Suddenly, the car swerved violently. “Contact,” Graves yelled. A black sedan had rammed their rear bumper. Another pulled up alongside them, the window rolling down. A man in a ski mask leaned out, holding a suppressed submachine gun. “Get down!” Victor roared, tackling Selena onto the floorboards. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Bullets hammered against the bulletproof glass, spiderwebbing the reinforced window, but not penetrating. Graves slammed the brakes, causing the attacking sedan to overshoot, then floored the gas, clipping the enemy car and sending it spinning into a parked delivery truck.
“They’re trying to box us in,” Graves shouted, swerving through traffic on Fifth Avenue. “Selena,” Victor yelled over the roar of the engine. “The call. The voice on the phone. Did you record it?” Selena was curled in a ball, clutching her laptop bag. “My phone. It automatically records unknown numbers. An old habit.” “Play it. Analyze it. Now. We’re being shot at. Do it. We need leverage.”
Selena scrambled up, plugging her phone into her laptop. Her fingers danced across the trackpad as the car lurched around a corner, tires screeching. She pulled up the audio file of the distorted voice. “Tell Miss Pendleton that her father screams hello.” “It’s masked,” Selena said, her eyes glued to the waveform. “Digital distortion. Voice-modulation software.” “Strip it,” Victor ordered. “You’re a genius, right? Unmask the bastard.” “I need a sample to compare it to. I need a key.” “Look at the background noise,” Victor shouted as another bullet pinged off the chassis. “There’s always background noise.”
Selena isolated the frequency behind the voice. She cranked the volume. Beneath the mechanical distortion, there was a faint rhythmic thumping sound. Thump. Whirr. Thump. Whirr. “It sounds like a press,” Selena said. “Industrial machinery.” “No,” Victor said, listening closely. “It’s too regular. Too clean.” Selena filtered the audio again. “Wait. It’s not a machine. It’s a clock. A very large mechanical clock.” She typed furiously, cross-referencing the acoustic signature. “It’s a Big Ben chime. No. The resonance is different. It’s the Clock of the Nations.”
Victor froze. “The Clock of the Nations. That’s in the atrium of the old Maritime Bank building in the financial district. The building has been abandoned for ten years.” “That’s where they are,” Selena realized. “That’s where they’re keeping him.” “Graves,” Victor shouted. “Change of plans. We’re not going to Brooklyn.” “Sir?” “Go to the financial district. The old Maritime building. We’re going on the offensive.”
“Victor, that’s suicide,” Selena said. “We have one guard. They have an army.” Victor looked at her. The arrogance was completely gone. In its place was a reckless, desperate courage. “We don’t need guns, Selena. We have something better. We have the one thing they want more than your father.” “What?” “We have the money,” Victor said. “We have the one hundred forty million we just stole from their front man. And I’m going to use it to buy an entrance.”