“Show him the receiver,” Harry said.
Siegman used a pair of tongs to lift a small circuit. “Again, not my field, but if this is an explosive, I’m guessing this is a receiver.”
The ramifications of what he was seeing were instantly clear to Jack. Father Collins had turned himself into a human bomb. Jack’s knowledge of ordnance wasn’t strong enough to estimate the power of the blast, but he’d just seen what a brick of C–4 could do to a packed earth wall.
The small room seemed eerily silent with the three of them staring at the mutilated corpse. Finally, Harry Driscoll said something to break the dead quiet. “This is the most twisted thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’ve heard of suicide bombers, of course—”
“It’s not that far off,” Jack cut in. “Either way, the bomber is going to die. This delivery system—”
“Delivery system!” Dr. Siegman gasped, horrified. “This is a human being!”
But Jack was beyond her sense of morality, assessing the threat. “It’s not as efficient as a suicide vest. You can pack that with more C–4, and use nails, bolts, other stuff to make yourself a claymore mine. But this would be undetectable.”
“There’s that metal plate, though,” Harry pointed out.
Siegman was finding the same page Jack was on. “It wouldn’t matter. Most metal detectors aren’t set to go off when they find that density of metal. The plates are made that way. And even when they are, what would the security guard do, ask you to open your arm?”
“Was the transmitter on him?” Jack asked.
They searched through the few possessions that had arrived with the corpse, but found nothing of interest. “It might be anything,” Jack said. “A cell phone. The keyless entry on a car. Anything.”
“He wasn’t going after anything when I arrested him,” Harry said. “Man, he played that cool. But I guess if you’re willing to have a bomb planted in your arm, you can handle a few questions from a cop.”
Jack stepped back from the corpse, as though the physical distance might lend him mental perspective. The discovery lent him a small sense of relief— whatever Collins had been planning to do, it clearly wasn’t going to happen now. And at least now they knew why Driscoll’s attackers had wanted to reclaim that body. But it also raised a hundred questions, and at least a dozen of them were urgent. What had been the intended target? Who had helped him with the horrific surgery? Was there a connection between Father Collins, the human bomb, and Father Collins, the child molester? Other questions swirled around in Jack’s brain. He needed to organize them.
“Background check on Collins,” he said out loud, reciting the first thing he needed. “We need to know who this guy was. This has got to be the C–4 missing from the — oh, damn.” A depressing thought struck him. He looked at Siegman. “I don’t suppose there’s ten pounds of the stuff in there.”
Siegman looked at the arm. “I can give you an exact weight in a little while,” she said, “but no way. Whoever did this did it well, but there’s no ten pounds. They did this well. Look, there’s a sterilized wrap around the explosive, so it doesn’t break off and start moving around in the body and get reactions from the immune system. But I guarantee you, this guy was feeling even this amount. He must have been in some serious pain. The human body doesn’t like a lot of foreign objects invading it.”
Jack felt some of the energy drain out him, and he tried to put a mental stopper in the leak. It had been a long night, and he still couldn’t catch up to the plastic explosives, or the actual plot. Every time he caught up with some of it, more seemed to be missing.
Jamey had long ago given up any thought of going home, so it didn’t bother her when Jack Bauer called. “I need everything you can get me on Sam Col
lins, a priest at St. Monica’s in Los Angeles, and I mean everything, including his medical records. He had surgery on his arm recently and I want all that information as well.”
“Give me ten minutes and I’ll tell you how much money he got from the tooth fairy,” Jamey said. She started typing.
Jack hung up and turned back to Dr. Siegman. “Doctor, I’m assuming that this was done with the man’s cooperation, yes? There’s no way this was done without his knowledge?”
Siegman looked startled, as though she hadn’t even considered the possibility. “Well, I guess it’s possible, once someone’s under, but what doctor would do that? Besides, you’d have to be a complete idiot. There’d be a lot of discomfort.”
Jack nodded his understanding and moved on. “Harry, we’ve got to figure out what the motive is, and the target. You know the Pope is in town, right?”
“Yeah, half our unit is assigned to it this week. He would be the obvious target. But a priest kill the Pope?”
“Maybe he’s a renegade,” Jack said. “Someone was telling me just recently about a group of people called schismatics who—”
“Yeah, they don’t think there’s been a real Pope since Vatican II,” Dr. Siegman said. “Usually very orthodox Catholics.”
“Are you Catholic?” Jack asked. “Me? I’m Jewish. But my sister married a Catholic, and he’s a schismatic. Family dinners are murder.”
Jack felt all the pieces fall into place. If Jamey came back with information connecting Collins to the schismatics, then he had his target and his motive. It was possible — although he felt the stretch here — that this Catholic renegade had contacted Yasin to learn how to plan the attack. Mercenary work wasn’t Yasin’s style, but he might be unable to resist a chance to help strike a major symbol of Western civilization like the Pope. If that was the case, then they might have nipped this whole incident in the bud.
Jamey Farrell called back a moment later and gave him a preamble. “I don’t think this is what you wanted to hear.”
Harry eavesdropped on the conversation, but Dr. Siegman returned to her examination of the bullet-damaged receiver.
“What I want to hear is that the priest was part of a renegade sect that hated and opposed the Pope and wanted him replaced. It’d also be like whip cream on top if, say, Yasin’s phone number appeared a few dozen times in Collins’s phone logs.”
“How about a guy so squeaky clean you could eat off his stomach. This guy, Collins, was a friggin’ saint.”
“He was a child-molesting monster,” Jack replied.
“Well, not according to any record of him anywhere that we can dig up. Grew up in Orange County, went to a Catholic high school where his grade point average was exactly that — average. Served as Vice President on the student council, played on the baseball team. College at Pepperdine. Seminary school after that. His name is listed on the boards of about fifty charitable organizations. I can’t even find a friggin’ parking ticket on this guy.”
“He can be all that and still hate the Pope,” Jack said.
“He could,” Jamey retorted, “or he could be cochair of something called the Eternal City Project, which raises money for underprivileged Catholic kids to go to Rome and see the Pope. Not to mention having received a meritorious service award from the Council of Bishops, which was presented to him by, um, yeah, the Pope himself two years ago.”
“Jesus,” Jack muttered, no pun intended. “All this is so much easier if he just hates the Pope. That would explain my target. Without that, I have no idea why a priest turned himself into a human bomb.”
“All that motive could still be hidden under this stuff,” Jamey pointed out. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“By the way,” Jack asked, “is there any way at all, any possible way, that you were off in your calculations, and that the box of C–4 was missing only a pound or so?”
“No way. If that thing was packed full, then ten pounds is missing.” She paused. “You saying there aren’t ten pounds where you are?”
“Yeah.”
“This case just won’t die, will it?” she asked.
“Medical records?”
“He checked into Cedars-Sinai a month ago after a car wreck. I have all the records from that surgery
