but he was alive. He stared at Jack incredulously. “You stabbed me,” he whispered hoarsely. “You stabbed me.”
“Don’t forget the elbow,” Jack reminded him. “Right now your throat is probably swelling up like a grapefruit. In a few minutes you’ll choke to death. I’m the only one who can save you.”
The man’s eyes widened. His rasping breath told Jack that he agreed with that assessment.
“If you want me to call for help in time, you tell me where Professor Rafizadeh is right now.” The man started to shake his head. “Right. Now.”
“Need…need me,” the militia man rasped. “I call…eight — thirty…or he dies.”
Jack put his hand on the protruding scissors blade and leaned gently. “Where?”
The man gasped. “C–Culver City!” He rasped out an address off of Sawtelle.
“Thanks.” They’d taken his cell phone, so Jack ran to the bedroom phone and dialed quickly. When a CTU operator picked up, he said, “This is Bauer. Patch me through to Sharpton.”
Kelly picked up seconds later. “Jack, wh—?”
“No time. I’ve got Ramin Rafizadeh. I’ve also got possible terrorists inside the U.S., and dead bodies. I need field agents and a medical team right away.” He rattled off the address and hung up before Kelly could ask anything else.
He turned to Ramin. “You’re okay, now. I’m a Federal agent.”
Jack left the scissors in the militia man’s body— pulling it out would only cause more bleeding — and ran downstairs. There was a spare room off the kitchen, and there he found a simple tool kit that included wire cutters. He ran back upstairs, past Ramin’s room, and into the library. The four prisoners’ terror turned to relief when they saw him enter.
He snipped them free one by one. “Ramin’s okay,” he said to Nazila as he freed her.
“You sick bastard!” she said in reply. “You let them hurt him!”
“You’re welcome,” he said sarcastically, cold and defensive and still adrenalized from having guns fired at his head. “They’d still be doing it if I hadn’t stopped them.”
Her hate-filled eyes lingered on him a moment, then she rushed past him to help her brother.
Jack checked his watch. Almost eight o’clock. He had a little over half an hour to save Nazila’s father.
Kelly slammed the phone down. Jack Bauer seemed hell-bent on pissing him off as much as possible today. Annoyed, he spouted orders at three different people to get medical team and law enforcement to the Beverly Hills address. He also ordered a holding cell to be made ready for Ramin Rafizadeh, the living dead man who was and was not a terrorist.
Kelly rubbed his temples. He felt a headache press against the inside of his skull like a dam wanting to burst.
Instead of getting up, he stared at his computer screen. He was still hacked into the Attorney General’s computer, and his virus program was still deleting files. He had taken no small amount of pleasure in watching the files disappear one by one. He didn’t know what they were, and he didn’t care. Any files important to the government would be backed up elsewhere. This was just Kelly’s own personal jab at the AG, who had tried to ruin the career of someone he lo — someone he liked very much.
His eyes meandered down the screen and tripped over the words
Kelly clicked on the file. It opened up and he saw a list of notes — dates, names, times — all connected to the Greater Nation militia group. There was a lot of information recorded here.
“Holy shit,” Kelly murmured. He glanced at the corner of his screen, where the progress report for his virus showed that complete destruction of all files was nearly complete. He couldn’t stop it. He’d never built a stop command into his virus, not even a back door. It was going to eat that Greater Nation file along with everything else.
“Excuse me, Kelly?”
Jessi Bandison had come to his door. She was leaning against the frame, her head tilted slightly to one side. He smelled the scent of jasmine, freshly applied.
“Do you think—” she swallowed—“I’m off in a few. Would you want to grab a coffee before I go?”
“Not now!” he said. The anger in his voice had nothing to do with her, but it still hit her like a slap in the face. “I’m sorry,” he said, no less sharply, “I just have a problem here. Can we talk later?”
“Okay,” she said, and retreated out of view.
Kelly scanned the open document, his eyes searching for anything of value. Two phrases leaped out at him.
and
Then the screen went blank.
6. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 A.M. AND 9 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Culver City is a stone’s throw from Beverly Hills— you can see it just to the south from the tops of some of the nicer mansions. But distance means nothing in Los Angeles. Los Angelenos do not measure distance by how many miles one location is from another. They measure everything by time. Beverly Hills is not fifteen miles from the ocean, it’s about a half hour. UCLA is not ten miles from the airport, it’s about an hour. Someone who lives over the Santa Monica Mountains, in the widespread San Fernando Valley, lives only eight miles from posh West Los Angeles.
But the miles meant nothing — it was the time it took to arrive that was significant. And the time, of course, depends on the traffic.
In the 1970s, and even through the 1980s, there had been a rhythm to L.A.’s traffic — morning rush hour was from around 7:30 a.m. to 10 a.m., and then it picked up again around 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. or so. The times in between were, for the most part, free. But by the mid nineties all semblance of rush hour was gone — it was gridlock on the freeways and surface streets from early morning until late evening. If you wanted open roads in downtown Los Angeles, then you had to wait until 5 a.m. on Christmas morning.
So at 8:05 on Wednesday morning, Jack found himself shucking and cutting through Beverly Hills, headed toward Culver City and an address he probably could have hit with a stone if he had time to bend down and pick one up.
He had recovered his gun and his phone, then waited until the medical team and the additional field agents had arrived. As the adrenaline levels in his body eased up, he asked Nazila if he could speak with her. The girl was reluctant to leave her brother’s side at first, but after a moment she relented and they went out to the front of the house. He wanted to speak to her there for two reasons. First, he’d know when his backup arrived. Second, she would be less inclined to make a scene on the front lawn.
“What do you have to say to me,” she said softly but angrily. “How dare you sit there and let them torture him?”
Jack nodded. “Yes, I did. I admit that. But I did it because I knew he was going to be interrogated by someone. Nazila, whether you like it or not, his name ended up on a contact list used by terrorists in a terrorist training camp.”
“But he’s not—”
“I believe you,” Jack interrupted. “I believe you.”
Nazila’s eyes widened like saucers. “You…do?”
