There was a muted beep. Hong said, “Excuse me,” and deftly plucked a mobile phone from his pocket. He opened it and listened, muttered something in Chinese, and pocketed the phone again.
“Ms. Myers, here is what I can tell you: Mr. Marcus Lee, or, as you call him, Nurmamet Tuman, is no threat to you, or to the United States in any way. Between you and me he is a former officer with the People’s Army, and if you cannot guess more than that, then you are not the kind of person I think you are.” By which Hong meant,
“His name is Uygur,” said Nina, silently thanking Jamey Farrell and the other analysts at CTU for the geography lesson she’d received during the drive over. “Before he was retired, did he work in the Xianjing-Uygur Autonomous Region? Did he infiltrate ETIM?”
Richard Hong stood up and smiled warmly, as though Nina had said goodbye instead of asking a prying question. “It was great to meet you,” he said in his casual American way. “I hope to see you around again.” He bent down and shook her hand, stubbornly ignoring the fact that she had not yet stood up. “Have a great day.” Then he was out the door, leaving Nina alone in the room.
Jack had given up the interrogation when Kasim Turkel passed out. He knew he’d gotten everything he was going to get when Turkel gave up the name of Tamar Farrigian. He’d hoped to find out something about the virus, but he wasn’t surprised that Turkel was ignorant of that. Ayman al-Libbi was notorious for playing close to the vest, and had angered his patrons more than once by withholding information from them.
A roar like falling water rolled down Wilshire Boulevard. Jack looked eastward and saw the police line break, cops stumbling backward as rioters broke through, pouring down the street like a reservoir suddenly rushing down a dry riverbed. Idiots, Jack thought. All they would do was bring out the cavalry and rubber bullets again. And for what?
Jack left Turkel on the street, intending to have the FBI or other CTU agents pick him up later. With his leg broken like that, he wasn’t going anywhere. But the injured cop was another story. Jack went back to him.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
The cop shook his head. “Only if you can make the street stop wobbling.”
“Come on.” Jack helped him up and pulled the man’s arm around his shoulder. Together they hobbled back down the road to the Federal Building, through the line of waist-high stone pillars, across the grass, and up to the glass doors. Uniformed officers on the inside opened the doors for them and pulled them inside. There was a short-haired woman with them. She held her hand out to Jack Bauer.
“Agent Bauer, Cynthia Rosen.” Jack remembered her name from the telephone.
“Thanks for your help. Is there a car I can borrow? I have to get back to CTU. It’s urgent.”
Rosen was nonplussed. “Well, yes. But your daughter—”
Kim. Jack felt a tug at his heart, the primal urge a father feels to protect his daughter. Manufacturing the ruse that had brought her into police custody had been hard enough. Now that the immediate danger had passed, he wanted nothing more than to wrap her up in his protective arms. But he did not doubt for a second that she had indeed been exposed to a deadly virus. According to his captor, she had hours before she was in danger or even contagious. That meant the very best way to protect her was to find the people who had put her in harm’s way, make them cure her, and then make them pay.
“Can you have someone escort her home, Agent Rosen?” he asked. “I’ve got to go. It’s urgent. Now please take me to a car.”
The white truck with “Sanchez Landscaping” on the side rolled to a stop at the foot of the circular driveway, where a Secret Service agent stopped him. The Secret Service agent was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but his short-cropped hair, angular build, and air of authority gave him away. Of course, al-Libbi would have known he was an agent even without these clues. He had been warned that the Secret Service might occupy the house.
“Can I help you?” the young man said.
“I guess,” al-Libbi said, affecting a Mexican accent nearly identical to that of the gardener he had murdered. With only a day’s growth of scruffy beard, dark skin, and the accent, he could pass for Latino. He’d done it many times to cross the border into the United States, even being stopped twice and deported, once to El Salvador and once to Guatemala. “I’m the gardener here. Is there something—?”
The Secret Service man nodded as though he’d been expecting the gardener, which was indeed the case. He stepped away from the truck, turned, and muttered something into a microphone at his wrist. A moment later the front door opened and Nurmamet Tuman (whom he must call Marcus Lee) appeared, followed by another Secret Service agent in a suit.
“Is everything okay, Mr. Lee?” al-Libbi asked in his most worried voice. “I have a green card.”
Tuman nodded at him. “Yes, that’s him, of course it is,” he said to the Secret Service agents.
The one in the suit nodded. “Okay, let him through.”
Ayman al-Libbi rewarded them with his best nervous smile and eased the truck forward.
His real name was Dr. Bernard Copeland, and until a short time ago he had planned to save the world.
He stumbled into his fashionable house on Fourteenth Street north of Montana in Santa Monica, closed the door, and fell onto the floor, exhausted. He tugged a small wrapper out of his pocket, unrolled it to reveal a wad of maracuja leaves. He popped two into his mouth and sighed in relief.
Copeland had known for more than two decades that the world was spinning out of control. He’d seen the human species work overtime to destroy its own environment when he worked as a graduate biology student in the Amazon. He’d joined the EPA soon after getting his Ph.D., devoting his energies to the government’s own fight to save the human habitat. But seven years at the Environmental Protection Agency had taught him the true definition of doublespeak, for he found himself under pressure not to fight off developers but to justify alliances with them. The government rationalized its permissive attitude toward industries that poisoned rivers, spewed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and turned acres of vibrant forestland into grazing ground for cattle. Disgusted, he had quit. To hide himself, he’d gone to work for the enemy, sold himself to a research firm studying the medicinal properties of fauna in the Amazon. It gave him an excuse to go back to the land he loved, and it gave him cover. The firm he worked for was pro-industry, and he carried its banner in public loudly and often.
In private, he began to develop relationships inside the real environmental movement. At first he met quietly with members of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, but he knew immediately that they were too tame for his needs. He had worked inside the machinery of government, and he knew that it would grind itself slowly, inexorably, into oblivion. Stopping it would require much more radical means than they were willing to take. But, slowly, his associations in the Sierra Club brought him in contact with more radical sects, until eventually he was having coffee with Earth Firsters and taking hikes with the Earth Liberation Front. Foresighted, he had kept his name to himself, using a nickname from the eco-terrorist’s favorite read,
Copeland was no utopian. He did not expect the world to revert to some antediluvian paradise. He was neither a vegan nor an animal rescuer. He was a scientist. He had studied the data and reached the inevitable conclusion: mankind could not continue to destroy the Earth without consequences. Someone needed to stop human beings from continuing on their destructive path, and for better or worse, Bernard Copeland had elected himself.
He’d spent several years committing low-level acts of terrorism: burning down isolated work sheds owned by timber companies, spiking trees. But even back then he’d known it was only exercise. He could spike a million trees, and it wouldn’t stop the world from destroying itself.
At first he used his scientific background to motivate companies to preserve his first love, the Amazon. He published papers describing the curative effects of turbocuarine, a natural muscle relaxant that had helped Parkinson’s patients; he gave lectures on
None of it mattered. Though revelations like those motivated some companies with promises of profit, there was just too much money being made cutting, stripping, and baring for grazing land or building housing. As the
