Rafizadeh. He didn’t have time for metaphysical mumbo-jumbo or New Age philosophy, but he knew that if you focused your whole self on another person, he felt it like a bullet come out of a gun. He focused on her now. He wanted to shout. He wanted to wring her neck for putting lives at risk by withholding information. He wanted to make her pay for the demotion he had suffered. But he didn’t. He stuck to the most important question.
“Where is he?”
“He never had anything to do with those people—”
“Life in prison. Guantanamo Bay, or somewhere even less enjoyable. You’ll be branded as terrorists yourselves.”
Nazila shook her head, her eyes pooling. “You tried all those threats before, Jack. If I thought my brother was actually a terrorist, I would—”
“You would be the first person to hand him over,” Jack terminated her sentence. “Bullshit.”
There were tears forming in her eyes now. “You know why I won’t tell you. All the reasons you just named. My brother has done nothing! But he’s on someone else’s list, so if you take him, he will end up one of those places you just talked about, and no one will see him again!”
“If he’s innocent, he’ll—”
“He’ll what? Only stay in a prison for two or three years as an ‘enemy combatant’?”
“Of course not,” Jack said, although he knew he was lying. It happened. It was the price you paid sometimes to keep people alive. “But everything we know so far points to the fact that there are terrorists in this country, probably somewhere in Southern California. I thought so six months ago, and now I’m getting more proof. We may have gotten lucky that they haven’t killed anyone yet. I need to find them, or people will die. And right now my only leads are your brother and those idiots in the militia. Tell me where he is.”
She hesitated. Her lips parted, but no words came out. She nearly buckled under the pressure he exerted on her, but at the last minute, she shifted her feet, as though preparing for a fight, and said, “I’ll tell you after you save my father.”
Debrah Drexler’s hands were still shaking as she closed her apartment door behind her and slumped down in the wide leather chair in her living room. She remembered the first time her ex-husband had slapped her, all those years ago. There was pain, but mostly there was shock that such a thing could happen at all. That’s how she felt now.
Who was that man? How could he know?
The first two years after her divorce had been a nightmare only slightly less horrible than her marriage. The friendships and the promises that awaited her in San Francisco were all broken. It was 1979, Carter was president, and Debrah had her own personal misery index: a little girl to feed, no job, and no money. What she did have was a body that had survived childbirth intact. And even in the depression of 1980, there were men with enough money and lust to allow her to pay the rent.
She’d never worried about her secret getting out. She was in and out of that business in less than two years, and she’d been nothing special. A middle-rate call girl using a fake name. No one paid much attention to her. If anything, the men wanted it kept secret more than she did. She was never arrested, never photographed. Since then, she’d been through five elections, and that period of her life had never even been a blip on her political radar.
The phone rang. Debrah took a deep breath to settle her voice and her hands. She picked up the receiver. “Drexler.”
“Senator.” Quincy’s voice slid along the phone line like so much oil. “I hope you don’t mind a second phone call in one morning.”
“Why not,” she said, switching on her business voice, “since our first one was so pleasant.”
“I just wanted you to know that I am seriously considering your suggestion to use the media.”
“Wonderful. You look very handsome on television.”
“Oh, it won’t be me. It couldn’t be me. I’m not the one with the information.”
She felt ice form in her stomach. “I don’t understand.”
James Quincy chuckled on his end of the phone. “Senator, I’m sure you’ve heard that politics makes strange bedfellows. But didn’t they tell you you’re supposed to get those partners
He knew. Of course he knew. He’d found out, somehow. The jogger was on his payroll.
“I take it from your silence you understand me. Now, let me tell you, Senator, that time is of the essence. The vote is not far off. Barely enough time for you to influence Wayans and D’Aquino. So I suggest something direct. A press conference. An early morning press conference, so that it hits the East Coast news cycle.”
“I couldn’t—”
“Yes, you can. You can say that you and I have had several phone conversations. These are logged, of course, so people will know we’ve spoken anyway. You can say that you’re convinced the NAP Act is in the best interest of the country, which is true.”
“No.”
He laughed again. “I won’t take that as your final answer. You have”—he paused—“a little over an hour until the 7 a.m. news cycle, which would hit the East Coast before lunch, which is perfect. If I hear that you’ve made your announcement, I’ll know we have a deal. If I don’t hear anything, then the next news I hear after that will be all about you.”
The line went dead.
“I don’t know where your father is,” Jack protested.
Nazila pointed at the phone in his hand. “Traffic cameras. Security tapes. Satellites.”
“It doesn’t always work like that. With a time and a place, we can scan particular cameras and routes. But just to look around randomly takes days and weeks, using everyone we’ve got. Just tell me where your brother is.”
She hesitated, but this time it was not from doubt. She was shopping for a bargain. “We can make a deal,” she said. “I will take you to him if you do two things for me.”
“Only two?” he said.
“First, you have to promise that you will listen to his case. He is not a terrorist. And second, you have to promise that as soon as you find him, you will save my father before anything else.”
Now it was Jack’s turn to hesitate. He’d lied before in his job — in fact, it was often his job to lie — but something about Nazila gave him pause. He didn’t want to lie to her, even though she’d lied to him. In the military and at CTU he’d dealt with all levels of evil — from petty criminals driven by greed to psychopaths driven to fill some dark hole in their souls. He knew that the devil had power to assume a pleasing shape. But when she said her brother was not a terrorist, she spoke simply and with conviction. Whatever might lurk in her brother’s heart, hers was pure.
“I promise, I’ll save your father,” he said.
Kelly Sharpton put his feet up on his desk and rubbed his eyes. It had been one of those mornings. His original daily sheet hadn’t had much more than update meetings with three of his top field people, a video link with Homeland Security where all he had to do was listen, and a report on updating satellite link software that was supposed to improve their database searches by 5 %. Instead, one of his field agents had raided a militia compound without permission and arrested a media-savvy, ex-military political radical, a terrorist investigation that had been closed six months ago was suddenly reopened, and a dead Iranian man had returned to the land of the living.
In this state of mind, he wasn’t exactly surprised when the operator buzzed him. “Kelly, you have a Debrah Dee on the phone. She says it’s important.”
“Debrah Dee…I don’t know the name. Will you send the call over to—”
“She says you’ll know her from the Bay Area, but that she’s moved to Washington D.C. since then.”
“Washington — Dee? — oh, shit, put it through.” In the seconds between the operator’s click-off and the connection, he put it all together, and when the phone clicked in, he said, “There’s a reason to be discreet, I’m guessing.”
“Yes,” said the caller. Her voice was measured— and not with the usual toughness of a female politician
