The man stepped back, shaking his head. “I’m from NHS. If you know what’s going on, you don’t want to go in there.”
Mercy started past him. “I’m the one who made the first call. I don’t think there’s contamination inside. He didn’t keep the virus here. Even if there is, I don’t care.”
“Why don’t you care?” the NHS man said.
“Because I’ve already been exposed. Now you’re wasting my time.”
The man’s reaction was visceral. He recoiled from Mercy as she walked up to the door. She turned to Jack. “You want to stay out here just in case?”
Jack considered. Mercy knew more about Copeland than she did. If there was evidence to be found, she was better suited to find it. And he’d be no good to anyone if he infected himself. He hefted his cell phone, indicated he would wait for her call. “Go,” he said.
The front of Copeland’s house included an airlock similar to the one she’d seen at the Vanderbilt Complex. She entered it and then strode into the house.
It was dark. She felt around the walls until she found the light switch and turned it on. The house was very much as she’d left it, except that Copeland’s body had been removed and only the bloodstains marked where he had lain.
There was a certain symmetry to Copeland’s death, and to Frankie’s, she thought. Copeland wanted to be a terrorist for a decent cause, and had been murdered by a more pragmatic, if cold-blooded, killer who understood that terrorism was inherently indecent. Frankie, in turn, had been destroyed by the very weapon she tried to usurp for terrorist purposes. Maybe there really was justice in the universe. But no, there would be no justice unless they uncovered Copeland’s secrets and replicated the vaccine, which meant justice relied, as it did so often, on the determination and stubbornness of fallible mortals like her.
Mercy thought justice ought to choose better champions.
Thirteen. Forty-eight. Fifty-seven. The numbers had no relation to one another that she could figure out, nor could the analysts at CTU find a connection. So their relationship had to be in connection with something else. An address. Most of a phone number? Something…
Mercy wandered the house, soaking in her impressions of Copeland. The house was meticulously kept, befitting a scientist and researcher. Copeland had planned his viral attack on the President with the utmost care. He had even created a contingency plan for dealing with investigators like Jack and Mercy. He was a planner, he was exacting. He was also careful. His operators were fragmented, few of them knowing the whole picture. So she guessed that the numbers were a combination to a safe or a code of some kind. Copeland would keep information (meticulous) but he would hide it (careful).
And he was corny.
There was a moment in Mercy’s investigations when her thinking fell into a groove, when her mind seemed to find the right element, and all of a sudden all extraneous items were redacted. Gone. Leaving only the answer before her, clear and distinct.
The book. It was that book with the stupid title. Mercy searched the bookshelf in the hallway but found nothing. She found a den with a television and two bookshelves packed with titles. Still nothing. She ran upstairs to Copeland’s bedroom, and she found it. An old, nearly faded copy of
Mercy flipped to page thirteen, and smiled.
Al-Libbi’s phone rang. He opened the connection without saying a word.
“You should praise Allah, my friend. Only a moment ago you went from being on our death list to being our most desired ally.” It was the voice from the Iranian ministry.
“If it is the will of Allah,” Ayman said, not really caring if Allah had anything to do with it, as long as he had a home. “Now, to deliver the package to you, I will need some help…”
Jessi tapped on the glass door of Christopher Henderson’s office. Henderson looked up unhappily; it had been a long day and he was looking forward to a moment’s rest. He’d just sat down for a few minutes, rubbing his eyes. NHS had all but taken over CTU to evaluate the threat of the virus. He’d just gotten word from Dr. Diebold that the station had tested negative, and that all personnel were cleared.
“Do you have a minute?” Jessi asked.
“Sure,” he said.
“I didn’t get a chance to talk to Jack Bauer,” she said. “And I haven’t seen any of the updates because the NHS wouldn’t let me near the computers—”
“It’s all clear now,” Henderson said.
“I was just wondering if Jack…if anyone’s heard from Kelly Sharpton.”
Henderson sat back. “Jack didn’t—? No one told you?”
“Jack sent me back here with the prisoner earlier. That’s the last thing I heard from either of them.”
Henderson stood up. “Jessi, I’m sorry. There was a fire-fight. Sharpton went with Jack. He was…Jessi, he was killed.”
Jessi felt all the life go out of her legs and she nearly fell. “Are you — are you sure?”
“Jack was with the body when he called in. He was— Jessi, I’m sorry. I heard you were close with him.”
Jessi felt the tears start coming. She turned and walked out of Henderson’s office.
His name was Todd Romond, and he was getting the hell out of Los Angeles.
“Gone too far, it’s gone too far,” he muttered to himself over and over again as he stuffed clothes haphazardly into a red wheeled suitcase. There was a redeye from LAX to JFK, and he planned to be on it. In New York he could take up with some friends and disappear for a while. His New York friends were old friends, from before his Earth First! days. No one could trace him there.
Someone knocked, and Todd nearly jumped out of his skin. He ran to the door as quietly as he could and peeked through the spy hole. It was only Mrs. Neidemeyer. He opened the door and looked down on her four-foot, ten-inch frame topped with wisps of white hair. She was wearing a pale blue dressing gown.
“Todd,” she said in her deceptively frail-sounding voice. Todd, a sometimes delinquent tenant, had heard how determined and persuasive that voice could be. “Your car is blocking the drive. The tenants will complain.”
“It’s only for a few minutes, Mrs. N,” he promised. “I’m almost out of here. Please excuse me.” He closed the door.
“Well, be sure it’s moved!” she called a little sharply.
He’d be sure. He had more incentive than she did. All she cared about was making sure Junior Merkle didn’t honk his horn and shout when he got home at three o’clock in the morning after playing drums in whatever band he was part of. Todd, on the other hand, was trying to stay alive.
Frankie had done it. She’d contacted terrorists, real terrorists, not people who spiked trees and chained themselves to bulldozers, not people like him. She’d always campaigned for their group to learn how real terrorists operated, but real terrorists blew up babies and old women. All Todd had ever wanted to do was see the rain forests survive his lifetime. He’d been willing to do a lot to make that happen, even shake the government to its own tangled roots.
Todd was an MIT graduate and had come this close to a Fulbright scholarship. He could certainly see the writing on this wall. Smith (Todd had thought of him as Smith rather than Copeland from the minute he adopted the nom de guerre) had dropped out of sight, and his house had looked like a crime scene until the big plastic tent was dropped over it. Frankie had called him less than three hours ago. All she had told him was that she was in charge now, she had backing from powerful friends, and she would get them all out of this. But Todd had listened carefully, and he guessed what she wasn’t telling him. She’d thrown her lot in with murderers and terrorists, and she had given them the vaccine. Todd was sure of it — why else would they work with her?
For Todd, it was only a small leap into the mind of the terrorists: now that they had the virus and the
