Hunted by Karen Robards Page A

eyes bulgedangrily. The rest of his pudgy face was as red as a chili pepper beneath his shock of dyed black hair, which was usually worn in a pompadour and was now wildly disheveled. His brow glistened with sweat.
    In his lap rested a big, black backpack.
    Caroline’s heart leaped. Dixon made a sharp sound.
    She knew they were both having the same thought.
    Bomb.
    The sensation Caroline experienced was akin to having a cold hand grip the back of her neck. She shivered. Cradling the hard plastic telephone receiver, her palm felt suddenly damp. There was nothing—no protruding wires, no telltale bulge—that she could see to help identify what the backpack contained. But combine the dead man’s switch, which she was now certain was what was in Ware’s hand, with the expressions on his and the mayor’s and her father’s faces, and the very fact that the backpack had been brought into play at all, and she was pretty damned sure she knew.
    They all were pretty damned sure they knew.
    There’s no way back from this. No possible happy ending.
    The best she could hope for was that nobody would die tonight.
    If that backpack really did contain a bomb, and every sign indicated that it did, all it would take would be one slipup from any of them and it could easily be game over for everybody in that room.
    “I’d hate to see the mayor here—and your dad, and the rest of these people—get vaporized,” Ware said, in what was an almost uncanny echoing of her thoughts. She’d missed it—toobusy ogling the backpack—but he’d picked up his weapon and once again had it in hand. “But that’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get what I want.”
    “You are going to get what you want. You just need to give us some time,” Caroline assured him, as, cursing under his breath and shooing Miller before him, Dixon turned and strode toward the other end of the van.
    Ware’s eyes seemed to bore into hers. “Like I said, you got forty-five—no, make that forty—minutes.”
    “Do what he says, Caroline,” her father said. He was breathing more heavily than before, and white lines bracketed his mouth. That look in his eyes—was he afraid?
    Of course he was afraid. He would be a fool not to be afraid.
    Caroline’s chest felt tight with dread. She had barely noticed what cramped quarters she was in until now, when the walls of the van felt like they were closing in around her. The air seemed to thicken, making it difficult to breathe. For most of her life, she would have said that she didn’t give a damn if her father lived or died. Now, she realized that wasn’t true: for all their differences, for all the hurt he had caused her and her sisters and their mother, there apparently was still some vestige of family feeling there. During her training, she’d seen the effects of a bomb detonated at close range: in one hideous instant, bodies were reduced to shredded meat and blood spatter. If Ware carried out his threat, death would be instantaneous, and gruesome, for everybody in that room.
    For the hostages. For her father.
    And for Ware.
    At the involuntary image that planted in her mind, she got momentarily light-headed.
    Was Ware prepared to carry out his threat? She couldn’t be sure, but it might well be a deadly error to assume that he was not.
    She took a deep, steadying breath.
    “You don’t want to hurt anyone, Reed,” she said. To hell with stirring up Ware’s memory where their past was concerned: the situation had just ratcheted up a couple of hundred notches on the desperate scale. Anyway, she doubted that he’d forgotten any excruciating detail of her teenage crush: she knew she hadn’t. To anyone else who was listening, she hoped she would just sound like a hostage negotiator trying to establish a closer relationship with a perp.
    “I don’t want to,” Ware agreed. “So don’t make me.”
    Holding up his clenched left fist, he waved it at her almost casually. Caroline was sure, now, that what she was