Michael Savage - Abuse of Power

But the biggest surprise here was Dave Karras, Max’s old flame and computer hacker extraordinaire. After that night in his apartment Jack figured he’d never see the guy again, especially in the same zip code as Max herself. Yet here he was, with a shave and a haircut, commandeering three laptop computers that projected their images onto Jack’s sixty-inch television screen.

Jack shot Max a quizzical look and she just shrugged and said, “What can I tell you? I’m a sucker for men who grovel.”

Jack still couldn’t picture them as a couple, but he’d given up on trying to figure out the ways of the heart a long time ago.

“Okay, guys,” Karras said. “I found it.”

He punched a button on one of the laptops and the television screen came to life with a building blueprint.

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

The Legion of Honor was a revered part of San Francisco’s history, a common destination for tourists and locals alike. Built in 1924, it was a smaller, multicolumned replica of France’s Palais de la Legion d’Honneur, which sits on the west bank of the river Seine.

San Francisco’s palace stood on a small hill in Lincoln Park, surrounded by a golf course and beautiful ocean vista, looking out toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Jack had always thought its architecture was reminiscent of the buildings in Washington, D.C., and Thomas Jefferson himself had used the original French palace as inspiration for Monticello, his estate in Virginia.

The Legion of Honor had served as a museum since its doors first opened, and had one of the finest collections of ancient and European art in the world.

Jack had been there many times, but looking at it in the form of a blueprint was a new experience for him.

“All right, folks,” Tony said, stepping over to the TV screen. “If Jack’s intelligence is correct, we’re looking at a possible terrorist assault on the museum at twenty-one hundred hours.” He looked at Max and Karras and winked. “That’s nine o’clock for the civilians in the crowd.”

Max raised an eyebrow. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

“Happy to oblige,” Tony said, then turned to the rest of them. “We have to assume they’re not going to call off the operation. Jack’s escape leaves them potentially exposed. They have nothing to lose by finishing what they’ve started, though I guarantee the thin black line is going to be even more vigilant now.”

“Thin black line?” Max asked.

“An enemy police action, blended into the shadows by using homegrown operatives,” Tony explained. “The question is how they’re going to pull this off. With the President’s appearance there, security will be locked so tight the chances of bringing in some kind of explosive device are remote, if not impossible.”

“What about the X factor?” Jack asked. “Harold Wickham.”

“Do you think he’ll show?” Tony asked. “I mean, if they’re going to blow the place up-”

“He may put in a token appearance and leave,” Jack said. “But he has clout. He’ll have full access.”

“What about the Secret Service?” Max said.

“They got to MI6, didn’t they?” Jack said. “Who knows how far this reaches.”

“Inside man or not,” Mike Abernathy said, “anyone who enters that place will have to go through a security scanner, a pat down, and a dog sniff, so a simple walk-on isn’t likely.”

“Right,” Tony said. His voice and his expression flattened. “That’s the problem. Me and Mike and Jonah here spent the morning trying to come up with potential alternative scenarios that might make the impossible possible, but we came up blank. Especially with Haddad as a wild card.”

“So we’re wasting our time,” Karras said.

“No,” Jack told him. “This function is the target, even if it’s not ground zero. They made no bones about letting me and Sara know that.”

“Then how the hell are they gonna hit it?” Max asked.

“That’s where Doc here comes in,” Tony said. He gestured to Doc, who was sprawled on Jack’s sofa, picking at his teeth with the corner of a matchbook. “He was downstairs grabbing a nap when the discussion started, but once he decided to get his ass outta the sack he already knew the answer to your question. Which is why I always have to remind myself he’s older than God.”

“You kiddin’ me?” Doc said. “Who do you think raised the Almighty?”

“So what’s the answer?” Jack asked impatiently.

Doc stopped picking his teeth, dropped the matchbook into his shirt pocket, and got to his feet.

“I started thinking about that little headquarters they appropriated in the bay,” he said. “Wickham told you they picked it because it was isolated.”

“Yeah. So?” Jack said.

“Plenty of places in the city are isolated, secure, convenient, ” he said. “That thing’s a pain in the ass to get to, and there’s always the chance a Coast Guard patrol will stop you, especially with the President coming to town-”

“Cold son of a bitch, too,” Goldman observed.

“No,” Doc went on. “There had to be another reason they picked it.”

“ What reason?” Max asked.

Doc replied, “Location, location, location.” He waited a moment to let that sink in. “I called a buddy at the National Reconnaissance Office. They’ve got a MATS-Maritime Anomalous Traffic Satellite-that flags divergence from normal patterns in the nation’s major waterways. Sort of like NORAD for shipping. All that stuff we’re supposedly not doing to protect our ports? We are.”

“Draw your enemy out by pretending not to be watching,” Jack said.

“Exactly,” Doc told him. “I had him look at the images from that region. He said there’s been very limited nighttime activity along the mainland coast near the island. The infrared images did not raise any alarms at the NRO because it failed to fit any standard danger profiles: it wasn’t adjacent to a populated center, only small vessels came and went, and it stopped.”

“Someone knew what they could get away with,” Jack suggested.

“Obviously,” Doc said. “But it got me poking around that region. And I remembered something. After the Japs struck Pearl Harbor, California was considered a prime target. Not only that, our armed forces relied heavily on munitions and other cargo being shipped out of the bay, so a lot of the existing bunkers along our coastline were fortified and several new facilities were built. Some of those newer bunkers were located under park land.”

“Lincoln Park?” Max asked.

Doc nodded. “Officially, nobody knows the exact locations. This was all very top secret. But years after the war was over, several of these installations were discovered and explored by thrill seekers, until the government went to considerable expense and trouble in the seventies to seal them all off once and for all.”

“I’m a San Francisco native,” Karras said. “So why don’t I know about this?”

“Because you aren’t supposed to. Nobody is. The military has been operating on the theory that they never know when these bunkers might be of use again, so they’ve kept a lid on their existence. After the tunnels were sealed off and the decades went by they became an urban legend.”

“Only this one turns out to be true,” Tony said.

Doc nodded. “A few years back, a small group of urban explorers discovered a way into the Lincoln Park bunker, purely by accident. Nature has a way of shifting the earth and one of them found a hole in the ground and got curious.”

“And they might not be the only ones who know about it,” Max said.

“You know how things travel on the Internet these days,” Tony said. “If some enterprising terrorist wanted to explore the situation, he might-for love or money-find someone willing to show him one of our city’s biggest secrets.”