information if you can give it.”
“It’s not that early,” Marianno said. “Fire away.”
“Jack asked me to find out anything I could dig up on Cardinal Allen J. Mulrooney. He’s the—”
“Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, sure,” the woman replied. “Interesting guy. You know he’s a schismatic, right?”
“A what?”
“Schismatic. This isn’t even classified, really, so I have no trouble telling you this. You ever heard of Vatican II?”
“Is the Pope Catholic?” Harry replied. Vatican II, officially known as the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, was a series of meetings held between 1962 and 1965 that made significant changes to the views and practices of the Catholic Church.
“Right. Some of the decisions made at Vatican II made a certain segment of the church unhappy. Some splinter groups were created within the church. Some are still inside the church, still follow the Pope, etcetera, but think the church has lost its way a little bit. Some are more extreme. They think there hasn’t been a legitimate Pope since 1962. They believe there’s been a schism. Schismatics.”
“And Mulrooney is one of those?”
“Not publicly,” Marianno replied. “I don’t even think the Vatican has solid proof, or they’d out him. But, yes, he is. Mulrooney was groomed by very orthodox priests and didn’t take kindly to the changes being made back then.”
This was news to Harry. Although he was far, far from the inner circles of the Catholic Church in Los Angeles, he’d been a congregant inside the archdiocese for most of his life. One heard rumors. But he’d never heard a whisper of this.
“Anything else? Anything about… about child abuse?” he asked.
“Ah,” the woman said solemnly. “Child abuse and Mulrooney? No. Nothing directly related to him. But the child abuse issue is a hydra waiting to raise its head. When it does, the church is going to have serious problems.”
Marianno laughed again, louder this time. “Didn’t Jack even tell you who you were calling? I’m in Italy, Harry. You’ve called the CIA’s Section Chief in Rome.”
For the second time in one night, Jack was riding up the 405 Freeway on a motorcycle. This time it was on Dog Smithies’s impounded Harley-Davidson. There was no traffic at this hour, even on the northbound 405, and Jack literally flew out of the city and into the foothills.
The Hell’s Angel in custody had given the police several pertinent pieces of information. First, Dean and his bikers expected to meet up with Smithies. Second, they’d never met him before, although they’d talked to him on the phone a lot. Third, Smithies was supposed to bring them more plastic explosives.
All this was now pretty goddamned far removed from CIA business, but Jack wasn’t sure he had a choice. He’d gotten himself involved in this business, and like it or not, Chappelle did have a pretty big book to throw at him. The least Jack could do was try to clean up his own mess.
The plan wasn’t very complicated: impersonate Smithies, find out what this Dean character was planning, and either call in the cavalry right away, or head him off and arrest him at the scene.
Alone on the bike, Jack had time to think about what he was getting into. Messes came with every job. Even on SWAT, which was as straightforward as it gets, he’d seen issues with other officers: questionable shootings, civilian complaints even when the shootings were righteous, guys jockeying for position to help boost their careers. Delta had been the same; even though every man in his unit had his back during an operation, when they were inside the wire, all of them had their own agendas and personal missions. The CIA was… well, hell, he wasn’t sure what the CIA was. He just knew that they were the guys looking into the shadows. Jack liked that, but he had to admit that half of any day spent at the CIA was devoted to managing the politics of the place. This new agency, Counter Terrorist Unit, was certainly full of all the same bullshit. But Jack had to admit that they were seeing a lot of action. Maybe there was good work to be done on the domestic front. For all his smooth salesmanship, Christopher Henderson was right: his CIA status hurt more than it helped right now. If the borders were porous enough to let Yasin back into the country so easily, who knew what other scorpions had crept inside the wire?
It would make Teri happy, too, he knew. So far, his CIA work had sent him overseas only on short-term assignments. But he knew that any day he might be permanently assigned to a foreign desk anywhere from Djibouti to Jakarta, and then where would they be? Teri didn’t want to move. Kim would have a meltdown. And Jack… Jack wasn’t sure what he wanted.
Inside the helmet, sealed off from the landscape hurtling past him at eighty miles per hour, Jack said the words aloud. “I don’t know what I want.”
“But Jesus,” Jack said into the helmet. “Can I really work for a prick like that?”
This internal dialogue continued for another mile or two, but in the end, a more practical side of Jack Bauer won out, the part of him that simply could not abide indecisiveness. “Screw it,” he said aloud. “Let’s just take out some bad guys.”
Ryan Chappelle sat alone in a darkened corner of the headquarters, away from the halogen lights in the conference room and the gentler yellow lights leaking out of Henderson’s office. Chappelle put his feet up and rubbed his temples.
Chappelle knew some of his staff didn’t like him. But he also knew that they liked their budgets, their computers, their access to classified materials. Their salaries. And those things weren’t created ex nihilo. Someone went out and got those items, fought for them, justified them after the money had been spent. That someone was Ryan Chappelle.
The PDA in Chappelle’s pocket buzzed, alerting him to something on his calendar. Chappelle shook his head and rubbed his cheeks, trying to shake off the sleep. He stood up and walked quietly to the conference room, activated the monitor, and signed in to the scrambled video conference. He had insisted the monitor and Internet connection be prepared for just this moment.
An efficient-looking middle-aged woman leaned into the screen frame. “Director Chappelle? Stand by for Mr. Harding.”
Chappelle did not disguise his displeasure as Peter Harding sat down in the chair at the other end of the link. Harding had the kind of bright red, almost orange hair and freckles that looked cute on a ten year-old-boy but unfortunate on a fifty-year-old man with jowls.
“Chappelle, how are you?” Harding said.
“Confused,” Ryan said tersely. “I understood this meeting was with the President.” “Change of plans. Now you’ve got the Deputy to the National Security Advisor.”
Ryan snorted. “So I see. Look, I need to know if the National Security Council is taking CTU seriously. I understood that the Division Directors were reporting directly to the President.”
Harding scratched his remaining shock of red hair. “That may change. We’re still sussing it out.”
Harding bristled visibly. “Don’t talk to me like that, Chappelle. This is a new—”
Chappelle interrupted. “It took seven years to get a unit like CTU up and running. You think the terrorists
