Targeted (Hostage Rescue Team Series Book 2) (22 page)

Unease settled in Tuck’s gut. This was unlike any situation they’d dealt with before. Sure they were at risk on every op because a lot of perps wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to shoot the Feds trying to take them down. They’d never before faced making an assault with someone like Spivey in there waiting for them, his entire operation planned for the moment they entered the building so he could kill them.

Even though Tuck and the others had suspected they might be the target since hearing about the crisis, hearing it confirmed by Celida made it hit home hard.

Tuck glanced around the table, met his teammate’s eyes one by one. Bauer. Farmboy. Schroder. Blackwell. Cruz. Vance. Seven of them on the primary assault team, and Grant, the leader of the other assault element acting as backup for this op.

Every one of them knew the dangers facing them on this op, and every one of them stood ready and willing to meet them head on in order to get those remaining hostages out and bring Spivey down. Subdue him and take him into custody if possible. Kill him if necessary.

One way or the other, they were bringing him out of that bank.

“We copy,” Tuck said to Celida. He turned his attention back to the schematics on the table in front of him. “We’ve got blueprints of the bank but it underwent renos two years ago and some of them aren’t shown on here. Were you able to see any vents, any other access points anywhere in the interior?”

“I went to the east door and only got a quick look around so I couldn’t see past the front counter or back to where the offices and vault are. I saw two vents in the ceiling, one on the east side and one on the west. All the hostages were cuffed and seated along the west wall.”

So coming through the one wall without any windows or doors that were probably rigged to explode wasn’t an option. Spivey had planned this well.

Tuck and his guys would plan better. “Anything else?”

“Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. Believe me, I wish I had more.”

What she’d given them was better than nothing, and he was proud that she’d managed to get that much considering she’d been staring down the barrel of a Glock. “It’s all right.”

He wanted to say so much more, something personal that reminded her how much she meant to him, but he wouldn’t in front of an audience. Not that he minded a little ribbing from the guys but Celida would kill him for what she’d no doubt consider embarrassing her in front of his teammates.

“I gotta go—DeLuca’s gonna make the phone call now,” she said. “You guys take care of yourselves out there. DeLuca will be in touch ASAP.”

“All right, thanks for the intel. Talk to you later.”
Sunshine
, he added to himself.

“Yeah.” She paused a moment, as though she wanted to say more too and couldn’t. “Bye.”

He ended the call and looked up at his guys. “So we’re left with ceiling or sub-floor entry.”

Both would make their lives difficult, but ceiling entries were pretty much always a last resort and a total fucking nightmare to execute. There were so many things that could go wrong; wires and piping and insulation for them and their gear to get hung up on.

Getting stuck at the critical moment of coming through the ceiling would delay their entry and leave them perfect sitting ducks for any shooter within range, let alone for someone with Spivey’s training. Not to mention their entry could trigger any and all the explosives Spivey had wired into the place. They were considering him to be suicidal, so without a doubt he’d use them.

Tuck’s first priority was to make sure all of his guys went home in one piece tonight. Everything else was secondary.

He rubbed a hand over his jaw, the whiskers scraping his palm. “Since it’s our best option at the moment, let’s take another look at the underground approach.”

He pulled the street map from the bottom of the pile and set it on top, tapped on the faint markings that showed an old tunnel first used during the Civil War by Union troops charged with fortifying the capitol’s defenses. It traveled directly beneath the bank, three meters below ground.

City crews had used it over the years since as a means to access various parts of the sewer or electrical systems. That didn’t mean it was still accessible.

“Bauer, your contact at City Hall still on hold for us?”

“Yeah, I’ll call him now.”

“Good. Find out if anyone’s been in this tunnel recently and whether we can access the bank from it. In the meantime, let’s grab our gear and load up so we can get rolling.” Because he had a feeling they were gonna get the call soon anyway, and the order to assault shortly after.

“You got it,” his roomie replied, pulling out his phone on the way to the loadout room.

After everyone had their gear the team loaded into two of their trucks. Schroder drove the one Tuck was in while he and the others held a pow-wow in the back.

Bauer verified over the phone that the tunnel did have direct access to the bank, through an old trap door in the floor of one of the back offices. It had been used by counterfeiters after the Civil War, and had long since been welded shut. Luckily they had the tools to fix that.

Tuck pulled out the map once more so everyone could see the access tunnel beneath the bank. “All right, let’s go over this,” Tuck said, and they began discussing their strategy, including backup plans for all conceivable contingencies. As he visualized the entry, a foreign sense of foreboding settled over him. He’d only felt this way a handful of times throughout his career and it always meant bad shit was going to happen.

Shoving it aside, he glanced at his watch, noting the time. They were about ten minutes from their destination, the closest access point to the tunnel from the bank. They’d wait there, prep as much as they could and stand by for further orders. If DeLuca’s call to Spivey didn’t go well, they could be given the order to assault immediately.

Didn’t matter when the order came, Tuck wouldn’t take his team into this blind.

No matter what happened in the minutes or hours ahead, he was going to make sure they were ready.

****

Every passing minute dragged by with agonizing slowness. He’d been planning this for so long. The constant overload of adrenaline was takings its toll because he could already feel the exhaustion starting to drag him down. Now, more than anything, he just wanted this over with.

Ken wiped his upper arm against the side of his face to catch the trickle of sweat that ran down his temple. It was sweltering in the bank now.

Since releasing the woman and child, he’d given each of the remaining thirteen hostages some water and a few mouthfuls of protein bar. They’d accepted him hand feeding them without looking at him, except the old lady, who’d glared a hole through his face the entire time he’d fed her.

The security guard had finally shown some backbone too, refusing either food or water with a mute shake of his head. The buried rage in his eyes and his watchfulness told Ken the guy was looking for an opportunity to act.

He wouldn’t find one.

In the dimness he checked his watch. Six minutes until the deadline. He was sure DeLuca cared enough about safeguarding the hostages to make a simple phone call.

When he looked back at the hostages, the old lady was wiping her face against her shoulder again, the fourth time in as many minutes. The polyester material of her shirt was dark with sweat from repeated wiping. He only needed one hostage for this next step, and his choice was a no-brainer.

He stalked out from behind the counter. “Everyone on their feet.” They all stared at him for a moment. “Up, now. Except you,” he said, turning the pistol on the security guard. “You stay right there where I can see you, and don’t move.”

The man’s jaw flexed and his nostrils flared but he didn’t move, just stared back at Ken with utter loathing. “Come on, move it,” Ken snapped at the others, ushering them around the counter toward the back.

At the doorway that led to the vault, he paused and looked back at the security guard. “Every single door and window in here is wired. You try to open any of them, you kill us all.”

Another baleful glare was the only reply.

Turning his back on the man for a few seconds, Ken herded the other twelve hostages to the vault. There was a small air vent inside, mostly used to control the humidity. They’d have plenty of air.

After demanding the vault code from the manager at gunpoint, he opened it and forced them inside. Some resisted, but quickly got moving when he put his Glock to the back of the bank manager’s head and threatened to shoot him here and now if they didn’t get their asses inside.

The air felt at least twenty degrees cooler in here, so there was less risk of them dehydrating or succumbing to heat exhaustion. With their hands secured behind them there was no way the manager or anyone else could access the keypad beside the door or enter the code to open the vault door, and they wouldn’t be able to see anything in the darkness once he closed the door anyway.

Leaving them there in the dark, knowing they wouldn’t be able to do anything to cause him trouble at this point, he shut the vault door behind him and hurried back to the front of the bank. The guard was exactly where Ken had left him, which wasn’t a surprise. There was nothing the man could do to disarm the trigger on Ken’s explosives vest, even if his hands were free.

Ignoring him, Ken walked to the desk and waited. The phone rang moments later. Holding the trigger switch hard in his left hand, he lowered the pistol in his right to the desk and answered.

“This is Special Agent Matt DeLuca, commanding officer of the HRT. I understand you wanted to talk to me?”

Even though he’d expected this call, had anticipated it for months and practiced exactly what he’d say, Ken couldn’t control the sudden leap in his pulse at the sound of the other man’s voice. He sucked in a calming breath, tightened his hand around the receiver. “Are you on site?”

“I am.”

The sonofabitch sounded every bit as arrogant as Ken had expected. “Are you interested in being the hero today? Because I might be willing to make a deal with you.”

“What kind of deal?”

“You for nine of the hostages.” All the females, because he didn’t want any women dying here today if he could help it.

DeLuca grunted. “We both know that’s not an option.”

“Then their deaths will be on you.”

“They’ll be on
you
,” DeLuca corrected, a bite to his voice, “unless you do the right thing by letting them go and giving yourself up. You haven’t hurt anyone yet. It’s not too late to end this before things escalate.”

“We both know that’s not an option either,” Ken sneered, echoing the earlier reply. He was too invested now and had passed the point of no return the moment he’d taken these hostages.

Killing the agent responsible for his wife and son’s deaths wasn’t possible because the man was already dead. He would have gone after the original HRT if possible, but it had proven impossible to find the names of the members, and it had taken him years to plan and put all this together. In hindsight maybe he could have more easily hunted DeLuca down and killed him before all of this.

But that wasn’t what Ken was after. He wanted to deal the hardest blow possible and that’s why he’d gone to the lengths he had to ensure the HRT would respond to this hostage taking.

A few seconds of taut silence followed. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“About how you can sleep at night after what you did.”

“What did I do?”

The rage he’d been suppressing for the past few hours suddenly flared to life. Hot. Searing his insides. His breathing increased, pulse thudding in his ears. “You killed my wife and son, you son of a bitch.”

“No, I didn’t. You’re misinformed. I wasn’t even inside the bank.”

Ken’s lips curled into a sneer. “You gave the order for the assault. It’d only been three hours since you guys showed up on site. Your negotiator hadn’t even begun to try to de-escalate things and the hostage-taker was a strung-out amateur bank robber. You rushed the assault and people died because of it. That’s on you.”

“I take full responsibility for my decisions that day. The hostage-taker had already killed two people, Ken, and he was about to kill another. I had no choice but to order the assault, and as a cop and former soldier you must know that.”

“What I
know
is that you ordered that breach prematurely and my wife and son died as a result. Killed by one of
your men
, even though your unit’s fucking motto is
Servare Vitas
.” To Save Lives. The bitter irony of it burned like battery acid inside him.

“It was a ricochet, Ken. A terrible accident. I know you read the reports.”

“Yeah, and that’s why I know it’s bullshit. What I also know is that you covered for your guy. You made sure the truth got buried during the investigation. That the witnesses conveniently forgot or were confused about who fired first so you could claim rightful authorization of lethal force.” His voice was raised now, the anger pushing at him hard.

“Ballistics and physics don’t lie. You read the report on those too.”

“They do if there’s a cover up.” That was the part that enraged him more than anything else. How could DeLuca have done it? His hand shook around the phone, his thumb twitching on the vest trigger. “You know goddamn well it wasn’t a ricochet that killed my family. It wasn’t a fucking magic bullet that took them both out—it was one of your guys lacking discipline, being a trigger happy cowboy, dying for the opportunity to take the perp out and not caring who got in his way.”

“You’re wrong, Ken. The man who fired that round was one of the best operators I’ve ever worked with, and a good friend. He’d never take that shot unless he had no other option. And he’d certainly never have endangered your wife’s and son’s lives on purpose.”

Ken wasn’t stupid. He realized that Special Agent Jason Holland hadn’t gone into the bank intending to hurt Carla and Eli that day, let alone kill them, but there was no fucking way someone with his training, experience and expertise should have
ever
taken that shot. Not when innocent hostages were in the line of fire.