by John Whitman
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Ramin; Biehn’s knowledge that Yasin was back in Los Angeles, which had been confirmed by security cameras; the three Islamists in possession of plastic explosives. “You’re going to put all that aside based on comments from a small-time arms dealer?”
“Your small-time arms dealer,” Chappelle pointed out. “The one you dug up. If he confirmed your theories, you’d be calling him a vital source of information. Instead”—he pointed at Diana—“the evidence points elsewhere, so suddenly we should ignore him?”
“Just don’t ignore all the rest of it.”
“We’re not, Jack.” Christopher Henderson played good cop, speaking in slow, measured tones. “We’ve already got the three men with the plastic explosives. We think that did a lot more to mess up their plans than you realize. Maybe Yasin got here just in time to find out we’d fucked up his plans. But we’ll get him, if he’s still in town.”
“And Biehn . . . ?” Jack challenged. “Had his own agenda,” Chappelle said, “which you fell for hook, line, and sinker.”
It was possible. Jack hated to admit it, but it was possible. There was one gaping hole, of course—how did Biehn know about Yasin? That was an enormous question mark squatting on any other theory. But put it aside for a moment, and what they were proposing made sense. In that moment, Jack tried to step back and away from his ego. Ego was the enemy of a good investigator, he had decided long ago. Men fell in love with their own theories, and once enamored, held on to them like prize possessions. The very best investigators pursued their theories with determination but not tunnel vision. Jack hadn’t been at this long enough to know if he was one of the very best, but he refused to stumble over his own ego.
Yasin certainly was up to something. But maybe CTU had shattered that plan. Maybe Jack, who had thought himself to be the man exposing the plot no one else had foreseen, was instead just a latecomer to a party that was already over.
“Jack, we’ll get him,” Henderson said, continuing to act the friend. “But according to Diana, that’s not where the urgency lies.”
Jack looked at the injured woman. She nodded. “Farrigian says the buyers were friends of Dog Smithies, who I guess you dealt with. They bought more plastic explosives than what was found on Sweetzer. A lot more. The buyer was a man named Dean.”
“Jamey Farrell ran down his information,” Henderson went on. “Dean runs a biker gang that is an offshoot of the Hell’s Angels. They want the Angels to go back to the old days. Back when they’d take over towns and make themselves the law. One of their gang was arrested last night in Fresno. He said that Dean was on his way down to L.A. He said they were going to ‘Blow some shit up.’ He said everyone would wake up tomorrow morning to a big surprise.”
Chappelle checked his watch. “Which gives us only a few hours to find them and stop them. And, much as I hate myself for saying this, Agent Bauer, you are going to help.”
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 3 A.M. AND 4 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
3:00 A.M. PST Santa Clarita, California
His real name was Dean Schrock, but he’d just been Dean for so long that even he had mostly forgotten the last name. He was old enough to feel a long day’s ride in his ass and lower back, but he was still young enough to bully the one-percenters who were part of his gang, and hell of bad enough to terrify the crap out of any cagers he saw on the streets.
Dean was part of a dying breed, and he knew it. Hell, he took pride in it. He’d been a kid during the heyday of Altamont, so he hadn’t been busting heads back then, but he was old enough to remember when whole towns would head for the hills when the Hell’s Angels rode down Main Street. These days most people calling themselves Hell’s Angels were wannabes or squiddies who’d just as soon ride a rice burner as a Harley and pretend to be badass. Sure, there were still a few throwbacks; Dean had heard about a Hell’s Angels club in New York City, and another up in Canada (friggin’ Canada, of all places!) that were hard-core and full of one-percenters, but they were few and far between.
Dean pushed an empty beer bottle off his belly and sat up. They were in a house on the outskirts of Santa Clarita, in the upland valleys north of Los Angeles. He’d forgotten—or, more to the point, he never really cared—whose house it was. Four or five of his boys were sprawled out on couches or chairs or on the floor. A couple of women were there, too— nothing to look at, or he’d have taken them into one of the bedrooms and had them himself. A few more of his boys were crashed in the bedrooms or the hallways, sleeping off the ride down from Bakersfield and the six-packs they’d swallowed since then.
All Dean’s boys were one-percenters—that is, part of the “one percent” of bikers that were outlaws, rather than the ninety-nine percent that the Hell’s Angels claimed were law-abiding citizens—and in just a few hours they were going to prove that even if only one percent of the biker population were outlaws, it was one hell of a one percent.
Bleary-eyed, he checked his watch. Little bit of time left. That puke Dog Smithies was supposed to show up before sunrise. Dean was looking forward to meeting him face to face, see what that bullshitter was really like. But right now he could close his eyes a little bit and dream of the big explosion.
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3:06 A.M. PST Parker Center, Los Angeles
As far as LAPD was concerned, Cardinal Mulrooney was a candidate for beatification. They maintained a small dossier on him, but the contents might as well have been provided by the Catholic Church’s public relations department. The report discussed Mulrooney’s upbringing in a poor Irish neighborhood of Chicago, his travel to Los Angeles as a teenager in the fifties, where he slept on the floor of the Catholic mission and then volunteered for their soup kitchen. Soon after, he had promised himself he would become ordained, and Allen James Mulrooney had been a servant of the Catholic Church ever since. There was, to Harry’s utter relief, not even a whisper in the dossier of child abuse or hushed-up scandals.
Harry would like to have stopped there. The Mulrooney file was flimsy, but it was official, and Harry could rightly have told Jack that was far as he could or would go. He sat in his office for a few moments, fingering the number Jack had given him. Finally, he punched in the long string of numbers. It didn’t seem like a phone number at all, but a few moments later, his phone was ringing.
“Marianno,” said a female voice on the other end.
“Maddie Marianno, this is Detective Harry Driscoll, LAPD,” he said. “Jack Bauer asked me to contact you. You have a moment?”
“Driscoll,” she repeated, and he was sure she was committing it to memory. “What kind of trouble has Bauer gotten you into?”
“Ha!” Harry said. “You definitely know Jack. Listen, I’m sorry for calling you so early, but I need a little information if you can give it.”
“It’s not that early,” Marianno said. “Fire away.”
“Jack asked me to find out anything I could dig up on Cardinal Allen J. Mulrooney. He’s the—”
“Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, sure,” the woman replied. “Interesting guy. You know he’s a schismatic, right?”
“A what?”
“Schismatic. This isn’t even classified, really, so I have no trouble telling you this. You ever heard of Vatican II?”
“Is the Pope Catholic?” Harry replied. Vatican II, officially known as the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, was a series of meetings held between 1962 and 1965 that made significant changes to the views and practices of the Catholic Church.
“Right. Some of the decisions made at Vatican II made a certain segment of the church unhappy. Some splinter groups were created within the church. Some are still inside the church, still follow the Pope, etcetera, but think the church has lost its way a little bit. Some are more extreme. They think there hasn’t been a legitimate Pope since 1962. They believe there’s been a schism. Schismatics.”
“And Mulrooney i
s one of those?”
“Not publicly,” Marianno replied. “I don’t even think the Vatican has solid proof, or they’d out him. But, yes, he is. Mulrooney was groomed by very orthodox priests and didn’t take kindly to the changes being made back then.”
This was news to Harry. Although he was far, far
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from the inner circles of the Catholic Church in Los Angeles, he’d been a congregant inside the archdiocese for most of his life. One heard rumors. But he’d never heard a whisper of this.
“Anything else? Anything about . . . about child abuse?” he asked.
“Ah,” the woman said solemnly. “Child abuse and Mulrooney? No. Nothing directly related to him. But the child abuse issue is a hydra waiting to raise its head. When it does, the church is going to have serious problems.”
No kidding, Harry thought. Aloud, he said, “Thanks for your time. Again, sorry to call so early.” Maddie Marianno laughed. “That’s twice you’ve said that. It’s not so early here. I’m having lunch.” “Oh,” Harry said, surprised. “Where exactly are you?”
Marianno laughed again, louder this time. “Didn’t Jack even tell you who you were calling? I’m in Italy, Harry. You’ve called the CIA’s Section Chief in Rome.”
3:12 A.M. PST 405 Freeway
For the second time in one night, Jack was riding up the 405 Freeway on a motorcycle. This time it was on Dog Smithies’s impounded Harley-Davidson. There was no traffic at this hour, even on the northbound 405, and Jack literally flew out of the city and into the foothills.
The Hell’s Angel in custody had given the police several pertinent pieces of information. First, Dean and his bikers expected to meet up with Smithies. Second, they’d never met him before, although they’d talked to him on the phone a lot. Third, Smithies was supposed to bring them more plastic explosives.
All this was now pretty goddamned far removed from CIA business, but Jack wasn’t sure he had a choice. He’d gotten himself involved in this business, and like it or not, Chappelle did have a pretty big book to throw at him. The least Jack could do was try to clean up his own mess.
The plan wasn’t very complicated: impersonate Smithies, find out what this Dean character was planning, and either call in the cavalry right away, or head him off and arrest him at the scene.
Alone on the bike, Jack had time to think about what he was getting into. Messes came with every job. Even on SWAT, which was as straightforward as it gets, he’d seen issues with other officers: questionable shootings, civilian complaints even when the shootings were righteous, guys jockeying for position to help boost their careers. Delta had been the same; even though every man in his unit had his back during an operation, when they were inside the wire, all of them had their own agendas and personal missions. The CIA was . . . well, hell, he wasn’t sure what the CIA was. He just knew that they were the guys looking into the shadows. Jack liked that, but he had to admit that half of any day spent at the CIA was devoted to managing the politics of the place. This new agency, Counter Terrorist Unit, was certainly full of all the same bullshit. But Jack had to admit that they were seeing a lot of action. Maybe there was good work to be done on the domestic front. For all his smooth salesmanship, Christo
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pher Henderson was right: his CIA status hurt more than it helped right now. If the borders were porous enough to let Yasin back into the country so easily, who knew what other scorpions had crept inside the wire?
It would make Teri happy, too, he knew. So far, his CIA work had sent him overseas only on short-term assignments. But he knew that any day he might be permanently assigned to a foreign desk anywhere from Djibouti to Jakarta, and then where would they be? Teri didn’t want to move. Kim would have a meltdown. And Jack . . . Jack wasn’t sure what he wanted.
Inside the helmet, sealed off from the landscape hurtling past him at eighty miles per hour, Jack said the words aloud. “I don’t know what I want.”
And if you don’t know what you want, how will you ever get it?
“But Jesus,” Jack said into the helmet. “Can I really work for a prick like that?”
There’s a Chappelle everywhere. Besides, you wouldn’t be working for him. You’d work for Henderson. Or for yourself.
This internal dialogue continued for another mile or two, but in the end, a more practical side of Jack Bauer won out, the part of him that simply could not abide indecisiveness. “Screw it,” he said aloud. “Let’s just take out some bad guys.”
3:24 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Ryan Chappelle sat alone in a darkened corner of the headquarters, away from the halogen lights in the conference room and the gentler yellow lights leaking out of Henderson’s office. Chappelle put his feet up and rubbed his temples.
It’s not always going to be like this, he almost said aloud. I do my job right, this will all get better. More efficient. It’ll be staffed properly.
Chappelle knew some of his staff didn’t like him. But he also knew that they liked their budgets, their computers, their access to classified materials. Their salaries. And those things weren’t created ex nihilo. Someone went out and got those items, fought for them, justified them after the money had been spent. That someone was Ryan Chappelle.
The PDA in Chappelle’s pocket buzzed, alerting him to something on his calendar. Chappelle shook his head and rubbed his cheeks, trying to shake off the sleep. He stood up and walked quietly to the conference room, activated the monitor, and signed in to the scrambled video conference. He had insisted the monitor and Internet connection be prepared for just this moment.
An efficient-looking middle-aged woman leaned into the screen frame. “Director Chappelle? Stand by for Mr. Harding.”
Chappelle did not disguise his displeasure as Peter Harding sat down in the chair at the other end of the link. Harding had the kind of bright red, almost orange hair and freckles that looked cute on a ten
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year-old-boy but unfortunate on a fifty-year-old man with jowls.
“Chappelle, how are you?” Harding said.
“Confused,” Ryan said tersely. “I understood this meeting was with the President.” “Change of plans. Now you’ve got the Deputy to the National Security Advisor.”
Ryan snorted. “So I see. Look, I need to know if the National Security Council is taking CTU seriously. I understood that the Division Directors were reporting directly to the President.”
Harding scratched his remaining shock of red hair. “That may change. We’re still sussing it out.”
Idiots, Chappelle thought. This is why mavericks like this Bauer character need me. Someone has to deal with this crap. “While you’re sussing, we are actually chasing terrorists out here. I’ve got people putting their lives on the line right now, and I’m giving my own people hell for not following protocol. How am I supposed to tell them that the people above us don’t even know what the protocol is?”
Harding bristled visibly. “Don’t talk to me like that, Chappelle. This is a new—”
Chappelle interrupted. “It took seven years to get a unit like CTU up and running. You think the terrorists have been sitting on their asses since then? Hell, one of our guys just got confirmation that Abdul Rahman Yasin came back into the country!” Harding’s eyes opened as wide as saucers. “That’s right. One of the terrorists from back in ’93.” Chappelle didn’t bother to mention that the “guy” he was referring to was a cowboy from the CIA. His fledgling unit could use all the credit it could get. “If you want us to keep trying to stop terrorists on a shoestring budget and no real access to the big decisions, fine. But you get what you pay for.”
He stood up and walked away from the screen, leaving Harding tripping over himself to respond.
Chappelle’s fingers shook from the sudden adrenaline dump. He wasn’t out there dodging bullets or facing down international terrorists. But there were many kinds of unsung heroism, and some of the most important battles were fought in little beige r
ooms by men like Ryan Chappelle.
3:31 A.M. PST Parker Center, Los Angeles
Driscoll had tried three times to call Jack Bauer, but the calls went directly to voice mail. Though he was a detective with over ten years, Harry had no idea what to do with the information he’d received. Mulrooney’s political affiliations within the Catholic Church had nothing to do with the current case, as far as he could tell. And the CIA (Jesus, had he really just called a CIA operative in Rome?) had no information on Mulrooney’s involvement in any child abuse scandals.
There was a part of Harry Driscoll that wanted to be done. No one could say he hadn’t played his role, put his career on the line, risked his neck. He should go home and sleep for a few hours.
But he couldn’t. Maybe it was the Catholic in him. He was guilted into staying on the case. It’s your own fault, some little voice was telling him. You wanted
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to be a part of the big terrorist case. You wanted to turn Biehn over to the Feds. You got him killed as much as Bauer did.
Oddly, it wasn’t the terrorist angle that was haunting Harry as the clock leaned toward four o’clock. It was Biehn, especially his face as he described the horror of his son being abused. While Biehn was alive, his righteous indignation had struck Harry as melodramatic. Now that he was gone, the silence was far more offensive than his antics. No one now was speaking for that kid who got abused.
“Damn,” Harry said to the empty building. “Hell and damn.”
He stood up and grabbed his jacket.
3:38 A.M. PST Santa Clarita
The 405 Freeway had merged onto Interstate 5, and Jack was now heading through the city of Santa Clarita. He left the 5 and turned onto one of the many roads that led into the hills. A hundred years ago the roads and homes built up here would have seemed like a world away from the city of Los Angeles. But the suburbs had crept steadily northward into the mountain valleys, and the dirt roads had been paved over. Jack followed one of these roads away from the residential streetlights and out into the hills, where a lonely one-story ranch house squatted at the top of a small rise. A garden of motorbikes seemed to have sprouted in the dry ground around the house. A porch light was on, and another light somewhere in the back of the house, but all was still.