Chapter Five
Elizabeth
The clack of Elizabeth's heels echoed up through the lobby and punctuated the silence. The hairs on her arms prickled. When she was younger, her parents had driven her and Will through the old ghost towns. Houses, churches, stores, all still standing, but empty. Though not lifeless. The absence of life seemed to give them a soul of their own. And with the cars abandoned and preserved by rust, it felt as though people might flood back at any moment, and someone would hit play, and time would restart. Such was the lobby now.
Elizabeth stopped in front of the elevators. She waited. Her heart thrummed dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, and a shiver scuttled up the back of her neck. Somebody's watching.
She spun round. The black hemisphere of the CCTV camera winked at her. Then came a rumble. When she turned back, the numbers above the elevator were shifting down. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. DING—Ground.
The doors shuddered open. At the front stood a man, semiautomatic pistol clutched in front of him.
Elizabeth's gaze fell straight to the weapon. Buh-boom, buh-boom, buh-boom. She steadied her breath, and her calves stiffened as she resisted an instinctive step backwards.
The man towered over her, even with the height loaned her by her stilettos. He wore black dress pants and a white shirt—sleeves rolled up the elbows, revealing taut ropes of muscle—and his beard was so bushy that it obscured the lanyard of his visitor pass. Behind him cowered Kat and Daisy. Both had their hands linked and pressed to the back of their heads. Their eyes were wide, but widened still when they caught sight of Elizabeth.
The man tilted the gun towards her, and he spoke in a gruff voice, like the rasp of gravel over concrete. "Hands on your head. Now."
With her gaze locked on his, Elizabeth raised her hands and held them to the side of her head. "Kat, Daisy—" She kept her voice smooth and low, as though talking to a toddler. "—keep your hands up and walk towards me."
But they just eyed the man and stayed at the back of the elevator.
Her tone sharpened. "Look at me, and do as I say."
Kat nudged Daisy, and Daisy crept forwards, pressing herself against the wall of the elevator as she edged past the man. Once she had stepped out into the lobby and backed away several paces, her heels scuffing over the floor, Kat followed.
All the while, Elizabeth kept her gaze fixed on the hostage taker, his eyes as bleak and unyielding as asphalt carving up the landscape. Her eyelid twitched. Whatever you do, don't blink.
The man opened his hand to the side and welcomed Elizabeth into the lift. She strode towards the doors, but in the corner of her vision, Kat shook her head. "Madam Secretary, no—"
"Go," Elizabeth said, and she jerked her head towards the main doors. "Now."
Kat and Daisy cast her anxious looks.
"I said now."
They stumbled backwards and then fled towards the exit.
Elizabeth entered the elevator, and the doors juddered shut.
"Hands against the wall," the man said.
Elizabeth stepped to the back of the lift and placed her palms flat against the cool wood. The man's presence loomed over her and prickled up her spine, and as he patted her down, his hands hot and clammy through her clothes, she held her breath and swallowed back the wave of nausea. Just close your eyes and think of America.
"Fine," the man said, and he moved away from Elizabeth, giving her space to breathe again.
She turned around. The tremble in her limbs begged her to lean back against the wall, but she stood tall. Breathe, keep calm, stay confident.
The man gave the thumbs-up to the camera in the top corner. Pause. Then the elevator lurched into its ascent.
Henry
Henry pushed open the door to the Situation Room. A glimmer of sunlight chased him inside, before the door swung shut and cast the room back into the murky glow. The air hung stale after the freshness of the corridor, and his vision hazed as his eyes adjusted to the artificial lights.
Everyone in the room was facing the screen on the far wall, with its feed from Elizabeth's camera, all except for the cyber team, who pored over their laptops.
"What the hell?" Russell sprang from his seat and stabbed one finger at the screen. "He's wearing a guest pass. How the hell did he get past security with a firearm?"
The man tilted the gun towards Elizabeth— "Hands on your head. Now."—and Henry's pulse quickened. Maybe he should have played the husband card, maybe he should have outright refused to let her go in, but I couldn't live with myself if they died. Well, it was too late now.
He lowered himself into the seat on Conrad's left, the one Elizabeth had taken earlier.
Oliver Shaw kept his gaze on his laptop screen as he muttered, "Hacking into the building systems would enable them to tamper with the X-ray machine too. All they'd have to do is change the image on the Threat Image Projection so that the weapons didn't appear."
"How's that even possible?" Russell said.
"Anything with a CPU is vulnerable to attack. And as we always say: If you can dream it, you can code it." Oliver flashed Russell a grin.
Russell glowered. "Then how about you dream up something to put an end to this whole debacle."
Oliver's smile withered.
"Easy, Russell." Conrad raised his eyebrows at Russell.
Russell paused, then bowed his head, let a sigh stream out, and sat back down.
"Oliver," Conrad said, "have you been able to take a look at the code they're using?"
"Yes, sir," Oliver said, "but it'll take a while to analyse it and to pick it apart."
"And how long's 'a while'?" Russell rocked back in his chair.
Oliver opened his mouth.
"And don't say 'How long's a piece of string?'."
Oliver pursed his lips. "The problem isn't just understanding the code, but finding a way that we can deactivate it or regain control ourselves without the hostage takers realising." His gaze flitted to Henry. "As Dr McCord said earlier, we don't want them to see what we're doing, and for it to provoke them into harming a hostage."
"And in the meantime?" Russell scanned the room.
Ephraim Ware leant forward, hands clutched atop the table. "We've got a good image of the first hostage taker, so we'll run his face through the system and see if we can establish his identity. The fact that he was granted access to the seventh floor should narrow it down considerably."
"Do we have a list of visitors from security?" Russell said.
"It's been erased," Oliver said.
"Of course it has."
Henry was drumming his fingers against the armrest, but stopped. "Elizabeth said that the IT contractors who installed the updates were due to come back to fix a 'known issue' over lunch." He glanced between Ephraim and the cyber team. "What if someone didn't just install a backdoor but made the system clunky on purpose so that they'd have to come back?"
Ephraim gave a half-shrug. "It's certainly worth looking into."
Director Doherty stepped up to the table and curled his fingers over the back of one of the chairs. "Mr President, the team outside have received Ms Sandoval and Ms Grant."
"Good," Conrad said. "Have your agents debrief them and see if they can shed anymore light on the situation."
"Yes, sir."
On screen, the elevator doors opened on the seventh floor and the hostage taker led Elizabeth out. Conrad turned to Henry. "Are you sure you're okay with this, Henry? If you'd rather sit it out—"
Henry shook his head. "No, I want to be here." I need to be here.
Conrad tapped his finger against his lips, a metronomic beat, and he eyed Henry with a certain skepticism, as though considering if that were such a wise decision after all. But then his expression mellowed, and he nodded. His gaze flitted towards the door. "And your children?"
"My brother-in-law's on his way to collect them." I'm sorry, she's done what? And she has the gall to say that I'm the one with the saviour complex. Henry paused. He bit down on the inside of his lip. Elizabeth had said it was nothing, but… "Before you agreed to send her in, Elizabeth said something to you: Steel…"
Conrad clenched his jaw. He shook his head. "I'm not going to talk about that."
"But what is it? What does it mean?"
The look in Conrad's eyes hardened, and it felt as though he had placed a pane of glass between himself and Henry. "Elizabeth was a highly competent agent; one of the best. I trust her, Henry. She knows what she's doing."
But something needled Henry, call it intuition, call it just the wisp of a thought. I have the skills. I've dealt with plenty of situations like this before. No doubt. But what side of the negotiations had she been on?
