24 Veto Power (25 page)

“Something’s not making sense to me,” Jack probed. “You say Frank Newhouse had Iranian friends. But you also say that he was part of the Greater Nation plan to stop the Iranians. Those two things don’t add up.”

“Our information about the terrorists didn’t come from Frank,” Marks said. “We have other friends that let us know what’s going on.”

“Names,” Jack demanded.

“That’s not part of this deal.”

Jack glowered, but said nothing. Marks continued.

“I assumed that Frank didn’t want to see the terrorists succeed. Frank joined us because he’s anti-Federalist, not anti-American. To be an anti-Federalist is a noble cause, Agent Bauer. We are fighting for the freedom of the states and the freedom of the individual. We are not un-American. When we heard that there might be some Iranian terrorists entering the U.S., I assumed he had heard something from old friends and wanted to stop it.”

“Maybe he’s still doing that,” Jack suggested.

“Then he’s doing a lousy job, especially considering that he seemed to know the guys that are behind it.”

6:31
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. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“He’s a good storyteller,” Jack growled, walking into the conference room behind Chappelle and Sharpton.

“You don’t believe him?” Chappelle said. “It makes sense to me.”

“We need to get background on Babak Farrah,” Jack said.

“Already on it.” Kelly tossed a file to Jack. The manila folder was thicker than the sparse paperwork inside. Jack thumbed through it as Kelly spoke. “We don’t get much out of Iran. What we have is innocuous enough—the CIA says he was a sergeant in the Iranian army, owned a small computer store, that’s pretty much it. He might have been the President of Iran before coming here, for all we know.”

Jack rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in a very long time. “So Frank Newhouse plays the Federal government but secretly works for Greater Nation. Then he plays Greater Nation but secretly works for Iranian terrorists. That’s our theory?”

“I’ll listen to a better one,” Chappelle said.

Jack didn’t have a better one. He tried to isolate his own concern, and that came down to only one thing: Brett Marks. He didn’t like him, he didn’t trust him, and he didn’t want to listen to him anymore. The idea that some of the evidence was coming from Marks— not to mention the fact that the nutcase would walk because of it—made him furious.

“I still have a problem,” he said at last. “Marks didn’t give us anything. We’re not any closer to finding the terrorists. We’re not any closer to finding Newhouse.”

Jamey Farrell walked in on the middle of his sentence. She had a huge grin on her face. “Who says we’re not any closer to finding the bad guys?”

Without a word, they followed her back to the conference room where she’d set up yet another display.

“I expect a raise after all this,” she said. “Just follow the pictures.” She pressed a button and a slideshow played for them. The pictures were all different angles—sometimes straight on, sometimes downward angles. Sometimes the objects seemed very close, more often they were far off, and always they were blurred and black and white. But one thing was obvious in all of them: the blue van. The slideshow was a pictographic recreation of the van’s journey, and it ended at a private hangar at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana.

Kelly Sharpton whistled. “Now that is good detective work.”

“We checked the logs at John Wayne,” she went on casually, as though it was all in a day’s work. “Only two flights left from that hangar or the one next to it that evening. One was a hobby flier who flew to Santa Barbara. She checks out. The other logged a flight plan for San Diego, but didn’t go there.”

“How do we know?” Chappelle asked.

Jamey said, “According to FAA records, it never landed there. We just got off the phone with the traffic controller who was on duty yesterday. He recalls tracking that plane and asking why it had veered off its course. They didn’t answer. He didn’t think much of it because hobby fliers take joyrides all the time.”

Jack asked, “Did he have any idea where it was going?”

“East.”

6:50
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. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles, Holding Room 2

“Nice of you to come back,” Brett said. “Are we finished here? Can I go?”

“I’m not sure,” Jack said. He hadn’t turned the camera back on. “You haven’t really given us anything. I mean, you told us a great story about Frank Newhouse. You gave us an explanation for the terrorists. But we didn’t get us any closer to finding anyone. If you want to walk, you better do more than just tell a good story.”

He turned the cameras back on. “You said that Frank Newhouse didn’t give you information on the terrorists, but you won’t tell us who tipped you.”

“No.”

“What did Frank do when you learned the information?”

“First, we called the FBI and Homeland Security. They didn’t seem to believe us. Frank, who was our inside man, said that it was because some government agency had already botched some Iranian investigation.” Marks let that sink in. Jack could tell by the grin on his face that he knew of Jack’s involvement there. “Anyway, you may not agree, but we know that we have the right as citizens to act in defense of our country, so we took it into our own hands. Frank led our investigation.”

“You let him do that even though you knew he had Iranian friends?”

Marks shrugged. “He fooled you guys a lot worse than he fooled us.”

“Did Frank mention what he thought the terrorist plan might be?”

“That’s what we were trying to find out. We had a lead on someone who knew the terrorists. Ramin Rafizadeh. We were looking for him when you got in the way. Other than that, all Frank knew was that they were going to attack the President sometime when he came to Los Angeles. It was going to be soon, I think.”

That’s the head fake,
Jack thought.
So we fell for the same fake Marks did.

Jack wasn’t sure where to go next. It was time to start fishing.

“Tell me what you know about EMPs.”

Brett Marks blinked. Jack had seen him do it before, but not very often. The militia leader was cool and composed and rarely caught off-guard. This had surprised him. “You mean electromagnetic weapons?” Brett asked.

“You know what I mean,” Jack said, pressing his small advantage.

“I know the government is developing weapons that short-circuit electronic equipment. I know that nuclear blasts can do the same thing, but cause a lot of other damage. My theory is that the powers that be would use weapons like that to shut down the entire infrastructure of the country if the people ever rise up and overthrow the illegal government. That’s just my opinion, of course.”

“My opinion,” Jack said, losing patience, “is that you’re insane. You couldn’t shut down the whole country.”

Marks gave him that professorial smile, the one he reserved for naïve students who had not read their Constitution. “You really don’t know anything, do you, Jack. A decent-sized EMP blast, either from a nuclear weapon or an EMP weapon, could black out the entire country. All you have to do is set it off high enough and in the right spot. Nineteen miles over Kansas would do the trick.”

6:59
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. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Kelly Sharpton was already on the phone by the time Jack left the holding cell and burst into the observation room.

“I’d say he’s given us something now, wouldn’t you, Jack?” Chappelle said.

“We’ll see,” Jack growled.

Sharpton hung up the phone. “Jesus, he’s right. I just got off the phone with DOD. Nineteen miles up you lose all grounding effects and the blast range extends far enough to reach the whole goddamned country.”

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLAC
E
BETWEEN THE HOURS OF
7 P.M. AND 8 P.M.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

7:00
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. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“Jamey!” Jack roared, leaving the observation room and steaming into the main computer room, pulling Sharpton and Chappelle in his wake. “How far can they get?”

“I’m on it!” Farrell called from her workstation. “Come see.”

Jack was hovering at her shoulder in seconds.

“All we have is a process of elimination,” she ex
plained. “Assuming our terrorists aren’t just joyriding up to Santa Barbara to visit their boyfriends, then the plane that took off from that hangar is a Cessna Citation Encore.”

Her computer screen filled with specs on the aircraft, a sleek twin-engine jet with a certain executive-level appeal.

“Once they deviated from their flight plan, they could go anywhere. There’s enough traffic up there that they’d be hard to track. But . . .” she added, before Jack could interrupt her with a question, “this Cessna’s maximum distance is right around two thousand miles, so either they have to refuel somewhere, or their destination is less than that.”

Sharpton said, “Kansas City. Seventeen hundred miles.”

Jack nodded. “We need to pull the trigger on this.” He looked at Chappelle. The District Director nodded.

7:05
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. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco

President Barnes was on his third attempt to tie his bow tie. He grimaced at himself in the mirror as the wings came out lopsided yet again.

“Hal, I keep telling you Chris will do that for you,” his wife said. Juliette Barnes was already dressed—her ability to be ready on time for all social functions was one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her—and watching him in the mirror from the sitting room attached to their suite.

Barnes’s frown deepened. “It just seems ridiculous to be the leader of the free world and not be able to tie your own goddamned bow tie.”

“Well, Mr. President, we’re running out of time.

You’d better either do the job yourself or get the steward to do it.”

He snorted. “Let’s hope you’re only referring to my bow tie when you say that.”

Her laugh was interrupted by a knock on the door. She turned to answer it, but by that time there were seven Secret Service agents in the room, two for her and five for him. The head of the detail, Avery Taylor, was a handsome man with a square jaw and jet-black skin. “Mr. President, sorry for the intrusion.”

“What is it?” he asked. The Secret Service worked incredibly hard to stay hands off, even in a public environment like the Westin Hotel. If they had walked into his private room like this, something was wrong.

“Just a minute, sir,” Avery said. He put a hand up to his ear bud and listened. “Affirmative. Patriot is en route.” Avery focused on Barnes. “Sir, we need to move you immediately. We’re taking you to a secure area of the Presidio on the east side of the city.”

“Why?” Barnes asked, “What about the dinner?”

“It’s being canceled, sir. This is blue.”

“Hal?” his wife asked anxiously.

“Blue” was Secret Service shorthand for an extreme emergency—one in which their commands overrode even his own. Their job was to protect him, and if they felt the danger was extreme enough, they would countermand his orders with their own.

“Go with them, Julie.”

With enough manpower and control, a man can exit any building quickly. Whisked out the door to a waiting elevator, its call button overridden, and down to a waiting car, President Barnes departed the Westin in less than three minutes, while his wife was escorted by Secret Service agents out a separate exit. By that time, Barnes was already on the phone with Admiral Toby Scarsdale (Ret.) his Homeland Security secretary, Mort Jacobs of the NSA, and Jim Quincy of Justice.

“Electromagnetic?” he was saying. “We spend sixty million a year trying to gather up nukes in Eastern Europe, and someone steals a fucking giant magnet in our own backyard?”

Scarsdale spoke up. “We’re still waiting for Rudy at the CIA to join the call, but I was told that these terrorists may have been in the country for over a year.”

“Six months,” Quincy corrected. “But it’s still a goddamned long time.”

“What are all our intelligence people doing!” Barnes roared. “Forget Rudy. Get me the guys on the ground that are in charge of this operation. Now!”

7:09
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. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jack was on the phone with air traffic controllers in Kansas City, Kansas, when Jessi Bandison, her coffee-colored face suddenly pale, handed him the phone.

“Hang on,” Jack said.

Jessi shook her head so vigorously it could have popped off. “Uh-uh. It’s the President. For you.”

Jack hung up one phone and took the other. “This is Jack Bauer.”

“Bauer, this is Harry Barnes.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.” He straightened automatically.

“I’m told you’re the guy on the ground causing this crisis.”

“After the guys who are causing it, yes, sir.”

“Bauer, you understand the shit storm you are about to unleash with this? The kind of disruption this is about to cause. You’re clear on this, right?”

Jack swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“You’re sure what you’re doing?”

“Sir, we know that the EMP was stolen, we know that eight—”

“Shut up, Bauer!” Barnes snapped. “Don’t play that bureaucratic shell game with me. I’m not asking you to give me evidence so I can decide. You look at the evidence and you decide. That’s what you get paid for. Is the risk worth the damage?” Barnes asked the last question slowly and clearly.