accidentally?”
Diana shook her head doubtfully. “If the plastic explosive was primed and ready with a detonator, if it was in a state where it might go off accidentally, it’d be hard to get it through security.”
“Same question, then,” Jack repeated. “Why blow up that flight? Was there anyone special on it?” He knew it was a callous question, but it was the kind of question that had to be asked if they were going to find the bombers.
But Diana put a stop to that line of thinking. “I researched everyone, trying to find a motive so I could convince the rest of NTSB that this was a bombing. There was no one on board that made any headlines or would be a target for any of the kinds of groups you guys are after.”
“Maybe Ali was the target,” Nina suggested. “Maybe he knew something and they wanted to shut him up. They blew up Ramin, didn’t they?”
The NTSB investigator agreed. “Okay, but even so, he had to have been holding the bomb. That blast originated in his seat.”
“A gift. A going-away present. Something,” Jack said. “They offed him because he was a witness.” He nodded approvingly at Diana. “So our first clue that something was going on came at us a month ago, and no one listened to you. Sorry about that.”
A look of gratitude unfolded out of the exhaustion on Diana Christie’s face. She might have cried if she weren’t in the presence of the two anti-terrorist agents. “Thanks,” was all she said.
“Okay, but now what?” Nina asked. “We’re still working on lots of hypotheses here, but no concrete evidence and no target. An airplane blows up, either accidentally or on purpose, with a possible terrorist on board. I can already tell you Abdul Ali’s record won’t give us any real leads. He’s a nobody as far as your people are concerned,” she said, meaning Jack’s CIA. “He’s a cipher.”
“Farrigian is still our best lead. I’m going to talk to him.”
“He has something to do with the airline explosion?” Diana asked. Jack shook his head. “Seller. He may be the source of the explosives, though.” “I want to go,” the NTSB agent said firmly. “I want in on the investigation.” “This is undercover work,” he replied, rejecting her.
“I don’t care. I’ve been on this thing from the beginning. Before either of you. If this guys deals in explosives, I can help. I may hear or see something you don’t.”
Nina waited for Jack to say no again. To her surprise, he hesitated, then said, “No promises. I don’t know what the play is yet. I’ll let you know. If you want to wait around, that’s your business. Now will you excuse us?”
Diana accepted this answer, and the dismissal, reluctantly, and left the room. “What the hell?” Nina said when she was gone. “She doesn’t even work for us!” Jack laughed. “Neither do I.”
If you asked Harry Driscoll, he’d already put in his time tonight. Interviewing Mark Gelson and throwing together the Dog Smithies sting with Jack Bauer were, in his opinion, enough for one night. He’d only returned to the Robbery-Homicide office to finish up his paperwork, and he absolutely planned on coming in late tomorrow. But while he was straightening up his desk (
So he found himself, just before eleven-thirty, walking into the rectory of St. Monica’s Cathedral, tramping up the stairs and past the yellow police tape and down the hall. A uniformed officer Driscoll had never met gave him the facts: Father Frank Giggs, one of the priests at St. Monica’s, in charge of the youth program. There was one possible witness, another priest who’d encountered a stranger in the hallway. A uniform was sitting with him in his room.
Driscoll nodded and walked into the crime scene. The victim’s body was on the floor, his back propped up against the bed. A pillow, its center black with powder burns and shredding by a hole, had slid down onto his chest. The priest’s face had turned to bloody pulp, already drying to gray crust. His hands were hidden behind.
“Shit,” Harry said to no one in particular. “There was serious malice here. Forensics?”
The uniform muttered into his radio, then waited. “Two minutes out. Been busy tonight.”
Harry nodded. He crouched down and examined the area, careful not to touch anything, not even the bedspread. He tried not to look at the ruined face, now that he was so close to it. The pillow had obviously been used to muffle the sound of a gunshot. Harry’s eyes, long used to searching for details, slowly scanned down the victim’s chest to his stomach and waist. He missed the groin puncture at first. Then he saw the blood smear on the priest’s pajama bottoms, and his eyes moved back up. Taking out his own pen, he gently moved the bunched-up gusset of the pajamas to reveal a hole in the cloth surrounded by blood. Harry could just make out tiny streaks of the blood that had undoubtedly drained downward below the body.
“Jesus,” Harry muttered. The man had been tortured. Who would torture a priest?
Harry put his pen back in his pocket. As he lifted his eyes a bit, he saw something on the floor, half hidden by the hanging bedspread. Out came the pen again. Harry dragged it into the open with the pen tip. It was a book of some kind — actually, a journal. Harry again used the pen to flip it open. He read only a few pages before he knew that his night was far from over.
11:39 P.M. Culver City, California
Abdul called himself a schoolboy because he couldn’t sleep. He wandered around his apartment in his robe, sipping club soda and listening to a Julia Ford-ham CD. This was haram, of course. His secret sin. Listening to music was not itself forbidden. Abdul was not one of those extremist imams, like those among the Taliban, who forbade music altogether. Abdul, rather, sided with ibn Hazm, who had declared music to be halal. Music could inspire the soul to submit more fully to the will of Allah; at least, Abdul found this to be true. Of course, ibn Hazm had lived a millennium ago, and had not conceived of music like this, or a voice as seductive as that of Ms. Fordham. And therein lay the sin, for Abdul did not simply listen to music in general, he longed for the voice and image of that singer. He played her music as he lay down to sleep, and in his dreams the messengers of Allah spoke with her voice. That was haram.
Yet on this evening even the gentle measures of
“Maybe,” he said aloud. He would not mind being wrong. To be called a cynic, a pessimist, a skeptic would be a small price to pay if the powerful religions of the world could come together and forge peace now, with the world teetering so close to the edge of chaos.
“Maybe,” he said again.
His doorbell rang.
Abdul was so startled that he stood in the center of his living room, not sure he had heard correctly. Who would ring his bell at this hour?
But the bell rang again, sounding somehow more insistent now. Abdul hurried over to his stereo and stopped the CD. The bell rang a third time before he reached the door and he opened it, intending to declare the lateness of the hour in his sternest tone.
But when he looked into the face of his visitor, he was stunned into silence. It was not a stranger’s face. It was his own face, but it was grinning happily, eagerly. There was wicked light in his reflection’s eyes.
“Hello, brother,” said his reflection, raising his right hand. Abdul just had time to see that his reflection’s left arm was in a sling, before he stopped seeing altogether.
7. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 A.M. AND 1 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
