“I need you to locate some records, as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile the engineers spooled the digital schematics back several pages, trying to locate the existing wall one of them spied on the blueprints. Activity was now swirling all around Edgar Stiles, but he was not a part of it. He watched the men scramble for a few minutes, then assumed they didn’t need him anymore.
Knowing that a new batch of paper files were probably already piled high on his desk, Edgar Stiles left the command center and returned to his workstation, unnoticed.
21. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 A.M. AND 2 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
Milo thought it was a total waste of time to mine the late Valerie Dodge’s computer. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Inside the PC there were lots of files about the modeling agency, but only one file that was secure. It took Milo only a few minutes to bypass the password system and open the file — a large multimedia affair full of bells and whistles.
“W00t,” he cried.
Milo quickly located a schematic of the Chamberlain, then found photos and profiles of female suicide bombers — Chechen women whose husbands had died or simply disappeared during the ongoing insurgency against the Russians. Next he found the photos and profiles of twenty Chechen gunmen smuggled into the United States by a company called MG Enterprises, then hired on as ushers for the Silver Screen Awards show.
As he moved through the file Milo found that it was all in here — the timing for the raid, the entry and exit points — most importantly, the position of the suicide bombers inside the auditorium.
Everything was here, a gold mine of intelligence.
Milo had just delivered the good news to Jack, when the engineers returned, all smiles.
“We’ve got something for you, Jack, and you’re going to like it,” said Jon Francis. He plugged a pen drive into the digital map table and called up a file.
“That little guy was right,” Francis began. “The old Crystal Palace movie theater was located on the site currently occupied by the Chamberlain, and that old theater had five — count ’em, five sub-basements. If you look hard enough, some of the old walls appear in the Chamberlain’s blueprints.”
“But can we get inside the auditorium through those basements?” Jack asked.
“We can cut a hole into the old sub-basement through this storm drain, right here,” a man from the Department of Water and Sewage explained. “That will put you under the Chamberlain. You’ll probably have to cut a hole somewhere else, but you’ll be inside.”
“It’s all completely underground,” Jon Francis interrupted. “The security cameras outside the auditorium, the ones the terrorists are using to watch us, they won’t see a goddamn thing.”
“The noise will be a problem, though,” another engineer cautioned. “We’ll need to use a jackhammer for five minutes or so to get through this wall — it’s over two feet thick. Normally we’d blast something this stout, but in this case. ”
“That’s okay,” said Jack. “We’ll set up loudspeakers around the Chamberlain, blast music. It will drown out the sound of the jackhammer.”
“What will the terrorists think?” Francis asked.
“They’ll think we’re practicing psychological warfare techniques,” Jack informed them.
“Techniques that aren’t effective, and everyone knows it,” Secret Service Agent Evans interjected. “Won’t that make us look foolish?”
In the harsh white light of the map table, Jack held Evans’s eyes. “Let the terrorists think we’re helpless. If they underestimate us they’ll get careless, make a mistake. Then we’ll take the bastards down.”
Jon Francis brought in a digging team from Pacific Power and Light. Armed with picks, shovels, flashlights, and a portable electric jackhammer, they entered the sewer system three blocks away from the auditorium.
Led by a team of inspectors from the Department of Water and Sewage, they moved efficiently through the murky, ankle deep water that flowed through a maze of seven-by-ten-foot concrete tunnels. Bringing up the rear, two technicians from the telephone company unspooled a long telephone wire — a land line that connected the construction team to Jack Bauer in the LAPD command center.
The inspectors led the team to what seemed like a dead end.
“Yep, this is the place,” grunted Jon Francis, shining a mini Maglite on a paper map — he never used digital versions in the field. “There’s eight inches of poured concrete right here. Behind it two feet of solid brick. Think you can break through without dynamite?”
“Stand back,” said the man with the jackhammer.
Using the land line they laid on the way in, Jon Francis contacted the command center. “Cue the music,” he declared.
From his throne-like chair in the center of the massive stage, Bastian Grost maintained a confident facade in front of his men, and in front of the hostages. His headscarf dangled around his neck — he did not care who among this crowd saw his face, for they would all be dead soon. Casually but authoritatively, he clutched his Agram 2000 in the crook of his arm in a gesture that suggested power and confidence.
So far his strategy had worked. Even the high and mighty members of the Hollywood elite averted their eyes when he fixed his glacial gaze on them. Despite his cool exterior, however, inside Sebastian Grost was boiling with rage. As an operational mastermind, he cursed his men’s missteps and missed opportunities, their inability to follow even the simplest order without indulging in violence of every sort, including the violation of some of the female hostages. Indeed, everything had gone wrong from the start.
After the successful seizure of the awards show, his trained strike team had failed to capture Russia’s First Lady, Marina Novartov, or even the wife of America’s Vice President. Most of Grost’s team had been shot during their firefight with the American and Russian security teams, and none of his men had witnessed exactly where the women had fled. It was possible the women had gotten out before the fire doors had slammed shut. It was also possible the two had escaped into a service elevator.
That elevator, Grost subsequently discovered, had not been in the auditorium’s original blueprints, nor was it controlled by the facility’s computer. Grost could find no way to unlock and reactivate the elevator, but he didn’t waste much time on that effort. He knew from his study of the blueprints provided to him that this structure had only four floors to search: the mezzanine, the theater floor, the ground floor, and the basement.
Hours had passed now, and the few men Grost could spare from guard duty had failed to locate the women. He would have to accept that he could not show the women on camera. He could only bluff that he had them in his custody.
The second problem arose at 11 p.m., when Hasan had failed to contact them through a secure and secret landline that connected the Chamberlain Auditorium to the computer center in Tijuana, even though Hasan had promised he would make “a final statement to the martyrs,” as he put it.
Then, at midnight came the final blow. The destructive virus that was supposed to destroy the West’s computer infrastructure had not been launched as scheduled. Grost knew that was true because he dispatched men to the auditorium’s roof, to watch the Los Angeles skyline beyond the blacked-out area around them. They reported that city lights still blazed, traffic lights functioned, and there were even passenger airliners lining up in the sky overhead as a prelude to landing at LAX.
At that point, Grost could no longer deny what he knew to be true.
Bastian Grost’s thoughts were interrupted by a curious sound — the throbbing beat of American hip-hop music. The sound was muffled, but still loud enough to be heard throughout the auditorium. He listened stone-faced
