by John Whitman
Kelly Sharpton put his feet up on his desk and rubbed his eyes. It had been one of those mornings. His original daily sheet hadn’t had much more than update meetings with three of his top field people, a video link with Homeland Security where all he had to do was listen, and a report on updating satellite link software that was supposed to improve their database searches by 5 %. Instead, one of his field agents had raided a militia compound without permission and arrested a media-savvy, ex-military political radical, a terrorist investigation that had been closed six months ago was suddenly reopened, and a dead Iranian man had returned to the land of the living.
In this state of mind, he wasn’t exactly surprised when the operator buzzed him. “Kelly, you have a Debrah Dee on the phone. She says it’s important.”
“Debrah Dee…I don’t know the name. Will you send the call over to—”
“She says you’ll know her from the Bay Area, but that she’s moved to Washington D.C. since then.”
“Washington — Dee? — oh, shit, put it through.” In the seconds between the operator’s click-off and the connection, he put it all together, and when the phone clicked in, he said, “There’s a reason to be discreet, I’m guessing.”
“Yes,” said the caller. Her voice was measured— and not with the usual toughness of a female politician practicing her craft. Something was scaring her and she was trying to control it. Kelly knew firsthand that very few things scared Debrah Drexler. “I’ve got a problem.”
“We should start a club,” Kelly said. He had leaned forward in his seat, but now that he knew it was Debbie, he eased back again and put his feet up.
“I tried calling your cell phone, but I couldn’t get through.”
“It’s off. New protocol they’re trying out. No cell use permitted inside CTU. You know this call will be logged, too?”
“That’s not a problem from this number. But I didn’t want your secretary hearing the name. I need help. Real help, and you’re the only person I could think of.”
Kelly felt his face flush like a schoolboy. All he could think was pathetic. Twelve years later, and still
the thought of being her knight in shining armor set his heart to beating. For a guy who’s supposed to be some top-notch field operative, you don’t learn much from the facts, Sharpton.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
She told him. When she reported her conversations with the Attorney General, and her encounter with the mystery man, her voice reacquired the crisp, direct tones of the Senator everyone knew from television. But as she concluded, the quaver returned. “I…I don’t know how anyone could have known that, Kel. It was so long ago. No one knew me back then. You were…you were the only one I ever told.”
Her words were part plea, part accusation. He could tell she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — believe he had betrayed her, but she was bewildered and desperate. She had to know, but couldn’t bring herself to ask. He would have done the same thing in her place.
“It wasn’t me, Deb. You know that. Besides, why would I tell the AG? You know how I feel about the NAP Act.”
She stifled a sob. “Yes, I know.”
Politics was all they could ever talk about anymore. This was ironic, of course, because it was politics that had driven a wedge between them a dozen years ago. She’d been the Mayor of San Francisco and he’d been head of the special response unit there. That made him the head of security and, ostensibly, her chief bodyguard. They’d danced around each other for several months. There was reason to hesitate — she was several years older than he was, for one thing; for another, a relationship, while technically permissible, was wonderful grist for the rumor mill. They’d finally taken the leap after a security briefing for a visit by the president-elect. She’d insisted on sitting in — even though the mayor had very little to say, and less to do, about the visits by the Federal government — and he’d enjoyed her biting style of questioning. In the general hubbub that inevitably follows one of those briefings, he’d managed to slide her a quick invitation to dinner. They’d each expected to be disappointed. How interesting could a law enforcement man be? How pleasant could a feminist politician be? And yet they’d each found a diamond in the rough and become fascinated. He had done undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, just across the bay, before chucking it all for a military career “just to see if he could hack it.” She wasn’t so much a feminist as an individualist, whose hackles rose whenever she perceived a person — any person— squashed by the system. The two years they spent together in the city by the bay were good years for both of them.
Good things end, though. No moss gathered on Debrah Drexler’s career, and she used her Bay Area popularity to jump into the national game, winning a seat in the Senate on her first try. That had been the end. If a local mayor was allergic to gossip, for a U.S. senator it was deadly poison. Though Kelly grasped her reasons in an intellectual exercise, his heart remained baffled, and confusion led inevitably to pain. She threw sporadic communications his way, trying to maintain contact, but it was too hard, especially when the conversations turned to personal matters. So when they did speak, which was not often, it was only about politics.
That was how she knew that Kelly Sharpton opposed the NAP Act. He was one of the few in his agency who did — most agents in CTU, and most officers in other intelligence units, were grateful for every tool that helped them do their job. But the aggressiveness of this “New American Privacy” awakened in Kelly some of his old Berkeley sensibilities. He wasn’t sure he wanted to live in a country so willing to sacrifice what it loved to save itself. It was his job to invade people’s privacy, disrupt their lives, sift through their secrets, because sometimes those people were evil. But he had always appreciated the watchmen who watched him. But now the watchers had joined the party themselves praising and encouraging the very government operations that the Founding Fathers had sought to check.
“I don’t really know the Attorney General,” Kelly said. “Would he go through with it?”
Deb half-laughed, half-sobbed. “Oh, he’d do it just to hurt me. We aren’t the best of friends.”
“The confirmation hearings. I remember.”
“This is just icing. It would ruin me. ‘Champion of Women’s Rights A Former Prostitute,’ ” she read the imaginary headline. “That’s going to be fun.”
“What do you need from me?” Kelly asked.
“He’s got something, Kel. Some kind of proof, or he wouldn’t talk about making it public. Twenty year old rumors would be useless. He’s got something. I need you to find out what he’s got and destroy it.”
Kelly felt his chest tighten. A fist clutched his heart. “That’s…you say it pretty easy. Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I’m desperate,” she said.
Words like felony, destruction of evidence, and breaking and entering floated through Kelly’s mind. “We’re talking about the Attorney General here. And it’s the digital age. And he’s friggin’ three thousand miles away from me. I can’t just toss his apartment and look for the negatives.”
“There’s got to be something. I don’t know anyone else—”
“You’re on the Senate Intelligence Committee!” Kelly shot back. “You know everyone! You know the bosses of my bosses’ bosses!”
“But I can’t trust anyone. Not anyone in Washington. Trust me, anyone I ask will either expose me right away or they’ll use the information themselves and I’ll do this all over again in a year or two. No one there is stupid enough to—”
“But I am. ”
“You’re brave enough,” she said. She paused, as though the enormity of her request was finally dawning on her. “Kelly, I barely know what I’m asking. I don’t even know what you can do. I don’t even know what he has, exactly. All I do know is that I’ve got an hour to make a decision. And I can’t let that get out.”
He sat up, almost getting to his feet. “You don’t mean you’d change your. ” he trailed off, not able to
finish the sentence. “That’s not you. You don’t buckle under.”
He could feel her stress through the telephone line. This was killing her, to have someone force her hand. Every politician makes compromises, of course, but Debrah Drexler had slogged through twenty years of politics without sacrificing her principles. He’d known her for years, and even when they weren’t talking, he’d watch her career and the way she voted. She was Liberal with a capital L, an ACLU supporter, and an outspoken civil rights champion. She bucked trends in either direction when her bullshit meter sounded. Despite her liberal tendencies, she had championed welfare reform for years… only to vote against the bill at the last minute because it did not provide adequate child care provisions for mothers who found jobs. That had nearly destroyed her reputation among the moderates who chose her over the conservative alternatives. By the same token, she had nearly destroyed her image on the far left by voting to revise affirmative action because she believed it had become a quota system that looked at color alone, without considering economic status. She weathered every storm by declaring her intention to vote for what she felt was right, even if it meant losing her job.
“There’s a lot of work to be done in the Senate,” she replied. “I don’t know who would speak up for women. The abortion debate is still going on—”
“You can’t vote for that bill,” he stated firmly.
“Then help me destroy his evidence. I need you to do it.” She checked her watch. “And I need you to do it in less than an hour.”
4. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 A.M. AND 7 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
6:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
The phone clicked off and Kelly wished nostalgically for the moment when his biggest problem was Jack Bauer. She would do it. He found it hard to believe, but he had heard the fear in her voice. She would sacrifice her vote for the sake of her career, and although Kelly was not privy to politics inside the Beltway, he guessed that her vote would influence others.
Blackmail. God, he hated politicians. He settled into his chair, wondering what the hell he could do about it.
6:04 A.M. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
“I hope you don’t mind meeting early, but otherwise the day’s full,” Mitch Rasher said as he stepped out of the way and let the Attorney General into his hotel suite.
Quincy was wearing a two-piece suit and tie to Rasher’s wrinkled polo shirt and jeans. “No problem,” he said crisply, “I was up anyway. No thanks,” he added as Rasher motioned to the pot of fresh coffee on the table.
The suite was big, but not opulent. Rasher habitually rejected any show of status. The man who had been called “Barnes’s brain” lived like he had no body. Staffers in the West Wing called him “the Hermit” because he sometimes spent days closed up in his office, working on arcane political strategy, sacrificing sleep (which everyone admired) and personal hygiene (which everyone regretted). He would show up to strategy sessions with his shirttails half-tucked and his tie askew, three days’ worth of beard shading his face. He cleaned up for the cameras when he had to, but he preferred to avoid the limelight altogether. Rasher derived some perverse personal joy from being the man behind the curtain, and wanted no media dogs exposing him as he tugged at the strings of power.
Rasher bit off a chunk of bagel and flopped down on the couch.
“Two days, Mitch,” Quincy said, settling himself easily into a chair opposite. “That’s not much time, even for you guys.”
“It could be two hours,” Rasher replied through a mouthful of bagel. “We’ve done all the arm twisting we’re going to do, Jim. I told you that before Frisco. No more going out on a limb for this one. We’ve already taken too much heat on military spending and the tax thing.”
Quincy tugged at his shirt cuffs, fingering his cuff-links. “It doesn’t make sense, you know. You’ve made this Administration all about homeland security. You told me to go after this bill. Now you guys are benching yourselves in the fourth quarter when you should want to win the game more than anyone.”
Rasher liked sports metaphors as much as the next guy. “Yeah, but sometimes when the game is lost, you sit your starters down so they don’t get hurt.”
The Attorney General stared at Rasher, who just chomped his bagel and smiled back. Rasher’s balding head gleamed in the light of the corner lamp, giving him an angelic aura. But the grin beneath it was from another place. It was the juxtaposition of the halo and the leer that bent Quincy’s thoughts at just the right angle. “Oh shit,” he said.
Rasher’s grin widened. Quincy knew him for what he was, of course. He was Mephistopheles. He was Iago. He was Machiavelli. He was the engineer within the White House fortress who kept the hapless other side constantly in disarray. But Quincy hadn’t considered, until that moment, that Rasher’s formidable powers could be directed inward as well.
“You want the bill to get killed,” he said.
“Come on, Jim, I never said that.”
“No, you wouldn’t say it. But it’s true. You want it killed. But what if something actually happens? What if there is a terrorist attack and it turns out we could have prevented it with more powers of investigation. What then?”
Rasher examined his bagel and flicked away a sesame seed. “That’s the good part. We just blame the other side for denying us the powers we clearly needed.”
“But if it goes down right now, you’ll look like—” He was going to say, look like losers. But of course, they wouldn’t look like losers. He would look like a loser. He was the poster child for the NAP Act. He was its architect. Quincy shook his head. Like all good plans, it was too simple to be seen, and he’d fallen for it like a hayseed in a poker game.
Lucky for him, he had a few aces up his sleeve. He recovered himself. “It may not work out how you think. I think I’m going to get the bill passed.” He checked his watch. Almost twenty after. “In fact, I can almost guarantee it.”
Rasher shrugged. “Okay. Then when it passes we just take the country’s temperature. If they’re still against it, we veto it and look good. If they’re for it, then we sign it and look good.”
Quincy said, “Then you’ll look like tag-alongs. My suggestion would be to let the President get out ahead of the issue. He needs to see which way the parade is headed so that he can get in front and lead it.”
Rasher lost interest in his bagel. “Thanks for the political advice, but you can’t guarantee squat. You’re down fifty-two to forty-eight and that’s if Robinson and McPherson don’t break ranks and go to the other side. All our guys tell us that there aren’t any votes to turn around.”
“Your guys have been wrong before,” Quincy said.
“No,” Rasher replied coldly, “they haven’t.”
“Well, they are this time. I’m predicting a flood of last-minute switches. I think it’ll surprise you, and you’ll get caught flat-footed. I’ll get this thing through, and I’ll get the credit, and there’s no way you’ll consider a veto.”
Rasher yawned. “Anything else?”
“No.” Quincy stood up, willing himself to walk casually to the door. He opened and closed it without saying goodbye, and only in the hallway did he allow his face to collapse into a scowl of rage. That bastard. Quincy had known they were abandoning him on NAP, but he’d never considered that they were actually going to let him hang for it.
Well, he thought, he had some surprises for them. His first plan sounded like it would work. And if it didn’t, Plan B was already falling into place.
6:18 A.M. PST Beverly Hills, California
It had taken a few minutes for Nazila to throw on some clothes, then she and Jack had driven north from Pico into Beverly Hills. Beverly Drive took them up through the heart of the little enclave, and Jack followed Nazila’s directions into the actual “hills” themselves — a group of low rises and high trees that managed to hide several hundred immense mansions north of Sunset Boulevard. Soon enough, as the sky turne
d from dark to pale yellow, they pulled up in front of an enormous, flat-fronted monolith, one of dozens that had sprung up in the past few years. Locals called them “Persian palaces” because they were the preferred residences of wealthy Iranian immigrants.
Jack stared at the mansion, then looked at Nazila. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“He is not a terrorist,” she said for the thousandth time. “He has friends who sympathize with his troubles.”
“We searched for him for six months and he was living here.” Ramin Rafizadeh, fugitive from justice, lying in the lap of luxury.
She turned toward him in her seat. “You don’t understand, Jack. The people who live here came to the
U.S. to get away from politics. None of them are terrorists. A lot of them are no more Muslim than you are. They don’t feel any connection to the Taliban and they’ve never set foot in a madrassa. You show them a terrorist and the first thing they will do is turn the other way. The second thing they will do is call the police. But do you know what makes them more afraid? You. People like you who arrest their sons.”
Jack’s lip curled. “Don’t start with that politically correct bull. I’m not going after some grandmother from Boise when most of the danger is coming from the Middle East.”
“We know that!” Nazila said. “That’s why we put up with the looks on the airplanes, and the double-takes in restaurants, and the questions from the police. But your laws go too far, and you know it.”
Jack had stopped listening to her. Standard operating procedure had become second nature to him, and while they both talked he had been scanning the street. At first nothing looked out of place — wide lawns, quiet houses, a few cars and a satellite dish installation van parked on the street. The cars were mostly expensive, but there were a few low-end Toyotas and Kias. These would be housekeeping staff arriving to wake the household up for breakfast…
He stopped. It was so obvious he almost missed it. He’d been up all night and his circadian rhythms were screwed up.