“Not really,” Peter replied. “Why you guys? Was Tintfass involved with the FBI? Informing for you, maybe? You guys pissed that Bauer offed him?”
“Bauer’s in the zoo where he belongs,” Fujimora leaned in a little, resting his hands on Peter’s window frame. “Just don’t disturb the animals too much. No one wants to get bitten. Good talking to you.”
Kris Czikowlis plucked a blue pen out of the pocket of her white medical coat and began scribbling on a notepad. It was standard stuff, but she always felt better when she made notes:
The patient lying on the bed in front of her was a male, mid-forties, Mr. Ryan Chappelle. Some sort of government employee or cop. Not overweight, although of course that didn’t rule out some sort of heart condition. No prior signs of distress, until he’d collapsed less than an hour earlier. By the time he arrived at UCLA Med he was comatose.
He wouldn’t be the first government employee, even police officer, to use drugs, and the right drugs in the wrong hands could turn the brain off like a light switch.
A man in a gray suit walked into the ICU, tugging at his tie. He saw the patient and then Kris. His eyes slid down her body and then back up to her eyes. But he did it quickly, and that passed for politeness these days.
“You’re his doctor?” the man said, offering his hand. “Chris Henderson.”
Kris replaced her pen and shook his hand. “I’m Dr. Czikowlis. Are you family?”
“No, colleagues. I was there when he collapsed. Do you know what happened?”
“Not yet,” she said. “He’s stable now, but comatose. Did you give a history to the paramedics?”
Henderson looked at Chappelle. On his best days the Regional Director looked thin. Lying in the ICU he was practically skeletal. “As much as I could. We’re not that close, really. But he always seemed to be pretty healthy.”
“We’ll find out what’s going on,” Dr. Czikowlis promised. “I’m ordering blood work and a few other tests.”
“What will the blood work show?”
“Anything in his system, drugs, like that.”
Henderson handed her a card that listed him with the Department of Homeland Security. It was official enough to look important, without giving away any classified information about CTU. “It’s fairly important that we get him well as soon as possible,” he said. “Also, it’s standard procedure for us to keep track of any information that goes out. Please let me know where the blood work is being sent.” She wrote it down for him.
“Thanks,” he said. “Will you call me the minute you know anything?”
“Of course,” the doctor said. “Is he. Look, I don’t know what you guys do, but is this related to his work? Was he doing something. Is he a spy?”
Henderson chuckled. “No, he’s a bureaucrat. But he’s an important bureaucrat, so please try to get him better.”
He came up from San Diego on the Pacific Surfliner and sighed as the train rolled into L.A.’s Union Station. He loved trains or, more specifically, he had a love-hate relationship with them. When the trains ran on time, their precision was a thing of beauty and, as Keats had said,
He liked train stations and subways more than airports because they usually displayed maps of the tracks, concise representations of the elaborate systems of paths, cars moving on paths, people getting on cars moving on paths.
He stepped off the Surfliner and into the crowd of travelers. A family composed of a man, a woman, and two twin girls of about nine years passed. The girls were pulling matching pieces of Coach luggage on wheels, and he noticed instantly that the woman constantly looked back to the girls while the man looked to the train schedule. Fulfilling their roles: father-leader, mother-protector. Those were their roles in this situation, but change the situation, he thought, and see how quickly their roles change. Grab one of the girls, smash her head with his fist, and then suddenly the father becomes the protector and the mother becomes the guide, leading them away from danger. Comfortably predictable.
A man in a respectable black suit saw him standing still in the middle of the crowd and mistook him for someone lost. Mistook him for a sheep. The man approached and held out a pamphlet called
He smiled. “I have heard seven from you, and will probably hear more.”
“If you’re looking for guidance, you’ll find it here.” He indicated the pamphlet.
He was enjoying this. He had learned long ago to find pleasure in minor distractions, rather than being annoyed by them. “Will it show me how to get to the Staples Center?”
The man in the black suit laughed. “No, but it’ll show you the word of God.”
“Ah,” he said, pretending only just now to understand. “To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.” That was Borges.
It suddenly dawned on the Jehovah’s Witness missionary that he was being toyed with. “Huh?”
“I’m going to make things easier on you. Enjoy the rest of your day.”
He walked away, feeling the eyes of the Jehovah’s Witness on his back for a few seconds. Then the man turned away, passing out more of his pamphlets. His stack contained roughly forty pamphlets, and the traveler estimated quickly that it would take him another fifteen minutes to pass out those pamphlets.
The train exploded ten minutes later. The traveler had just gotten into a taxicab and was driving away when the sound of the explosion roared out of the entrance to Union Station.
It was not a big explosion, and did not cause extensive damage. A truly large explosion would have brought attention that the traveler did not want, so this one was made to look like an explosion of diesel fuel, which was combustible at 105 degrees Fahrenheit. It was not, as the traveler had already reminded himself, big enough to cause extensive damage. But it was big enough to stop the train service at Union Station which, at that particular time of day, would cause a ripple affect, disrupting the service of Los Angeles’s Metro transit system, as well as train service in Santa Barbara and San Diego, and, to a lesser extent, delaying train service as far away as Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Chicago, Illinois. The family with the Coach luggage would not be injured but, in some small way, their lives would be changed forever by the ripple effect of his actions. He smiled happily.
“Where you headed?” the taxi driver asked.
“Staples Center,” he said.
“Got it. I don’t wanna lose a fare, but you know you coulda taken the Metro right from Union Station. Drops you off right at Staples.”
The traveler glanced back. Wisps of smoke drifted up out of the Union Station building, barely visible in the streetlights, and he could already hear sirens. “I think they’re having trouble with the trains.”
The drive was a short one, directly across the downtown area of Los Angeles, the only place in the suburban sprawl that simulated the “downtown” feel of New York or Chicago, with concrete canyons formed by skyscrapers looming over streets. Oddly enough, these streets were cast almost completely in shadow during the day. At night they were bright with light pouring out from the buildings. A quick run down one of these canyons and the taxi emerged on the south side of downtown, where the Los Angeles Convention Center and Staples Center together covered whole acres of land.
The taxi pulled to a stop in front of the Staples Center and the traveler got out, paid, and walked toward the north side of the building. There were small crowds moving in and around the center for some event or concert that was of no consequence to the traveler.
He spotted Francis Aguillar before Aguillar saw him. This was to be expected, because the traveler changed his appearance quite often. Aguillar, too, had changed his appearance, but the traveler looked past the new van dyke and the longer hair. Aguillar’s posture was the same, his habit of standing with the weight on his left leg was still obvious, and the tilt of his chin was the same.
“Francis,” he said.
