than his share of chaos. He understood that a mob generated its own energy, and that this energy had to be transferred somewhere, somehow. But understanding it did not mean he respected it. The soldier in him felt nothing but disdain for misdirected violence. As far as he was concerned, a crowd of people engaged in protest were exercising their rights in a democracy. He risked his life to defend that right, whether he agreed with them or not. But a mob that destroyed property and caused violence was just a bunch of low-level terrorists.
Jack’s cell phone rang and he flipped it open. It was someone at CTU. “Bauer.”
“Jack, it’s Chris. I’ve got the surveillance team at the Federal Building on the line.”
Jack looked down at the floor, as though he could see through several layers of concrete to the command center below. “I’m at the Federal Building.”
“I know, but with Almeida at the hospital, they didn’t know how to reach you. I’m patching them through.”
There was a click, and Jack said again, “Bauer.”
“Agent Bauer, this is Cynthia Rosen, FBI. Are you still on the premises?”
“Upstairs, watching the shit hit the fan.”
“Listen, bear with me if I’m not sure about this, but my team just took over surveillance after whatever happened this morning, so I’m not totally up to speed. But your unit had requested FRS on a couple of people, didn’t it?”
“That’s right.” Jack watched a glass bottle arc up and out of the mass of protestors and bounce off a policeman’s riot shield.
“Well, we got something. Facial recognition on a guy you had videoed this morning.”
Jack straightened. “Muhammad Abbas?”
“No. Based on the video you guys took, it was the subject he was talking to. We don’t have his name, just a match with the previous video we captured.”
“Better than nothing,” Bauer said. “You have him now?”
“Affirmative. North side of the building.”
“Roger.” Jack slapped his phone shut and ran.
Mercy had no gun, no badge, and no radio, so she had pursued her two subjects on foot. Frankie and Seldom Seen Smith had bolted out the front door and onto a residential street. The small Spanish-style houses and low- hanging power lines told Mercy she was somewhere in West Los Angeles, but she couldn’t see any street signs.
Frankie and Smith ran together for several blocks, but then got smart and split up at a residential street, Frankie swerving west and Smith continuing north. Mercy stayed on Smith. Her feet started to ache almost immediately; having gone from near-zero circulation to a sudden sprint was too much for them. She’d have given anything for a radio, but she refused to quit. She wanted this bastard, if only to prove to Jack Bauer that she was right.
Fortunately, Smith was no athlete himself. She wasn’t gaining on him, but she wasn’t giving ground, either. And so far Smith hadn’t opted for the one thing Mercy feared most — that he’d swerve up a driveway, over a fence, and turn the chase into an obstacle course. Thank god for middle-aged terrorists.
She stayed focused on Smith, but she became vaguely aware of the scene ahead of him. They were running toward a tall building, and there seemed to be some kind of loud noise and movement ahead. They crossed another residential street, and the Spanish bungalows gave way to small apartment buildings and duplexes. Mercy saw a cloud of white smoke in the distance and wondered if there was a fire of some kind. Then she picked up the faint acrid smell of chlorobenzylidene and knew that it wasn’t smoke; it was tear gas. She lifted her eyes up from Smith’s back and got her first clear view of the structure ahead of her.
It was the Federal Building.
Looking beyond Smith, she saw that the disturbance was a mass of people, frothing and surging like waves battering a sea rock. Another plume of tear gas rose up, and she heard wailing sirens mix with the roar of ten thousand people chanting.
Mercy realized what Smith was trying to do and she gave him her grudging respect. If Smith plunged into the midst of that chaos, he would be almost impossible to find.
Even as she thought this, he reached the edge of the crowd.
Jessi Bandison hated puzzles. She hated puzzles in the same way she hated tangles in her curls — they were things that ought not to be, and she felt obliged to work them until they were out of her hair.
“Marcus Lee” was the current tangle she was trying to smooth away. A quick search had pulled up a file full of information on him, but none of it was of any consequence.
According to his file, Lee was a Chinese American who in 1998 had immigrated to the United States, where he already had several family members in residence. The FBI had a file on him, but it consisted of no more than a cursory background check that came up clean.
Jessi had contacted the CIA, hoping they might have done a workup on a former Chinese national. Through their database she managed to obtain a glimpse of the Chinese government’s own files on Lee. The prospect excited her until she’d mined the data and found Lee to be about as interesting as a stucco wall. The man had just enough background to be real but not enough to be interesting: born in Shenzhen, educated at UCLA, then returned to China to work in computers, but never achieved any strong connections in the Communist Party. Eventually he earned a visa and immigrated to the United States, where he’d turned his IT savvy into a thriving software business. He lived in Brentwood, paid his taxes, committed the occasional parking violation, but that was it.
Jessi didn’t like it. The story the data told her seemed believable, but the tangle was still in her hair, and now it was starting to bother her.
“I’ve got two choices,” she said to herself, staring at her computer screen in CTU’s bullpen full of computer terminals. “I can assume that my connection’s wrong, that this bank account has nothing to do with Marcus Lee, and that Marcus Lee is a solid naturalized citizen.”
But that didn’t smooth the tangle, it just ignored it.
“Or I can assume that the account connection is right, and there’s more to Marcus Lee than he wants me to know about.”
It was the bank account that was the key. How was Lee connected to the bank account? Instead of running down Lee, Jessi turned her attention to the Cayman Islands and began to research account number 343934425. Like accounts in Swiss banks, the Cayman Islands accounts were kept confidential, but unlike the Swiss, the Cayman Islanders had neither the tradition nor the backbone to maintain that privacy under pressure. As she dug deeper, Jessi expected to find history on some FBI or CIA investigation that had linked the name Marcus Lee to account 343934425.
She was right that a prior investigation had matched Lee to the account. But to her surprise she found that the investigation itself was Russian. Jessi stared at the screen for a moment, baffled by the notation. But there was no mistake: Russian intelligence had fed the CIA the data. This wasn’t completely unheard of, but to Jessi it was a gaping hole in the road.
Fortunately, she knew someone who might be able to help. She dialed a number she hated to admit she knew by heart.
“Hey,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“Hi Kelly,” Jessi said. “How are you?”
“Well, better now,” said Kelly Sharpton. “I’ve been hoping you’d call.”
“It’s business,” Jessi said.
“Oh.”
Kelly Sharpton had been her boss for a short time at CTU. He’d been brought in on temporary assignment during Jack Bauer’s fall from grace. There’d been a spark between them, but Sharpton had left the unit some time ago, “seduced by the lure of filthy lucre,” as he put it, and the spark had never started a fire. At least that was how Jessi thought of it. But they spoke every now and again when Kelly was in town, and Kelly had been growing more and more obvious with his hints.
“You have some contacts with the Russians, don’t you?”
“Did,” he corrected. “It’s been a while.”
