24 Veto Power (13 page)
Authors: John Whitman
“You heard?”
“Of course I heard!” Chappelle fumed. “You think I’m not going to hear about it when my agents requisition local law enforcement without authorization, raid private property without a search warrant—”
“Actually, he got an arrest warrant—”
“—and get into firefights in Beverly Hills?” the Director said, steamrolling over Kelly’s comment. “I thought we sent this guy to Siberia. No wait, if we’d done that we’d be at war with Russia!” Chappelle’s words and anger had carried him into the office, where he now passed like a small tiger in an even smaller cage. “Where the hell is Walsh?”
“Washington D.C.,” Kelly said. “Testifying.”
“Testifying? Oh, the NAP Act. God, I wish they’d just pass that thing and move on.” Chappelle didn’t bother to notice Kelly roll his eyes. The District Director continued. “Anyway, I want you to tell Bauer that he’s going in front of the review board the minute he gets in—before he even changes his damned shirt but after I tear him a new asshole.” Kelly, whose own anger at Bauer had diffused over the last hour, felt obligated to fill in for Jack’s mentor Richard Walsh, in defending him. “He did get the guy. We’ve got Marks in the building. And you heard about the terrorist lead?”
“I don’t care if he got Elvis—” Chappelle pulled up short enough to choke on his own words. “Terrorist lead? What lead?”
Kelly tapped his screen and the display lit up with CTU’s internal report on Ramin Rafizadeh. “It’s not all clear yet, but basically the Greater Nation had a lead on a terrorist squad on U.S. soil. They were going after it themselves. Jack discovered it, and it led right back to this guy, Ramin Rafizadeh. Jack was after him for a while until we heard that he was dead.”
Chappelle smiled. “Right, we busted Bauer for that case.”
Kelly nodded. “Well, get this. It turns out Jack was right. The Rafizadeh father did know where his son was and the son was—is—alive. Jack just rescued Ramin from the Greater Nation and he’s going for the father now.” Sharpton checked the chronometer on his computer. “Should be there already.”
Chappelle rubbed his hand across his balding head. He never liked any statement that included the sentence “It turns out Jack was right.” He sighed. “All right, when Bauer checks in give him to me. We have this Marks guy?”
“Holding room two.”
“How’d he get hold of intel on terrorists in the U.S.?”
Kelly had been wondering that himself. “We don’t know. But these guys are pretty well-financed. Most of them are rednecks, but their upper ranks are filled with a lot, and I mean a lot, of ex-military officers, Special Forces, like that. They have money and they’re passionate about their cause.”
“Yeah, well I’m passionate about my cause and I
don’t
have money so I’m also very irritable,” Chappelle said. “So let’s make sure they pay. Add obstruction of justice to the charges. This guy should have reported the terrorists to us.”
Chappelle started to walk away. Kelly chewed the inside of his cheek before saying, “Yeah, well, that’s an issue . . .”
Chappelle said over his shoulder, “What, there’s no space left on the booking sheet?”
“No,” Kelly said, “I think he did report them to us.”
Chappelle’s shoes squeaked on the tiled floor and stopped. He turned around. “What do you mean?”
“Marks told Jack that he had passed on his tip. We can’t find any record of it anywhere.”
“So, he’s lying,” Chappelle said. “Bad guys lie.”
“Except . . .” Kelly hesitated. He realized there was no way for him to describe what he’d seen on the Attorney General’s computer without exposing himself.
“Except what?” Chappelle said.
“I may have a little information that suggests the Attorney General knew about the tip but didn’t pass it on. And I also got a clue that the AG’s office may have their own man inside Greater Nation.”
Chappelle stepped back toward Sharpton. He didn’t like surprises. He didn’t like them on his birthday, he didn’t like them disguised as suitcases in train stations, and he especially didn’t like them coming from his own staff. “What sort of ‘little information’? Who gave you the clue?”
Kelly looked right into Chappelle’s small eyes. “I can’t tell you. It’s a personal source,” he lied.
“Proof?”
Kelly watched in his mind’s eye as the data were destroyed by his virus. “No, it’s gone. But I saw it with my own eyes. The Attorney General knew about the terrorists but didn’t pass it on. And he had his own mole inside Greater Nation and no one ever mentioned it to us, even though we had our own man in there six months.”
“No proof, no case,” Chappelle declared, waving the issue off. “Especially when you’re talking about the AG. Besides, Bauer got one bad guy. That sounds like plenty for one day.”
Chappelle turned his back on the issue.
8:35
A
.
M
. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
James Quincy bit into the last bit of cantaloupe on his room service breakfast, wiped his hands on the white napkin, and picked up the phone. He relished this call, and had decided to wait until after breakfast to make it. This act of vengeance would make the perfect dessert.
“Zelzer,” he said. “Make the calls.
Washington Times
,
Wall Street Journal
,the
Nation
. Add the
Wash
ington Post
and the
New York Times
as well. She’s a hero over there, and I want them to choke on their own rags. Right, do it now. I’m sending the pictures.”
Quincy hung up. He fired up his laptop and connected remotely. The laptop contained encryption software, and there were five or six hoops to jump through to reach his own desktop via the remote software, but eventually he arrived at his own terminal’s log in. He typed his name and the password “winstonsmith” and waited. After a moment, his desktop booted up. At least the screen said his desktop had booted up. But there was nothing on it. He clicked on the icon for his hard drive and saw all his applications, and none of his files. None of them.
“Son of a bitch,” Quincy muttered. He didn’t know how his files had been deleted. But although he did not know how, he was sure he knew who. He had had no idea Debrah Drexler could be so formidable.
He picked up the phone again. “Zelzer, I need you to get someone from IT security over to my office. Someone’s been tampering with my computer. I want to know who and I want to know now!”
8:37
A
.
M
. PST Culver City
Black and white patrol cars filled the street, their red and blue top lights spreading color over the scene. Uniforms were searching backyards and bushes, but Jack knew they wouldn’t find anything. Newhouse was good. He was much better than a weekend warrior deserved to be.
Jack watched LAPD tape off the area, adding bright yellow ribbon to the rainbow. He ducked under it and went into the house. The body of the big blond militia man lay where it had fallen. The second Greater Nation goon, the one who’d held Rafizadeh, also lay where he’d died. Lzolski was pouting by the door, furious at having been caught. Paulson and Nina were arguing over whose shot had put the second militia man down.
“That was my head shot,” Paulson said, raising his empty hands and aiming his fingers like a gun.
Nina rolled her eyes. “Get over yourself. You missed. That was my shot.”
“Whoever shot him ought to be hanged,” Jack said. “That guy was our lead. These militia nuts are after the same thing we are—terrorists—but they’re always one step ahead of us.”
Jack went into the living room. Professor Ibrahim Rafizadeh was sitting on the couch flanked by two paramedics. They were checking his vitals and giving him oxygen. Two more paramedics were pulling a stretcher into the house. Even through the oxygen mask, Jack saw that the professor’s face was covered with bruises and blisters, the same kind of blisters that Ramin would have by now. The Greater Nation had tortured the old man.
Rafizadeh lifted his eyes to meet Jack’s. Just as Nazila had felt compassion for Jack, Jack now empathized with her father. The old man had withstood intense interrogation from Jack himself not six months ago, and he hadn’t cracked. This morning he’d been brutalized and broken down. He’d handed the torturers his own son. And then he’d been saved by the man who had apparently ruined his life.
“Ramin is safe,” Jack said.
Rafizadeh nodded. He pulled the mask away from his face momentarily. “He is not a—”
“I talked to your daughter,” Jack said. “She’s pretty convincing.” He smiled. He didn’t see the need to tell the professor that he’d allowed Ramin to be tortured. “He’s at CTU, but I’ve told them to use kid gloves. They’ll just want background.” Jack paused. “He did know something, you know. He heard a rumor about a terrorist cell here.”
Rafizadeh shook his head. This time he didn’t bother to lift the mask, so his voice was hollow and distant. “There are always rumors. Someone knows someone who knows someone whose cousin was in the madrassa, whose friend was killed by American bombs, and he mentioned . . .” The professor trailed off, rolling his hand over and over to indicate the unending pattern of gossip. “We are victims of a rumor.”
“A rumor is just a premature fact,” Jack said.
“No,” Rafizadeh replied in scholarly tones. “No, that is not true. Rumor is a weapon.”
Jack had no reply. The paramedics bustled around the professor for a moment, then asked him to lie on the stretcher. Once he was comfortable, Rafizadeh looked up at Jack. “These men. Did they get our names from you?”
“No,” Jack said earnestly. “We don’t know where they got them. We arrested their people for a different reason. It was coincidence that we found your name. It all happened early this morning. We learned that they thought you were terrorists and were coming to get you, so I came to...help.”
Rafizadeh chuckled. “God is great. But he has a wry sense of humor.”
8:42
A
.
M
. PS
T
Department of Justice, Washington, D.C
.
Brian Zelzer loved his job with a youthfulness that was out of place for a man approaching fifty. Pear-shaped with thin arms and thinner hair, he still bounced around the halls of the DOJ like a teenager. He couldn’t help it. If someone had told him that a scrawny kid from Atlanta could bluff his way through UNC-Charlotte, learn to write succinct bullshit for a PR firm (“It doesn’t have to be accurate, it has to be succinct,” his bosses told him long ago), then grab the coattails of a few career politicians he’d met at Bible study once he’d gone on the wagon and end up in Washington, D.C., he’d have laughed. But here he was, the Department of Justice’s interagency liaison, working a few doors down from the Attorney General himself. Of course, to Brian he wasn’t the Attorney General, he was just Jim, with whom he’d commiser
ated for nearly twenty years. Brian had found that sobriety—he’d been sober since 1989—gave him nearly unlimited energy, especially when it came to griping about the sorry state of affairs in the country. He and Jim had griped about the secularization of the country and activist judges who added bricks and mortar to the imaginary wall between church and state, until one day Jim, who’d made a name for himself as a Kansas prosecutor, had offered Brian a chance to help do something about it. Next thing he knew he’d stopped writing press releases and started campaigning for Barnes, and now here he was.
He even liked dealing with the maze of interrelated agencies that made up the Justice Department and law enforcement and intelligence community. His official title was Deputy Assistant Director of Interagency Communications for the Office of Intergovernmental and Public Liaison, but privately he gave himself the same informal title he’d used as a PR man: shitslinger. His job was to manage the message that went out from the DOJ to the internal law enforcement community (FBI, ATF, etc.) and the external intelligence community (CIA, Department of Defense, blah, blah), and he found it exciting to ride herd on the rumors and innuendos that constantly threatened to trample his boss’s agenda.
So when the phone rang, he picked it up with his usual aplomb. “Zelzer!” he said.
“Brian Zelzer, this is Special Agent Kelly Sharpton, CTU Los Angeles.”
Brian frowned, not unhappily. CTU. Counter Terrorist Unit. Sometimes it took a minute to navigate the government’s habit of creating trinomial acronyms (FBI, CIA, DOD, ATF, DOD, etc.). “Yes, Agent Sharpton, what can I do for you?”
“Listen, I’m hoping you can help me with something. We have a case on our end, a domestic terrorism case. A militia group that was planning some domestic terrorism. We took care of that, but during a raid we discovered that they had some information on Islamic terrorists on U.S. soil. They said they reported it to the FBI and to you guys.”
Zelzer said with automatic brightness, “Sure, you might want to try the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit. I can give you Cindy Fromme’s—”
“I tried them. They say they never heard anything. I was thinking you guys had heard something.”
“Oh, no problem, then let me connect you to our investigations dep—”
“I tried them, too. They didn’t have anything, and when I kind of pushed it, they sent me to you.”
“I see. Well. How can I help?”
“To be honest,” said the Special Agent, “I have some reason to believe that this militia group did turn in a tip on Islamic terrorists. The militia group is called the Greater Nation. You may have heard of them, they’ve made a lot of noise lately. I’ve been told the tip went right to the top over there, and I’m trying to track it down.”
“Told by whom?” Brian asked. The brightness in his voice had lost a bit of wattage.
“I can’t say,” the CTU agent said evasively. “Look, I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m just trying to track down a lead.”
“I wish I could help you, Special Agent, but we don’t know anything.”
“I see. Well, thank you.”
Brian Zelzer hung up. The minute the line went dead, he hit his speed dial. It was answered immediately. “Jim, it’s Brian. I think I might know who broke into your computer...”
8:45
A
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
The miracle of the modern age was the instantaneous transfer of information. A reporter speaks into a microphone in Kabul, Afghanistan, and her voice comes out of a television in Boise, Idaho. A man presses his thumbprint into a scanner at London’s Heathrow Airport, and his name appears on a computer screen in New York. And when a CTU agent makes a phone call from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., he finds his own telephone ringing a few minutes later.
“Sharpton,” he said.
“Special Agent Sharpton,” said the caller. “This is Attorney General James Quincy.”
Uh-oh, Kelly thought. He felt fear and anger churn together in his stomach. This man had just tried to blackmail the woman he’d loved for years. He was also one of the most powerful men in the country, and Kelly had just hacked his computer. “Yes, Mr. Attorney General?”
“I understand you were making inquiries regarding the Greater Nation. Something about a tip.”
“Um, yes. Yes, sir,” Kelly found himself totally unprepared for the AG’s directness. Did he know that Kelly had tampered with his evidence? “I ...I’m following a lead. According to some of our sources, the Greater Nation had information on a terrorist cell in the U.S. We were hoping you—your office had more information. Also, again according to our sources, we had information that you might ...that your office might actually have assets inside the Greater Nation—”
“Assets,” the AG said calmly. “You mean spies.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How did you come by this information?”
Kelly said, “I’d rather not say.”
“Hmm. I’m not sure I can help you here, Agent Sharpton. I’m aware of the Greater Nation, of course. We incarcerated some of their people when I was a prosecutor in Kansas. But I wouldn’t count on any tips from them. In my experience, they’re a bunch of far-right zealots. They’re certainly capable of doing damage to themselves and others, but I hardly think they know more about terrorism than CTU does.”
“That’s true, sir,” Kelly said, “but it’s our job to follow up on any leads—”
“Yes, it is. And if you did your jobs, this probably wouldn’t be an issue,” the AG said sharply.
“Excuse me, sir?” Kelly felt his neck heat up.
“I’m not attacking you, Agent Sharpton. I just think CTU, and many other agencies as well, could be more efficient. I’m working to give you the tools to make you more efficient. The NAP Act—”
“Yes, sir,” Kelly said, sharpening the edge in his own voice. “Well, perhaps you should save the sales pitch for the Senators.”
The phone line was deadly quiet for a moment. “What did you just—?”
“I’m not attacking you,” Kelly said with just a hint of sarcasm. “I just think the DOJ, and many other agencies as well, could be more cooperative. I’m not sure we need less personal privacy. I think we need less interagency privacy. For instance, if you could tell me about Frank Newhouse . . .” He let the name hang in the air. A pause followed the name, but Kelly could not interpret it over the phone.
“You are insubordinate,” James Quincy said. “I did you the favor of returning your inquiry personally, and you—you’ll be hearing from me again.” He hung up.
Kelly slumped back in his chair, filled with bewildered dread, like a healthy man who’s just been told he has a month to live. It didn’t make sense. Why would the Attorney General call him directly? Was the Greater Nation that important? Was Frank New-house? Or maybe it had nothing to do with the militia and the terrorists. Maybe the AG knew that Kelly had hacked his computer and helped Debbie. It wasn’t impossible—phone taps, computer taps, and a dozen other surveillance devices allowed even the most secret information to leak out instantaneously, given the right conditions. Kelly put his head in his hands. Whatever had happened, one thing was sure: he had just bought himself a lot more trouble than he’d bargained for.
Jessi Bandison watched Kelly from her desk in the pit. Her gravedigger shift was long over, but the more ambitious analysts often stayed behind for overtime or for advancement. The security team noticed that she hadn’t logged out or left the building, but once they confirmed she was all right, no one gave her any more notice.
She could still feel the heat that had risen into her cheeks. The flush of embarrassment she’d felt in asking him to coffee had turned instantly to anger. Why had he spoken to her like that? He’d flirted with her almost as much as she’d flirted with him. The way he stood so close to her when they worked a program together, the way his face lit up when he smelled that jasmine on her skin. He was more obvious than she was. He had no right to snap at her like that.
George Mason walked past her terminal. He was the Assistant Administrative Director of CTU. “Bandison, are you still on?”
“Oh,” she said, halting her internal diatribe. “Oh, no, not technically.”
Mason looked disappointed. “We need help running a simulated attack on the network. It’s a slow day, so we’re doing diagnostics and security checks. I knew you liked to hack, so I figured you might want to give us a run for our money.”
Jessi shook her head. “If it’s optional, I’d rather opt out, if that’s okay. It was a long night and I’ve already done one test hack.”
“Really, for them?”
“No. I did one for Kelly.”
Mason shrugged. “I didn’t know we were running anything else. It wasn’t scheduled.” Mason blew by her, forgetting his own comment as soon as he’d said it.
But Jessi didn’t. “It wasn’t scheduled,” he’d said. Kelly was a top analyst, but he wasn’t the administrative director. Why would he know about a fire drill when Mason didn’t? Jessi bit her lip. What had she done? What had
he
done? She looked around the room, wondering what to do. Her eyes settled on District Director Ryan Chappelle.
She walked up to him. “Excuse me, Mr. Chappelle?”
“Yes?” he said in his normal voice, which was as sharp as shattered glass. Jessi almost retreated from it. She hesitated, which only seemed to annoy him further, so she finally said, “Can I—can I speak with you for a minute?”
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7
8
9
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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLAC
E
BETWEEN THE HOURS OF
9 A.M. AND 10 A.M.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
9:00
A
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack Bauer pulled his SUV into the CTU parking lot and yawned. The drive from Culver City had meant downtime, which was the worst thing for him at the moment. Lacking the adrenaline dump, he now felt tired, dirty, and hungry. He was still wearing his BDUs and equipment from the Greater Nation raid, gear that had already served him through three gun battles that morning.
