“Sorry, they’re gone,” he said with a smile. But inside, his heart was breaking. One more loose end to clean up.
Jack pulled in to CTU headquarters. There would be a truckload of paperwork to fill out in the Peppermint shooting, but for the moment he ignored it. He had his phone to his ear, talking with Kelly and the other CTU staff on the crisis even as he entered the building. He was on speakerphone in the conference room, so he kept talking as he entered the building.
“. so someone hires Farid to organize their transition into Los Angeles, and also hires the smuggler that gets them over the border,” Jack was saying. He reached the conference room and saw Sharpton, Chappelle, Nina Myers, CTU chief analyst Jamey Farrell, and Jessi Bandison. He heard his voice coming out of the squawk box on the conference table and hung up his phone. “They get into the country. But it wasn’t six months ago, it was just a few weeks ago. That doesn’t jibe with our warnings about Ramin Rafizadeh. It also gets him off the hook officially.” He took a seat. “It doesn’t make sense that the rumors come first, and then the terrorist cell appears. That’s bugging me.” He had a list of items that bothered him, including the coyote’s connection with MS-13 and Farrah’s obsession with killing Farid. Farrah could just as easily have escaped the building. Instead he’d taken a hostage.
Kelly added, “There’s more that doesn’t make sense. Why did these guys have a cheap apartment in Westwood and an expensive condominium a mile away? Why did they try to blow up the fancy condo but leave the apartment intact, when the apartment had the clues to their plans?”
They looked at one another, searching for answers but finding only bewildered looks, until Nina bobbed her head in the direction of an idea. “It’s a head fake.”
The entire group looked her way. “Go on,” Chappelle encouraged.
“They want the apartment found. They don’t want the condo found, because the condo has real evidence. So they rig the condo to get rid of the evidence.”
“But the condo is connected to Frank Newhouse, not the Iranians,” Jessi Bandison observed. “Frank Newhouse is connected to the Greater Nation and the Attorney General.”
“Frank Newhouse is the key to all this,” said Ryan Chappelle. He spoke definitively, using that voice that Bauer hated. However, Jack had to admit that the director was right. “The unanswered questions all revolve around him.”
“Agreed,” Jack said. “Jessi, are you up for staying on?”
“She’s way overtime,” Chappelle said, falling back into character.
“I’m good to go,” she said. “I’m getting kind of annoyed with that guy. I’ve got records I can check.”
Jack nodded. “Good. Go. Nina, I think we need to go with your head fake idea. Until we know more about Newhouse, let’s assume this EMP lead is the real one and the Islamic poetry clues are a false lead. Get on the phone. Call UCLA and Cal Tech. Tell them to check on everything they have related to EMPs. Do that now.”
Nina understood that “now” meant “right now” and she left the table while Jack was still talking.
“Then get going. Kelly, Jamey,” Jack said. “We need to learn more about this Babak Farrah, may he rest in peace. You should. ” He paused. Kelly was grinning at him so brightly that Jack almost blushed. The two of them were left at the table with Ryan Chappelle. “Damn, Kelly, I’m sorry. I’m not the SAC here anymore. You should be divvying these assignments.”
“No problem, sir!” Kelly said, but he was laughing. “You can’t help yourself, Jack. I’d be the same in your shoes. This is your ship. You ought to be running it. No offense,” he added for Chappelle’s benefit.
The Director wasn’t quite as amused. “I’m surprised you’d let Bauer undermine your authority, Kelly,” he said critically.
Kelly patted his two bandaged hands together. “You serve in the military and you see some interesting things,” he said. “Everyone salutes the officers, but when the excrement hits the fan, everyone turns to the real leaders. Usually it’s some NCO from Bumfuck, Alabama. Doesn’t matter. He’s the guy in the foxhole that everybody listens to.”
Chappelle couldn’t help the disdain that crept into his voice. “Are you saying you’re not that man?”
“Oh, I am,” Kelly said, with a wink to Jack. “This just isn’t my foxhole.”
Jack and Kelly stood up from the table as Nina Myers entered the room. Her face was grave. “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “I talked to Cal Tech. Someone stole their EMP devices. Yesterday.”
16. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 P.M. AND 7 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
The power that CTU brought to bear in the next quarter of an hour was, to say the least, awesome. Within minutes, every computer terminal of every analyst and programmer inside CTU was turned loose on the subject of Cal Tech in Pasadena. Data flowed into the clandestine unit’s Los Angeles headquarters like water flowing into a reservoir. Employee records were checked. Student names and I.D.s were crosschecked against the names of known terrorist suspects. E-mail accounts were run (without the owners’ knowledge) and phrases were matched against key words related to EMPs, Iran, Allah, Persia, and a thousand other phrases that might offer a connection. Two thousand gigabytes of security footage were dumped into CTU’s computers and scanned by Jamey Farrell and a team of analysts. Students and teachers at Cal Tech who never knew they were on camera had their images analyzed by CTU’s facial recognition software. On one single screen, cars running in and out of the Cal Tech parking lot closest to the building that had housed the EMP devices were analyzed, looking for any car that was out of the ordinary.
Meanwhile, Jack and Kelly received more information from Nina. “Two devices are missing. The first is a bomb. Not a bomb like we think of,” she added, “a pulse weapon. Set it off, it emits an electromagnetic pulse that wipes out all electronic devices in its range. The second one is, as far as I can tell, the rocket-propelled grenade of the sci-fi world. Aim it, fire, it zaps its target with an electromagnetic beam that fries all its circuits. The Cal Tech people called it a HERF Rifle — HERF for high energy radio frequency.”
“What’s the range?” Kelly asked.
“Unknown. They were testing. The bomb’s potential depends on how it’s delivered. The rifle is more directed. You can build a little one for a few hundred bucks, but it doesn’t reach more than a hundred feet. This one is supposed to be the surface-to-air missile of radio waves.’
“Why did Cal Tech have these things?” Kelly asked. “They don’t build weapons there, do they?”
“That’s what I asked,” Nina replied. “I got two answers. The Director of Research for the Advanced Physics Department told me they had a contract with DOD and I should mind my own friggin’ business.”
Jack considered this. “I know Cal Tech is the research branch of Jet Propulsion Laboratories.”
Nina nodded. “Then some public relations person with a little more tact got on the phone and said they’d been loaned the devices to test some shielding mechanism. Either way, they’re both gone.”
“We should have known this earlier,” Jack said. “Why didn’t they report it?”
“They didn’t know. The devices had been stored and weren’t scheduled for use again for two more days.”
Jack had the distinct sense that they were fighting on too many fronts. In combat, a classic strategy was to engage the enemy in one location, causing him to move resources to that front, then attack him elsewhere. He had the vague sense that he was falling victim to that strategy, but he couldn’t tell where the real attack might happen.
His intercom buzzed. It was Jamey Farrell, CTU’s head programmer. “We’ve got something.”
Jack watched the video screen as Jamey Farrell fast-forwarded through video from a security camera at the edge of the parking lot. It showed a walkway from the lot toward the buildings near the Physics Labs at Cal Tech. “They did a really good job,” she said in grudging admiration. “If there hadn’t been about eight of us working on this, we’d have missed it. There.” She froze the video. Jack saw two men walking together. They were dressed like grad students; that is to say, they wore sloppy jeans and sloppy T-shirts, and they looked like they didn’t eat well enough. Both were dark-skinned, but that meant nothing. Half the student body of Cal Tech was Pakistani or Indian.
