Takeover - Lisa Black [34]
She heard Cavanaugh’s voice, full and deep even on the radio’s tiny speaker. “Can I speak to Lucas?”
Don took his call out of the room.
“Chris.” Lucas’s voice sounded much less real than Cavanaugh’s and had an echo to it. The robber had them on speakerphone, so that the hostages could hear every word of the process meant to free them. Theresa wondered if that made Paul feel better or worse. “You’re early.”
“I needed to give you the heads-up. First, though, is everyone in there still doing okay?”
“They’re getting tired and thirsty and will probably have to go to the bathroom soon, Chris, so it would be best if we could take our show on the road. What are you telling me? The chief won’t part with four million dollars that’s not even his?”
“No, they’re still talking about the money. It’s the car. They took it to the medical examiner’s office and—”
“What did they do to it?”
“Nothing. It’s fine. It’s just that the flatbed isn’t there to pick it up yet, so I know it isn’t going to be back here to you by the one-hour deadline. There’s no way. And I didn’t want to wait until the last minute to tell you. Things usually go smoother with that policy—I don’t surprise you, you don’t surprise me, okay? Can we agree on that at least?”
“Too late, Chris. I’m already surprised that you’d risk losing a few of these people because the entire police department is at the Winn-Dixie drinking coffee instead of getting a tow-truck driver off his ass. Makes me think there’s some other problem with the car.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the car.”
“You didn’t cut up the interior, did you? Bobby will be really mad if you did. I mean really.”
A pause.
“Robert Moyers.” Don spoke from the doorway. “CPD just ran him down. He sold the house because he had to serve eight months for a parole violation from the armed-robbery charge. He got out on Friday.”
“Is that Bobby Moyers with you?” they heard Chris ask.
“The one and only!” a distant voice shouted. The other robber. “What’d you do to my car?”
“The car’s fine.” Lucas sounded fainter for a moment, as if his head had turned away from the phone. “Chris says so.”
“I don’t believe them,” the faraway voice continued.
“Now, Bobby, if Chris says the car is okay, it’s okay. We’re happy about that, Chris, and we’ll give you another ten minutes to get it on a flatbed. And don’t talk to me about traffic jams, because everyone in town is over at the convention center, so there isn’t any traffic. Talk to me about something else—like why I don’t see any money coming up the elevator. What have you been doing for the past forty minutes, Chris?”
“We’ve been working on the money, too. The problem is, the robots never place money in the passenger elevators, only the freight elevators. To get them to move money to a new place, the Fed engineers have to write a whole new program.”
“You’re telling me the tech geeks can’t handle that?”
“They’ve begun to work on it. When you”—Cavanaugh paused here, no doubt trying to think of a less offensive word than “invaded”—“took over the lobby, we evacuated the building. Nearly three hundred people work in that building, Lucas, and they couldn’t all hang out at the Hampton Inn. We sent them home. Everyone’s getting a paid day off because of you, so you’re a fairly popular man among the staff right now.”
Theresa snorted.
Jason told her gently, “I know he’s laying it on a little thick, but if you can get them feeling good about themselves, for any reason, they’ll look at the hostages that much more generously.”
“So you don’t have any programmers?” Lucas pressed.
“Oh, yeah, we got hold of two. One has arrived, I’ve been told, and the other is stuck in the convention-center traffic.”
Lucas said nothing. Theresa asked Jason, “Is he lying?”
“Chris? No. He meant what he said about not lying to them.”
“I’d lie to them.” Leo sat with one ear cocked toward the radio, as if listening with all his might.
“He can’t. As bizarre as it sounds, the whole thing works on trust. If he says the