Jack hurtled down Temescal Canyon, then swerved onto PCH, determined to get to Marina del Rey as soon as possible. If there was an attack there, Tony would need all the help he could get. The ocean was to Jack’s right, the sun just starting to drop down behind his right shoulder. He glanced in the rearview mirror. His eyes stung from dryness and fatigue.
His phone rang. “Bauer.”
He heard Ludonowski’s voice. “It’s Seth—”
“The Forum,” Jack interrupted. “It’s the Pacific Rim Forum.”
Jack heard white noise, then: “It can’t be.”
Bauer snapped, “I just told you it is. I got it from—”
“Jack, it’s Jamey on the line, too. The forum isn’t right. We tracked the communications between Zapata and Jemaah Islamiyah. They’re pretty one-way. It was Zapata who initiated the conversations. He’s the one who put the idea out there. The e-mail that mentioned ‘Papa Rashad’s factory’ came from an IP address at a Starbucks a block from the Biltmore where Zapata was staying. Another came from a cafe in Pacific Palisades, less than a mile from Risdow’s address.”
Jack absorbed this information quickly. “You’re talking about what I was talking about. Zapata making us chase our own tails.”
“Giving us a pattern to follow,” Seth observed.
“Then he lied to Risdow, too,” Jack said, accelerating through a yellow light. “He seemed sure it was the forum.”
“How do you know?” Seth asked.
“We can ask him when he gets in,” Jamey said.
“I’m not bringing him in,” Jack replied.
“I know,” Jamey replied, sounding a bit confused. “The police are.”
Her bewilderment was contagious. Jack felt it creep through the phone into his chest. “What are you talking about?”
“The police. They collared Risdow. We put an APB out automatically, even though you were headed for his house. Santa Monica PD picked him up on Lincoln.”
Jack swerved out of his lane and onto the sidewalk, standing up on the brakes and bringing the borrowed Mercedes to a halt inches from the fence of a public parking area.
“Are you saying Kyle Risdow was on Lincoln Avenue five minutes ago?” Jamey was now impatient as well as confused. “Well, yeah.” “I just came from his house. I was talking to him five minutes—”
Pressure welled up in Jack’s chest, threatening to burst like a capped volcano. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t have made such an amateurish—
“Bring up a photo of Risdow. Tell me what he looks like.”
Seth answered. “Hold on. Driver’s license photo from a couple of years ago. Caucasian, pretty typical WASP-y type. Blond hair, blue eyes. Six-foot-one according to this—”
“Damn it!” Jack yelled. Stupid. Bush league. Weak. Letting fatigue make him so sloppy.
“Jack, what’s wrong?”
He was too angry at himself to be embarrassed. “I think I just let Zapata go.”
That had been interesting.
Zapata was driving a rented Ford Mustang down Sunset Boulevard, careful to accelerate to the speed of the traffic around him. His heart was still beating rapidly, though with excitement or fear, he wasn’t sure. Maybe they were the same.
He was forced to acknowledge the presence of luck. As a general rule, he did not believe in it. Luck was the name given by the uneducated to unaccounted-for variables that happened to unfold in their favor. He, Zapata, had always believed that all variables could be calculated if one were meticulous.
This particular event, however, could only be fortune smiling down on him. He had not in his wildest dreams expected any government agent to make the connection between Kyle Risdow and himself. There was, quite literally, no connection that anyone could follow. For the first time in his adult life, Zapata had been utterly and completely shocked by the appearance of the blond man (his ID had said “Bauer”) at the back of the house, and because he believed in coincidences even less than he believed in luck, he knew for certain this was the same man who had killed Aguillar, the same blond man described by Franko, who. Ah.
That was it.
Synapses fired across his brain, bridging the gaps in the story. The blond man who “hadn’t acted like a cop” had saved Lopez. He was a government agent with some sort of special license. Maverick behavior. Zapata understood the premise without needing to know the details. They had sent a maverick after him, someone who did not follow the normal patterns of law enforcement behavior. Zapata saw all the events laid out before him like a storyboard. The agent was thrown in jail, befriended Ramirez, gotten close— literally, a door away. But Zapata had seen that coming. The minute Ramirez broke out of jail with a “friend,” Zapata had ordered Aguillar to kill him and Vanowen. But Aguillar had died, too, and Aguillar had an MS–13 tattoo. Bauer had tracked it to Lopez, and managed (again, luck!) to reach him before Franko could do his work.
Zapata could not see how or why Lopez would have cooperated. Lopez could not have known that he had contracted Franko to kill him. As far as he knew, Lopez hadn’t even known about Risdow. But then, Zapata thought, Smiley was sharper than he showed and he kept his ears open. He could have heard Kyle’s name mentioned, and hoarded the information like a pack rat. But even if Lopez had information, why would he give it to a Federal agent? That part, Zapata could not fathom. There were not enough data.
Briefly, very briefly, he considered abandoning his plan. He’d done so before. No particular scheme held any special place in his heart. His goal was anarchical, not political, and he had always adhered to the maxim that discretion was the better part of valor. There would be other targets.
Yet, he had to admit, he was feeling something else; something new. Pride. That was it. His ego was now involved. No one had ever come close to laying a hand on him, and here this Agent Bauer had come within arm’s reach of him twice in less than twenty-four hours. He was proving to be a formidable opponent.
“Gentlemen, we have to wrap up,” said Martin Webb, rising from the conference table.
The three other men at the table also stood up. The nearest, Frank Nye, from the Board of Directors of Dow Jones, looked aghast. Martin had never seen him in anything but a three-piece pin-striped suit done for him in Bond Street in London. Today he was wearing khaki slacks and a polo shirt. “Marty, you can’t be serious.”
“Why not?” the Fed Chairman asked.
“Well, well,” Nye huffed, “the problem’s still in front of us.”
Martin nodded seriously. “And it won’t be solved on a Saturday night.”
One of the other men, Marion Zimmer, staggered forward. Old enough to have been born when Marion was still a man’s name, his body creaked but his mind was still sharp. “Come Monday, if the markets crash, the country will go with it. You’re the one with your finger in the dike, Webb, and you want to go? We were scheduled for another hour. I flew all the way from—”
“I think we’ve covered everything,” Martin said. He wanted to see his grandson’s fight, although, truth be told, they really had covered everything. They were four old men who wielded great power, but because they were so old, and had wielded power for so long, they’d forgotten that power had its limits. At a certain point, the markets had to be left to chance. “I know what to say tomorrow in the news. I’ll put a brave face on for Monday’s bell, and the rest will take care of itself.”
He left them behind, their faces frozen like old, wrinkled stone, and headed down to a car waiting to drive him to Staples Center.
Pan needed the money, so he’d taken one part of the Zapata job himself. That way he could keep his overall cut, plus one-sixth of the share for the drivers.
Besides, this was the weirdest thing he’d ever heard of, and he wanted to see it up close.
He was driving northbound on the 405 Freeway, one of the main arteries that carried traffic into and out of
