by John Whitman
Jack staggered to his feet just as shocked bystanders from the hotel lobby came out to help him. He pushed them aside and, soaking wet, lumbered toward the doors. The Swiss Guards would be evacuating the Pope. He had to make sure they knew what to watch for.
Jack reached the elevators, but the Swiss Guard stationed there was gone. He pulled out his cell phone, but it was dead. Either the water or the explosion or both had killed it. He needed to find Giancarlo, but he didn’t know their escape protocol. Would they barricade in, or exfil immediately?
As Jack stood there for a moment, dripping pinkish water onto the lobby tiles and trying to collect himself, Harry Driscoll appeared out of an opening elevator.
“Jack!” he yelled. “Are you — Jesus, I can’t believe it!”
“Where’d they go?” he asked.
“They’re evacuating everyone,” Harry said, guessing at Jack’s line of thought. “If there’s a third bomber, they won’t find him. They’re driving everyone away from the Pope. How did you live through that?”
It was only then that the reality of the last two minutes occurred to Jack. He’d just fallen two hundred feet into a pool and then been concussed by a man who exploded not ten feet away from him.
Jack’s knees weakened. His hands shook momentarily. He would have been excused, he thought, if he’d just passed out. But he didn’t. His knees firmed up. He willed his hands to stop shaking. There was work to be done.
“I need your phone.” He called CTU and got Christopher Henderson because Jamey was on the phone with someone from the NSA. “Christopher, get me in touch with Giancarlo, the head of the security team.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Christopher said. “Every line we have just lit up like a Christmas tree. No one over there is answering anything, I’ve got—”
Jack hung up on him. A car. They would move the Pope out of the hotel the moment they thought the ambush was over. Jack hurried to the parking lot with Driscoll dragging along in his wake.
2:07 P.M. PST Safe Room, Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles
“You are uninjured, Holy Father?” Giancarlo said.
John Paul felt dizzy, not from injury, but from the rush and chaos of the last few minutes. Sharp though he was in mind, he was an old man in body, and his frail heart was racing under his brittle chest. “I… I’m not injured. Was there… I heard an explosion.”
Giancarlo nodded. “There was an attempt on your life. We are secure for the moment, but we need to move you. Are you able to travel?”
“By the grace of God,” the Pope said. “And you, Giancarlo.”
And Jack Bauer, the Swiss Guard thought. He was a good man, to have sacrificed himself like that.
“Prepare to move,” Giancarlo said into his microphone. “Bring the cars around.”
2:10 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Nina Myers half dragged Gary Khalid into CTU, ignoring the shocked looks of the skeleton crew of analysts and computer techs, ignoring even Christopher Henderson’s astonished face.
She led Khalid, who limped and whimpered behind her, into an empty room down the hall and pushed him onto the bare floor.
“Now you and I are going to talk,” she said. “And believe me, the only way you’re leaving this room, ever, is if you tell me everything you know.”
2:11 P.M. PST Safe Room, Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles
Advance men told Giancarlo that the hallway was quiet, and the delivery doors were clear. He gave the signal, and the Pope’s retinue moved out of the safe room and straight to the service elevator.
2:13 P.M. PST Four Seasons Delivery Dock
Jack waited by the delivery dock, not knowing but guessing it to be the most logical point of exfiltration.
“You’re a friggin’ mess,” Harry Driscoll said.
“You want a prettier partner, take up ballroom dancing.” Harry’s cell phone rang. Jack handed it to Harry, who handed it right back. “Your people.”
“Jack,” Jamey said. “We got Khalid. Nina is questioning him now.”
“Good.”
“Also, I’ve got news for you. Your guy at the NSA works miracles. He’s got a possible for you.”
“Go,” Jack said. He thought he heard a car approaching.
“Daniel Bender, a rabbi. The records that exist for him are all on the up-and-up, nothing to indicate any sort of questionable activity. But you’d expect that or he wouldn’t have been invited.”
“So?” Tires squealed. To his right, the service elevator bell chimed.
“So, he doesn’t seem to exist prior to 1996. There is plenty of information on him after that, but nothing beforehand. Your guy Carlos noticed that.” There was a hint of professional jealousy in her voice.
“Well, it’s something,” Jack said, a little enthusiastically.
“There’s more. Your NSA guy tracked his communications. He sent an e-mail to his brother, a rabbi in Jerusalem. The e-mail was some kind of apology. I’m sending you a picture of Bender.”
The elevator doors opened. The phone bleeped, and Jack pressed the text message button. A picture of a jovial, round-faced man appeared.
“Okay, thanks.” Jack stood up and made himself as obvious as possible as he walked toward the crowd of black suits that emerged. Instantly, guns were pointed in his direction, and he was ordered to freeze in four or five languages.
“Giancarlo,” he said, searching the compact group.
“Dio mio,” Giancarlo said, stepping forward. “Bauer? That was very impressive.” He said something in Italian, waving the phalanx of security men, with the Pope somewhere in the middle, toward the three Ford Broncos that were pulling into the dock. “I want to thank you for—”
But he never finished. Jack looked over his shoulder at one of the men in the phalanx. He shoved past Giancarlo and dove at the man’s knees, taking him down heavily. “Go, go, go!” he shouted.
Giancarlo reacted instantly. The quick-moving phalanx doubled its pace. Some of them shoved the Pope into the middle car. They had all vanished in an instant, and the cars were peeling away.
Jack felt the man struggle; he was big, looking fat but feeling solid. Jack rolled, and came up on top of him. He straddled the man and punched him once in the face, but before he could strike him a second time, the man bucked his hips and grabbed at Jack’s hands, rolling him over and reversing their positions.
“Wait, wait!” the big man yelled.
Driscoll came up behind and clipped him with the butt of his handgun. The big man winced and glared at Driscoll, yelling, “Stop! I’m with you!”
Jack back-rolled away. His gun was gone, but he readied himself to lunge. It was Dan Bender; Jack recognized his face from the photo he’d just seen.
“I’m on your side!” Bender claimed. “Talk,” Jack demanded. “Keep your finger on the trigger, Harry.”
Bender wisely did not move, but he waited a moment to catch his breath. “You’re Jack Bauer, with the CIA. My name is Dan Bender. I am Mossad.”
“Bullshit,” Jack said.
“The truth,” Bender replied. “I am Mossad stationed here in the United States. I was assigned to observe the conference. We got wind that there might be some trouble. We weren’t sure that your services were prepared to handle it.”
“Well, we were,” Jack said. “At least, so far. How can I believe you?”
“Who do you think it was who put you on the trail of the C–4 in the first place?”
That was good enough for Jack. He still called in Bender’s name, and they waited while Henderson routed it through various channels, but Jack was already sure. His original tip on the C–4 had come from the Israelis. Having worked with them before, Jack knew they were talented enough and arrogant enough to want to follow the trail on their own.
After a few minutes and a return call, they let Bender rise to his feet. “To be honest, we weren’t sure you guys were aware enough to believe there’d be an attack on U.S. soil,” Bender said. “We figured the l
ead on the explosives would get lost in the bureaucracy.”
“1993 was a wake-up call for us,” Jack said. “We know they’re out there. I followed the trail from Cairo back to Los Angeles. We had separate agencies working it. Did you know about the suicide bombers?”
“No idea,” Bender admitted. “I’m about all the resources we have here at the moment. There’s a lot going on back home, from Gaza all the way to Baghdad.”
“This is so far over my pay grade,” Driscoll muttered.
“That was nice work,” Bender said. “I saw you go over the wall; that had to be the end of you. You ought to be Israeli.”
“Or a cat,” Driscoll added. “Can we find somewhere else to stand?”
“I don’t think they’re done,” Jack said to Bender. “I think there’s one more bomber.” He explained his theory of the three attackers.
“We should get over to St. Monica’s,” Bender said. “Those Swiss Guards are good, but they don’t get enough practice. They should have carved me out of their group much earlier than they did. If something else is going down, they might not be ready for it. Hey,” he added. “How did you ID me?”
“You sent an e-mail,” Jack said. “Some kind of apology to your brother. We thought it was a goodbye note before your suicide.”
Bender laughed. “Funny how the little things trip you up. My brother’s a real rabbi. One of the most righteous men I know. I was apologizing for giving the rabbis a bad name.”
2:26 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Maybe, if the cameras had been installed, Nina would have gone a little lighter. As it happened, there were no security cameras in the room that would eventually become a holding cell, so she was free to do her worst on Gary Khalid. She had handcuffed his wrists and ankles, and she spent her time walking around his prone body. Every time she circled around to his feet, she walked on the ankle she’d broken a short time earlier.
Gary himself suffered two kinds of torment. One was the physical pain, which was growing worse by the moment. The other was psychological: to be under the control of a woman, of all things. It was ludicrous. Humiliating.
He had held out for several minutes already, but in the end, Khalid was no hero. He felt the bones grind in his ankles, and he knew that he was done.
“You performed the operation on Father Collins?”
“Yes.”
“And the guy who pretended to be Abdul al-Hassan.”
“Yes, I did.”
“How did you kill Diana Christie?”
Khalid explained quickly. He didn’t know Farrigian well. From what he understood, Farrigian had told the people Khalid worked for about her, and they’d set a trap. Khalid had been brought in to work on her. It had been brutal and quick. They’d captured her and anesthetized her, then planted the bomb in her arm.
“Was she told to give that false lead on purpose?”
Yes, Khalid sobbed, ashamed but unwilling to bear any more pain. His employers had set up a separate attack, hoping that if the authorities were following the C–4, they would travel in that direction. The NTSB agent had been used to validate that plot.
“How many people did you operate on aside from Christie?”
Khalid hesitated, but only until Nina rested her toe on his broken ankle. “Four. But there were only supposed to be three. One of them blew up accidentally.”
Abdul Ali. None of them understood how it happened. He was the first recipient, and he had been done early on so that his arm would have plenty of time to heal. He had come into Los Angeles for work and to prepare for the conference, but something had caused the receiver in his arm to trigger the detonator. The whole plane had gone down, and they had needed to find a replacement.
“Who was the replacement?”
“I don’t know. Really!” he pleaded when she raised her foot. “I didn’t know any of them. All I know is that one of them had no idea he was involved. They created credentials for me at Cedars and I went in to do the operation. He had no idea what had happened to him. The other two were part of the plan.”
“Tell me about them.”
“One of them was a Muslim. The other was American. He looked kind of familiar to me, but I don’t know where from.”
Nina crouched down beside him. “I need more than that, Khalid,” she said sweetly.
He looked up at her in fear and hatred. “I don’t know any more. I didn’t know them. I never knew their names.”
“Tell me who you worked for. Who hired you to do this?”
“It began with Yasin,” Khalid admitted. “But years ago. He got the idea to deliver a bomb this way, and he told me he wanted me to do it. I moved here, to the U.S., to be ready. And then one day I got the message to start the work.”
“Did Yasin come here to coordinate it?”
“I didn’t work with Yasin after that,” Khalid answered. “There was someone else. A non-Muslim.”
“What non-Muslim?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know. Yasin approved him. I didn’t ask any more than that.”
Nina tried to think of who was left. There were no non-Muslims on her original suspect sheet. She decided to call Bauer.
2:31 P.M. PST Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles
After flashing his badge, and with some additional help from Harry Driscoll, Jack had managed to scrounge a change of clothes from the hotel management. He was dry, but that was the best that could be said for him. Every muscle in his body was sore; every bone felt bruised. It occurred to him with great irony that he had recently told Christopher Henderson that he enjoyed overseas work with the CIA because that’s where the action was.
Driscoll’s phone rang again as he was dressing, and he listened to Nina debrief him on the Khalid interrogation. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jack had hoped that Khalid himself was the mastermind behind the whole plot, but that was not the case.
“We know there’s a third bomber out there, based on clues and the leftover C–4,” Jack said. “You can’t get any more information out of him?”
“I’ve already leaned on him,” she replied blandly. “He’ll go into shock soon.”
“Keep at it. We need to know who the final bomb is.”
“Agreed, but the Pope is safe, isn’t he? If he’s at St. Monica’s, surrounded by his people, he’s as safe as he can be.”
2:43 P.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles
Michael admired and hated Yasin with a passion that rivaled his love for the true church. Yasin had built backup after backup into his plan, and it was working now to perfection. Of course, it had been Michael himself who executed that plan, but the brainchild had been Yasin’s. Michael had always assumed that, once the Pope had been killed, he himself would find Yasin and kill him, to eliminate the threat of any future blackmail. Now he wondered quite honestly if he was up to the task.
A few moments later, the Pope’s retinue arrived at St. Monica’s. Michael had arrived seconds before, and he was already posting his own security people all around the cathedral. As the three black Broncos appeared, and the Pope, shielded by his men, was hustled into the great chapel, Michael shook hands with Giancarlo.
“That was quite a scare,” he said.
“More than a scare,” Giancarlo said. He turned to speak to several of his Swiss Guards, then he turned back. “We will be here for only an hour. I have radioed to the Vatican’s private airplane. It is being prepared now. We will head to the airport and get back to Rome.”
Michael made himself look perplexed. “Do you think there is more danger?”
“I don’t know,” Giancarlo admitted, “but as the Arabs say, ‘Trust God, but tether your camel.’ After what has happened here in the last twenty hours, the safest place for us is St. Peter’s. In the meantime, is the entire facility secured?”
“Yes,” Michael said.
2:50 P.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles
A new arrival entered through a small door in the north wa
ll of the cathedral grounds, a door that should have been locked and guarded by Michael’s men, but it was not. He closed the door quietly and stepped behind a small bird-of-paradise. As planned, a plastic bag lay there. He quickly slipped on a black suit similar to the kind worn by the plainclothes Swiss Guards. In just a few minutes he was ready.
This would be a good end, a final part to play.
22. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
3:00 P.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles
“I would like to be alone for a moment, Giancarlo,” John Paul said. “Except for Cardinal Mulrooney. Please ask him to come.”
Giancarlo could not fully honor that request. He refused to leave the Pontiff unguarded. But he ordered his men to guard all the doors to the cathedral, and they had left him alone at the altar. Despite the pain in his knees, John Paul knelt at the altar and put his head in his hands.
What, what, O Lord, was he to do with such hatred? That someone would blow himself up to stop him from holding a peace conference was, to him, practically inconceivable. He had gone out of his way to invite diverse opinions and represent all possible sides of the argument. And still it was not enough.
“Your Holiness?”
John Paul looked up to see Mulrooney, tall and lean and hawkish, standing over him. “Your Eminence. Please, sit with me.”
Mulrooney sat, and for a moment, John Paul knelt beside him in silence. Finally: “Giancarlo spoke with an American agent. Do you know the man actually carried the explosives inside his body?”
“Horrible,” Mulrooney whispered.
“It may surprise you to hear me say this, Allen, but I believe our differences to be petty. In the face of this sort of unspeakable hatred, the schism in the church is meaningless.”
Mulrooney shifted ever so slightly.
“It’s true,” John Paul said. “We must get past them if we are to survive. What unites us is greater than what divides us. A war is coming, and we must prevent it.”
