by John Whitman
Senator Armand moved on to the next topic. “You must be aware, Director, that your methods are being called into question this morning. What can justify the fact that an operative escorted a suspect in a murder investigation around Los Angeles and apparently let him attack and nearly murder someone?”
Nothing can justify it, Chappelle wanted to shout. He’s a thug and I don’t want him on my team!
But he’d already painted himself into that corner once. If Bauer wasn’t going to be a pain in his neck, Chappelle would at least put him to good use. “This was the same operative this committee praised earlier for stopping Castaic Dam. I have spoken with him”—that was true—“and he’s assured me that his actions were based on urgent needs and time constraints.”
Chappelle couldn’t believe he was sitting here defending that moron Jack Bauer. But if Bauer’s actions could ensure his funding, he’d take it. “Bauer is out there now, working loose ends of this case. But I can assure you he is doing everything possible to stay within the letter of the law.”
10:29 A.M. PST Farrigian’s Warehouse, West Los Angeles
“Oh, ahhh!” Farrigian howled. “Oh god, it’s the
truth! I didn’t sell the stuff to Arabs.”
“They had it,” Jack spat. “How’d they get it?”
“How the fuck should—ow! I don’t know. Not from me. I bought from Arabs. I bought from them!”
Bought from Arabs, Jack thought. From Yasin? Had Yasin arranged this from the other end?
“Names,” Jack demanded.
“I don’t know. I’ll give you all the shipping information, but I can tell you it was nothing. Some joke of a gangster in Cairo named Farouk. Middleman like me.”
Jack held back a curse. Farouk was where he’d started. Farouk had led him to Ramin. He already knew that Farouk knew almost nothing. He couldn’t go in circles.
“You sold to someone. Give me those names. And don’t say the bikers,” he warned, gouging another hole in Farrigian’s forehead.
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“Aah! I did sell to them. I was told to. But some I sold to this other guy who was in charge. I don’t know his name, I swear I don’t!” he added in a panic as Jack aimed the sights at a fresh spot. “He was American. He never let me see him, but he talked like an American. He only wanted a little for himself. The rest he said to sell to Dog and Dean.”
“How did he know them?” Jack asked.
“Don’t know. They weren’t the same type, that’s for sure. And they didn’t know my guy at all. They kept talking about Mark or Mike or something, but that definitely wasn’t the guy who arranged the whole thing.”
“What was he going to do with it?”
“Are you kidding me?”
Jack wasn’t kidding. He cut another red line across the arms dealer’s forehead. But he doubted Farrigian could answer his question. The mastermind behind the C–4 had gone to great lengths to keep the authorities busy with other problems. There was no way he would tell his master plan to the likes of this.
“What did you to do Diana Christie?” Jack asked.
“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even meet her. I made you guys when you came last time. I didn’t trust you, but you weren’t my problem, you were Dean’s, so I sent you to him. Guys want to pay me to keep my mouth shut, they pay me, right? Otherwise it’s the law of the jungle. When she came back, the boss man was here to meet her, not me. Did they kill her?”
“Eventually,” Jack said. “Oh, man, look, none of this is my thing. I just buy and sell, you know?” Jack asked how much C–4 the mysterious leader
had kept for himself. Jamey Farrell would have been pleased when Farrigian said, “About ten pounds.”
10:40 A.M. PST Culver City
Marwan al-Hassan had one more act to perform before leaving for the Unity Conference, a sort of purification ritual. Slowly, carefully, he slid his left arm out of its sling. Then he began to unwrap the bandage that covered his arm. It took several minutes, and every movement was painful, but he forced himself to continue until the bandage was gone. His forearm looked sickly and pale, but under long sleeves it would not be noticeable. There would be pain, but the pain was a small price to pay for the glory that was to come.
10:59 A.M. West Los Angeles
Jack’s phone rang. “Harry, what’s happening? Are
you at the coroner’s office?”
“Yeah, and you need to get down here. Now.”
“They did the autopsy?”
“Yeah, but you need to see this to believe it.”
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 11 A.M. AND 12 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
11:00 A.M. PST Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles
Security for the Unity Conference was subtle but efficient. Guests passed through two sets of metal detectors in the lobby and took a specially designated elevator to the top floor, where Swiss Guards dressed in elegant black suits politely relieved all guests of their unnecessary bags and coats. As they did, a hidden camera snapped a high-resolution photo of their faces and a computer matched it against a predetermined guest list. Guards surreptitiously passed swatches of chemically treated cloth over some part of each guest, and the swatches were casually passed back to a coatroom that had been turned into a laboratory. The swatches were examined—one that turned black indicated the presence of explosive agents.
The man who called himself Abdul al-Hassan passed casually through all this security, even patiently allowing the Swiss Guards to probe his arm sling. The only moment of trouble he had was walking through the second metal detector, which, unbeknownst to him, was set at a higher sensitivity. The detector made no sound, but a single light went off on the far side of the metal frame, and a young man in Armani smoothly gestured for al-Hassan to step to the side.
“Do you have any metal on you, sir?” he asked in lightly accented English.
“Metal?” al-Hassan said. “No. The other detector didn’t—”
The young man smiled. “They are temperamental sometimes.” He held up a metal wand. “May I?” Before al-Hassan could respond, he began to wave the handheld detector over the attendee. The wand hummed steadily until the guard passed it over alHassan’s arm.
“Ah,” he said. “I broke my arm. There is a metal plate in there.”
The guard nodded. He gently fingered the cloth sling again, and then waved al-Hassan through.
“Can you believe the security here?” said a woman who appeared suddenly beside him.
Marwan al-Hassan knew immediately that this was a Jew. Only his training kept the look of disdain off his face. “Necessary, I suppose.” He turned away from her.
“Well, no need to be rude, Mr. al-Hassan,” the woman said. “Are you saying you don’t remember me?”
Marwan looked at her calmly, but he felt his heart
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pound against the side of his neck. Could he be undone so quickly? “I’m sorry?” “Amy Weiss.” The woman laughed. “I interviewed you on Thursday about the conference.” “Ah, of course,” he said apologetically. “I’m so sorry. The last few days have been very hectic.”
“I’m sure,” Amy Weiss said. “That’s just twice now, after I did that story on your peace efforts after the ’93 bombing.”
Marwan fought the urge to squeeze her neck until her head popped off. “We all have our failings,” he said sweetly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
11:11 A.M. PST I–10 Freeway
Boo McElroy had never picked up his room as a kid, so now he was stuck picking up trash on Interstate 5. Boo (his real name was Bradley, but no one called him that) didn’t have the vocabulary to use the word irony, but that’s what he felt. He’d always told his mom she could go stuff herself every time she tried to get him to clean up. He was a tough kid, independent, doing his own thing.
Until he got caught robbing a 7-Eleven, his third robbery since turning eighteen. Now he was
serving a year in county, and working off some of that time wearing an orange vest and raking up trash along the freeway with a crew of cons.
He couldn’t believe how much shit people tossed out of their cars. Come on, he tossed a bottle or can now and then, but his own personal shit couldn’t amount to much. It was all these other bastards who treated the city like it was a toilet.
He used his poker to jab a can and then lift it up into his trash bag. He moved on and saw a large canvas bag. It was his size and half covered in dust and leaves. It looked full. Well, hell, he thought, no way was he picking up that big thing. They couldn’t make him—
He stopped mid-gripe and blinked. He used his poker to push aside some leaves.
There was a cold, gray hand sticking out of the bag.
11:14 A.M. PST Los Angeles Department of Coroner Forensic Sciences Lab
Jack saw Harry Driscoll waiting outside the door of the forensics lab.
“What couldn’t you tell me over the phone?” Jack asked, slightly annoyed.
“Inside,” Harry said. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. You have to see it.”
Jack followed Harry inside, where they were both greeted by a woman in a lab coat who introduced herself as Dr. Siegman. She looked astounded and fascinated and was clearly eager to get back to the autopsy room. Outside, they donned surgical masks, then entered.
The naked corpse of the priest lay on the examination table. Its left arm had been cut open and splayed out.
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“This is why we wanted you to come down,” the coroner said. “Look at the arm.”
Jack approached the table and looked at the sickeningly butchered arm. The bone was exposed, but along the bone there was a steel plate, around which had been packed strips of what looked like very wet putty.
“C–4?” Jack asked. Siegman shrugged. “That’s not my field, but from what the detective tells me, that may be the case.”
Siegman picked up a probe and used it to push aside some of the dead tissue. “Look how it’s designed. A plate like this is normally used to brace a badly broken bone. But this one is a lot weaker. And look how the explosives are packed in there. I think if this were to explode, all this metal would go flying outward.”
“Show him the receiver,” Harry said.
Siegman used a pair of tongs to lift a small circuit. “Again, not my field, but if this is an explosive, I’m guessing this is a receiver.”
The ramifications of what he was seeing were instantly clear to Jack. Father Collins had turned himself into a human bomb. Jack’s knowledge of ordnance wasn’t strong enough to estimate the power of the blast, but he’d just seen what a brick of C–4 could do to a packed earth wall.
The small room seemed eerily silent with the three of them staring at the mutilated corpse. Finally, Harry Driscoll said something to break the dead quiet. “This is the most twisted thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’ve heard of suicide bombers, of course—”
“It’s not that far off,” Jack cut in. “Either way, the bomber is going to die. This delivery system—”
“Delivery system!” Dr. Siegman gasped, horrified. “This is a human being!”
But Jack was beyond her sense of morality, assessing the threat. “It’s not as efficient as a suicide vest. You can pack that with more C–4, and use nails, bolts, other stuff to make yourself a claymore mine. But this would be undetectable.”
“There’s that metal plate, though,” Harry pointed out.
Siegman was finding the same page Jack was on. “It wouldn’t matter. Most metal detectors aren’t set to go off when they find that density of metal. The plates are made that way. And even when they are, what would the security guard do, ask you to open your arm?”
“Was the transmitter on him?” Jack asked.
They searched through the few possessions that had arrived with the corpse, but found nothing of interest. “It might be anything,” Jack said. “A cell phone. The keyless entry on a car. Anything.”
“He wasn’t going after anything when I arrested him,” Harry said. “Man, he played that cool. But I guess if you’re willing to have a bomb planted in your arm, you can handle a few questions from a cop.”
Jack stepped back from the corpse, as though the physical distance might lend him mental perspective. The discovery lent him a small sense of relief— whatever Collins had been planning to do, it clearly wasn’t going to happen now. And at least now they knew why Driscoll’s attackers had wanted to reclaim that body. But it also raised a hundred questions, and at least a dozen of them were urgent. What had been the intended target? Who had helped him with
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the horrific surgery? Was there a connection between Father Collins, the human bomb, and Father Collins, the child molester? Other questions swirled around in Jack’s brain. He needed to organize them.
“Background check on Collins,” he said out loud, reciting the first thing he needed. “We need to know who this guy was. This has got to be the C–4 missing from the—oh, damn.” A depressing thought struck him. He looked at Siegman. “I don’t suppose there’s ten pounds of the stuff in there.”
Siegman looked at the arm. “I can give you an exact weight in a little while,” she said, “but no way. Whoever did this did it well, but there’s no ten pounds. They did this well. Look, there’s a sterilized wrap around the explosive, so it doesn’t break off and start moving around in the body and get reactions from the immune system. But I guarantee you, this guy was feeling even this amount. He must have been in some serious pain. The human body doesn’t like a lot of foreign objects invading it.”
Jack felt some of the energy drain out him, and he tried to put a mental stopper in the leak. It had been a long night, and he still couldn’t catch up to the plastic explosives, or the actual plot. Every time he caught up with some of it, more seemed to be missing.
11:33 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jamey had long ago given up any thought of going home, so it didn’t bother her when Jack Bauer called. “I need everything you can get me on Sam Col
lins, a priest at St. Monica’s in Los Angeles, and I mean everything, including his medical records. He had surgery on his arm recently and I want all that information as well.”
“Give me ten minutes and I’ll tell you how much money he got from the tooth fairy,” Jamey said. She started typing.
11:35 A.M. PST Los Angeles Department of Coroner Forensic Sciences Lab
Jack hung up and turned back to Dr. Siegman. “Doctor, I’m assuming that this was done with the man’s cooperation, yes? There’s no way this was done without his knowledge?”
Siegman looked startled, as though she hadn’t even considered the possibility. “Well, I guess it’s possible, once someone’s under, but what doctor would do that? Besides, you’d have to be a complete idiot. There’d be a lot of discomfort.”
Jack nodded his understanding and moved on. “Harry, we’ve got to figure out what the motive is, and the target. You know the Pope is in town, right?”
“Yeah, half our unit is assigned to it this week. He would be the obvious target. But a priest kill the Pope?”
“Maybe he’s a renegade,” Jack said. “Someone was telling me just recently about a group of people called schismatics who—”
“Yeah, they don’t think there’s been a real Pope since Vatican II,” Dr. Siegman said. “Usually very orthodox Catholics.”
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“Are you Catholic?” Jack asked. “Me? I’m Jewish. But my sister married a Catholic, and he’s a schismatic. Family dinners are murder.”
Jack felt all the pieces fall into place. If Jamey came back with information connecting Collins to the schismatics, then he had his target and his motive. It was possible—although he felt the stretch here—that this Catholic renegade had contacted Yasin to learn how to plan the attack. Mercenary work wasn’t Yasin’s style, but he might be unable to resist a chance to help strike a major symbol of Western civiliza
tion like the Pope. If that was the case, then they might have nipped this whole incident in the bud.
Jamey Farrell called back a moment later and gave him a preamble. “I don’t think this is what you wanted to hear.”
Harry eavesdropped on the conversation, but Dr. Siegman returned to her examination of the bullet-damaged receiver.
“What I want to hear is that the priest was part of a renegade sect that hated and opposed the Pope and wanted him replaced. It’d also be like whip cream on top if, say, Yasin’s phone number appeared a few dozen times in Collins’s phone logs.”
“How about a guy so squeaky clean you could eat off his stomach. This guy, Collins, was a friggin’ saint.”
“He was a child-molesting monster,” Jack replied.
“Well, not according to any record of him anywhere that we can dig up. Grew up in Orange County, went to a Catholic high school where his grade point average was exactly that—average. Served as Vice President on the student council, played on the baseball team. College at Pepperdine. Seminary school after that. His name is listed on the boards of about fifty charitable organizations. I can’t even find a friggin’ parking ticket on this guy.”
“He can be all that and still hate the Pope,” Jack said.
“He could,” Jamey retorted, “or he could be cochair of something called the Eternal City Project, which raises money for underprivileged Catholic kids to go to Rome and see the Pope. Not to mention having received a meritorious service award from the Council of Bishops, which was presented to him by, um, yeah, the Pope himself two years ago.”
“Jesus,” Jack muttered, no pun intended. “All this is so much easier if he just hates the Pope. That would explain my target. Without that, I have no idea why a priest turned himself into a human bomb.”
“All that motive could still be hidden under this stuff,” Jamey pointed out. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“By the way,” Jack asked, “is there any way at all, any possible way, that you were off in your calculations, and that the box of C–4 was missing only a pound or so?”
“No way. If that thing was packed full, then ten pounds is missing.” She paused. “You saying there aren’t ten pounds where you are?”