The Child Thief Read online

  I cursed beneath my breath, then whirled as I heard the door open behind me.

  Jackie stood there, the frustration in her eyes mirroring mine. She moved into the room, pushing the door softly closed behind her, and hurried up to me. “No kid in here, either?” she whispered.

  I shook my head.

  “Dammit,” she breathed. “We gotta call Nelson.” She pulled out her comm device, and we both switched to Nelson’s channel. Jackie spoke softly into the microphone. “Hey, there are no kids in the children’s bedrooms.”

  There was a pause, and then Nelson’s voice came through our earphones. “They’re definitely at the house. They must just be in different rooms.”

  I exhaled slowly. This wasn’t good. Nelson’s tracking technology was precise to the point of determining which house a child was located in, but not so granular as to specify exactly which room they were being held in—especially when there were multiple floors. I’d been part of a scenario like this once before, when the target hadn’t been in any of the rooms we’d expected them to be in, and it had been the first and only mission I’d been on that we’d had to abort. It was just so risky to start venturing deeper into big houses like these, blindly opening doors to rooms where adults could be sleeping, or worse, awake with insomnia.

  Jackie and I stared at each other, and I bit my lip. I knew the risks, and yet I was still reluctant to immediately call it quits on this one. Especially when we were both almost positive that this house belonged to two elderly people. There was only one car parked outside on the driveway, too, which was a good indication that they didn’t have visitors other than the kids.

  Aborting a mission was a terrible blow for the birthparents; it made the chances of us being successful on a follow-up mission much less, because after one break-in, a family went on high alert—brought in extra security, like dogs—and it wasn’t as easy to pull off a burglary again. We had to leave a gap of at least six months, to be safe, and let things die down a bit. And I knew better than anyone that that was a long time to wait for your child, even if the second attempt was successful, especially when this family was already geared up and ready to flee to the border this very night. As soon as we delivered their children.

  “What do you suggest, Nell?” Jackie whispered, her voice tight. I sensed from the expression in her eyes that she was experiencing the same reluctance as me.

  Nelson swore softly on the other end of the line. “Honestly, guys, this one’s up to you,” she replied after a beat. “You gotta go with your gut. I’m not gonna tell you to keep going, but I’m also not gonna tell you to retreat. Ant and Abe haven’t reported movement other than yours yet, and I’ve also got my eye on their screen, so I guess you could keep going as long as everything’s still. But again, do what you feel is right. It’s your asses on the line.”

  Jackie sighed. “Okay,” she muttered, then cut the line and turned back to me. “What do you think?”

  I swallowed. “I guess we could keep going for now. We both have a pretty good idea of where the other bedrooms are from the map, so we could see if the kids are in any of those. Worse comes to worst, we open a wrong door and make a run for it.”

  Jackie nodded stiffly. “Okay,” she whispered. “Let’s keep moving, then.”

  We headed up to the middle floor and took a left down the hallway, stopping at the first doorway we came across. It was ajar, and a quick sweep inside told us that it was another bedroom, but empty. Retreating, we split up to walk on either side of the hallway to make our search faster, and carefully began opening each door, making as little sound as possible, before shining our lights inside on a dim setting.

  By the time we reached the end of that side of the hallway, we still hadn’t come across any kids—or anyone at all, for that matter.

  We were just moving back the way we’d come to search the other end of the hallway when Ant’s voice suddenly crackled in our ears. “Something’s moving near the staircase. It’s… It’s heading toward you.”

  I looked to Jackie, and she immediately grabbed me by the shoulder and hauled me into the nearest room, a bathroom we’d already verified as empty.

  We pressed ourselves up against the wall, Jackie resting a hand on the gun in her holster, and waited for several tense seconds, while my heart did somersaults beneath my ribcage. Then Jackie created the smallest crack in the door and peered through it.

  She scoffed quietly. “Quite the intruder,” she whispered, then opened the door fully and reentered the hallway.

  I stepped out tentatively after her to lay eyes on a large, ginger tabby cat.

  It was gazing at us cautiously, its wide, nocturnal eyes glistening in the shafts of moonlight that spilled through a nearby window.

  “D’you think we should give him the tissue?” I whispered, deciding it looked like a male. I didn’t want to needlessly sedate a cat, but at the same time, cats could be noisy, and putting him to sleep for an hour wouldn’t do him any harm.

  We stayed still for a long moment, watching the animal, while he continued to watch us. Then Jackie moved slowly toward him, and he ran off. She rolled her eyes. “Let’s just keep moving.”

  “It was just a cat, guys,” I murmured into my comm.

  “Okay, I see it moving away now,” Ant muttered back. “Sorry, it’s easy to miscalculate size on this screen.” And then the line went quiet again.

  We continued exploring the other end of the hallway, but only found more empty rooms and nothing of interest—until I arrived at the door at the very end and found that I couldn’t open it. I pressed my ear to the crack, but was met with only silence, giving me no clue as to what could be inside.

  I beckoned Jackie over as she finished checking her last door. “Locked,” I whispered, pointing to the handle.

  We exchanged a look, and she nodded, as if reading my mind.

  I retrieved the pick from my belt and began working quietly on the lock. We’d come this far, and it didn’t make sense for us to leave any stone unturned. Even though I couldn’t think of a reason why they would lock children inside a room at night.

  It took a couple of minutes, but the device finally cracked the lock with a soft, satisfying click. I pushed the door open by less than an inch, listening. When I could still hear nothing, I pushed it wide enough to enter and shone my light inside, to discover that it was definitely not a bedroom.

  It was a long, rectangular room, the walls of which were packed with shelf upon shelf of expensive-looking weapons, ranging from handguns to heavy-duty machine guns.

  “Whoa,” Jackie whispered, stepping in behind me. “Seems there’s more to Gramps and Grammy than we thought.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, finding the sight unnerving, to say the least.

  Maybe the guy was ex-military, or ex-security, or something. Which wasn’t really the vibe I had gotten from those placid photographs down in the hallway. Then again, everyone presented themselves differently in photographs. Still, as I gazed around at the eye-watering array of lethal weapons, I felt a small tug from my intuition to turn back, for the first time. Anyone who owned this many guns wouldn’t take a break-in lying down, if they caught us.

  But I couldn’t let it get to me. I reminded myself that the security on the house had hardly been great so far; we’d broken in easily enough, and there were no killer dogs around. We just needed to find the kids and get out ASAP.

  Then, when we stepped back out of the room into the corridor, Ant’s tense voice suddenly burst into my eardrums, midsentence. “—your way! Guys? Where are you?! Something else is moving toward you!”

  I had no time to unpack his words, as Jackie had already yanked me back into the weapons room and pulled at the door to conceal us. We both pressed our cheeks to the wall again as we peered through the small crack she had left, my head beneath Jackie’s, our breathing sharp and uneven. But no footsteps followed Ant’s alert. Just the same fat, ginger cat as before, returning to the hallway and ambling down it toward us. He stopp
ed right outside our room, his eyes fixed on the door crack.

  “Oh, for the love of…” I grumbled.

  We both shifted back into the corridor and stepped around the feline.

  “Guys, it’s the same freaking cat!” Jackie hissed into her comm.

  “Sorry!” Ant shot back. “It’s easy to lose track of things on the X-ray, and better safe than sorry, right?”

  “Yeah,” Jackie mumbled, running a hand over her masked face.

  As we took a moment to let our heartrates recover from the false alarm, Ant added, “Also, what happened to you guys? You disappeared for a minute.”

  “Huh?” she whispered. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “I mean disappeared. Whatever room you just stepped into, it’s not showing up for us.”

  “Oh,” she said softly, shooting me a look that showed she was as confused by his statement as I was.

  We peered back into the weapons room and ran another sweep over it with our flashlights. It occurred to me that perhaps the whole thing was some kind of vault. A safe room. Not terribly safe from burglars—well, at least not burglars with a lockpick as advanced as ours—but maybe thieves weren’t the main reason they hid all this stuff in here.

  Sometimes the government ran aerial scans of residential areas to check on people’s weapons inventories, particularly in cities where crime was higher. They had special tech that could pick up on guns and such, similar to how we were able to retrieve information about a house’s structure from the air. If our X-ray wasn’t able to penetrate this room, and our comms didn’t seem to work when inside it, then that meant it had to be insulated with some kind of heavy material our rays couldn’t pass through. Maybe lead.

  So perhaps the couple didn’t want the government knowing about their huge collection, though I didn’t know why they’d possess it in the first place.

  I pushed my speculations aside. Whatever the case, we needed to keep moving.

  And we also needed to stop having stupid distractions. Each minute we stayed in this house was a minute longer for one of the residents to wake up and cause us trouble. My eyes fell on the chubby cat, who was still sitting by the entrance to the weapons room, and was looking utterly unapologetic for the fright he’d just given us. I could tell he’d become more confident since our first encounter, too, as he hadn’t run away this time when we passed right by him.

  I made a spur-of-the-moment decision and bent down to pick him up, stifling his subsequent meow by quickly plopping him down in the weapons room and shutting him inside.

  “Sorry, Chubbo,” I murmured. It was either that or drugging him, and I figured this was the friendlier (and quicker) option. If I could, I’d let him out on the way down.

  Jackie gave me a look, and I shrugged. “He was just gonna keep setting off false alarms.”

  The corners of her eyes lifted slightly in what I guessed was an amused expression. “Okay,” she muttered. “Let’s keep moving.”

  Having finished on the middle floor, we headed up the staircase to the final floor, where, close to the top of the stairs, we finally found a room with loud snoring emanating from it. It sounded like two sets of adult snoring, in fact, so we figured we could write that room off as the couple’s bedroom and search the rest of the rooms for the kids—hoping that they were not in the same room as the grandparents. As that would… not be fun.

  Thankfully, we found a room with lighter snoring carrying through the door cracks, too, just a little farther along and across from the grandparents’ room. I could only assume that the infants were up here because the adults had wanted them closer, which I honestly didn’t blame them for. Having children’s rooms on the ground floor of a three-story house had seemed like weird planning to me, from the start.

  Stepping inside, we found the two children with curly red hair lying in the center of a wide, side-netted double bed. Little Becky and Jason, both looking blissfully asleep.

  My heart clenched at the sight of the little boy in particular. He had to be very close to Hope’s age, and I found myself approaching his side of the bed instinctively, while Jackie moved around the other side to be closer to the slightly older girl.

  Not wanting to waste another second, we immediately reached for the tissues in our belts and leaned over to press them gently against the noses of the children. They were already sleeping, so there was no noticeable difference; it would just mean that they would stay asleep now, when we picked them up. The sedative acted within three minutes, so we stood there, waiting and watching the time. We couldn’t afford to pick them up prematurely and have them make a noise now that we were up here, so close to the—

  A blaring siren pierced the quiet. It carried up from somewhere beneath us, but was so loud and screeching, it felt as if it could’ve been emanating from within the room itself.

  Panic shot through me as the sound rattled my brain and eardrums, and I looked at Jackie, finding her eyes wide with alarm.

  “Go, go, go,” she hissed, and we scrambled to pick up the kids, three minutes’ waiting be damned. There wasn’t even time to consider what the hell the siren was, considering the fact that we’d taken out all the alarms.

  We raced with the children to the door and were on the verge of crossing the threshold when the door to the grandparents’ room swung open, several feet ahead of us in the hallway, forcing us back inside.

  Feeling the boy stir in my arms, I pressed the tissue back over his nose, while Jackie did the same to the girl. Holding our breath, we gazed through the crack we’d left in the door and watched as a tall, broad-chested, elderly man in dark green pajamas thundered out, a long shotgun clutched between his hands.

  “What the devil!” he growled, his voice shockingly menacing for a seventy-something-year-old. “Someone’s broken into the armory!”

  The armory.

  Realization dawned on me, and my stomach dropped. The weapons room. It could’ve been fitted with alarms that had been protected from our pulse by the room’s fortified walls. And Chubbo…

  “Seems your friend just caused us another round of trouble,” Jackie hissed into my ear.

  I grimaced. Never mind an army of cats; we couldn’t even deal with one. Or rather, I couldn’t.

  Guilt surged through me, as it had been me who had shut the animal in there. Though it probably wasn’t fair to beat myself up about it. We had already entered the room, and no alarms had gone off, so I hadn’t exactly had reason to expect that locking a cat in there would set one off. Perhaps he had actually climbed up onto the shelves and touched the weapons, or something similarly obtrusive.

  Damn, kitty.

  “Guys! There’s a bunch of movement right near you, and I don’t think it’s the cat this—”

  I pulled the earphones from my ears with a wince. The alarm was still so loud, and Ant’s frantic voice layered on top of it was not something I could handle right now. Jackie did the same, and though I wanted to reply via comm to assure him that we knew the location of the hostiles now, there was no time.

  “Lights are out, too!” the old man growled, hitting the switch in the corridor. He stormed toward the staircase, and Jackie and I both knew this was our moment. Our tiny window of opportunity.

  We launched out into the corridor the second his frame disappeared from view and raced after him toward the staircase. We stopped a few feet before reaching it, our backs against the wall, and peered out to check his progress on the stairs. He was halfway down this flight, and we waited for him to reach the bottom and turn right toward the armory before dashing down ourselves.

  We had to slip past the second landing and make it to the ground floor during his transit to the room—before he discovered it was empty.

  Our legs pumping, we had just made it halfway down the stairs when a guttural roar erupted from above us.

  “HARRY! I got ‘em here!”

  I turned to see his stout wife standing at the top of the staircase, her lips pinched, her eyes raging beneath her s
ilk nightcap… and clutching another large gun in her hands. Judging by the huge assortment of weapons they had in the armory, I guessed I shouldn’t have been surprised if they slept with guns beneath their mattresses.

  “Don’t move another inch!” she yelled, pointing the barrel in our direction.

  Jackie and I froze, clutching the limp children closer to our chests as Harry reappeared at the bottom of the staircase.

  We were trapped.

  5

  “Put the children down,” Harry ordered.

  My arms instinctively tightened around the boy, and I stole a glance at Jackie, to see her eyes flitting between the couple, as if calculating our options. Holding the children was likely the only thing stopping them from shooting us right now, so putting them down would be a bad idea.

  I held my breath, waiting for Jackie to make the first move rather than trying to make one myself, as she had way more experience in kidnappings gone wrong than me. Something told me, however, from the harshness of her breathing, that she’d probably never found herself stuck quite like this before.

  “I said put them down,” Harry growled. “I won’t ask a third time.”

  The creaking of a step drew our attention to the top of the stairwell. The woman was descending, slowly but surely, toward us, and I guessed she was trying to get closer so she could get a better shot.

  We couldn’t let that happen.

  As if of the same mind, both Jackie and I shifted the kids to a single arm and slid our free hands to our holsters. We drew our guns swiftly, trusting that neither hostile was going to risk shooting quite yet.

  The motion made the woman pause in her descent, though she’d managed to get unnervingly close. I realized with a spike of panic that if she were a risk-taker, she could very well take a shot at us from there.

  “We’ll lower our guns if you lower yours,” Jackie said in a distinctive, slurred accent that wasn’t her own, doing a remarkable job of keeping her tone calm.