Irish Throwdown (What Happens In Vegas Book 4) by Matt Lincoln (short books for teens .TXT) 📕

perp was being honest and isn’t planning on just setting it off anyway.” There was an irritable bite to his voice, and I could tell the fatigue was getting to him.

“Agents!” a voice boomed from down the hall. I looked up and smiled automatically when I saw it was Seamus. “Good to see you again!”

“Good to see you, too,” I nodded.

“You look like death warmed over, boys.” Seamus glanced between Junior and me. “Although I suppose I can’t be blaming you. Anyway, I just got a call from your director. We’re getting ready to mobilize now. Are you heading to Connolly, then?”

“What?” I answered dumbly.

“Sorry,” Junior sighed. “I didn’t get to that, did I? Fiona found an audio clip of a railway crossing hidden in the original broadcast file. It was obviously added after the recording had been created, which means the broadcaster must have put it there deliberately. She thinks that’s a hint that he’s planning to target a train station.”

“And Connolly’s the biggest station in Dublin,” Seamus added. “Of course, we’re sending men to all the stations in the area, but if someone wanted to cause destruction, they’d be better off choosing the biggest and busiest station, right?”

“Makes sense to me,” I agreed.

“Let’s hurry, then,” Junior urged. “He told us we’d have twenty-four hours, but I’m not sure it would be wise to trust him. The last time he sent us somewhere, we were met with an ambush.”

Seamus’s smile fell a little, most likely remembering what had happened to Callahan.

“I’m going to find this brute,” Seamus huffed. “And boot him out of my beloved country.”

I smiled at his vigor as we headed off toward the entrance of the police station. We weren’t the only ones rushing out, and there was a clamor outside the station as officers loaded into their cars and took off toward their respective posts.

“Buckle up, gentlemen,” Seamus advised as we climbed into the car. He turned on his lights and sirens before taking off down the street.

By this point, I had gone several days without more than a few hours of sleep at a time, and my head was throbbing painfully. Still, I felt wide awake as adrenaline coursed through my veins. The closer we got to the train station, the more palpably I could feel the excitement of an impending adventure.

Seamus pulled up to the station just as a cavalry of other police cars arrived as well. We climbed out of the car and joined the other officers spilling through the entrance into the train station.

The inside of the station was large, with a high, vaulted ceiling and a long row of turnstiles that led toward the platforms. There wasn’t a soul in sight apart from the Garda, so the whole place felt eerily too cavernous and empty. It gave me a foreboding feeling before we’d even begun.

“Alright, listen up!” a uniformed officer standing by the front of the turnstiles yelled. “Remain with your teams and don’t go wandering off. If you find something, keep your hands off it! Call in Bomb Disposal immediately. I will say that again. Do not touch anything! If you find something that you believe might be an explosive device, step away and call for Bomb Disposal. Do I make myself clear?”

The man’s instructions were met by a chorus of affirmations, and the next moment everyone was breaking off into their groups.

“That was the deputy commissioner,” Seamus informed us as we moved further into the train station. “Don’t worry about what he said about staying in teams. That was for the Garda. You’re free to move around as you please, though I would recommend you heed his warning about not touching anything you happen to notice. The entire station’s been evacuated by now.”

“Has anyone checked the security tapes?” Junior inquired as he stopped in his tracks to look up at a camera mounted on the wall above us.

“I’m not sure,” Seamus replied. “I can find out, though.”

He led us down a hallway and into a back area clearly only meant for staff.

“Lucky for you, I’ve been back here before,” Seamus remarked. “I don’t know what it is about public transportation that brings about the absolute worst behavior in some people. Anyway, if I recall correctly, it should be right through here.”

He pushed open a door marked “security” and stepped inside. To my surprise, there were already a pair of officers in there.

“If it isn’t Seamus,” one of the officers greeted. “What are you doing here?”

“Just giving the agents a little tour,” Seamus responded. “They need to see the security tapes.”

“Ah.” The officer nodded as she looked past Seamus to peer at us. “We were just about to go through them.”

“Perfect,” Seamus replied. “Hopefully, it’ll make locating that bomb easier.”

The small security room was too cramped for all of us to fit comfortably, but I pushed my way toward the screens mounted against the walls, anyway. There were a couple dozen monitors mounted along the front wall of the room, as well as a few sitting on a desktop. Each one displayed a different part of the station, from the hallways to each individual track.

“It’s going to take a while for us to review everything,” Junior frowned. “Even if every person in the room watches a different monitor, that means we’ll each have to go through three or four of them.”

“We’d better get going, then,” I replied. We were nearly down to half of our allotted time, so we needed to take advantage of every moment we had left. “Seamus, which tracks would you say are the busiest?”

“Maybe platform four,” he hummed in response. “That’s one of the DART tracks. There’s a train about every ten minutes, so it’s always pretty busy during the weekdays.”

“I’ll start with that one, then,” I stated. “It would make the most sense for the perp to pick a target that would result in a higher number of casualties.”

The screens on the wall displayed live feeds of the station, but only the four monitors