Silence.
“Alpha-Two! Are you there?”
Silence.
One of the two masked men climbed up the front of the truck, through the broken glass, and extracted keys from one of the dead guards. The other men guarded the area.
“You’ll never get away with this,” the smart guard told Nicole. “They’ll hunt you down like a rabid dog.”
She didn’t say a word, just stared at him.
He turned his gun on her. “I die, you die.”
“And then all those children die,” she whispered.
His face fell. She smiled. Just a small smile, but her excitement was growing and she couldn’t contain her glee.
Sirens roared from seemingly every direction, coming closer.
“Open the door,” Nicole said.
The armored transport van had to be unlocked from the outside, but opened from the inside. Her team could get in because they had the right tools, but it would take longer.
Time was critical.
“Officer, if you do not open the door in ten seconds, my people will start killing those children, one by one, until you do.”
“Don’t do it, Isaac,” the second guard said.
“Seven seconds. I’m not bluffing.”
The smart guard, Isaac, was torn. She saw it in his eyes. This was the type of dilemma they’d been trained for, even when the threat was rare. Did you let a prisoner go to save innocent lives? It was a fair trade, as far as Nicole was concerned. But in training, you never gave in to terrorists. In the textbooks, there were hard and fast rules. All criminals were terrorists. Do not negotiate with terrorists.
“Four seconds.”
Isaac glanced out the front and saw a fourth gunman come out of the bus holding a child in front of him.
But children … that was a wild card. You can train for it, but until you were in a situation with the barrel of a gun at the back of a child’s head, you really didn’t know what you would do.
Isaac got up and turned the knob. The click told her it was open.
“Put the gun down and you’ll be spared,” she said.
“Don’t do it! They’ll kill us both!”
She looked Isaac in the eye. “I’m not lying.”
The door opened, and Isaac put his gun down and his hands up.
The other guard didn’t. He didn’t get a shot off before a bullet pierced his skull.
One of the masked men quickly unlocked Nicole’s shackles. She picked up the gun that Isaac had dropped. “No one will believe it, but Isaac, sleep well because you will save those kids.”
“Will?” he said through clenched teeth.
“Time?” she asked one of her men.
“Eight fifty-four and thirty seconds. Thirty-one, thirty-two—”
Nicole cut him off and turned back to Isaac. “You have five minutes, twenty-ish seconds to get those kids off the bus before the bomb goes off. And if you are wondering? There really is a bomb. And it really will go off at nine a.m.”
Nicole ran alongside her rescuers. The police would be closing in fast, but they had an escape route already in place. A car idled in the alleyway off the main street, and Nicole and the others jumped in. The other two men who’d stayed with the bus had their own escape route.
The driver glanced at Nicole. “You cut your hair.”
She touched Joseph’s face. “It’ll grow back.”
“I like it.”
She smiled as Joseph sped away. She pulled a gun, watch, and cell phone from the glove compartment box. They didn’t get too comfortable. They didn’t talk. They listened to the police band as Joseph traversed through downtown San Antonio. It didn’t take long for Isaac the smart guard to alert authorities to the bomb threat.
It was no idle threat.
She glanced at her watch, her stomach tingling with anticipation. She stripped off the jumpsuit and pulled on the simple black dress that Joseph tossed her.
They were almost to Amistad Park when she heard the explosion in the distance.
Distractions always worked.
The explosion was the cue for the helicopter to land. It had been painted to look like a news chopper. She and Joseph got out of the car and ran across the soccer field to where the chopper had landed. The men in the back jumped into the front seats and drove off to dump the vehicle and pick up something clean. Less than three minutes after the explosion, Nicole and Joseph were strapped in the helicopter, lifting off from the grass.
Joseph leaned over and kissed her hard on the lips, then held her face in his hands and looked at her. He didn’t have to say anything—couldn’t over the sound of the blades whirling above them—but his eyes said everything.
She was loved. And she was free.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author ALLISON BRENNAN is the author of more than twenty-five novels, including the Lucy Kincaid and Max Revere series, and many short stories. A former consultant in the California State Legislature, she lives in Northern California with her husband Dan and their five children. Visit: www.allisonbrennan.com or sign up for email updates here.