Wrong Place, Right Time(12)

My captor is all serious now, his non-eyebrows drawn together as he stares at the wall. “I acknowledge with code Harbinger.” He pauses after this mysterious transmission, nods, and then continues. “Yes. Okay. Got it.”

Dev hangs up the phone and walks over to drop down into the chair opposite me. His legs spread open and he rests his elbows on the arms of the seat. The fingers of one hand come up to rest on his lips. The other hand dangles in the air at his waist, hanging casually as if he doesn’t have a care in the world . . . as if he didn’t just act like some army sergeant in an action movie where someone’s trying to assassinate the president, the White House is full of terrorists from Uzbekistan, and he’s the only G-man on the inside. He’s staring at me like he’s considering buying me at an auction or something.

Gulp. Holy hotness. I feel like a piece of meat, and I like it. What’s wrong with me?

“Well?” I sit back down in my seat and attempt to smooth out the wrinkles in my pants, trying to distract myself from my nutty thoughts as I wait to hear the news about our hopefully imminent rescue. I’m happy to know that the bad guys have not cut the telephone lines here like they always manage to do in the movies. At least something is going right today.

Dev’s hand moves away from his face and he sits up a little. “Someone did try to breach the warehouse entrance, but it’s been handled. Now we just need to wait until one of the team or a member of the police department can come and let us out.”

This makes no sense to me. I ignore the first part of his statement—something too distressing to acknowledge without some more internal processing first—and focus on the second point. “What do you mean, someone has to come and let us out?” I look over at the keypad. “Don’t you just have to go over there and type in some numbers and put your fingerprints on the screen?”

He gives me a sheepish look. “Normally, yes, but . . . uh . . . I might have been a little overeager about getting us to safety when we came in.”

I back my chin up into my neck. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He dips his head, and when he answers, I notice that his face is a little pinker now than it was before. “There are two ways to enter this room. One way, you can just tap the keys to get in and out, and the other way, you go in, and you’re kind of stuck inside until someone comes from the outside to let you out.”

This doesn’t compute. What kind of messed-up system do they have here, anyway? My words come out measured and slow. “Why would you have a door to a panic room that doesn’t open from the inside?” You’d think people whose whole business involves dealing with criminals and security would be smarter about how they set up their locking systems. Duh. I’m trapped in the lair of the Bourbon Street Boneheads. Awesome.

He doesn’t sound as embarrassed as I think he should when he explains. “Well, it’s the same concept as a home alarm, in a way. There are two different codes you can enter when you want to go in; one code just shuts everything off, but the other code is used when somebody’s holding you at gunpoint. It shuts everything off, but at the same time, silently alerts the monitoring team to the fact that there’s something fishy going on, so they can send law enforcement to intervene. Certain members of the New Orleans Police Department have the access code too.”

I only have to think about that for a few seconds before the obvious problems jump right to the front of my mind. “So, then, what you end up with when you use the second kind of code is a bad guy with a gun locked inside this room with you.” I nod my head sarcastically, thinking how ridiculous these people are. “I see. That makes complete sense.”

He shrugs. “It does if you have the kind of training we do.”

My eyebrow goes up. “And what kind of training would that be? The ability to hypnotize people into putting their weapons down, lying on the couch, and giving up?”

“No. We’re all trained to relieve people of their weapons in a very short space of time. Let’s just say that anybody who came in here with one of my team and a weapon would not be leaving here with that weapon.”

He’s pretty full of himself, but to be fair, I have seen his and Ozzie’s physiques, and my sister does have some biceps now, something she’s never had before. Who knows . . . maybe he is a ninja disguised as an NBA basketball player. I move on to my next most logical argument.

“Why not just use one code that will open the door and let people go in and out? I don’t get how having it locked from the outside is any kind of benefit to somebody inside here.”