A crowd of latecomers still clogged the entrance to the museum. Tobie clenched her hand over the scorched hole in the front of her bag and hoped no one noticed the blood splatters on her arm and the skirt of her dress.
“Keep your head down,” said Jax, leaning in close to her. “And whatever you do, don’t turn around. Ever meet an NOPD homicide cop named Ahearn? Small, sandy hair, invisible eyelashes?”
The taste of copper pennies was back in Tobie’s mouth. She was careful not to look around. “No. Why?”
“Because he’s standing over there beside one of the uniforms at the barricades. I think he’s made us.”
“What do we do?”
One of the men guarding the doors said, “Excuse me, miss. You need to put your bag on the X-ray machine and move through the metal detector.”
“Sorry,” said Tobie. As she stepped toward the metal detector, she threw a quick glance over her shoulder and saw him: a plainclothes detective with sandy hair pushing purposefully through the crowd. “Shit,” she whispered.
Jax grabbed her arm, pulling her up the stairs into the museum’s huge main entrance hall.
It was a cavernous space that soared some four stories high. The main front wall was glass, but the rest of the structure was concrete and steel. Gray walls, gray ceiling, gray floors. The only color came from a row of allies’ flags ranged along a shallow second story balcony at the rear and the three green Army vehicles parked in front of the windowed wall: a Sherman tank, a half-track, and what she now realized was an old amphibious jeep. She could see its anchor, still incongruously fastened near the rear.
Jax touched her arm. “There’s your Skytrooper.”
Tobie’s head fell back. She found herself staring up at a huge C47. The last time she’d been here, not too long after she first moved to New Orleans, two small, single-engine planes were suspended by heavy cables from the ceiling of the museum’s lofty main hall: a British Spitfire fighter and an old naval torpedo bomber called the Avenger.
The Spitfire was still there, in the far corner. But the Avenger had been replaced by a much larger C47. It hovered high over the center of the warehouse-like space, a lumbering transport with a white underbelly and rows of dark windows nearly lost in the dull sheen of its fuselage.
“Oh, God,” she said, her gaze fixing on the encircled star that was the emblem of the old Army Air Corps. “That’s it. They must have hidden the—”
“Don’t say it,” he warned her.
She lowered her voice. “They must have hidden the package in the plane when the museum made the switch.”
“The problem is, how are they going to detonate it?”
Tobie scanned the laughing, chattering throng, their voices melding together into a dull roar. Clusters of men in suits and women in silken dresses balanced wine-glasses while selecting hors d’oeuvres from the trays of passing waiters. A wizened little man in a wheelchair sat looking out at nothing in particular, a proud grin on his face, the Medal of Honor on its blue ribbon around his neck nestling next to rows of other medals pinned to the chest of his faded uniform. Beyond him, Tobie could see the mayor’s bald chocolate head thrown back as he laughed at something.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Two minutes after seven. Beckham is already here. See him? By the podium.”
Tobie followed his nod. A podium had been set up between the museum’s two hulking Higgins boats.
“Every minute we stay here,” said Jax, leaning in close to her, “brings us that much closer to dying.”
She looked up at him. His voice was calm, but she could see the sweat glistening on his upper lip, see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “What would happen if we yelled fire? Wouldn’t that at least clear the place out?”
“No. We’d be tackled in an instant and hustled out of here.”
“Then you leave,” she said, frantically scanning the crowded hall. “There’s no point in you staying.”
“Right. I’ll just clear out and let you and all these other people get blown to pieces.”
She saw his eyes suddenly narrow. “What? What is it?”
She followed his gaze to where a young man with dark hair and a hawklike nose stood off to one side. He was lugging a huge video camera and had a press pass around his neck. What was it Jax had told her about the guy who owned the Charbonnet house? He was a UNO professor, wasn’t he? A journalism professor.
“That’s one of the guys in the visa photos Matt e-mailed me,” said Jax. “He’s Iranian.”
As they watched, the Iranian raised the Canon camcorder. It was big and black, designed to take digital videos on tape. He panned slowly over the crowd, then swung to point it directly at the vintage airplane looming over them.
“Grab him!” yelled Jax, surging forward. “There’s a bomb!”
“No, wait!” Tobie knew Jax had taken one look at that long black lens and remembered the cylinders she’d sketched during the remote viewing session. But it was all wrong. “That’s not it!” she shouted. But Jax had already lunged.
Women screamed, their colorful skirts swirling as they scrambled out of the way. Jax knocked into a young waitress with a platter of shrimp that flew into the air, the waitress crashing back into a guy with a tray of drinks.
The young Iranian turned to stare, his green eyes wide with confusion, not understanding until the last minute that the guy in the khakis and the polo shirt was coming at him.
Jax slammed into him, bowling the kid over, the camcorder flying out of his hands to land with a shattering smack on the hard concrete floor.
Suddenly, something like a dozen guns erupted from beneath suit jackets and out of little purses, the snick of their hammers being drawn back loud in the hushed silence. “Get down, you son of a bitch,” yelled a Secret Service agent with a big .357 Sig he stuck in Jax’s ear. “Do it! Do it! On your face! Arms out to the side! Make a move and I blow your brains out!”
Jax lay facedown on the concrete, his arms spread-eagled, a Secret Service agent’s foot in the small of his back and a dozen guns pointed at his head. “The camera,” he said. “It’s the triggering mechanism for a bomb.”
One of the agents—a hulking guy with a blond crew cut—leaned over to pick up the Canon. “Doesn’t look like a bomb to me.”
“No, you don’t understand…” Jax began.
But Tobie was looking beyond him, at the spotlights mounted on the wall behind him. Big, black cylinders.
“Shit,” she whispered.
She swung around. The lights were everywhere, mounted high on the walls and on the exposed steel girders. Heart pounding wildly, she let her head fall back.
The hall had been built with a semicircular observation platform that jutted out into the air from the third floor balcony. It stood just about level with the Skytrooper hanging suspended from the center of the hall’s ceiling. Two flights of concrete and steel stairs climbed toward it, wrapping around the elevator shaft.
Tobie stared at the platform’s familiar gray metal railings. Whoever took the photograph of the Skytrooper in the Archangel Project file had been standing on that platform.
She looked beyond the platform, to the rear wall where a row of three black spotlights hung suspended from a pole, the last one positioned so it pointed straight through the side window of the C47’s cockpit.
She raced toward the steps, taking them two at a time, just as the sandy-haired detective burst through the knot of security at the front entrance and shouted, “That woman in the pink sundress—stop her!”