“And so far, you’re the only lead I’ve got,” Tony said to Dyson.
As he looked down, he was sure he saw Dyson’s finger twitch.
Mercy closed in on Seldom Seen Smith.
Smith’s strategy had nearly worked. Mercy had lost him when he plunged into the crowd at the south end of the Federal Building. She’d plunged in after him, past jagged lines of people who seemed hesitant and uncertain. The protest chants had ceased, replaced by a loud, fearful buzz caused by the police activity a block or two to the north. She slid between people and stood on her toes, which did her no good.
She’d grabbed a cell phone out of someone’s hand. “Hey!” the young girl complained. Mercy ignored her and dialed 911, but the circuits were busy. She’d dialed the direct line for her office, but the line rang until a recording came on saying, “Thank you for calling the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Bureau. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911…”
Mercy closed the connection and tossed the phone back to the girl. If she needed another one, there’d be plenty around. She pushed forward, not knowing what else to do, knowing that Smith would do everything he could to lose himself in the huge crowd. As she moved forward, she made mental notes about his appearance: Caucasian male, over six feet, balding with brown hair, eye color probably brown, thin, probably under two hundred pounds…
And then she saw him. He had done the right thing, changing his pace, moving slowly to avoid attention. She would have missed him entirely if luck hadn’t turned her in exactly his direction. Their eyes locked for a moment, his opening wide and hers narrowing sharply. He moved away from her and she moved forward.
She had tracked him that way through the crowd until now, at the far northeast edge of the crowd, almost two blocks away from the Federal Building, he was coming to the edge. Mercy saw open street beyond. More importantly, she saw two uniformed police officers stationed at the corner. Pinning her eyes to Smith’s back, she moved toward the cops. “I’m a cop,” she said. “Detective Bennet, West Bureau. I lost my badge during a pursuit. I need help with an arrest. Can you call for backup?”
“Who’d we call?” one of the uniforms said sarcastically. “Everyone’s here.”
“Then it’s you two,” she said.
“How do we know?”
“You don’t,” she admitted. “But who else is going to walk up to you and say they are a female detective from West Bureau?”
The uniformed cops nodded; not quite convinced, but willing to play this out. They followed her into the crowd. Smith had seen them. As they moved forward, he moved back into the crowd itself.
Much more slowly, in fact. The two uniforms fanned out and easily flanked Smith. Mercy moved forward. Smith had slowed almost to a stop. Was he giving up?
The uniform on Smith’s left moved in. Smith raised his hand and yelled, “I give up! I give up! Stop hurting me!” in a voice full of panic.
The cop stopped, taken aback by the fear in Smith’s voice, since the cop hadn’t touched him at all.
“Stop! Help!” Smith screamed in a high-pitched voice. He lunged forward at the cop, who held up his hands defensively. Smith clutched at the officer but yelled, “Let go of me! Help!”
“Hey, man, he’s not fighting you,” someone standing nearby said.
“Get off him, you freakin’ fascist,” said a blond kid in a Von Dutch T-shirt.
“Get him off me, get him off!” Smith yelled.
The second uniform rushed forward, seeing his partner in a struggle, and pulled Smith away and to the ground.
“Goddamned pig!” the blond kid yelled, angry now.
Mercy saw it happen, but couldn’t stop it. Smith clutched at the officer, preventing him from standing up, but yelled, “Help! Help! He’s breaking my arm!”
Two protestors yelled and grabbed the officer from behind, pulling him away. The officer swung wildly and hit the blond kid in the face. He jumped on the officer’s back, and the first cop, who’d regained his feet, waded in to help. Before anyone could stop it, a huge fight had broken out, and the two uniforms disappeared under a pile of bodies.
Smith slipped away.
At that moment, Jamey Farrell hated camera phones. Worse than useless, they gave the impression of being useful without delivering much on the promise.
She’d received the photo sent over by Jack Bauer — a grainy close-up of a dark-haired man in blue. It might as well have been an Impressionist painting. But Jamey knew her job and she did it well. Within minutes of receiving the file, Jamey fed the data over into CTU’s image-enhancing software. A quick phone call to Jack confirmed that the man was of Slavic/Asian descent, which helped her nudge the program. The computers had spent the last few minutes reconstructing the subject’s face. Every ten seconds or so her computer screen rolled like a wave, and a slightly sharper version of the man’s face appeared. The image had just reached the point where Jamey felt it was worth running through CTU’s facial recognition software.
She used the inter-office line and called over to Donovan Exley, a young analyst with graphics expertise. “Van, I’m going to feed you an image. Can you run FRS on it right away.”
“No prob,” he replied.
Jamey sent the file and nodded in satisfaction. The wonders of science would turn Jack Bauer’s Impressionist painting into the complete biography of a terrorist suspect.
Jack waited impatiently for Jamey Farrell to get off her ass and get him information. He knew that wasn’t fair — Jamey was one of the most capable analysts he’d met. But standing in the midst of ten thousand screaming protestors with clouds of tear gas wafting through the mob did not increase his empathy.
He looked to the east, where the tear gas had been fired. There was dark smoke there, too, probably a car fire, but he hadn’t seen people running from that direction. He guessed that the incident had been isolated. Tear gas had probably scattered the vandals, and so LAPD had backed off.
The blue-shirted man was still close by. Jack had spent the intervening minutes studying the people around him — they were a mix of Slavs and Asians, and they were definitely with the anti-China contingent. With nothing else to do except try to blend in, Jack joined in a chant (something about “China’s record doesn’t rate — keep them out of the G8”) while he formed theories about his subject. He decided that there was only one way the subject could and would be seen at the protest: he was expected to be there. There was no other explanation for why a man with terrorist connections had been seen twice. He wanted to be seen — at least, he’d wanted to be seen the second time. The first time, when the security cameras had caught him in the middle of his meeting with Muhammad Abbas, had been luck — Abbas had stayed away from Federal property like a vampire avoiding a church. But now the blue-shirted man was doing everything he could to get noticed.
Jack smiled grimly at his own detective work. Who needed computers?
A moment later, he felt the change before he saw it. A wave of anxiety swept through the mob, moving like a murmur through a crowd, only stronger, more visceral. Row by row, lines of people turned their heads away from the Federal Building and toward the west. In the distance, someone screamed.
Jack stood as tall as he could, but saw nothing. At the edge of the plaza, near the sidewalk, was a row of short cement pylons. They were designed to look decorative, but their real purpose was to prevent car bombers from driving into the building. Jack pushed his way past murmuring, confused protestors until he found one of these pylons and stood up on it, raising himself a good two feet above the crowd. The screaming increased; the protest chants had turned to cries of fear and terror.
From his vantage point, Jack could see the far west edge of the crowd folding back in on itself like a riptide. And he could see why they were running.
