He brings my people up when I need him to. I don’t want to lose him.”
Jack slid out from under Julio, careful to keep his finger on the trigger and the muzzle on Julio. He stood slowly. Some of the gang-bangers clearly wanted to fire, but Cesar waved them off.
“Listen, Julio, this is all I want from you,” Jack said, moving to keep the little man between him and the other guns. “I saw your picture on a driver’s license by the name of Richard Brighton.”
“Never heard of no Brighton,” Julio said, his eyes straining to their corners to see him. “But if he looks like me he must be a handsome bitch.”
“I’m thinking you helped some people cross the border a while ago. Maybe about six months ago, maybe a little longer. Maybe you helped some men cross over, guys who weren’t Latino. Jog your memory?”
Julio hesitated. “Yeah, I did that. But it wasn’t no six months ago. Maybe two.”
“How many guys? What’d they look like?” Jack was inching backward toward the door. The gangbangers sauntered after him.
Julio said, “Eight, I think.” Jack pushed the muzzle into his cheek. “Eight, eight! They were Arabs or something like that.”
Jack stifled a desire to blow Julio’s head off right there. The U.S. spent billions of dollars to protect itself from enemies that wanted to tear it apart, rooting out terrorist training camps in Pakistan, buying off weapons-grade uranium in the former Soviet bloc, and spending countless man-hours snatching cell phone calls and radio signals out of the airwaves using the most complex technology on the planet. And here was Julio from Boyle Heights, tearing their carefully constructed fences into shreds with a beat-up van and a path through the mountains.
“Where’d you take them?”
“Shit, I don’t rem — okay! I dropped them off downtown. At a building on Flower. One of those new renovations with the apartments on top. I don’t remember which one. But the guy who paid me was named Farrah.”
“Thanks, Julio,” Jack said, reaching the door. “You’re a real patriot.”
He shoved Julio back toward the gang-bangers and bolted out into the street.
Kelly kept sobbing until the Demorol kicked in. The paramedics had arrived fifteen minutes after his plea for help, along with Nina Myers and several other CTU agents. By the time they treated him the pain had made him delirious, and all he could imagine was hot, burning coals entering his bloodstream and coursing through his body.
The medics poured some kind of powder on his hands to snuff out the burning material. Then they washed his hands with some kind of antiseptic that stung like hell, and finally they wrapped his burned hands and shot him full of Demorol.
Glenn Schneider had arrived with the CTU team. He was bald, with wide shoulders and a wide belly, too. Spaced out on pain and painkillers, Kelly imagined him to be a human shield against bombs.
The bomb squad leader looked at Kelly’s bandaged hands and said, “Whoever did this is a real bastard. That’s homemade napalm they used. I guess they didn’t want anyone messing with their bomb. You know, if you’d tried to pick it up instead of kicking it, it would have burned your hands and your face right off. It’s also lucky it didn’t hit the Solidox.”
“Oh, I feel lucky,” Kelly said dryly.
Nina Myers sat down beside him. “Nice work,” she said. “You know they found more of this Solidox planted in the heating system in the hallway. This bomb would have taken out this whole floor, and probably started a fire that would have killed more people.”
“We find anything here?” Kelly asked. He didn’t mind saving lives, but he was hoping his burned hands had helped to advance their case.
“One thing,” Nina said. “Bits of wire. Looks like someone tried to clean it all up, but they were in a hurry —”
“Yeah, well, they needed time to leave me that present.”
“Right. Anyway, they missed some. The wire is just wire, same as you’d use in a computer or stereo. But the insulation is weird, and there are a couple of connectors that are also weird. We’re taking it back to study.”
“Bits of wire,” Kelly said grimly, staring at his bandaged hands. “Well, I guess it’s better than bits of me.”
President Barnes never got angry in public, and he rarely lost his temper even in private. His self-control had nothing to do with temperament and everything to do with self-preservation; when Harry Barnes lost it, he lost it completely. The Presidential Suite at the Westin bore witness to that fact.
Barnes began with the telephone on his desk and progressed to the wooden guest chair. Those two objects and several others struck the desk with force, courtesy of Harry Barnes’s temper.
“What the goddamned hell does that asshole think he’s doing!” Barnes raged.
Mitch Rasher weathered the storm better than the shattered chair (it helped that he was neither the object nor its target). He stood to one side, serene as a stone, letting the storm blow over him.
“Who leaked the fucking story!” Barnes demanded.
“Well, offhand, I’d say it was him,” Rasher said.
“He wouldn’t dare!” the President said. His initial rage was passing. He felt it drain away, emptied into the sacrificial pieces of furniture. Everyone thought Mitch Rasher’s greatest contribution to his presidency was his political strategy. It wasn’t; it was this — this ability to manage Barnes as he passed through these infrequent but dangerous rages.
Barnes straightened his tie and smoothed his dress shirt. He picked up the remote and rewound, replaying comments from Attorney General Quincy at a press conference. “I assure you that the FBI and other agencies are investigating these threats and taking them quite seriously. I would like to point out that I have spoken directly with agents in charge of this investigation and I was told in no uncertain terms that these potential terrorists were under surveillance six months ago. However, the case was dropped due to an inability to gather evidence. If the NAP Act had been enacted back then, I’m sure these terrorists would have been apprehended long before they became a threat.”
Barnes took one more deep breath. Drained, calm, he returned to the stone-faced deal maker everyone outside that room believed him to be. “He’s using a terrorist threat against me to scoop up a little more power.”
Rasher nodded. “But a little more power for him is a little more power for you.”
Barnes waved that off. “If I don’t have enough power now then I’m a sick man, and so are you. This privacy act is either good for the country or it’s not.”
Rasher smiled. He put his fingers together in front of him, adopting that strange angelic pose so out of sync with his schemes. “Jim seems to believe in it enough to use this so-called threat against you as a soapbox.”
Barnes leaned against his desk. “There is no threat, right? That’s confirmed.”
“None,” Rasher said. “The source itself is questionable, and they don’t even have the right city.”
“You know, he’s forcing our hand. If I don’t get out in front of this thing, I won’t get any of the credit if it passes. I’ll look like I sat on the sidelines while important legislation was enacted by him.”
Rasher walked over to the coffee table and began to pick up pieces of broken chair. “Mr. President, do you recall who wrote the much ballyhooed campaign finance reform bill that proved useless?”
“McCain-Feingold.”
“Exactly. And, by any chance, do you recall who wrote the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, commonly called the Welfare Reform Act,
that was so popular a few years ago?”
Barnes searched his memory. “No.”
“Exactly. When it comes to issues like this, people don’t remember successes, they remember failures. Let Quincy be the pioneer, sir. Either he’ll get shot full of arrows or he’ll found a city. Then you’ll come in and run it. Or if the people don’t like it, you can veto the whole thing and be the people’s champion.”
Barnes frowned. He was too competitive to enjoy that advice, but he couldn’t deny its logic. He decided to make a short list of replacements for the office of Attorney General.
