“You really do love her,” Mercy said. She’d watched the pain on his face when he made the call, and the nearly incomprehensible anguish in his thoughts afterward.
Jack shrugged. “We’ve had a life, you know?”
“I guess,” she said, then added, “but not really.”
He had no response for that. He’d spent his savings of emotional currency on others already, including her. He had nothing to spare for a life and career that had kept her from a husband and family.
The mobile phone rang, saving him from his obligation to respond. “Bad news,” Henderson said. “Santiago and Kalmijn are both gone.”
“Al-Libbi?” Jack asked.
“There’s no knowing for sure, but there are no signs of struggle, and certainly no bodies,” the field operations chief replied. “And phone records show that each residence received a call from Todd Romond’s location not long ago.”
“He was already packed to go,” Jack guessed. “He warned them.”
“Which means they’re in hiding. Let’s work on friends and family and try to find them.”
Henderson said, “I’ll have Jamey Farrell run through video footage and electronic data. Maybe a traffic cam picked up their directions. Long shot, but we’ll try everything.”
“I’ve got an angle I can work,” Jack said.
He hung up and relayed the information to Mercy. “What’s your angle?” she asked.
“I’ll take you there,” he said. This was a moment he’d been dreading.
They drove in semi-silence, punctuated now and then by brief questions filling in bits and pieces of the day. Frankie must have been exposed to the virus at the same time Mercy was, but she’d received the weaponized version, the same one that had been used on the President. They made sure that NHS had tented that safe house as well. So far, they’d been lucky: the virus had been contained at several relatively controllable locations. Mercy herself had been lucky. It appeared she’d absorbed the slower-acting strain.
Mercy didn’t realize where they were going until they pulled up in front of 16150 West Washington. Jack got out and she followed suit, a look of confusion settling on her face. “This…you know what this address is? This is my informant inside the eco-terrorist movement.”
“I know,” Jack said. He climbed the exterior steps to the second floor with Mercy in tow and went straight to the apartment of Ted Ozersky, a.k.a. Willow. He knocked, and the door opened almost immediately. Willow shook hands with Jack and let them both in.
Mercy sat down gingerly, as though she thought the floor might suddenly disappear beneath her. “What’s going on?”
Jack took a deep breath. “Mercy, this is Ted Ozersky—”
“I know him, don’t be an idiot,” Mercy said, suddenly irritable.
“Ted Ozersky is a CTU agent.”
The sentence was such a non sequitur to Mercy that it barely registered. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m a CTU agent, Detective,” Ozersky said. The California drawl was gone. He spoke in crisp, efficient clips.
Jack had been waiting almost a month to tell Mercy the truth, and he’d known since the moment she showed up at the Federal Building that the day had arrived. But he hadn’t had time to consider how to tell her, and there was very little time to spare, so it came out now in a rush.
“Mercy, all the stuff you tried to tell me this morning, about radical eco-terrorists. I knew it was all true. CTU has had its eye on them for a while, but they were tough to get inside.”
Ozersky (she had stopped thinking of him as Willow the minute his voice changed) said, “I had managed to infiltrate Earth First! but I could see that they weren’t a real target for CTU. It was their radical fringe that was the threat. Those guys are paranoid, and I couldn’t get any closer. But I passed along what I did hear.”
“Including, several months ago, that someone in a fringe group had contacted Ayman al-Libbi, trying to learn how he operated,” Jack jumped in. “That’s when Tony Almeida and I got seriously involved.”
“A couple of months ago…” Mercy said. She was in shock.
“One piece of information that Ted passed on was the rumor that the eco-terrorists had someone inside the security services, but we didn’t know who. It could have been FBI, even CTU. It could have been more than one person. At the time, I was nervous about giving our operation too high a profile.
“When Gordon Gleed was murdered, I knew the ecoterrorists were making a move. I needed someone to investigate, someone I knew was good, and that I could keep an eye on without the word getting out that CTU was involved.”
“That you could keep an eye on…” Mercy repeated dumbly. Jack sat ramrod-straight, ready to take the brunt of her anger as soon as the meaning of that phrase seeped in. But she passed it over for the moment. She said, “Are… Jack, are you telling me that you arranged for me to get on the Gordon Gleed case?”
Jack nodded. “And I made sure that Ted became one of your contacts. He was able to feed you information you could use, and it never appeared that the Federal government was involved. Copeland — I didn’t know his name until you found it out — Copeland was paranoid about the Federal government. One whiff of us and I was afraid he’d vanish.”
“Did you know about the virus?” she asked.
“All rumors,” Jack said. “But we knew that the ecoterrorists were trying to improve their game by learning from the big leaguers like al-Libbi.”
The shock was wearing off. Anger crept into her voice. “This morning, at the Federal Building, you made me feel like an idiot.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But at that point we’d narrowed our suspects down. Tony believed that the mole was in the FBI, and that he was part of the surveillance team. I couldn’t be sure if he was listening to our conversation. If he was, I wanted him thrown off the scent.”
“But—”
“Remember, I tried to talk you out of coming to the Federal Building at all, but there’s no stopping you.”
Mercy’s neck turned pink. “So I’ve just been in the fucking way…”
Jack smiled. “Hardly. You’ve done all the work. You found out about the Monkey Wrench Gang. We didn’t know anything about these people except that they, or at least some of them, wanted to work with al-Libbi, who I knew was inside the country. The only snafu was when you came to see me. It made Copeland panic because he thought I was investigating him. He got Kim involved, and he kidnapped you. That threw a wrench into the works. But everything we learned about who they are we learned from you.”
Mercy looked from Jack to Ted Ozersky and back to Jack. The emotions churning inside her were visible on her face. “You used me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. And he was; not sorry for doing whatever needed doing to complete the task. As far as he was concerned, that was the definition of his job. But he had an immense amount of respect for her, and he was genuinely sorry for any pain he caused her.
“The thing to do now,” Ozersky said, saving them both from the tense silence that followed, “is to compare notes. Two people have gone missing. I spent a lot of time on the fringes of the group. You’ve spent a lot of time investigating. Maybe together we can come up with something.”
The next moment was, perhaps, the moment Jack most admired Mercy Bennet. She’d just been humiliated personally and professionally by a man who, from her perspective, had nearly become her lover. But she rebounded almost immediately and plunged into a conversation with Ozersky. He talked about people he’d met on the fringes of Frankie’s circle. She whittled down his list from memory, discarding people she’d investigated and found to be inactive or unenthusiastic when it came to real action. It wasn’t long before they came up with a short list of contacts for both Santiago and Kalmijn that might know their whereabouts.
“Good,” Jack said. “The three of us will follow up on Santiago’s contacts. I’ll call from the car and have Tony Almeida and Nina go after the others.”
“Santiago worked at Earth Cafe over in Venice,” Ozersky said. “We should start there. It closes any minute.”
They stood up, and Ozersky ran to get his gun and badge. During the interlude, Mercy stared daggers at Jack, but said nothing. Jack already felt like he’d been through hell, and something told him it was only the beginning.
