Freedom TM

here he could watch the action through dozens of surveillance cameras. There was also a dedicated emergency phone line, a radio base station, and a house phone. The room also had a sofa, a wet bar, and flat-screen television—not to mention shelves of emergency provisions and a narrow door leading to a Spartan restroom.
    Hollis had everything he needed to await rescue.
    The house phone rang, and he tapped the speakerphone button as he clicked through monitors, trying to find the service gate cameras. “Talk to me.”
    Metzer’s voice came over the speaker.
“Can you get a dial tone on your emergency line?”
    Hollis grabbed the emergency phone and held it to his ear. Nothing. Some cultural instinct compelled him to stab repeatedly at the hook switch. “It’s dead. This was supposed to be a buried cable. How did they know where it was, Metzer?”
    Hollis heard talking in the background. Then Metzer came back on.
“We’ll talk about that later. Right now I’ve got men missing, and motion detectors in alarm all over the estate. I’m pulling everyone back into a perimeter around the master suite.”
    “How did these people get through the gates?” One of the security monitors showed the estate’s front entrance, which stood wide open.
    “I don’t know.”
    “It’s your
job
to know! I wasn’t supposed to ever
need
this room, damnit.” He fumed for a moment then added, “Send someone up to get Mary.”
    “She’s not with you?”
    “I can’t have her in here. Just put her in a closet or something. And figure out a way to contact the police. I don’t care if you have to use fucking smoke signals!” He hung up and kept flipping through security monitors. He’d spent a fortune on security, and he wasn’t getting much of a return on his investment. He was going to sack the entire security team after this was over—starting with Metzer.
    As Hollis cycled through cameras, the monitors showed various rooms on a dozen screens—multicar garage, pool patio, pub room, dining room, driveway …
    He stopped cold. In the middle of the driveway, one of Metzer’ssuited security men lay in a pool of blood, still clutching a submachine gun. His head was missing.
    “Jesus Christ!” Hollis picked up the house phone and dialed Metzer’s extension. It rang several times and went to voice mail. Hollis pressed the call button on the radio base station but heard nothing but static. “Fuck!”
    Then the power went out.
    Here in the safe room backup batteries instantly engaged, but on the security monitors he saw most of the lights kick off around the estate. Now only interior emergency lighting remained. Outside was blackness.
    Hollis clicked through the interior surveillance cameras. There—he saw two security people in the grand foyer with Metzer locking the ornate front doors of Hollis’s twenty-three-thousand-square-foot mansion. Metzer was racing upstairs, pointing and shouting to position men at the top of the staircase. They all carried MP-5 submachine guns. The second floor was apparently going to be their Alamo.
    Just then the front doors blasted open, sending door hardware, wood, and glass fragments silently spraying across the polished stone floor. Something the size of a man had burst through the doors at high speed, taking out the large antique table just inside the door and crashing into the far wall. The room started to fill with smoke.
    The surveillance camera showed security men opening fire from the second-floor railing. More shadows were already racing through the front door. Hollis couldn’t get a good look at them in the dim light and smoke. They moved fast—through the doorway and up the wide staircase. In mere moments they exited the frame. Hollis clicked around in frustration to find a suitable camera to see what was going on.
    He soon saw his own bedroom on one monitor—he’d had thissecurity camera installed as a precaution against sexual assault charges (one never knew what visions of rape young women might dream up after the fact). It wasn’t on the rotation available to the security team, but here he could see Metzer grabbing Mary by the wrist and pulling her from the bed. She was nude and screaming, but the muscular German was having none of it. On camera Metzer noiselessly shouted at her and pointed under the bed, letting go of her hand as he reacted to something in the hallway.
    Metzer trained his weapon on the door as Mary crawled under the bed behind him and moments later