Nina fell unusually silent and Jack glanced in her direction. Her slender form appeared tense. One hand held the PDA, the other moved to massage her forehead in thought.
“Nina? What you have found?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”
“Tell me.”
“The Trade Pavilion event began at the same moment the time code in Lesser’s Trojan Horse activated the virus.”
Jack chewed on that fact. “But we still don’t know what it does, correct?”
“That’s right.” Nina went back to squinting at the tiny text on her PDA screen. “The biggest project Sanjore worked on was the Summit Studio complex, which was built to revitalize a large section of downtown.”
She looked up. “By the way, Summit is the studio that is releasing Gates of Heaven. Hugh Vetri had an office on the ninth floor of Tower One.”
“Interesting, although it proves nothing.”
Jack entered the parking garage and grabbed the paper tag spit out by the automatic dispenser. The gate rose and Jack drove deeper into the bowels of Rossum Tower.
“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence here,” said Nina. “But all of it could be discounted as simple coincidence.”
“Ibn al Farad whispered Nawaf Sanjore’s name to me seconds before he died. It has to mean something.”
“Do you think Sanjore could be Hasan?” Nina’s tone was skeptical.
Jack guided the SUV into a space and cut the engine. “We’ll know soon enough.”
An ebony silhouette in Giorgio Armani, Nawaf Sanjore glided through his thirty-fifth-floor office on Bruno Magli shoes. Outside, the skyscrapers of Century City rose around him, the glass walls of his penthouse apartment affording the architect a magnificent view.
But Nawaf Sanjore ignored the vista as he moved from computer to computer, dumping megabytes’ worth of data onto micro drives or zip disks. As each storage device became full, Sanjore yanked it out of its drive, its USB port and slipped the item into a fawn-brown attaché case. His intelligent, alert eyes scanned the monitors, checking the contents of each data file before preserving it. He moved with calm, deliberate precision, even white teeth chewing his lower lip in concentration.
Behind the architect, two assistants burned papers, plans and memos in the crackling flames of his central fireplace — a raised circle of gray slate capped by a horn-shaped steel exhaust vent.
On an HDTV monitor at a large workstation, Nawaf Sanjore called up the crucial schematics he’d just loaded onto a micro disk — the blueprints for the Chamberlain Auditorium. He had provided Hasan with these plans while the facility was being built. Under Hasan’s orders he’d made secret alterations to the original blueprints, adding a secret land line accessible only by the terrorists once they took control of the auditorium. Now the day had come. Three years of planning and preparation were coming to fruition, yet still Nawaf Sanjore harbored secret doubts.
Could such an audacious plan succeed?
The architect bowed his head, shamed by his lack of faith. Hasan was wiser than he, Sanjore knew, and to lose faith in the man who had brought him enlightenment was worse than a betrayal — it was madness. Before he met Hasan, Nawaf Sanjore did not believe that Paradise was real. Hasan had showed him the light and the way and now he was a believer. All Hasan asked in return was absolute obedience, unquestioning faith. A small price to pay for eternal bliss.
“When the hard copies and paper files are destroyed, I want you to purge the mainframe’s memory — all of it,” Nawaf commanded. “I don’t want the authorities to recover anything.”
“Yes sir—”
A chime sounded, interrupting them. The architect turned back to the monitor, switched it off. “Sanjore here…”
The voice recognition program built into the apartment’s elaborate intercom system identified the speaker’s location and piped the message through.
“This is Lobby Security, sir. Two CTU agents are here. They wish to speak with you. They say it’s an urgent matter of national security.”
A large man with a substantial black beard emerged from the living room, his expression alarmed. “What do they want?” he whispered.
Sanjore shot the man a silencing look. “I will meet with these agents,” he told the voice on the intercom. Send them up to the thirty-fifth floor, please. I’ll have someone greet them there.”
“Roger, Mr. Sanjore.”
The intercom faded. Saaid spoke. “It is madness to speak to these Americans. They must have learned something. The whole plan might be unraveling. They could be here to arrest us all—”
“Two of them? I doubt it.” Sanjore clapped his hands on the other man’s shoulders. “Have faith, Saaid! All is not lost. And if it is, then we shall meet again in Paradise.”
Nawaf’s words calmed his colleague. Still, Saaid spoke in worried tones. “They suspect something. Why else are they here?”
“It was the youth, Ibn al Farad,” said the architect. “He was weak and he was foolish. Most likely it was the Saudi who gave us away. It is good that Hasan moved the evacuation schedule forward. He must have sensed the danger.”
Saaid rubbed his hands. “The American intelligence agents are on their way up right now. What are you going to do about them?”
“I’m nearly finished here. These men”—Nawaf gestured to his assistants—“will purge the computers. Go to my room, take the suitcase and my PDA and go to the roof. Tell the pilot to start the engines. I will join you momentarily.”
“You must hurry! The Americans are coming—”
Sanjore raised a manicured hand. “Do not fear, my friend. We will leave this place together. Yasmina will deal with the Americans.”
The view through the glass elevators was spectacular, but Jack hardly noticed. He kept his eyes on the quickly ascending digital numbers above the door. The car began to slow on the thirty-first floor. On the thirty-fifth, the burnished steel doors opened.
The woman who greeted Jack and Nina was so petite Jack thought for a moment she was a child. A second glance revealed her age to be at least twenty-five. Slim, with a dark complexion and wide, black eyes, her tiny, perfectly proportioned frame was wrapped in a tight, sky-blue sari. Her small feet were encased in jeweled slippers. Her dark hair, piled high on her head and held in place with ornamental silver daggers, added inches to her height.
Still, she barely topped four feet. Jack doubted the young woman weighed more than ninety pounds.
Graciously, she dipped her head. “Shall I announce you? My name is Yasmina.” Her smile was warm, her voice light and melodious as wind chimes.
“I’m Special Agent Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorist Unit. This is Nina Myers, my partner.”
“Mr. Sanjore is eager to help you if he can. Please follow me.”
The woman turned and walked in short, measured steps down the carpeted corridor.
After he spoke with the helicopter pilot, Saaid realized he had not retrieved his master’s things from the master bedroom, as commanded. He hurried down the spiral staircase, terrified he’d meet armed American agents around the next corner — or Nawaf, who would realize Saaid’s mistake.
He reached his master’s bedroom, found the Louis Vuitton suitcase on the bed, the PDA on the dresser. Relieved the task was so simple, he grabbed the items and hurried out the door. In the hallway he heard voices, froze.
The Americans.
Saaid stared down the corridor. Someone approached, their shadows dancing on the walls. He had to get out of there! Heart racing, he hurried across the hall to the spiral staircase. On the way he crashed the suitcase against a stone pedestal, tumbling a pre-Columbian sculpture onto the concrete floor. The shattering sound was like an explosion.