24 Declassified: Trinity 2d-9

by John Whitman

  Michael rode shotgun in the Cardinal’s car, but his mind had leaped five miles and more than an hour ahead.

  Almost, he thought. Almost there.

  After so much work, only a short time to wait, and then the heresy of Vatican II would be eradicated.

  12:16 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Jamey Farrell reentered the conference room with a look of pure embarrassment on her face. “It was there all the time,” she said meekly. “If only I’d thought to look.”

  “What is it?” Jack said, although he thought he already knew.

  “Abdul Ali was arriving in Los Angeles to attend several meetings. The most important one was the Unity Conference. He was scheduled to meet with the Pope.”

  12:18 P.M. PST Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles

  Giancarlo swept the reception hall as he planned to do several times in the next hour or more prior to the arrival of the Holy Father. Every precaution had been taken, of course, but he did not feel right unless he had personally walked every inch of the area. In order to better mingle with the crowd of eighty or ninety clerics in the hall, he was dressed in the black robes of a priest, and, if necessary, he could speak eloquently on various theological topics. But at this moment he avoided all conversation, simply smiling and tipping his head to anyone who made eye contact with him.

  Another “priest”—actually one of his Swiss Guards in a similar disguise — approached him and said quietly in Italian, “There is a telephone call for you. It may be urgent.”

  Giancarlo bowed and turned, gliding out of the room. In the hallway outside, he opened a nondescript door that led to a separate room filled with video monitors. In this room, there was no attempt to hide security. Four men in body armor and wearing automatic weapons slung over their shoulders waited with professional patience, while three others watched the video screens intently.

  One of them handed a headset to Giancarlo. He slipped it over his head and said in English, “This is the Chief of Security, may I help you?”

  “This is Federal agent Jack Bauer,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “I’m concerned that there may be an attempt on the life of the Pope.”

  12:25 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Jack admired calm, and the man on the other end of the line sounded almost serene. “I see,” he said. “I am aware that my people have already vetted this call, but can you tell me what agency you’re with?”

  “Well,” Jack said, almost smiling at the complex answer to such a simple question, “I am in a special capacity with the State Department.”

  “You are CIA,” the man, Giancarlo, interpreted.

  “I’m currently working with a special counterterrorism unit on a domestic case. It’s led us to believe that there may be a plot for suicide bombers to assassinate the Pope.”

  Giancarlo allowed himself the faintest flicker of a smile. “Be assured, sir, there is no way for a suicide bomber to get anywhere near His Holiness.”

  In the most straightforward way that he could, Jack described the hunt for the C–4, the horrific discovery of the bomb planted inside Father Collins.

  As Jack ended his story, the security man seemed nonplussed. “That is startling,” he said without inflection, “but I don’t understand. You say that you have found the C–4, and that you have stopped this suicidal priest. Do you think the Holy Father’s life is still in danger?”

  Jack explained their theory about Abdul Ali. “We’re not sure if we’re right about Ali. And if we’re right, we’re not even sure if the priest was a replacement for Ali, or if they were both supposed to be there. But I thought you should know.”

  Giancarlo said, “Thank you. I will inform His Holiness, but I fear that without solid proof, he will not cancel this conference. He has committed himself to see it to the end.” Jack sighed. “Let’s just hope the end doesn’t come too soon.”

  12:30 P.M. PST Santa Monica Boulevard

  Gary Khalid’s hands still shook, but he was starting to feel better. He had one more hurdle to clear — an enormous hurdle, to be sure, but only one. He had to stop by his hiding place. He had decided to leave Los Angeles for good, but first he had to pick up his secret travel bag with cash and identification that would carry him through this crisis. He was smart enough not to hide the bag in his own home (but, he thought wryly, not smart enough to keep the travel bag with him at all times). The bag was, in fact, in the last place anyone would look for him.

  Maybe they aren’t looking for me yet, he thought. But even so, that was the best time to run. He would go to Venezuela, where he would be out of reach of the U.S. authorities. From Venezuela, he could make his way back to Pakistan, and from there to the Northern Provinces, or maybe to Afghanistan, where the Taliban were building a truly Muslim community.

  But first he had to get that bag.

  12:33 P.M. PST Beverly Hills, California

  Nina had volunteered to track down the doctor who’d done surgery on Father Collins. She felt the need to pursue this most morbid aspect of the case, having watched Diana Christie blow up. Nina was not a big fan of emotion, and she would have slapped anyone who suggested she needed a good cry, but she suspected there would be some sort of catharsis in confronting the actual procedure.

  David Silver was the surgeon of record who had repaired Collins’s broken arm. A few phone calls had located him at his Beverly Hills office, on Camden Drive just north of Wilshire. Inside the office, she leaned over the counter where the receptionist sat, and surreptitiously showed her identification. “It’s urgent, I’m afraid,” she said softly but firmly.

  “We’re already backed up by forty-five minutes,” the receptionist pleaded.

  “Let’s round it out to an hour,” Nina replied, and pushed through the door to the back offices. The receptionist, flustered, guided her to Dr. Silver’s office, where she sat. The doctor himself appeared a moment later. He was young, with dark brown hair. He was also about five foot two, and he was already forming a helicopter pad on the top. He had a habit of making a wet, sucking sound at the corners of his mouth every few breaths. A catch on paper, Nina thought, but in real life, he was catch and release.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, looking more than a little concerned.

  Nina introduced herself and then dove right in. “I am interested in a patient of yours from several weeks ago. Samuel Collins, a priest, who had a broken arm that you set.” Nina’s voice was casual and her posture relaxed, but her right hand never strayed far from the Glock 17 at her hip under her jacket.

  Dr. Silver chewed his lip. “A priest? Collins… that doesn’t ring a bell.” He pressed the intercom. Nina tensed. If there was going to be trouble, it would happen now. “Marianna, can you look up records for a Samuel Collins? Broken arm.”

  He looked up. “I usually remember all my patients. Certainly recent ones, and I think I’d remember a priest, but…”

  The buzzer sounded. “Dr. Silver, did you say Collins? I don’t have a Sam Collins anywhere. We don’t have a patient with that name.”

  “Thank you.” He looked at Nina. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to say.”

  Nina’s bullshit meter wasn’t going off. This guy didn’t feel like a con man, and there was nothing about his operation that raised red flags. But she wasn’t giving up yet. “Cedars-Sinai’s records indicate that Collins had surgery at that hospital almost four weeks ago, on Tuesday the twelfth. You are listed as the surgeon. Can you tell me where you were that day?”

  Silver looked shocked. “Am I in trouble?”

  “That depends on where you were.”

  Silver’s eyes went up and to the left, which told Nina he was accessing some visually remembered memory. “The twelfth? I could check my calendar and — oh! The twelfth. That’s easy. I was at my place in Jackson Hole. We were there all week.”

  Now it was Nina’s turn to look perplexed. “You can prove this? Are there witnesses?”

  Silver said, “Yeah. My wi
fe, my twin daughters, the caretaker who watches the place when we’re not around, Hank the fly fishing instructor…”

  “I get it,” Nina said, standing up. “Thanks for your time.”

  12:40 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Jack was still pacing back and forth, deciding that he had to go over to that Unity Conference himself, when Nina called back.

  “You can forget Dr. Silver. He wasn’t even in town when this operation is said to have happened. He has a ton of witnesses.”

  “We have to run them down, though,” Jack said into the phone.

  “Trust me,” she answered. “This is a nerdy Jewish doctor in Beverly Hills. He’s not blowing up anyone.”

  Jack put her on speakerphone and addressed Jamey and Christopher Henderson. “So now we’re saying someone doctored his records and basically faked an operation. A conspiracy can only go so wide before leaks start happening, and the only leak we’ve ever found here is back in Cairo, and then Ramin. Everyone else has stayed pretty quiet. Are we now saying there’s a doctor out there who has something against the Pope, did these operations, faked records, and has flown under our radar?”

  “This case is getting weirder,” Henderson said.

  No one spoke for a minute, until Harry Driscoll cleared his throat. He’d been there the whole time, but he’d faded into the background, whether out of fatigue or frustration, Jack didn’t know. “Who says it has to be a doctor? I mean, a real doctor? Collins wasn’t planning on staying alive, right? So if the operation wasn’t perfect, who cares?”

  “That doesn’t help much, though,” Nina said over the phone. “It widens our pool, it doesn’t narrow—”

  “Start with the suspects we have,” Driscoll suggested. “Could one of them have done it?” Jack shrugged. “It’s worth a try. Jamey, can you—” “Already doing it.” She had dragged a laptop into the conference room. Henderson frowned. “No wireless networks are allowed in here.”

  Jamey shrugged. “With all respect, I will absolutely follow that rule when you get more than two working computers in here. In the meantime… hmm.”

  “Something?” Jack asked.

  “Well. Yeah.” She looked up. “I just ran Nina’s original list of suspects against any information on medical school, medicine, etcetera. You know who graduated from medical school before moving here?”

  “Who?”

  “Gary Khalid.”

  12:48 P.M. PST Sweetzer Avenue, Los Angeles

  Gary Khalid drove up the street in a borrowed car, but he didn’t see anything unusual. If someone was watching the house, their countersurveillance skills were much better than his meager talents. It couldn’t be helped. He had to get inside his house. He cruised his neighborhood several more times, searching for he knew not what.

  Though he gave the appearance of an affable, simple man, Khalid was highly intelligent. At a certain point, he realized that he was being foolish. The way the Americans worked, if they had figured out his involvement in the affair, they would have ransacked his house by now. And if they were lying in ambush, they would have pounced on him long before now.

  Still, he pulled his car to the end of the block and waited. He had waited many long years to strike a blow against the Zionists and Crusaders. He could wait another hour.

  12:57 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Jack finished reviewing the records on Khalid’s education in Pakistan. Like so many clues, they had been right in front of him, but they’d meant nothing until he knew what to look for.

  Khalid had not only finished medical school in Islamabad, he had practiced as a surgeon and served as a doctor in the army.

  298

  “Last night this was in his favor,” Jack said to no one in particular. “Educated, capable. Didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist. Now it puts him right back in our sights.”

  He looked at Christopher Henderson. “Do you know what all this tells me?”

  Henderson shook his head.

  “It tells me we’re not ready for this,” Jack admitted. “It tells me these guys can come here and make us chase our own tails and do whatever they want. We’d better catch up.”

  Henderson noted with a slight smile that Jack now said we, but he said nothing.

  Jamey Farrell hung up a telephone. “LAPD sent a car to Khalid’s residence for us. No one’s home. They searched, didn’t find anything unusual. He may have already run out on us.”

  “I would if I were him,” Jack said. “He must have cut Diana Christie up pretty quickly and horribly to turn her into a bomb. He probably panicked.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not out of the country yet.”

  “Mexico’s only a couple hours away.”

  “But he wasn’t ready for it,” she pointed out. “I mean, how could he be? This thing with Diana Christie had to be last-minute, because you didn’t even know she’d come along until last night. So she went to that meeting and they ambushed her, did… whatever”—Jamey shuddered—“and then sent her off. So maybe after that, Khalid decides it’s time to get out of town.”

  “If I were him, I’d just get in the car and go,” Jack said. “But he’s not you. He’s a guy who’s been inter viewed at bunch of times and passed with flying colors. He probably feels like he’s safe.”

  Jack was impressed. “You should do fieldwork,” he said.

  “Nah, I’m not a big fan of getting shot at,” she said.

  Jack phoned Nina Myers, who was en route, and filled her in. “But he’s not home,” Jack said finally. “So if you have any ideas…”

  “I do,” Nina said. “Unless you need me at the conference, I’ll go get Khalid.”

  “Who said I’m going to the conference?” Jack replied.

  Nina just laughed, and hung up.

  20. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 P.M. AND 2 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  1:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  “You really think there’s still a threat?” Driscoll asked. “I mean, didn’t we stop the guy?”

  “The missing C–4,” Jack said by way of explanation. “And the fact this whole damned thing is never-ending, and I can’t seem to get my hands around it. It’s like these guys make a religion out of being devious.”

  “Yeah, instead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we got the bomber, the stooge, and the plastic explosives.”

  It was a bad pun, and Driscoll would have forgotten he’d even said it except that Jack suddenly stopped, his eyes growing distant. “Threes,” Jack said. His eyes focused again, and he looked at Driscoll in astonishment. “Ramin said that. That Yasin would do things in threes. There are going to be three attackers and we’ve only got one.”

  “How can you be sure?” the detective asked.

  “I’m not,” Jack said, suddenly animated. “But I bet if you check with Dr. Siegman, she’ll say that there was just about enough missing C–4 to create two more bombs like the one in Collins’s arm. Three bombers. And there’ve been three areas to investigate: the bikers, the Sweetzer Three”—saying the word itself was almost like the click of a puzzle piece—“and the Unity Conference.”

  “Don’t forget the child molestation thing.”

  Jack shivered — it was not forgettable. “But that wasn’t one of Yasin’s plans. In fact, that’s where it all started to go wrong for them,” he pointed out. “Think about it, Harry. Where would we be if Don Biehn hadn’t come along? I’d have stopped a two-bit biker thug, and maybe I’d have followed that lead to Castaic Dam. CTU would have kept the Sweetzer Three on ice, and figured they’d bagged all the C–4. We’d be sitting on our butts right now while Collins was getting ready to blow himself up. We need to get over there.”

  1:05 P.M. PST Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles

  Michael said the Ave Maria to himself in Latin, the only way that it should be said, as he followed Cardinal Mulrooney through the reception at a polite distance. He glanced at his watch. The Cardinal had to leave so
on of his own accord. If not, Michael would make him leave.

  In Michael’s mind, Mulrooney ought to be in line for the papacy. Not because he was an especially moral man, but because he, like Michael, could see the false path down which the church had traveled these past forty years. They were few and far between in the church. Michael had to admit that. But Jesus had only a few followers when he started to spread the word. The true word of God could not be contained. By the will of the Lord, Michael would strike a blow against the heretics. There were several among the cardinals who were secret leaders of the schismatic movement. Several of them stood a decent chance of becoming Pope after John Paul was blown to hell.

  It hadn’t been easy, that first meeting with Yasin. In another time and place, Michael would have killed the man and rejoiced at it. But Yasin had come to him with evidence of the church’s secret sin — the unwholesome appetites of some of its priests, who preyed on the children in their care. Michael knew of it, of course. He was in charge of security, and more than once he had acted as the intimidating presence in the background while a kindly priest convinced a child or a parent to keep quiet and allow the incident to drift into the past. The priests, meanwhile, were always moved to a new diocese to avoid any further unpleasantness.

  Somehow, Yasin had known of this. Maybe a guilty priest had confessed, or an abused child had found his way to him. Michael didn’t know, and never would. But Yasin had shown him several letters, and video footage that a priest had taken of one of the… incidents. The evidence was damning.

  Even so, Michael would never have let himself or the church be blackmailed, until he realized what Yasin was proposing: the assassination of Pope John Paul II. And, better yet, an assassination that Michael could blame on the Muslims, who were more than willing to take credit for it. For Michael, it was a wondrous triptych: the death of the heretical Pope; the awakening of Christians to the threat of Islam; and the ability to escape unsuspected. All he had to do was agree to work with Yasin.