Abuse of Power (32 page)

Jack was clueless. “What’s that?”

“It’s a rudimentary form of code based on the old Caesar cypher. A lot of gamers use it to hide cheat codes and spoilers on Internet forums. They’re extremely easy to crack, which is why the sender used that second level of encryption.”

“So how does it work?” Jack asked.

“You replace each letter by the one located thirteen letters after it in the alphabet. For example, an
A
becomes an
N.
I have the lookup table here.”

He punched a key and a small window popped up, showing:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm

“Decryption is a fairly mindless task at this point,” he went on. “The numbers will remain the same. All we need do is transpose the letters and we’ll know what these messages say.”

Faisal had already gone to work, using another computer application to quickly translate the lines. When it was done, he stacked the decryptions on the screen:

RSQU3054383

twins

August twenty

Twenty Hundred HRS

http://bit.ly/hzsYM3

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Jack felt his heart begin to race. “I think we’ve just hit pay dirt,” he said to Sara. “You realize what this is, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure what the first two lines are all about,” Sara said, “but that last one’s an Internet address. So I’m guessing these are the date, time, and target of an attack.”

Jack nodded. “The first one looks like a serial number of some kind. Or maybe the ISO number for a shipping container.”

“Could be a shipment from Chilikov, if Haddad was successful.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Jack said. “But what about this ‘twins’ line? You think it’s a reference to the twin towers? A reminder of their last big hit?”

“The infidels will soon see destruction that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.”

“It could be that,” Sara said. “It could also be two prongs of an attack, two cells, matching automobiles being used for smuggling—anything. But whatever it means, August twentieth is only three days from now. Saturday night.”

Jack gestured to Faisal. “Can you paste that URL into a browser? I want to see what they have in mind.” He added as an afterthought, “Please?”

Faisal did as he was asked. When he clicked the address, Google Maps came to life on screen, showing a satellite image of San Francisco. Flagged in the middle of it by a big letter
A
, was one of the city’s best-known landmarks.

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Jack’s mind suddenly flashed on that afternoon at Pagliaci’s, when Danny Pescatori gave Tony a VIP invitation to the museum gala. He’d forgotten about it until now.

And it was scheduled for this Saturday night.

“My God,” he said, his heart kicking up a notch as the realization sank in like a depth charge to the brain. “They’re going after the President.”

PART THREE

Countdown

30

San Francisco, California

Talia “Tally” Griffin was convinced that
this
time she’d struck gold.

After years of dating all the wrong guys, winding up in relationships that went absolutely nowhere, she was certain that she had finally found her Prince Charming.

His name was Victor Massri.

Tall. Handsome. With deep, dark eyes, smooth brown skin, and that exotic, wispy little black goatee.

Tally didn’t normally go for men with beards, but Victor was the exception to the rule, and from the right angle he reminded her of Johnny Depp.

He was Egyptian, he’d told her, born and raised in London, and ever since they’d started corresponding online—through the SF Singles Hotline dating service—she knew she’d found someone very special.

Until this moment, the only contact they’d had were e-mails and text messages, a few photos they’d exchanged, and several prolonged phone calls, but seeing him walk out of that airline terminal flashing those beautiful white teeth was everything she’d hoped for, and more.

He greeted her with a platonic hug. She wanted more but she also didn’t want to scare him. The man was not one of her local jerks, he was
foreign.
She didn’t know what his customs were.

“Just the one suitcase?” she asked.

“I always travel light,” he told her, tossing the bag into the backseat.

They stood there awkwardly for a moment until Tally said, “I can’t believe you’re finally here.”

“Nor can I,” he told her.

It wasn’t just Victor’s dark good looks, however, that got Tally’s engine running hot. The two had clicked the moment she answered his request for an online meet. He told her that he’d seen her photo and thought she was “lovely,” and was doubly pleased when he read her profile and discovered she was an urban explorer. Her exact words to him were, “I love all old buildings, especially ones that have all the original furniture and fixtures.”

Victor told her he was an architect who had a great love for history, and had done quite a bit of exploring himself. He said he’d been to many abandoned sites around the world, from the eerie, fortresslike apartments of Battleship Island, Japan, to the decrepit unused underground railway stations right in his own hometown.

“You’re even more lovely in person,” he told her, and Tally knew she had to get this guy alone, real soon. Whatever cultural reserve he might have, she was determined to bridge it.

They climbed into her Toyota and she took him straight to her apartment.

This was going to be a night to remember.

*   *   *

Hassan Haddad had never forgotten just how disturbingly aggressive American women could be. But if he were to judge by this one, he’d say they’d gotten even worse over the last decade.

The moment he set foot in her apartment and dropped his suitcase, this althletic blond, blue-eyed ex-hippie with the ridiculous name and the wild curly hair was already pulling his jacket away and, when he didn’t object—indeed, he forced himself to smile with encouragement—starting on the buttons on his shirt.

Before she had even finished that task, Tally was kissing his chest and somehow unbuckling his pants at the same time as the trail of her kisses moved down toward his abdomen. Then she was on her knees and had him in her mouth and, aggressive or not, Haddad found himself unable to resist.

He was suddenly swept back to those nights at Berkeley, when his two dorm mates would tend to him as if they were his personal sex slaves, their enthusiasm matched by their skills—which were considerable. He had a hard time now remembering their names. Sabrina … and Jennifer?

Yes, that was it.

They were wild women, almost as wild as this one, and they had been more than willing to share themselves with Haddad. While he preferred women who obeyed men and acted in the way Allah had intended, he found himself unable to resist the charms of Sabrina and Jennifer.

Most of the students and professors he encountered in those days were far to the left of the average American, and he had difficulty hiding his contempt for them. In fact, he despised everything about them but pretended to share their views in order to get to know them and understand their thinking. Most of these radical leftists were Jews, which reconfirmed his inherent beliefs about all Jews: they were “chosen” by God to spread disorder across the globe.

On occasion, however, he would notice the ultrareligious Lubavitch Chasidic Jews as they walked to prayer with their children on Saturdays. He couldn’t help but admire their family solidarity, their piety, but most significantly their dignity.

He hated to admit, even to himself, that they reminded him of his own people, especially the most pious. He could not afford to feel charity toward a people who were oppressing so many Muslims. He rejected the argument that the Jews were just protecting their homeland. All they had to do was return to the Diaspora that God had intended and all would be well—

He remembered the Friday night when his life’s work crystallized. Sabrina (or was it Jennifer?) took him to the Chabad house near the campus. She kept telling him how much he was going to love the people there because they reminded her of him.

How stupid could these American girls be, comparing him, a son of Allah, with these pathetic children of Yahweh? But he needed to play his role so he went. As he entered the room he was enveloped within the loud singing. He noticed the women were on one side of the room and on the other there was a large circle of men dancing, with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Some had their small children with their legs around their necks, riding their shoulders.

Haddad was stunned when a very tall man with red hair and a full red beard reached from the circle and pulled him in. He recalled the man’s piercing blue eyes as he was drawn into the whirl of dancing men. He was momentarily swept up in the intoxicating mixture of the loud voices singing in unison in the cousin-language of Hebrew, the feel of the old wooden floors swaying beneath his feet.

For a fleeting instant he felt he was back in Pakistan, among his own kind.

And then he remembered who he was, and who
they
were. He felt revulsion by their proximity, by their smiles, by their revelry. He wanted to transform it all to still, bloody sorrow. He endured their presence so he could study their weaknesses. So he could protect those Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere whom these “Chosen People” had chosen to persecute.

Haddad felt that same hatred now. For the Jews, for their American allies, for the sluts like Tally who corrupted all of womanhood.

She wanted to be used? Haddad would oblige. When the time was right he would show this aggressive bitch what few American men would ever dare. She would be tamed and dominated. She would understand what true aggression was.

But he had no time for such things right now. He needed her to be fully on his side until he got from her the information he needed, so he let her have her way with him, right there on her living room floor.

It wasn’t, he supposed, the worst compromise he could make.

*   *   *

“You read all the newspaper columns I wrote,” Tally said, “but they really only touch on the surface of San Francisco’s underground.”

“I am eager to hear more,” Haddad told her truthfully.

“I’m so glad!” she enthused. “So few people know about it, even those who live here. But there’s an entire secret history beneath the city that’s largely ignored or forgotten.”

It was the next day, and they were driving in Tally’s Toyota. Her aggressiveness behind the wheel matched her sexual aggressiveness.

“Educate me,” he said, as he watched the road. It would be absurd for him to die in a car crash after all the effort it had taken to get to this point.

“Well, first there’s Chinatown,” she told him. “During the gold rush, hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants came to the city and were forced to live in slums. By the late eighteen hundreds that area was a network of underground sewer tunnels and passageways topped by crowded tenement buildings. It was one of the most dangerous places in San Francisco.”

Haddad laughed inside. He had seen his share of slums in his time, and knew quite well how dangerous they could be.

“Most of the immigrants were destitute, and many of them were sold as slaves to work in kitchens and laundries. Young girls would be forced into prostitution, and those who tried to protect them used the underground tunnels to hide them away.”

Heathen behavior, Haddad thought, but typical of a country run by infidels whose greed and base interests knew no bounds.

She babbled on. But it wasn’t that part of the city’s underground that he was interested in. He had done enough research on his own to know that there was something far more useful to him than a Chinese history lesson. Bloggers had announced the general area of the entrance; she had saved him having to search for it. Fault line maps created by the U.S. Geological Survey—charts showing dip, azimuth, depth, and other data used by San Andreas Geophysical Operations for threat assessment—had unwittingly delineated the tunnels themselves. The route for the assault was planned. Haddad merely had to see the tunnels for himself, make sure they were clear.

Finally, trying not to show his impatience, he directed her towards his needs.

“What about the bunker you referred to in one of your articles?”

“Ah,” she said. “Even fewer people know about that, maybe some old-timers and a handful of urban explorers like me.”

“When were they built?”

“During the Second World War,” she said. “San Francisco was considered a very vulnerable target if the war were ever to come to our shores, so the military built a massive underground bunker in preparation for an attack.”

“How could people not know about this?”

“Because it was a military secret to begin with. After the war ended the place was completely sealed up so that nobody would find it.”

“That seems a waste. Surely they’ve utilized it—say, for storage?”

She shook her head. “Some cities did things like that. New York, for instance. Stocked them with canned goods in case of a nuclear attack. It scared people so they stopped. It was easier just to pretend the bunkers didn’t exist.”

“And you’ve managed to find a way inside the bunker?”

She smiled. “Yep.”

“And it truly leads to this place you told me about?”

She gave him a sly smile.

Haddad felt a sudden flash of anger and wanted to slap the smile from her face. Why couldn’t she just answer the question? He did not have time for games.