They can’t see him, but they can hear him. It sounds like he’s right underneath them. “I don’t like this,” Zulu says. “I don’t like this at all. The cops sneaking around, Nicholas missing. You should’ve let me keep looking. Maybe I could have found him or figured out where the cops got in.”

“Remember what Kilo said,” Golf says through Zulu’s mic. “That we have to stick together, no matter what.”

“Yeah, and where’s Karl, Kilo, whatever now? Kicking back at the airfield while we take all the risks. He didn’t even answer the last time you tried him.”

Golf keeps his tone even. “He said that he was going to be in and out of range.”

A third voice chimes in over the mic. “The negotiator promised that the cops were going to keep back. Obviously that was a lie. Things are going south. Nicholas is missing, Karl’s not responding, and the cops are trying to spy on us.”

“This isn’t how it was supposed to go down,” says a fourth man on the mic.

As they are speaking, Cole cautiously starts to move again. He’s only a few feet away from the planter. And tucked behind the planter is a—Miranda squints—a weird-looking black, bulky vest with a dozen pockets.

A cold finger traces her spine as she realizes that it’s a suicide vest, just like the ones the killers are wearing.

“I don’t understand how the cops or FBI got close enough to send that remote-control Jeep right up to us like that,” Zulu says. “All the nearby exits are locked. We’ve got clear lines of sight. We should have spotted them right away. But they’re obviously here and we don’t even know where they are.”

“All the more reason we can’t have you go running off,” Golf says. “We can’t afford to lose someone else.”

“We need to get out of here,” the third man says. “We need that bus and we need it now. I told the negotiator that they had better hurry if they don’t want more people to die.”

A bus? Is that slang for something? Miranda exchanges puzzled looks with Grace. A bus doesn’t sound like the ideal getaway vehicle. Slow, lumbering, huge turning radius. Then Miranda gets it. The one good thing about a bus is that it can hold a lot of people. The killers must be planning on taking at least some of the hostages with them.

Layered under the voices is another noise. Miranda tilts her head, straining to hear. She can’t quite place it. It’s like someone has left a hose running.