There were other people in the shot, but Jamey used computer enhancement software to zoom in on the two men.
“Do you see anything unusual about them?” Jamey asked.
Jack pressed the keyboard, zooming out so he could see other students. “No.”
“You will,” Jamey promised.
She fast-forwarded and froze. “There. This is ten minutes later.”
Two more men, both dark-skinned, both dressed like graduate students. “I don’t see it yet.”
Jamey fast-forwarded again. On the third set of two dark-skinned men, Jack understood. “No backpacks.”
“Right. There’s a fourth set, too. Yesterday afternoon we had four sets of two males, probably of Middle Eastern descent, walk on to campus with no backpacks within a five-to ten-minute span of each other.”
Kelly nodded. “Are you working to ID them?”
Jamey looked mildly insulted. “Of course. So far, they aren’t in the records.”
“That’s them, then,” Jack said. “Transportation?”
Jamey nodded and clicked her keyboard, minimizing video of the walkway and calling up a camera shot of the driveway into the lot. “We studied the parking lot for a half-hour window prior to the appearance of the first two.” The video ran until she froze it on the image of a blue van. “This van pulls in. It doesn’t leave until nearly midnight that night. The eight guys never appear on camera again. When they left, they
definitely avoided any areas that had cameras.”
“License plate?”
“Obscured.” Jamey zoomed in and digitally enhanced the video. The front license plate was missing. She jumped to another screen, late night footage that showed the van leaving. The back plate was half covered with mud, and only the digits 42[][]G[] were visible. “We’re running all permutations of those letters to see what comes up.”
Jack nodded. “It’ll be stolen or false. That’s our target.”
“There’s one more vehicle we can’t account for,” Jamey said. She rewound the tape and froze on a second van. This one was white with the name “Ready-Rooter” on the side panel. “This van comes in a little after nine in the morning. We have no record of it leaving.”
“You checked with Cal Tech, I assume.”
Jamey nodded. “Oh, yeah. They definitely called for plumbing service, and Ready-Rooter checks out, too. But it bugs me. Here.” She sped ahead to a shot of the van leaving.
“I thought you said it didn’t leave,” Jack said.
“That’s the thing. You saw it arrive. Now you see it leave. Now,” she zipped forward for the last time. “Now it arrives again. But I’ve got no final departure. Far as this video’s concerned, that van is still in the parking lot.”
“Did we send someone over?”
“Tony Almeida offered to go. We’re expecting a call.”
“Stay on the blue van,” Jack suggested.
“My team is tracking it,” Jamey said. “Give us a few more minutes.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ll be right back.”
“What are you going to do?” Kelly asked.
“I’m going to talk to the guy that started this whole thing.”
“And here I thought you’d forgotten about me,” Brett Marks said.
Jack closed the door behind him and sat down. Marks was, finally, starting to look tired. He’d been kept in that room all day with only one toilet break. There was nowhere to lie down, and the chairs were anything but comfortable.
“You were right about the terrorist cell,” Jack said. “They’re in the city.”
“We knew that this morning,” Brett said.
“We’ve learned a little more,” Jack said. “But the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit is your friend Frank Newhouse.”
Marks’s face wrinkled as though he’d been presented with a foul-smelling food. “If he’s who you say he is, he’s no friend of mine. Apparently I’m a lot less perceptive than I thought. I thought it was bad enough that I got fooled by you, but Newhouse seems to have played me for a lot longer.”
“How long have you known him?”
“For years. Ever since—” Brett Marks stopped.
“Go on,” Jack said.
Marks sat up straight and stretched. “You know, it occurs to me. I’ll tell you everything I know about Frank Newhouse,” he offered, “if you let me go.”
Behind the one-way glass that looked onto holding room two, Kelly Sharpton and Ryan Chappelle both groaned. “Oh, shit,” Kelly muttered.
“No!” Jack fumed. “No way!”
Ryan Chappelle held up both his hands to appease Bauer. “Jack, it’s not a bad deal. Marks is low-level. We don’t even know if he could have pulled off the sodium cyanide bomb.”
“He has a fortress up in Palmdale!” Jack protested. “Two days ago they were ready to kill that foreman and steal ten gallons of poison. He’s as much a nutcase as Frank Newhouse or these Iranians. He’s got his own army!”
“He’s a political radical, but he’s not very capable,” Chappelle said. “His guys proved willing to do damage, but mostly inept, right? I talked to the prosecutors. They think the best they’ll get is a number of weapons charges.”
Jack got right up in Chappelle’s face. “And conspiracy to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit a terrorist act—”
Chappelle, though much shorter than Jack, didn’t back down. “Most of his men won’t testify. All we’ve got is Heinrich Gelb’s testimony, and Martin Padilla thinks Marks’s defense team will chop him into pieces.”
Chappelle and Bauer locked eyes so fiercely that Kelly Sharpton imagined he could see a line of fire blazing between them. Kelly spoke very calmly, “Jack, I hate to say, but it might be worth it.”
Bauer broke eye contact with Chappelle to look at Kelly in surprise. “What?”
“Think about it,” Kelly said. “You’ve already broken up the Greater Nation. Marks by himself can’t do anything, and we can make it part of his agreement that he never engages in militia activities again.”
Jack didn’t like it. He wanted to keep his eye on the Iranians, too, but that didn’t mean completely abandoning Marks. “He won’t respect any agreement he makes with us. He believes the entire Federal government is illegal.”
Kelly shrugged. “Then if he starts up, we bring him back in, and it’s all over.”
“I spent six months listening to that madman talk. I can’t stand to see him walk.” Jack didn’t even try to hide his disgust.
“But at the same time, you get what you were after originally. You get a chance to stop the terrorists you said were here all along. It’s worth the risk.”
“The time is six twenty-two, Pacific Standard Time. This interview is taking place inside the Los Angeles headquarters of the Counter Terrorist Unit, holding room two. Special Agent Jack Bauer interviewing. State your name for the record,” Jack said sourly.
Everything in holding room two was the same as before, except now there was a video camera set up in the room, recording his conversation with Marks.
“Brett Ellis Marks.”
“Mr. Marks, are you prepared to make an official statement in relation to information on a man known as Frank Newhouse?”
“Yes, in exchange for my immediate release from custody and
“You mean
