Plus, both of them would murder me if they found out about this later.”
I sighed. Awkward was an understatement.
Fortunately, Jake seemed to have forgiven me for lying to him about absolutely everything for the entire three years we’d worked together, but my boyfriend Scott still hadn’t figured out how to act around the ex-partner who I’d been legally married to in five different countries.
I couldn’t exactly blame him—the situation was far from typical—but Sadie was right. We needed Jake.
Especially since his new partner Kelsey used to be a hostage negotiator.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “But make sure to tell Scott that I’m totally fine and he doesn’t need to bust in here and rescue me.”
“Good luck with that,” she chuckled. “Even before your mission in Prague, he was already acting the part of an overbearing fiancé.”
“I know,” I grimaced. Officially, Scott was still just my boyfriend.
While it had been incredibly sweet and fitting for him to propose right on the heels of our cover identities getting married last week, it wasn’t exactly the kind of story I could tell his mother and the entire clan of Korean aunties at my bridal shower.
Obviously we’d make it official at some point, but his caveman instincts had already kicked themselves firmly into overdrive. “Just … try. Okay?”
“Sure,” she agreed. “But aren’t you supposed to meet him for dinner in like five minutes?”
“How do you know about that?”
“How do you think he got the reservation at King’s?”
Touché.
“Let’s get back to the hostages,” I said. Conversations about my messy love life could wait.
I rose to my knees and stole a glance through the window, but the hostage situation hadn’t miraculously fixed itself in the ten seconds I’d spent arguing with Sadie.
A quick glance around the office didn’t do much either—a copy machine and a couple carts of unshelved books weren’t going to help me in a shootout.
But all of this would go a lot smoother if I could get the hostages out before our bad guys started making demands and using humans as collateral.
“Any chance Jake has a tank of knockout gas in his car?”
“None,” Sadie deadpanned over the click of her keyboard. “Unless you want to start crawling through the ceiling and roll your dice playing Die Hard, we’re probably stuck waiting for Jake and Kelsey to ask your new friends whether they’d prefer a helicopter or a million dollars in Jacksons.”
I rolled my eyes and went back to the window. If I could get a shot of just one of their faces, Sadie could work her magic and within ten minutes we’d know exactly who we were dealing with and what they wanted. But the masks did give the civilians a better chance of survival.
“Are there any old rare books here that I don’t know about?” I asked. “Maybe a vault of secret first editions?”
“Nope,” Sadie said immediately. “That was the first thing I checked.
“Raptor’s earbud just went live,” she continued, using Scott’s call sign. “I’m looping him in now.”
Another click sounded, and Scott’s voice filled the line.
“ Princess? Are you okay?”
“Yep,” I whispered. “Just trying to figure out how to get a group of thugs to willingly give up all of their leverage.”
“If you think?—”
“Don’t worry,” I cut him off. “I’m not dumb or desperate enough to try the ‘one federal agent in exchange for twenty civilians’ trick.” Yet. “I’m still trying to figure out if I can make a bomb out of construction paper and school glue.”
Sadie sighed. “I know you want to just waltz in and fix this, but you can’t do it by yourself. For now, you have to wait.”
“You expect me to wait?! ”
“Yes, Princess,” Scott said. “Wait.”
How the hell am I supposed to do that?!
After six years as a case officer for the CIA, waiting was not my strong suit.
I was much better at kicking down doors or strapping on my stilettos and charming the guards.
I did not like to think of myself as the kind of girl who sat around waiting for a man to rescue her, but Scott and Sadie seemed damn determined to make sure that’s what I did.
“How much longer?” I whispered, peering through my little window like a helpless sitting duck.
“SWAT is en route with the command center,” Scott said. “Jackal is … on his way.” That would be Jake. “And I’m on the rooftop across the street looking for a way in.”
I slid to the floor and stared up at the bland paperboard ceiling tiles. “I don’t need you to come in ,” I said firmly. “I need to get the civilians out .”
“We know, Princess,” Sadie said. “But two guns are better than one, and we won’t have any leverage until we know what our bad guys want.”
“Fine,” I said. “How soon can we expect Kappa to call?”
As if on cue, the phones started ringing, and I snapped back up to watch the perps’ reactions. The one on the end marched around the desk, roughly grabbing the receiver as the others tightened their stance before the hostages.
I couldn’t hear what he said through the door, the seconds ticking by slowly as I watched him talk. But as soon as he put the phone down, Jake joined our line.
“Kappa’s gonna try calling back in a couple minutes,” he began, referring to Kelsey. “We don’t have names, but we’ve got their demands: two hundred black and white cookies, five million dollars in unmarked small bills, and a van with a guarantee of safe passage to the airport.”
I snorted. “They asked for cookies ?”
“Apparently so,” Jake said. “Either they just love chocolate, or they’re using it as a stall tactic. Kappa said she once had a pair of bank robbers order three dozen margherita pizzas since they knew orders that size typically require a twelve-hour notice.”
“Interesting,” Sadie chuckled. “I was just gonna see if I could learn anything from the bakery’s security cameras.”
“Either way, money and cookies aren’t their endgame,” I said. “There has to be a reason they targeted the library .”
The generic black uniforms of the gunmen were about as illuminating as the silence on the other end of my earbud. But before I could start entertaining terrible ideas about makeshift explosives and running in to yank a few masks off, one of the thugs grabbed a girl by the arm.
“Hold up,” I murmured, pulling out my phone. “They’re singling out one of the librarians. I’m gonna try to get a picture.”
Between the window and the distance, the image quality was decidedly terrible, but I did my best to snap a shot as they dragged her behind the counter. Towards an office.
Towards my office.
I cursed under my breath and ducked under the nearest desk, pulling the chair in close as I squished my body against the wall. I hit send on the photo as the door clicked open, then turned off vibrations and shoved my phone into my pocket.
“Princess?” Scott said over my earbud. “What’s going on over there?”