93

San Francisco

The private jet touched down on the San Francisco International Airport’s tarmac on schedule.

A car was waiting. The driver stepped out and leaned against the vehicle, arms crossed in front of him, fingers unbelievably muscular.

The plane taxied to a stop, the wind generated by it ruffling the waiting driver’s dark hair.

Within minutes, the clamshell door of the jet opened with a pneumatic wheezing and the airstairs were lowered to the ground.

One of the Hermitage’s air staff, a pretty flight attendant in a crisp uniform, stepped out and moved to the side of the stairs. Her smile was strained, her neck visibly bruised. She looked like she’d been crying.

Jason appeared at the top of the stairs. He stabbed her as he walked past, a quick throat puncture with a replacement blade. She topped over backward, hitting the tarmac at an awkward angle.

Geppetto laughed.

Jason walked down the steps and slid into the front passenger seat without a word.

Geppetto got behind the wheel and drove the car to Pier 33. Gina Hayes was scheduled to speak in five hours. A specially scheduled ferry was waiting to take them to Alcatraz Island.

Jason’s face was set as tight as sinew, reflecting his mood. The nature of his unique craniofacial structure had saved his life, the malleability of his bones absorbing rather than shattering beneath the rock’s blow, though he had the mother of all headaches. When he didn’t call ten minutes after arriving on the scene of the Beale vault, the backup crew had descended. He was revived. The vault was emptied of its treasure. The corpses of the two men Jason had killed were dumped into it. Same with the bodies of the two backwater cops who arrived, presumably sent by Wiley and Odegaard.

He didn’t call her Isabel anymore.

The vault, now a tomb, had been resealed, reburied, and their tracks covered as much as possible. The blood remained, but a heavy rain would erase that. One member of the cleanup crew drove the police car several miles away and abandoned it before being driven back to headquarters by his partner. The subterfuge wouldn’t last for long, or it would last forever if the police didn’t get lucky. Jason didn’t care either way. The Hermitage possessed the treasure.

They also had the Underground leadership docket, according to Barnaby. It had been downloaded into the Hermitage’s computer banks. A new underground harvest—the final one—would begin soon.

All that remained was to secure and destroy the documents the women had stolen from the vault and then to kill Hayes.

Jason had been disappointed to discover that much of Barnaby’s fuss had been about a two-hundred-year-old land treaty. From what Jason knew of American history, he didn’t see how Jackson’s past indiscretions coming to light would be more than a quick-burning scandal, harmless to the Hermitage without Beale’s treasure to finance a lengthy legal battle or Gina Hayes alive to underwrite an investigation.

Nevertheless, like a birthday piñata, all the remaining treats were wrapped in one tight package: Alcatraz. Wiley and Odegaard’s plane from Richmond would be landing at SFO in seventeen minutes. They carried the authentic treaty. They would take it to the Golden Lucky, where they would be told to bring it directly to Gina Hayes in person.

Who else could they bring it to? FBI? NSA? Local police?

No. There’d be no way to know they weren’t simply handing the document over to the Hermitage. The Underground possessed only one path out. It led them to Hayes, now outed as an ancestral Underground member thanks to Wiley’s cracking of Beale’s cipher, and the one person with enough power and incentive to use the documents to redistribute much of the Hermitage’s wealth back into its rightful hands.

The women would clean up at Golden Lucky and fret over how to sneak onto Alcatraz. The security would be ironclad. They’d find a way in; not too easily as to cause them suspicion but not so hard as to be impossible.

The Hermitage had made sure of it.

And then Jason would tie up every single loose end.

Alcatraz was going to be one bloody party.