breakfast…
He stopped. It was so obvious he almost missed it. He’d been up all night and his circadian rhythms were screwed up.
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.
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 “
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.”
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
