by John Whitman
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 is 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 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, Christopher 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 year-old-boy but unfortunate on a fifty-year-old man with jowls.
“Chappelle, how are you?” Harding said.
“Confused,” Ryan said tersely. “I und
erstood 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 rooms 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 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.
The Harley made enough noise to wake the dead, so Jack didn’t even try stealth. He roared up the S-shaped road to the top of the rise and then idled the engine as he rolled to a stop a few yards from the front door. He climbed off the bike and slid the helmet off his now-sweaty head. He pulled the package out of a pack strapped to the seat and climbed the steps.
He reached the top step to find a shotgun in his face.
3:45 A.M. PST Brentwood
Amy Weiss dreamed that church bells were ringing, which was odd because she was in a grocery store, not a church. The church bells became cash registers that wouldn’t stop ringing up her yogurt, and then telephones ringing at the cashier’s stand, and then she was awake and it was just her telephone ringing shrilly at a ridiculous hour of the morning.
“Uh-huh,” she groaned, having fumbled for the phone.
“Amy, it’s Josh Segal.” She struggled to remember who that was. She dredged up a recollection that Josh Segal was the assistant metro editor, and often got stuck on the night desk. “I need you up and at ’em.”
“My dad said ‘up and at ’em,’ every morning for twelve years,” Amy said. “Don’t use that phrase, please.”
“Either way, you need to get up. You’re slated to have that interview with the Pope this morning, aren’t you?”
“Interview. Yes. In, oh, five hours or so. Trust me, it doesn’t take that long to do this hair.” She yawned again, wanting to be sleepy, but sleep was fading away. Her reporter’s instincts were tuned in to the excitement in Segal’s voice.
“Drag it out of bed, Weiss,” the assistant editor said. “There’s been some serious stuff you need to be up on when you meet with him.” Amy listened as the editor described, in as much detail as the police would allow, the violence that had taken place at St. Monica’s.
“Jesus, and they’re still holding the conference tomorrow, uh, today?” she said, now fully awake and pulling clothes out of her drawer.
“That’s what they’re telling us. The police haven’t given any motive for the murder of this Father Giggs. They’re not releasing the name of the intruder killed later that evening. We’ve been on the phone with a public relations person for the archdiocese, but we’re getting a hundred variations of ‘no comment.’ ”
“You think the Pope’s going to tell me anything more than what you’re getting from the archdiocese? I’m just doing a puff piece on the conference.”
“You just graduated to the crime beat. I figure our article on the attacks will be a hell of a lot more interesting with a quote from the Pope in it. So get up and—”
“—at ’em. Bite me,” Amy said genially, and hung up.
3:52 A.M. PST Santa Clarita
Jack had spent several minutes facedown in the dirt beside the porch with the shotgun pressed against the back of his neck. He had thought about taking the gun away from the bearded, beer-gutted biker, but this was no time to make trouble. He tolerated the biker’s boot in the small of his back while someone went in to clear things with Dean. Finally, he was let up. Jack looked at the biker, who was grinning out of the hole in his bushy brown-white beard, still lazily holding the shotgun in Jack’s general direction.
“You want to point that thing somewhere else,” Jack said, “before it accidentally gets shoved up your ass.”
“Ha!” the biker said. “You give that a try someday. Come on.”
He led Jack into the house. It stank of beer and farts and mildew that had been around much longer than the bikers. The living room was gloomy, lit by only a seventies-era table lamp and a small fluorescent in the kitchen. There were two couches and a tattered easy chair, the latter occupied by a big man with the kind of huge, uncut arms that indicated genetic size. The man, probably in his late forties or early fifties, still had a barrel chest pushing his T-shirt to the limit. CTU had been able to dig up only one mug shot, but that had been enough. Ja
ck recognized Dean Schrock.
“I heard you was a fat guy,” Dean said.
Jack shrugged. “Had to lose my gut. My cousin had a heart attack. My age, too.”
“So, what,” said the biker with the shotgun, “you eat bean sprouts and salads? Shit, we really doin’ business with this dipshit?”
“I’m the dipshit with the shit you need,” Jack said. “Besides, looks like every pound I lost was your gain, so shut the fuck up.”
The biker gave Jack a fuck-off look, but Dean laughed. “Anyway, I made calls when I got here. I knew who to expect.”
Jack shrugged, but inwardly, he knew what Dean meant. The bartender at the Killabrew had been Smithies’s middleman, so having her under the Federal thumb had made impersonating Dog easy, despite the difference in their appearance.
“You heard from Peek?” Dean asked.
“Peek,” Jack knew, was the nickname of the biker the Fresno police had picked up. From what he had confessed, his job had been to ride in early and meet with Farrigian.
“Nah,” Jack said. “He told me to meet up here.”
Dean and the fat biker exchanged glances, and Jack knew that Peek’s absence had put them on edge. “You bring what I need?” Dean asked.
Jack hefted the sack. “You wanted one more brick, I brought it.” “What the fuck?” said a female voice out of the shadows. Jack didn’t know who she was or what she meant, so he tossed the brick to Dean. A couple of the bikers flinched as the dormant explosive arced across the room, but Dean caught it casually and hefted it.
“What the fuck?” said the woman again, staggering into the lamplight. She was blond, in her late thirties, but with the used look of a much older woman. She blinked at Jack. “You’re not Dog!”