Kasim had spent the last thirty minutes listening to Muhammad Abbas describe the plan to him. His head was swimming.
This was a whole different world for him — not just the physical world of expensive American hotels and silk suits, but also the world of intrigue. He had plotted and schemed back home, of course, but the plots had been straightforward and the schemes had led almost immediately to action. And always the action had been at his own hands. In his heart, he believed this hiring of a mercenary was distasteful and was frowned upon by Allah. But, by the same token, it was Allah who had led them to Nurmamet, who made all this possible, so maybe it was just Kasim himself who frowned upon it.
“As I said,” Abbas pontificated, “it is important for your group to continue with its normal activities. If your people would normally be at the protests, you must be there. Your absence will make the FBI and others suspicious.”
“It will also give us alibis,” Nurmamet agreed.
“Which you will need,” Abbas assured them. “After tonight, every law enforcement agency from every country in the G8 will swarm over this city like flies on a carcass.”
4. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 A.M. AND 11 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Nina was slowing the CTU car to a stop, but Jack had already jumped out and hit the ground, running through CTU’s doors with a flash of his badge. Henderson was waiting for him in the main room.
“Medical team?” Jack said.
“Conference room,” Henderson said, equally short.
Henderson, and Nina farther off but gaining, followed in Jack’s wake as he burst into the conference room, where three techs with an array of electronic devices were waiting. Jack was already pulling off his shirt and pointing at the bruise on the inner side of his left elbow. It looked as though someone had drawn his blood.
“I’ll explain everything in a minute,” he said to the other agents. To the techs, he said, “Here’s the deal. I think someone bugged me with a tracking device. I’ve got this bruise on this arm, so I’m putting two and two together and figuring that he inserted it there. Find it.”
He sat on the edge of the conference table as they went to work. Over their shoulders and bobbing heads, he addressed Henderson and Nina, delivering a machine-gun summary of the events of the last hour.
“It’s got to be al-Libbi,” Jack said. “The grab was professional. I was in and out in less than an hour, clean and simple.”
Henderson checked some notes he’d gathered while waiting for Jack. “There were no witnesses to the accident, but several residents called in reports on your car and the red pickup, which were left on the side of a residential street. LAPD is doing forensics on them, but I want to send our people down.”
“I guess we have to, but be careful,” Jack said. “This guy has someone on the inside.”
Nina raised an eyebrow. “Not inside CTU?”
“I don’t think inside CTU. He referred to us as ‘Counter Terrorism Unit’ instead of ‘Counter Terrorist Unit.’ That tells me he’s not too familiar. But he knew we were on to him, and he knew I was the agent investigating pretty damned quick after that, and knew enough about me to know I had a daughter and that she was there. That’s a hell of a lot of information to get in just a few minutes. It’s got to be someone inside G8 security.”
Chris pressed the intercom button on the conference room phone. “Jamey?”
“Here,” Jamey Farrell, senior programmer, replied over the speakerphone.
“I need a list of everyone with every agency who is assigned to security on the summit, and who works as a liaison with CTU.”
“Every agency?” Her voice sounded incredulous. “You realize we are talking about the G8, right? That means we’re talking about all the local agencies, plus State, CIA, DOD intelligence—”
“Everyone, please.”
Jack jumped in. “Start with everyone Tony’s come in contact with.”
“Go, Jamey. Thanks.” Chris terminated the line.
Jack had been ignoring the poking and prodding of the techs, but one of them now stepped into his line of sight. “Excuse me.”
“Did you get it out?” Jack asked.
“No. I mean, there’s nothing there,” said the tech.
Jack was surprised. “Really? This guy was positive about tracking me.”
Nina shrugged. “He was bluffing. Maybe he’s bluffing about Kim, too. We should bring her in and have her tested anyway.”
The tech prepped a small syringe. “All I can tell you is that there’s no transmitter embedded in your arm. Nothing on your clothes, either. It looks like they either drew blood from you or injected something into you. We’re taking a blood sample just to make sure there’s nothing nasty in your bloodstream.”
Nina laughed. “Jack’s got plenty of venom of his own.”
Mercy Bennet had just reached her desk at LAPD’s West Bureau. Her desk was bare except for file folders and paperwork from a stack of new cases. She hadn’t had time yet to put up her picture of Tank, her chocolate Labrador, or her favorite quote. It said, “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems or as good as it sounds.” She’d written it herself soon after making detective. In the middle of her first case — the murder of a small-time dealer in Venice that she’d hoped would break open a whole drug ring — when the trail was getting cold, she’d scribbled it on a yellow sticky note. The maxim applied to every area of her life, so she’d had the little sticky note laminated and taped to her computer screen. Her eyes went to it every time she heard news, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
But it wasn’t there at the moment. She hadn’t bothered unpacking yet. West Bureau had been her first assignment as a detective, six years earlier. She’d managed to scratch and claw her way up the ladder, fighting past other up-andcomers reaching for the next rung and pushing against the weight of mid-career sloths who wouldn’t move aside for her, until she made it to the department’s prestigious Robbery Homicide Division. She’d spent two years there, working the meaty cases requiring the biggest budgets, until she’d attracted the attention of a deputy chief looking for sharp minds and go-getters in the post-9/11 era. The minute Homeland Security was established and the department needed a liaison to work with the Feds and the Counter Terrorist Unit, Mercy volunteered. She assumed the move would be an ascension, a step up from tracking cop killers and high-profile celebrity murders to hunting terrorists alongside secret agents.
But as with many departmental changes related to Homeland Security, this job had evolved — or, rather, devolved— into administrative and bureaucratic nonsense. Instead of participating in midnight raids on al-Qaeda safe houses, Mercy served as nursemaid to LAPD officials whining about jurisdiction while playing coy with Federal officials whose egos were bloated by their budgets. She didn’t like it, but for the first few months she did what any sane person does when confronted with intolerable government work: she gritted her teeth and bore it, knowing that eight more months of work would give her the Get Out of Jail Free card she needed to transfer to another department.
Unfortunately, all that had changed when she found herself on the receiving end of Ryan Chappelle’s very unpleasant personality. Chappelle was the Regional Director of CTU and a complete twit. Some of the other leaders there had oversized egos, too — George Mason and Chris Henderson among them — but at least they were competent. Chappelle was just a rule book dressed up in a suit, as far as she could tell, and she let him know it whenever his rules got in her way.
The only saving grace — although maybe it was a curse— to her time as CTU liaison was Jack Bauer. She had known from the first day she met him that they were kindred spirits. She also knew he was married, and so when they first started talking to each other, she studiously avoided anything flirtatious. That was her first clue, really: they both tried not to flirt and in doing so they got to know each other well. Jack was a straight line cutting through
