had been killed. “You searched the body, right?”
“Of course. Nothing there. I did get one thing, though. I have a partial plate on the Chrysler that attacked me. I want to run it down, and I want your help.”
“Okay, but why do you want help from me? You can do that on your own.”
“Hmm-mmm,” Driscoll refused. “I gotta tell you, Jack. The minute that guy yelled, ‘Get the body,’ I freaked. There’s something going on here that’s a lot bigger than some guy in Robbery-Homicide. There’s
spook stuff happening, and you’re a spook.”
“Okay, give me the partial.”
Jack wrote it down, and handed it to Jamey. “Can you run this right away?”
Jamey blinked. “This Chrysler. You know how popular it is? There are going to be a lot of them.”
“So far, you’ve been brilliant. You’ll do it.”
Jamey Farrell’s glare indicated that the flattery hadn’t worked. But she took the scrap of paper and left the office.
“I don’t get paid enough for this,” Henderson said.
“But think of all the nice people you get to spend time with.” Jack laughed. He left Henderson moping at his desk and followed behind Jamey. She’d gone to one of CTU’s working computers. He stood behind her as her fingers flew over the keyboard.
She knew he was there without looking. “We’re authorized to tap into all kinds of databases. If it’s a California plate — oh, damn.”
She’d just finished, and a long list of license plates appeared. There were more than two hundred black Chrysler 30 °Cs. “Maybe we could get LAPD to help us track them down.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “But let’s play a hunch. How many of those are rental cars?”
Jamey’s finger clicked again. “Five.”
“Okay, let’s get on the phone and find out if any of them are leased in Los Angeles right now.”
They worked together, and it was done in a few minutes. There were two. One had been rented to a Sharon Mishler. They ran her information and found her to be a resident of New York, having recently arrived on a flight from JFK to LAX. They recorded her information and funneled it to LAPD to investigate. The other had been rented by a Bas Holcomb, resident of Los Angeles. Before Jack could say a word, Jamey was running down his information.
“No nothing, really,” she said as she assembled information from the DMV, IRS, and several credit bureaus. “No criminal record. Certainly no connection to anything like a terrorist organization.”
“He’s still our best lead,” Jack said. “I’ll run this down with my LAPD contact.”
Yasin sat in the coffeehouse and read the news on a laptop computer while he sipped tea. He would have preferred the food and drink at Aroma Cafe, which was a few miles down the road, but he could not risk it. That cafe was frequented by dozens of Israeli immigrants, and unlike the ignorant Americans, the Israelis were perceptive enough to recognize him as an Arab, and a suspicious one at that.
Yasin himself was an American, having been born in Bloomington, Indiana — a fact that he believed he could correct only by striking a blow against his despised homeland. 1993 had been a start, but it had not satisfied him. He wasn’t sure that today would scratch his itch, either, but it would do for the moment. Those he worked with in al-Qaeda desired this blow, and that was enough for him.
The method, though, had been entirely his idea. Not just the method for delivering the explosives— although he admitted smugly that the method was brilliant — but also for the associates he had shanghaied into helping him. That had been a unique twist.
Yasin thought back to the day he had first met Abdul Mohammed, who’d been born Casey Stanwell, a Catholic until he’d been driven away from the infidel faith. It was his story that had given Yasin the idea.
Yasin sipped his tea again. He might have felt less satisfaction if he’d known that Father Collins had been killed. And that his body lay in the coroner’s office ready to be autopsied. And that a Federal agent named Jack Bauer was tracking down the associates Yasin had so carefully coerced.
Jack pulled into a mini-mall parking lot, and the fireplug of a detective got into the car.
“You have any idea what kind of night I’ve had?” Driscoll said by way of hello.
“A pretty good idea, yeah,” Jack replied.
“What is this we’re doing now?”
Jack explained. “We traced the partial plate you gave us. There were a lot of possibilities, but we narrowed it down to a couple possibles. You and I are going after the most likely one. Rented to a Bas Holcomb, business address a mile from here.”
Driscoll nodded. “If Mr. Holcomb shot up my car, I would definitely like to have a word with him.”
Holcomb’s address was a landscaping business on Crescent Heights a few miles away, much more difficult to travel now that the morning traffic was in full swing. It was an old adobe-style garage converted to office space and equipment storage. There were three narrow parking spaces, one of which was occupied by a newish-looking half- ton pickup. Jack pulled into one of the others, and the two men got out. Driscoll unbuttoned the safety strap on his gun holster as they passed under a sign that read st. francis landscaping.
The front door led to a tiny office with a desk covered in stacks of manila folders and invoices like ramparts of a castle. An old lady sat behind the desk, punching numbers into an old beige calculator that rattled off sums and spewed out tape. She looked startled to see someone walk through the door.
“Hi,” Jack said in his friendliest manner. “Is Bas around?”
She didn’t stand up, but she stopped banging on the calculator. “The owner hasn’t been around much, lately. Not since we got that big client.”
“You know where we can find him?”
The lady shrugged and started losing interest. “Probably there. Mr. Holcomb takes the work seriously.”
“Where would that be?”
“The mosque down in Inglewood.”
As the two men walked out of the office, the old woman reached for the telephone and dialed.
“Clarissa?” Mr. Pembrook said by way of answer.
She replied in a whisper, even though she knew the visitors were gone. She wasn’t used to espionage. “Yes, sir. You asked me to tell you if anyone came around the office looking for Mr. Holcomb. Two men just did.”
Pause. “Did they say who they were?”
“No. No, and I didn’t think to ask. Is everything all right? Do we owe money?”
“No trouble, darling. Probably old friends. What did they look like?”
Clarissa described them. “A blond man, nice-looking I guess, about as tall as you. The other man was short, a black man. Looked like a weight lifter. I told them Mr. Holcomb was over at the Inglewood mosque. Do you know if he’s there?”
“I can’t say I know for sure,” Pembrook replied.
“I hope I didn’t lead them astray. Are they old friends of your partner’s?”
“Oh, yeah,” Pembrook said. “They’re old friends, all right. Thanks, Clarissa.”
Pembrook hung up his cell phone and leaned back in his chair, trying to breathe away the tightness in his chest. He wasn’t as good at this as Michael. And, somehow, he hadn’t expected it to go this far. The master plan had been beyond him: all Michael had ever asked of him was to act as backup muscle, which he’d been doing since their days in Special Forces.
They’d bonded back then, not just over a shared love of violence, but over religion. They were both Catholics, and both shared similar views of certain church activities. They’d been friends ever since, and although he had a small landscaping business he shared with Bas Holcomb, his real job flowed from Michael’s security work for the church.
Now Pembrook called Michael with a trembling hand. “You know what’s going on?” He detailed his conversation with the assistant at his company. “We’ve got to disappear.”
“That was true no matter what happened today,” Michael said. His voice was steady. “Have we sent them on
