24 Declassified: Trinity 2d-9

by John Whitman

  “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.

  “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 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 rece
ntly 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.”

  “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 civilization 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?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This case just won’t die, will it?” she asked.

  “Medical records?”

  “He checked into Cedars-Sinai a month ago after a car wreck. I have all the records from that surgery online.”

  Jack thanked her and hung up. He was aware that Harry Driscoll and Dr. Siegman were staring at him, but he ignored them. He had to think, and his insights were coming few and far between. He wished he’d had at least a few minutes of sleep when he’d been home — not for his own comfort, but so that his brain would have had time to reset. Maybe it’d be working better now.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “This is what we have to go on. There is roughly ten pounds of plastic explosives out in the open. Some fraction of that is here, in Father Collins’s arm. The rest isn’t enough to do any huge damage to any buildings or important structures, so we can rule out that sort of terrorist attack.

  “Father Collins apparently had no motive to murder anyone, and was working toward becoming the next Mother Teresa. But we know that’s not true because he stuck a bomb in his arm. I’m going back to the office to start working on this.”

  “Mr. Bauer?” Dr. Siegman said, holding up the tiny electronic device. “This might interest you. You should take it and have it double-checked, because I might be wrong about this thing.”

  “It’s not a receiver?”

  “Oh, it’s definitely a receiver. But unless I’m mistake, there’s also a little timer built into it. A kind of fail-safe, maybe.”

  “A timer.”

  “Set to go off at five-thirty today.”

  19. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 P.M. AND 1 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  12:00 P.M. PST Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles

  Rabbi Dan Bender had to admit that he was enjoying himself. It had been years since he’d attended a truly splendid party, and the reception that preceded the official start of the Unity Conference was nothing if not splendid. Clerics and holy men from a number of religions were in attendance — not just rabbis, imams, and Christian clergy, but also a few Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists. The Dalai Lama had been invited, but was unable to attend due to illness.

  Although he tried not to appear obvious about it, he searched the crowd for Father Collins. He didn’t like the man, but for reasons obvious to himself, Bender felt it very important to know the man’s whereabouts.

  He could not find Collins, which concerned him very much. But he did spot Abdul al-Hassan who, quite out of character, was standing by himself near a tall indoor plant in a large pot. Bender sidled over to him. “I’ve never known you to avoid a crowd, Abdul, at least not when you thought you could turn it into an audience.”

  Abdul turned on him sharply, and for the briefest of moments, Bender thought he saw real hatred in the Muslim’s eyes. But the emotion, whatever it was, vanished in a flicker. “Well, I suppose I am just trying to hold back,” he said quietly. “This is the Christians’ affair, after all. It would not be good to step on toes.”

  Bender laughed. “What, haven’t you read the brochure? This event is for all of us.”

  “It is a political stunt for the leader of the Crusaders to appear to be the leader of us all,” al-Hassan said simply.

  Bender hesitated. “Are you in an especially bad mood, Abdul?”

  Marwan hesitated. He knew his brother shared that view — he’d heard him speak against the paternalistic approach taken by the Christian Pope. Had he said something wrong? “No, why?”

  Bender shrugged. “There’s an edge in your voice. I hope everything is all right.” “Fine,” Marwan said, thinking of what was to come. “I am absolutely fine.”

  12:06 P.M. PST Mid-Wilshire Area, Los Angeles

  Go back to the beginning.

  Jack remembered hearing that somewhere, though he couldn’t recall where. The truth is that he had been picking up his investigative skills in a sort of on-the-job training program. His training with LAPD SWAT, and in Delta, and with the CIA, had much more to do with field operations than mystery solving. But someone somewhere had once told him that when the clues start slipping out of your mental grip, go back to the beginning.

  “What’s the earliest event?” he said aloud, alone in his car. Driscoll was trailing him. “If we count it, there’s the airline bombing that Diana Christie was working on. No,” he corrected, “there’s the timeline Farouk gave me. The purchase of C–4 out of Cairo and its shipment to the U.S. When was that?

  “Six weeks ago, he said,” Jack answered himself. “Then the airline accident or bombing, whichever it is. Four weeks ago. Yasin arrives in Los Angeles four days ago. I question Ramin yesterday, and the house blows up.”

  Jack was still reciting the timeline of events as he pulled his car up to CTU’s nondescript building and walked inside. He caught the attention of Nina Myers, Jamey Farrell, and Christopher Henderson and motioned them toward the conference room. They followed, and he began to repeat his timeline so far, this time writing it on a whiteboard in the almost-bare r
oom.

  Jamey Farrell shook her head. “You missed something. Nina arrested the Sweetzer Three. That was two days ago. One day before you went to Ramin’s house.” Jack nodded and crammed that onto the whiteboard above Ramin.

  “Well, that’s a thing to think about,” Christopher Henderson mused. “Yasin — assuming it’s Yasin we’re talking about here — didn’t care at all about the three Muslims we captured with a load of plastic explosives. But the minute you questioned Ramin, he blew the place up.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t get to them when they were arrested,” Nina suggested.

  Jack saw where he was headed. “Could be. But he was ready and waiting for Ramin. That bomb was planted long before we got there. Not these three, though. Why not?”

  “They’re too important to kill?” Henderson proposed.

  But Nina was headed in the other direction. “No. They weren’t important enough.” Her eyes met Jack’s, and both realized the other was thinking the same thing.

  “They don’t know anything,” Jack said first. “They were meant to live, so we would waste time on them. They were the first decoy, just in case we were on the trail of the C–4.”

  “So the airplane, then,” Nina wondered. “Where does that fit in? If Christie was right, then they blew it up. Why?”

  “Something about Ali, the guy in the seat,” Jack said. “You did a thorough background on him?” Nina crossed her heart. “Trust me. Nothing in his past. Squeaky clean.” “Like Collins,” Jack said. He paused, then said,

  “Forget his past. What was his future? Where was he going?”

  Jamey Farrell blushed. “I never looked for that. Give me a minute.” She hurried out of the room.

  12:15 P.M. PST En Route from St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles