by John Whitman
Tony started his car again and headed back down the road. As he drove he had a thought: he’d gone too far. The driver came up here to do something, and in Tony’s experience “something” always took longer than a few minutes. Figuring twenty minutes each way as a maximum, Tony shortened the search area he would recommend to CTU for tomorrow morning.
He was so lost in thought that he barely saw the coyotes. They were scrawny brown and gray phantoms skittering across the edge of his headlights. Their eyes flashed demonlike in the lamp glare. They scattered off to the brush, but they didn’t run away. That was odd. Coyotes were scavengers and cowards—the only reason they would resist their flight instinct was if...
Tony stopped the car and turned out the lights. It was dark now, but he could still see the coyotes, ghosts in the darkness. They crossed the road again. A few seconds later he heard yapping and snarling.
Almeida grabbed his flashlight and jumped out of his car. Drawing his gun, he ran across the road and into the brush. Most of the coyotes scrambled away from the flashlight beam and the sound of his footsteps, but one big male stood its ground, fur raised up and teeth bared. Tony fired one shot into the air, and the crack of the discharge stole the coyote’s courage away. It yelped and ran off with the others.
Tony probed the ground all around with his flashlight beam. The circle of light fell across a large patch of broken ground. The earth had been upturned and then patted down in an area about fifteen feet wide and ten feet long. The coyotes had been digging and scratching at it, and Tony now saw what they’d been fighting over.
A human hand, partially mauled, was sticking up from the earth.
10:40 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Tony Almeida’s news struck Jack like a blow to the stomach. Eight bodies. He’d discovered eight bodies buried in a shallow grave in the hills above Pasadena. In the dark, looking at bodies buried for nearly a day, Almeida couldn’t be sure, but he thought they looked Middle Eastern, either Arab or Persian.
Kelly had stood by Jack, even after Chappelle’s tirade. Like everyone else in CTU, he knew Bauer had made the wrong call, but Kelly had led men in battle, and led investigations, too. He understood that the only way to get things right was to act, and sometimes the wrong actions were taken. Good leaders learned from their mistakes and overcame their deficiencies.
He was as shocked by the news as Jack was. “Someone killed them. Newhouse?”
“But why?” Jack asked. “Why would he bring them into the country and then not use them? And if there’s no terrorist attack, why bring them into the country?”
Kelly shook his head. “We still haven’t sweated Farid. He’s in a holding cell down there.” He jabbed a bandaged thumb down the hall. “I’m probably not very intimidating right now with my Band-Aids on.”
“I’ll do it,” Jack said.
Before he could get up, Jessi called over to him. “Jack, Nina.”
Jack picked up the phone. “Nina, what’s going on?”
“William Binns.”
“Excuse me?”
“William Binns,” Nina repeated.
“I’m not in the mood for games, Nina. That name means nothing to me.”
“Well, it should. It’s an alias for Frank Newhouse. It’s an alias he’s managed to keep off his record, even from the CIA and Justice. As far as anyone is concerned, William Binns is a nobody. He likes art and doesn’t like excitement. Even his girlfriend thought so
until he tried to kill her.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. It looks like killing his girl was the first bad job he’s done. He must have been in a hurry. He did take the time to smash her face in and send her car over a cliff but she’s a tough cookie for an artist type—”
“Nina!” Jack interrupted. He was too exhausted for her smartass comments. “I need more information. There’s no time for a long explanation, but I think this guy is going to try to set off an EMP device here, in Los Angeles, when the President’s plane flies over. That’s a little after one in the morning.”
“The girlfriend doesn’t know anything about that, and she’s in bad shape. Maybe we can get her healed for a bit and then—”
“To get range for the EMP, he has to get to somewhere up high. Do we have any records on him having a pilot’s license, records of owning an airplane—”
“Oh, I’ve got one thing,” Nina said. “William Binns leases an office on the top floor of the Twin Towers in Century City.”
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 P.M. AND 12 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
11:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack slammed the phone down and relayed the information to Kelly Sharpton as quickly as he could.
“You’ve got a problem,” Kelly said. “There’s no way Chappelle will authorize a strike team for you.”
“Yeah,” Bauer growled. “Why should tonight be any different than last night? I’m going to Century City. You sweat Farid.”
“I bet I know what he’s going to say,” Kelly said, tearing the bandages off his hands.
“Yeah, but I need to be sure.” He took a deep breath. It had been a long day and he’d already turned the world upside down once making the wrong call.
He didn’t want to do it twice. “What’s his game? Frank Newhouse is supposed to be undercover working for Justice to infiltrate the Greater Nation. Then we hear a story that he’s got Iranian contacts and he’s helping terrorists get into the country. Then we hear that the terrorists have been killed and that Frank Newhouse has an alias called William Binns. Who is this guy really working for? What does he really want?”
“Only one way to find out,” Kelly said.
Jack nodded. “I’ll go ask him right now. Call me if you get anything from Farid.”
11:10 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Kelly Sharpton walked into the holding cell with a smile on his face. Farid shifted around in his chair like a cat stuck in a small box, his narrow face twitching and his eyes glancing from Kelly to the observation mirror and back to Kelly.
“It’s about time someone talked to me,” Farid complained.
“We’ve had a busy day,” Kelly said with the air of someone with a burden on his shoulders. “And, let’s face it, you’re just not that important.”
Farid’s left eye twitched. “That’s right, I’m not important, so I don’t know anything, so let me go.”
Kelly spun his chair around so the back was facing Farid. He straddled the chair and crossed his arms over the back, then rested his chin on his forearms. “I didn’t say you didn’t know anything. I do think you know things. Let’s start with what you told Jack . . .”
For the next few minutes, Kelly made Farid repeat the information he’d relayed to Bauer: Farid was a finder who helped get jobs for immigrants, especially illegal ones. A man had called him and told him there were eight Iranian men who wanted into the country and who needed work. This man had put Farid in contact with the coyote who was bringing the men over. Farid got them hired by Babak Farrah, but Farrah got angry when the men didn’t show up to do any work for him. He blamed Farid and came after him.
“That’s all I know,” Farid ended. “Next thing, Farrah tries to kill me, and that blond guy comes in shooting everybody, which I appreciate, by the way, and now I’m locked in here.”
Kelly smiled, but shook his head. “No, that’s not all you know, Farid. For example, I’ll bet you know a little about Farrah. Tell me about him from when he lived in Iran.”
“Iran? What’s there to tell? Farrah was a little nobody, like all of us. Biggest thing about him was that he didn’t like to be religious, and he kept getting noticed by the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice, so he came to America. You can make a good living from vice here.”
“What about his work for Iranian intelligence?”
Kelly watched Farid’s reactio
n carefully. The reaction would tell him far more than the words. Farid’s face was blank for a moment, then it looked confused. In that instant, Kelly learned what he needed to know. If Farid had been pretending, he would have made some kind of reaction—surprised, confused, annoyed, anything—immediately. But his first reaction had been incomprehension—not confusion, but a complete failure to understand Kelly’s meaning. After that, the words were almost anticlimactic. “Farrah was never in the intelligence service. He was a little sergeant or something. He got out of the army as soon as he could.”
“Why did Farrah want to kill you?” Kelly asked.
“I told you, he was mad because I took his money for the eight workers, but they didn’t do any work for him. He was mad because they stole some guns and some money, he said, and he wanted to blame me.”
Kelly said nothing. Farid had nothing to give him here. That was the story Farrah had told him, and that’s all Farid knew. But Kelly had a theory of his own. From Jack’s story, he knew that Farrah had even tried, at the end, to take a dancer as hostage and trade her for Farid. Farrah had been determined to kill Farid at great risk to himself. That didn’t jibe with Farrah’s reputation as a cold and calculating businessman. Kelly’s theory was that someone had wanted Farid dead and told Farrah to do it.
“Tell me about this phone call you received, the one that told you about the eight men in the first place.”
Farid shrugged, brushing the question off as unimportant. “I don’t know, it was just a guy. I figured he had his reason for calling me, but whatever they were, I didn’t care. He had eight guys I could get into the country, and that was good enough for me.”
“Name?” Kelly asked.
Farid just laughed.
“His accent. He was Iranian?”
“Not Iranian. American. At least, that’s how he sounded over the phone.”
“Tell me about the coyote,” Kelly demanded.
Farid held up his hands. “Fuck, no. That guy works with MS-13. You know that gang? I want nothing to do with them.”
Kelly couldn’t blame Farid. MS-13 was the most violent street gang in the country. People who crossed them ended up chopped into little pieces and spread around several states. Lucky for Farid, they already knew who the coyote was, and they already had him.
Kelly stood up and walked out of the holding cell without saying a word. He closed the door on Farid as the man yelled after him. Kelly ran down to Jessi Bandison’s station. “Get Tony on the line. Get him to send over a picture of one or two of the bodies. I want faces.” She nodded without speaking—there was still tension between them—and he walked down to the next holding room.
They’d sent CTU agents out to get Julio Juarez several hours ago. He’d been arrested without incident— but only because LAPD had gone into his neighborhood in platoon strength—and first brought to Rampart Division. But he’d been quickly transferred over to CTU. Originally, they’d been planning nothing more than a cursory interview, just to keep their records clear. But suddenly Julio’s testimony had become very important.
It got off to a pleasant start.
“Who the fuck are you?” the little man said as Kelly entered.
“Good evening,” Kelly said. He sat down in this chair the same way he’d sat down with Farid.
“Fuck that,” Julio said. He sneered, accentuating the sagginess of his eye. “That bitch told me all he wanted was to ask a question and he’d get out of my face.” He was talking about Jack Bauer.
“Well, all I want is to ask a question and I’ll get out of your face, too,” Kelly said calmly. “I want to know about the man who put you in contact with Farid Koshbin.”
Julio sneered at him, squinting with his good eye so that the sunken one glared at him. “You want me to narc. You got to give me something, I give you something.”
“So you knew him.”
“Maybe. I tell you, you tell me I walk.”
Kelly rubbed his jaw with one burned hand, considering. The truth was, CTU hadn’t really planned to hold Julio. They’d planned to turn his name over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then release him. But Kelly held his pose for another moment to let Julio sweat. Julio stared at Kelly’s burned hand, his normally slope-faced expression mixed with disgust and admiration for the agent’s stoicism.
“We’ll see,” Kelly said at last. “Your story’s good, I’ll let you go.”
Now it was Julio’s turn to consider the offer, but he didn’t have many chips with which to bargain. “Look, homeboy, I don’t know the guy’s name. Best Ican tell youisthatheknewsomeofour people back East.” Kelly had read up on MS-13 and knew that ‘back East’ meant Maryland and Virginia, where the gang was strong. “He dropped the right names to me, I helped him out, you know what I’m saying?”
“You saw him?”
“My cell,” Julio said, pointing to his pocket where his mobile phone would have been if CTU hadn’t
taken it.
“What did he sound like? Iranian? Hispanic?”
“No, dude, he was a white boy like you.”
Kelly nodded, expecting to hear it. “Okay, Julio, you sit tight for a minute.”
Kelly left the room and went to Jessi’s desk. She nodded before he even got there. “Best Tony could do from where he’s at.” She pulled up two images on her screen—they were mug shots of two dead men, their faces still covered with dirt stains. The images were low resolution and grainy.
“Can’t we get anything clearer?” he asked.
Jessi shrugged. “He’s out in the middle of nowhere.”
She printed out copies and handed them to Kelly. He returned to Julio’s room.
“Recognize these?”
“Shit, my sister’s camera takes better pictures. They should buy you a new one.”
“If you paid your taxes, we could afford it. Do you recognize them?”
“Yeah, kinda. Looks like two of the ragheads that I brought up. They spent most of the time locked in the back of a truck, you know? But we let ’em out once in a while. Looks kinda like them.”
“Okay, Julio, you’ve been a real hero today. Thanks.”
Kelly turned to leave. As he did, Julio shouted, “Hey, so I get to go, right?”
“We’ll see.”
Walking down the hallway, Kelly thought of the things he had learned. Some of them seemed connected, and some of them seemed random, but all, he was sure, were important. The man who had orchestrated the entry of eight Iranians was white. He worked or spent time on the East Coast, where MS13 was strong. He had connections with MS-13. The Iranians he had brought over were now dead. The Iranian who was supposed to house them, Babak Farrah, had been angry when they left him, so clearly he wasn’t expecting them to go off to commit acts of terror. Militia leader Brett Marks claimed that Farrah was former Iranian intelligence, but according to Farid, he wasn’t. Farrah had wanted Farid dead.
And somehow, Kelly knew, this was all connected with the Attorney General’s efforts to blackmail Debrah Drexler. Kelly didn’t know how he knew, but his investigator’s instincts told him it was far from coincidence that Frank Newhouse’s name came up so prominently in both schemes. The connection, of course, was Newhouse and the Attorney General. Newhouse and the Attorney General ...Kelly repeated the phrase over and over, flipping it in his mind like a word jumble that you keep rearranging until it comes close to the solution.
This is what it came down to, always. There were the guns and the tactics and the unbelievable satellites that allowed you to read a note scribbled on the back of someone’s hand, but in the end, it always came down to this: someone sitting in a chair, trying (and sometimes failing) to put the pieces together in his head. Kelly forced himself to put away his anxiety and the pain in his hands and bend his thoughts to the various threads of evidence fluttering like a broken spider web in the breeze.
Newhouse had worked for the AG. If Newhouse did work in Maryland, he could have run into MS
13. There was o
ne connection. If Newhouse wanted an alias that no one—not even the CIA and FBI— would track, the Attorney General could arrange it. There was another connection. Frank was working for Justice...Frank was also working for the Iranians...No, Frank wasn’t working for the Iranians. Marks was wrong. Farrah was pissed that the Iranians hadn’t stayed and worked for him. The Iranians had been killed ...before or after the terrorist plan was put into effect? Kelly had to assume they were killed prior to the event, because the event hadn’t happened yet. Why bring them into the country and then kill them? Had there been an argument? No. They were killed by the driver of the Ready-Rooter truck. The truck had planned to leave Cal Tech without being noticed. The murders of the Iranians had to be part of that plan. So again, the question: why go to the trouble of sneaking them into the country and then killing them?
Kelly couldn’t find a way to reorganize the loose strands. He had to change strategies. Stop thinking about the terrorist threat and Frank Newhouse. Think of it a different way. Think of what was easy to find and what was difficult. The facts that were difficult to uncover were the ones the bad guys feared the most.
Kelly wished he had Jack on the phone, but he wanted to sort out his thoughts first. The facts that were easy to find were, as far as he knew, these: there were terrorists in Los Angeles (Marks had told them so); the terrorists were Iranians; the terrorists had stolen an EMP device from Cal Tech; the terrorists were going to set off a bomb over Kansas.
Kelly reviewed that list, and scratched off one thing. It had not been easy to discover that the terrorists had stolen an EMP device. He looked at his burned hands for a minute—they had learned that only because he had gotten to the condo in time and stopped the bomb. In fact, the bad guys were so determined to keep the EMP clues away from them that they almost blew up two entire floors of a building. And apparently Frank Newhouse had tried to kill his own girlfriend, the only person who’d given them a lead on his alias. If CTU hadn’t learned about the EMP theft, what would they know: terrorists in Los Angeles; terrorists were Iranians ...terrorists planning to set off EMP device over Kansas.