With their vehicle on the 49th Street side compromised by the presence of the police, exiting by the 50th Street side made the most sense, but somehow something just didn’t feel right about it for Abdul Ali. If the police knew about the railroad platform and the 49th Street entrance, then they very likely knew about the 50th Street stairwell too. Ali could be running right into another trap, and so he made sure to choose their method of egress very carefully.

Because the Grail facility’s private garage entrance let out onto the 49th Street side of the building, it was immediately ruled out. That seemed to leave them with no alternatives until Ali realized that the hotel had at least two more perfectly acceptable exit points-the main doors at the rear of the hotel on Lexington Avenue as well as those at the very front of the Waldorf on Park Avenue. The only question was how they were going to get there.

As the secret garage exit opened only from the inside of the facility, Ali was fairly confident that they would not find a swarm of police officers waiting for them on the other side. Once in the garage, they could locate a service entrance to the hotel and from there make their way to either the Park or Lexington Avenue exits. Considering that everything was happening at the east end of the hotel, near Lexington, Ali leaned heavily toward making an escape via Park Avenue. They could decide what to do next, once they were safely out of harm’s way.

As Ali put the finishing touches on one of the little surprises they planned on leaving behind, Sacha dispatched men to check the status on each of the stairwells. Osman was the first to report. From what he could tell, the booby trap in the 49th Street stairwell had been triggered and the police had been forced to retreat. Yusha reported not seeing any signs of pursuit via the 50th Street stairwell, but then he suddenly broke off. When Sacha asked him what was going on, the man quietly spoke into his microphone to say that he thought he heard people approaching. Sacha told him to fall back and wait, that they were coming to support him, but the overconfident warrior told his commander not to bother. He had the high ground and could handle it himself. It was the very last Sacha heard from him.

With the man at the top of the stairs lined up right in the center of his sights, Harvath yelled “Grenade!” and lunged backward, knocking his team down the stairs. As he fell with them, Harvath repeatedly squeezed the trigger of his weapon until its magazine was empty.

The team hit the landing in a pile of twisted limbs and then scrambled to descend farther to safety. When the grenade detonated, they were pressed against the opposite wall a story and a half down. Harvath had quite literally saved their lives.

As the stars began to clear from their heads, Harvath inserted a fresh mag and they remounted the stairs twice as fast, knowing that the terrorists’ colleagues couldn’t be far behind.

When they reached the uppermost landing and stepped over what was left of the man’s corpse, they could see he was probably dead before the grenade even detonated. Most of Harvath’s shots had found their marks-in both the man’s head and chest area. Falling to the ground, the grenade must have rolled backward into the corridor where, a few feet later, it detonated and tore huge chunks away from the concrete walls and ceiling.

As the team stared at the dead body, they all noticed that it appeared too pale to be Arab. “He almost looks Caucasian,” said Hastings, not realizing that in the truest sense of the word she was absolutely right.

“Who the hell are these people?” asked Herrington as he removed the man’s balaclava so they could get a good look at his face. “Are we sure we’re dealing with al-Qaeda?”

Harvath went through the man’s pockets but found nothing helpful. He was just as in the dark as his team was. All he knew was that they were less than a step behind the terrorists now and he didn’t want to lose any ground.

The group fell into a stack formation, pushed on into the corridor, and got ready for the fight they all knew was waiting for them just up ahead.

When they hit the Grail’s entry chamber, it looked like a scene straight out of Iraq or Afghanistan. The charred walls were riddled with bullet holes. The floor was covered with spent shell casings, blood, and body parts. Off to the side, three more Caucasian corpses, their balaclavas removed, were lying facing the Lexington Avenue wall. Or had they been positioned that way-facing east toward Mecca? Harvath filed that part of the scene away, and once they had gone through the dead men’s empty pockets, he led the team deeper into the facility.

The carnage inside was just as bad, if not worse than what they had seen at the three previous sites. The marine guards were all dead, as was each and every facility employee. And for what? What were these people after? Why risk so much just to attack these sites? No matter how hard Harvath tried, he just couldn’t wrap his head around it.

The other thing he couldn’t understand was where the rest of the terrorists were. Including the man he had gunned down in the stairwell, there were five corpses in the Grail facility, all dressed in the same black Nomex fatigues with patches identifying them as members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team-yet another ingenious ploy. With everything going on today, the cops were even less likely to question federal officers than their own Emergency Service personnel. What’s more, the NYPD for the most part knew very little about the makeup of HRT. The chances of the terrorists being uncovered as frauds, at least in the short run, seemed pretty minimal.

As Harvath and his team continued to clear the facility, they readied themselves for the inevitable. There had to be more men somewhere-the satellite photos had shown at least two teams of four to seven men. Would the four dead men have needed to come here in two separate vehicles? There had to be others and they had to be close. Harvath could feel it.

Walking back into the center of the main room, Harvath took another look at its raised floor platform. It was about thirty by thirty and similar to those he’d seen in brokerage houses, as well as in the FBI and DHS crisis management centers. Framed within the polished aluminum railings that defined the platform’s edges were the facility’s computer workstations. On the first pass, Harvath had thought he’d heard something strange, and now as he stood still, he could almost make out what it was-a strange beeping coming from one of the computers.

As he hopped up onto the platform, he radioed the special response officer downstairs on the train siding. Since no one had come out the 50th Street stairwell and he knew that even the wounded McGahan and his remaining officers had their eyes on the 49th Street stairwell and the adjacent garage, the only remaining egress the terrorists had was via the elevator.

The officer reported back that not only had they not seen anything, they hadn’t heard anything either. Wherever the elevator was, it hadn’t moved-he was certain of it.

Harvath was pretty sure of it too. Just as he was sure they hadn’t finished off the last of the terrorists. But if they hadn’t taken the elevator, where the hell were they?

The question was still banging on the front door of Harvath’s mind as he approached the beeping computer. Suddenly Tracy Hastings yelled, “Stop!”

As Harvath looked at her she added, “Whatever you do, don’t move.”