Carter pulled over a chair—which looked like one that could have sat around King Arthur’s table—and dropped into it. “My knees are killing me, and I’m dead tired,” he said. “Even if Yoshida is in on it, for whatever reason, how does that help us find our perps and discover a way to help those poor people who are bleeding to death across town?”

No one spoke. Burke felt the gravity of the situation overwhelming him again. As he had been discussing the revolutionary battery, he had almost forgotten about the group of people whose lives depended on them finding a cure, if one even existed. It was a small flickering flame of hope, but he refused to let it go out.

Burke considered Carter’s words. They needed to track down the perpetrators, but how? The police, US Marshals, FBI, and CIA were already out in force, checking all the ways out of the city and scanning for facial recognition based on the vague descriptions given by the hostages and the South African’s unusual height. He found one of Allanon’s tall-backed chairs like the one Carter had pulled over. It had plush red padding with a golden lion stitched over the back. He sat down, leaned back, interlocked his fingers, and raised his arms to cover his eyes with the backs of his hands.

What would they need? Where would they go? How would he pull off such a robbery and escape with his prize?

He had carried his iPad in under his arm. Now, he opened it and activated his sketch-noting program. His eyes flicked over the drawings and connections, landing on the name Lamar Franklin, the young gunman the thieves had used as a patsy and then murdered. How had the South African connected with him? It wasn’t like they just walked into a bar and asked if anyone would like to go rob a bank. He had to have been referred. Plus, their equipment. Where did they acquire the C-4 and fully automatic assault rifles?

Burke started pacing and said, more to himself than anyone, “We need to find where they recruited Lamar Franklin and acquired their arsenal.”

“Our detectives are digging into Franklin—running known associates, bank records, employers—but so far, they’re getting nowhere,” Nic said. “They’re checking with Oakland PD, where he grew up.”

They couldn’t run known associates on the other terrorists because they didn’t know their identities, and they couldn’t knock down the door of every gun runner or mercenary in the state. There wasn’t time for that.

His eyes scanned his notes and caught upon the image of the cards he had found in the wallets of Ty Loria and one of the men in tactical gear who had appeared with Yoshida. The trouble was that he wasn’t sure how Carter would react to some of the less than legal actions he had committed. He knew the older man’s strong disapproval over his CIA social hacking experiment, especially since it hadn’t yielded much useful information.