Furious

36

Kris eyed Jack. “Do you know any Taylor Foile of the WBI?��� she asked him.

“Nope. Do you?” he asked Penny.

“Never heard of him.”

“Well, he seems to know me,” Kris said. “Nelly, how are you getting this? I thought you were off net.”

“I am, except for stuff I make myself or where I’m so close to a poor little brain that I can overpower it. This is coming in on a 911 channel. It’s open to everyone.”

“Do we want to talk to him?” Kris asked.

“It will give away our location,” Jack, Penny, and Nelly said, all at once.

“So, we wait to see if he goes on,” Kris concluded.

About that time, Taylor Foile must have gotten tired of waiting and went on. “Princess Kristine, your father asked me to find you before anyone got hurt. Specifically, before you got killed. I see that you are using the sleepy darts my assistant, Agent Leslie Chu, by the way, a major fan of yours, pried out of the wood beam you shot them into.”

“Fans everywhere,” Penny said with a sigh. “I hope she didn’t help.”

“Of course she did,” Jack said. “It’s her job.”

“Shush,” Kris said.

“None of the people you shot are in any danger,” the voice from Nelly went on. “The worse charges that might be placed against you are use of a false identity and being a public nuisance. A major public nuisance and a real pain in my rear end.”

“I don’t think he likes me,” Kris said.

“Would you like you if you’d been one step behind us since we landed?” Penny pointed out.

Kris nodded agreement.

“I’ve been one step behind you since you landed,” the WBI man admitted. “But you have got to stop running. Stop right now.”

“What does he know that we don’t?” Jack asked.

Kris frowned. What could Grampa Al have up his sleeve?

“You made a mistake turning off the lights, Princess Kristine,” the voice said. “When the building lost power, your grandfather had a helicopter lift him off from his penthouse. If my guess is right, and this entire affair is your effort to talk with your grandfather, it’s not going to happen.”

Jack started to punch STOP, but Kris stopped him.

“What is it about you Longknifes?” Penny drawled. “You’ll order anyone around, but a simple family talk, not so much.”

“Honey,” Jack whispered softly, “if he’s flown the coop, there’s no reason for us to keep going.”

“I’m not sure I believe him,” Kris snapped, and again pushed Jack’s hand away from the STOP button.

“Worst for you and your friends,” the voice went on, “when he left, he flooded three of the five floors below his penthouse with Sarin gas.”

Kris hit the STOP button. Jack and Penny’s hands slapped down on top of hers a fraction of a second later.

The elevator rumbled to a halt at floor 183.

“What’s your granddad doing throwing Sarin gas around in a public building?” Penny demanded.

“It’s a Longknife thing,” Jack scowled.

“I didn’t know anything about Sarin,” Kris said defensively. “I was prepared for tear gas, and even that stuff that makes you vomit.” She was. Among all their fake flab were breather hoods. They were wearing gloves. They were prepared for a lot. Just not a gas that killed you if a single drop got onto your skin.

“Princess Kristine,” the WBI man continued, “you’ve gotten through a lot. But it only means you now have to come down through even more. Everyone is ready for you. There are a lot of guns down here, and unlike yours, none of them shoot sleepy darts.” He paused to give that time to seep in.

“Please, for your father’s and mother’s sake, surrender yourselves. I have a warrant for your arrest. The judge must have owed your father quite a favor to sign something so unbelievably vague, but I do have a warrant. If you surrender to me, I can get you out of here, and very likely there’ll be a judge waiting for you. You can be released on your own recognizance and be having breakfast tomorrow, make that this morning, with your Grampa Trouble. I had a most unenlightening talk with the old guy. He told me nothing, except that he was pretty sure no one was going to kill you. I didn’t know about the Sarin gas then. I wonder what he’d say now.”

“He’d say no one should have any Sarin,” Jack snarled.

Kris took a deep breath. She’d never been face-to-face with defeat like this. Every brick wall she’d met before she’d managed go over, around, under, or turn to rubble.

This brick wall looked pretty solidly in her face.

Dejected like never before, she turned to Jack. “I wonder,” she said, “do you think they’d let us share a cell?”

“I don’t think it will matter,” Jack said with one of his lopsided grins. “I don’t perform well on camera, and I doubt they’ll ever let the three of us go anywhere where there weren’t two, no three people, watching us on security screens every second for the rest of our lives.”

“Face it, Kris,” Penny said, “unless you have some way for us to fly out of here, we’ve trapped ourselves.”

“We planned a break-in,” Jack pointed out. “We didn’t plan to break out.”

Kris nodded. She’d always figured that if they got to Grampa Al, that was all that mattered. That would change everything. What followed would depend on what she could talk him into or out of. Now it was blindingly clear. He didn’t want to talk to her, and he wasn’t going to listen to anything she had to say.

I have failed!

Kris didn’t like the feeling of that. Failure. It felt too much like straggling in with just one ship left out of a whole Fleet of Discovery.

Failure was not something she wanted to get into the habit of.

But face it, girl. You are not going to shoot your way out of this. Penny is right, you either fly out of here or surrender.

One thing was clear, she was not going to get Jack killed. She’d spent her whole life waiting for him to come along, and getting him killed on the first date was not in the plan. Before she’d let any of them die, she’d surrender.

Strange, you never thought of surrender before Jack kissed you.

Damn it, I’m not calling it quits because I’ve fallen for Jack. I’m calling it quits because there’s nothing to fight for anymore, and I can’t fly out of here.

Can’t you?

Kris’s blood froze. She had to quit arguing with herself. Especially when she was right.

She hit the UP button.

“What?” Penny and Jack both shouted.

“Let’s fly out of here, folks,” Kris said.