Cait leaned against the wall, gun still aimed at Shelby, who had wisely stopped smiling.
“Cait?” Monteforte ventured. “You said you had a plan. Please tell me there’s still a plan!”
“Sorry?” Monteforte asked, voice rising.
“For bringing you into this. I needed help, and when Sarah put me on the phone with you … I’m sorry.”
Monteforte swore, shaking her head in dismay.
Shelby let the whole situation ride for a few seconds and then he seemed to settle back into his chair, more than comfortable. He stared at Cait’s gun and then at her face.
“You surprise me, Sergeant McCandless. Your service record indicates a highly capable soldier. But you come into something like this without an exit strategy?”
Cait laughed. “Sweet of you to worry about me, but I’m not concerned about an exit. Neither is Lynch. We’re here to put an end to you and your whole Collective and we never expected to get out alive.”
“Jesus, Cait,” Monteforte whispered.
“His name is Lynch,” Shelby said. “Good to know. What I wonder, however, is what you intend to do now. How are you planning to, as you say, end the Collective? If you were going to kill me, I imagine you’d have done so already. Maybe you’ve found you’re not much of an executioner. Killing an unarmed man in cold blood isn’t your style?”
Cait stiffened, finger tightening on the trigger. “Maybe. And maybe not.” She looked at Monteforte. “How’re you doing, Detective?”
“Terrified,” Monteforte said. “There are too many ways this could all end in bullets.”
“I know. And I’m sorry about that. But you’ve done your part, and very convincingly, too,” Cait said. “I liked how freaked out you seemed just now. Don’t worry, though. It’s time to lower the curtain on our little show. No one else is going to die today.”
Cait glanced at Shelby, saw the confusion in his eyes at the sudden change in her demeanor, and she relished it.
Shelby started to rise from his chair. “What are you talking about? You’re trapped in here, girl. You’re not walking out of this room alive.”
Cait smiled at him. “We’ll see.” She glanced at Monteforte. “I hope Sarah got this right.”
For once, Monteforte smiled. “Me, too.”
Cait went over beside Shelby’s desk and aimed her gun at his head. “Detective Monteforte, if you’d do the honors?”
Monteforte did not smile. With her left hand, gun still steady in her right, she pulled her badge off her belt and tossed it onto Shelby’s desk.
“Pick it up,” Monteforte said.
Shelby did, studying the badge.
“Cait works at Channel Seven News in Boston. Her friend Sarah Lin is a reporter there. The cameramen all love her. And those guys can rig a camera into anything,” Monteforte explained.
“Bullshit,” Shelby said, holding the badge up in front of him. “You expect me to believe you managed to get a camera through my security?”
“Actually,” Monteforte said, “it wasn’t that hard. That pinhole camera’s one-thirty-second of an inch wide, less than half an inch thick. Sarah had a guy drill a hole in the badge. Your scanners couldn’t have picked it up.”
As she spoke, Shelby tore the badge off the leather clip Monteforte had used to affix it to her belt. He turned it over and stared at the chip on the back, maybe the size of a postage stamp. He could barely contain his fury, but Cait watched him tamp it down, stifling the tremor in his hands and the flare of his nostrils.
“You’d have to have a receiver for this,” he said, almost hopeful.
Cait nodded toward the window. “Right out there. My friend the reporter drove the detective down here in a borrowed Boston news van. It’s parked out there, set to receive the signal and transmit it live.”