Chappelle stepped back toward Sharpton. He didn’t like surprises. He didn’t like them on his birthday, he didn’t like them disguised as suitcases in train stations, and he especially didn’t like them coming from his own staff. “What sort of ‘little information’? Who gave you the clue?”
Kelly looked right into Chappelle’s small eyes. “I can’t tell you. It’s a personal source,” he lied.
“Proof?”
Kelly watched in his mind’s eye as the data were destroyed by his virus. “No, it’s gone. But I saw it with my own eyes. The Attorney General knew about the terrorists but didn’t pass it on. And he had his own mole inside Greater Nation and no one ever mentioned it to us, even though we had our own man in there six months.”
“No proof, no case,” Chappelle declared, waving the issue off. “Especially when you’re talking about the AG. Besides, Bauer got one bad guy. That sounds like plenty for one day.”
Chappelle turned his back on the issue.
James Quincy bit into the last bit of cantaloupe on his room service breakfast, wiped his hands on the white napkin, and picked up the phone. He relished this call, and had decided to wait until after breakfast to make it. This act of vengeance would make the perfect dessert.
“Zelzer,” he said. “Make the calls.
Quincy hung up. He fired up his laptop and connected remotely. The laptop contained encryption software, and there were five or six hoops to jump through to reach his own desktop via the remote software, but eventually he arrived at his own terminal’s log in. He typed his name and the password “winstonsmith” and waited. After a moment, his desktop booted up. At least the screen said his desktop had booted up. But there was nothing on it. He clicked on the icon for his hard drive and saw all his applications, and none of his files. None of them.
“Son of a bitch,” Quincy muttered. He didn’t know how his files had been deleted. But although he did not know how, he was sure he knew who. He had had no idea Debrah Drexler could be so formidable.
He picked up the phone again. “Zelzer, I need you to get someone from IT security over to my office. Someone’s been tampering with my computer. I want to know who and I want to know now!”
Black and white patrol cars filled the street, their red and blue top lights spreading color over the scene. Uniforms were searching backyards and bushes, but Jack knew they wouldn’t find anything. Newhouse was good. He was much better than a weekend warrior deserved to be.
Jack watched LAPD tape off the area, adding bright yellow ribbon to the rainbow. He ducked under it and went into the house. The body of the big blond militia man lay where it had fallen. The second Greater Nation goon, the one who’d held Rafizadeh, also lay where he’d died. Lzolski was pouting by the door, furious at having been caught. Paulson and Nina were arguing over whose shot had put the second militia man down.
“That was my head shot,” Paulson said, raising his empty hands and aiming his fingers like a gun.
Nina rolled her eyes. “Get over yourself. You missed. That was my shot.”
“Whoever shot him ought to be hanged,” Jack said. “That guy was our lead. These militia nuts are after the same thing we are — terrorists — but they’re always one step ahead of us.”
Jack went into the living room. Professor Ibrahim Rafizadeh was sitting on the couch flanked by two paramedics. They were checking his vitals and giving him oxygen. Two more paramedics were pulling a stretcher into the house. Even through the oxygen mask, Jack saw that the professor’s face was covered with bruises and blisters, the same kind of blisters that Ramin would have by now. The Greater Nation had tortured the old man.
Rafizadeh lifted his eyes to meet Jack’s. Just as Nazila had felt compassion for Jack, Jack now empathized with her father. The old man had withstood intense interrogation from Jack himself not six months ago, and he hadn’t cracked. This morning he’d been brutalized and broken down. He’d handed the torturers his own son. And then he’d been saved by the man who had apparently ruined his life.
“Ramin is safe,” Jack said.
Rafizadeh nodded. He pulled the mask away from his face momentarily. “He is not a—”
“I talked to your daughter,” Jack said. “She’s pretty convincing.” He smiled. He didn’t see the need to tell the professor that he’d allowed Ramin to be tortured. “He’s at CTU, but I’ve told them to use kid gloves. They’ll just want background.” Jack paused. “He did know something, you know. He heard a rumor about a terrorist cell here.”
Rafizadeh shook his head. This time he didn’t bother to lift the mask, so his voice was hollow and distant. “There are always rumors. Someone knows someone who knows someone whose cousin was in the madrassa, whose friend was killed by American bombs, and he mentioned. ” The professor trailed off, rolling his hand over and over to indicate the unending pattern of gossip. “We are victims of a rumor.”
“A rumor is just a premature fact,” Jack said.
“No,” Rafizadeh replied in scholarly tones. “No, that is not true. Rumor is a weapon.”
Jack had no reply. The paramedics bustled around the professor for a moment, then asked him to lie on the stretcher. Once he was comfortable, Rafizadeh looked up at Jack. “These men. Did they get our names from you?”
“No,” Jack said earnestly. “We don’t know where they got them. We arrested their people for a different reason. It was coincidence that we found your name. It all happened early this morning. We learned that they thought you were terrorists and were coming to get you, so I came to…help.”
Rafizadeh chuckled. “God is great. But he has a wry sense of humor.”
Brian Zelzer loved his job with a youthfulness that was out of place for a man approaching fifty. Pear-shaped with thin arms and thinner hair, he still bounced around the halls of the DOJ like a teenager. He couldn’t help it. If someone had told him that a scrawny kid from Atlanta could bluff his way through UNC–Charlotte, learn to write succinct bullshit for a PR firm (“It doesn’t have to be accurate, it has to be succinct,” his bosses told him long ago), then grab the coattails of a few career politicians he’d met at Bible study once he’d gone on the wagon and end up in Washington, D.C., he’d have laughed. But here he was, the Department of Justice’s interagency liaison, working a few doors down from the Attorney General himself. Of course, to Brian he wasn’t the Attorney General, he was just Jim, with whom he’d commiserated for nearly twenty years. Brian had found that sobriety — he’d been sober since 1989—gave him nearly unlimited energy, especially when it came to griping about the sorry state of affairs in the country. He and Jim had griped about the secularization of the country and activist judges who added bricks and mortar to the imaginary wall between church and state, until one day Jim, who’d made a name for himself as a Kansas prosecutor, had offered Brian a chance to help do something about it. Next thing he knew he’d stopped writing press releases and started campaigning for Barnes, and now here he was.
He even liked dealing with the maze of interrelated agencies that made up the Justice Department and law enforcement and intelligence community. His official title was Deputy Assistant Director of Interagency Communications for the Office of Intergovernmental and Public Liaison, but privately he gave himself the same informal title he’d used as a PR man: shitslinger. His job was to manage the message that went out from the DOJ to the internal law enforcement community (FBI, ATF, etc.) and the external intelligence community (CIA, Department of Defense, blah, blah), and he found it exciting to ride herd on the rumors and innuendos that constantly threatened to trample his boss’s agenda.
So when the phone rang, he picked it up with his usual aplomb. “Zelzer!” he said.
“Brian Zelzer, this is Special Agent Kelly Sharpton, CTU Los Angeles.”
Brian frowned, not unhappily. CTU. Counter Terrorist Unit. Sometimes it took a minute to navigate the government’s habit of creating trinomial acronyms (FBI, CIA, DOD, ATF, DOD, etc.). “Yes, Agent Sharpton, what can I do for you?”
“Listen, I’m hoping you can help me with something. We have a case on our end, a domestic terrorism case. A militia group that was planning some domestic terrorism. We took care of that, but during a raid we discovered that they had some information on Islamic terrorists on U.S. soil. They said they reported it to the FBI and to you guys.”
Zelzer said with automatic brightness, “Sure, you might want to try the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit. I can
