3
Red and blue lights strobing across the roof of the cruiser, Carter had the V8 buried — the engine screaming as the car tore down the dead-straight Mojave highway.
But even at that speed, even with the chassis shuddering beneath us, Donovan hadn't shut up.
"Save your fuel, Carter." He was leaned back against the seat like a man watching a sport he'd already bet on. "You won't catch Spike. I know my son better than anyone. He's a born winner in this desert — never failed to take what he's set his eyes on, never let a prize slip through his fingers once he's got his hands on it. People like you — wage slaves, every one — you just don't have the instincts for it."
I was sitting less than two feet from him, both hands still arranged in the deliberate, slightly awkward posture that made it look like I'd dragged them from behind my back to my lap through sheer stubbornness.
I didn't respond to any of it.
In truth, I understood his son's so-called predator instincts better than he did — that particular brand of appetite, naked and completely without limit.
I tilted my wrist slightly and let my thumb slide along the edge of the tactical terminal, pushing the display brightness to maximum.
On the electric-blue screen, all four feeds from inside the Raptor were running clean.
Spike wasn't content to just drive a million-dollar armored truck. His eyes were sweeping the cabin like searchlights, and when they found their mark, they locked on and held — the center of the rear seats, where a matte-black metal case was bolted hard to the structural divider between the cabin and the cargo compartment. Four high-tensile expansion bolts. It wasn't going anywhere.
The case had a hazard symbol on the front and a block-letter stencil: MAXIMUM SECURITY MILITARY SAFE — UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS PROHIBITED.
"Boss." One of the crew in the back seat swallowed, eyeing the case. "What is that thing? Looks like high-end government transport. Maybe we wait until we're back at—"
"Wait my ass." Spike's eyes had gone bright. He slapped the man's hand aside. "A case rated like that? Inside, you've got either bearer bonds from a Swiss account or next-generation heavy ordnance worth a fortune on the black market. Whoever owns that truck is a smuggler, and we just hit the jackpot."
He reached into the door pocket and pulled out a solid steel window-breaker.
Then he turned around in the driver's seat and started hammering the combination lock housing with everything he had.
Bang. Bang.
In the back of the cruiser, I shifted my body by a few inches — just enough to tuck the terminal's faint glow precisely into the blind spot between Donovan and the security partition.
"What are you looking at?"
He'd clocked the blue light on my wrist. His face came forward against the mesh, eyes narrowing.
When he made out what was on the screen — his son, live, in real time — he went still for a moment. He understood immediately that it was remote surveillance I'd installed in the vehicle. But there was no anger at being played. What came instead was a sharp, almost crowing laugh.
"You put a pinhole camera in your own truck? Ha!" He pressed closer to the mesh, watching Spike go to work on the safe. "And what exactly does that do for you? You're sitting in a police car in handcuffs like a dog on a leash, bleeding out inside while my son tears open the best thing in that whole vehicle. When he gets what's inside, I'll use your own money to have someone come back and pull out those watching eyes of yours."
I didn't look at him.
I looked at the screen and let my lips move, voice completely flat, completely empty of anything:
"Three."
Donovan frowned. "What are you muttering about?"
"Two."
On screen, a sharp crack — and the combination lock housing flew off under the force of Spike's swing.
No locking cylinder behind it. No biometric scanner.
Just a single exposed wire running to a large mechanical button with no labeling, pulsing urgent red.
Spike looked at it for less than a second.
Greed had already consumed everything else. In his mind, this was the final switch — the one that opened the vault. He let out a sound of raw, bottomless want, and slapped the button with his open palm.
"One." The last number came out of me like something dropped into still water.
In the same millisecond Spike's hand hit the button, every cool-toned light in the Raptor's interior went dark.
What replaced them: two rows of deep-red strobe lights along the roof lining, detonating in the sealed cabin like something erupting from the floor of hell.
WARNING COMMAND RECEIVED
HYDRAULIC SECURITY LOCKDOWN PROTOCOL — ENGAGED
From inside the door frames came a low, grinding mechanical clench. The hydraulic locks on the B6-rated ballistic doors engaged with absolute finality.
The atmosphere in the feed reversed in under a second.
The grin on Spike's face froze solid.
The red warning lights threw harsh shadows across the confusion on his face. He dropped the window-breaker without looking where it fell, spun toward the door, and yanked the handle. Nothing. He yanked it again. The door didn't move by a millimeter.
In the back, the other two were already past caring about the safe. They grabbed their handguns and started beating the windows with the grips — full strength, point-blank. The reinforced ballistic glass that could stop rifle-caliber rounds gave them nothing but dull thuds and silence. Not a mark.
The panic ignited fast and total. The claustrophobia of a sealed steel box with no way out.
Donovan had gone rigid.
He watched his son scrambling in a sealed compartment like a man watching something collapse in slow motion. Then his face slammed against the mesh.
"What happened? What the hell did you do to that car?!"
Carter had caught the noise from the back seat and was already checking the mirror, sharp-eyed.
I raised my head.
Whatever expression I'd been wearing for the past hour — the tourist who'd had a bad day, the cooperative detainee — it was gone. Through the security partition, I looked at Donovan the way you look at something that is no longer a problem you need to solve.
"You were just telling me your son always gets what he goes after," I said. "That he never lets a prize go once he has his hands on it."
My mouth moved into something that wasn't quite a smile.
"Congratulations. This time he opened it himself. What's inside is more than enough to send your whole family straight to hell."
The last word was still in the air when the tactical terminal's speaker produced a single, toneless mechanical voice — female, completely without affect:
"Extreme danger. Physical isolation protocol disengaged."
On screen, the rear seat backrest began to vibrate with a deep, structural groan.
Then the heavy composite armor plate separating the cabin from the cargo compartment — the one that had been sealed since the beginning — shuddered with a sound like metal tearing from the inside.
And then, with a single enormous clang, the locks blew.
