by John Whitman
11. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
4:00 A.M. PST Santa Clarita
“Who the fuck are you?” Jack said lazily.
“Deb!” she said indignantly. “I lived down ’round here back in ’94. Or maybe ’95. Something like that.” She blinked several times, and spoke in the overly enunciated speech of someone who is trying not to sound drunk. “I met him coupla times.”
“You mean you screwed him a couple times!” The fat biker laughed. So did everyone else, including Deb, who was clearly no delicate flower.
“You know Deb?” Dean asked. He was laughing, too, but Jack could feel the energy between them change. A wall had gone up between them.
Jack looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t know.
It’s like four o’clock in the morning. At this point I’m too shit-faced to know what they look like. And if I wasn’t shit-faced, I sure as hell wouldn’t choose this one.”
This elicited a roar of laughter from everyone except Deb, who was insistent. “No, no, I’m serious, Dean. I’m sure I met that fat slob before. This ain’t him.”
There were two directions: forward or backward. Jack wasn’t usually one for retreating. He strode forward and plopped himself down on the couch at a ninety-degree angle to Dean, and put his booted feet up on the old scratched coffee table. “Look, I got you the first batch of stuff. Then I hear from Peek that you want more. I brought it. You gonna let this split tail give me a bunch of crap?”
Dean was shrewd. He played the controversy very casually, but Jack, just as shrewd, knew that the biker leader was on his guard. “Nah, she can’t even remember what she looks like half the time,” he said. “Besides, you said you talked to Peek, right?”
Jack leaned back as though he didn’t care much as he corrected: “I didn’t talk to him. He left a message at the Killabrew.” That was how Dog did most of his business. And CTU had checked Smithies’s personal phone records. No calls that day or night from anyone that might have been connected to Peek the biker.
Before Dean could respond, Jack found Deb in his face, her skin leathered yellow, undoubtedly from years of smoking. “You’re way too good-looking. If I’d screwed you, I’d remember it.”
“If I did you, I’d do my best to forget it,” Jack answered. He put his hand on her face and shoved her backward. She fell sprawling on her backside, shrieked, and scrambled to her feet, coming at Jack like a harpy. Before Jack had moved, Dean was on her, catching her wrists in his big hands and shoving her aside.
“Give it a rest, Deb,” he said. “Hell, I did you last year and you hardly remember it.” To Jack, he said, “Thanks for bringing up the extra stuff. You want to help us use it?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah.”
4:09 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
Another door that Harry Driscoll did not want to open. This one, on Shoemacher Avenue, belonged to Father Sam Collins. But just as he had before, Harry knocked.
The door opened after a minute, and Father Collins, his eyes swollen from restless sleep, greeted him.
“Father Collins, Detective Driscoll. I hope I gave you enough time to—”
“Come in, come in, Detective,” Collins said with as much congeniality as four o’clock would allow. “Yes, thanks for calling ahead. I put on some coffee if you want it.”
Harry followed Collins’s words and gestures into the small, well-kept house. There was an intricately carved crucifix hanging in a place of prominence in the entryway, but otherwise the house gave no indication of belonging to a man of the cloth.
“What happened to your arm?” Harry asked immediately.
Collins touched his right hand gingerly to his left arm, which was bound up in a sling. “Oh, it’s been such a pain. Literally!” He laughed. “I was in an accident a while ago. My arm was really badly broken and I had to have surgery. I’m not sure how it’s gone, though. I have a checkup scheduled for next week, but it’s been hurting a lot.”
“What kind of accident?” Harry probed.
“Car accident. Coffee?” Harry accepted, and Collins poured two cups in the open kitchen, then brought them into the living room. “I barely remember it. I didn’t even wake up until after the surgery. I saw the X-rays, though. I have this huge plate in my arm.”
Harry nodded absently. “I’m sorry to have bothered you so early.”
Collins waved him off. Now that he was more awake, his face opened into a smile that Harry guessed was almost permanent. “It’s a wasted night anyway. My arm’s keeping me up, and I have a big conference today, and last night someone broke one of my back windows.”
Biehn, Harry thought. Biehn had said he was trying to break in when someone kidnapped him.
4:12 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
Collins had always been the weak point. The complication. Michael had known it from the beginning. But Yasin had insisted. He had wanted there to be three deliverymen — three, as an ironic joke for Yasin’s own amusement — and Yasin had wanted at least one of them to be ignorant of the package he was carrying. At first, Michael had argued against this last idea, and won. But after that idiot Ali had gotten himself blown up on an airplane, they had to replace him with someone, and Yasin had insisted on returning to his original idea of the unwitting messenger. They had gone to immense amounts of trouble to make that happen, and now, of course, that one unnecessary twist was about to become the snag that might unravel the whole plan.
Michael was parked outside Collins’s house again, just as he had been before, when Detective Biehn arrived. That last encounter had been sheer luck; this was foresight. Michael had bugged Collins’s phone weeks ago, so that he could monitor any calls the priest made to any doctors he might know. That surveillance had paid off when another detective had called, waking Collins and asking him if he could stop by for a few questions. Michael had driven like a bat out of hell through the foggy Los Angeles morning to arrive just behind the detective.
Yasin could go to hell, as far as Michael was concerned. The power Yasin had over them depended entirely on the keeping of a secret, and that secret was unraveling as steadily as their plan. Michael was going to have to eliminate Collins for everyone’s sake, and Yasin could go cry to Allah for all he cared.
4:14 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
“Father Collins,” Harry said, after spending several minutes asking simple questions designed to relax a suspect. “How well did you know Father Giggs?”
Collins sighed. “We were both priests at St. Monica’s, so I knew him pretty well, of course.”
“Were you both part of the youth program?”
Collins shifted ever so slightly. “Me? No, not officially. I helped out when I could. The program was popular, and Father Frank was sometimes overwhelmed.”
“Did you molest the children like he did?”
Silence engulfed the room like a tangible thing, a thick blanket of tension tangling them both. “Exexcuse me?” Collins said at last. He drank his coffee with a trembling hand.
“I said,” Harry repeated, staring directly into the priest’s eyes, “did you molest the children just like Father Frank did?”
Father Collins’s face flushed, then went very, very pale. His eyes could find no place to rest. They flitted like nervous birds from Driscoll to the coffee table, to the window, until finally they fell, exhausted, toward his cup. “I… no… Oh, Mary, mother of…” Something struck him and he looked up finally, his eyes filling with a fearful realization. “Oh my Lord. Is that why Giggs was killed?”
“Answer the question,” Harry demanded. His voice did not contain Biehn’s righteous indignation. It couldn’t, because he could not wrap his brain around the crime he was investigating. He recoiled from it. But his sense of justice would not let it be.
“I didn’t!” Collins said quietly but urgently. “I mean, I haven’t. Not in years.” He shuddered. “It was such a sin. I should never have; it was
Frank; almost always Frank.”
The cup fell from Collins’s hand, staining the couch and the rug with coffee. Collins put his head in his good hand and let out one long, strangled sob, his body convulsing.
4:17 A.M. PST Santa Clarita
One wouldn’t know it from looking at Dean Schrock, but he had a long memory. It stretched farther back than Altamont, farther back than the heyday of the Hell’s Angels. It stretched back to the days when his father lost his farmland in the Owens Valley, way north of Los Angeles. The Owens Valley farmers wanted nothing from Los Angeles. Most of them had never even been there. But Los Angeles wanted something from Owens Valley.
Water.
Eighty years earlier, Los Angeles had all but won the California Water Wars and stolen the water from the Owens River, draining the Owens Lake dry and turning a fertile inland valley into a desert. Farms were ravaged. Spirits crushed. Families torn apart.
The farmers, poor in political power but rich in defiance, had fought back as best they could. Owens Valley in the 1920s witnessed numerous acts of sabotage against the aqueducts built to drain their water for Los Angeles taps. In the late fifties and early sixties, Dean had grown up on the desiccated remains of the family farm, listening to his dad tell stories of his grandfather using a pick to punch holes in the pipes when he couldn’t get his hands on dynamite.
That was when his father wasn’t drunk and miserable, just miserable. Later, when the father drank too much to tolerate, and Dean got too old to take it, he beat up his old man and headed north on a stolen motorbike.
The beating he gave his father never satisfied him. It made him sorry for the old man. Dean always thought that, if he ever decided to raise some real hell, he’d do it to Los Angeles. And he’d do it for Owens Valley.
Which was why Jack found himself riding Smithies’s impounded Harley, hurtling toward Castaic Lake with Dean’s Hell’s Angels all around him. Castaic was a man-made lake, a reservoir that served as the end point of the California Aqueduct. Basically, it was an enormous storage tank for most of the water Los Angelenos drank.
And Dean was going to blow it up.
“Not just Castaic Dam,” Dean told him when they pulled over to get gas for some of the bikes. “Most of that water comes from Northern California. Stolen, too, I guess. No, my personal target is the pumping station at Sylmar. That’s where the Owens water comes from. But hell, these days the water that ruined Owens is barely a drop down in the city. So I want to hurt them more. I figure I’ll blow up both. That’s why I needed the extra shit.” He hefted the bag Jack had brought to him.
They kicked their bikes into gear and rode north on the steadily rising Interstate 5 for a few miles before arriving at Castaic Lake. Jack had never visited the area, so he could do nothing but follow as Dean took an off-ramp that curved away heading toward a vast dark area to the east of the interstate. The road led to small collection of buildings.
There was a gate, and floodlights, but the bikers didn’t seem bothered by them at all. One of the gang hopped off his bike and lifted a pair of bolt cutters off the back, walked boldly up to the gate, and snapped off the thick chain locking the gate closed. The sign on the gate read castaic dam — state water program reservoir — access restricted. The biker pushed open the gate and Dean’s gang rolled in.
Jack felt a fist close hard around his heart as he realized just how easily terrorists could wreak havoc on vital locations inside the United States.
4:32 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
It might have been the longest fifteen minutes of Harry Driscoll’s life. It was certainly the most horrific. For that time period, he had become Father Collins’s confessor, listening as the priest unburdened himself of many, many years of sins. And those sins were many: lust, gluttony, avarice, selfishness. But all his sins, in whatever form, were always, always visited upon children.
What horrified Driscoll most was the tender terms in which Collins spoke of the kids he had abused and sodomized. They were his lambs, his own flock, his tender charges. When Driscoll mentioned Aaron Biehn’s name, Collins’s face softened and his eyes drifted off nostalgically.
Harry resisted the urge to slap him.
“Oh God,” Collins cried softly as he finished describing his many acts, and those of Father Giggs. “God, forgive me for what I’ve done. I’ve been terrible.”
Harry stood up. His voice was hoarse. He’d spent a twenty-year career digging at the underbelly of the city, rooting out the bad things that grew there. He decided he’d never seen a more horrible or pathetic creature than this. “I don’t know if God forgives people like you,” he rasped. “I sure as hell don’t. And I hope the judge doesn’t, either. Get up.”
Collins seemed to know he was beaten. He stood meekly. Harry grabbed the priest’s good arm firmly and walked him out the door into the chilly morning air.
“Am I being arrested?” Collins said, as naïve as ever. Harry wondered if he was mentally deficient. “I… I have a presentation to give for the Pope.”
“You’re going to miss it,” the detective replied. He opened the car door and guided Driscoll into the backseat. Harry couldn’t handcuff the wrist on the priest’s bad arm, so he hooked one ring around Collins’s good right wrist and the other to his left ankle.
He closed the door and hurried around to driver’s side, jumped in, and drove off toward Parker Center.
He was too disturbed by the images in his head to see the car ease away from the curb behind him.
4:51 A.M. PST Castaic Dam
At least there was a night watchman, Jack thought ironically. Of course, he hadn’t done much except sputter and wheeze as Dean strode up to him, beat him senseless, and then tossed him into a storage shed.
Beyond the buildings they could see the enormous bulk of Castaic Dam, not much more than a giant earthworks thrown across a ravine. Below it, a shallow gorge ran down toward Santa Clarita and, below that, to the main suburbs of Los Angeles.
“That’s a whole lotta water behind there,” said one of the bikers. “That flood the city?”
“Nah,” said another. This was the tubby biker who’d put Jack down in the dirt earlier. “Too far to travel. It’ll get Santa Clarita real wet, prob’ly, and mess up a lot of shit in the San Fernando Valley.”
Dean nodded. “Yeah. I’m not trying to flood the city. I’m just taking away its water.”
Jack understood enough about Los Angeles history to know what that dam meant. Los Angeles was built mostly on desert, and relied on the massive California Aqueduct to bring in most of its drinking water from the north. Castaic was the storage tank for all that water. Wreck Castaic, and millions of acre-feet of water just drained into the dust.
“Let’s go,” Dean said.
It was the tubby biker, whose name was Barny, who seemed to know what he was doing. He directed several of the bikers as they broke out packets of plastic explosives — some of which, Jack guessed, were the plastic explosives Farrigian had sold to them instead of the Islamists — and began telling them how to lay it along strategic points of the dam. The dam itself was nothing like Jack expected. He’d visited large dams before, and they usually looked like giant medieval castles. Castaic, however, was little more than a dirt dike reinforced with rocks and other debris to prevent erosion. It was, however, tall at over four hundred feet, and there was a huge amount of water behind it.
“You gonna help, or what?” Barny challenged. Jack realized that he had hesitated while the others were hiking out along the foot of the dam.
“Yeah,” Jack replied. “I plan on helping a lot.”
12. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 A.M. AND 6 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
5:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
“You could go home, you know,” Christopher Henderson said.
“And miss all this action?” Nina Myers said, waving her arm across the empty conference room and the darkened main office beyond. “Actually, I don’t feel r
ight going to bed when there’s someone out there undercover.”
“Jack’ll be all right,” Henderson replied.
“He will?” Nina replied. “You know Chappelle screwed him over.” She looked around, not sure if the Division Director was still lurking around the office. “He’s out there with no backup, and if he goes under, Chappelle is going to chalk it up to the CIA instead of us.”
Henderson had to agree, but he also knew that Jack hadn’t been presented with much of a choice. “We have the same SWAT unit on call as we did before. It worked out when Jack was with Smithies.”
Nina threw him a disapproving look. “Smithies was alone. This time it’s a bunch of bikers. The response team isn’t trailing them; they’re a couple miles away. It’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Jack can take care of himself.” Henderson shrugged, and the two sat in silence for a moment. Nina sipped her coffee before changing subjects. “What do you think of that NTSB woman?”
Henderson grinned. “You jealous that you’re not the only queen bee at the moment? Get used to it when this place is really staffed.”
Nina gave him a one-fingered wave. “She bugged me earlier. Her thing about Farrigian. I didn’t like it.”
“What?” Henderson was only half listening. It had been a long time since he’d pulled an all-nighter, and he was barely surviving this one. Thank god for coffee.
“Well, Jack was right. What are the odds of different agencies stumbling over two different groups with two different supplies of plastic explosives.”
“Not all that likely, but we’re brand-new here. Who knows what we’re going to uncover.”
Nina held up her hand to stop him. “That’s right, we’re brand-new. And we sent a brand-new investigator who doesn’t do undercover. With no backup. Do we even have audio? Of course not. But we accepted her version of a story told by an arms dealer.”
“And it’s working out,” Henderson said. “Jack’s on to something.”
