continuous dull groan.
So there was no one to hear Don Biehn scream.
His captor had rolled the tire of his car over Biehn’s handcuffed hands, crushing them and pinning him face-up on the ground. Biehn’s legs were strapped together with something he couldn’t see, and tied off to the metal base of one of the great pumps, which nodded its giant hood over him as he stared up at the dark sky.
Biehn didn’t know who had kidnapped him, or why. The man hadn’t even asked him questions yet. Biehn had woken from his drug-induced stupor (chloroform?) to find his fingers already crushed under the car. He’d played possum for a few minutes while his captor stood a few feet away, whispering into a cell phone. Biehn heard very little of the conversation, but what he heard was startling. If he could survive this, he might be able to use that conversation to avoid prison or the gas chamber.
The captor, not quite visible in the gloom, had hung up his phone. He knelt down beside Biehn and slapped him to wake him. Then he cut Biehn’s shirt away and carved a bloody line down his chest, causing Biehn to scream despite himself.
Now his captor came close. There was a dim light somewhere nearby on one of the pumps. In the very faint light, Biehn saw a gleaming bald head and a handsome, clean-shaven face staring down at him.
“That is to let you know I am serious,” said his captor, holding up his knife. “Don’t make me show you how truly, truly serious I am.”
Biehn said nothing. What the hell was going on? Was this guy with the church?
The man held up Biehn’s badge. “Were you there to arrest Father Collins?”
“Yes,” Don lied.
The captor cut away a sickle-shaped piece of skin below Biehn’s left nipple.
“No,” he said calmly as Biehn sobbed. “Police officers do not sneak around the backs of houses to break and enter. They do not come alone, either. Don’t lie to me again.”
This time, Biehn had not screamed, but the cut hurt like hell. He blinked away tears of pain. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.
The man cut him again. Biehn thrashed in his confinement, feeling his fingers tear and nearly break under the weight of the car tire.
“I see that you want to ask questions, too,” the man said. “Well, I’m not unreasonable. I will let you ask questions. But your questions will come at a cost. Every time you ask one, I will cut a piece from you. Now, do you want to ask something?”
“Do you work for the church?” Biehn asked.
“Yes,” the man said. “You can call me Michael.”
Biehn spat into his face.
The man cut a thin fillet, just below the epidermis on Biehn’s left side. Biehn cried out and thrashed again. He felt two of his fingers dislocate. But he also felt them start to wiggle in the space he’d created.
“Now it’s my turn,” Michael said. “What did you want with Father Collins?”
“To kill him.”
“Why?”
“Because he deserves to die.”
That answer seemed to strike Michael as curious. He started again. “What do you know of the plan?”
“What plan?”
“That was a question,” Michael said. He gouged a piece from Biehn’s right side. Blood trickled from both sides of his body down into the mud. “What do you know of the plan?” Michael asked again.
Biehn didn’t know how many more cuts he could take. He was losing blood, and the pain was excruciating. “I don’t know about any plan.”
“I will make deeper cuts for lying.”
“I really don’t!” Biehn sobbed. “I have my reasons
for killing that piece of shit!’
“What reasons are those?” Michael asked.
“Fuck you.”
“Who are you working for?”
“Nobody!”
Another cut, not deep, but in the sensitive area of the armpit. Biehn thrashed again, felt another finger dislocate, and this time his arms came free. Michael looked genuinely startled when Biehn sat up. Gripping his two battered hands into a club, Biehn smashed Michael across the jaw, and the torturer crumpled sideways. Biehn snatched up the knife and cut the leather strap — a belt, it seemed to be— from around his ankles. Michael stirred, and Biehn turned to stab him. But his feet were cramped and asleep, and his hands were too battered to hold the knife well. Michael slapped the blade from his grip. Biehn clutched at Michael’s shirt with his handcuffed hands and headbutted him in the face. His position was weak and the strike wasn’t strong, but it was enough to stun Michael again. Biehn stood up, his legs feeling like dead wood beneath him. He wanted to stay and fight, but he was weak from pain and blood loss. He ran into the darkness.
6. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 P.M. AND 12 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Jack walked into CTU’s shell of a headquarters looking like a dog’s chew toy. His hair was tousled, and his clothes and face were covered with dust. His wrists were still sticky from the duct tape. But his eyes were on fire, and he was all business as he walked through the office toward the bare meeting room. He passed a woman sitting impatiently in a chair. He recognized her as the same thin, pretty woman he’d passed earlier in the evening. She seemed eager to talk with anyone who would pay attention to her, but Jack hurried past her into the room where Christopher Henderson waited. Nina Myers was there, too. The analyst Jamey Farrell was also present, as were a few others Jack hadn’t met.
“Everyone’s up to speed?” Jack asked.
“You want to clean up first?” Henderson offered.
Jack waved him off. “Do we have a list of likely targets?”
Jamey Farrell spoke up, but she spoke to Henderson out of deference to his position. “Yeah, but it’s so long it’s not usable.” She passed around packets of paper. “Sorry, our monitor isn’t hooked up to the network yet. These will have to do. Look at the first six pages.” They did, and saw a long list of Los Angeles landmarks. Jack frowned. With the exception of a few financial institutions, he could have found the same list in any Los Angeles guidebook.
“We have to narrow this down,” he said.
Henderson observed, “Our working assumption is that the weapon is plastic explosives. If that’s the case, they can’t have much of it. Even if they have twice as much as we’ve already uncovered (and that’s next to impossible), they still don’t have huge amounts.”
“Which means their target is specific,” Jack added. “Something small.”
Nina Myers made a skeptical noise in the back of her throat. “That doesn’t fit their MO.” She sat down, leaning back in one of the brand-new chairs. “I mean, our theory is that this is Yasin, right? One of the Blind Sheik’s guys? Maybe even al-Qaeda. You all know al-Qaeda, right?”
Jack did. Al-Qaeda was an Arabic phrase that literally meant “the base.” It was the catchphrase for a network of Islamic fundamentalists with very anti-Western, anti-American sentiments. The loose network had gotten its start during the Russian war in Afghanistan. In 1991, al-Qaeda turned its anger on the United States when that country dared to maintain its troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the two mosques, Medina and Mecca. Al-Qaeda had bombed an embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing a number of Americans. One of the primary terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bomb attack was Ramzi Yousef, a known associate of al-Qaeda. Although the al-Qaeda name hadn’t gotten much play in the media yet, operators in intelligence circles were already talking about them as the next big threat.
