by John Whitman
“Stay on the blue van,” Jack suggested.
“My team is tracking it,” Jamey said. “Give us a few more minutes.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ll be right back.”
“What are you going to do?” Kelly asked.
“I’m going to talk to the guy that started this whole thing.”
6:14 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles, Holding Room 2
“And here I thought you’d forgotten about me,” Brett Marks said.
Jack closed the door behind him and sat down. Marks was, finally, starting to look tired. He’d been kept in that room all day with only one toilet break. There was nowhere to lie down, and the chairs were anything but comfortable.
“You were right about the terrorist cell,” Jack said. “They’re in the city.”
“We knew that this morning,” Brett said.
“We’ve learned a little more,” Jack said. “But the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit is your friend Frank Newhouse.”
Marks’s face wrinkled as though he’d been presented with a foul-smelling food. “If he’s who you say he is, he’s no friend of mine. Apparently I’m a lot less perceptive than I thought. I thought it was bad enough that I got fooled by you, but Newhouse seems to have played me for a lot longer.”
“How long have you known him?”
“For years. Ever since—” Brett Marks stopped.
“Go on,” Jack said.
Marks sat up straight and stretched. “You know, it occurs to me. I’ll tell you everything I know about Frank Newhouse,” he offered, “if you let me go.”
Behind the one-way glass that looked onto holding room two, Kelly Sharpton and Ryan Chappelle both groaned. “Oh, shit,” Kelly muttered.
6:17 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
“No!” Jack fumed. “No way!”
Ryan Chappelle held up both his hands to appease Bauer. “Jack, it’s not a bad deal. Marks is low-level. We don’t even know if he could have pulled off the sodium cyanide bomb.”
“He has a fortress up in Palmdale!” Jack protested. “Two days ago they were ready to kill that foreman and steal ten gallons of poison. He’s as much a nutcase as Frank Newhouse or these Iranians. He’s got his own army!”
“He’s a political radical, but he’s not very capable,” Chappelle said. “His guys proved willing to do damage, but mostly inept, right? I talked to the prosecutors. They think the best they’ll get is a number of weapons charges.”
Jack got right up in Chappelle’s face. “And conspiracy to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit a terrorist act—”
Chappelle, though much shorter than Jack, didn’t back down. “Most of his men won’t testify. All we’ve got is Heinrich Gelb’s testimony, and Martin Padilla thinks Marks’s defense team will chop him into pieces.”
Chappelle and Bauer locked eyes so fiercely that Kelly Sharpton imagined he could see a line of fire blazing between them. Kelly spoke very calmly, “Jack, I hate to say, but it might be worth it.”
Bauer broke eye contact with Chappelle to look at Kelly in surprise. “What?”
“Think about it,” Kelly said. “You’ve already broken up the Greater Nation. Marks by himself can’t do anything, and we can make it part of his agreement that he never engages in militia activities again.”
Jack didn’t like it. He wanted to keep his eye on the Iranians, too, but that didn’t mean completely abandoning Marks. “He won’t respect any agreement he makes with us. He believes the entire Federal government is illegal.”
Kelly shrugged. “Then if he starts up, we bring him back in, and it’s all over.”
“I spent six months listening to that madman talk. I can’t stand to see him walk.” Jack didn’t even try to hide his disgust.
“But at the same time, you get what you were after originally. You get a chance to stop the terrorists you said were here all along. It’s worth the risk.”
6:22 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles, Holding Room 2
“The time is six twenty-two, Pacific Standard Time. This interview is taking place inside the Los Angeles headquarters of the Counter Terrorist Unit, holding room two. Special Agent Jack Bauer interviewing. State your name for the record,” Jack said sourly.
Everything in holding room two was the same as before, except now there was a video camera set up in the room, recording his conversation with Marks.
“Brett Ellis Marks.”
“Mr. Marks, are you prepared to make an official statement in relation to information on a man known as Frank Newhouse?”
“Yes, in exchange for my immediate release from custody and your government’s agreement to waive any and all charges it is considering for my prosecution.”
“You mean the government’s agreement.”
“No, I don’t.”
Jack rolled his eyes toward the one-way mirror and shook his head. “Okay. Tell us everything you know about Frank Newhouse.”
The story Marks told started out familiar to everyone who had seen the CIA file. Newhouse had been born in Glendale, Arizona, when that part of the country was sand and sage brush. He’d joined the army at eighteen and re-upped three times, finding a home in Special Forces. He’d seen action in Grenada and Panama. He was in the middle of the ugliest part of Somalia.
“So far you’re not telling me anything I can’t read in the newspapers,” Jack said acidly.
“Then you must know about the friends he made in Iraq,” Brett said.
Everyone perked up at this. Brett Marks was a good storyteller, and they listened breathlessly as he described Newhouse’s experience during Operation Desert Storm. “Frank was one of the first in. He dropped behind enemy lines as a forward observer, calling in coordinates for the Air Force. He was nearly caught by the Republican Guard. In fact, they did capture him. They were torturing him, but he was rescued.”
“That’s not in the file,” Jack said.
“Because he wasn’t rescued by our guys. He was rescued by Iranian agents working inside Iraq.”
“Bullshit,” Jack said.
“Is it? You know Iran wanted Iraq destroyed. They made a lot of noise in public about U.S. aggression, but Iraq was also their mortal enemy. They were happy to see us blow up Saddam Hussein. They’d been sneaking in agents from the beginning. Most of them got caught by Saddam’s police, but a few made it through. One of the Iranian agents rescued Frank and helped him finish his mission.”
“Did this Iranian agent have a name?”
“Babak Farrah.”
Jack slammed his reaction down, keeping Marks from reading him. “Why didn’t Frank tell anyone about this?”
“As far as I know, he did,” Marks said. “But if he didn’t, I can’t blame him. Desert Storm seemed to have made Frank lose his taste for government work. He was pissed about everything: soldiers who came back with Persian Gulf Syndrome and weren’t treated for it, lies the government seemed to tell about why we went. He had already left the Army. He kept working for the government, but in his heart he’d already joined the Greater Nation by the time the second Iraq War happened. You can imagine how that put him over the edge. He was doing consulting work for Homeland Security. With his record, he easily passed all the security checks. He and I were careful not to expose his connection to the Greater Nation. Eventually he was put on a task force to investigate us, which was perfect. For us, I mean.”
“Something’s not making sense to me,” Jack probed. “You say Frank Newhouse had Iranian friends. But you also say that he was part of the Greater Nation plan to stop the Iranians. Those two things don’t add up.”
“Our information about the terrorists didn’t come from Frank,” Marks said. “We have other friends that let us know what’s going on.”
“Names,” Jack demanded.
“That’s not part of this deal.”
Jack glowered, but said nothing. Marks continued.
“I assumed that Frank didn’t want to see the terrorists succeed. Frank joi
ned us because he’s anti-Federalist, not anti-American. To be an anti-Federalist is a noble cause, Agent Bauer. We are fighting for the freedom of the states and the freedom of the individual. We are not un-American. When we heard that there might be some Iranian terrorists entering the U.S., I assumed he had heard something from old friends and wanted to stop it.”
“Maybe he’s still doing that,” Jack suggested.
“Then he’s doing a lousy job, especially considering that he seemed to know the guys that are behind it.”
6:31 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
“He’s a good storyteller,” Jack growled, walking into the conference room behind Chappelle and Sharpton.
“You don’t believe him?” Chappelle said. “It makes sense to me.”
“We need to get background on Babak Farrah,” Jack said.
“Already on it.” Kelly tossed a file to Jack. The manila folder was thicker than the sparse paperwork inside. Jack thumbed through it as Kelly spoke. “We don’t get much out of Iran. What we have is innocuous enough—the CIA says he was a sergeant in the Iranian army, owned a small computer store, that’s pretty much it. He might have been the President of Iran before coming here, for all we know.”
Jack rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in a very long time. “So Frank Newhouse plays the Federal government but secretly works for Greater Nation. Then he plays Greater Nation but secretly works for Iranian terrorists. That’s our theory?”
“I’ll listen to a better one,” Chappelle said.
Jack didn’t have a better one. He tried to isolate his own concern, and that came down to only one thing: Brett Marks. He didn’t like him, he didn’t trust him, and he didn’t want to listen to him anymore. The idea that some of the evidence was coming from Marks— not to mention the fact that the nutcase would walk because of it—made him furious.
“I still have a problem,” he said at last. “Marks didn’t give us anything. We’re not any closer to finding the terrorists. We’re not any closer to finding Newhouse.”
Jamey Farrell walked in on the middle of his sentence. She had a huge grin on her face. “Who says we’re not any closer to finding the bad guys?”
Without a word, they followed her back to the conference room where she’d set up yet another display.
“I expect a raise after all this,” she said. “Just follow the pictures.” She pressed a button and a slideshow played for them. The pictures were all different angles—sometimes straight on, sometimes downward angles. Sometimes the objects seemed very close, more often they were far off, and always they were blurred and black and white. But one thing was obvious in all of them: the blue van. The slideshow was a pictographic recreation of the van’s journey, and it ended at a private hangar at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana.
Kelly Sharpton whistled. “Now that is good detective work.”
“We checked the logs at John Wayne,” she went on casually, as though it was all in a day’s work. “Only two flights left from that hangar or the one next to it that evening. One was a hobby flier who flew to Santa Barbara. She checks out. The other logged a flight plan for San Diego, but didn’t go there.”
“How do we know?” Chappelle asked.
Jamey said, “According to FAA records, it never landed there. We just got off the phone with the traffic controller who was on duty yesterday. He recalls tracking that plane and asking why it had veered off its course. They didn’t answer. He didn’t think much of it because hobby fliers take joyrides all the time.”
Jack asked, “Did he have any idea where it was going?”
“East.”
6:50 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles, Holding Room 2
“Nice of you to come back,” Brett said. “Are we finished here? Can I go?”
“I’m not sure,” Jack said. He hadn’t turned the camera back on. “You haven’t really given us anything. I mean, you told us a great story about Frank Newhouse. You gave us an explanation for the terrorists. But we didn’t get us any closer to finding anyone. If you want to walk, you better do more than just tell a good story.”
He turned the cameras back on. “You said that Frank Newhouse didn’t give you information on the terrorists, but you won’t tell us who tipped you.”
“No.”
“What did Frank do when you learned the information?”
“First, we called the FBI and Homeland Security. They didn’t seem to believe us. Frank, who was our inside man, said that it was because some government agency had already botched some Iranian investigation.” Marks let that sink in. Jack could tell by the grin on his face that he knew of Jack’s involvement there. “Anyway, you may not agree, but we know that we have the right as citizens to act in defense of our country, so we took it into our own hands. Frank led our investigation.”
“You let him do that even though you knew he had Iranian friends?”
Marks shrugged. “He fooled you guys a lot worse than he fooled us.”
“Did Frank mention what he thought the terrorist plan might be?”
“That’s what we were trying to find out. We had a lead on someone who knew the terrorists. Ramin Rafizadeh. We were looking for him when you got in the way. Other than that, all Frank knew was that they were going to attack the President sometime when he came to Los Angeles. It was going to be soon, I think.”
That’s the head fake, Jack thought. So we fell for the same fake Marks did.
Jack wasn’t sure where to go next. It was time to start fishing.
“Tell me what you know about EMPs.”
Brett Marks blinked. Jack had seen him do it before, but not very often. The militia leader was cool and composed and rarely caught off-guard. This had surprised him. “You mean electromagnetic weapons?” Brett asked.
“You know what I mean,” Jack said, pressing his small advantage.
“I know the government is developing weapons that short-circuit electronic equipment. I know that nuclear blasts can do the same thing, but cause a lot of other damage. My theory is that the powers that be would use weapons like that to shut down the entire infrastructure of the country if the people ever rise up and overthrow the illegal government. That’s just my opinion, of course.”
“My opinion,” Jack said, losing patience, “is that you’re insane. You couldn’t shut down the whole country.”
Marks gave him that professorial smile, the one he reserved for naïve students who had not read their Constitution. “You really don’t know anything, do you, Jack. A decent-sized EMP blast, either from a nuclear weapon or an EMP weapon, could black out the entire country. All you have to do is set it off high enough and in the right spot. Nineteen miles over Kansas would do the trick.”
6:59 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Kelly Sharpton was already on the phone by the time Jack left the holding cell and burst into the observation room.
“I’d say he’s given us something now, wouldn’t you, Jack?” Chappelle said.
“We’ll see,” Jack growled.
Sharpton hung up the phone. “Jesus, he’s right. I just got off the phone with DOD. Nineteen miles up you lose all grounding effects and the blast range extends far enough to reach the whole goddamned country.”
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 7 P.M. AND 8 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
7:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
“Jamey!” Jack roared, leaving the observation room and steaming into the main computer room, pulling Sharpton and Chappelle in his wake. “How far can they get?”
“I’m on it!” Farrell called from her workstation. “Come see.”
Jack was hovering at her shoulder in seconds.
“All we have is a process of elimination,” she explained. “Assuming our terrorists aren’t just joyriding up to Santa Barbara to visit their boyfriends, then the plane that took off from that hangar is a Cessna Citation Encore.”
“Once they deviated from their flight plan, they could go anywhere. There’s enough traffic up there that they’d be hard to track. But . . .” she added, before Jack could interrupt her with a question, “this Cessna’s maximum distance is right around two thousand miles, so either they have to refuel somewhere, or their destination is less than that.”
Sharpton said, “Kansas City. Seventeen hundred miles.”
Jack nodded. “We need to pull the trigger on this.” He looked at Chappelle. The District Director nodded.
7:05 P.M. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
President Barnes was on his third attempt to tie his bow tie. He grimaced at himself in the mirror as the wings came out lopsided yet again.
“Hal, I keep telling you Chris will do that for you,” his wife said. Juliette Barnes was already dressed—her ability to be ready on time for all social functions was one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her—and watching him in the mirror from the sitting room attached to their suite.
Barnes’s frown deepened. “It just seems ridiculous to be the leader of the free world and not be able to tie your own goddamned bow tie.”
“Well, Mr. President, we’re running out of time.
You’d better either do the job yourself or get the steward to do it.”
He snorted. “Let’s hope you’re only referring to my bow tie when you say that.”
Her laugh was interrupted by a knock on the door. She turned to answer it, but by that time there were seven Secret Service agents in the room, two for her and five for him. The head of the detail, Avery Taylor, was a handsome man with a square jaw and jet-black skin. “Mr. President, sorry for the intrusion.”
“What is it?” he asked. The Secret Service worked incredibly hard to stay hands off, even in a public environment like the Westin Hotel. If they had walked into his private room like this, something was wrong.
“Just a minute, sir,” Avery said. He put a hand up to his ear bud and listened. “Affirmative. Patriot is en route.” Avery focused on Barnes. “Sir, we need to move you immediately. We’re taking you to a secure area of the Presidio on the east side of the city.”