evidence here. He was tired of conjecture, and he sure as hell was tired of looking like a fool at CTU. First there were terrorists, then it was all a big mistake, then there were militia men who knew about the terrorists, then there were no terrorists again, but Jack has to rescue innocent Iranians from the militia. Then it turns out a dead man is actually alive, and he has heard a rumor about terrorists, and the militia men know about an apartment. It was enough to drive a man insane, except that Jack was just too damned stubborn to go insane.
And the truth was, he hadn’t even begun to tackle the mystery of Frank Newhouse. Why the Attorney General’s office would have an undercover agent inside a militia group baffled him, especially when CTU followed policy and informed other departments, including the FBI and Justice, of any investigations that involved domestic terrorism. Jack had no doubt whatsoever that the proper authorities had been informed, since it was Ryan Chappelle’s job to pass on the information. Chappelle might be an ass and a bumbler when it came to field work, but he pushed paper with the best of them.
In Jack’s mind, there was a more important question than why the AG had inserted his own people: why hadn’t Newhouse identified himself? The jig was up the minute Jack had raided the Greater Nation compound. And there was certainly no reason to keep up pretenses at the Culver City house, when Jack had rescued Rafizadeh. Not only had he not unmasked himself, he’d actually fired shots at Jack when he gave pursuit. Jack didn’t take kindly to people shooting at him; if that guy really was an undercover agent, once this was over, Jack planned to take him outside and go round and round with him until the man explained himself.
Jack pulled his mind away from Newhouse. That was for later. He needed to focus on the task at hand. He stepped into the room, where five agents studiously dusted down surfaces, picked through the few belongings with tweezers, and ran a blue light over everything to expose biological tracings.
“Hey, something over here!” someone called from the bathroom. Jack hurried over to where a man in a surgical mask was swabbing sections of the counter and testing them in a portable scanner. He held a cotton swab under the scanner’s sensor. A light on the side of the scanner had turned from red to green. “Traces of nitroglycerine. A little C-4, too. Someone was in here making a bomb.”
“I’ve got something,” said another tech from the living room.
Jack spun around and went back to the room, where the tech was thumbing through a book with gloved hands. This was Peter Ren, one of CTU’s language experts specializing in the Middle East. He held up some scraps of paper inside the book. Jack looked at them, but they were also written in Farsi, which looked to him like so many elegant designs drawn along the page.
“Well?”
“It’s poetry. Really old-fashioned poetry, I think,” Ren said, perusing one scrap of paper and then another.
“You think?” Jack said sharply. He began to feel a small knot twist itself in his stomach. He sensed something with that sixth sense of experienced fighters. His enemy was out there somewhere, in the dark, unseen but near. The discovery of bomb making had increased his anxiety.
“Well, it’s just scraps. It doesn’t really make any sense.” Peter Ren looked at Jack helplessly. “I’m a translator, not a scholar. I didn’t even know that Muslims wrote poetry like this anymore.”
“What makes you think it’s important? Maybe it’s junk.”
Ren held out the scraps of paper he was holding. “Then there’s a lot of it. I’ve got eight pages right here, and there are twenty or thirty more stuffed into another book. Look, if you really want to understand this stuff, you need someone who can do more than just translate the words. You need someone who understands medieval writing. I can call in, find someone for us.”
Jack laughed, but the sound was miserable. “Don’t bother. I know just the person.”
“Who are you working for, Kelly?”
“I work for you.”
“You’re lying.”
Kelly Sharpton and Ryan Chappelle had repeated that conversation, in different variations, six times during the last half hour. The variations usually came in the form of expletives and, once, a commentary on Kelly’s parentage. Chappelle had also found different ways to ask the question, but it always came down to the same thing: assumption of guilt, gigantic leap to conclusions, and a question based on the conclusion, followed by Kelly’s denial.
Kelly sat in the metal chair behind the metal desk. Chappelle had, for some reason, saved him the humiliation of handcuffs, but the smaller man kept the two big uniformed guards in the room. Kelly spent most of his time, during Chappelle’s questions, wondering if he could take out both security guards and the District Director before anyone outside noticed.
“Kelly,” Chappelle said, switching from bad cop to good cop with all the grace of a dog standing on its hind legs. “There’s nowhere to hide from this. Jessi has already told us you told her to hack into the DOJ system. We know from Justice that someone went in and deleted all the AG’s files. That’s the Attorney General! We’ve done a keystroke log on your computer, and we know you futzed around in terminals over there. Why?”
It was a simple question, and there was a simple answer. Of course, Kelly refused to speak it. He had no intention of getting Drexler in trouble. He’d risked his career to save her, and if he was going to go down in flames, taking her with him would do nothing but make his crime an exercise in futility.
“That’s all you’re going to do, sit there?” Chappelle said. Standing, he was for once taller than Sharpton and seemed to enjoy the perspective. “The FBI will be here in an hour. You can talk to them.”
9. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 A.M. AND 12 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Thank god for Kinkos, Juwan thought as he hit the brakes and screeched to a stop at the edge of Zachary Taylor Park. He jumped out and ran down the grass slope to the water’s edge.
“That took too long,” she said.
“Fast as I could,” he gasped. He reached into his coat to grab the files.
“Kiss me,” she said, throwing herself at him again. He was more prepared this time, and caught her in his arms and kissed her. Again, it was a movie kiss, full of force but empty of passion. He was vaguely aware of her hands on his body, just as before. When they separated, he felt an empty space where the files had pressed against his abdomen.
“You’re really good at that,” he said, knowing that the documents were now hidden under her own coat.
“You should see me fake an orgasm,” she said. “Bye.”
She turned and walked along the path without ever looking back at him.
Juwan hurried back to his car. The copies he’d made were on the carpet, half-stuffed under the passenger seat. He hadn’t even had time to read them, but at a glance he could tell the pages contained someone’s biography.
He left Arlington and was on his way into D.C. when his mobile phone rang. He popped his earpiece in and said, “Burke here.”
“Juwan.” It was the Senator herself. Juwan straightened in the driver’s seat like a pupil at his desk when the teacher walks in. The Senator didn’t call him very often.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Listen, you know that lunch I sent you for? Have you picked it up yet?”
Juwanwasasmart man, andbynow he wascatching on to the clandestine habits of the others involved in this errand. To him it seemed as ridiculous as a spy movie, but he wasn’t in charge, so he replied, “Yes, that lunch. I got it and I’m on my way back to the office.”
“Good. There’s someone who’s really hungry for it. Starving, maybe. Hurry.” She hung up.
That’s when the Pontiac Bonneville slammed into him.
Jack arrived at CTU with the the stack of papers and the two books in which they’d been hidden tucked under
