by John Whitman
“No luck with the guys in custody?” Jack asked.
Nina scowled and said sarcastically, “They are holding up under our most ruthless interrogation methods. We’re only serving them tea twice a day now. They still won’t break.” Jamey Farrell chuckled.
“If it is a smaller target,” Jack mused, “what would it be? What people or events are happening tomorrow?”
Jamey ticked off a few things from memory. “The Pope is in town for the Unity Conference. The Vice President will be attending, but he’s not scheduled until the day after tomorrow and isn’t in town until the early morning of that day. The Governor of California will be in the city for a huge Democratic fundraiser, which is a likely political target. The space shuttle is scheduled to land tomorrow, although Edwards Air Force isn’t the primary landing site, always the emergency one.”
Henderson held up a hand to stop her. “Actually, it’s not. I read there are issues with the landing strip at Kennedy Space Center. Edwards is the primary zone now. Has been for over a month.”
They all paused. “The shuttle would be an interesting target,” Jack said. “If it’s Edwards, that adds new meaning to the fact that these bikers are somehow connected. Lancaster is a lot closer to Edwards than we are down here.” He looked at Henderson. “Do you have someone you can put on that?”
Henderson opened his arms wide. “I’ve got a whole room full of people,” he said humorlessly.
“Can you borrow—?” Jack started to say.
“Relax, Jack,” Henderson drawled. “You’re not the only resourceful one. There’s someone I’ve been after to join up. Guy named Almeida. I’ll see about him.”
“Another recruit?” Jack laughed.
“You’re not the only fish in the sea.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “So we’ll pursue the space shuttle angle. I’m going to deal with this Farrigian issue. I guess that’s it for now. Thank you all.”
The group started to disband. Nina Myers hung back until only she and Jack remained in the room. “You look like hell,” she said.
Jack looked up from the target list and grinned. “I don’t look much better when I’m cleaned up. Although my wife does try.”
She walked halfway to the door, then turned back toward him. “I like the way you take charge here.
100
You’re going to help us get this unit into shape.” “I turned down the job. I’m just working my own case through here.”
“Uh-huh,” she said dismissively. “You’re what this place needed. Oh, and by the way,” she said with a Cheshire cat smile. “You didn’t have to mention your wife. I saw the ring. I just don’t see it as an issue.”
Jack wasn’t often surprised, but her boldness left him momentarily speechless. She laughed charmingly at it. “You just keep that thought in mind. Might be a reason for you to stick around CTU. Meanwhile, I’ve got to keep up this ridiculous search for Abdul Ali, a man who seems to have vanished.”
“Excuse me.”
That same woman was standing in the doorway. Her arms were crossed in front of her and her feet were planted, as though she was prepared to be defiant. But she wore a look of astonishment. Jack had the impression that he’d caught her halfway between two different attitudes.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Did you say you were looking for someone named Abdul Ali?”
Nina’s own expression had turned instantly from flirtatious to judgmental. “You’re the NTBS investigator, aren’t you?” she asked coldly.
“Diana Christie,” the woman affirmed. “It was Abdul Ali, right?”
Nina shook her head. “All respect, but this is a Federal case we’re discussing. You shouldn’t be eavesdropping—”
“I’m on a Federal case, too,” Christie interjected. For all her frail prettiness, she clearly had a hard, determined core. “And if I hadn’t just eavesdropped, you’d be out running your ass off for no reason. If I’m right, the guy you’re looking for is dead.”
11:12 P.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
Father Sam Collins crouched down beside his back door, trying to sweep up the glass one-handed. He’d broken his left arm a few weeks ago in a car accident, and it was causing him a lot of trouble. The break had been bad, apparently, and they’d put a steel rod in his arm and popped his dislocated elbow back into place. He hadn’t had his own doctor, and the archdiocese had recommended one to him. Collins wasn’t sure the man was any good. His arm hurt a hell of a lot.
The pain in his arm wasn’t the only thing making Collins grumpy. Someone had broken one of the glass squares in his beautiful French doors. At first he’d thought it was a robbery, but nothing had been taken. The door itself was still locked from the inside. Probably the gardener, Collins had thought with a sigh. It was probably time to get rid of his current guy. Melanie across the street had told him that you had to change gardeners every year or so because their work got sloppier. Collins didn’t like to believe that—he liked to believe the best in everyone. But someone had broken his window, that was certain.
Collins swept the big shards of glass into a paper grocery bag. Then he got out a Dustbuster and used that to suck up the smaller bits. By the time he was done, his left arm ached. He wished he could take a Vicodin, but they left him groggy for hours, and to
102
morrow was an important day. Tomorrow he would sit at the right hand of the Holy Father at the Unity Conference. It was going to be a glorious day.
11:17 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
“This might be a break for both of us,” Diana summarized. “And it’s such a simple, stupid thing.”
“I’ve been looking for a dead man,” Nina said. “Abdul Ali, Ali Abdul. Just a mix-up of names. But why doesn’t anyone know he’s dead?”
“Someone knows,” Jack said. “Someone knows and doesn’t want to make a lot of noise about it, especially if Federal investigators are already asking.”
While Jack and Nina’s tension increased, Diana Christie was obviously relieved. “So this is an answer. At least part of one. If Abdul Ali is a suspect in your case, if he’s involved with this plastic explosive, then maybe he brought some on board. That’s what caused the detonation.”
Nina frowned. “Why would he want to blow up an Alaska Airlines flight? Could a bomb have gone off accidentally?”
Diana shook her head doubtfully. “If the plastic explosive was primed and ready with a detonator, if it was in a state where it might go off accidentally, it’d be hard to get it through security.”
“Same question, then,” Jack repeated. “Why blow up that flight? Was there anyone special on it?” He knew it was a callous question, but it was the kind of question that had to be asked if they were going to find the bombers.
But Diana put a stop to that line of thinking. “I researched everyone, trying to find a motive so I could convince the rest of NTSB that this was a bombing. There was no one on board that made any headlines or would be a target for any of the kinds of groups you guys are after.”
“Maybe Ali was the target,” Nina suggested. “Maybe he knew something and they wanted to shut him up. They blew up Ramin, didn’t they?”
The NTSB investigator agreed. “Okay, but even so, he had to have been holding the bomb. That blast originated in his seat.”
“A gift. A going-away present. Something,” Jack said. “They offed him because he was a witness.” He nodded approvingly at Diana. “So our first clue that something was going on came at us a month ago, and no one listened to you. Sorry about that.”
A look of gratitude unfolded out of the exhaustion on Diana Christie’s face. She might have cried if she weren’t in the presence of the two anti-terrorist agents. “Thanks,” was all she said.
“Okay, but now what?” Nina asked. “We’re still working on lots of hypotheses here, but no concrete evidence and no target. An airplane blows up, either accidentally or on purpose, with a possible terrorist on board. I can already tell
you Abdul Ali’s record won’t give us any real leads. He’s a nobody as far as your people are concerned,” she said, meaning Jack’s CIA. “He’s a cipher.”
“Farrigian is still our best lead. I’m going to talk to him.”
104
“He has something to do with the airline explosion?” Diana asked. Jack shook his head. “Seller. He may be the source of the explosives, though.” “I want to go,” the NTSB agent said firmly. “I want in on the investigation.” “This is undercover work,” he replied, rejecting her.
“I don’t care. I’ve been on this thing from the beginning. Before either of you. If this guys deals in explosives, I can help. I may hear or see something you don’t.”
Nina waited for Jack to say no again. To her surprise, he hesitated, then said, “No promises. I don’t know what the play is yet. I’ll let you know. If you want to wait around, that’s your business. Now will you excuse us?”
Diana accepted this answer, and the dismissal, reluctantly, and left the room. “What the hell?” Nina said when she was gone. “She doesn’t even work for us!” Jack laughed. “Neither do I.”
11:28 P.M. PST Rectory of St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles
If you asked Harry Driscoll, he’d already put in his time tonight. Interviewing Mark Gelson and throwing together the Dog Smithies sting with Jack Bauer were, in his opinion, enough for one night. He’d only returned to the Robbery-Homicide office to finish up his paperwork, and he absolutely planned on coming in late tomorrow. But while he was straightening up his desk (straightening up being a relative term among the detectives, whose desks ranged from untidy to ludicrous) when the 187 call came in from St. Monica’s. He wasn’t inclined to take it, but the city had apparently been lively that night, and there was no one else to respond.
So he found himself, just before eleven-thirty, walking into the rectory of St. Monica’s Cathedral, tramping up the stairs and past the yellow police tape and down the hall. A uniformed officer Driscoll had never met gave him the facts: Father Frank Giggs, one of the priests at St. Monica’s, in charge of the youth program. There was one possible witness, another priest who’d encountered a stranger in the hallway. A uniform was sitting with him in his room.
Driscoll nodded and walked into the crime scene. The victim’s body was on the floor, his back propped up against the bed. A pillow, its center black with powder burns and shredding by a hole, had slid down onto his chest. The priest’s face had turned to bloody pulp, already drying to gray crust. His hands were hidden behind.
“Shit,” Harry said to no one in particular. “There was serious malice here. Forensics?”
The uniform muttered into his radio, then waited. “Two minutes out. Been busy tonight.”
Harry nodded. He crouched down and examined the area, careful not to touch anything, not even the bedspread. He tried not to look at the ruined face, now that he was so close to it. The pillow had obviously been used to muffle the sound of a gunshot. Harry’s eyes, long used to searching for details, slowly scanned down the victim’s chest to his stom
106
ach and waist. He missed the groin puncture at first. Then he saw the blood smear on the priest’s pajama bottoms, and his eyes moved back up. Taking out his own pen, he gently moved the bunched-up gusset of the pajamas to reveal a hole in the cloth surrounded by blood. Harry could just make out tiny streaks of the blood that had undoubtedly drained downward below the body.
“Jesus,” Harry muttered. The man had been tortured. Who would torture a priest?
Harry put his pen back in his pocket. As he lifted his eyes a bit, he saw something on the floor, half hidden by the hanging bedspread. Out came the pen again. Harry dragged it into the open with the pen tip. It was a book of some kind—actually, a journal. Harry again used the pen to flip it open. He read only a few pages before he knew that his night was far from over.
11:39 P.M. Culver City, California
Abdul called himself a schoolboy because he couldn’t sleep. He wandered around his apartment in his robe, sipping club soda and listening to a Julia Ford-ham CD. This was haram, of course. His secret sin. Listening to music was not itself forbidden. Abdul was not one of those extremist imams, like those among the Taliban, who forbade music altogether. Abdul, rather, sided with ibn Hazm, who had declared music to be halal. Music could inspire the soul to submit more fully to the will of Allah; at least, Abdul found this to be true. Of course, ibn Hazm had lived a millennium ago, and had not conceived of music like this, or a voice as seductive as that of Ms. Fordham. And therein lay the sin, for Abdul did not simply listen to music in general, he longed for the voice and image of that singer. He played her music as he lay down to sleep, and in his dreams the messengers of Allah spoke with her voice. That was haram.
Yet on this evening even the gentle measures of Porcelain drifting through his apartment could not lull Abdul to sleep. Tomorrow was the opening of the Unity Conference. Intellectually (and, truth be told, Abdul al-Hassan’s intellect was formidable) he knew the conference was doomed to failure. Upon opening, the conference would flare like a television screen turned on: all light and noise, but no heat. Soon it would flicker and die. Abdul had said as much to his friend and opponent Rabbi Moskovitz, and both had felt pity for the Catholic Pope and his minions who struggled valiantly to assemble the Unity event. Yet, even as he laughed with Moskovitz, Abdul felt a romantic hope nestle itself in his heart. Wouldn’t it be nice if it worked? Would it not be grand to find that rival forces, so far apart, could build bridges across the chasm that divided them.
“Maybe,” he said aloud. He would not mind being wrong. To be called a cynic, a pessimist, a skeptic would be a small price to pay if the powerful religions of the world could come together and forge peace now, with the world teetering so close to the edge of chaos.
“Maybe,” he said again.
108
His doorbell rang.
Abdul was so startled that he stood in the center of his living room, not sure he had heard correctly. Who would ring his bell at this hour?
But the bell rang again, sounding somehow more insistent now. Abdul hurried over to his stereo and stopped the CD. The bell rang a third time before he reached the door and he opened it, intending to declare the lateness of the hour in his sternest tone.
But when he looked into the face of his visitor, he was stunned into silence. It was not a stranger’s face. It was his own face, but it was grinning happily, eagerly. There was wicked light in his reflection’s eyes.
“Hello, brother,” said his reflection, raising his right hand. Abdul just had time to see that his reflection’s left arm was in a sling, before he stopped seeing altogether.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 A.M. AND 1 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
12:00 A.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles
“Your Holiness.”
The Pope lifted his head from his hands. “It’s all right, Giancarlo. I am not sleeping.”
Giancarlo Mettler stepped into the room, gliding across the carpet. Giancarlo was skinny and balding, with watery brown eyes and a weak chin, the very image of an anonymous mid-level Vatican functionary. Only that fluid, catlike glide revealed him as the highly trained Swiss Guard that he was. Among all the many, many layers of security that surrounded the Holy Father, Giancarlo was the last and greatest, save for God alone. Only divine grace lay closer to the Pope’s skin than Giancarlo Mettler.
110
“There’s been a disturbance in the rectory, Holy Father,” the Swiss Guard said quietly. “Local law enforcement agents are investigating.”
The Pope slowly climbed up from his kneeling position beside the bed. Giancarlo politely took his arm, politely ignoring the loud creaking of his knees. “Do we need to evacuate?” the Pope asked.
“Not yet, Holy Father,” Giancarlo said. “But I wanted you prepared in case tha
t becomes necessary.”
“The disturbance?”
Giancarlo hesitated. “Sadly, a murder. A priest.”
John Paul crossed himself. “You’re sure there is no danger . . . ?”
“Not sure, Your Holiness. There was an eyewitness. We are certain the killer has come and gone. The grounds have been thoroughly searched. We believe it has nothing to do with your presence here.”
A soft knock interrupted them. Giancarlo frowned irritably. “Cardinal Mulrooney, Your Holiness. Security will have let him through. He insists on seeing you. I have not said you are available. I can send him—”
The Pope patted Giancarlo on the shoulder. “I could not sleep anyway, Giancarlo. Let him in, please.”
John Paul arranged himself on a stool at the foot of his bed as Giancarlo opened the door and stepped aside, becoming instantly invisible as Cardinal Mulrooney swept into the room. He knelt perfunctorily and stood quickly. “Your Holiness, you have been informed?”
The Pope nodded. “I understand there is no danger.”
“Not of that kind,” Mulrooney said. He glanced back at Giancarlo, aware of him despite the guard’s ability to fade into the background. “May we speak privately?”
Ever alert, Giancarlo stepped forward, his face a question. John Paul nodded, and Giancarlo departed without a word.
Mulrooney said, “Your Holiness, the murder is terrible, but the danger is not to your body. I believe . . .” He hesitated, reluctant to speak of the topic, even in the most circumspect terms. “I believe this murder may have something to do with . . . the issue.”
The Pope did not immediately take his meaning. “Issue?”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” Mulrooney snapped, annoyed at the man’s thickness. “The issue. The one that we had hoped would never become a problem. A very serious, very public problem.”
John Paul was still for a moment, his mind scrolling through a list of possible problems, the vastness of which only he could know. Then he trembled ever so slightly as he summoned, from some locked place in his mind, one of the greatest of fears. “How could it possibly . . . oh.” John Paul was much quicker than Mulrooney wished to admit. In a flash, he grasped the possibilities: discovery, a vengeance killing, the police, capture, a trial, exposure, a suspect on trial beyond the reach of the church, embarrassment beyond measure.