by John Whitman
Meanwhile, her quarry’s life as Frank Newhouse was full of information, but none of it was helpful.
“I can’t find anything on him that doesn’t check out,” Jessi had confessed a half hour earlier. “The CIA record is pretty much what you’d expect. We had the FBI investigate all his points of contact, but he’s not there.”
“Has the CIA run down any more information on this Babak Farrah? The one who was supposedly his Iranian contact?”
“Nothing more than we’ve got already.”
Nina tapped her knuckles on the steering wheel. She didn’t believe this; it wasn’t logical. Frank Newhouse might have fooled the Greater Nation idiots easily enough, but no one could make this big a play with the United States government without making at least some mistakes. There was a loose end somewhere, and Nina was determined to find it.
“What about the guy Jack brought in, Farid something. Has he been interrogated?”
At her desk at CTU, Jessi looked around. Every eyeball she sought was glued to a computer screen. “I don’t think so.”
“Get someone on it. He knew this Farrah, maybe he’s a lead.” Nina pulled up in front of an apartment building off of Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica. “I’m at my next stop, Jess, one of the possibles on that partial print. Call me if Farid gives up anything.”
Nina hurried out of the car, wanting to get this over with. She had already burned through the likely leads and was now working on the unlikely. Forensics had pulled a partial print off a white tub Newhouse (or whoever he was) had used to make a bomb. The problem with a smudged print was that, even if the subject was in the database, it might not match. Jamey Farrell had run a program that brought up possible matches, but there were more than two hundred names in Los Angeles alone. On a hunch, Nina had broken the list down into names on L.A.’s West Side. She had no real reason for doing this other than her gut. The Frank Newhouse who worked with the terrorists seemed to prefer downtown and East Los Angeles, since that Newhouse had worked with Farrah, Farid, and Julio Juarez, and had rented an apartment for the terrorists near USC. But the other Frank Newhouse owned a condo (under the name Pat Henry) on the West Side.
One of the names on her possibles list was for Matilda Swenson. Nina reviewed her rap sheet, such as it was. Matilda was a pretty blond, younger in the mug shot but she’d be thirty-six now. In fact, Nina noticed, today was Matilda’s birthday. She was an artist who’d been busted twice. The first time was in ’94 for marijuana possession. This was hardly an indictment, but it was enough to get her into the system. What intrigued Nina most, aside from her West Side address, was the second arrest. This was for disturbing the peace during the recent World Bank conference in Los Angeles. Apparently, Matilda didn’t much appreciate the centralization of power. In that one line, Nina heard the faint echoes of Brett Marks’s Greater Nation platform.
Nina climbed the steps to number 204 and knocked.
8:09 P.M. PST 49,500 Feet Above Kansas
“Approaching maximum altitude.” Lundquist heard the voice of Sam Amato, his wingman, in his ear. Sam’s voice was steady and professional. But behind it, Lundquist sensed the danger Sam was feeling.
“Roger.” He looked at his readouts. He was right under the target, then past it. He banked hard left and came around, lifting his nose up. He couldn’t see the balloon in the dark, but his radar could. It was more than fifty-one thousand feet and climbing.
With his nose still pointed up, Lundquist selected AIM-9N Sidewinder missiles and, just like in a video game, guided the small square pointer right over the target. “I can’t get good tone,” he said. “Switching to guns.”
“Forty-nine thousand, eight hundred feet,” Sam warned.
“Roger. Pull back to forty thousand, Sam. I got this one.”
“Bobby—”
“Don’t worry,” Lundquist said with a laugh, “you think I’m going to let anything go wrong right before my kid is born?”
Sam Amato didn’t laugh. He broke right and tipped his nose to the ground.
8:10 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
No one spoke. Jack watched the screen as the fast-moving blip representing the F-16 pulled right on top of the smaller, slower blip that represented disaster.
8:11 P.M. PST 50,400 Feet Above Kansas
Lundquist felt his engines lurch. They’d been chuffing at him for the last ten seconds. He ignored them. He came up underneath the balloon, and when the crosshairs of his 20mm Gatling guns fell across the blip on his screen, he opened fire.
8:12 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack Bauer held his breath as the two radar blips came together briefly, then broke apart. One of the contacts — the F-16—fell away. The other vanished.
“Target destroyed.”
The room erupted in cheers. Hands slapped Jack on the back and shook his arms. Kelly Sharpton, his hands still bandaged, threw his arms around Jack in a friendly hug.
8:12 P.M. PST 50,200 Feet Above Kansas
The F-16 bucked slightly like a startled horse. Then the engines cut out all together. Jets feed on air, which is why the ceiling for most fighter jets is fifty thousand feet. To go higher than that, you need a rocket.
Lundquist had been flying nose up. When the power cut out, the F-16 tipped backward, and he found himself upside down, his plane flat on its back as it fell back toward home. He didn’t panic, but he did feel annoyed. He was a captain in the United States Air Force and this was his airplane. He was not about to have it scratched up by something as stupid as a lack of oxygen.
Lundquist initiated his relight procedure. Every display in his cockpit twinkled like Christmas. Then he felt the familiar rumble under his feet and heard the deep-throated roar of the engine behind him, and he grinned.
The grin fell away from his face the next instant when something clanged through the guts of the F-16. Lundquist knew immediately that it was foreign object damage, and he thought ironically that the only foreign object up this high was the goddamned thing he’d been shooting at. His engine groaned at him. “Command, this is Mustang 1–9,” he said calmly. “I’ve got FOD to the engine.”
Alarms went off like klaxons all around him. “My compressor is — shit!” He knew what was coming next and he hit the eject button. Small explosive charges popped the canopy off his plane, and a half second later his seat was blown out of the cockpit. At the same time, the F-16 turned into a ball of fire that enveloped him. He blew into the careening canopy and slammed his head, helmet and all, into the Plexiglas.
As the world went dark around him, Bob Lundquist wondered if it was a boy or a girl.
8:15 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
The entire staff of CTU Los Angeles watched in silent horror as the F-16’s radar signature plummeted toward the ground.
“Eject, eject,” someone whispered.
The radar screen gave no sign that he ever ejected.
“Oh my god,” Jamey Farrell whispered. “That pilot…”
They listened over the intercom as a control tower in Kansas tried to raise the F-16. The words “Mustang 1–9… Mustang 1–9. ” until the words became a lament.
Jack allowed himself a moment of silence, a moment of remorse. Then he steeled himself. He had sent men to die, and had watched them die, before. He reminded himself why that man had died, what he had died for. Then he said hoarsely, “Tell the other pilot to confirm the target is down.”
Jamey Farrell looked at him as though he was a monster. “Jack, that pilot. ”
“Tell him!”
Someone relayed the query, which was relayed to the second F-16 pilot, Sam Amato, who confirmed.
Jack nodded in satisfaction. “Nice job everyone,” he said resolutely.
Then he turned away from everyone, down the hallway toward the holding cells. When he was alone in the dim passageway, he gritted his teeth to bite back tears.
8:20 P.M. PST Santa Monica
Nina walked around the building, then
walked back up the stairs to Matilda’s apartment. There was no back door. Nina tried to peek into the window. Through a crack in the drapes, she saw an easel and the back of a canvas. Matilda was a painter.
“Can I help you?”
Nina looked up toward a young man, maybe twenty, in a BareNaked Ladies T-shirt and jeans.
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m looking for Matilda Swenson. This is her apartment, right?”
“Yeah,” the kid said in that sardonic tone that only the young can master. “I’m sort of the manager. I guess she’s not here, which is why the door doesn’t open when you knock.”
Nina smirked. “Thing is, when the doors don’t open, I usually knock them down.” She showed him her badge. “Federal Agent Nina Myers. Can you open the door for me, Mr. Manager?”
He did. Nina walked into a sparse but elegant apartment with hardwood floors, Roman shades, and minimalist furniture. There was a two-seat red velvet couch, an ultra-thin flat-panel television mounted on a stand on the floor. There was no dining table, just two stools pushed up against a built-in bar in the kitchen. Almost all the space had been designed to allow room for paintings, and paintings were everywhere. There were small canvases and large ones; some were framed but most just leaned against walls near corners. Oddly, none of them hung on the walls, which had been painted seafoam green.
“She’s a painter,” said Mr. Manager, hanging out in the doorway behind her.
“How well do you know her?” Nina asked.
“Just sort of hello,” he said, waving to show what he meant. “She stays in a lot when she’s painting, I guess.”
Nina thumbed through a couple of paintings. Matilda favored a Picasso-esque style, but her shadings moved a little more toward pastel. The effect wasn’t very pleasing. Horses had become a theme for her. There were galloping horses, horses at rest, and horses with foals. But all the horses were done in that piecemeal, surreal style, with each part of the horses treated as its own unique shape, rather than as part of the whole creature.
“I’m not sure I like it,” Nina said.
Mr. Manager laughed. “I don’t think her boyfriend does, either.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, he burned one of the paintings. It was a painting of him, I think. So either he was sacrificing it to the gods, or. ” He didn’t seem to have enough energy to finish the sentence.
“He did? You saw him?”
“Yeah. He burned it in the alley. That’s where my apartment looks. I get the crappy one, but it’s free.”
“Can I see that painting?”
“Why’d you want to see it?” he said, looking at her like she was the idiot. “I told you, he burned it. It’s a bunch of ashes now.”
“Right. Have you seen Matilda this evening? Since he burned the painting?”
“Nope.”
Nina nodded. She opened the folder she was carrying and pulled out a picture of Frank Newhouse. “Any chance her boyfriend looks like this?”
8:41 P.M. PST Santa Monica
“Jessi, it’s Nina,” she said urgently. “I need your help right away.”
“Nina, I’m already searching as fast as I can. There’s nothing on Newhouse except his regular service record—”
“Forget that. I need you to get all the information you can on Matilda Swenson. What I want most is a tag on her cell phone. If it’s on, I want to know where she is right now.”
Before calling, Nina had dug through a small file drawer that held Matilda’s bills and found statements for her Verizon wireless account. Nina read off the account number. “Get linked up with them right away. And let’s just hope her phone is on.”
Nina paced back and forth, tapping her cell phone in her hand as she tried to think. Frank Newhouse had a second life, one that wasn’t on the grid, and Matilda was part of it. Find Matilda and you find Frank, or at least a little more about him.
Mr. Manager still stood in the doorway, leaning lazily against the doorjamb and watching her.
“Aren’t you going to ask what this is all about?”
The young man blinked at her with heavily lidded eyes. “You’re with the government right?”
“Yep.”
“Is it possible that what you’re looking for might kill me?”
“It’s possible.”
“Then I don’t want to know about it.”
Nina’s phone rang. “What have you got?”
Jessi spoke quickly. “We pinged Swenson’s cell phone. It’s on, but the signal is weak. It’s coming from somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains, about eight miles northwest of you, near a fire road off of Mulholland Drive.”
Nina knew the area. The entire Santa Monica Mountain Range was a wilderness corridor for Los Angeles. Although the mountaintops were only a mile or two from the city, they were wild and covered in brush. It was a nice place for a picnic, but how many people picnicked at eight o’clock on Wednesday evening? “Call L.A. Sheriff Mountain Rescue. We need to get up there right away.”
19. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 P.M. AND 10 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
9:00 P.M. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
Attorney General James Quincy returned to his hotel room. He wasn’t on the Secret Service’s short list for VIPs in case of a crisis, but he had been moved to a secure location by the rest of the security staff. Pulling at his tie, he sat down in a chair and turned on the television, flipping through the news stations. The lead story was, of course, the crisis itself, including details of the grounding of air traffic, the loss of the F-16, and theories (all wrong) about the nature of the threat itself. But slowly, over the course of the next few minutes, Quincy heard it start:
“…why weren’t these terrorists stopped at the border…”
“. in the country for months without being uncovered…”
“. current procedures inadequate to deal with the global threat…”
Quincy smiled. He couldn’t have said it better himself.
9:14 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack received calls from the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of the CIA, and the President of the United States.
“Nice work, Agent Bauer,” President Barnes said with a laugh. “You have the thanks of a grateful nation.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jack said.
“But no raise. I’m trying to reduce the debt.”
“I understand, Mr. President.”
Barnes hung up.
Kelly Sharpton whistled. “Jack Bauer, super spy!”
Jack shook his head. “Do we have a recovery team out there?”
Kelly nodded. “ETA is about five minutes.”
Jack sat down in an empty seat and let his shoulders slump a little. “It should never have come to this. We should have found them earlier, we should have stopped them before they ever got a weapon.”
Kelly looked up at the ceiling, its recesses hidden in shadows. The overhead lights at CTU hung down on thin bars, illuminating the computer room, but beyond the lights there was darkness. “What can you do? The society we live in, the way we want to be, leaves us open to infiltration. How are you going to stop someone like that coyote?”
Jack curled his lip. “Tougher laws. Better systems.”
Kelly sighed. “We’d only wreck what we’re trying to save.”
“So we let them destroy it?” Jack said skeptically.
“No. Our openness is our weakness. So we just have to be strong in other ways.”
9:20 P.M. PST Pasadena, California
Tony Almeida wished he hadn’t volunteered.
Jamey Farrell had noticed two suspicious vans pulling into that particular lot. The first one was the blue van they had tracked to John Wayne Airport. The second was a white Ready-Rooter plumber’s van that apparently arrived twice but left only once. The blue van had already been accounted for. It had stood there, silent and waiting, when the CTU team arrived at John Wayne Airport to investig
ate the hangar from which the Cessna had flown. They were dusting and sweeping, but no one expected them to find much more than they already had.
Tony, on the other hand, had offered to visit Cal Tech and check out the scene there. He had arrived at the parking lot at Cal Tech three hours earlier, just as the sun was setting but before the streetlights came on. There were a few cars parked at this hour, but most of the lot was empty. At the far end of the lot, a group of boys used the empty space to practice curbjumping and acrobatics on their bicycles. The lot was right next to the physics buildings, which had given the thieves (in either the blue or the white van) perfect access to the EMP devices. First Tony looked for the van itself, but of course it wasn’t there. Then he searched for alternative exits that the van might have taken, a route that hadn’t been picked up by the security cameras. The parking lot in question had only one driveway — a combination entrance/exit with a white traffic arm that required drivers to stop and take a ticket (on the way in) and pay (on the way out). There was also a kiosk with an attendant. The parking lot was situated on the edge of a low hill that sloped down toward a side street. Tony parked in the lot and walked toward the edge to see if there was another driveway, but he saw only the curb, a sidewalk, and beyond that ice-plant covered slope.
Tony walked over to the kiosk. “Excuse me.”
The attendant, a young black woman with a tiny ring in the side of her nose, wearing an orange vest, had leaned out. “Uh-huh?”
“Is there any other entrance or exit to this lot?”
“Other entrances? Naw, this is the only entrance.”
