24 Declassified: Cat's Claw

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 something 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.