“That doesn’t help much, though,” Nina said over the phone. “It widens our pool, it doesn’t narrow—”
“Start with the suspects we have,” Driscoll suggested. “Could one of them have done it?” Jack shrugged. “It’s worth a try. Jamey, can you—” “Already doing it.” She had dragged a laptop into the conference room. Henderson frowned. “No wireless networks are allowed in here.”
Jamey shrugged. “With all respect, I will absolutely follow that rule when you get more than two working computers in here. In the meantime… hmm.”
“Something?” Jack asked.
“Well. Yeah.” She looked up. “I just ran Nina’s original list of suspects against any information on medical school, medicine, etcetera. You know who graduated from medical school before moving here?”
“Who?”
“Gary Khalid.”
Gary Khalid drove up the street in a borrowed car, but he didn’t see anything unusual. If someone was watching the house, their countersurveillance skills were much better than his meager talents. It couldn’t be helped. He had to get inside his house. He cruised his neighborhood several more times, searching for he knew not what.
Though he gave the appearance of an affable, simple man, Khalid was highly intelligent. At a certain point, he realized that he was being foolish. The way the Americans worked, if they had figured out his involvement in the affair, they would have ransacked his house by now. And if they were lying in ambush, they would have pounced on him long before now.
Still, he pulled his car to the end of the block and waited. He had waited many long years to strike a blow against the Zionists and Crusaders. He could wait another hour.
Jack finished reviewing the records on Khalid’s education in Pakistan. Like so many clues, they had been right in front of him, but they’d meant nothing until he knew what to look for.
Khalid had not only finished medical school in Islamabad, he had practiced as a surgeon and served as a doctor in the army.
298
“Last night this was in his favor,” Jack said to no one in particular. “Educated, capable. Didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist. Now it puts him right back in our sights.”
He looked at Christopher Henderson. “Do you know what all this tells me?”
Henderson shook his head.
“It tells me we’re not ready for this,” Jack admitted. “It tells me these guys can come here and make us chase our own tails and do whatever they want. We’d better catch up.”
Henderson noted with a slight smile that Jack now said
Jamey Farrell hung up a telephone. “LAPD sent a car to Khalid’s residence for us. No one’s home. They searched, didn’t find anything unusual. He may have already run out on us.”
“I would if I were him,” Jack said. “He must have cut Diana Christie up pretty quickly and horribly to turn her into a bomb. He probably panicked.”
“Yeah, but he’s not out of the country yet.”
“Mexico’s only a couple hours away.”
“But he wasn’t ready for it,” she pointed out. “I mean, how could he be? This thing with Diana Christie had to be last-minute, because you didn’t even know she’d come along until last night. So she went to that meeting and they ambushed her, did… whatever”—Jamey shuddered—“and then sent her off. So maybe after that, Khalid decides it’s time to get out of town.”
“If I were him, I’d just get in the car and go,” Jack said. “But he’s not you. He’s a guy who’s been inter viewed at bunch of times and passed with flying colors. He probably feels like he’s safe.”
Jack was impressed. “You should do fieldwork,” he said.
“Nah, I’m not a big fan of getting shot at,” she said.
Jack phoned Nina Myers, who was en route, and filled her in. “But he’s not home,” Jack said finally. “So if you have any ideas…”
“I do,” Nina said. “Unless you need me at the conference, I’ll go get Khalid.”
“Who said I’m going to the conference?” Jack replied.
Nina just laughed, and hung up.
20. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 P.M. AND 2 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
“You really think there’s still a threat?” Driscoll asked. “I mean, didn’t we stop the guy?”
“The missing C–4,” Jack said by way of explanation. “And the fact this whole damned thing is never-ending, and I can’t seem to get my hands around it. It’s like these guys make a religion out of being devious.”
“Yeah, instead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we got the bomber, the stooge, and the plastic explosives.”
It was a bad pun, and Driscoll would have forgotten he’d even said it except that Jack suddenly stopped, his eyes growing distant. “Threes,” Jack said. His eyes focused again, and he looked at Driscoll in astonishment. “Ramin said that. That Yasin would do things in threes. There are going to be three attackers and we’ve only got one.”
“How can you be sure?” the detective asked.
“I’m not,” Jack said, suddenly animated. “But I bet if you check with Dr. Siegman, she’ll say that there was just about enough missing C–4 to create two more bombs like the one in Collins’s arm. Three bombers. And there’ve been three areas to investigate: the bikers, the Sweetzer Three”—saying the word itself was almost like the click of a puzzle piece—“and the Unity Conference.”
“Don’t forget the child molestation thing.”
Jack shivered — it was not forgettable. “But that wasn’t one of Yasin’s plans. In fact, that’s where it all started to go wrong for them,” he pointed out. “Think about it, Harry. Where would we be if Don Biehn hadn’t come along? I’d have stopped a two-bit biker thug, and maybe I’d have followed that lead to Castaic Dam. CTU would have kept the Sweetzer Three on ice, and figured they’d bagged all the C–4. We’d be sitting on our butts right now while Collins was getting ready to blow himself up. We need to get over there.”
Michael said the Ave Maria to himself in Latin, the only way that it should be said, as he followed Cardinal Mulrooney through the reception at a polite distance. He glanced at his watch. The Cardinal had to leave soon of his own accord. If not, Michael would make him leave.
In Michael’s mind, Mulrooney ought to be in line for the papacy. Not because he was an especially moral man, but because he, like Michael, could see the false path down which the church had traveled these past forty years. They were few and far between in the church. Michael had to admit that. But Jesus had only a few followers when he started to spread the word. The true word of God could not be contained. By the will of the Lord, Michael would strike a blow against the heretics. There were several among the cardinals who were secret leaders of the schismatic movement. Several of them stood a decent chance of becoming Pope after John Paul was blown to hell.
It hadn’t been easy, that first meeting with Yasin. In another time and place, Michael would have killed the man and rejoiced at it. But Yasin had come to him with evidence of the church’s secret sin — the unwholesome appetites of some of its priests, who preyed on the children in their care. Michael knew of it, of course. He was in charge of security, and more than once he had acted as the intimidating presence in the background while a kindly priest convinced a child or a parent to keep quiet and allow the incident to drift into the past. The priests, meanwhile, were always moved to a new diocese to avoid any further unpleasantness.
