by John Whitman
Don walked away from the urgent calls and commands passing back and forth between the paramedics, and away from the ululations of his wife and neighbor. He went into Aaron’s room. There was a journal on Aaron’s desk. Don Biehn the police officer picked up the journal and began to read.
A few pages later, it was Don Biehn the father who knew that he was going to kill someone.
4. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 P.M. AND 10 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
9:00 P.M. PST Mid-Wilshire Area, Los Angeles
Jack pulled up in front of the bungalow on Edinburgh Avenue just north of Melrose. Like all the houses on the street, this one was well-tended. The front yard was small, but the porch light revealed a well-cut lawn and a flower-lined walkway that serpentined through the grass up to the porch. The door itself was a massive slab of well-varnished oak. Jack rapped on it with his knuckles.
Lights were already on inside, shining through the curtained windows to the left of the door. Jack saw one of the curtains draw back for a moment, then fall into place. Beyond the thick door something rattled, then the door opened a bit, and a tall, thin man stared out at him uncertainly.
“Yes?”
Jack held up his identification. “Mr. Ghulam Meraj Khalid? My name is Jack Bauer. I’m with the State Department. Can I have a word with you?”
Khalid managed to look frightened, annoyed, and accommodating all at once. He stepped back and pulled the door open wide. “Um, State Department, of course, come in, come in.”
Jack smiled and entered onto hardwood floors as well-maintained as the yard out front. There was not much in the way of furniture — a simple couch, a chair, a wooden dining table with a clean-lined credenza beside it. A flat-screen television hung on the wall across from the couch and the chair. It was on, broadcasting a rerun of CSI.
“Please, sit,” Khalid said, indicating the couch. “Would you like something to drink?”
“No, thanks,” Jack said, though he did sit down. He looked at Ghulam Meraj Khalid as the other man lowered himself into the chair. Khalid was lean, the kind of lean that was always genetic. His nose was hooked, and his hair was thinning. He reminded Jack vaguely of the Goon from an old Popeye cartoon. But he had a friendly smile and an animated expression.
“This is about Abu Mousa,” Khalid said.
“What makes you say that?” Jack asked.
Khalid laughed. “I hope it’s about that! What else have I done?”
“You tell me,” Jack said casually.
Khalid laughed again, nervously. “Nothing. It’s just you’re the third or fourth police officer or whatever to talk to me about this. At least this time I get to answer questions here. Or…?” Khalid looked toward the door as though other men might appear to escort him out.
“Here’s fine,” Jack said. His demeanor was casual, almost bored, but he was assessing the other man carefully. Khalid was appropriately nervous, but no more than one could expect from a man being questioned by the Federal government. “So first, your full name is Ghulam Meraj Khalid, yes?”
The man nodded. “You can call me Gary.”
“And how are you involved with Abu Mousa?”
Gary said, “I’m not. Involved with him, I mean. I know all three of those guys a little, but only through my job.”
“You work with them?” Jack asked.
Gary looked confused. “No. I’m a mailman. I
mean, mail carrier, that’s what they tell us to say these days. A U.S. postal worker. I figured you’d know that already.”
Jack did. He’d read Khalid’s file. But the simplest way to trip someone up was to play dumb and ask every question under the sun.
“They are on my route,” Gary continued. “I pretty much know them as much as I know anyone on my route.”
Jack smiled charmingly. “So we’ll find your fingerprints in everyone’s house?”
Khalid blushed. Jack wondered if he might find Khalid’s prints in the homes of a housewife or two. “Well, I don’t really know them that well. But they’re Muslims, too, you know? I pray five times a day, and sometimes they invited me in to pray in their house. It’s a little more convenient than the back of the truck.”
“How often did you pray with them?”
Khalid shrugged. “I couldn’t say. Once or twice a month, I guess. You know, if they’re home, if they see me, if they invite me in, I say yes. It didn’t happen all that much.”
“But they were home sometimes during the day. What do they do for a living?”
Gary the mailman shrugged. “I don’t know. I heard one of them, not Mousa, one of the other guys, talking about computers once, but mostly we just prayed, talked a little, then I went on my route.”
“You knew Mousa the best,” Jack said.
Gary tilted his chin. “I don’t… I guess. Why?”
“You just said, ‘not Mousa, one of the others.’ You sound familiar with him.”
Gary nodded. “I guess so. He was the most talkative. The friendliest.”
“How long have you been a mailman?”
“Seven years. I’ve been in the U.S. for almost twelve,” he added with a smile. “Like I said, I’ve had this conversation three or four times already. I figured that was your next question.”
“You’re like an expert,” Jack agreed. “What are your politics?”
Gary looked confused. “My politics? I… hmm, what do you mean? Are you asking me how I vote? Does that matter here?”
Jack reassured him. “No, not really. I don’t mean your politics here. I mean your politics back home. Pakistan.”
Gary calmed noticeably. “Oh, that. Yeah, I left because of politics. Look, I don’t know if this gets me into trouble or not, but I came here because I didn’t like what was happening in Pakistan back then. Benazir Bhutto got elected. They made her Prime Minister! I didn’t want to be in that country.”
“Was it Bhutto herself? Or the fact that she was a woman? You don’t like women?”
Gary grinned. He did have an infectious smile. “Oh, I like women well enough, you know? But there’s a place for everything. I’m not sure a woman’s place is in charge.”
Jack laughed. “So you came here? Women here have more freedom than—”
Gary interrupted. “No, yeah, that’s what they say here. I mean, that’s part of the propaganda, right? But no one here’s dumb enough to elect a woman.”
Jack’s mobile phone rang, and he saw Driscoll’s number appear on the screen. “Sorry,” he said, and answered.
“Bauer, it’s Harry,” Driscoll said. “This case is getting stranger all the time. I got a lead on the plastic explosives. Coming?”
“Yes,” Jack said. He stood up and shook Gary Khalid’s hand. “Thanks. We’ll be in touch.”
9:09 P.M. PST Brentwood
The sirens had faded. Carianne had gone in the ambulance as it rushed Aaron to the hospital. They were going to try to save him. Don had said he would follow behind in the car. But first, he had a quick chore to do.
Don Biehn, police officer and caretaker of his household, owned several guns but kept them secured in a gun safe. Only he knew the combination. If he’d opened it, he would have found inside a Heckler & Koch.40 caliber semi-automatic, a Kimber Custom II.45 caliber, and a Smith & Wesson.38 caliber six-shot revolver. All of them were fine weapons that had seen a lot of use in his practice shooting.
But Don didn’t go to that safe. Instead, he went to the garage and got his ladder. Dragging it over to the tall, do-it-yourself white cabinets he had built, he climbed the ladder so that he could reach the top of the shelves. There was dust everywhere, on and around old boxes they had never opened from their last move, laid thickly over two antique-looking blue lamps that Carianne insisted on keeping, and a box containing a fondue set they had received as a wedding gift nineteen years ago, but never opened.
Don pushed these useless artifacts aside until he found a small box with the words “Old Lecture Notes” scribbled in bla
ck marker. He pulled it out, sneezing at the dust, and rested it on the flat top of the ladder. The box top slid off easily enough. Don dug through the piles of bent and yellowed paper from his days at Cal State University Northridge. Beneath them lay a rolled-up piece of canvas — right where he’d stashed it seven or eight years earlier. Dan unrolled the canvas, and a Taurus 92F semiautomatic fell into his hand.
It had been his first year as a homicide detective. He and his partner had been working a bank robbery case involving a couple of career criminals. Don managed to arrest one of them in his home. He’d found several weapons, including the Taurus, and discovered that the Taurus was unregistered. Untraceable. Don had stashed it away, and no one had noticed. As a cop who had tracked suspects through their guns and watched prosecutors nail them with ballistics, Don figured that it might be useful to have a weapon that was completely unconnected to himself.
He had been right.
9:16 P.M. PST Pacific Coast Highway
At quarter after nine on a weeknight, the Interstate 10 Freeway worked the way it had been designed to work: it got you from the middle of Los Angeles to the beach in just a few minutes. A tunnel marked the end of the I–10. When you emerged on the far side, the world opened up onto a gigantic postcard of Los Angeles: the beach, the ocean, and the Pacific Coast Highway.
Jack was moving up the coast highway — also easily navigated this time of night — with his speakerphone on as Driscoll recited the nature of the lead they were going to investigate.
“…telling you, it’s the weirdest lead I’ve ever followed. But it’s very L.A.”
“So tell me,” Jack called out to the cell phone resting on the console of his SUV.
“You ever heard of Mark Gelson?”
Jack considered that. “I know Mark Gelson the actor. The Future Fighter guy.”
“That’s him. You don’t see him much anymore, but he used to be on the A-list back in the eighties. Anyway, the story is that he got pulled over on the way home to Malibu for drunk driving. He was raving, talking about how he was going to set things straight, blow some people to pieces, just like in his movies.”
“So what?” Jack said skeptically. “Some has-been actor gets sauced and—”
“He mentioned plastic explosives.”
Jack nodded at the cell phone. “Ah.”
“Yeah. It could be nothing.”
“No, it’s something,” Jack said wryly. “It’s an over-the-hill actor who misses being in the headlines, and we’re helping him. He have a movie coming out?”
“Thought of that,” Driscoll replied through the phone. “He’s got zilch. A new version of the complete set of Future Fighter movies came out on DVD, but that was two years ago. I don’t see this as a publicity stunt. If it’s anything, it’s just a drunk old guy trying to sound as tough as he used to look. But I’ll catch hell if we don’t check it out. You want to leave this one to me?”
Jack shrugged, mostly to himself. “I’m almost there anyway. See you in the driveway.” He hung up.
Mark Gelson. Jack had been a fan of the Future Fighter movies when they came out. He was the target market, of course. The Future Fighter lived in a post-apocalyptic world. He was a hero, but an amoral one willing to do whatever it took to defeat evil. He was a maverick who literally lived outside the law. Jack recalled that Gelson had made the headlines a few times for erratic and scandalous behavior. Back then the media weren’t quite as ruthless as they were these days, so the news didn’t stay in the papers long, but Gelson had been in his share of barroom fights and nightclub scuffles. Most people figured he was just trying to live up to the heroic, tough-guy image he portrayed on screen.
Jack reached the exclusive beach colony of Malibu and drove down along Malibu Colony Road until he reached the address for Mark Gelson’s beach house. Driscoll was waiting for him outside on the street, smoking a cigarette. Jack watched the cigarette tip glow momentarily brighter in the darkness beyond the light atop Gelson’s gate and stared at Driscoll quizzically.
“Took it back up,” the detective said unapologetically. “Otherwise I’d be perfect and no one could stand to be around me.” He dropped the cigarette and crushed it with his heel.
Gelson’s house was screened by a tall, ivy-grown wall with an iron gate. There was an intercom set next to the gate. Driscoll buzzed it and heard a female voice say in a Hispanic accent, “Yes, who is it?”
“Los Angeles Police Department, ma’am,” Harry Driscoll said. “Mr. Gelson is expecting us.”
The intercom buzzed irritably. The gate rattled and chugged, swinging back and away from them. Jack and Driscoll walked up the wide circular drive to a white, very modern house that looked like several large white cubes stacked irregularly together. Something about the way the giant cubes were stacked triggered a sense of recognition in Jack. It was nothing definitive, but he had the sense that the cubist architecture had meaning.
They could hear the ocean murmuring in the darkness beyond the house.
“Those residuals must be nice,” Driscoll said enviously.
The door opened as they approached, and a sturdy Latina nodded at them. She motioned for them to enter and guided them toward the living room. The walls of the hallway were white, like the exterior of the house, and entirely bare except for a single, ornate crucifix fixed at eye level. The view was stark. The living room matched. It was huge, and the entire west wall was glass. Light from the room spilled out onto the sand and the waves beyond. There was a painting over the couch that appeared as white as the wall on which it hung. But as Jack studied it for a moment, he began to see faint discolorations that pulled his vision out of focus, or rather into a new focus in which he saw the faint image of a man’s face painted white within white.
“That’s a Stretch.”
Jack turned, mildly surprised that he’d let someone enter a room without his knowledge. “Excuse me?”
“The painting. It’s a Stretch. Ronnie Stretch, the artist. You know his work?”
“I didn’t even know it was a painting at first,” Jack admitted. “But it’s interesting how things come into focus if you give them time.”
He turned fully to face Mark Gelson. Somehow, Jack always expected actors to be taller than they really were. Gelson was about five feet, seven inches. He looked younger than his fifty-plus years, and still carried the square jaw and bright blue eyes Jack remembered from the movies, even though there was more salt than pepper in his hair. He was wearing blue jeans and an American Eagle T-shirt, the kind of clothes you might see on twenty-somethings at Chia Venice.
Gelson approached and shook Jack’s hand firmly. “Detective Driscoll?”
Jack pointed over at Harry. “My name is Bauer. That’s Driscoll.”
“Detective Bauer, then,” Gelson said before turning to Harry. “Can I get you guys something to drink?”
“No, but thanks for seeing us so late in the evening,” the detective took over. “We have some questions about—”
“Last night.” Gelson sat down. He shook his head gravely. “Look, I’m not sure why detectives are involved, but I don’t make a habit of driving drunk. It was stupid. I know I’m going to take a hit in the papers tomorrow.”
“It’s not the drunk driving part we’re here about, Mr. Gelson,” Harry interrupted. “It’s about what you said. You talked about—” Harry flipped a page in his notepad. “You said, ‘I hope my guys blow your fat asses up with the rest of them.’ ”
Gelson blushed. “Doesn’t sound like me, does it. Jesus, I hope not, anyway. I’m sorry, I was drunk…”
“And then you said, ‘I’m so fucking glad I bought them the plastic explosives.’ ”
Mark Gelson froze like a DVD on pause. “What do you mean?
Harry Driscoll folded his notebook and said simply, “The question, Mr. Gelson, is what did you mean? When did you get the plastic explosives? Who are your friends?”
“I don’t…” The actor’s face had gone from red to white in a s
plit second. “I’m not… Do you mean explosives?”
Abu Mousa had been a better actor. Driscoll’s disdain showed clearly on his face as he said, “We can just as easily do this downtown. In fact, I’d rather do it down there. We’ve got video cameras, tape recorders, it’s more convenient; isn’t it, Jack?”
Bauer nodded.
“Yeah, so let’s go down there—” He reached for Gelson’s arm. The actor squirmed away and sank back into the couch.
“No, look, okay. Okay.” Some of Gelson’s good looks seemed to have faded away, the reverse action of the picture on the wall. “Look, can I tell you the truth?”
“That is the general idea,” Jack said.
Gelson put his head in his hands. He didn’t cry, but he was close to it. Jack was just about to step forward and shake him when the actor rubbed his face and looked up. “I’ve got some friends. They’re guys I hang out with sometimes. It’s stupid, maybe just something I do to relive the old days, you know? There was a time when I used this whole town like a cheap whore, and all anyone did was scream for more. I rode bikes with gangs, I did coke like it was vitamin C. I used to fire directors off the set. I—”
“The plastic explosives,” Jack demanded.
Gelson jumped a little. “Okay. Um, I didn’t really buy it. I just gave money. I was hanging out with some guys I knew from back then. They said they could buy some stuff to raise some real hell. I gave them the money.”
“Who were these guys?” Jack asked. “Were any of them from another country?”
Gelson looked bewildered. “Another…? No. They’re from here. They’re bikers.”
“Where were they buying the plastic explosives from?”
“They didn’t tell me. Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know they were serious. I don’t want anyone getting hurt. I swear. I just… I just wanted to raise a little hell, you know?”
“Nice job,” Jack grunted.
Gelson looked “Is this… will this get into the papers?”
Driscoll rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you just tell us where to find your biker friends.”