Eventually, though, her conscious mind would not be denied, and she came to. She was lying on her side, hooded, with her hands bound behind her back. Her ankles were tied as well. She was lying on a hard floor. Voices from another room drifted toward her.
“. ill her. Jesus, we’re in it this far. What difference does it make,” someone was saying.
“A great deal of difference,” said another voice, a very calm voice. “There is a distinction between killing for the cause and outright murder. You know that.”
“I know that makes you comfortable to say it,” replied the first speaker. “All I know is that I’m going to jail if they catch me, and so I don’t want to be caught.”
Mercy shifted her arms a little, trying to get some blood back into them. As she did, she felt something jab into her hand. It was a nail of some kind, sticking up from the floorboard. She rubbed her wrist on it and felt the cords catch. She listened again — the voices came through a wall. There was no other sound. If someone was in the room with her, he was quiet as a ghost. She rubbed the cord against the nail again…
Driving a borrowed SUV with a siren, Jack made good time from CTU to Federal Plaza. No call came during the drive, which meant that either the dialysis had worked or the terrorist wasn’t bothering to issue another warning. Jack didn’t care either way. He’d spent enough time lying down and leaving his daughter out in the cold. He was going to bring her in.
This whole day had turned to hell. He had planned it perfectly, but like all plans it had gone awry, starting with Mercy Bennet’s appearance at the Federal Building. Jack hadn’t counted on that. Their meeting had triggered a series of events that had spun the whole day out of control, and drawn his daughter into danger she did not deserve. But he was determined to take care of that.
As he drove, Jack sorted his list of worries. He had to get Kim out of harm’s way. He had to find al-Libbi and this virus. And he had to make sure al-Libbi’s plot against the G8 was neutralized.
And then there was Mercy. She’d been taken by the terrorists. She might be dead, she might be under torture. And he was doing nothing about it. He recalled his own words to her:
Jack turned onto Westwood Boulevard, which marked the eastern edge of the protest perimeter, and drove south past Wilshire Boulevard until he reached Olympic Boulevard, then swung west until he came to Veteran. He turned right back up Veteran until he reached the same parking area Mercy had discovered. Jack parked and looked around for the nearest set of available uniformed cops.
“Hey, gentlemen, can you help me?” he asked, showing them his badge as he approached.
One of the cops turned toward him, and Jack recognized the face and the bandaged wrist at the same time. “Oh, it’s you,” the cop said. “You back for the other one?”
Jack hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he thought of basic infantry training: in an ambush, attack the attack. “Special Agent Jack Bauer, Counter Terrorist Unit,” he said in his command voice. “I need help from a few of you guys. Come with me, please.”
Ayman al-Libbi parked a dark blue Toyota Sentra close to the curb on a residential street in Brentwood, California. Brentwood was the next enclave over from Westwood, separated by the wide 405 Freeway. Not quite as large or wealthy as Beverly Hills, it was still drenched in money. The neighborhood was wealthy enough that his cheap auto would eventually draw attention, but for the rest of the day it would be mistaken for a car driven by a maid. By nightfall, it would no longer matter.
He checked the address. The house he was looking for was several doors down, a two-story house with a wide grass lawn, red-tiled roof, and a wall that hid a patio before the door. It reminded Ayman of the architecture of Spain. A green pickup truck was parked in front of the house, and he could hear the high-pitched whine of a leaf blower.
A leaf blower, he thought. The sound of the leaf blower made him angry in an irrational way. It seemed to represent everything he despised about the West — countries full of people too lazy to rake their own leaves, who used gasoline imported from the Middle East to power machines to move the leaves around for them. And then, of course, they would bomb those Middle Eastern countries to keep the price of gasoline low. It was the height of decadence.
By the time Ayman reached the Spanish house, the leaf blower had stopped. A pot-bellied Mexican man in green pants and a green shirt walked down to the sidewalk and put the leaf blower in the back of the white truck. He removed some kind of small shovel and then turned back toward the house. As Ayman approached, the gardener knelt down along a stone walkway that led up to the wall. Long-leafed agapanthus plants lined the walkway, resting in freshly dug soil.
“Those look good,” Ayman said pleasantly.
The gardener turned, his round face covered in a sheen of sweat. “Eh? Oh, thank you,” he said, saluting with his little shovel. He had a gentle Mexican accent. Ayman, who spoke four languages, understood how hard it could be to rid the tongue of the rhythms of home.
“Is this a good time to plant agapanthus?” Ayman asked.
The gardener had already turned back to his planting. Now he turned fully toward Ayman and smiled. “No. But…” He pointed the shovel toward the house and rolled his eyes.
Ayman nodded. “Well, we all work for someone.”
The gardener stood up and wiped his brow. “That’s the truth. Even though I like to think that I work for myself.” He walked past Ayman toward his truck, which had the words “Sanchez Landscaping” on the side.
Ayman followed him to the truck. “If we are lucky, we serve our own ends. But we work for others. Have you owned your own business for long?”
The gardener, Sanchez, opened the passenger door of his truck and reached inside for a card. “Nine or ten years, I think. Here.”
He turned to give Ayman the card and was surprised to find him standing so close. Ayman pushed the gardener almost gently back onto the passenger seat. As Sanchez lost balance, Ayman lifted a silenced.22-caliber semi-automatic handgun and shot him in the head.
Jessi Bandison was potshot-ing. At least that was her word for it. Chris and Jamey had assigned her to track down any connections between the terrorist Ayman al-Libbi and any groups that might want to cause trouble at the G8. The problem, of course, was that there were a thousand groups that
After that, Jessi had transferred from a resource-oriented search to a motive-oriented. Falun Gong came up again and was discarded. The East Turkistan Independence Movement, or ETIM, was the most likely candidate simply because they had an office in Los Angeles, which proved they were politically savvy and had some resources. But the “office” turned out to be a Mongolian barbecue restaurant in a strip mall, and every source Jessi dug up on ETIM in eastern China was roadblocked. Beijing was very tight-lipped about political activism, especially when it involved violence. As far as the Communist Party was concerned, ETIM didn’t even exist because there was no East Turkistan at all.
“Any luck?” Chris Henderson asked.
“Nada,” she said, stiffening a bit. Henderson had never been anything but cordial to her, but somehow he gave her the creeps.
Bits of data shining out of the computer screen reflected on her light chocolate-colored skin and round cheeks. “We don’t have much data on activity inside China. I’m just potshot-ing now.”
Chris read the screen, conscious of how close his hand was to her shoulder. “You’re back on ETIM. I thought that was a dead end.”
“Oh, I’m not, really,” she said. “It’s all the shotgun approach at this point. I’ve got the computers doing a random match on any names that appear to be of eastern Chinese origin with any other unusual activity, such as
