“I’m following a trail that leads from a CIA file to Russian intelligence. Can you put the word out for me?”
“Do I get a dinner out of it?” Kelly laughed.
Jessi felt her heart flutter. She shouldn’t be flirting with him.
“Deal,” he said. “Expect a call.”
Jack slipped out of the double doors and ran behind the line of officers near the entrance of the Federal Building.
The scene was rapidly spiraling out of control. A bottle shattered on the ground a few feet behind him. Dark smoke mixed with the plumes of tear gas, and Jack knew that protestors had set fire to something, probably a car. He also knew that over at the Veteran Center, half a mile away, LAPD had mustered the horse-mounted squad. If the violence continued, they’d be charging down Wilshire Boulevard, backed up by rubber bullets.
Jack reached the north end of the Federal Building. “I’m here,” he said into his mobile phone. “Talk to me.”
He was still in touch with Cynthia Rosen downstairs in the command center. She talked back to him now. “He’s still there. Getting tough to stay on him, though. Bodies are starting to fly around there.”
“I’m there.”
The north side of the Federal Building was the narrowest plot of land — an arcade no more than ten yards wide, with a grass lawn another twenty yards, and then the street.
LAPD’s original plan had blocked traffic from the street, allowing the protestors to occupy the boulevard and leaving a healthy perimeter between them and the building. The riot had changed all that, and as Jack rounded the corner, the crowd was pushing its way onto the concrete. There was a police line there as well, and in Jack’s view they were exercising admirable discipline. Protestors were pushing at their phalanx of riot shields, but they had yet to bring their batons to bear.
“He’s at your nine o’clock,” Rosen said. “Blue shirt.”
Jack looked to his left. It was nearly impossible to get a clean look at anyone beyond the riot shields and in the swarming crowd. But a flash of blue caught his attention and he focused on it. The man wearing the shirt did not stand in the front ranks, but close enough to be noticed, raising his fist and yelling at the police line.
Jack hesitated before moving on. Something about this man’s presence at the protest didn’t make sense. Why would a terrorist working for Ayman al-Libbi bother with the political protest? It didn’t make sense even to risk a showing. There was no upside, and al-Libbi could not be completely confident that Federal investigators hadn’t identified at least some of his help. So this man was either so far down the food chain that al-Libbi considered him unimportant, or he had some other reason for keeping him at the protest. Jack tucked that thought away as he made his move.
He did not want the subject or anyone nearby to see him come from the Federal Building, so he turned back around the corner, then passed through the police line.
“Where do you think you’re—?” one of the officers asked.
“Federal agent,” Jack said, flashing his badge. He held it tight in his left hand, figuring he might need it again soon.
Crossing the line between the police phalanx and the rioters, Jack felt like a sailor leaping from the ship and into a choppy sea.
“Who the hell are you?” a young man challenged, grabbing Jack as he pushed his way into the crowd.
Jack kneed him in the groin. “No one to mess with.”
He stepped over the man and into the space created where he fell. A few more people yelled at him or clutched at him, but Jack ignored them, and a few steps later he was among people who hadn’t seen him and didn’t pay attention to him except for the second during which he pushed past them. They were all chanting in the same rhythm, but he had the impression the words changed from group to group, as though the rioters were made up of distinct groups with distinct messages who’d all fallen under the same spell. As he made his way through the crowd, rounding the corner of the building, a young Latino pushed him aside and threw a bottle. Jack watched it spin through the air toward a police officer, who ducked behind his shield as the bottle bounced away. The young man smiled at Jack and said something in Spanish that he didn’t quite catch. Jack resisted the urge to punch him in the face and moved on.
He waded through the crowd and reached the north side. Using the building as perspective, he made his way back to the point where he’d seen the blue shirt. There was an ebb and flow to the mob as it pushed close to the police barricade and then gave way, and the blue-shirted man was no closer to his original position than a man overboard at sea. But Jack spotted him at last, a few yards away. He shoved his way past four or five short Latino men dressed in primitive costumes, with signs that read “dejar la amazona tranquila!”, elbowed through two men holding a banner that said, say no to china! remember tiananmen! Finally, he forced an open space next to the man in the blue shirt.
Jack had expected him to look Middle Eastern, but if looks were any indicator, the man’s background was farther east and north. He looked Chinese, or Slavic, or both. Jack had traveled in the “-stans” that were the former satellites of the old Soviet Union — Uzbekistan, Turkistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the like. The blue-shirted man reminded Jack of men from that region. This thought reminded Jack of something he’d heard in a briefing several weeks earlier, but he couldn’t recall it at the moment.
Jack pulled out his cell phone and activated the camera feature. He knew the blue-shirted man wasn’t paying much attention to him, but he pretended to enter a number and hold the phone to his ear. “What!” he yelled, just for show. “What?” He pulled the phone away from his ear the way people did who’d lost a connection, as though moving the phone a few inches away would improve the reception. In that moment the blue-shirted man’s face appeared on the screen. Jack snapped the picture. A second later he forwarded it to CTU.
Tony Almeida woke with a start when his chin fell forward into his chest. His headache had eased over the last hour, but he was still having that strange post-concussion sensation of layered awareness. Every ten minutes or so he felt as if now, finally, his mind was completely lucid… only to discover ten minutes later that his mind really hadn’t been clear, but
He checked the big round clock on the hospital room wall. He’d been asleep only for a few seconds. Dyson was still in the bed, motionless, the monitors beeping along calmly. Dyson’s skull had been fractured by his impact with the cinder-block wall.
Tony stood up and was glad when the room didn’t spin. He walked over and stood next to the bed, looking down at Dyson. An oxygen tube hung under his nose and draped over his face.
The FBI had vetted Dyson’s record and found nothing. Not trusting them, CTU had done its own research, and even Jamey Farrell, who was a tenacious analyst, had drawn a blank. As far as any of them could tell, Dyson had absolutely no connection to Ayman al-Libbi or any groups that might want to hire him.
Tony opened his cell phone and called CTU.
“Jamey Farrell.”
“It’s Tony. Have we had any luck tracking any of the people in the van that took Detective Bennet?”
She sounded mildly annoyed. “Not yet. There’s nothing on the van at all. We ran a check on Frankie Michaelmas. No one knows where she’s at. What makes you think she has anything to do with Ayman al- Libbi?”
“Jack’s hunch,” Tony said. “Why do you ask like that?”
“Ozersky’s a granola. Goes by the name Willow, if that tells you anything. The girl is pretty much the same. She’s an environmental freak, not a political activist. Do you know something I don’t?”
“Just that Jack’s hunches are often right.”
Tony hung up. Jamey had no idea how far out on a limb he’d gone to pursue one of Jack’s hunches. In fact, very few people in CTU knew how far he’d gone. To make it all turn out right, they needed a break — a big one.
