Harry would like to have stopped there. The Mulrooney file was flimsy, but it was official, and Harry could rightly have told Jack that was far as he could or would go. He sat in his office for a few moments, fingering the number Jack had given him. Finally, he punched in the long string of numbers. It didn’t seem like a phone number at all, but a few moments later, his phone was ringing.

“Marianno,” said a female voice on the other end.

“Maddie Marianno, this is Detective Harry Driscoll, LAPD,” he said. “Jack Bauer asked me to contact you. You have a moment?”

“Driscoll,” she repeated, and he was sure she was committing it to memory. “What kind of trouble has Bauer gotten you into?”

“Ha!” Harry said. “You definitely know Jack. Listen, I’m sorry for calling you so early, but I need a little 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

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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.”

No kidding, Harry thought. Aloud, he said, “Thanks for your time. Again, sorry to call so early.” Maddie Marianno laughed. “That’s twice you’ve said that. It’s not so early here. I’m having lunch.” “Oh,” Harry said, surprised. “Where exactly are you?”

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.”

3:12 A.M. PST 405 Freeway

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, Christo

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pher 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.”

And if you don’t know what you want, how will you ever get it?

“But Jesus,” Jack said into the helmet. “Can I really work for a prick like that?”

There’s a Chappelle everywhere. Besides, you wouldn’t be working for him. You’d work for Henderson. Or for yourself.

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.”

3:24 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

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.

It’s not always going to be like this, he almost said aloud. I do my job right, this will all get better. More efficient. It’ll be staffed properly.

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

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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.”

Idiots, Chappelle thought. This is why mavericks like this Bauer character need me. Someone has to deal with this crap. “While you’re sussing, we are actually chasing terrorists out here. I’ve got people putting their lives on the line right now, and I’m giving my own people hell for not following protocol. How am I supposed to tell them that the people above us don’t even know what the protocol is?”

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 have been sitting on their asses since then? Hell, one of our guys just got confirmation that Abdul Rahman Yasin came back into the country!” Harding’s eyes opened as wide as saucers. “That’s right. One of the terrorists from back in ’93.” Chappelle didn’t bother to mention that the “guy” he was referring to was a cowboy from the CIA. His fledgling unit could use all the credit it could get. “If you want us to keep trying to stop terrorists on a shoestring budget and no real access to the big decisions, fine. But you get what you pay for.”

He stood up and walked away from the screen, leaving Harding tripping over himself to respond.

Chappelle’s fingers shook from the sudden adrenaline dump. He wasn’t out there dodging bullets or facing down international terrorists. But there were many kinds of unsung heroism, and some of the most important battles were fought in little beige rooms by men like Ryan Chappelle.

3:31 A.M. PST Parker Center, Los Angeles

Driscoll had tried three times to call Jack Bauer, but the calls went directly to voice mail. Though he was a detective with over ten years, Harry had no idea what to do with the information he’d received. Mulrooney’s political affiliations within the Catholic Church had nothing to do with the current case, as far as he could tell. And the CIA (Jesus, had he really just called a CIA operative in Rome?) had no information on Mulrooney’s involvement in any child abuse scandals.

There was a part of Harry Driscoll that wanted to be done. No one could say he hadn’t played his role, put his career on the line, risked his neck. He should go home and sleep for a few hours.

But he couldn’t. Maybe it was the Catholic in him. He was guilted into staying on the case. It’s your own fault, some little voice was telling him. You wanted

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to be a part of the big terrorist case. You wanted to turn Biehn over to the Feds. You got him killed as much as Bauer did.

Oddly, it wasn’t the terrorist angle that was haunting Harry as the clock leaned toward four o’clock. It was Biehn, especially his face as he described the horror of his son being abused. While Biehn was alive, his righteous indignation had struck Harry as melodramatic. Now that he was gone, the silence was far more offensive than his antics. No one now was speaking for that kid who got abused.

“Damn,” Harry said to the empty building. “Hell and damn.”

He stood up and grabbed his jacket.

3:38 A.M. PST Santa Clarita

The 405 Freeway had merged onto Interstate 5, and Jack was now heading through the city of Santa Clarita. He left the 5 and turned onto one of the many roads that led into the hills. A hundred years ago the roads and homes built up here would have seemed like a world away from the city of Los Angeles. But the suburbs had crept steadily northward into the mountain valleys, and the dirt roads had been paved over. Jack followed one of these roads away from the residential streetlights and out into the hills, where a lonely one-story ranch house squatted at the top of a small rise. A garden of motorbikes seemed to have sprouted in the dry ground around the house. A porch light was on, and another light somewhere in the back of the house, but all was still.

The Harley made enough noise to wake the dead, so Jack didn’t even try stealth. He roared up the S-shaped road to the top of the rise and then idled the engine as he rolled to a stop a few yards from the front door. He climbed off the bike and slid the helmet off his now-sweaty head. He pulled the package out of a pack strapped to the seat and climbed the steps.

He reached the top step to find a shotgun in his face.

3:45 A.M. PST Brentwood

Amy Weiss dreamed that church bells were ringing, which was odd because she was in a grocery store, not a church. The church bells became cash registers that wouldn’t stop ringing up her yogurt, and then telephones ringing at the cashier’s stand, and then she was awake and it was just her telephone ringing shrilly at a ridiculous hour of the morning.

“Uh-huh,” she groaned, having fumbled for the phone.

“Amy, it’s Josh Segal.” She struggled to remember who that was. She dredged up a recollection that Josh Segal was the assistant metro editor, and often got stuck on the night desk. “I need you up and at ’em.”

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“My dad said ‘up and at ’em,’ every morning for twelve years,” Amy said. “Don’t use that phrase, please.”

“Either way, you need to get up. You’re slated to have that interview with the Pope this morning, aren’t you?”

“Interview. Yes. In, oh, five hours or so. Trust me, it doesn’t take that long to do this hair.” She yawned again, wanting to be sleepy, but sleep was fading away. Her reporter’s instincts were tuned in to the excitement in Segal’s voice.

“Drag it out of bed, Weiss,” the assistant editor said. “There’s been some serious stuff you need to be up on when you meet with him.” Amy listened as the editor described, in as much detail as the police would allow, the violence that had taken place at St. Monica’s.

“Jesus, and they’re still holding the conference tomorrow, uh, today?” she said, now fully awake and pulling clothes out of her drawer.

“That’s what they’re telling us. The police haven’t given any motive for the murder of this Father Giggs. They’re not releasing the name of the intruder killed later that evening. We’ve been on the phone with a public relations person for the archdiocese, but we’re getting a hundred variations of ‘no comment.’ ”

“You think the Pope’s going to tell me anything more than what you’re getting from the archdiocese? I’m just doing a puff piece on the conference.”

“You just graduated to the crime beat. I figure our article on the attacks will be a hell of a lot more interesting with a quote from the Pope in it. So get up and—”

“—at ’em. Bite me,” Amy said genially, and hung up.

3:52 A.M. PST Santa Clarita

Jack had spent several minutes facedown in the dirt beside the porch with the shotgun pressed against the back of his neck. He had thought about taking the gun away from the bearded, beer-gutted biker, but this was no time to make trouble. He tolerated the biker’s boot in the small of his back while someone went in to clear things with Dean. Finally, he was let up. Jack looked at the biker, who was grinning out of the hole in his bushy brown-white beard, still lazily holding the shotgun in Jack’s general direction.

“You want to point that thing somewhere else,” Jack said, “before it accidentally gets shoved up your ass.”

“Ha!” the biker said. “You give that a try someday. Come on.”

He led Jack into the house. It stank of beer and farts and mildew that had been around much longer than the bikers. The living room was gloomy, lit by only a seventies-era table lamp and a small fluorescent in the kitchen. There were two couches and a tattered easy chair, the latter occupied by a big man with the kind of huge, uncut arms that indicated genetic size. The man, probably in his late forties or early fifties, still had a barrel chest pushing his T-shirt to the limit. CTU had been able to dig up only one mug

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shot, but that had been enough. Jack recognized Dean Schrock.

“I heard you was a fat guy,” Dean said.

Jack shrugged. “Had to lose my gut. My cousin had a heart attack. My age, too.”

“So, what,” said the biker with the shotgun, “you eat bean sprouts and salads? Shit, we really doin’ business with this dipshit?”

“I’m the dipshit with the shit you need,” Jack said. “Besides, looks like every pound I lost was your gain, so shut the fuck up.”

The biker gave Jack a fuck-off look, but Dean laughed. “Anyway, I made calls when I got here. I knew who to expect.”

Jack shrugged, but inwardly, he knew what Dean meant. The bartender at the Killabrew had been Smithies’s middleman, so having her under the Federal thumb had made impersonating Dog easy, despite the difference in their appearance.

“You heard from Peek?” Dean asked.

“Peek,” Jack knew, was the nickname of the biker the Fresno police had picked up. From what he had confessed, his job had been to ride in early and meet with Farrigian.

“Nah,” Jack said. “He told me to meet up here.”

Dean and the fat biker exchanged glances, and Jack knew that Peek’s absence had put them on edge. “You bring what I need?” Dean asked.

Jack hefted the sack. “You wanted one more brick, I brought it.” “What the fuck?” said a female voice out of the shadows. Jack didn’t know who she was or what she meant,

so he tossed the brick to Dean. A couple of the bikers flinched as the dormant explosive arced across the room, but Dean caught it casually and hefted it.

“What the fuck?” said the woman again, staggering into the lamplight. She was blond, in her late thirties, but with the used look of a much older woman. She blinked at Jack. “You’re not Dog!”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

4:00 A.M. PST Santa Clarita

“Who the fuck are you?” Jack said lazily.

“Deb!” she said indignantly. “I lived down ’round here back in ’94. Or maybe ’95. Something like that.” She blinked several times, and spoke in the overly enunciated speech of someone who is trying not to sound drunk. “I met him coupla times.”

“You mean you screwed him a couple times!” The fat biker laughed. So did everyone else, including Deb, who was clearly no delicate flower.

“You know Deb?” Dean asked. He was laughing, too, but Jack could feel the energy between them change. A wall had gone up between them.

Jack looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t know.

It’s like four o’clock in the morning. At this point I’m too shit-faced to know what they look like. And if I wasn’t shit-faced, I sure as hell wouldn’t choose this one.”

This elicited a roar of laughter from everyone except Deb, who was insistent. “No, no, I’m serious, Dean. I’m sure I met that fat slob before. This ain’t him.”

There were two directions: forward or backward. Jack wasn’t usually one for retreating. He strode forward and plopped himself down on the couch at a ninety-degree angle to Dean, and put his booted feet up on the old scratched coffee table. “Look, I got you the first batch of stuff. Then I hear from Peek that you want more. I brought it. You gonna let this split tail give me a bunch of crap?”

Dean was shrewd. He played the controversy very casually, but Jack, just as shrewd, knew that the biker leader was on his guard. “Nah, she can’t even remember what she looks like half the time,” he said. “Besides, you said you talked to Peek, right?”

Jack leaned back as though he didn’t care much as he corrected: “I didn’t talk to him. He left a message at the Killabrew.” That was how Dog did most of his business. And CTU had checked Smithies’s personal phone records. No calls that day or night from anyone that might have been connected to Peek the biker.

Before Dean could respond, Jack found Deb in his face, her skin leathered yellow, undoubtedly from years of smoking. “You’re way too good-looking. If I’d screwed you, I’d remember it.”

“If I did you, I’d do my best to forget it,” Jack answered. He put his hand on her face and shoved

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her backward. She fell sprawling on her backside, shrieked, and scrambled to her feet, coming at Jack like a harpy. Before Jack had moved, Dean was on her, catching her wrists in his big hands and shoving her aside.

“Give it a rest, Deb,” he said. “Hell, I did you last year and you hardly remember it.” To Jack, he said, “Thanks for bringing up the extra stuff. You want to help us use it?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah.”

4:09 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles

Another door that Harry Driscoll did not want to open. This one, on Shoemacher Avenue, belonged to Father Sam Collins. But just as he had before, Harry knocked.

The door opened after a minute, and Father Collins, his eyes swollen from restless sleep, greeted him.

“Father Collins, Detective Driscoll. I hope I gave you enough time to—”

“Come in, come in, Detective,” Collins said with as much congeniality as four o’clock would allow. “Yes, thanks for calling ahead. I put on some coffee if you want it.”

Harry followed Collins’s words and gestures into the small, well-kept house. There was an intricately carved crucifix hanging in a place of prominence in the entryway, but otherwise the house gave no indication of belonging to a man of the cloth.

“What happened to your arm?” Harry asked immediately.

Collins touched his right hand gingerly to his left arm, which was bound up in a sling. “Oh, it’s been such a pain. Literally!” He laughed. “I was in an accident a while ago. My arm was really badly broken and I had to have surgery. I’m not sure how it’s gone, though. I have a checkup scheduled for next week, but it’s been hurting a lot.”

“What kind of accident?” Harry probed.

“Car accident. Coffee?” Harry accepted, and Collins poured two cups in the open kitchen, then brought them into the living room. “I barely remember it. I didn’t even wake up until after the surgery. I saw the X-rays, though. I have this huge plate in my arm.”

Harry nodded absently. “I’m sorry to have bothered you so early.”

Collins waved him off. Now that he was more awake, his face opened into a smile that Harry guessed was almost permanent. “It’s a wasted night anyway. My arm’s keeping me up, and I have a big conference today, and last night someone broke one of my back windows.”

Biehn, Harry thought. Biehn had said he was trying to break in when someone kidnapped him.

4:12 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles

Collins had always been the weak point. The complication. Michael had known it from the begin

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ning. But Yasin had insisted. He had wanted there to be three deliverymen—three, as an ironic joke for Yasin’s own amusement—and Yasin had wanted at least one of them to be ignorant of the package he was carrying. At first, Michael had argued against this last idea, and won. But after that idiot Ali had gotten himself blown up on an airplane, they had to replace him with someone, and Yasin had insisted on returning to his original idea of the unwitting messenger. They had gone to immense amounts of trouble to make that happen, and now, of course, that one unnecessary twist was about to become the snag that might unravel the whole plan.

Michael was parked outside Collins’s house again, just as he had been before, when Detective Biehn arrived. That last encounter had been sheer luck; this was foresight. Michael had bugged Collins’s phone weeks ago, so that he could monitor any calls the priest made to any doctors he might know. That surveillance had paid off when another detective had called, waking Collins and asking him if he could stop by for a few questions. Michael had driven like a bat out of hell through the foggy Los Angeles morning to arrive just behind the detective.

Yasin could go to hell, as far as Michael was concerned. The power Yasin had over them depended entirely on the keeping of a secret, and that secret was unraveling as steadily as their plan. Michael was going to have to eliminate Collins for everyone’s sake, and Yasin could go cry to Allah for all he cared.

4:14 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles

“Father Collins,” Harry said, after spending several minutes asking simple questions designed to relax a suspect. “How well did you know Father Giggs?”

Collins sighed. “We were both priests at St. Monica’s, so I knew him pretty well, of course.”

“Were you both part of the youth program?”

Collins shifted ever so slightly. “Me? No, not officially. I helped out when I could. The program was popular, and Father Frank was sometimes overwhelmed.”

“Did you molest the children like he did?”

Silence engulfed the room like a tangible thing, a thick blanket of tension tangling them both. “Exexcuse me?” Collins said at last. He drank his coffee with a trembling hand.

“I said,” Harry repeated, staring directly into the priest’s eyes, “did you molest the children just like Father Frank did?”

Father Collins’s face flushed, then went very, very pale. His eyes could find no place to rest. They flitted like nervous birds from Driscoll to the coffee table, to the window, until finally they fell, exhausted, toward his cup. “I . . . no . . . Oh, Mary, mother of . . .” Something struck him and he looked up finally, his eyes filling with a fearful realization. “Oh my Lord. Is that why Giggs was killed?”

“Answer the question,” Harry demanded. His voice did not contain Biehn’s righteous indignation. It couldn’t, because he could not wrap his brain around the crime he was investigating. He recoiled from it. But his sense of justice would not let it be.

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“I didn’t!” Collins said quietly but urgently. “I mean, I haven’t. Not in years.” He shuddered. “It was such a sin. I should never have; it was Frank; almost always Frank.”

The cup fell from Collins’s hand, staining the couch and the rug with coffee. Collins put his head in his good hand and let out one long, strangled sob, his body convulsing.

4:17 A.M. PST Santa Clarita

One wouldn’t know it from looking at Dean Schrock, but he had a long memory. It stretched farther back than Altamont, farther back than the heyday of the Hell’s Angels. It stretched back to the days when his father lost his farmland in the Owens Valley, way north of Los Angeles. The Owens Valley farmers wanted nothing from Los Angeles. Most of them had never even been there. But Los Angeles wanted something from Owens Valley.

Water.

Eighty years earlier, Los Angeles had all but won the California Water Wars and stolen the water from the Owens River, draining the Owens Lake dry and turning a fertile inland valley into a desert. Farms were ravaged. Spirits crushed. Families torn apart.

The farmers, poor in political power but rich in defiance, had fought back as best they could. Owens Valley in the 1920s witnessed numerous acts of sabotage against the aqueducts built to drain their water for Los Angeles taps. In the late fifties and early sixties, Dean had grown up on the desiccated remains of the family farm, listening to his dad tell stories of his grandfather using a pick to punch holes in the pipes when he couldn’t get his hands on dynamite.

That was when his father wasn’t drunk and miserable, just miserable. Later, when the father drank too much to tolerate, and Dean got too old to take it, he beat up his old man and headed north on a stolen motorbike.

The beating he gave his father never satisfied him. It made him sorry for the old man. Dean always thought that, if he ever decided to raise some real hell, he’d do it to Los Angeles. And he’d do it for Owens Valley.

Which was why Jack found himself riding Smithies’s impounded Harley, hurtling toward Castaic Lake with Dean’s Hell’s Angels all around him. Castaic was a man-made lake, a reservoir that served as the end point of the California Aqueduct. Basically, it was an enormous storage tank for most of the water Los Angelenos drank.

And Dean was going to blow it up.

“Not just Castaic Dam,” Dean told him when they pulled over to get gas for some of the bikes. “Most of that water comes from Northern California. Stolen, too, I guess. No, my personal target is the pumping station at Sylmar. That’s where the Owens water comes from. But hell, these days the water that ruined Owens is barely a drop down in the city. So I want to hurt them more. I figure I’ll blow up both. That’s why I needed the extra shit.” He hefted the bag Jack had brought to him.

They kicked their bikes into gear and rode north on the steadily rising Interstate 5 for a few miles before arriving at Castaic Lake. Jack had never visited the

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area, so he could do nothing but follow as Dean took an off-ramp that curved away heading toward a vast dark area to the east of the interstate. The road led to small collection of buildings.

There was a gate, and floodlights, but the bikers didn’t seem bothered by them at all. One of the gang hopped off his bike and lifted a pair of bolt cutters off the back, walked boldly up to the gate, and snapped off the thick chain locking the gate closed. The sign on the gate read castaic dam—state water program reservoir—access restricted. The biker pushed open the gate and Dean’s gang rolled in.

Jack felt a fist close hard around his heart as he realized just how easily terrorists could wreak havoc on vital locations inside the United States.

4:32 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles

It might have been the longest fifteen minutes of Harry Driscoll’s life. It was certainly the most horrific. For that time period, he had become Father Collins’s confessor, listening as the priest unburdened himself of many, many years of sins. And those sins were many: lust, gluttony, avarice, selfishness. But all his sins, in whatever form, were always, always visited upon children.

What horrified Driscoll most was the tender terms in which Collins spoke of the kids he had abused and sodomized. They were his lambs, his own flock, his tender charges. When Driscoll mentioned Aaron Biehn’s name, Collins’s face softened and his eyes drifted off nostalgically.

Harry resisted the urge to slap him.

“Oh God,” Collins cried softly as he finished describing his many acts, and those of Father Giggs. “God, forgive me for what I’ve done. I’ve been terrible.”

Harry stood up. His voice was hoarse. He’d spent a twenty-year career digging at the underbelly of the city, rooting out the bad things that grew there. He decided he’d never seen a more horrible or pathetic creature than this. “I don’t know if God forgives people like you,” he rasped. “I sure as hell don’t. And I hope the judge doesn’t, either. Get up.”

Collins seemed to know he was beaten. He stood meekly. Harry grabbed the priest’s good arm firmly and walked him out the door into the chilly morning air.

“Am I being arrested?” Collins said, as naïve as ever. Harry wondered if he was mentally deficient. “I . . . I have a presentation to give for the Pope.”

“You’re going to miss it,” the detective replied. He opened the car door and guided Driscoll into the backseat. Harry couldn’t handcuff the wrist on the priest’s bad arm, so he hooked one ring around Collins’s good right wrist and the other to his left ankle.

He closed the door and hurried around to driver’s side, jumped in, and drove off toward Parker Center.

He was too disturbed by the images in his head to see the car ease away from the curb behind him.

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4:51 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

At least there was a night watchman, Jack thought ironically. Of course, he hadn’t done much except sputter and wheeze as Dean strode up to him, beat him senseless, and then tossed him into a storage shed.

Beyond the buildings they could see the enormous bulk of Castaic Dam, not much more than a giant earthworks thrown across a ravine. Below it, a shallow gorge ran down toward Santa Clarita and, below that, to the main suburbs of Los Angeles.

“That’s a whole lotta water behind there,” said one of the bikers. “That flood the city?”

“Nah,” said another. This was the tubby biker who’d put Jack down in the dirt earlier. “Too far to travel. It’ll get Santa Clarita real wet, prob’ly, and mess up a lot of shit in the San Fernando Valley.”

Dean nodded. “Yeah. I’m not trying to flood the city. I’m just taking away its water.”

Jack understood enough about Los Angeles history to know what that dam meant. Los Angeles was built mostly on desert, and relied on the massive California Aqueduct to bring in most of its drinking water from the north. Castaic was the storage tank for all that water. Wreck Castaic, and millions of acre-feet of water just drained into the dust.

“Let’s go,” Dean said.

It was the tubby biker, whose name was Barny, who seemed to know what he was doing. He directed several of the bikers as they broke out packets of plastic explosives—some of which, Jack guessed, were the plastic explosives Farrigian had sold to them instead of the Islamists—and began telling them how to lay it along strategic points of the dam. The dam itself was nothing like Jack expected. He’d visited large dams before, and they usually looked like giant medieval castles. Castaic, however, was little more than a dirt dike reinforced with rocks and other debris to prevent erosion. It was, however, tall at over four hundred feet, and there was a huge amount of water behind it.

“You gonna help, or what?” Barny challenged. Jack realized that he had hesitated while the others were hiking out along the foot of the dam.

“Yeah,” Jack replied. “I plan on helping a lot.”

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 A.M. AND 6 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

5:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“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.”

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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.”

5:06 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

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.

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“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.

5:18 A.M. PST Mid-Wilshire Area, Los Angeles

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 300C 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.

5:27 A.M. PST Farrigian’s Warehouse, West Los Angeles

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

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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-visitors-only spots for several hours. What the hell was she doing back here?

5:28 A.M. PST Mid-Wilshire Area, Los Angeles

Michael kept up a steady barrage of gunfire, his silenced .40 caliber semi-automatic puncturing the Acura the detective had been driving. The detective had managed to scramble around to the far side of the car for cover, and he wasn’t sure if he had been hit or not. Michael had started to advance, but the man squeezed off a few rounds that kept Michael down.

Still, he couldn’t wait much longer. Seconds were ticking by, and when enough of those seconds had passed the police would come, and he couldn’t allow that for many, many reasons. “Go,” he ordered the man in the passenger seat. It was Pembrook, the best of his small security detail. Pembrook bolted toward the Acura, even as the detective fired again. Pembrook flinched and dropped to one knee, but kept firing. Silenced rounds shattered the glass.

No! Michael thought. We need Collins.

Pembrook stood and fired. Michael saw the rounds shatter the window, saw Collins shudder and go limp. “Stop!” he yelled.

Pembrook halted at his shout, confused. “Get the body!” Michael yelled. “Get the body!” Pembrook started forward again, but now sirens wailed in the distance. The detective’s gunfire had awakened the residents. “Forget it!” Michael yelled, causing Pembrook to stutter once again. Seeing Michael dive back into the car, Pembrook scrambled back to the Chrysler.

5:31 A.M. PST Farrigian’s Warehouse, West Los Angeles

Nina tested the doors of the warehouse but found them locked. She started to walk the wall, looking for a window or other entry, but as she neared the corner, she heard the door open behind her. She pressed herself against the wall and listened.

“. . . you have to get it out. I did what you asked,” said Diana Christie. She sounded near to panic.

“It’s not me, I told you,” said a voice Nina assumed belonged to Farrigian. “I’ve got nothing to do with that.”

A car roared by, drowning out part of Christie’s response. “. . . one I know,” she was saying. “Please.”

“You did what they asked. Go home. I’m sure they’ll be in touch.”

Nina heard the door close and footsteps walk away. A moment later a car door opened and closed, and Diana Christie drove away.

“What the hell is that all about?” Nina said quietly. “And who is she working for?”

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5:45 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

The sun was rising as Jack finished planting the armed C–4 along the base of the dam as Barny had directed. He resented every moment of it as much as he resented the weight of the plastic explosives strapped to his back. After placing the last brick and activating the detonator, he turned back toward the dirty slope where Dean waited.

The hike back took a few minutes, made longer by the smarmy grin on Dean’s face as Jack trudged back up the slope.

“Well, I gotta say that made this more fun than I expected.” The biker laughed. “I had time, I’d try to figure out who you are and how you got on to me, but I figure I’ll find out soon enough. When you disappear, more cops are bound to sniff around.”

“They’re around now,” Jack bluffed. “Wait a few minutes.”

“Nah.” Dean brushed off the attempt. “They’d have come down on us the minute we strapped a bomb on your back. You’re alone. Why, I got no idea. But I’ll take it.”

“Can I blow him up now?” Barny asked. Dean shook his head. “Go down and make sure he did it right. I don’t trust him.”

Barny nodded and trotted down the slope, followed by one of the other bikers. Jack glared at Dean’s grinning face. “It was too easy,” Dean noted.

Barny came back after a few minutes, puffing and sweating. “He tried to fuck us. He disabled the receivers on all the detonators. I fixed it, but I had to use the delayed fuse. The bombs will detonate about five minutes after we send the signal.”

Dean nodded. “Dump him in the reservoir.”

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 A.M. AND 7 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

6:00 A.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles

Pope John Paul woke suddenly, but gently, as he always did. He liked to think it was the peace of God, though in his heart he could not be sure. It had been his career-long secret weapon, this ability to wake up gently, but immediately, with a mind focused on the affairs of the day. That morning, he woke up with the Unity Conference, and all it represented, clearly in mind. He understood, as so few seemed to, what was at stake. East and West were headed for a reckoning of tragic proportions. Someone needed to blunt the impact of the collision, bring the two sides together with a handshake rather than a clenched fist.

6:01 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

Jack punched the closest biker in the face. The man staggered back, and Jack kicked him hard in the chest, sending him sprawling down the slope.

“Blow him—oh,” Dean said, the grin falling off his face.

Jack had known it from the minute they allowed him to walk back up the slope. They couldn’t detonate the bomb on his back when he was standing right among them. But they would scatter, and they were already trying. He had to get to Barny and his cell phone. Jack lunged at the fat biker, tripping him. But huge, viselike hands grabbed him, dragging him backward. Jack didn’t resist. Instead he spun and traveled with the pull, tucking his chin and ramming his forehead into Dean’s chest. He followed it with a knee that connected with Dean’s groin. The big man doubled over like he was hugging Jack. Jack grabbed his hair at the temple and twisted it, peeling Dean’s head away, and headbutted him again, this time in the face. He felt teeth give way.

But he couldn’t stay with Dean. Barny had the phone that would trigger the bomb on his back. He spun and jumped down the slope. Barny, fat and slow, was just getting to his feet. He was holding a cell phone in his hand, his fingers fumbling at it, when Jack reached him and leaped, landing with both feet hard on Barny’s back like a surfer atop his board. Barny grunted and his arms sprawled out, but he managed to keep his grip on the phone. Jack hopped from Barny’s back and landed hard with one foot on the biker’s right wrist. Barny howled but managed to

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press his thick thumb on the send button just before Jack crouched down and tore the mobile phone out of his clutched hand.

6:04 A.M. PST Los Angeles

Harry Driscoll had been sitting on the curb on Ross-moor Avenue for nearly twenty minutes. He was in a daze. Twenty-plus years on the force, and this was only the second time he’d been in a firefight. The first time, Jack Bauer had saved his ass. This time, Harry had the funny feeling that Bauer was somehow the cause of it.

Though he was built like a fireplug and tough as iron, Harry hadn’t joined the force out of machismo. He was no cowboy and had never wanted to be. He believed in justice, and wanted to keep his streets safe. He had been very satisfied with the role of a beat cop, and then been elated to move up into the ranks of detective, where he could pursue the criminals he knew were out there. His promotion to Robbery-Homicide, the elite unit in LAPD, had been one of the most gratifying moments of his life. He preferred rooting out the bad guys through solid detective work, and though he wasn’t afraid to face danger, he’d never lusted for the thrill of bullets whizzing around him.

During the last twenty minutes there had been squad cars, ambulances, and other detectives. He had answered their questions the way dazed witnesses and victims often answered his: distantly, hollowly, as though the incident had happened to someone else.

But one thing kept going through Driscoll’s mind, even while he finished answering their questions, even while the forensics guys worked on the cars and examined Father Collins’s corpse. Why had one of the gunmen shouted, Get the body! Get the body!

6:05 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

Jack stomped on Barny’s head. He looked back up the slope, but none of the other bikers was in sight. His fingers tore at the backpack that had been strapped so tightly to his chest. They’d lashed the two shoulder straps together across his chest—a simple bind that wasn’t meant to stop him indefinitely, just make it hard enough to undo without them seeing his struggles. He bent down and fished through the pockets of the now-motionless biker until he found a small folding knife. Flipping it open, he cut through the bindings and slipped the backpack off, hurling it from him and dropping flat, using Barny as cover.

But the bomb he’d been wearing didn’t go off. The digital timer hadn’t even started counting down.

Instead of relief, Jack felt a sickening pit open in his stomach. Jumping to his feet, he ran down the slope to the base of the dam and checked the first brick of plastic explosives. The digital timer on its face was counting down, the tenth-of-a-second digit flashing so fast it looked like a flickering 8.

Barny hadn’t triggered the bomb on his back. He’d set off the explosives on the dam. Jack had less than five minutes to stop it.

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6:08 A.M. PST Los Angeles

“You can’t call it off,” Yasin told Michael over a mobile connection. “They will not find out in time. There are too many fail-safes and backups in this operation.”

Yasin could afford to be calm. Michael could not, but he forced himself to sound relaxed anyway out of a sense of professional competitiveness. “None of the backups will work if the event itself is canceled. You can only push me so far.”

“I know,” Yasin agreed. “That is the reality of all blackmail. You know the power I have over you. You, not I, will decide whether it’s worth it or not to follow my orders. But remember, I lose nothing by exposing the ones you try so hard to protect. I will do it willingly. And if you quit, you will lose them, and also the chance to kill a common enemy. The choice is yours.”

Yasin dropped off. Michael was walking along Olympic Boulevard toward a bus stop. He had ditched the car and stripped off his black shirt, and wore only a fitted athletic T-shirt and his dark pants. He and Pembrook had separated.

Michael thought, just for a moment, about bolting. He had an escape plan, of course—a false identity, an open ticket to Venezuela, a small house there. Not really a life, but a place to bivouac. This carefully laid plan was fraying at the seams.

But his faith was too strong. Professional though he was, Michael was also a devout Catholic. A true Catholic. And though he despised Yasin for other reasons, the man was right in saying that they shared a common enemy. Michael had committed himself to destroying that enemy, and he would do so at any cost.

6:10 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

Jack couldn’t just pull the detonators. The triggers were not elaborate, but Barny had been clever enough to give each one a contact trigger—if the detonators were simply pulled out, a small wire still buried in the plastic explosives would trigger the brick. Pulling out the wire while the detonator was in place would have the same effect.

Disarming the detonator itself proved to be simple enough. Either Barny’s knowledge did not extend to fail-safes and redundancies, or he hadn’t had time to incorporate them. Jack’s explosives training was not extensive, but he’d learned to both arm and disarm basic explosives while in Delta. That knowledge came in handy now as he careful removed the blast cap from each detonator. The process wasn’t complicated, but he had to move slowly to prevent having the two brass connections touch. He finished the first one and saw that the digital counter had run down to 3:57.

And he had six more to go.

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6:11 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

Dean stumbled backward among the control rooms west of the dam, still spitting out bits of his own teeth and blood. One of his gang—Doogan, he thought, but his head was reeling, too—was running next to him, but the others were scattered. They’d seen Barny go for the trigger that would blow that Federal motherfucker to little pieces.

Dean was almost to his bike, and his head was clearing, when he realized that he hadn’t heard an explosion of any kind. “Doog,” he said through swollen, bloody lips, “Less get back there.”

6:12 A.M. PST Castaic Dam

Jack wasn’t going to make it. He’d disarmed all but two, and the last timer had read 1:30.

Jack sprinted toward the second to last bomb, took a deep, steadying breath, and disconnected its blast cap. Without a current and a small charge to set it off, the plastic explosive was now just so much molding clay.

Forty-five seconds left. Jack sprinted toward the last bomb, wondering if he might make it . . . but even as he reached it, he knew the answer, and he kept on running, reaching the far end of the dam and driving himself up that slope until he reached the height of the dam more than four hundred feet above the gulch, and threw himself to the ground.

Behind and below him, hell erupted. A sound that reminded him oddly of a lion’s roar rent the air, and in an instant dirt was raining down on him, and dust filled the sky. The blast was powerful enough to make the solid earth beneath him tremble. With clods of earth still raining down, Jack leaped to his feet and ran back to the edge of the slope. A huge chunk of the dam was gone, as though scooped away by a giant hand. Water spurted through weak points in the wall in a half-dozen places. None of the newly made springs was very large, but erosion would loosen the dam further. Someone else would have to take care of that.

Jack hurried along the top of the dam, running gingerly over the weakened portion, then leaning into a full sprint as he headed back toward the maintenance sheds. His usual speed was not there because he was still carrying a stack of explosive bricks, but he was fast enough to reach the far side just as Dean’s Angels came stumbling down the slope to his left. Jack dropped to one knee, letting them descend and pass, then he ran among the sheds. One of the bikers must have spotted him because he heard a howl from behind, but he didn’t stop. He ran through the sheds and back to the bikes. He paused for only a second, to hang his backpack off the backseat of Dean’s bike. Then ran to his own bike and, as fast as he could, lashed the stack of plastic explosives onto the seat behind him. Then he hopped on the Harley and started it up.

A bullet whined a few feet over his head. He spun the bike around, sending a spray of dirt and gravel behind him. He couldn’t hear any more reports over the sound of his engine, but he thought he heard the hiss of more rounds falling and passing to the left

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and right. He felt a faint thud in his lower back and knew that a bullet had found its way into the stack of plastic explosives. The bricks had dispersed the bullet’s force, so it hadn’t penetrated his skin.

Jack raced down the access lane and onto the main road, knowing that they would give chase. He hurtled down the road for almost a mile before he found a good blind turn in the road, traveled past it, then turned and stopped in the middle of the road. He took Barny’s cell phone out of his pocket. He flipped it open and pressed the menu buttons until a list of recent calls appeared. Two numbers appeared, one after the other, over and over again, and Jack knew that they were dry runs for the receivers attached to the detonators.

Just then, Dean and his bikers came roaring around the corner, not a hundred yards away. They saw Jack, and Dean’s eyes lit up brighter than the early morning sun. Jack highlighted one of the two numbers and pressed send.

Nothing happened. Dean was now fifty yards away.

Jack scrolled down to the other number, held up the phone as though it were a talisman, and pressed send again.

It took a microsecond for the signal to flash from the phone to the nearest cell site to the receiver. When that fraction of a second ticked away, Dean and his bikers vanished inside a ball of fire.

6:30 A.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles

“. . . after last night’s disturbances, Your Holiness,” said Cardinal Walesa, “I don’t see how we can possibly continue.”

Walesa was speaking in Polish, and John Paul answered him in kind. “All the more reason, Your Eminence, all the more reason.” In truth, John Paul was somewhat rattled by the violence that had rocked the cathedral all evening, but he refused to let it show.

He was sitting in the front room of his bedchamber, surrounded by his closest advisors. Cardinal Mulrooney was also there. It was Mulrooney who spoke next.

“Your Holiness,” he said in delicate English, “I can only guess what His Eminence has said, but I suspect he’s urging you to postpone the Unity Conference. I am afraid I must agree.”

“Postpone, yes!” Walesa said, seizing on the word. “Postpone but not cancel. That is the word for it.”

Cardinal Rausch from Germany, an old and dear friend from John Paul’s days as a cardinal, put his own hand over the Pope’s. “It might be best, Your Holiness. No one would question the reason. The media would be sympathetic.”

John Paul looked for help from an unlikely source—Father Martino, his press secretary. As a calculating politician, John Paul had made use of Martino many times, but he did not have much affection for the man. Now, however, he thought Martino might come in useful once again. “Father Martino, what are your thoughts?”

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Martino, perennially out of favor, was surprised to be consulted. He looked wide-eyed from cardinal to cardinal before stammering, “Well, Your—Your Holiness, on the one hand, His Eminence Cardinal Rausch is correct. The media would write a sympathetic story—”

“There!” Rausch said, patting John Paul’s wrist. “You see?”

“—but, on the other hand,” Martino continued, “on the other hand, the Holy Father has made a great effort, in many public statements, to define the importance of this first Unity Conference. If . . . if he were to stay, despite recent events, the media would talk about it for days. It would be a media coup.”

The small congregation of cardinals murmured disapprovingly, and a few scoffed openly. Rausch turned pink. “These aren’t ‘recent events.’ We’re talking about murder! Right here!”

“But the conference will not be here,” John Paul said firmly. “And murders take place every day, all around the world, in the name of religion. We must not be deterred.”

He dismissed them with a nod. Only when they were gone did Giancarlo materialize out of the shadows. “Your thoughts, Giancarlo?”

The capable protector deliberated a moment. “My thoughts are always for your safety, Holy Father. My advice is obvious.”

“And yet we cannot always do God’s work and be safe.” Giancarlo shrugged. “The cardinals agree with me.” John Paul waved his words away. “Rausch is too

good a friend. His fear is for the flesh, when his mind should be on the church’s mission. Mulrooney never supported the conference. Wait for me a moment, Giancarlo.”

The Pope was too old to kneel comfortably, so in private he would pray in a comfortable chair. He did so now. His eyes closed gently, but the lids and lashes flickered ever so slightly like the tiny flashes of electricity pulsing in a radio. The security man was sure that the Holy Father was receiving some signal from heaven. Giancarlo had watched this many times. In these moments, the old Pope seemed both intimately vulnerable and utterly intangible, a holy relic that could not be harmed. Giancarlo, however, knew that was not true.

The old man sat there for more than a moment. Several minutes passed, but Giancarlo did not move. Though he felt like a traitor, he prayed that the Pope would open his eyes and decide to postpone the Unity Conference. Neither he nor the police could find any connection between the violence at St. Monica’s and the Pope himself, but the murder was far too close to home for his own comfort. The prudent thing was to return immediately to the Vatican, where all the power of the church was assembled to protect the Holy Father.

Five minutes passed, then ten. Giancarlo stood, motionless. In his early years, in moments like these, he had said Ave Marias. Lately, though, he had taken to repeating to himself the poem “On His Blindness” by John Milton (even if Milton was a Protestant). It ended with the line, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

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Finally, the Pope’s eyes opened slowly and peacefully. He looked at Giancarlo with his keen eyes. “I will go forward, Giancarlo. If some violence should occur, will you be there for me?”

Giancarlo’s expression, like his faith, never wavered.

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 A.M. AND 8 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

7:00 A.M. PST Los Angeles Department of Coroner Forensic Sciences Lab

Harry had been down Mission Road, where the coroner’s office was located, many times during his career. But there was something creepy about this trip, because he didn’t usually follow right behind the bodies. He felt like a scavenger circling a carcass.

But he couldn’t help it. As if being shot at wasn’t enough motivation, Harry was obsessed with the driver’s last words: Get the body!

What kind of assassins shot you up and then wanted to keep the remains? What was it about the body? Something telltale about the rounds? No, there were plenty of rounds in and around Harry’s

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car, which now looked like Swiss cheese. To make sure he was dead? Probably not. Get the body already assumed Collins was dead.

It had to be evidence. The killers assumed that Collins was in possession of something incriminating and they wanted it. If that was true, then this case was turning into something much larger than a widespread child abuse ring. Whoever was involved was willing to kill to keep their secrets.

Harry’s driver—a uniform who’d offered to give him a lift, thinking he was heading toward Parker Center—pulled into 1104 North Mission and stared white-faced at the building that housed the city’s dead.

“You think they order lunch in?” the uniform said. “Who’d deliver?” “They get plenty of deliveries,” Harry said as he got out.

He showed his badge to the clerk at the front desk and waited until a coroner’s assistant came out. In a city the size of Los Angeles, the coroner’s office was open twenty-four hours a day, but even they had their off-peak hours. The man who appeared was young, with big curly hair that had been fashionable when Harry was this kid’s age. The coroner looked sleepy, and was obviously just finishing the night shift.

“You’re the detective?” he asked lazily. “Driscoll,” Harry said, flashing his badge. “I’m on the case with a body being delivered right now.” “Jason Keane,” said the other. “Can we help with something? I mean, besides the obvious.” “I just want to have that body examined as soon as possible. Like, immediately,” Harry underscored,

a little dubious of the mop-headed kid’s attention span. “Can you start now?”

Keane shook his head. “I’m not the guy. Just the assistant. The coroner left early because it was slow.”

“And the morning guy—”

“Called in late,” Keane said. “’S why I’m stuck here at almost quarter after.”

Driscoll frowned. “Sounds like government work to me. Who’s his supervisor?”

7:13 A.M. PST Culver City

Marwan al-Hassan had finished the morning salaat and was sipping tea in his brother’s breakfast nook. His left arm hurt, but he didn’t care. The day he had committed himself to was now at hand, by the will of Allah. Not only would the pain in his arm vanish, but he would be gathered into paradise. And he would strike a blow against the infidels. Such a blow! Perhaps not the greatest blow, but a decisive one, like the stab of a dagger that leaves no great hole, but penetrates deep.

Yasin had explained to him the importance of the blow, especially to deal it here, on American soil. The fear it would cause, the chasms it would create between their enemies, would be significant. Marwan would be a hero, and his name would be praised.

Marwan decided to make another cup of tea.

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7:16 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jack hadn’t felt this tired in a long time. There was a part of him that wanted to be pissed off at Christopher Henderson, or Ryan Chappelle, or both, for not providing him the backup he needed up at Castaic. Where had the surveillance been? Where was the cavalry?

These were legitimate questions, but Jack knew the answers would not satisfy him. CTU was an infant, disorganized, with unclear lines of communication. When Jack had gone after Dog Smithies, it had been with the help of Harry Driscoll and the LAPD. The Dean thing had been done strictly through CTU, and CTU definitely did not have its act together yet.

But Jack was too tired to chew anyone out, so when he staggered in the door and saw Christopher Henderson, he just shook his head reproachfully and took a seat in the conference room. He didn’t know if there was going to be a debrief and he didn’t care. He hadn’t slept in a while, and since yesterday evening he had nearly been blown up twice and shot at twice. The phrase “third time’s a charm” drifted through his mind in a very unsettling way.

There was some activity around Jack while he sat. Someone put a bagel and some coffee in front of him. Jamey Farrell had taken charge of the stack of C–4 and was examining it. Christopher Henderson was on the phone with the Santa Clarita police and the

L.A. Sheriff, talking through the firefight and explosion that had left more than a half-dozen people dead near Castaic Dam.

Jack had lost his cell phone, so he dialed home from one of CTU’s landlines. Teri answered on the

first ring.

“Jack?” she asked worriedly.

“Hi, it’s me,” he said.

“Were you home at all last night?” Teri said. “Or did you leave early?”

“Not home. I’m sorry,” he said. Hearing Teri’s voice was like a tonic that relaxed his muscles. But the effect was not beneficent. As he relaxed, his guard dropped, and the fatigue seemed to sink into the marrow of his bones. “You wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had. It was like being in Delta again.”

“I thought that kind of night ended with Delta,” she replied. The reproach in her voice made Jack wince. “Is it over now?”

In his mind’s eye, Jack saw Dean engulfed in a fireball. “Should be.”

“Do you want to come home and have breakfast?”

Food, Jack thought. Food sounds good. How long’s it been since I’ve eaten anything? “I’ll be right there.”

7:29 A.M. PST Los Angeles Department of Coroner Forensic Sciences Lab

Driscoll listened to the woman on the phone talking. “. . . I’m not annoyed at the early hour, Detective Driscoll. I’m annoyed that you won’t listen to the facts.”

“I’ve listened to your facts, ma’am,” Driscoll argued into the receiver. “You won’t listen to mine.”

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“You don’t have any,” the woman said gently.

Driscoll had to admit that he was most annoyed at her calm and rationality. She—her name was Patricia Siegman—was clearly accustomed to dealing with anxious investigators eager to receive data on their cases. She was currently handling Harry with an aplomb he would have admired, if only she were using it on someone else.

“You have a witness who was shot. I understand that, but something like sixty percent of the criminal forensics we conduct are shootings. We have a backlog, and I have two coroners out.”

“But this is important—” “—and I’ll get to it today, Detective. I’ll get to it by noon. I can’t do any better than that.”

Driscoll checked his watch. She was doing him a favor, he knew. A five-hour turnaround was ridiculously efficient. But somehow it wasn’t enough for him. Get the body! The phrase haunted him, and maybe it was just his time around Jack Bauer, but he had a gut feeling that the explanation for that phrase was urgent.

7:33 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jamey Farrell hadn’t performed integral calculus since college, but she found herself dusting off her equations as she measured the bricks of C–4 that Jack Bauer had brought in. As soon as she’d measured the bricks, she took their average and scribbled it on a sheet of scratch paper.

Then she went down to the closet that currently passed as CTU’s evidence locker. The crate they’d confiscated from Sweetzer Avenue was easy to find— it was just about the only item in the closet. Huffing and griping to herself, Jamey loaded it onto a small mover’s cart and pushed it back up to the computer bay she’d commandeered as a work space. The crate still contained the C–4 they’d found. Looking at the real deal, Jamey was struck by how obvious it was that some of the plastic explosive had been missing. In real life the box looked much emptier than it had on video. Just eyeballing the crate told her that one could fit much more C–4 inside.

She frowned but continued working. Her next job would be to measure the volume of the C–4 Bauer had brought in, and then estimate how much (if any) was missing. She had a sinking feeling that no one was going to like the answer she came up with.

7:46 A.M. PST Bauer Residence

Jack pulled into his own driveway and parked his car. He flipped down the vanity mirror and took a good look at himself. He’d splashed water on his face at CTU, but he still looked dirty, sweaty, and bruised. There were circles under his eyes the size of gym bags.

I should have taken more time, he thought. Cleaned up more. Borrowed a shirt. This will be a conversation.

Jack didn’t relish the idea of keeping secrets from Teri. Given free rein, he’d have explained to her every cut and bruise. But much of the information

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about his job was classified, and though he told her everything he could, the result still left holes, and those holes became gaps in their relationship. Better to come home clean and happy, and avoid the need for stories altogether.

He walked in the door and entered a world entirely disconnected from the last few hours. In this world, bacon sizzled on a frying pan, channel four was broadcasting local news and traffic alerts, and Teri Bauer was trying to get Kim out of the bathroom.

“It’s not that bad, Kimmy. Just come on!” She smiled at Jack as she saw him, then rolled her eyes, pointed to her chin, and mouthed the word pimple.

“It’s huge!” Kim Bauer wailed from behind the bathroom door. “It’s a volcano.”

“It’s stress,” Teri said. “Last night was tough on everyone because of Aaron. Let me put some cover-up on it.”

There was a pause, followed by a soft click as Kim unlocked the bathroom door. Teri threw her arms around Jack, kissed him, and said, “Eggs on the table. Teen crisis in the bathroom.” She paused. “Did you know about Aaron Biehn?”

Jack nodded. “I heard.” “I want to know about it. After she’s gone.” Teri vanished behind the door.

Jack went into the kitchen and sat down at the small table there. The scrambled eggs were a little cold, but he didn’t care. He felt as though he hadn’t been home in weeks. While he ate, he listened to the news, simply because it sounded so wonderfully mundane: traffic on the I–10, a fight between the mayor and the city council. These were the crises most people faced. And they seemed to Jack as trivial as a pimple on the chin. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He finished the eggs and decided that he would take a nap for a few minutes.

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 A.M. AND 9 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

8:00. A.M. PST Bauer Residence

Jack stretched out on the couch in his living room and pushed the cushion under his head. And then his cell phone rang.

“Bauer,” he said unhappily.

“This is Jamey Farrell over at CTU.”

“If this is about paperwork or reports, I’ll come in and answer questions in a couple of hours,” he grumbled, his eyes still closed.

“Nothing like that,” she replied. “It’s about the plastic explosive you brought in.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do we care if some is still missing?”

Jack opened his eyes. “What makes you think it’s missing?”

“I just analyzed the crate, and the volume of each brick of C–4. Even accounting for the bricks you dealt with, I think there still could have been several bricks left, maybe up to ten pounds of it.”

Now Jack sat up, rubbing his eyes and trying to shake the sleep off his brain. “But you don’t know that, right? That crate must have been a lot more full with the stuff I brought in.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jamey said. “But you know how a room looks bigger sometimes after you put furniture in it? Same with this box. I put the C–4 back in it, and no matter how I stuffed it, there are obvious spaces left. I did the math, too. Maybe ten pounds.”

Jack didn’t want to hear it. “The stuff Smithies had? The stuff that blew up Ramin?”

“Factored in.”

“That is not what I want to hear,” Jack admitted.

“Don’t shoot the messenger. What do you want to do about it?”

Jack laughed. “Who says it’s my decision?”

“I didn’t ask anyone,” Jamey said. “You just seemed like the guy who wants to know.”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “All right. I’m coming in.”

8:05 A.M. PST Crescent Heights Avenue, Los Angeles

Rabbi Dan Bender rarely used e-mail. He didn’t trust it. Words sent electronically were as permanent as if they’d been etched in stone. He would certainly send nothing confidential over the Internet, and Rabbi Bender was in possession of many, many secrets.

He had written the first draft of the letter to his

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brother on stationery, but in the end he decided against it. He needed to be sure his brother received this message, and the post between Los Angeles and Jerusalem had never been one hundred percent reliable. But, as he had already told himself, e-mail was like graven stone. His brother would see it eventually.

This is what he typed into his computer:

Dear Sam, I hope Miriam is feeling better. You’re both in my thoughts and I pray for her remission.

In the meantime, I want to send you a note of apology, and possibly a goodbye. I can’t tell you why I am apologizing. You may or may not hear about it. But there is a distinct possibility that you won’t hear from me after today, so I wanted to express my feelings.

You were always a better Jew than I. Even Dad thought so, although of course he was too much of a mensch to say it. You were a better rabbi, too. But there are reasons for that, some of which may become apparent to you. But among the unsaid reasons is this: you are a righteous man. In the end, I find that I am not. If I were righteous, I would not be doing what I’m going to do today.

I hope you’ll forgive me. With all my love, from your brother, Dan

He reread the short message several times, wishing he could write more. His finger hovered over the send button for a moment. Then he clicked it, and the deed was done.

8:10 A.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles

“I hope you’ll forgive the cautions,” said the Pope to Amy Weiss. “There was a disturbance here last night.”

“No problem,” Amy said, although in fact the whole affair had disturbed her. Her interview had been scheduled for two weeks; she’d passed through the background check the Vatican had required. One would have thought the metal detector and the bag search would have been enough. But the thin, soft-spoken man had come along with a nun in tow and had insisted on a complete search of her clothing and person. If all Amy had been after was the puff piece, she would have walked out. But she was now on the trail of a legitimate page one story. “In fact, I’d like to ask about that.”

The Pope’s eyes twinkled charmingly as he replied in his softly accented English, “I find the Unity Conference to be a much more pleasant topic, don’t you?”

Amy felt the force of his charm and his authority, and tried to resist it. “Well, the two are related, aren’t they? Do you consider the attacks here last night to be a threat? Are they related?”

“That is a question for a policeman, not a priest,” John Paul said dismissively. “In any case, the confer

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ence will not be stopped. It is, I believe, the most important thing in the world.”

“This conference?” she asked.

“Its purpose,” John Paul said, putting a hand on her arm gently, almost pleadingly. “East and West; Christian, Muslim, and Jew. They are at war, or they soon will be. It is a war that may cover the world in flame. It must be averted.”

Amy wanted to talk about the murders; she had been told to talk about the murders. But this old man, so small and yet so infused with power, charmed her with his sincere and plaintive voice. “But the Catholic Church has been the cause of strife, hasn’t it? Are you the appropriate party to end it?”

John Paul smiled. “Who better?”

8:14 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jamey Farrell spent several minutes updating Christopher Henderson on her recent findings. Henderson looked terrible, but then she probably didn’t look fresh as a daisy herself. She’d seen Henderson dozing on the couch in his office, but she knew from experience that that sort of sleep had little lasting effect.

“This is the case that won’t die,” Henderson grumbled as she finished. “Why couldn’t it have just ended when we arrested the Sweetzer Three?”

Jamey shrugged. “I’m not a field operator, but if you ask me, I think someone’s been expecting us to come along. I think we’re chasing lots of decoys.”

Henderson shook his head. “Those bikers weren’t a red herring. They were really going to blow up the city’s water reserves.”

“I didn’t say red herrings. I said decoys. We chased that threat because it was real, but it’s got nothing to do with some other plot. Something we haven’t found yet.”

“Your missing C–4.”

“Jesus, I hope you’re wrong,” said Jack Bauer, walking into the room. “I’ve been shot at enough for one day.”

“You got here fast,” Henderson noted.

Jack shrugged. “It’s easy if you ignore all the traffic laws.” He sat down on the couch where Henderson had earlier slept. “Look, how sure are we about this? Aren’t you guys the ones who said the Ramin and Muslim connection was a different plot that had already been stopped?”

“Director Chappelle, not me,” Jamey said. “And all I’m really saying is that there is still C–4 missing. And that there was a Muslim connection at the start.”

“But no suspects left,” Jack said. “And no target.”

Nina Myers walked into the middle of the conversation. “I have a new suspect for you.” She described her surveillance of Diana Christie.

When she was done, Jack tried to rub away his headache. “None of it makes sense. What the hell would an NTSB investigator be doing with a small-time arms dealer? And what does it mean for us? The lead she gave us from that conversation was real! It put us in Dean’s way.”

“Jamey thinks decoys,” Henderson said.

Jack considered this. “Yasin. He knows we know

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he’s in the country. That’s why Ramin’s dead. Maybe he expected it, and planned this. But it’s pretty elaborate.”

“Not so much,” Nina said. “All it really took was giving away some of the C–4 to someone who wanted to do something with it. And maybe asking them to plan their event for today. Yasin’s attack may be on a different day entirely.”

Jack shook his head. “Ramin thought today, and he was on that side of the equation. Okay.” He gathered himself with a breath. “Are we back at square one again?”

His answer came in the form of his ringing cell phone. He gestured an apology when he saw the number, then answered. “Hey, Harry.”

“Jack, you heard what happened to me?” Driscoll said quickly. When Jack replied in the negative, Harry filled him in, and Jack felt the aching pulse in his forehead increase. Biehn. Jack hadn’t thought of Biehn in a couple of hours. There was a connection between Biehn and Yasin that he hadn’t resolved yet. Biehn claimed he’d been kidnapped when he got close to Collins. Now Driscoll had been ambushed when he arrested Collins, and the priest 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 300Cs. “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

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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.”

8:39 A.M. PST Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Encino, California

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 Café, which was a few miles down the road, but he could not risk it. That café 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.

8:44 A.M. PST Los Angeles

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

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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.”

8:52 A.M. PST Los Angeles

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.”

8:53 A.M. PST Renaissance Hotel, West Hollywood

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

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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 their way?”

“Yes, they’re on their way to the mosque. They have Holcomb’s name, too. I have to say, I’m scared shitless, but that was a good idea. It’s a deflection and an early warning system all built into one.”

“You can thank my Arab friend for that. He seems very good at twists and turns.” “As long as none of the twists turn back on us,” Pembrook prayed. “Amen,” Michael said. “Anyway, pack. Tonight we’re both getting out of here.”

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 A.M. AND 10 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

9:00 a.m. CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Nina Myers decided that she had a love-hate relationship with Jack Bauer already. She liked his no-nonsense, name-taking, ass-kicking style, except when he turned it on her. She had a strong lead with this Diana Christie anomaly, and she knew it. He’d made a mistake in brushing it aside, in brushing her aside, and that pissed her off. Like a schoolgirl, she’d gone from admiring him to despising him after a single moment of neglect. She was aware of that, and it made her even angrier.

She left CTU and got into her car, laying the address to the NTSB agent’s apartment on the passenger seat. She was going to confront Diana Christie

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on her own . . . but somewhere in the no-BS zone in her brain, she knew that she was doing it not because it was her job, but because Jack Bauer had spurned her. That made her angriest of all, and she planned on taking it out on Diana Christie.

9:03 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“What I’m looking for is a reason not to pull your funding and scrap the Counter Terrorist Unit right here and now,” said Senator Armand from Mississippi.

It was not the best way to start a video conference, and Ryan Chappelle could feel sweat dripping down his sides beneath his dress shirt.

“That wasn’t a rhetorical question, Director,” Armand added into the silence that followed. “I’m sorry, Senator,” Chappelle said. “I was gathering my thoughts. May I speak freely?”

Several of the senators and congressmen on the Joint Subcommittee on National Security chuckled. Armand himself grimaced. “I prefer it to ankle licking, Director. Let’s cut the bullshit and speak truth to power.”

Chappelle nodded. “Because bad things are happening right now, and more bad things are on the way.”

“Bad things?” Armand leaned forward, as though trying to push right through the monitor from three thousand miles away. “You sound like my four-yearold.”

“If you want more details than just ‘bad things,’ Senator, then give us the funding we need,” Chappelle retorted. “Right now I’ve got three analysts, which is currently okay because I have only two working computer terminals. Only four or five field agents. You have more aides on your staff than I have agents to protect the western United States. So until you give me funding, all you get is ‘bad things.’ ” Take that, you pompous son of a bitch.

Another committee member, Malpartida from Texas, responded. “That’s the safe reply, Director. You aren’t fully funded yet, so we shouldn’t expect results. I get it. But what you have done, so far, is drag your agency into the murder of a priest and several other killings. This is all very public for an agency that is supposed to be covert.”

Chappelle had been ready for this, and he’d been practicing the reply for an hour, wanting it to sound crisp but not rehearsed. “We are not operating in Somalia, Congressman. We’re not operating in Angola or Sarajevo. We’re in downtown Los Angeles. We are not going to be able to hide everything we do.”

“But what you do seems to involve murders and shootings, not stopping terrorists!” Armand broke in. “I’m getting off-the-record reports about shootings in the hills, people getting blown up on motorcycles. Is this how you’re running things?”

“No, sir,” Chappelle said, ready for this as well. “That wasn’t one of my people. That’s an operative on loan from the CIA. His case crossed ours. CTU can’t be held responsible for his actions.”

“What the hell was he doing blowing people up?” Armand drawled.

Chappelle explained the Castaic Dam incident to the best of his knowledge, doing his best to highlight

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Bauer’s maverick personality and independence from CTU. When he was done, Representative Malpartida spoke up. “I hear you. He’s a loose cannon. But are you saying he single-handedly stopped these terrorists or bikers or whatever from blowing up a dam?” The CTU Director hadn’t seen the trap until too late. “Uh, well, nothing is that simple, but—”

“But?” Malpartida persisted.

“—yes, sir,” Chappelle said reluctantly.

The Congressman snorted and half-spun in his chair, glancing left and right at the other assembled politicians. “Forgive me, gentlemen, but it sounds to me like we don’t just need more funding, we need men like this agent!” He looked at Chappelle through the monitor. “Can’t be held responsible for him? Damn, sir, it sounds like you should be begging to get some of the credit for putting him on the case!”

Chappelle’s neck turned red. “Yes . . . yes, sir,” he found himself stammering unhappily. “We’re . . . we’re trying to recruit him to the team.” Even as he said it, Chappelle suspected that he would regret that statement for the rest of his life.

9:08 A.M. PST Inglewood, California

This time, they took Harry Driscoll’s car, lit up in red and blue and wailing like a banshee. Without the lights and sirens, they never would have reached Inglewood, a suburb south of downtown and near the airport, in under twenty minutes.

The mosque was an unobtrusive structure, built with discretion in mind. Harry and Jack pulled into the parking lot and looked up, seeing a short tower with the faintest resemblance to a minaret. The lawn was well-tended but nondescript, and instantly Jack wondered why they needed a landscaper. His question was answered, though, when they passed the outer wall into a courtyard that was all fountains, flower beds, and pathways, like something out of 1001 Arabian Nights. Beyond the garden lay the mosque proper.

There was a short, thin, brown-skinned man in gray work trousers and a gray work shirt, down on one knee, pulling weeds from one of the flower beds. He didn’t look up until they were standing almost on his ankles.

“Bas Holcomb?” Driscoll demanded.

“Que?” the man replied.

“Are you Bas Holcomb?”

“Oh. No!” the man said, smiling and standing, clapping dirt off his hands. He spoke in quiet, clipped English, as though uncomfortable with his command of the language. “My name is Javier. Espinoza. I work for St. Francis Landscaping. That’s—”

“His company, we know,” Driscoll interrupted. “Is he here somewhere?”

Jack’s cell phone rang, and Harry continued the interrogation while Jack stepped aside.

The gardener shook his head. “I no see him. He supposed to be here?”

“You tell me,” Driscoll retorted.

The gardener shrugged. “’S not my usual job. I covering for the regular guy. He sick. I usually work at another place for them.”

Jack closed his phone and looked at Driscoll irritably. “My people just got ahold of the car rental

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agency. The Chrysler was supposed to have been returned yesterday. Holcomb’s house is vacant, and he hasn’t made a call from there in forty-eight hours.”

“He skipped town,” the detective deduced.

“It gets worse. The Chrysler was found this morning abandoned on a side street. No prints. No one’s heard from him in days.”

Driscoll knew what Jack was thinking, but they couldn’t discuss it in front of a civilian. “Okay,” he said to the gardener. “If we need to talk to you, can we reach you through the landscaper?”

“Sure,” Javier Espinoza said, “or most days at the other place. That’s where I work for them.”

“What’s the other place?”

“Sante Monica.”

9:18 A.M. PST Santa Monica, California

Nina didn’t hesitate. She pulled her car up to the little postwar bungalow on Twenty-sixth Street below Pico, walked up the little path, and kicked in the door. She didn’t throw around that much weight, but what she lacked in size, she made up for in technique. Her foot connected right where the bolt should be, and the door flew inward, banging against the wall, and Nina was already inside, scanning the room over the top of her muzzle.

Diana Christie ran halfway into the room, startled by the noise. Her left arm was in a sling and she held a small semi-automatic in her right hand, but she didn’t raise it. When she saw Nina, her eyes filled with fear.

“Drop the weapon!” Nina ordered.

Diana did so immediately. She held up her good arm and backed away from Nina. “Oh god,” she said in sheer terror. “Get out of here. They’ll know! They’ll know!” She sounded on the verge of hysterics.

“Down on the ground!” Nina demanded, advancing steadily.

“No, please, you don’t understand—”

“Get on the ground, now!” Nina was almost within arm’s reach. Suddenly, Diana Christie bolted. She ran out of the living room and down a hallway, then through another door. Nina followed a few steps behind, and they ended up in a small, cramped garage, with Diana on the far end pressed against the door, and Nina at the interior door, her sights level on Christie’s chest.

“Get out of here!” Christie pleaded, tears streaming down her face. “Get out of here!”

Nina was about to respond, but a bomb went off, and a gruesome image of bright lights and blood splashed across her retina.

9:25 A.M. PST St. Monica’s Cathedral, Downtown Los Angeles

Mulrooney heard Michael enter his office. He could always tell it was Michael by the sound, or rather, the near-lack of it. Michael’s footsteps reminded him of the padding of cat’s paws from his childhood.

“Big day, Michael,” Mulrooney said.

“Very big, Your Eminence,” the security man agreed.

Mulrooney noticed that Michael had lost some

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of his gleam. There had always been a sort of sheen around the man, a halo, for lack of a better word. Now it was tarnished. “Is everything all right with our . . . problem?”

Michael shrugged uncertainly, a gesture as uncommon as the fatigue that showed on his face. “I believe so, Your Eminence, but I can’t be sure. Dortmund is no longer a problem, and of course Giggs is gone. Collins is also dead.”

The Cardinal felt no remorse. “Monsters all. If it weren’t to protect the church, I’d have thrown them out myself. Is there any . . . are there any witnesses?”

The security man said, “No one firsthand, Your Eminence. I don’t know what Father Collins might have told the police officer, but at least Collins himself cannot testify to anything.” Michael could not bring himself to mention the other man who knew so much about the abhorrent acts of the clergy, and the church’s attempts to cover them up: that bastard Yasin, whom Michael would deal with someday.

Mulrooney nodded with satisfaction. “Then you’ve done as much as you can, Michael. Thank you. You are a soldier for the true church.”

Mulrooney said, and Michael received, the phrase the true church with a profound respect. When Michael didn’t reply, Mulrooney continued. “I can’t wait until this damned conference is over. I want that false Pope out of my diocese!”

“It will be over soon, Your Eminence,” Michael promised. “But on that count, I have a favor to ask of you. You must excuse yourself from the Unity Conference. Make an appearance at the reception, but then beg off.”

Mulrooney almost passed over the request, disregarded it, but it stung him after the fact, like the butterscotch taste of whiskey that burns the throat a moment later. He stopped—his every muscle locked into place where he sat, as he might have done if a wild dog had suddenly appeared in his office, growling at him.

“Michael, what is going on?” he asked.

Michael had been preparing for this conversation, but in no version had it seemed satisfactory. “Your Eminence, there is nothing for you to know. Or, rather, there are two things. First, that you must be out of the reception hall a few minutes after it begins. Second, that everything I do, I do to protect the true church.”

Mulrooney studied Michael, and felt in that moment that although the man had worked for him for several years, and that (though the Cardinal would barely admit it to himself) Michael had done many unscrupulous deeds at his request, he didn’t really know the man at all. “Have you . . . are you going to do something?”

“Not me, Your Eminence,” he said matter-offactly. “But a thing will be done. The less you know, the better.”

With that, Michael turned and walked out, leaving the Cardinal of Los Angeles to wrestle with a conscience he had ignored for many, many years.

9:33 A.M. PST Santa Monica

Nina Myers picked herself up off the floor. She could hear nothing but a loud ringing in her ears.

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The garage was on fire. She saw the smoke and the flames, but she couldn’t hear the noise. If fire trucks were on their way, she had no idea. The garage— what she could see of it through clouds of dust and smoke—had been blasted by the bomb. Chunks of wall had been blown away, and the big garage door was twisted on its hinges.

She knew she’d been unconscious, but she didn’t know for how long. Her mind had constructed a fantasy of sleep and vacation. Was she on vacation? Had she been sleeping? No, she didn’t sleep in a garage. A bomb. A bomb had exploded. She’d been concussed. She might be seriously injured. Nina’s eyes swam in and out of focus, so from a kneeling position she patted her hands up and down her body. She felt skin, and clothes, and wetness that was probably her blood. She was cut! No, not her blood. Diana Christie’s blood, splattered all over her. Diana had been blown up.

Weirdly, it occurred to Nina that Jack Bauer had first come to CTU the night before after being nearly blown up. Shit, she was coming in second to him already. She felt professional jealousy rear its ugly head.

You are delirious, lady. Unrattle your brain!

Nina grabbed hold of something sturdy—a tabletop?—and pulled herself to her feet. She shook her head but still couldn’t see, so she felt her way to a wall, and then to the interior door. She had to get out. She had to stop the ringing in her head. And she was sure there was something important about the bomb that had just gone off. Something she couldn’t quite draw into the clear part of her brain . . .

9:38 A.M. PST Malibu, California

Jon Boorstein liked his brand-new BMW 730i. He liked ordering Armani (in the same waist size for the last seven years, thanks to his trainer Gunnar). He liked Cannes and he liked the after-parties at the Oscars.

He did not, however, like his job. His job was the price he paid for the good things in life.

“But what a fuckin’ price,” he muttered as he glided his Beemer through the self-opening gate of Mark Gelson’s Malibu home.

He hopped out and walked through the door, which was opened by Lucia, without breaking stride. He didn’t look at the elaborately carved crucifix hanging on the wall—the thing always gave him the creeps. Walking by that thing was about the only time Boorstein ever appreciated his Judaism, which forbade graven images.

Mark was sitting on the deck overlooking the sand and the Pacific, reading the Times. Though he was good-looking by any other standard, in Hollywood he was over the hill. Some actors, especially men, aged into new roles and remained sex symbols—hell, Bruce Willis was heading toward fifty, wasn’t he? Others couldn’t let go of the man they’d been in their twenties, so they got grouchier as they aged, and the resentment showed.

Boorstein had tried, a year or two ago, to encourage Gelson to move past his Future Fighter persona. If he’d managed the aging process well, he’d have a whole new set of doors opening for him. But Gelson couldn’t, so he didn’t, and now he was slowly dropping down on Boorstein’s must-call-back list.

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“Hey, Jon,” Gelson said, as though surprised to see him. “What’s up?”

“Headlines,” Boorstein said, sitting down. “They’re up all over the place, and they’re talking about you. But not the way we want.”

“Don’t PR guys say there’s no such thing as bad publicity?”

“They do say that,” Boorstein agreed irritably. “But they don’t have clients who talk about blowing people up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gelson said. “It’ll all blow over soon enough.”

Boorstein heaved a dramatic sigh. “Maybe, maybe not. Here’s the problem, my friend. You are moving out of the where-are-they-now file and into the what-have-they-done-with-their-life file. That means that people aren’t doing bios on you, but when you fall on your face, they want to tell that story.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Gelson said. “You pitch that to Entertainment Weekly?”

Boorstein snorted. “Them I tell about your next this, your upcoming that. But you I level with. The mug shot was already in the paper. But I know two reporters who are doing a follow-up, digging up dirt.” Boorstein’s voice grew suddenly grave, and his cavalier movements settled into focused attentiveness. “So tell me, is anyone going to find out about this whole Catholic Church thing?”

Gelson looked calm, almost serene. “I don’t think I care anymore, Jonny. I don’t scream and shout about it. Why should they care?”

“Because Catholics go see movies. And if they hear that you are a schizophrenic—” “Schismatic,” Gelson corrected.

“Yeah, that. Then they might stop going to see your movies, and then people would stop paying you, and I wouldn’t get paid, and that would be bad.”

Gelson looked out at the ocean. “You know, the Catholic Church is the oldest continuously existing entity in the Western world. That’s a powerful thing all by itself. Then of course you add the grace of God and—well, never mind. But it’s been around. And it’s worked. It brought education and enlightenment. It was Catholic priests in Ireland that preserved Western civilization during the Dark Ages. One church, unbroken, unchanged. That’s why it lasted. It remained true. Until the sixties.”

Boorstein wished he didn’t need the history lesson, but he did. If anyone had ever told him about Vatican II, and the massive changes the Pope had ordered, he didn’t remember. But Gelson told him in detail about the changes in the catechisms, in the Mass, and so many other vital parts of the service.

“Hundreds of years, Jonny. Hundreds. And then, wham! It all gets changed by one man.”

“By . . . the Pope,” Boorstein reminded him.

“Not my Pope,” Gelson said.

Boorstein shrugged. “Look, none of your fans are going to care about a theological debate. Just don’t say or do anything crazy. Okay?”

Gelson shrugged. “No promises.”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 A.M. AND 11 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

10:00 A.M. PST Mid-Wilshire Area, Los Angeles

“You know, I came across an honest-to-god coincidence once,” Harry Driscoll said as he and Jack Bauer drove back to Jack’s car. “When I got out of the academy, I moved into apartment 432 at 1812 Delaware Avenue, and I got a new phone number. Swear to god the phone number was 432–1812.”

“No kidding,” Jack said.

“No kidding,” Harry repeated. “But in twenty years of detective work, that’s the only goddamned coincidence I ever came across. There are no coincidences. Ever.”

“St. Monica’s,” Jack said, cutting to the chase.

“Saint friggin’ Monica’s,” the fireplug of a detective replied. “Why is it you go there twice in one night. The priest that I arrest, who works there, gets shot. And now the guy who rented the car that shot me up, who seems to have disappeared, runs a business that takes care of the place.” Harry shook his head in disbelief. “You keep chasing this C–4 all over the city, and we keep ending up back at St. Monica’s every time.”

“I’m with you,” Jack said, “but where’s the next step? At least, where is it as far as the terrorists are concerned? You’ve absolutely got a criminal investigation to chase down, with child molestation and priests who should probably be castrated. But what about the plastic explosives? There’s no connection for me, as far as I can tell.”

Driscoll said, “You know the connection. Biehn said that whoever kidnapped him also knew about the terrorist, Yasin’s his name, right?” Jack nodded. “So the kidnapper takes Biehn, who was shadowing Collins. Same kidnapper has knowledge of some terrorist thing connected with Yasin. You got to figure that the same terrorist tried to kill me when I went after Collins.”

“We need that autopsy,” Jack said.

10:05 A.M. PST Santa Monica

We need our own forensics team, Nina thought. Add it to the list.

Not that Santa Monica PD’s team was bad. But even if they did everything by the book, there would be bureaucracy. Information would have to flow up the chain at the local PD, then back down through

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the Federal agencies. And by that time it might be too late.

These guys hadn’t even treated her like a colleague. The fire truck and black-and-white that arrived together on the scene had first treated her like an accident victim, then the cops had briefly put handcuffs on her when they realized a bomb had gone off, and then they had ignored her when someone checked her credentials through the State Department.

Now one of the forensics techs, a tall, ugly man with lanky black hair and pockmarks, approached her with a quizzical look on his face. “Ma’am, a question?”

“Fire away,” she said. “What have you guys got?”

“Well,” he said, then stopped. He furrowed his brow, creating deep lines above his pockmarked cheeks. Finally, he asked, “Was the victim . . . was she holding anything when the bomb went off?”

Nina tried to think back. At first her memory was fuzzy, but then she recalled Christie dropping her handgun. Her right hand had been empty. Her left arm had been in a sling. “No. Not unless she was hiding something in the sling on her arm. Why?”

The tech’s quizzical look deepened. “Well, only because the explosion . . . well, the explosion looks like it happened right where she was standing. Was she wearing a bomb?”

Nina shook her head. “I guess she might have been. I didn’t see anything big on her. But my brain is pretty banged up.”

“Okay, thanks,” the tech said, but he left looking even more perplexed.

Nina took out her cell phone, thankful that it still worked, and dialed the number for Jack Bauer. He answered quickly. “It’s Nina Myers,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m headed back to CTU. Are you there?”

“Santa Monica. I’ve got news for you. I went to see Diana Christie to talk to her about her and Farrigian.”

“What did she say.”

“She blew up.” Nina described her brief, explosive encounter with the NTSB investigator. She was gratified when Bauer said, “It sounds like Ramin. You may have been right. Are we running a background check on her?”

“I’ll do it. But you know this thing is getting crazier, right? Yesterday she was the one pushing for an investigation. Then last night she sends us on a wild-goose chase. Today she blows up.”

Jack agreed. “This whole thing is convoluted. Someone set it up that way.”

“Yasin?”

“Has to be. But there’s someone else. Someone on the front line who can move around without arousing suspicion. And they planned so that we’ve spent the last twelve hours running after everything but their target.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m done playing. I’m going to go ask some people some hard questions. Starting with that weasel of an arms dealer.”

10:12 A.M. PST Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles

Gary Khalid lifted his demitasse with a trembling hand. He couldn’t get it to stop shaking. Anyone

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watching would have laid the blame on the four triple espressos he had drunk. But it wasn’t so. Khalid was excited and terrified and ready to get out of the country. He dared not return home. Considering the fact that the priest’s body was in the hands of the authorities, it was only a matter of time before the police uncovered their carefully laid plan. And eventually, Yasin had assured him, they would reexamine the history of Ghulam Meraj Khalid.

10:13 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“I already gave you the best example I can, sir,” Chappelle said. He was disciplined enough to keep the fatigue and annoyance out of his voice. If they thought redundancy and tedium could wear him down, they had seriously underestimated Ryan Chappelle. “But let me do so again. Right now I have agents spread thin all over Los Angeles, running from place to place because I don’t have manpower to chase down several leads at once . . .”

10:14 A.M. PST Mid-Wilshire Area, Los Angeles

Jack sped back to Farrigian’s warehouse with a grim look on his face. He was sick of being bounced around. He was going to ask questions and keep asking until he got answers.

10:15 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“. . . drafted other agencies into our pursuit of terrorists,” Chappelle said into the video monitors.

“Isn’t that positive?” a Congresswoman asked. “Multiagency involvement means greater pooling of knowledge, doesn’t it?”

“And a greater chance of leaks, or worse, ma’am,” Chappelle said. “And different agencies have different agendas, and different command structures. Even if the people themselves are good, we won’t know what kinds of bureaucracies they’ll have to deal with.”

10:16 A.M. PST Los Angeles Department of Coroner Forensic Sciences Lab

Harry Driscoll felt his bones start to ache. He was getting too old for this sort of work. Pulling allnighters and getting shot at, that was a young man’s work. But this next job, at least, was specially designed for an old veteran like him.

He walked into the coroner’s office to find Patricia Siegman waiting for him. “I know I promised you noon, Detective, but we’re doing the best we—”

“Step into my office, please,” he said, and half dragged her into the men’s room before she could resist.

“Look and listen,” he said. He was short enough for them to see eye to eye, but he was twice as broad. “I’m with LAPD but I’m doing work with a govern

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ment unit. They believe terrorists are going to make some kind of attack today. Now. But they don’t know what. I think this guy was involved somehow, I don’t know exactly. I think this autopsy could give us an answer, so I need you to move some other stiff off the table and put my guy on it or people may die and it’ll be your fault.”

10:18 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“. . . terrorists are out there,” Chappelle concluded with just the right hint of righteous indignation. “You all believe that, or this meeting would never have been called. We don’t know where they are exactly, but I do know we have the resources to root them out, if we commit those resources to action. If not, they will hide in convenient places, waiting for convenient moments, and then they will strike.”

10:19 A.M. PST Playa del Rey

Yasin had moved, as was his habit these days. He’d spent a short time in the San Fernando Valley, and now he was headed toward the suburbs near the airport. He doubted the authorities had any idea of his location, but even with the simple changes he’d made to his appearance, someone might recognize him. It was better to be unpredictable.

He was impressed with how well this more elaborate plan was working. ’93 had been simple, but ineffective. Yes, there had been headlines, but they had succeeded only in angering the Americans, not terrorizing them. This plan had required much more subtlety, much more planning, but so far it had worked. Yasin was not blind to the fact that Federal agents were scouring the city, but he had foreseen that possibility, and, through Michael, he had set up intricate avenues and mazes to lead them here and there. So far, so good. Allah was willing.

10:20 A.M. PST Farrigian’s Warehouse, West Los Angeles

Jack drove into the parking lot of Farrigian’s Warehouse and walked in the front door, SigSauer in hand. He’d been here only ten hours earlier, but it seemed like a lifetime. He walked over to the little office and opened the door without knocking.

Farrigian was inside. He squealed when he saw Jack Bauer, but there was nowhere to run. Jack grabbed the front of his shirt, gathering up cloth and chest hairs into a tight fist, and dragged the petty criminal across the desk, scattering papers. He slammed Farrigian down onto the floor as invoices fluttered around them. Jack put his knee into Farrigian’s chest and his gun against his cheek.

“What the f—?” Farrigian gagged.

A guy dressed in jeans, work boots, and a T-shirt came around the corner, attracted by the noise. “Hey Andre, everything okay?” He pulled up short when Jack, kneeling, brought the Sig around to the height of his groin.

“Everything is okay,” Jack stated. “Got that?”

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“Sure thing, boss. Holy shit!” the worker said, melting away.

“All right,” Jack said, pressing his knee harder into Farrigian’s sternum. “I’m sick of all this crap. You sold a package of C–4 to a bunch of Arab terrorists, right?”

Farrigian shook his head no as vigorously as he could with the gun jammed back into his cheek.

Jack had had enough. He had never been a huge advocate of torture, mostly because he himself had been an operator with Delta, and the possibility of capture and torture were very real and very unclean to him. But he’d been run around like a dog in heat all night, and he was done.

He used the Sig’s sights to cut a red streak along Farrigian’s forehead.

10:26 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Senator Armand moved on to the next topic. “You must be aware, Director, that your methods are being called into question this morning. What can justify the fact that an operative escorted a suspect in a murder investigation around Los Angeles and apparently let him attack and nearly murder someone?”

Nothing can justify it, Chappelle wanted to shout. He’s a thug and I don’t want him on my team!

But he’d already painted himself into that corner once. If Bauer wasn’t going to be a pain in his neck, Chappelle would at least put him to good use. “This was the same operative this committee praised earlier for stopping Castaic Dam. I have spoken with him”—that was true—“and he’s assured me that his actions were based on urgent needs and time constraints.”

Chappelle couldn’t believe he was sitting here defending that moron Jack Bauer. But if Bauer’s actions could ensure his funding, he’d take it. “Bauer is out there now, working loose ends of this case. But I can assure you he is doing everything possible to stay within the letter of the law.”

10:29 A.M. PST Farrigian’s Warehouse, West Los Angeles

“Oh, ahhh!” Farrigian howled. “Oh god, it’s the

truth! I didn’t sell the stuff to Arabs.”

“They had it,” Jack spat. “How’d they get it?”

“How the fuck should—ow! I don’t know. Not from me. I bought from Arabs. I bought from them!”

Bought from Arabs, Jack thought. From Yasin? Had Yasin arranged this from the other end?

“Names,” Jack demanded.

“I don’t know. I’ll give you all the shipping information, but I can tell you it was nothing. Some joke of a gangster in Cairo named Farouk. Middleman like me.”

Jack held back a curse. Farouk was where he’d started. Farouk had led him to Ramin. He already knew that Farouk knew almost nothing. He couldn’t go in circles.