Mind Games (28 page)

Down inside the vault replica
,
Stan rolled in a large, flat screen TV connected to an extension cord.

“You guys shouldn’t get bored down here with this giant screen.” He scratched the back of his comb-over. “Now, I’ll send live video feeds from twenty different properties into this monitor. He handed Cameron a walkie-talkie. From there, you’ll need to call me up and tell me which of our guinea pigs needs a little zap. Just let me know if you see any suspicious behavior. When you do, I’ll pull that one from your feed and send you another property to watch. We want to nail as many of these crooks as we can. Think of it like that board game…Battleship. Here’s the main difference. We can see the enemy. They can’t see us.” Stan walked out of the vault and turned back to them. “Choose wisely.”

His laugher was cut off as he sealed the door to the vault.

“Ok, I have to ask,” Max said. “What’s the deal with your wife? Did she just get off the crazy train or what?”

“I have no idea.”

“She’s got a nice look though. You did well, Frosty. She’s a stone cold fox...even in a fat suit.”

“Don’t ever say that again.” Cameron said. He nervously paced in the vault. “We have to find Sarah.”

“I bet she’s still in the cottage somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Dude, the cottage has more rooms in it than even I know about.” Max walked to the TV and tapped on the screen. “Hey, check out this guy. He ordered two large pizzas. For himself. I thought they were going to send us down some food.”

Cameron looked at his own muddled reflection in the stainless steel walls inside the vault.

“I’m starving, man.” Max picked up the walkie-talkie. “Stan, what time is it?”

“Late,” Stan’s voice crackled.

Max turned to Cameron. “You think we should call in some pizza?”

“Yeah I wish.”

The vault door slowly opened. Dallas entered and slid two plates of food across the floor.

Max picked up a plate and stuck his finger in some mashed potatoes. “Dallas, this food is cold! Have Sheri heat this up.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Dallas said.

“Then send The Leader down here.”

Dallas brought his walkie-talkie to his mouth, still glaring at Max and Cameron. “Mr. Leader, we’ve got a few girl scouts down here complaining about cold food.”

“Dallas, we’ve been over this. Don’t call me unless there’s a real problem,
”
Jen’s electronically altered voice answered.

“You heard the man, eat up!” Dallas locked the vault door and left the two alone again.

Max slapped his knee. “We should have told him his beloved Leader is a she.” He wiped an imaginary tear from his eye. “Maybe next time.”

“No, next time we get out of here.” Cameron shoveled in a mouthful of cold green beans.

Max started eating his cold mashed potatoes and turned to Cameron. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Dallas isn’t as strong as he looks,” Cameron said.

Max laughed. “Keep going…”

“When he comes in to bring the food next time, we hide behind the vault door and jump him from the side.”

“I think you’re forgetting something, Frosty. Dallas escaped prison.” Max folded his arms. “Even if we get out of here, Stan will see our tracker marks on the move and probably send someone else.”

“We have to find a way to deactivate the trackers, permanently.”

“One problem, Frosty. Stan hardly ever leaves the security room. He even sleeps in there.”

“Give me your pocket knife,” Cameron said. “We don’t have to break in. We’ll have him come to us.”

Max tossed it over, and Cameron cut the power cord to their large TV display. The twenty live video feeds blinked off the screen.

“Forget about taking Dallas out.” Cameron said. “Stan will do just fine. Then we’ll take care of Dallas.” He grabbed the walkie-talkie. “Stan, we’ve got a problem in here. Something happened to the TV.”

It wasn’t that difficult to beat up Stan.

He wasn’t much of a fighter.

Max and Cameron waited on opposite sides of the vault door. Then, when Stan opened it, they both pushed off from the walls and kicked him in the chest.

And it worked. Stan was out cold.

Cameron lifted Stan to the freight elevator and they moved up one floor to the security room.

Once inside, they tied up Stan. Max jumped into Stan’s computer seat. It took him a moment, but he found the program that tracked the workers. He turned the trackers from active to standby.

Now, they were officially off the grid.

Cameron taped Stan’s mouth shut and told Max to stay behind while he took care of Dallas. Before he left, he opened Stan’s security cabinet. He took a tranquilizer gun and two darts. Then he loaded one of the darts into the gun and placed the spare in his mouth.

Cameron took the elevator down to the tunnels.

After a few wrong turns, and some strange glances from other workers, Cameron found Dallas pushing another digger against a tunnel wall. Sure enough, he was yelling at him, holding the digger in the air by the throat. Cameron leaned around the corner, sighting Dallas in his scope, but the digger saw him and grinned a bit.

The worker’s cheeky facial tick made Dallas even angrier, but he stopped yelling and turned around. Dallas stared at Cameron through the scope of the dart gun.

“What the hell are you doing over there?!” Dallas dropped the digger and stomped towards Cameron. Then he ran towards him. “Hey, stop!”

Too late.

Cameron fired the first dart into the femoral artery in Dallas’s left leg.

But Dallas kept running, gaining momentum. He pulled the dart out of his leg.

Cameron rapidly pulled the second dart from his mouth and reloaded the gun. Looking down the scope, it was hard to track Dallas as he ran, but Cameron aimed and fired.

The dart whizzed, sliced the air, and pierced Dallas’s jugular vein.

Dallas pushed into a sprint and pulled the second dart from his neck, yelling
,
“You son of a bitch! I’m gonna to kill you!”

Cameron slipped in the dirt as he pushed himself up and ran around the corner down the tunnel into the main digging site, but Dallas was gaining on him. The chase extended into the main tunnel, and the other night diggers watched as Dallas spat obscenities. He tried to grasp at Cameron’s shirt to pull him down, but Cameron was more agile. Cameron zigged and zagged, leading Dallas in a wide ellipsis around the dig site. Some of the workers cheered and others laughed.

Cameron evaded Dallas another fifteen seconds, and he could already tell the red-haired supervisor was getting worn out. The tranquilizing serum pumped through him like a thick sludge, slowing him down.

They ran through another group of workers and Cameron looked back as Dallas’s sprint became a walk, then a trundle, then a dizzied stumble. His ankles gave way, then his knees; and he stretched his arms out towards Cameron in a final attempt to swipe at him. Dallas continued to holler and caw, but his taunts slurred as his tongue became enlarged in his mouth. Then his arms went limp, his eyelids drooped, and he fell face-first into the dirt.

Dust billowed up from his body, and the digging site went silent.

Then, when they saw Dallas wasn’t getting back up, most of the workers cheered, but Cameron quickly hushed them. He was afraid he’d brought too much attention to Dallas’s take down. Jennifer had probably seen him.

Cameron whispered a warning to some of the workers, and everyone went back to digging.

He loaded Dallas’s limp body into the freight elevator and tied him up next to Stan in the security room. Cameron let Max have the honor of putting Stan under with the serum, and they locked the security room.

On their way back to the elevator, Max said, “Sarah’s still here somewhere. Where do you want to start looking? The cellar?” Max reached for the button to the main floor, but Cameron stopped him and pressed the button going down a level to the bank replica.

“No. I went down there with Sheri. I didn’t see a secret room.”

“Have you checked under the stairs?”

“No,” Cameron said. “I was thinking we try the attic.”

“Then why are we going down?”

“You’ll see.”

Cameron already attracted enough attention tranquilizing Dallas. He didn’t want the other workers to know Sarah was his daughter. He wanted to see her and hold her again. He wanted to reunite in private to speak with her and comfort her not as a captive, but as her father. And he especially didn’t want Sheri nosing her way into the situation. Cameron believed his plan would allow him to find Sarah discretely, but he still needed Max’s help.

Cameron explained to Max how he wanted to move up to the cottage through the ductwork in the vault replica. He wanted to try this method while they’d been locked in the vault, but he knew Stan would have seen them on the move and sent Dallas to stop them. Now, with the supervisors under liquid sleep and the trackers deactivated, they had a chance.

They went to the vault again. Max showed Cameron how to work the suction devices, then he shoved a crow bar into a duffle bag around his shoulder and he jumped up into the vent. Cameron joined him, and the two began the climb. Cameron’s hands slipped only once, but he caught himself and kept moving. They climbed up and up past the security room level and past the main floor of the house. Cameron saw the living room through one of the vents.

Max and Cameron quieted their suction devices as much as possible, slowing their pace, and Max even held his breath until they reached the second floor of the cottage. Max saw a dim light through the vent opening above them, and he popped it open cautiously.

Since they climbed past the kitchen vent exit, neither of them knew exactly which room they were about to enter on the second floor. The rest was all improv.

As Max pulled Cameron into the dark room, they brushed themselves off and looked around.

Dozens of glass eyes stared at them.

They were in Sheri’s doll room.

A foot kicked Max’s ankle.

The foot belonged to the guard they’d rolled up like a burrito in the rug a few hours before. The supervisors were so busy monitoring the vault that they never looked for the missing guard.

Max kicked the guard back and pointed towards the door. The dresser was still shoved against it, just where they’d left it.

“The attic is directly above us now,” Max whispered.

Cameron jumped on the top of the dresser and Max handed him the crow bar from his duffle bag. Cameron rammed the crow bar into the ceiling and pulled down.

As the rubble fell, Cameron used his arms to block the dust. He dropped the crowbar and motioned for Max to give him a boost. He squirmed through the hole and pulled himself the rest of the way up, planting his feet on the attic’s wooden floor.

The attic was cut in two by a giant, wall-length mirror with a ballet bar extending in front of it.

Cameron pulled Max up through the hole in the floor and they searched the attic. An oscillating fan in the corner sent waves of air through some bed sheets hanging opposite the mirror. Cameron frantically pulled the sheets down, but the action only spread dust throughout the air. Max searched behind an old cast-iron stove and found nothing but cobwebs.

Then Cameron looked towards the mirror. He slid his hands against the mirror’s surface and knocked. He kept doing this until he felt a hollow portion behind the mirror near the end. “Over here.”

“Frosty, look.” Max pointed to a gap in the mirror near the end of it where it merged with the attic wall. He pressed his fingers into the gap and pulled out, but the mirror didn’t budge.

Cameron slammed the mirror with his palms, trying to pop it out of its hinge. And as Max kept pulling and Cameron kept pushing, the thin door built into the mirror turned open a few inches.

Then they heard a voice.

“Hello?” The reflective door muffled the eleven-year-old voice.

“Sarah?” Cameron pressed his face against the door. “Honey?”

“Daddy?”

“Sarah! We’re going to get you out of here. Okay?”

Cameron pushed against the mirror until it warped. The opposing forces of Max’s pulls caused the mirror covering the door to shatter. Then, as they stumbled back to avoid the falling shards of glass, the door closed again and latched. All that remained under the broken mirror was a layer of drywall that made up the locked door.

Cameron smashed his foot into the wall, and the drywall blasted it away in foot-sized chunks. He could see Sarah’s feet, then her legs.

“Stand back, honey!”

He continued to kick, plowing the drywall away until he could he fit through. Cameron ran in and grabbed Sarah, hugging her and spinning her around.

“Oh, Sarah. My Sarahshine!”

“Daddy, you’re crying.”

Her eyes were so blue. So radiant.

“I’m just so glad to see you, honey. Are you alright?”