by John Whitman
“Did you — have you met anyone else? Had trouble with any other groups?”
“Dad, stop asking about trouble. Everything is totally cool. I even got interviewed by a reporter. He’s going to put my name in the paper, which is cool. He was kind of a dweeb, though. He was trying to talk to me and he nearly stabbed me to death with his pen.”
Jack’s heart sank. “His pen—?”
“Well, he didn’t really stab me, but like he poked it at me. I have a red mark and everything.”
Jack had held out the faint hope that his mysterious captor was bluffing. That hope now withered away. “But you’re feeling okay?”
“Dad, yes! You’re totally channeling Mom.”
He couldn’t tell her. There was no reason. There was nothing he could do from here. Not yet. “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”
9:53 A.M. PST Four Seasons Hotel, Beverly Hills
Kasim had spent the last thirty minutes listening to Muhammad Abbas describe the plan to him. His head was swimming.
This was a whole different world for him — not just the physical world of expensive American hotels and silk suits, but also the world of intrigue. He had plotted and schemed back home, of course, but the plots had been straightforward and the schemes had led almost immediately to action. And always the action had been at his own hands. In his heart, he believed this hiring of a mercenary was distasteful and was frowned upon by Allah. But, by the same token, it was Allah who had led them to Nurmamet, who made all this possible, so maybe it was just Kasim himself who frowned upon it.
“As I said,” Abbas pontificated, “it is important for your group to continue with its normal activities. If your people would normally be at the protests, you must be there. Your absence will make the FBI and others suspicious.”
“It will also give us alibis,” Nurmamet agreed.
“Which you will need,” Abbas assured them. “After tonight, every law enforcement agency from every country in the G8 will swarm over this city like flies on a carcass.”
4. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 A.M. AND 11 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
10:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Nina was slowing the CTU car to a stop, but Jack had already jumped out and hit the ground, running through CTU’s doors with a flash of his badge. Henderson was waiting for him in the main room.
“Medical team?” Jack said.
“Conference room,” Henderson said, equally short.
Henderson, and Nina farther off but gaining, followed in Jack’s wake as he burst into the conference room, where three techs with an array of electronic devices were waiting. Jack was already pulling off his shirt and pointing at the bruise on the inner side of his left elbow. It looked as though someone had drawn his blood.
“I’ll explain everything in a minute,” he said to the other agents. To the techs, he said, “Here’s the deal. I think someone bugged me with a tracking device. I’ve got this bruise on this arm, so I’m putting two and two together and figuring that he inserted it there. Find it.”
He sat on the edge of the conference table as they went to work. Over their shoulders and bobbing heads, he addressed Henderson and Nina, delivering a machine-gun summary of the events of the last hour.
“It’s got to be al-Libbi,” Jack said. “The grab was professional. I was in and out in less than an hour, clean and simple.”
Henderson checked some notes he’d gathered while waiting for Jack. “There were no witnesses to the accident, but several residents called in reports on your car and the red pickup, which were left on the side of a residential street. LAPD is doing forensics on them, but I want to send our people down.”
“I guess we have to, but be careful,” Jack said. “This guy has someone on the inside.”
Nina raised an eyebrow. “Not inside CTU?”
“I don’t think inside CTU. He referred to us as ‘Counter Terrorism Unit’ instead of ‘Counter Terrorist Unit.’ That tells me he’s not too familiar. But he knew we were on to him, and he knew I was the agent investigating pretty damned quick after that, and knew enough about me to know I had a daughter and that she was there. That’s a hell of a lot of information to get in just a few minutes. It’s got to be someone inside G8 security.”
Chris pressed the intercom button on the conference room phone. “Jamey?”
“Here,” Jamey Farrell, senior programmer, replied over the speakerphone.
“I need a list of everyone with every agency who is assigned to security on the summit, and who works as a liaison with CTU.”
“Every agency?” Her voice sounded incredulous. “You realize we are talking about the G8, right? That means we’re talking about all the local agencies, plus State, CIA, DOD intelligence—”
“Everyone, please.”
Jack jumped in. “Start with everyone Tony’s come in contact with.”
“Go, Jamey. Thanks.” Chris terminated the line.
Jack had been ignoring the poking and prodding of the techs, but one of them now stepped into his line of sight. “Excuse me.”
“Did you get it out?” Jack asked.
“No. I mean, there’s nothing there,” said the tech.
Jack was surprised. “Really? This guy was positive about tracking me.”
Nina shrugged. “He was bluffing. Maybe he’s bluffing about Kim, too. We should bring her in and have her tested anyway.”
The tech prepped a small syringe. “All I can tell you is that there’s no transmitter embedded in your arm. Nothing on your clothes, either. It looks like they either drew blood from you or injected something into you. We’re taking a blood sample just to make sure there’s nothing nasty in your bloodstream.”
Nina laughed. “Jack’s got plenty of venom of his own.”
10:12 A.M. PST West Bureau, Los Angeles Police Department
Mercy Bennet had just reached her desk at LAPD’s West Bureau. Her desk was bare except for file folders and paperwork from a stack of new cases. She hadn’t had time yet to put up her picture of Tank, her chocolate Labrador, or her favorite quote. It said, “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems or as good as it sounds.” She’d written it herself soon after making detective. In the middle of her first case — the murder of a small-time dealer in Venice that she’d hoped would break open a whole drug ring — when the trail was getting cold, she’d scribbled it on a yellow sticky note. The maxim applied to every area of her life, so she’d had the little sticky note laminated and taped to her computer screen. Her eyes went to it every time she heard news, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
But it wasn’t there at the moment. She hadn’t bothered unpacking yet. West Bureau had been her first assignment as a detective, six years earlier. She’d managed to scratch and claw her way up the ladder, fighting past other up-andcomers reaching for the next rung and pushing against the weight of mid-career sloths who wouldn’t move aside for her, until she made it to the department’s prestigious Robbery Homicide Division. She’d spent two years there, working the meaty cases requiring the biggest budgets, until she’d attracted the attention of a deputy chief looking for sharp minds and go-getters in the post-9/11 era. The minute Homeland Security was established and the department needed a liaison to work with the Feds and the Counter Terrorist Unit, Mercy volunteered. She assumed the move would be an ascension, a step up from tracking cop killers and high-profile celebrity murders to hunting terrorists alongside secret agents.
But as with many departmental changes related to Homeland Security, this job had evolved — or, rather, devolved— into administrative and bureaucratic nonsense. Instead of participating in midnight raids on al-Qaeda safe houses, Mercy served as nursemaid to LAPD officials whining about jurisdiction while playing coy with Federal officials whose egos were bloated by their budgets. She didn’t like it, but for the first few months she did what any sane person does when confronted with intolerable government work: she gritted her teeth and bore it, knowing that eight more months of wo
rk would give her the Get Out of Jail Free card she needed to transfer to another department.
Unfortunately, all that had changed when she found herself on the receiving end of Ryan Chappelle’s very unpleasant personality. Chappelle was the Regional Director of CTU and a complete twit. Some of the other leaders there had oversized egos, too — George Mason and Chris Henderson among them — but at least they were competent. Chappelle was just a rule book dressed up in a suit, as far as she could tell, and she let him know it whenever his rules got in her way.
The only saving grace — although maybe it was a curse— to her time as CTU liaison was Jack Bauer. She had known from the first day she met him that they were kindred spirits. She also knew he was married, and so when they first started talking to each other, she studiously avoided anything flirtatious. That was her first clue, really: they both tried not to flirt and in doing so they got to know each other well. Jack was a straight line cutting through the maze of life. Though he was always on the move, Mercy’s image of him was that of a rock holding steady in the middle of a rushing stream. He had a sense of duty that belonged to another time and place, but he made it live and breathe here and now. She found herself spending more and more of her duty time with him.
Unfortunately, her own no-nonsense attitude had gotten her booted out of the job. This would have been okay with her, but Chappelle, toad fungus that he was, sensed that removal from his presence was more reward than punishment, and went after her career. Mercy found herself ejected from Robbery Homicide altogether; she landed back down to West Bureau, where her caseload had consisted of a ring of residential burglaries (high school kids, she was sure) and a missing persons report (a runaway wife, as far as she could tell).
To her surprise, Jack Bauer kept calling. They had coffee. They had dinner. They had…they had come close. But Mercy was smart enough to sense that Jack was keeping something to himself, and though he was inscrutable, she guessed that this “something” was his wife. Not his wife as the woman to whom he was married — that fact didn’t stop any man that she knew — but his wife as someone he actually loved. That stopped Mercy in her tracks. Jack had kindled in her the hope that she might actually meet someone who could match her spirit. She was willing to cross the line with him, to commit adultery, but only if he really loved her, really wanted her. If he still loved his wife, then Mercy would have none of it.
Those thoughts had consumed her for the past few weeks, far more than the purse snatchers and DVD thefts.
All that had changed when Mr. Gordon Gleed got himself murdered. As fate would have it, Bel Air fell under West Bureau’s jurisdiction, and thanks to a minor miracle, Mercy had been atop the rotation when the call came in. Even so, she wouldn’t have given the case much thought if the murderer hadn’t worked so hard to toss the house. The fake robbery theory had led her to investigate Gleed’s background, which was squeaky clean — well, at least as far as the law was concerned. Gleed’s ethics, on the other hand, were more than questionable. Seventeen interviewees, four bios written for four separate corporate boards of directors, and two articles in Business Week and Fortune magazine all indicated that Gleed was a ruthless businessman who, if he had ever had an empathetic bone in his body, had obviously pawned it for growth capital. Gleed had spent the last four years running an association of “rural natural resource providers”—which meant logging companies, oil companies, and ranchers — battling environmental regulations. A press release copublished by several environmental groups called Gleed’s Free Enterprise Alliance “the Gestapo of the U.S. industrial complex” and described Gleed himself as “a cowardly Faust, who has sold OUR souls to the devil instead of his own.”
Environmental groups, Mercy decided, were made up mostly of liberal arts majors who had taken too many writing workshops in college.
Mercy knew her basic premise was sound: radical environmentalists had ratcheted up both their rhetoric and their violence in the last few years. It was only a matter of time before they graduated to full-fledged terrorism, and Gleed would certainly be at the top of any tree-hugger’s list. The picture became clearer for the detective when she discovered that Gleed had launched a corollary campaign of his own. His Free Enterprise Alliance had funded several private investigations of the well-known environmental group Earth First! and its offspring. If the Sierra Club was Dr. Jekyll, Earth First! was Mr. Hyde. While other environmental groups chained themselves to trees to stop logging, Earth Firsters had (it was alleged) spiked trees to stop loggers. Tree spikes, apparently, chewed up the chainsaws the loggers used, and could conceivably cause serious damage.
Mercy had acquired a warrant to review the files created by the private investigators. The files indicated that Earth First! was too amorphous to pursue. Earth First! claimed to be a leaderless “nonorganization” with no official membership. In addition, this organization that didn’t exist had published several statements over the years. The first statement claimed that Earth First! neither condemned nor condoned tree spiking or other violent acts. The second encouraged Earth Firsters to not spike trees since other methods had proved more useful.
Apparently, the Gleed files suggested, this hadn’t sat well with some more radical environmentalists, who thought that Earth First! had lost its cojones. Earth First!’s new stance caused several spinoff organizations such as the Earth Liberation Front, the Rain Forest Network, and the ridiculously named Monkey Wrench Gang. Mercy wasn’t involved enough to know if these groups were just fronts for Earth First!’s activities or if they were legitimate entities unto themselves, but she did know that Gleed had gone after them with a passion. The Monkey Wrench Gang had claimed responsibility for at least three acts of arson not only in the United States, but in the Amazonian rain forest as well, firebombing trucks and trailers owned by logging companies that paid dues to Gleed’s Free Enterprise Alliance. Gleed had used political pressure to instigate arson investigations against a number of individuals in these loose organizations.
This, obviously, was where Mercy’s radar started to beep. It didn’t take a Robbery Homicide detective to establish a motive: pro-business advocate investigates violent environmental activists, who murder him in retaliation.
Her biggest obstacle wasn’t the linkage: it was the attitudes of other investigators. The word eco-terrorist sounded like a Doonesbury joke or a Rush Limbaugh tag. Every investigator with every agency, from the FBI to the LAPD, considered environmental activists to be vegetable-eating tree-huggers, which in their minds meant they were pacifists. The only group that seemed to understand clearly what these groups were capable of was the Free Enterprise Alliance. But Mercy’s problem was that the FEA was hardly impartial — they had plenty of reason to make the eco-terrorists look as evil as possible. Mercy had lucked out when Gleed’s investigators turned her on to an environmental activist who actually was a tree-hugging pacifist. He went by the name of Willow.
And that’s who Mercy decided to call.
“Hey,” Willow said in a casual, familiar voice.
“How’d you know who was calling?” Mercy asked. Her cell phone was ID restricted.
“I didn’t. I just always answer the phone that way.”
The first time Mercy had spoken with Willow, she thought she’d have to run him in on a narcotics charge. But she soon realized that he wasn’t doped up — he always talked and acted like he was stoned.
“Willow, I struck out again.”
“That sucks,” he said casually. “Those guys are a bunch of tight asses, aren’t they?”
“You have no idea.” The truth was, Mercy was pretty tight-assed herself, but for some reason Willow had taken a liking to her, so she played to his expectations as much as possible. “I can’t get anyone to believe that an eco-terrorist would plan something big for the G8 summit.”
Silence. Willow apparently didn’t understand that this was his cue to contribute to the conversation.
“What do you think they might be planning, Will? I need somethin
g to go on.”
“Man, I don’t know,” said the informant. “I told you I never liked their vibe. I stopped hanging with them a long time ago. I just heard from a friend that they were getting all postal and working themselves up, and that they were talking like the G8 was going to be jacked up.”
This was about as far as Mercy had gotten last time with Willow. If he’d been her sole indicator, she wouldn’t have given him a second thought. But since Gordon Gleed had been murdered for hearing the same information (at least that was her theory), she had to assume there was some truth behind it, if she could ever find the specifics behind Willow’s vaguery.
Mercy decided it was time to stop playing softball with him. “Willow, I need to know who told you, and I need to know now.”
“I told you, that’s not cool with me. I’ve taken a vow against violence but I’ve also taken a vow against ratting out my friends.”
“Well, your two vows are officially in conflict. If you don’t put me in touch with someone who knows what’s going on, then you’ll as good as help cause whatever violence happens. So tell me—”
“Man, you are starting to sound like—”
Mercy pulled a piece of paper out of her files, checking his address. “Tell you what, you’ll tell me in person instead. I’m going to be at your house in ten minutes.” She cut the connection. Mercy grabbed her purse and stood up, then, at the last minute, picked up her desk phone and rang the dispatcher. “Roll a unit to 16150 West Washington,” she said. “Occupant is a male Caucasian, twenty-six years old, five feet six, brown hair, approximately one hundred sixty pounds. He’s not to go anywhere until I arrive.”
10:17 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack buttoned his shirt back on as the techs left with a vial full of his blood.
