“You could go home, you know,” Christopher Henderson said.
“And miss all this action?” Nina Myers said, waving her arm across the empty conference room and the darkened main office beyond. “Actually, I don’t feel right going to bed when there’s someone out there undercover.”
“Jack’ll be all right,” Henderson replied.
“He will?” Nina replied. “You know Chappelle screwed him over.” She looked around, not sure if the Division Director was still lurking around the office. “He’s out there with no backup, and if he goes under, Chappelle is going to chalk it up to the CIA instead of us.”
Henderson had to agree, but he also knew that Jack hadn’t been presented with much of a choice. “We have the same SWAT unit on call as we did before. It worked out when Jack was with Smithies.”
Nina threw him a disapproving look. “Smithies was alone. This time it’s a bunch of bikers. The response team isn’t trailing them; they’re a couple miles away. It’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Jack can take care of himself.” Henderson shrugged, and the two sat in silence for a moment. Nina sipped her coffee before changing subjects. “What do you think of that NTSB woman?”
Henderson grinned. “You jealous that you’re not the only queen bee at the moment? Get used to it when this place is really staffed.”
Nina gave him a one-fingered wave. “She bugged me earlier. Her thing about Farrigian. I didn’t like it.”
“What?” Henderson was only half listening. It had been a long time since he’d pulled an all-nighter, and he was barely surviving this one. Thank god for coffee.
“Well, Jack was right. What are the odds of different agencies stumbling over two different groups with two different supplies of plastic explosives.”
“Not all that likely, but we’re brand-new here. Who knows what we’re going to uncover.”
Nina held up her hand to stop him. “That’s right, we’re brand-new. And we sent a brand-new investigator who doesn’t do undercover. With no backup. Do we even have audio? Of course not. But we accepted her version of a story told by an arms dealer.”
“And it’s working out,” Henderson said. “Jack’s on to something.”
Nina felt like she’d bumped her head against a wall. She paused a moment, then said. “What’s the best kind of lie?”
“I don’t follow.”
“The best kind of lie isn’t one that stops your investigation. It’s the kind that sends it somewhere else. Somewhere that looks like a payoff.”
“You think Farrigian lied,” Henderson concluded. “Even though we got information that’s leading us right to a terrorist plot we’re about to stop?”
“I think I’m tired but I can’t sleep,” Nina said, downing her coffee. “And I don’t like being the one sitting around. I’m going to go see what’s up with this Farrigian.”
Jack followed Barny’s directions, slid down a dirt slope next to the maintenance sheds, and started to walk along the base of the dam with the rest of Dean’s gang. There was nothing high-end or technical about this area: it was a dry gulch. If there was a spillway somewhere, Jack couldn’t see it. Maybe there was no need in thirsty Los Angeles.
Jack also wasn’t sure how much damage the plastic explosives would do against that formidable earthworks dam. But as the group walked along the dam base, Barny was being very precise about where he wanted the charges placed. Jack drifted toward the back of the group, then reached behind his back to pull out the Sig that no one had bothered to take from him.
As his hand closed on the weapon, he felt tempered steel push against his temple.
“How fucking stupid do you think I am?” Dean’s voice growled.
Jack’s answer was a quick grab at the weapon, redirecting it, and a kick to Dean’s groin. The biker grunted but didn’t go down, while Jack felt a half-dozen hands and arms wrap him up and tackle him to the ground. He bit someone hard and managed to headbutt another biker, but there were too many of them, and they had him pinned a moment later.
Dean stood over him, his face mostly hidden by the predawn gloom but his bulk unmistakable. “You little shit,” he said. “You think I wouldn’t recognize a cop trying to get close to me? I thought you guys gave that shit up years ago.”
Jack would have shrugged if he could have moved any part of his body under the pile of limbs. “Well, you can’t have gotten any smarter.”
Dean laughed. “We’ll see. Stand him up.”
They dragged Jack to his feet. He relaxed, hoping the two or three bikers that continued to hold him would loosen up, but they remained on guard. “We’ll let our friend here plant the explosives for us. No sense in risking all our necks. Rig him up.”
It was fast thinking, what they did to Jack — so fast that Jack couldn’t help but wonder how Dean got the idea for it. Barny, who clearly had some knowledge of explosives, rigged a brick of plastic explosives to Jack’s back where it was hard to reach, and added a detonator. Then he held up a cell phone, punching in a phone number. “I press send and you go boom,” the fat man said. “You get it?”
Jack nodded.
“We’ll be standing right over here. You make a run for it, and you die. I see you reach back there, you die. I’m going to mark the exact spots where I want you to put them.”
Barny walked away along the base of the wall. Jack could feel Dean grinning at him, and he could feel the weight of the plastic explosives strapped to his back.
Traffic had started early, and like an early snow it had caught everyone by surprise. Almost a half hour after leaving Shoemacher Avenue, Harry Driscoll was still stuck on Wilshire Boulevard, where the irresistible force of L.A. traffic had met up with the immovable object of a CalTrans repair project. Checking the traffic news, Harry learned that Cal-Trans in its infinite wisdom had decided to effect repairs on Wilshire, Olympic, and Pico all on the same morning, clogging the three major surface arteries running east to west in the city.
“Your tax dollars at work,” he muttered.
Collins had been quiet since they’d driven away from his home, but whether it was from fear or relief that his monstrous nature had finally been exposed, Harry couldn’t tell.
“I’m getting off this street,” Harry said, not really talking to Collins. He jerked the wheel left and honked, inching his way through three rows of traffic heading in the other
direction, waving politely at the drivers who blared their horns and flipped him off. Right of way in Los Angeles was never given, only taken; that was Harry’s motto.
He found himself on Rossmoor, a residential street in the Hancock Park neighborhood. A few other cars had peeled off the main drag as well, but after a block Driscoll was alone. He pulled up to a stop sign at the next intersection and reached toward his glove compartment to get his maps when he felt something jolt his car hard, banging his head into the dashboard.
Rear-ended. “Son of a bitch!” he grunted, pushing his hand on his head to squeeze away the pain. ‘Worst goddamned day of my life. You stay here,” he snapped at Collins.
Harry got out of the car with a scowl on his face and turned to look at the black Chrysler 30 °C that had bumped into the back of his car. His scowl turned to surprise and then fear as he saw the Chrysler’s door open and a small barrel jut out, aimed right at him. Harry was ducking and spinning before he heard the first sharp, angry cracks of gunfire.
Nina reached the gate of Farrigian’s Warehouse and tested it; finding it unlocked, she slipped inside. She had no plan, and no cover story, but she wasn’t expecting much trouble from tepid criminals like the Farrigian brothers. As she had told Henderson, she hated just sitting around, but she wasn’t expecting to glean much information from this field trip. Which was why she was stunned by what she saw in the parking lot.
It was Diana Christie’s car. She was sure of it. Christie had parked in one of CTU’s brand-new authorized-
