54

“Why all the Korans?” asked Tobie as Jax pulled back onto the freeway and headed north. “What’s going on?”

He glanced over at her. “Do you remember seeing any Korans in that vision of yours?”

“It wasn’t a vision; it was a remote viewing session. But no, I don’t remember any Korans.”

He drove the Trailblazer as if it were a sports car, weaving nimbly in and out of traffic. “I’m beginning to think that house in the Ninth Ward was a setup.”

“A setup?” She swung her head to look at him.

“That’s right. Everything we saw—the snips of wire, the splattered solder—all of it was put there to lead the observer to one inescapable conclusion: Islamic terrorists. Right down to the Koran.”

“Why would someone set up a house to look like a bunch of Islamic terrorists had manufactured a bomb there?”

“Presumably so it can be found after a bomb goes off.

A bomb that may or may not have been built by a bunch of Islamic terrorists.”

“You think that’s what this is all about? A terrorist attack? But…what could the Keefe Corporation have to do with something like that?”

He turned off the freeway onto Irving Boulevard. “Maybe we’ll understand that a little better when we get to these coordinates of yours.”

Tobie abruptly sat forward, her gaze on the soaring tower of glass and steel that rose before them. “That’s it. That’s the building I saw.” She stared at the wide granite steps, the fountain, the small garden edged by a low wall. The street in front of the building was half obstructed by rubble from a building being demolished halfway down the block.

Jax pulled in next to the curb at the corner and killed the engine. In the pale light of early dawn, the city streets were eerily deserted. He thrust open the car door, and after a moment’s hesitation, Tobie followed. She realized she was shivering, from cold, from exhaustion, from fear.

“Will the building be open this early?” she asked as they climbed the broad stone steps.

“The main door will be.”

They found the building directory mounted high on the wall opposite a bank of elevators. Tobie ran through the names, but nothing leaped out at her. “What do we do now?” she asked.

“Get the access card out of Fitzgerald’s wallet.”

She dug the dead man’s wallet out of her messenger bag while he hit the elevator button. One set of doors near the end snapped open immediately.

“We stop at every floor,” he told her, pressing the button for the second floor, “and see what we find.”

At each of the first three floors they came to, the elevator doors slid open to reveal halls lined with office doors. But on the next floor they found themselves staring at a darkened lobby sealed off behind heavy glass doors. Beyond the lobby lay another set of glass doors leading to a corridor of offices. A black sign with bold brass letters above the reception area read: GLOBAL TACTICAL SOLUTIONS.

“See that little box beside the first set of doors?” said Jax. “That’s an access card reader.”

Tobie jerked her gaze away from the sign to a flat white panel with a steady round red light. “Why don’t I see any security cameras?”

“They’re there. They’re just hidden. They could be in the air vents, or the smoke detectors, or just about anywhere.” The elevator doors started to slide shut, and he hit the button to hold them open. “I need you to stay in the elevator and keep it here. If you’re right about this place, we’re going to need to bail out of here in a hurry.”

She put her hand on his arm, stopping him when he would have moved through the doors. “Should you even go out there? If there are cameras—”

He gave a soft laugh. “They’ve already seen us. An outfit like this will have cameras mounted on the outside of the building. Probably even in the elevators.”

“And this is supposed to reassure me?” she said, pressing her thumb on the button to keep the doors open.

She watched him cross the reception area and hold Fitzgerald’s access card about an inch away from the remote reader. The steady light blinked from red to green. There was a loud click and the doors unlocked.

“Shit,” he said, and ducked back in the elevator.

In quick succession he hit the buttons for the fourth, third, second, and first floors.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“The surveillance cameras trained on that card reader feed somewhere—probably to a room in the basement where a very bored guard spends his life staring at a bank of monitors. When Fitzgerald’s card popped that lock, the system would have flashed Fitzgerald’s ID photo up on one of those screens for comparison. So whoever was looking at me through that security camera is, as we speak, on the phone with security saying, ‘We’ve got an intruder.’”

The elevator doors popped open on the empty fourth floor corridor. He grabbed her hand and pulled her off. “Let’s go.”

They could see the fire stairs at the other end of the hall. They raced toward them, yanked open the heavy door. Breathing in stale, concrete-scented air, they pelted down the steps. By the time they reached the third floor, Tobie’s knee was on fire, but she kept going, round and round, her hand slick on the banister, their clattering footfalls echoing up and down the enclosed stair shaft.

As they reached the ground floor, he held a finger to his lips, then carefully pushed the heavy fire door open about six inches.

From here, she could see the bank of elevators. Two uniformed guards with bulky black holsters on their belts stood in the corridor. Their gazes scanned up and down the line of doors. As Tobie watched, the elevator they’d sent down hit the ground floor and its doors flew open on the empty cage.

Jax slapped the fire door open wide. “Now.”

The fire stairs emptied into the lobby just to the left of the entrance. They were halfway out the front doors before a shout went up behind them.

Skirting the fountain, they dashed across the narrow shrubbery and leaped the retaining wall. Sprinting across the sidewalk, Jax yanked the rental car’s key out of his pocket and hit the remote, popping the locks on the doors. Tobie jerked open the passenger door and practically fell into the Trailblazer. She barely got the door slammed before Jax hit the gas.

They tore up the street, dodging orange construction cones and piles of sand. “Jesus. That was close,” she said, just seconds before a white Crown Victoria with darkly tinted windows exploded up out of the parking garage and bore down on them.