Tony curled his lip unhappily. “Right now we just want to save her life. Where would she be if she’s not home?”
The woman had started crying again, but between sobs she gave them the answer Susan had given her tormentors. Sarah blew off steam at underground parties — raves. She was a lawyer now but she hated her job and forgot her troubles by attending the raves thrown by a college friend who ran a DJ company called Goodnight’s. That was all she knew.
“Jamey, I need to leave,” Jessi said.
Jamey Farrell looked up from her work, bleary-eyed and brain-fried. She’d been through some long days at CTU, and this one matched them all. “Can you stay a little longer? I’m just getting a call from Tony Almeida and I’m going to need some research.”
“No,” Jessi said. “I mean I need to leave CTU.”
Jamey put down her pen. “You mean for good.”
Jessi nodded. “I lost someone today—”
“I know, I heard. I’m sorry. It comes with the territory here sometimes—”
Jessi shook her head. “That’s everybody’s attitude. No one’s even stopped to think about it. Kelly worked here. Okay, not as long as Jack Bauer or some of the others, but he had friends here. But everyone goes on like nothing happened.”
Jamey set her jaw. If Jessi had been hoping for sympathy, she was going to be disappointed. “Listen, ’cause I’m only going to tell you this once. No one here pretends like nothing happened. But if you want to work in this unit, then you have to get tougher than this. In this line of work, people die. And do you know what happens if we stop to mourn them right away? More people die. Those agents out in the field can’t stop to bury every body because they’re busy stopping the bad guys from killing more people. Same goes for us in here.”
“I–I know. that’s why I think I need to leave.” Jessi crossed her arms like a shield. “Jamey, I missed something earlier. I was going over security footage that I’d downloaded and I saw one of those people they’re looking for, Pico Santiago. I could have tracked him, I could have led Jack straight to him, but I missed it because I was upset.”
“Then you screwed up. Now fix it.”
“He’s dead! I can’t make him alive again—”
“No, but you can do your job so the agents in the field do their job and keep more people alive.” She crossed her own arms. “You want to mourn the guy you had a crush on, then do it by getting the guys who killed him.”
With no fear of an ambush, Jack and the others made better time down the hill. They had waited for the mountain rescue helicopter and lost a few precious minutes while Jack explained what had happened to the stricken pilots surveying the carnage, and then double-timed back down the trail.
As Jack, Mercy, and Ted Ozersky climbed back into the car, Jack’s phone rang. It was Jamey Farrell. She briefed Jack on the events Almeida had reported. “Thirty more seconds and I’ll have an address for you. You’re taking one and Tony and Nina are taking the other. They’re the two most probable locations for Sarah Kalmijn.”
“Where’s Henderson? Why isn’t he briefing me?”
“He’s out. The guys you killed may be part of an Iranian sleeper cell. Henderson is leading a raid.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “We keep swinging and missing. We have to hit a home run this time.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Jamey said. She told Jack about the call on his cell phone from al-Libbi.
“Has he made any demands?” Jack asked.
“Not yet, but Henderson and Chappelle are sure he will.”
“We’ll get him first.”
“Here’s the address.” She read off a location.
Christopher Henderson sat in the back of a CTU van studying a hastily generated blueprint of the house owned by Ah-mad Moussavi Ardebili. The easiest way to botch a raid was failure to plan, and Henderson’s five- minute pep talk with his squad hardly counted as planning. But it couldn’t be helped. They were running out of time.
“It looks like there are two rear entrances,” Henderson said to A. J. Patterson, his squad leader. “Send half your men around the—”
“We won’t need it,” someone said from the front of the van. “Look!”
Henderson pushed forward and looked out the window. They were in a well-lit neighborhood of short but well-kept lawns and fairly large houses, many of them rebuilt “Persian palaces” that were popular in the area. In front of one of these, four or five men were hurriedly running out of the houses carrying boxes, which they stowed in the back of a Dodge pickup truck.
“Moving day,” Patterson said, hefting his MP–5. “Let’s see if we can help.”
The CTU van stopped and the agents poured out, shouting at the men to freeze. Three of them did, but two of them ran into the house, with Henderson, Patterson, and two other agents in pursuit.
Henderson was second in the door behind Patterson. There was a loud bang and Patterson fell out of sight. Henderson nearly tripped over him, but managed to keep his feet and squeeze off a burst of automatic fire in the direction of the blast. He barely had time to register that he was in a living room with a fire burning in the fireplace before someone slammed into him, pinning his MP–5 to the wall. But Patterson was suddenly on his feet again. A short burst from his submachine gun made Henderson’s assailant vanish.
The entry team flowed forward, and now Henderson saw a short, squat man with a long salt-and-pepper beard kneeling at the fireplace, squealing at the sight of the CTU team as he lifted a box and dumped documents into the fire. Henderson grabbed the bearded man and hauled him away. Without regard for his own safety, Patterson stuck his hands into the fire and scooped the papers, some of them ablaze, into his arms and hauled them out. He fell on the stack, rolling back and forth with his body to stifle the flames.
“Ahmad Moussavi Ardebili, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts against the United States,” Henderson said, panting. He glanced at the papers. “Start going through these immediately.”
20. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 A.M. AND 3 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
The club was called Plush, and it was anything but. It was, essentially, a giant warehouse space with a long wooden plank that served as a bar. Only two things recommended it: the bar was fully stocked and the DJ was fantastic. Since most people went to raves to drink and dance, the setup was perfect and the club was an enormous underground success.
The ride over had been silent. Jack was completely focused on finding this last person who could stop the virus. Mercy had not had time to recover from the shock of Jack’s revelation, and sat lost in her own thoughts. Ozersky guessed at the tension between them and decided to stay out of it as much as possible.
It wasn’t until they reached the warehouse just off Fairfax Avenue that Jack spoke. “I’ll go in alone. Mercy, you and Ted go in together. We’re looking for the DJ named Good-night. He’s friends with Sarah Kalmijn.”
Ozersky started forward, but Mercy grabbed Jack’s arm and held him back a few steps. “I was thinking in the car. When you were telling me about your marriage, you said you and your wife had gone to Catalina for the weekend, and that it was a great weekend.”
“Yeah,” Jack said noncommittally.
“That’s where you saw al-Libbi, isn’t it? When you got back?”
“Yes,” he affirmed again.
She shook her head in disbelief. “You’re a piece of work, Jack. You used the vacation with your wife as a setup for staking out the docks. You’re the best operator I’ve ever met, but you’re a real son of a bitch.”
