respond.
Jack wanted assistance, but he didn’t want it just yet. He jumped back over to the blue-shirted man and crouched down beside him. The man was shuddering and sobbing from pain. There was blood on his pant leg, so Jack knew without looking underneath that the fracture was compound. His shin had snapped when the police van turned over.
Jack grabbed his face in one hand and turned his chin until their eyes met. “Your name.”
The man sobbed again, but said, “Kasim Turkel.”
“Kasim, you’re going into shock,” Jack said calmly. “Your leg is shattered and you’re hemorrhaging all over the place. You’re going to die, unless I get you help right now. Do you want to die?”
Kasim shook his head.
Jack sat down and sighed. “Personally, I don’t care one way or the other. You can live or die, it’s all the same to me.” Kasim looked up at him in fear. Jack continued. “So if you want me to care, one way or the other, that is, it’s going to be very important how you answer the next few questions. Do you understand?”
Kasim nodded.
Jack replied with a look of satisfaction. He tapped the barrel of the Beretta directly onto Kasim’s broken leg. Kasim screamed. “Good. Let’s start.”
Celia stood up as Eli Hollingsworth, the Director of NHS, walked in. He was wearing a sterile suit that had been hastily pulled over his business attire. “Show me,” he said tersely.
Celia stepped out of the way and let him examine the blood sample. By the time he straightened, his face was grim and looked far older than his forty-seven years. “The data you’ve collected on this sample matches information we just received from Brasilia. Local authorities down there in the province of Minas Gerais found a local in his hut. His body looked like it had been torn apart, but it turns out the skin ruptures weren’t caused by assault. The skin had broken open due to hemorrhagic fever of a kind not previously recorded.”
“Most hemorrhagic fevers originate in Africa,” Celia pointed out.
“Not this one,” Hollingsworth guessed. “At least, not according to current evidence. This is the only case so far. It happened in a populated area with no sterility and high probability of transference from one host to another. No one would have brought the disease down there, there’s no reason to. So we have to assume that it originated there.”
“But now it’s here,” Celia said. “Do we have more information on the patient here? Were they in Brazil?”
“CTU hasn’t released it yet, for security reasons. All we know so far is that exposure probably took place this morning around nine o’clock,” Hollingsworth replied. “One more thing. There is one difference between this virus and the one in Minas Gerais. This one seems to replicate more slowly. I’d guess the local patient won’t become seriously compromised until about twenty hours or more after exposure. The strain from Brazil killed its victim in less than twelve.”
“So we’re dealing with two strains,” Celia said. “And we have no vaccine for either of them.”
Kasim Turkel screamed again, but his cries sounded thin and empty on the deserted street. The blond man was barely touching him, but he kept tapping the barrel of his weapon right on the jagged spot where his leg bent at an unreal angle.
“You are part of the Eastern Turkistan Independence Movement?”
“Yes.”
“And you hired Ayman al-Libbi to come to this country and attack the G8 summit?”
No answer. Tap, tap went the muzzle.
“Yes, yes!” Kasim shrieked.
“What is he planning?”
“I don’t know.”
Tap, tap, tap.
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” he screamed in Uygur, then in English.
“He needed help once he got here,” Jack said. “Where did he go? Who did he meet with?”
“I don’t—”
Tap.
“Aghh!” Kasim sobbed. “I…I never met him before. We took him, but we waited outside. I don’t know what he wanted.”
“Names,” Jack said threateningly.
“F-Farrigian.”
Tamar Farrigian. Jack knew him. He was a fence and trafficker who usually played in the shallow end of the pool. He was a sometime informant for CTU and kept out of trouble enough to continue in that useful role. But if he was selling arms to major players like al-Libbi, his time had come.
“What did he buy?”
“Bombs. Or rockets. Something explosive. I didn’t see what.”
“When was he planning his attack?” Jack asked. “Where?”
There was no answer. He tapped Kasim’s leg, but the man only screamed and sobbed in his native language. Jack didn’t press further — it would have surprised him if al-Libbi had shared his plans with his employers.
“What about the virus?” he asked, thinking of Kim.
“Wh-what?” Kasim replied. There was genuine confusion in his voice.
“The virus!” Jack said, poking harder at the leg.
“I don’t know, I don’t know what that is!” Kasim insisted, once he’d stopped crying. “What virus?”
Jack believed him.
The Chinese Consulate was downtown, near Vermont and Wilshire and a stone’s throw from Lafayette Park. A run at breakneck speed along the cliffs of Mulholland Drive to avoid the riot area, a race down the curves of Laurel Canyon, and then a hard left turn along Third Street with little regard for red lights and less for anyone else’s right of way, all helped Nina Myers reach the building in under thirty minutes.
She was expected. The demure young woman in the gray dress suit took a cursory look at her credentials, then spoke softly into her tiny headset in Chinese before rising and escorting Nina to a side room with a short, wide table surrounded by thick leather chairs. Her shoes made almost no sound when she walked.
“Water?” was all she said. When Nina declined, she gave a short bow and vanished.
Richard Hong entered a moment later, as boisterous as the girl had been timid.
“Ms. Myers, how are you?” he said in a very American accent, shaking her hand vigorously and dropping down on the couch opposite her and crossing his legs. The table, made more for coffee than for meetings, came only to his raised foot, and he tapped it gently and thoughtlessly. “What can I do for you?”
Nina knew this game, and she didn’t want to play it. She cut through the layers of diplomacy, if for no other reason than she knew it was not the Chinese way. “You can tell me why the Chinese government never told us that Marcus Lee was really Nurmamet Tuman, and why he is giving money to ETIM.”
Nina couldn’t have caught Hong more off guard if she’d jumped up on the table and slapped him in the face. The Chinese official straightened, and as he did, the diplomatic facade melted off his face. His black eyes gleamed. He looked at her, then quickly to the door, and then back, and in that moment Nina knew three things: the room was bugged; her accusations were serious enough that Hong thought men might burst into the room; and someone higher up than Hong had decided to let this all play out.
Hong tried to recover by reciting a memorized line. “There is no ETIM.”
Nina started to protest, but Hong waved her off, recovering some of his former gallantry. “Oh, of course there are a few malcontents,” he said. “But to call them a real organization would be like calling the Clippers a real basketball team, eh? Factual in the strictest sense, but meaningless in the practical world.”
“Well, they are real enough to receive two million dollars. And Tuman is real enough to give it to them. He’s also apparently clever enough to change his dossier so that no one noticed that he changed his name, or that he grew up in the heart of the East Turkistan resistance in Urumchi.”
Hong glared at her in a decidedly undiplomatic way. She wasn’t intimidated. Very few things intimidated her, and none of them were in this room.
