A line of mounted policemen was charging down Wilshire Boulevard to scatter the crowd. It was archaic, but no less terrifying for that fact: a line of horsemen twenty strong, the horses charging at a steady lope, their eyes rolling in their heads, the riders holding riot clubs, herding the crowd of people like so much cattle.
At that moment, Jack’s phone rang. “Jack, it’s Chris,” Henderson said quickly. “Are you still in the crowd?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Get out,” Henderson commanded. “Some protestors just beat two cops nearly to death. LAPD is calling in the cavalry. They’re using rubber bullets.”
Jack hung up and looked for some escape route, but he already knew it was too late.
8. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Jessi Bandison’s line buzzed. “Yes?” It was CTU’s call center. “You’ve got a call from the
Russian Embassy.” “I’ll take it,” Jessi said. “Jessi Bandison,” she said as the connection was made. “Miss Bandison,” said a female voice in smooth English,
with only a hint of accent around the edges. “I am Anastasia
Odolova. Anna, if you like.” “Jessi, then. What can I do for you?” “A mutual friend suggested I call you. I might be able to
help you with what you’re looking for.” Jessi found herself wondering what Odolova looked like.
Her accent was almost cartoonish, and Jessi couldn’t help imagining a lean vamp in a slinky black dress. She herself was round and chocolate-skinned, the opposite of a Russian seductress. “Okay, thank you. I was hoping —”
“You wish to know about Marcus Lee.”
“Right,” Jessi said. She rolled her eyes. Maybe it was the smooth, almost studied lilt of the Russian accent, but Jessi felt ridiculously like a 1950s espionage agent. She ought to be wearing a trench coat. “I’m running down information on him and I noted that there’s been an information exchange between us and the SVR,” she explained, referring to Russia’s foreign intelligence service. “I’m curious to know if you have any additional information I can use to corroborate my own.” That was standard operating procedure when talking with foreign entities: never admit how little you know. But Jessi wasn’t well versed in deception, and the words felt large and clumsy as she spoke them.
A smile spread itself across Odolova’s words, as though she understood exactly what Jessi was not saying. “I am happy to help you,” the Russian said with a slightly aspirated “H” in each word. “In fact, I believe I have what you need. We have a more extensive dossier on Marcus Lee, including”— Odolova paused for dramatic effect —“including his real name.”
Jessi’s heart skipped a bit. There were no aliases in her file, and no aliases according to the Chinese dossier she’d seen. To an analyst like her, a name was like the single thread that, when pulled, could undo the knot. “Yes?”
“I suggest you pursue the name Nurmamet Tuman. You will find that he is not from Shenzhen, but in fact he was born in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.”
Jessi furrowed her brow. “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous…?”
“I believe the separatists refer to it as East Turkistan.”
Wilshire Boulevard had turned into a river of people, and Kasim Turkel was being carried east by the current. The mob surged en masse away from the charging horses. For a split second, Kasim considered resisting, but he nearly lost his footing. To fall meant being trampled to death by stomping feet and, afterward, galloping hooves. So he ran with the crowd, swimming his way toward its edge like a man struggling toward the banks of a river. But each person he tried to push past panicked and clawed at him. The protestors and their chants were gone, replaced by mid-brained primates fleeing a pack of predators. Screams and shouts of anger and fear filled Kasim’s ears, punctuated by the sharp report of gunfire.
Kasim had been in that place of terror before — in the streets of Urumchi when the Chinese soldiers charged the pro-independence demonstrators. Kasim had been a teenager then; that afternoon had become a jumbled memory of arms and legs and screams, smoke, and tear gas. In his panic, Kasim saw once more rifle butts raised up and brought down violently on the heads of wailing Uygur women, children screaming for their parents, and men being dragged into waiting trucks. Though the images had blurred into one long scene of terror, the emotions of that night were as sharply defined today as they were ten years ago. That was the night of Kasim’s metamorphosis. That was the night the independence-minded boy was transformed into a freedom fighter.
Kasim had no idea where he was going. He knew the policemen on horses were behind him, but ahead he saw black smoke, like the smoke of burning tires, mixed with the white smoke of tear gas. Tear gas meant the police were close by, and he feared the American police were boxing them in to kill them all. Somewhere in his skull, a tiny piece of his mind told him that the Americans did not operate this way, but that tiny fragment was overwhelmed by the seething reptile of his mid-brain that understood only fear and anger. Terror had gripped him as it had gripped all those around him.
In the midst of all that confusion, Kasim looked around for an escape route, and his eyes fell on the face of an American man. The man had blond hair and wore a green shirt, but it was his eyes that caught Kasim’s attention. Those eyes were locked on Kasim with fierce intent. And in that moment, the same reptilian brain that drove Kasim along with the terrorized crowd told him that this man was a predator, and he was the prey.
Forgetting the crowd, risking the loss of his footing, Kasim turned at an angle to the human current and swam toward the far side of the street, scratching and clawing his way through anyone and everyone in his path. Someone shrieked at him and scratched at his face, but he pushed him down, stepped over him, and surged forward. He reached the sidewalk. The crowd was thinner here. He was facing a wall and knew that on the other side was a wide open space — a graveyard of soldiers, the Veteran’s Memorial. Kasim slithered along the wall, buffeted by people running past him. He reached the corner, the Federal Building still looming on the south side of the street; here on the north side, he was standing before a huge engraving built into the wall of the memorial. There were three figures carved in alabaster, three men with soldier’s uniforms from different time periods. Beside the memorial was a side street, far less crowded. Kasim started to run.
Instantly he felt something hard and heavy slam into his back. He flew forward and hit the ground hard, cutting open his chin and shoving all the air out of his body in one agonizing punch. He gasped for breath. Before he could regain his senses he felt strong hands grab his shoulder and spin him over. Kasim blinked up into the blue sky and sunlight. He was looking up into the face of the blond-haired predator.
“Don’t move,” the man snarled in a voice that sounded like smashing gravel. “Federal—”
But his words were cut off. In the same instant that he had spoken, dark shadows appeared behind him, blotting out the sun. More hands grabbed the blond man and pulled him off Kasim, slamming him to the ground. Kasim started to rise, but someone’s knee planted itself firmly on his chest. “LAPD, stay down!” someone ordered, and Kasim had no strength left to argue.
At the edge of his vision he saw the struggle as uniformed policemen restrained the blond man, who was yelling something. One of the policemen jabbed a small canister into the blond man’s face. There was a hissing sound, and the blond man gagged and coughed.
Chaos and hell.
Those two words kept repeating in Mercy’s head like a violent mantra. The general vicinity of the Federal Building had exploded into a full-scale riot. Packs of protestors ran this way or that, some of them fleeing the scene. Others seemed to have produced bandanas and masks from nowhere. She saw a Latino man in a “Save the Rain Forest” T-shirt light a Molotov cocktail and throw it at a police car. A man and a woman staggered past her, supporting each other as they walked. Both were bleeding from the head.
It had taken Mercy twenty minutes to travel the three blocks from the street she’d been on — somewhere
