by John Whitman
“But that’s not your real name,” the Cardinal inquired.
Now Michael turned his bronze face toward the priest. “No. You don’t want to know my real name, Your Eminence. All you need to know is that, for the moment, our goals are in alignment. I will stop this policeman’s vendetta because it’s a danger to my own plans, at least until tomorrow.”
“How can I be sure you’ll keep your promise after tomorrow?” Mulrooney fretted.
Michael looked at him disdainfully. “I am not interested in your filthy church secrets. Our deal is intact. Help us, and I will remain silent. Betray us, or get in our way, and the pittance this policeman knows will be a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of crimes that we expose.”
Mulrooney stiffened slightly. “Like you said, our paths are in alignment.”
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 A.M. AND 2 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
1:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack watched Harry Driscoll escort another man through the main doors of CTU. The bags under Harry’s eyes looked big enough to pack a lunch. Jack wondered how he looked himself. He wondered if there might be a moment or two to catch some sleep. But he stifled a yawn when he got a clear view of the man Driscoll escorted, walking with his hands cuffed behind his back and the detective’s arm firmly planted on his. He looked like someone had beaten him with a stick. That wasn’t Driscoll’s style, so Jack assumed it had happened prior to his arrest.
“What’s up, Harry?” Jack asked with more energy than he felt.
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“Conference room?” Driscoll replied.
Jack led them to the empty room, and Driscoll sat his prisoner down. Jack closed the door. “What’s the story?”
“Jack, this is Don Biehn. Detective Don Biehn, by the way. I’m arresting him for murder. But he says he’s got—”
“There are terrorists in Los Angeles,” the man, Biehn, reported. “No shit,” Jack said. “We already knew that. That’s why we set up these great offices.”
“I can tell you what one of them looks like,” Biehn said. “I can tell you his real name, and his alias. I can also tell you part of what their plan is.”
Jack’s confusion and annoyance fused into a laser-like focus. “Okay, tell.”
“Two things,” Biehn said. “First, amnesty. I killed a monster tonight, there’s plenty of evidence to convict me, but I want to go free. Second, you let me finish the job I started.”
“Forget it,” Driscoll said. “I told you in the car that was—”
“They’re monsters!” Biehn snapped.
“Then put them behind bars with all the other monsters!” Driscoll shot back.
Biehn looked at Jack. “My son was being molested by priests at our church for years. I never knew it. I even made him go to Sunday school some days. He would cry about it. I figured he was being a baby. I made him go!” Biehn shuddered.
Jack felt sorry for the man, but he knew he couldn’t help. Even he was willing to bend the rules only so far. “I’m not going to release a murderer. I’m sure as hell not going to let him loose to go kill more people.”
“Abdul Rahman Yasin.”
Jack felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. “What?”
“He’s a terrorist, right? I can tell you when he arrived in the city. I can tell you a lot more, but let’s start with that.” Biehn sat back in his chair, smiling out of his haggard, exhausted face.
“How the hell do you know that?” Jack was stunned.
“I’ll tell you that, too. After you let me go.”
“Let’s start with your proof,” Jack said. “When did he arrive?”
Biehn had overheard a conversation between Michael and Yasin just before Michael had begun to torture him. He had heard quite a few interesting details. “I don’t know what airline. But I know that he arrived at LAX four days ago, in the afternoon, I think. And that he’s leaving tomorrow.”
Jack really had no idea how this battered, broken cop with murderous intentions had gathered information on a terrorist suspect, but he knew he had to check it out. “Wait here,” he said.
He walked out of the conference room and through the main room, toward Christopher Henderson’s office. He entered without knocking to find Henderson sitting at his computer, though his eyes were closed. Jack rapped his knuckles on the desk.
“That’s impressive,” he said as Henderson started awake. “I haven’t learned to see through my eyelids yet.”
Henderson shuddered himself further awake. “Long friggin’ day. What’s up?”
“Is that Jamey Farrell around? I need someone to run down some intelligence.”
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“Try bay one. It’s one of the data banks down the hall past the conference room. She has a cot in there.”
“A cot?”
“She’s dedicated.”
Bauer hurried down the hall and into the same technical bay he’d visited with Nina Myers. There was indeed a cot there, and Jamey Farrell was asleep on it. She was a light sleeper and popped up as soon as Jack entered.
“What?” she demanded.
“I need some data analysis,” Jack said. “Did Henderson give you any instructions earlier about downloading feed from LAX for facial recognition?”
Jamey yawned. “Yup. For the last week. That’s a lot of data. If you don’t narrow it down, it’s gonna take—”
“Four days ago. Afternoon. Let’s do 1200 to 2100.”
Jamey hopped out of the cot, grumbling, and went over to the half-finished tech bay. “It’s all here. Let me get to the right area.” She fired up the monitor and punched in some time code. A series of squares appeared within the monitor like a checkerboard, each square representing a camera. In each square was a time code set at 12:00:00. “Starting facial recognition.” Jamey punched in a few more commands, and the video started running at high speed, the travelers hurrying through the frame like Keystone cops. For a brief instant, each face flashed as the facial recognition software captured it. Jack and Jamey watched for a while as the time code ran forward from 12:00 to 13:00, then 13:22, and then suddenly pinged.
“Oh, shit,” Jamey said. She clicked on the warning window that had appeared. A face in the security footage opened up in a new window, and the system summoned another face from its own data banks, an older picture. The older picture had a mustache whereas the security photo did not, and the hair was different, but the features were the same. Under the older photo appeared the name “Abdul Rahman Yasin” and in larger letters under both pictures appeared the word MATCH.
“Right,” Jack said. “Now please get me a list of all flights landing at gates—”
“—coming out of that area and passing that security camera. You want about thirty minutes prior?”
“You’re good,” Jack said. “This CTU might be in good hands after all.”
“Better damned believe it,” she muttered as he walked out.
Jack hurried back to the conference room, but his phone rang on the way. He stopped in the hall when he saw the number flashing on his screen.
“Bauer,” he said quickly. “Thanks for answering the page, Carlos.”
“Sure,” said a throaty, cigarette-induced voice on the line. “No reason I should be sleeping anyway. I mean, why should I still be sleeping when it’s already . . . oh, damn, look at that, I should be sleeping!”
“Can’t be helped,” Jack replied. “I need help only the NSA can give me at the moment. I need a wiretap run immediately.”
When Carlos was truly annoyed, as now, all the sarcasm left his voice. “Wiretap? Call the locals.”
“I need speed,” Jack explained briefly. “My window to gather information is hours, not days. I need it yesterday and I’ll deal with the FISA court.” The Federal Intelligence Services Act had been estab
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lished in the early seventies. It allowed int
elligence agencies broader surveillance powers under the supervision of a secret court. One of its primary benefits was the ability to set wiretaps and other invasive forms of surveillance prior to getting a court order.
Jack practically heard the espionage man’s shrug through the phone. “It’s your head, Jack, not mine. Gimme the info. I’m on it.”
Jack passed on Farrigian’s information, then hung up and hurried into the conference room, where Biehn and Driscoll sat in silence. Jack threw a you’re-notgoing-to-believe-this look at Harry. “Abdul Rahman Yasin was identified passing through LAX four days ago, in the afternoon.”
“Told you,” Biehn said. “We have a deal?” Driscoll said, “So what? So cooperate and you’ll get a reduced sentence.” Jack said, “What you know has to be worthwhile, or I’ll scrap any deal we make.”
Driscoll turned on Jack as though he’d just suggested they mug a cripple. “Jack, you’re not serious. No one’s making a deal with him—”
“I might be,” Jack replied firmly.
“He killed someone, Jack. Let the DA talk to him. He can cut a deal for a reduced charge, maybe even manslaughter, but—”
“I don’t have time!” Jack snapped. He knew he didn’t have to snap like that. He was getting tired, too. He steadied his voice. “I still don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ve got all kinds of circumstantial evidence that it’s going down tomorrow. You’re talking about booking him, interviewing him, getting the DA down to talk to him, paperwork, an attorney . . .” Jack was frustrating himself with the list, so he stopped. “The last time Yasin was in this country, he tried to blow up the World Trade Center. Whatever he’s doing tomorrow, we need to stop it.”
Driscoll was still staring at Jack, aghast. It was as though he was staring at a stranger. “To stop it you’re going to make a deal with a murderer.”
Now it was Jack’s turn to stare at Harry, but his look was pure disdain at his old friend’s naïveté. “You mean am I willing to get information on a known terrorist by releasing a guy who killed a child molester? Yes.”
It occurred to Driscoll that he had never really known Jack Bauer. Or perhaps the CIA had changed the former LAPD SWAT officer. Either way, it was clear that Jack Bauer was willing to leave closed the doors that Driscoll felt obligated to open, and was probably willing to open doors Harry wouldn’t touch. “That’s against the law,” he said quietly.
Jack pretended he hadn’t heard.
1:18 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Nina Myers had tried to go home and sleep. She had told herself there was nothing left to do that night; that Jack Bauer seemed to want to play with the little blond chippie from NTSB; that she would be a better investigator after a good night’s sleep.
But that hadn’t lasted much beyond midnight. As the clock swung around toward one a.m., she was out of bed and pacing her living room, trying to think of angles she hadn’t covered. When the clock struck one she was in her car, and fifteen minutes
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later she was walking into CTU. She saw the log and knew Bauer was there, but he looked busy and she was feeling competitive. He hadn’t responded to the direct approach at all. Maybe he’d warm up to a girl who could keep pace with him.
Despite what she’d said earlier, she thought that the Ali Abdul/Abdul Ali mix-up might actually produce some new data. She hopped on to one of the office’s working terminals—these were in short supply during the day, but this late at night, with most of the analysts gone, she had her pick of stations—and logged into the FAA’s records. Through the FAA, she was able to look at Alaska Airlines’ manifests. That’s when she started to learn something about Abdul Ali. According to the airline, he’d been traveling in Pakistan under the mixed- up name. His flight back to the United States had been canceled. For some reason, he had been eager to get home, so he’d jumped airlines to get back to the United States—a flight up to Moscow and then another one to Juneau, then down to Los Angeles. It had been a crazy and uncomfortable jaunt, but it had gotten him into Los Angeles sooner than any other combination of flights.
“So the first thing I know about you, Mr. Abdul Ali, is that you really, really wanted to get home,” she said to the humming computers.
She knew there was nothing to be learned by his contacts in Los Angeles. All had been dead ends. If he was part of some plot, he’d been chosen well. But Pakistan was a very interesting country for a cipher to visit. Nina switched from the FAA’s logs to her list of intelligence reports—a collection of reports from the Department of Defense, State Department, CIA, and NSA. Someday, she hoped, someone would come along and gather all these reports into one official album. It was ridiculously inefficient to have to cull through so many different reports. She did searches on “Pakistan” and “terrorism,” which did almost nothing to narrow the field. Limiting the reports to a window of one week prior to the Alaska flight—which would have been about five weeks prior—helped somewhat, and Nina began skimming the articles.
The list was still long, and Nina couldn’t do much more than spot check the more likely sources. This was ten minutes of boring, frustrating work at that late hour, but it was the kind of work that got the job done. Nina had gotten into fieldwork for the excitement, and there was plenty of that, but every moment in the field was backed up by hours of research. She remembered something Victor had told her: Before you pull the trigger, you must know where to aim the gun.
She was just about to give up when a string of words caught her eye. It was a report on a meeting in Peshawar, in northern Pakistan, close to the tribal regions that bordered Afghanistan. That area was a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, and was an unusual place for an American to visit. The meeting itself was a bit dubious: it had been billed as a Sunni-Shiite détente, which was itself unusual. Not malignant, but unusual. And why would an American with no apparent ties to Islamic fundamentalism be in Peshawar, Pakistan, at the same time as an Islamic conference?
Whoever had done the reporting on the Peshawar conference had been thorough. The report included
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a complete list of registered attendees. Nina felt herself in the groove now, like a bloodhound latching on to the scent, nose to the ground. She knew his name would be there even before her eyes settled on “Abdul Ali.”
Nina could have gotten an analyst to help her, even woken one up if need be, but her own computer skills were nothing to sneeze at. In seconds she had the computer running a match between her list of “persons of interest” in Los Angeles and the guest list from Peshawar. Aside from Abdul Ali, there was one match: Sheik Abdul al-Hassan.
Nina sat back and stared at the name as it burned a mark into her screen and into her brain. This was interesting. Al-Hassan was already on her list. She had questioned him briefly. If he was a terrorist, he was so deep under cover, even he had forgotten who he was. According to a very thorough background check, al-Hassan was an avid promoter of Islamic causes, but an equally avid promoter of peace. The Imam al-Hassan had proven himself to be an outspoken critic of Western intrusion into the Middle East . . . but an even more outspoken critic of Islamists who used violence to achieve their ends. According to the report, the conference had been a small part of a global religious peace effort. Even if Peshawar was an unusual place for the conference, the meeting’s purpose fit with al-Hassan’s file. From what Nina could tell, Ryan Chappelle was more likely to attack the United States than Sheik Abdul al-Hassan. And yet the Imam hadn’t mentioned that trip during his interview. That bothered her. Bothered her enough, in fact, that she was going to go wake Mr. al-Hassan up.
1:31 A.M. PST West Hollywood, California
Jack had no intention of letting Don Biehn kill anyone. He didn’t care at all if Biehn never served a day in prison for killing a child molester, but Jack wasn’t an accomplice to murder. But letting Biehn confront his son’s molester in private, away from the public eye, was a small price to pay for information that might save hundreds of lives.
The explosion had injured more than one thousand people and killed six. But considering its potential, the plan had been a failure. Tower One’s foundations stood, and the heat from the explosion had burned the cyanide away.
None of this made Jack feel any better. Yasin and whoever he was working with now had had years to learn from their mistakes. It was the grandeur of their schemes that worried him. Had the WTC bombing been even a moderate success, thousands of people would have died. If that was the scale on which they still operated, Jack had to find out what
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they were planning and stop it. And he had only a few hours left in which to do it. Until Carlos and the NSA plucked any information out of Farrigian’s communications, Biehn was Jack’s best lead. He had to follow it, and Harry Driscoll’s righteous indignation be damned.
Father Dortmund’s bungalow was a holdout against the redevelopment of West Hollywood, a one-story cottage holding its ground against the six- and eight-story condominium complexes on either side. It was not unkempt, but it was plain—a square lawn with no flower bed, a small white porch front, and white paint. The porch light was the kind of tolerable but unimaginative light sold at big box hardware stores across the country. Jack had the distinct impression that Father Dortmund wanted his residence to be livable without investing too much time or affection, as though he might need to move at any moment.
Jack parked a few houses down and used a second pair of handcuffs to hobble Biehn’s feet. “I’m not in running condition,” the detective protested.
