Jack and Nina were walking down a hallway when they heard the noise. Jack turned his head toward the sound, but Nina Myers faced the woman Yasmina— and that was what saved them.
As Yasmina whirled, her dainty hand plucked the ornamental daggers out of her thick hair. She hurled one at Jack’s exposed throat.
“Jack!” Nina cried, pushing him against the wall. Her movement put Nina in the path of the dagger. The silver blade sank deep into her shoulder, and Nina cried out.
In an agile and graceful movement, Yasmina spun through the air and landed, legs braced, in front of Jack while he was still regaining his balance. A second dagger slashed his forearm. But the blade caught the bandages already under his shirt, and with a reflexive strike from Jack, the weapon flew out of the woman’s hands.
A heavyset man burst past them and down the hall, barreling like an out-of-control train toward a spiral staircase. He clutched a suitcase in one hand, what looked like a silver revolver in the other. For a split-second, Jack thought it might be Nawaf Sanjore.
Yasmina took advantage of the momentary distraction, aimed a sharp kick at Jack’s knee, slammed his jaw with the palm of her hand, then reached for another pair of daggers secreted in her clothing. She pulled both blades, poised to impale Jack, when a sliver dagger plunged into one side of her throat and ripped out the other. A fountain of blood gushed as Nina tugged the weapon free, cutting through veins, arteries and cartilage.
Yasmina lurched forward, eye glazed, red lips curled back. The daggers dropped from her hands. Then her head lolled backward and she pitched forward.
At the end of the corridor, the heavy man thundered up the spiral staircase. Jack’s head swiveled wildly. “Nina are you all right?”
Clutching her wounded shoulder, Nina stepped over Yasmina’s corpse. “I’ll be okay, but you’ve got to stop him.”
Jack was up and running for the stairs before she’d finished her sentence. He grasped the handrail with one hand, drew the Tactical with the other. Before he reached the top he thumbed the safety off. The stairs led to a narrow catwalk and a steel door. He slammed his shoulder against it, and pushed it open. Dust and hot wind battered him as a helicopter rose from the flat roof, twisted in the air and soared away.
Jack ran across the roof, aiming his Tactical at the fleeing chopper. He almost squeezed the trigger when he saw the heavyset man. The man was poised on the edge of the roof, the Louis Vuitton suitcase sitting beside him, as he watched the helicopter fade into the bright horizon.
“Do not move!” Jack commanded. “Step away from the edge of the building and turn around.”
The man raised his hands in surrender, but he did not face Jack.
“Step back and turn around!” Jack repeated. In the large man’s hand, he saw the object that he’d thought was a silver revolver. It was actually a PDA, an item that might have belonged to Nawaf Sanjore. Jack knew he had to get it.
“Face me!” Jack commanded, moving forward.
At the sound of Jack’s approaching footsteps, the man lowered his arms, then jumped off the edge of the high-rise.
“Allah Akbar!”
The diminishing volume of the suicidal scream reached Jack’s ears as the big man disappeared from view.
13. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 P.M. AND 6 P.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
Jack returned to the corridor where the fatal confrontation had begun. He found the body of Yasmina, but Nina was gone. He dropped the Louis Vuitton suitcase he’d found on the roof, drew his weapon and held it in ready position with both hands.
“Nina! Nina, can you hear me?”
Her reply emerged through hidden speakers. “Jack! There’s a staircase at the end of the corridor. I’m two floors below you, in Sanjore’s office. I think I found something.”
Jack made his way downstairs, found Nina hunched over a computer keyboard. She had dressed her shoulder wound with century-old cognac, wrapped it with shreds from a white, Egyptian cotton towel. The puncture wound was deep. Already her bandage was stained with seeping blood.
“I’ve called in the forensics team,” he informed her, snapping shut his cell phone. “They’ll be here any minute. Nawaf Sanjore got away in a helicopter. CTU had the aircraft on radar, but lost it in the ground clutter over Los Angeles. He could be headed anywhere, by now. We’ve lost him.”
Jack secured his weapon. “I managed to corner one of Sanjore’s aides, but the man threw himself from the tower rather than face capture. He had a PDA in his hand, I doubt it survived the fall…”
“The computers have been wiped clean, too,” said Nina, her voice rock-steady despite the stab wound. “But look at this! I found it when I turned on the monitor.”
It was the largest screen in a room filled with them. Jack stared at the color schematic — some kind of plans for a building. But there was nothing to identify the structure.
“Someone forgot to close the program when they wiped the memory. The file is gone, but the contents of this screen can be downloaded into the printer’s memory,” said Nina. “At least I hope so.”
She tapped a few keys. A large printer in the corner fired up and spit out an oversized spread sheet of the plans. Nina and Jack both released breaths they didn’t know they were holding.
“That’s something, at least,” said Nina.
“Good work,” Jack replied. He touched her arm. “And thanks for saving my ass.”
“Jack! You’re bleeding.”
Jack raised an eyebrow as he rolled up his sleeve. “So are you.”
Nina glanced down at the blood staining the strip of towel she’d used to wrap her puncture wound. “But I dressed it already,” she told him.
She indicated the shredded towel on the desk. Jack reached for it. “Yasmina caught me where I had been cut before, at the al-Bustani mansion,” he told her, wrapping a strip of Egyptian cotton around his seeping arm. “I think the blade got tangled with the bandage. It saved me.” He smiled at his second in command. “Neat trick, Nina. Killing her with her own blade.”
Nina smirked. “Well, she stuck the damn thing in my shoulder. The least I could do was return it to her.”
Jack chuckled, but in that brief moment he saw a cruel glint in Nina’s eyes he’d never seen before. It was gone in a flash — so quickly he thought he’d imagined it.
Secret Service Agent Craig Auburn accompanied two private security consultants for a final electronic sweep of the entire auditorium. Both men were experts at special event security and brought along their own equipment. One man, about forty with peppered hair, carried a high-speed gas chromatography unit over his shoulder. A younger man, not even thirty, had a silver-gray micro-differential ion mobility spectrometer strapped to his back. The trio started in the wings, climbed high into the catwalks above the stage, through the entire upper stage area, then down again.
Auburn, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of a Currency Fraud Division desk job, was huffing and puffing by the time they reached the massive main stage. Briefly he wondered if he’d make retirement, or if his deteriorating heart would kill him before he ever saw his pension.
Concerned, the older rent-a-snoop powered down his unit. “Hey, buddy. You okay? Need a rest or something?”
Auburn rasped a reply. “No, no. Just jet lag.”
The men crossed the stage, which seemed shiny smooth from a distance. Close up, Auburn saw blocking marks, hatches, electric plugs covered by metal hoods dotting the empty expanse.