by John Whitman
A satellite van. There wasn’t a dish or cable company in the world that came when you wanted them. There certainly wasn’t one that made 6:30 A.M. repair calls. He started the engine.
“Where are we going?” Nazila asked.
“Around the back.”
Jack rolled his SUV gently, even sleepily, away from the mansion. As soon as it was far enough up the block, he gave it more gas and made a quick right turn. Most of these Beverly Hills houses had wide alleys separating them from their backyard neighbors. This allowed the city to collect the garbage without the bins or the garbage trucks being seen. Jack made another right into the alley and hurried down as quietly as possible, counting houses until he came to a high cinder-block wall that was his target.
He drew his gun. “Stay here,” he ordered, and slipped out of the car.
6:26 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Kelly Sharpton’s heart had known, from the moment Deb had asked, that he would help her. But his head struggled with the idea for a full twenty minutes.
What he was contemplating was criminal. It was worse than anything Jack Bauer had ever done. Jack, for all his brashness, was just a field operative, and in the field you made decisions on the fly based on experience and most recent data and then you fought like hell to win. Despite the flak he threw at Bauer, Sharp-ton had always admired him for coloring even close to the lines in his efforts to see the big picture.
But this…this was suicide.
His phone rang again. “Same caller, Kelly,” the operator said.
“What?” Kelly snapped when the line went live.
Debrah Drexler sounded like she was pacing. “I’m running out of time here, Kel. I have to speak to someone from the press in about half an hour. If I don’t, that news goes public and I’m ruined. I need help and I need it now.”
“Do you know what you’re asking me to do?” he hissed back at her, forcing his voice down.
“No,” she said, quite honestly. “I have no idea. But I do know that you’re the only one with access to information like this, and the only one who might be able to stop it.”
Kelly looked around. The walls of his office were glass. He could have darkened them with a switch, but it was still early and the gravediggers were the only ones on. They were down on the deck, manning their terminals. He continued. “You don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”
“Yes, I do—”
“It might be a live witness. It might be a hard copy of a photograph in a safe somewhere. I can’t touch that, period. I certainly can’t do it in thirty minutes.”
“I know what it is,” Debrah repeated. “I just got a copy of it on my e-mail. It’s a reminder to do what I’m told.”
Sharpton had the queasy feeling that his stomach was sinking and his heart was leaping at the same time. “You got an e-mail? Send it to me.”
He hung up.
The e-mail came through a few seconds later. Kelly went straight for the attachment and opened it, and there it was. A series of black-and-white photos of a man with a woman who was definitely Debrah Drexler, twenty years younger than today and probably ten younger than when Kelly had first met her. The shots were grainy but clear, and they told a simple story. Manand womanenter hotelroom. Manputs money on nightstand and undresses. Man needs to lose weight and shave his back. Woman takes money and undresses. Woman needs to eat more. Woman lays a pillow on the floor and drops to her knees.
Kelly recognized the style. These were screen grabs from gotcha footage from a sting operation. The man was clearly the target, not Deb, and he could guess why it had never surfaced before. The man, whoever he was, had cooperated, or become irrelevant, or the law had just forgotten about him, and the footage was filed away for years. The man, most likely, never rose to prominence, and the hooker was just the hooker. Without Debrah’s name attached to the file, there was nothing to find, even when digital databases replaced card files. The greatest danger to Debrah Drexler’s career had lain dormant in some catalog in a local archive for twenty years. Until now.
Kelly turned his attention to the e-mail itself. It was a forward, from Deb’s e-mail, naturally. She’d received it from “[email protected]”, which would be a blind, of course, but that didn’t worry him. He was the Federal government.
Kelly fired up a search program on his desktop and sent the e-mail, forward and all, into it. The search software was nicknamed “Sniffer” and it was the nephew of the Carnivore program, the FBI’s daunting powerhouse that could track and monitor any e-mail sent anywhere over the Internet. Sniffer wasn’t nearly so powerful, but it was a lot more focused.
The first thing Sniffer did was easy — it broke open the IP numbers, including the one for “oldfriend1604.” Now Sniffer really went to work, a digital bloodhound on an electronic trail. Kelly sent him back upstream to find where this particular collection of bytes had first come from. As the minutes ticked by, Sniffer sent him regular updates: a server in Los Angeles had relayed from a server in Arlington, Virginia, which had in turn relayed from a server in Washington, D.C. After chasing its tail in circles for a while inside the Beltway, Sniffer finally straightened out and pointed its nose at a computer terminal in the Attorney General’s office registered to “Bigsby, Shannon.” Kelly looked up that name in CTU’s (rather extensive) listing of government employees, and learned that Shannon Bigsby was the assistant to the Attorney General.
“Kim, Kim,” Kelly muttered, “what are you doing sharing dirty pictures?”
He heaved a sigh, but it was not relief. Using Sniffer was the easy part. Sniffer could trace, but it couldn’t hack into computers, any more than a bloodhound could both find a fugitive and put handcuffs on him. For that, Kelly needed help.
He punched an extension into his phone.
“Bandison,” came the voice.
“Jessi, can you come up here. I’ve got an exercise for you.”
6:33 A.M. PST Beverly Hills
Jack pulled himself up over the top of a wall for the second time that morning. This one couldn’t have been more different from the one at the Greater Nation compound. The inside of the wall was screened by twenty foot tall Italian cypress trees. Jack slid down between two of them, using them as a shield as he surveyed the backyard. To his right was a rectangular pool with a black bottom, and a cabana that probably doubled as a guest house, its windows dark. The left side of the yard was a wide expanse of grass sweeping gently upward to a marble patio and a row of glass doors leading into the three-story main house. He saw no movement in the house. If someone was watching him from a window, he was still and quiet.
Jack moved carefully behind the screen of cypress trees until he was even with the cabana, then bolted for it, staying low and moving in a straight line. He reached the cabana and pressed himself against its wall, which offered him cover from most of the windows of the house. He listened to the cabana wall. He couldn’t detect any sound or movement inside. He hoped it was empty. There was a space between the cabana and the side yard wall and he crawled there, ignoring the cobwebs and the beetles scurrying on the wall, as well as the skittering sound that could only be a rat. Even Beverly Hills had rats — maybe more than its fair share. He reached the far end of the cabana, and now there was nothing but open ground between him and the doors. He watched again, looking for any signs of movement. There was none. He bolted.
He reached the main house itself and melted into the wall. Carefully he peeked inside the nearest set of French doors, eight square panes of glass set in a white wooden framework. It was a den of some kind, and it was empty of people. He tested the door. Locked, which he expected. He hesitated, wondering what to do next. He could call CTU, but he wasn’t looking forward to convincing Ryan Chappelle or Kelly Sharpton that they needed to raid another Persian household because he thought Ramin Rafizadeh was alive. He could try to pick the lock, but that kind of work wasn’t his specialty and even if he could do it, it would take time. He could break the glass, but that would
make more noise than he could afford.
A sound from inside the house made his choice for him. It was a muffled scream, loud enough to sound urgent but not loud enough to carry very far. Jack turned sideways to the glass panes and jabbed his elbow sharply through the pane nearest the door handle. It shattered in what seemed to Jack to be a thousand screaming pieces. If someone was listening, he’d heard him. He hoped the screams upstairs covered his entry.
Careful to avoid the glass, Jack reached through the now-empty rectangle and opened the door. He wasn’t worried about an alarm. Either the bad guys had disabled it and the rest of his entry would be quiet, or the alarm would sound, bringing the police. Either option was fine by him.
No alarm. He slid the door open enough to slip inside, then closed it. He heard one or two angry voices somewhere above him, and another short scream. They were on the second floor. Jack kept his gun in front of him as he moved through the house, clearing each room that he passed. A hallway led out of the den and past three or four other rooms — maid’s room, laundry room, downstairs office, before opening up into the biggest entryway Jack had ever seen. The floor looked like a single enormous piece of green marble filled with white swirls and gold specks. A chandelier as big as a Lexus hung down from a ceiling fifty feet above him. A circling stairway rose up to the next floor. Jack leaned out of the hallway, trying to see upward. All clear, as far as he could tell. He made for the stairs as an angry word and a sob filled him with urgency.
The stairs were carpeted so he went up fast and quietly. He reached the second floor and another long hallway, this one probably bedrooms and bathrooms.
“Sit there!” A harsh voice and more sobs, coming from the end of the hall. Jack crept down the hallway pressed against the wall, his eyes and his gun trained on the farthest doorway. He took his eyes away only long enough to glance into each room — empty, as far as he could tell, although some of them contained hallways stretching deeper into the house and out of sight.
He reached the end of the hallway and heard two voices talking to each other.
“Get her fucking feet, she keeps kicking.”
“Kick her back!”
He heard a thud and a squeal. Jack melted off the wall, “slicing the pie” as he rounded the corner so he could take in the whole room at once. His muzzle fell instantly on two men dressed in blue overalls who were kneeling over an old woman in a gray robe. They had bound her hands behind her back and were in the process of binding her feet. There were three others in the room — a woman and two men. One of the men was younger, and the others were the same age. Jack guessed: grandmother, husband, wife, and Ramin Rafizadeh.
“Federal agent! Get the fuck away from her!” Jack yelled, stepping fully into the room.
The two men in blue coveralls jumped like startled cats. They whirled around, reaching for guns that they’d laid to the side. “Don’t!” Jack yelled, firing a round into the couch an inch from one man’s hand. The people in the house shrieked at the sound of gunfire. Both men turned ghostly pale and froze. Jack recognized one of them from the Greater Nation meetings.
“Get down on your knees.”
The two men obeyed. Jack saw the entire room now. It was a library. Every wall space, right up to the door he’d just entered, was lined with bookshelves.
“Where is Frank Newhouse?” he asked. He didn’t know why he asked that, when Ramin and Ibrahim Rafizadeh should have been his immediate targets, but he went with the question.
“Fuck you,” one of the militia men said.
“You can say that to the friends you make in prison,” Jack growled. “Maybe you can finally get fucked by Brett Marks, because that’s where he’s at right—”
He saw it too late. One of the Greater Nation soldiers looked at him, then his eyes flicked over Jack’s shoulders for the briefest instant. Jack spun around, but it was the wrong move. He caught just a glimpse of the third militia man pushing with his arms, just before the book case came crashing down on top of him. Something heavy and sharp slammed into his forehead, and the world went dark.
6:41 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jessi Bandison skip-stepped up to Kelly’s office. She didn’t know why that man turned her on. She was twenty-five and fine by almost anyone’s standards, and her taste ran toward dark men with a little bit of street and a lot of education. But she was different — a black girl raised first in Amsterdam by diplomat parents who then moved to the United States when she was in middle school. She had dated every type, from thugs to jocks to Oreos. She’d maybe played around with a white boy now and then in college, just for fun, but only because college was for experimenting. None of them gave her that tingle in her belly. And she’d never dated an older man. So why this one?
But there she was, reaching the top of the stairs to his office just slightly breathless, and not from the climb. He was sitting in his chair, back straight, shoulders thrust out to the sides like the corners of a triangle that tapered down to the small of his back. The man wore fitted shirts, which was good, because for a forty-something white man he had a fine figure. His hair had a little gray on the sides, but it didn’t show much because he kept it short. It was only his face that showed his age, and he wore it well, with those wrinkles near his eyes that bunched up when he laughed.
“What do you need?” she asked. She was informal at his request. She’d have preferred it if he wanted to maintain the command structure — it would have been easier to mask her desire — but Kelly Sharpton didn’t stand much on ceremony as long as the job got done.
“Sit down,” he said, removing himself from the seat and offering it to her.
She took his place and looked at the computer. The screen showed a log-in page — for the Department of Justice.
“Okay, what?” she asked again.
“We’ve got an assignment. We need to run a fire drill on the Justice Department.”
“Fire drill” was Kelly’s nickname for fake hacks done on friendly networks to test their security apparatus. “We need to see if we can crack the Justice Department database and crawl inside their files.”
“Really?” Jessi said, genuinely surprised. “Doesn’t Justice have their own anti-hacking team for that?”
“Someone over there’s worried they’re getting stale. They want fresh eyes on the problem. We got picked, and I picked you. See if you can get me in.”
Jessi put her hands in her lap. “Well, I can tell you off the bat that I can’t do it. The encryption on the DOJ system is too strong. You’d need to be past the firewall, and we can’t even do that.You remember when someone came close to hacking the DOD system a few years ago? Since then, it’s impossible to get past the first layer, and then of course all the other layers are—”
“I can get you past the outer wall,” Kelly said. “My terminal’s already logged in, just like I did earlier when I wanted you to sort the FBI logs. It’s the outer ring, and we’re supposed to go a lot deeper, but it’s a start.” He smelt that jasmine smell on her again.
Jessi still didn’t touch the keys. “Kelly, I’m off shift in about a half hour. Can’t you have someone on the next crew do it?”
“No, I need you,” he said, placing special emphasis on each word. She felt her heart skip a beat. “Besides, the shift won’t be a problem. I need you to crack it in—” he checked the terminal’s clock—“fifteen and a half minutes.”
“You’re joking—”
“Fifteen minutes, twenty seconds…”
“Okay.” Finally, she put her fingers on the keys.
Guilt pinched his heart. But only for lying to her when he knew she liked him. He wasn’t exposing her to any trouble. It was his order, his terminal, and his access code.
His phone rang. “Debbie Dee again,” the operator announced, sending the call through.
“I’m on it,” he said without a hello.
6:47 A.M. PST Senator Drexler’s Office, San Francisco
In the half hour since they�
��d last spoken, Debrah Drexler had driven from her apartment to her San Francisco office, located across from City Hall. The office reminded her of the old days, when politics were simpler and the results clearer. She’d chosen a third-story office, rather than something higher, because when she gave interviews from her home state, her small conference room provided a backdrop of downtown San Francisco, which felt like “home” to her.
A news crew was there already, and two more were on their way up the elevator. She hadn’t called them, of course. They’d received a tip—“someone on her staff” was all anyone could say — that Senator Drexler had an important announcement to make, something big enough to rouse remote cam operators and still sleepy morning news reporters from their beds. The Attorney General had laid it all out for her.
Debrah had locked herself in her office. “I’ve got media here. They’re expecting me to say something at the top of the hour.” Panic crept into her voice.
Kelly pulled the phone away from his ear. “How you doing, Jessi?”
“Interesting encryptions here,” she murmured, in her own world. “Are they watching from their end to see how I do it?”
“Sort of,” Kelly said, getting back on the phone. “We’re doing our best over here. I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get the job done.”
“Don’t be a cynic!” Jessi protested.
“Shit!” Debrah Drexler said in her best Bronx accent. “I’ve got to go do this, Kelly. I’ve got to. It’s one vote out of thousand votes that will help people.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Kelly said, forcing his tones into neutral for Jessi’s benefit. “This is an awfully important operation. Some things shouldn’t be compromised.”
“It’s my goddamned career! It’s my humiliation!” she said. He heard the anxiety in her voice. She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to herself now, talking herself into it. She’d told him about the nights, long ago, when she’d used that same tone to talk herself into selling her body.
