By the time Jack and his team hit the island, everyone was gone.
They came at it hard, at three in the morning, Tony Antiniori commandeering the Sea Wrighter as three of their friends-all ex-military, faces painted, weapons in hand-jumped onto the now empty dock and charged up the ramp toward the concourse.
Despite Jack’s loss of blood, Tony had used his skills as a medic to do a quick patch job and get him back on his feet. But as he headed out after the others, Tony held him back.
“I don’t think so, buddy. Leave this to us.”
“Try and stop me,” Jack said.
Tony sighed and backed off.
Then Jack was off the boat and pounding up the ramp, a borrowed Colt AR-15 assault rifle in hand, moving with the others like commandos on a village raid. Even though Jack knew the exercise was probably futile he had to try, had to see if by some miracle Sara was still here, maybe tied up in a room somewhere, maybe in the foghorn building.
They covered the entire compound in less than ten minutes, crashing through doors, moving from room to room in the old Victorian, finding nothing but the mess left behind by Soren and his band of madmen, and the remnants of the fight in the dining room.
Jack took the winding stairs up to the lighthouse and scanned the concourse below, then the bay itself, looking for any signs of a body on the surface. His wound opened again but he didn’t care. His heart was stuck in his throat as his light played across the water. He was relieved when he saw nothing but the black water lit by the sinking moon.
Tony clambered up the stairs behind him. He stared out as well.
“They probably took her to use as a hostage,” Tony said. “You’ve proved pretty resilient-and they know you got away.”
“Yeah,” Jack said.
He hoped that Tony was right.
“Come on,” Tony said, urging him back down the stairs.
Jack followed docilely.
Jack thought about that last look she’d given him, that cold, unflinching gaze, the one that said she was prepared to deal with whatever came next, that she could take care of herself. But try as he might, he could not quite forgive himself for doing as she’d asked.
A mix of dread and anger sluiced through his body as he walked back past the lighthouse tower, clutching the AR-15. The woman he loved, the city he cherished, both at risk thanks to a man he loathed. It was an emotional cocktail that sharpened his focus to a razor edge.
As they exited the lighthouse they encountered a wiry former Navy SEAL who came jogging toward them.
“It’s all clear,” said Jonah Goldman. “Nobody on-site.”
Tony nodded. Jack was looking out at the bay.
“She’s not out there,” he said. “You’ve got to believe that.”
Jack sucked down a long, slow, tremulous breath.
“Now it’s time to go,” Tony said.
They hustled back to the boat, Jack lagging, Tony running watchfully at his side. The long night and loss of blood were conspiring against him.
The world turned and he dropped straight down as they reached the dock.
When Jack woke the sun was shining through a porthole. He was lying in his cabin, Eddie snuggled next to him.
Jack was instantly alert-and angry. He had passed out and they’d let him stay passed out. He swiveled his head and found Maxine sitting in a chair across from the bed. He was surprised to see her.
“How long have I been out?” he asked.
“Couple of hours,” she said. “They kept you sedated so they could deal with this.”
She held up a small bottle containing a nugget of metal-the bullet Tony had dug out of Jack’s shoulder sometime in the middle of the night. “No permanent damage, but it seems you’ve gotten yourself in pretty deep.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Jack sighed.
“So tell me.”
He did as he tried to overcome the lingering effects of whatever they’d pumped into his veins. He told her about the trip to Tel Aviv, the tense moment at Ben Gurion International, the near-miss with Hassan Haddad, breaking into Abdal al-Fida’s apartment, the encounter with Swain and his magic wand, the deaths of Brendan and the others, the e-mails Alain had discovered, Lawrence Soren and the firefight on the island… But mostly he talked about Sara, because it was his only way of hanging on to her right now.
“I shouldn’t have left her on that island,” he said.
“What choice did you have?”
“The one I didn’t take.”
“The one where you wind up dead?”
“Might be better than this,” he said bitterly.
“Uh-huh,” Max said. “And if this Swain guy is using her for leverage, then it seems to me you may have saved both of your lives by getting away.” She paused. “But more importantly, we are facing very organized, very powerful, very well connected megalomaniacs who are planning something bad. Stopping them is more important than anything else.”
“What are you saying?”
She leaned toward him now, her expression intense. “I want to help you, Jack. We all want to help you find Sara. But even more, we want to help our country. That gala starts in a little less than six hours and we need to do everything in our power to keep those bastards from blowing the place up.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?”
“Teamwork,” Max said. “Teamwork and a whole hell of a lot of luck.”
They had turned the salon and pilothouse of the Sea Wrighter into a makeshift command center, reminding Jack of the apartment house in Paris. The Sea Wrighter itself was anchored in the middle of the bay, away from prying eyes and ears, and who knew what else. If they were going to make some kind of move, it had to be done with the greatest of stealth.
Three of Tony’s buddies were here, the same three who had helped them assault the island. Jack had met them over the months in various bars that he and Tony frequented around town, old hardened war vets who still remembered what it meant to fight for your country. Back in the days when the bad guys were easier to spot and you knew who your friends were by the uniform they wore.
Now those uniforms had been replaced by street clothes, and you never knew who might be hiding behind a simple T-shirt and a pair of jeans. And thanks to fascists like Lawrence Soren and the people he bankrolled, there was no way to know when a look of concern or surprise was genuine, or merely a facade designed to manipulate and deceive.
But like Tony himself, his buddies were old-school, the kind of guys you could rely on in a pinch.
There was Mike Abernathy, a steel-eyed sixty-five-year-old former army combat commando badass, who looked as limber as a kid out of high school. Mike had done four tours in Vietnam, earned a chest full of medals, and at one time was even on the short list for a Medal of Honor.
Then there was Jonah Goldman, a fifty-year-old former Navy SEAL whose search-and-rescue missions around the globe were legendary, a guy who looked like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And finally, Doc Matson, former medic and paratrooper who had trained Tony himself. Grizzled, white haired, Doc was the oldest of the bunch, and possibly the toughest, and the others sometimes kidded that he’d fought alongside Ulysses S. Grant.
It was a motley crew, all right, but these men were as tough as they came and had the mental and physical prowess to best any twenty-year-old coming out of the box.
But the biggest surprise here was Dave Karras, Max’s old flame and computer hacker extraordinaire. After that night in his apartment Jack figured he’d never see the guy again, especially in the same zip code as Max herself. Yet here he was, with a shave and a haircut, commandeering three laptop computers that projected their images onto Jack’s sixty-inch television screen.
Jack shot Max a quizzical look and she just shrugged and said, “What can I tell you? I’m a sucker for men who grovel.”
Jack still couldn’t picture them as a couple, but he’d given up on trying to figure out the ways of the heart a long time ago.
“Okay, guys,” Karras said. “I found it.”
He punched a button on one of the laptops and the television screen came to life with a building blueprint.
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor.
The Legion of Honor was a revered part of San Francisco’s history, a common destination for tourists and locals alike. Built in 1924, it was a smaller, multicolumned replica of France’s Palais de la Legion d’Honneur, which sits on the west bank of the river Seine.
San Francisco’s palace stood on a small hill in Lincoln Park, surrounded by a golf course and beautiful ocean vista, looking out toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Jack had always thought its architecture was reminiscent of the buildings in Washington, D.C., and Thomas Jefferson himself had used the original French palace as inspiration for Monticello, his estate in Virginia.
The Legion of Honor had served as a museum since its doors first opened, and had one of the finest collections of ancient and European art in the world.
Jack had been there many times, but looking at it in the form of a blueprint was a new experience for him.
“All right, folks,” Tony said, stepping over to the TV screen. “If Jack’s intelligence is correct, we’re looking at a possible terrorist assault on the museum at twenty-one hundred hours.” He looked at Max and Karras and winked. “That’s nine o’clock for the civilians in the crowd.”
Max raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for clearing that up.”
“Happy to oblige,” Tony said, then turned to the rest of them. “We have to assume they’re not going to call off the operation. Jack’s escape leaves them potentially exposed. They have nothing to lose by finishing what they’ve started, though I guarantee the thin black line is going to be even more vigilant now.”
“Thin black line?” Max asked.
“An enemy police action, blended into the shadows by using homegrown operatives,” Tony explained. “The question is how they’re going to pull this off. With the President’s appearance there, security will be locked so tight the chances of bringing in some kind of explosive device are remote, if not impossible.”
“What about the X factor?” Jack asked. “Harold Wickham.”
“Do you think he’ll show?” Tony asked. “I mean, if they’re going to blow the place up-”
“He may put in a token appearance and leave,” Jack said. “But he has clout. He’ll have full access.”
“What about the Secret Service?” Max said.
“They got to MI6, didn’t they?” Jack said. “Who knows how far this reaches.”
“Inside man or not,” Mike Abernathy said, “anyone who enters that place will have to go through a security scanner, a pat down, and a dog sniff, so a simple walk-on isn’t likely.”
“Right,” Tony said. His voice and his expression flattened. “That’s the problem. Me and Mike and Jonah here spent the morning trying to come up with potential alternative scenarios that might make the impossible possible, but we came up blank. Especially with Haddad as a wild card.”
“So we’re wasting our time,” Karras said.
“No,” Jack told him. “This function is the target, even if it’s not ground zero. They made no bones about letting me and Sara know that.”
“Then how the hell are they gonna hit it?” Max asked.
“That’s where Doc here comes in,” Tony said. He gestured to Doc, who was sprawled on Jack’s sofa, picking at his teeth with the corner of a matchbook. “He was downstairs grabbing a nap when the discussion started, but once he decided to get his ass outta the sack he already knew the answer to your question. Which is why I always have to remind myself he’s older than God.”
“You kiddin’ me?” Doc said. “Who do you think raised the Almighty?”
“So what’s the answer?” Jack asked impatiently.
Doc stopped picking his teeth, dropped the matchbook into his shirt pocket, and got to his feet.
“I started thinking about that little headquarters they appropriated in the bay,” he said. “Wickham told you they picked it because it was isolated.”
“Yeah. So?” Jack said.
“Plenty of places in the city are isolated, secure, convenient, ” he said. “That thing’s a pain in the ass to get to, and there’s always the chance a Coast Guard patrol will stop you, especially with the President coming to town-”
“Cold son of a bitch, too,” Goldman observed.
“No,” Doc went on. “There had to be another reason they picked it.”
“ What reason?” Max asked.
Doc replied, “Location, location, location.” He waited a moment to let that sink in. “I called a buddy at the National Reconnaissance Office. They’ve got a MATS-Maritime Anomalous Traffic Satellite-that flags divergence from normal patterns in the nation’s major waterways. Sort of like NORAD for shipping. All that stuff we’re supposedly not doing to protect our ports? We are.”
“Draw your enemy out by pretending not to be watching,” Jack said.
“Exactly,” Doc told him. “I had him look at the images from that region. He said there’s been very limited nighttime activity along the mainland coast near the island. The infrared images did not raise any alarms at the NRO because it failed to fit any standard danger profiles: it wasn’t adjacent to a populated center, only small vessels came and went, and it stopped.”
“Someone knew what they could get away with,” Jack suggested.
“Obviously,” Doc said. “But it got me poking around that region. And I remembered something. After the Japs struck Pearl Harbor, California was considered a prime target. Not only that, our armed forces relied heavily on munitions and other cargo being shipped out of the bay, so a lot of the existing bunkers along our coastline were fortified and several new facilities were built. Some of those newer bunkers were located under park land.”
“Lincoln Park?” Max asked.
Doc nodded. “Officially, nobody knows the exact locations. This was all very top secret. But years after the war was over, several of these installations were discovered and explored by thrill seekers, until the government went to considerable expense and trouble in the seventies to seal them all off once and for all.”
“I’m a San Francisco native,” Karras said. “So why don’t I know about this?”
“Because you aren’t supposed to. Nobody is. The military has been operating on the theory that they never know when these bunkers might be of use again, so they’ve kept a lid on their existence. After the tunnels were sealed off and the decades went by they became an urban legend.”
“Only this one turns out to be true,” Tony said.
Doc nodded. “A few years back, a small group of urban explorers discovered a way into the Lincoln Park bunker, purely by accident. Nature has a way of shifting the earth and one of them found a hole in the ground and got curious.”
“And they might not be the only ones who know about it,” Max said.
“You know how things travel on the Internet these days,” Tony said. “If some enterprising terrorist wanted to explore the situation, he might-for love or money-find someone willing to show him one of our city’s biggest secrets.”
“Hassan Haddad,” Jack said.
“And you’re sure there’s one of these underground bunkers in Lincoln Park?” Karras asked.
“Absolutely,” Doc told him. “And a section of it that leads straight to the Legion of Honor.”
“How do you know all this?” Max asked.
Doc grinned. “Because, my dear, I’ve seen it firsthand. I used to work in those tunnels.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“It was my first deployment, straight out of boot camp, about a year before they closed the whole operation down. That’s why I stayed here-fell in love with the city. I must’ve traveled the length of those bunkers a thousand times. And I can tell you, they aren’t just limited to Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked.
“They run all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s like an express highway system down there, but without the traffic.”
“Okay, so we know of a possible way into the building,” Jack said.
“Not possible,” Doc told him. “Probable. The Legion of Honor was built back in nineteen twenty-four.” He gestured to Karass and pointed to the blueprint on-screen. “Show me the subbasement on that thing.”
Karass did as he was told and the blueprint came up on the screen. Doc pointed to it. “Back in my day, there was a way into the tunnels by an elevator located in this subbasement right about here. They sealed that off after the tunnels were closed but there was a special hatch built close by, in case the elevator wasn’t working.” He shifted his finger to point out the location of the hatch. “It’s a few years since I’ve been down in that basement, but the last time I saw that hatch it was secured by a simple chain and padlock.”
“Wouldn’t the Secret Service know about this?” Tony asked.
“No doubt they would and they’d have a man guarding it,” Doc said. “But if these savages have a friend on the inside, who’s to say he couldn’t neutralize the agent and open the hatch?”
“Jesus,” Max said. “Can’t we just call in a bomb scare?”
“With what proof?” Jack said. “They get a hundred of those a day, and they undoubtedly do routine sweeps.”
“So what’s the solution?” Karras asked.
Tony said, “A two-pronged attack. Doc has a friend he thinks can give him a pretty good idea where the exterior entry point to the bunkers is. I say we wait for cover of darkness then go and see what we find.”
“And what’s the second prong?” Jack asked.
“You and me,” Tony said, then reached into his pocket and took out the VIP invitation to the gala that Danny Pescatori had snagged for him. “Better break out your tuxedo, brother. We’re gonna be rubbing shoulders with the President tonight.”