just to keep their records clear. But suddenly Julio’s testimony had become very important.
It got off to a pleasant start.
“Who the fuck are you?” the little man said as Kelly entered.
“Good evening,” Kelly said. He sat down in this chair the same way he’d sat down with Farid.
“Fuck that,” Julio said. He sneered, accentuating the sagginess of his eye. “That bitch told me all he wanted was to ask a question and he’d get out of my face.” He was talking about Jack Bauer.
“Well, all I want is to ask a question and I’ll get out of your face, too,” Kelly said calmly. “I want to know about the man who put you in contact with Farid Koshbin.”
Julio sneered at him, squinting with his good eye so that the sunken one glared at him. “You want me to narc. You got to give me something, I give you something.”
“So you knew him.”
“Maybe. I tell you, you tell me I walk.”
Kelly rubbed his jaw with one burned hand, considering. The truth was, CTU hadn’t really planned to hold Julio. They’d planned to turn his name over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then release him. But Kelly held his pose for another moment to let Julio sweat. Julio stared at Kelly’s burned hand, his normally slope- faced expression mixed with disgust and admiration for the agent’s stoicism.
“We’ll see,” Kelly said at last. “Your story’s good, I’ll let you go.”
Now it was Julio’s turn to consider the offer, but he didn’t have many chips with which to bargain. “Look, homeboy, I don’t know the guy’s name. Best Ican tell youisthatheknewsomeofour people back East.” Kelly had read up on MS-13 and knew that ‘back East’ meant Maryland and Virginia, where the gang was strong. “He dropped the right names to me, I helped him out, you know what I’m saying?”
“You saw him?”
“My cell,” Julio said, pointing to his pocket where his mobile phone would have been if CTU hadn’t
taken it.
“What did he sound like? Iranian? Hispanic?”
“No, dude, he was a white boy like you.”
Kelly nodded, expecting to hear it. “Okay, Julio, you sit tight for a minute.”
Kelly left the room and went to Jessi’s desk. She nodded before he even got there. “Best Tony could do from where he’s at.” She pulled up two images on her screen — they were mug shots of two dead men, their faces still covered with dirt stains. The images were low resolution and grainy.
“Can’t we get anything clearer?” he asked.
Jessi shrugged. “He’s out in the middle of nowhere.”
She printed out copies and handed them to Kelly. He returned to Julio’s room.
“Recognize these?”
“Shit, my sister’s camera takes better pictures. They should buy you a new one.”
“If you paid your taxes, we could afford it. Do you recognize them?”
“Yeah, kinda. Looks like two of the ragheads that I brought up. They spent most of the time locked in the back of a truck, you know? But we let ’em out once in a while. Looks kinda like them.”
“Okay, Julio, you’ve been a real hero today. Thanks.”
Kelly turned to leave. As he did, Julio shouted, “Hey, so I get to go, right?”
“We’ll see.”
Walking down the hallway, Kelly thought of the things he had learned. Some of them seemed connected, and some of them seemed random, but all, he was sure, were important. The man who had orchestrated the entry of eight Iranians was white. He worked or spent time on the East Coast, where MS13 was strong. He had connections with MS-13. The Iranians he had brought over were now dead. The Iranian who was supposed to house them, Babak Farrah, had been angry when they left him, so clearly he wasn’t expecting them to go off to commit acts of terror. Militia leader Brett Marks claimed that Farrah was former Iranian intelligence, but according to Farid, he wasn’t. Farrah had wanted Farid dead.
And somehow, Kelly knew, this was all connected with the Attorney General’s efforts to blackmail Debrah Drexler. Kelly didn’t know how he knew, but his investigator’s instincts told him it was far from coincidence that Frank Newhouse’s name came up so prominently in both schemes. The connection, of course, was Newhouse and the Attorney General. Newhouse and the Attorney General…Kelly repeated the phrase over and over, flipping it in his mind like a word jumble that you keep rearranging until it comes close to the solution.
This is what it came down to, always. There were the guns and the tactics and the unbelievable satellites that allowed you to read a note scribbled on the back of someone’s hand, but in the end, it always came down to this: someone sitting in a chair, trying (and sometimes failing) to put the pieces together in his head. Kelly forced himself to put away his anxiety and the pain in his hands and bend his thoughts to the various threads of evidence fluttering like a broken spider web in the breeze.
Newhouse had worked for the AG. If Newhouse did work in Maryland, he could have run into MS
13. There was one connection. If Newhouse wanted an alias that no one — not even the CIA and FBI— would track, the Attorney General could arrange it. There was another connection. Frank was working for Justice…Frank was also working for the Iranians…No, Frank wasn’t working for the Iranians. Marks was wrong. Farrah was pissed that the Iranians hadn’t stayed and worked for him. The Iranians had been killed…before or after the terrorist plan was put into effect? Kelly had to assume they were killed prior to the event, because the event hadn’t happened yet. Why bring them into the country and then kill them? Had there been an argument? No. They were killed by the driver of the Ready-Rooter truck. The truck had planned to leave Cal Tech without being noticed. The murders of the Iranians had to be part of that plan. So again, the question: why go to the trouble of sneaking them into the country and then killing them?
Kelly couldn’t find a way to reorganize the loose strands. He had to change strategies. Stop thinking about the terrorist threat and Frank Newhouse. Think of it a different way. Think of what was easy to find and what was difficult. The facts that were difficult to uncover were the ones the bad guys feared the most.
Kelly wished he had Jack on the phone, but he wanted to sort out his thoughts first. The facts that were easy to find were, as far as he knew, these: there were terrorists in Los Angeles (Marks had told them so); the terrorists were Iranians; the terrorists had stolen an EMP device from Cal Tech; the terrorists were going to set off a bomb over Kansas.
Kelly reviewed that list, and scratched off one thing. It had not been easy to discover that the terrorists had stolen an EMP device. He looked at his burned hands for a minute — they had learned that only because he had gotten to the condo in time and stopped the bomb. In fact, the bad guys were so determined to keep the EMP clues away from them that they almost blew up two entire floors of a building. And apparently Frank Newhouse had tried to kill his own girlfriend, the only person who’d given them a lead on his alias. If CTU hadn’t learned about the EMP theft, what would they know: terrorists in Los Angeles; terrorists were Iranians…terrorists planning to set off EMP device over Kansas.
Now how could we have learned about the Kansas strategy so easily without learning of the EMP device itself? Kelly thought. That information came easily because it came from.
“Oh, shit,” Kelly said out loud.
The information on the EMP burst over Kansas had come from Brett Marks.
The information on Frank Newhouse’s Iranian connections had come from Brett Marks.
The information on the terrorist cell in Los Angeles had come from Brett Marks.
And every single one of those pieces of information had been wrong.
Los Angeles was not famous for its skyline. There was a small cluster of tall buildings downtown, and the Westwood area had another tiny forest of them. But the closer one got to the ocean, the fewer there were, until there were none at all, with only one exception: Century City. This tiny enclave, made up of a few residential blocs, FOX Studios, and the outdoor Century City shopping mall, also included the two massive Twin Towers of the Century City Plaza. These two towers, forty-four stories high, were prominent enough that, on the morning of 9/11, they were considered viable targets for a West Coast follow-up attack by al Qaeda operatives.
A massive plaza served as a foundation for the two massive buildings. The plaza also housed the Shubert Theater, Henry’s Grill (home, for those who were interested, of the Annual Bad Hemingway writing competition), and the ABC Network. But all these were only foothills clustered around the mountains that rose into the sky
