“All the employees are next door or sent home,” Mulvaney added.
“I have to go back,” she repeated. “You can’t stop me from going back to the lobby. He’ll kill Ethan-”
Mulvaney stepped forward, which only made her retreat farther until she bumped into the glass door labeled BANK LOANS. “We understand, Mrs. Ludlow. We’re not going to stop you from delivering the money if your child’s life is at stake. I hate to let you go back there, but we don’t appear to have any choice.”
She breathed in a huge sigh of relief; it seemed to fill her entire body with air. After she let it out, she spoke a good deal more calmly. “He wants me to pack this bag with money, like a million dollars or something.”
Mulvaney extended a hand for the backpack, but she held it to her chest. “No, he wants this exact bag back. He’s going to make me or one of the other hostages unpack it and repack all the stuff, so we can’t put any dye packs or locators in with the money. If there is, he’ll kill my son.” Her moment of relief, of trust that the cavalry could ride in and save her, had passed. The pitch of her voice rose with each word, and she seemed more afraid of them than of the robbers in the lobby.
“Okay,” Mulvaney soothed.
“You have to help me get the money.”
“It’s okay,” the security chief told her. “That, we can do. Come this way.”
“I’ve never even been on this floor.” She followed him, flanked by Patrick and four security guards. “When I got in the elevator, I went to the eighth floor because I pushed the wrong button. But then I used the restroom. I had to. I thought I was going to pee my pants.” She sniffed. “I had to. But if I’m not back in twenty minutes-”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Ludlow. You have eleven minutes left, and this won’t take that long.”
Patrick longed to ask her… what? How Theresa was doing? He could watch that himself on the monitors, and Jessica Ludlow had barely met Theresa; the young woman wouldn’t have any insight as to her mental state. Ditto the robbers, but he had to try. “We’ve been watching on the lobby cameras, Mrs. Ludlow, but is there anything you can tell us about those two men? Anything they might have said to each other?”
“No.” She answered Patrick without taking her eyes off the security chief as she followed him through the glass door, nearly tripping in her haste. “They don’t talk much. He says more to us than the other guy.”
“Anything stand out about them? A tattoo? A smell?”
“No. I can’t think of anything, I’m sorry. All I can think about is Ethan and that big gun.”
Mulvaney led her and her escorts past a grouping of desks to a set of double doors too narrow to lead to a room. The metal latch system in the middle of the two doors had a thin gap for a magnetic card, and a numbered keypad. Mulvaney punched in six numbers in quick succession.
Despite his agitation Patrick found himself curious about the Fed’s building security. It seemed pretty thorough. Lucas must know something about it, at least enough to know better than to try to get around it. “You have the code?”
“The director of this department whispered it over his cell phone about five minutes ago,” Mulvaney said as he gave the latch a twist. The heavy metal doors opened to reveal a set of drawers, each with its own lock. “As soon as this crisis ends, he’ll come in and program a new code, known only to himself and the board. You know how it goes. They don’t let us cops near the money, only the guns.”
Jessica Ludlow stared in dismay. Set into the wall were twelve drawers, three across, four down. Each seemed as wide as paper money was long. Each had a smaller version of the card swipe/ numeric keypad latch on its face. “Is that where the money is? How are we going to get in there?”
“Ten minutes.” One of the security guards, who held a stopwatch, announced to Mulvaney.
“That was the second thing the director whispered in my ear,” Mulvaney said in answer to Jessica Ludlow. “I think he found it personally painful.” He opened three drawers with what seemed to be the same numeric code, sliding each one out and setting it on the carpeted floor. Each had been filled to the top with one-hundred-dollar bills, held in bundles with paper bands.
Jessica Ludlow sank to her knees and opened her backpack. One of the security guards tried to pull it away gently. “I’ll fill it for you.”
She wouldn’t let the nylon bag out of her hand. “No! It has to be me… It’s my son’s life. Please.”
“Of course,” the young man placated. “But it will go faster if I help you.”
She held the bag open as the young man dropped in the bundles. “There can’t be any dye packs, you know, or whatever other security things you might have.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Ludlow,” Mulvaney assured her. “We don’t put anything like that in these drawers. We’ve always assumed a robber would never get this far.”
His tone did not convince Patrick, who caught his eye. Mulvaney seemed to nod, and the Homicide detective said nothing. He was in another agency’s house now and would have to trust their judgment in an area of crime that he, Patrick, seldom dealt with. But any surprise Lucas received might prompt him to kill another hostage. He’d shot Paul; choosing Theresa, who had traded herself for Paul, might have an appealing symmetry to the sick son of a bitch. “We wouldn’t do anything to startle the robbers,” Patrick said, speaking to Jessica Ludlow’s bent head but looking at Mulvaney.
“We won’t,” the security chief confirmed.
“That’s all I can fit.” The blond woman struggled with the bag’s zipper. “How much is it? I lost count.”
The guard who had helped her said, “Eight hundred forty thousand.”
“Seven minutes,” the other one reported.
The young woman hefted the backpack with a grimace. Patrick thought for a moment that he could smell her fear, a sharp, sweaty odor. “That might not be enough,” she worried. “I’m sure he said a million.”
“It’s all you can fit in that bag,” Mulvaney pointed out.
Jessica slung one strap over her shoulder and weaved through the cubicles, making for the elevator like a student late for class. The men had to trot to keep up with her.
The elevator doors stood open; this apparently confused her, because she stopped and did not go in.
“We shut it off,” Mulvaney explained, reaching in and flicking a red switch before holding the doors for her. “So you wouldn’t have to wait for it.”
Then she moved inside quickly and stood at the front, as if trying to bar them from entering. “You can’t come with me. He said I had better come back alone.”
“I know,” the security chief said. “And I’m sorry. We’d rather do anything in the world than have to send you back there, Mrs. Ludlow. You’re a brave woman.”
She pushed the “L” button. “He has my baby.”
The doors began to slide shut. Patrick’s stomach seemed to shrink; it went against a cop’s grain to let an unarmed civilian walk into a criminal’s power, it battled with every instinct he had. But he could not see a solution.
With five inches to go, her palm slammed against the moving door. She spoke to Patrick, as if answering one of his earlier questions. “One thing. It was after they shot that guy in the blazer, the one that new lady asked them to let go. Lucas said to the other guy, ‘If the cops come in after us, we have to kill them all.’ But he nodded his head at us as he said it. He didn’t mean you cops, he meant he’d have to kill us. The hostages.”
The doors slid shut.
Before he left, Patrick asked the Fed security chief about the money packs. “There’s really nothing in there?”
“Nothing this scumbag is going to figure out.”