24 Veto Power (4 page)

But Quincy didn’t explode. His voice was, in fact, cold and calculated. “I may just use the media, now that you mention it. But I did want to give you one more chance. The New American Privacy Act gives us the power to root out terrorists no matter how they try to hide. The Justice Department needs to be able to dig into records, set up phone taps immediately when we identify a suspect—”

“The only problem with your theory—no, one of the
many
problems with your theory, Mr. Attorney General, is that the current administration and the FBI both seem to consider anyone who disagrees with them a suspect. If I remember right, last year you investigated people just for going to an anti-Barnes rally.”

“The individuals we focused on had ties to—”

“If you want to debate, let’s go on Sunday morning television,” Drexler said impatiently. “Otherwise, accept the fact that my vote is going to be a no. And I’ll tell anyone who listens to me to vote the same.”

There was another pause on the line. Somehow, Drexler didn’t like it. Quincy wasn’t the kind to give up, and he certainly wasn’t the type to let someone else get the last word in. His calm demeanor put all her empathic sensors on alert. He wasn’t giving up. He was coiling like a cobra.

“Senator, I strongly recommend that you reconsider. Otherwise you may end up regretting your decision.”

Drexler snorted. “You’re not the first man to say that to me.”

4:14
A
.
M
. PST Greater Nation Compound

As the Senator hung up her phone, five hundred miles to the south, Jack Bauer threw open the door of the black SUV. He grabbed Brett Marks by one handcuffed arm and pulled him out of the car. Marks grunted—he was belted into his seat. Bauer barked as though it was the militia man’s fault. He unbuckled Marks, then pulled him, stumbling, out of the car.

“What the hell is this?” Jack said, holding up the notebook from the munitions house.

Marks squinted. There was just enough light from the houses around for him to see the cover of the notebook. He smiled. “Ah, that’s Operation Backup.”

Bauer tapped the notebook against Marks’s head. “That doesn’t tell me anything.”

Marks looked amused by Jack’s loss of composure. “It’s not that complicated, Jack. There is a terrorist cell operating around Los Angeles. Since the Federal government wasn’t doing anything about them, we decided that we would. After all, that’s what the militia is for, if you want to read the Second Amend—”

“No sermons,” Jack rumbled. “Tell me about these terrorists.”

The Greater Nation leader nodded at the notebook. “It’s all in there. We got a tip from some contacts overseas that some terrorists had slipped past the border. We started snooping around a little and we found out how they were connected here. We were going to take them out before they did any harm. See, Jack, it’s like I was saying when you were pretending to be part of the cause. We are patriots.”

“My hero,” Jack mocked. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler—and legal—just to inform the authorities?”

Oddly, for the first time in this whole affair, Brett Marks actually looked surprised. “We did. We called Homeland Security. We called the FBI. They wouldn’t listen to us.”

“Imagine that,” Jack snorted. He flipped open his cell phone and speed dialed the office. “Bauer here,” he said when the gravediggers answered. “Give me Sharpton.”

Kelly was on the line in a moment. “Don’t hang up on me again.”

“Chew me out later,” Jack growled. “I’ve got something here, maybe. There’s some indication here that the Greater Nation was on to an Islamic terrorist cell here.”

“The militia guys were working with Islamic terrorists?”

“No, they were targeting them. Marks claims they uncovered a sleeper cell or something in Los Angeles. He says they reported it. The notes say three months ago. It also says here that these terrorists were planning something soon. Can you check the Domestic Security Alerts?”

“On it. Call you back.”

4:18
A
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

In his office, Kelly pressed a button on his phone and Jack’s call vanished. He flipped the intercom line and said, “Jessi.”

The voice of Jessi Bandison, the most capable of the gravediggers, came on. “Here.”

“I need you to scan the tip sheets for me. Check Homeland Security’s DSAs for the last six months. Also the FBI logs from local and national.”

“Kelly, I’m not cleared for—”

“When you get to the logs, buzz me and I’ll code you through. I’m looking for anything about tips on terrorists in Los Angeles.”

Jessi buzzed back quickly—she was good at her job—and Kelly half walked, half jumped down the stairs from his loft to the pit where the gravediggers worked. Jessi Bandison—mocha-skinned, curvy, and attractive in all the ways a fashion model was not— watched unblinking as lines of code flashed from bottom to top on her screen. “Nothing in our logs about Islamic terrorists. At least not here in L.A.”

“Okay. Link up with Homeland Security and go through their servers and the FBI logs.”

She did, and a moment later a password screen came up. Kelly typed in his i.d. and password, and a second later they were through to a new level of security.

“So what is this?” Jessi asked.

“The FBI puts out formal alerts to all departments associated with Homeland Security. But they also keep their own logs for internal use. It’s an ongoing intra-net brainstorming session set up after 9/11. Everyone and anyone doing field work or receiving data is supposed to log information of interest here.”

Jessi looked pleasantly surprised. “That’s impressive.”

“It’s bullshit,” Kelly said. He leaned over Jessi. There was a faint smell of jasmine on her neck. He was careful to stare at the screen. “It’s just a CYA gimmick. Everyone’s afraid to miss something, so there’s so much garbage poured into the log all the time that it’s impossible to study it in real time. All it really does is allow you to go back and see if anything was done in the past. That way, if the shit hits the fan, everyone gets sprayed.”

“Thanks for that image.”

At Kelly’s direction, Jessi searched for key words that included
terrorist, Islam, Los Angeles,
and
militia
.

4:25
A
.
M
. PST Greater Nation Compound

At the Greater Nation compound, SUV engines were revving as the SEB unit prepared to take their prisoners away. Jack nearly missed the phone call.

“Bauer,” he said.

“Jack, we’ve got nada. No reports, no tips, no nothing. If your weekend warriors told anyone, it must have been the post office.”

“Thanks.” Jack snapped his phone off and glared at Marks. “No tips. Truth is, that’s what I expected. You’re not the type to rely on the government.”

Marks shook his square head. “You don’t get us, Jack. I don’t know why I didn’t see that. We believe that protecting our borders from terrorists is one thing the government should do. Of course I’d tip them if I learned something. But no one did a thing. The only difference between me and you is that you think if you can’t stop it, we regular citizens ought to just lie down and take it. Sorry, that’s not my style.”

“Is that where Newhouse went? You told him to focus on a mission. Was this it?”

Marks said nothing.

“All right. You’re such a patriot, then tell me the plan. Tell me where I can find these terrorists.”

“Absolutely.” The immediacy of his answer surprised Jack. “There’s a family in Beverlywood. A father and a daughter. One of the terrorists is linked to them and we’re sure they know what he’s doing. Our plan was to start with them.”

Jack felt the same cold groping in his stomach, like an ice-cold eel swimming through his guts. “A father and daughter. What name?”

“It’s all in there,” Marks said. “The address and everything. The name is Rafizadeh.”

The eel in his gut found its home and settled heavily. “Shit,” Bauer said.

***

Six months ago. A holding cell inside CTU headquarters, with a bare steel lamp hanging down from the darkness and bright, directed bulb that illuminated an uncomfortable steel table and left the rest of the room in darkness. Jack Bauer stood at the edge of the light, staring down at the man handcuffed to the table. He was an older man, his hands softened by a scholar’s life and his belly rounded by many comfortable meals. The handcuffs weren’t necessary for security—this old man offered risk of neither fight or flight—but they added to Jack’s psychological advantage. The man in the chair was a prisoner. Jack was the jailer.

“Stop protecting them,” Jack growled. “We’ll find them anyway. Then we won’t need you anymore.”

The old man blinked at Jack. His glasses had been taken away—another small part of the psychological war—and he could barely see past the bright lights in his eyes. His cheeks above his thin, gray beard were sunken with fatigue, and three days of questions had bent his back and slumped his shoulders. But his voice was still as firm as the day Jack had brought him in.

“I hope you do them find, whoever they are,” said the old man with a gentle Farsi lilt in his speech. “In the meantime, I once again ask for my lawyer.”

“No.”

Jack let the denial hang in the air. He didn’t explain that the Patriot Act gave him permission to detain suspected terrorists—even U.S. citizens—indefinitely. The denial held more power without the rationale behind it. Of course, he also didn’t explain that even with the broadened powers the Patriot Act gave him, Jack’s hold on this old man was tenuous, and based on little more than one email picked up by the FBI’s Internet-searching

Jack straddled the chair across from his captive so that their eyes were level. He smiled. “Professor Rafizadeh, you’ve had a fairly unpleasant time here with us. But this is the honeymoon. I can promise that the marriage will be really ugly.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders. “You are threatening me, sir, but with what? Do you think I don’t know what is waiting for me out there? My job will be gone. My tenure, it is nothing now. My daughter will suffer from this also. You have already ruined everything I have, just with what you have done. What will you do, send me back to Iran?”

“At a minimum,” Jack said. He stared at the scholar. He refused to ask again. Rafizadeh knew what he wanted.

The investigation had been fairly straightforward. A contact in Lebanon had pointed Israeli security to a training camp on the Syrian border. Israeli commandos had raided the camp a month earlier. There wasn’t much there, but the commandos came across a few names that hadn’t been deleted from computer lists. Some of those names turned up on Homeland Security’s watchdog list of possibles who had entered the United States. Inside the country, they’d disappeared. That’s where Bauer and CTU had come in. Like bloodhounds sniffing a cold trail, they’d tracked most of the names to dead ends. Only one lead had played out—the name of a suspected terrorist training at the Syrian camp turned out to be the son of Ibrahim Rafizadeh, professor of middle eastern history at the University of Southern California. From the moment he’d met the professor, Jack believed Rafizadeh was a prime example of a criminal who hid in plain sight. He was an Iranian immigrant, naturalized in 1998, but who kept close ties in Iran. He had been an outspoken advocate for Muslim rights after 9/11 and a harsh critic of United States policies toward Muslims, including detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and other locations. At the same time, however, he published papers and had spoken on news programs lambasting fundamentalist Islamists as backward and dangerous. An Iranian ayatollah had even issued a fatwa against him in 2002 after his book,
The Divided Soul: A Study of the Heart and Mind of Islam
was published in the United States. What better cover, Jack thought, than to be a public figure speaking out for Muslim rights while denouncing terrorist activities.

But a month’s worth of wiretaps, tag-team tails, and round-the-clock surveillance hadn’t dug up a shred of evidence beyond Rafizadeh’s connection to his son, whom he had apparently not seen in several years. It didn’t make sense to Jack. He’d been in the Rafizadeh house several times—both with their permission and without—and the pictures on the walls, the scrapbooks, the framed report cards, all told Jack the story of a man who adored his children and would not,
could
not cut ties with them. So he’d brought the professor in under the Patriot Act, hoping to sweat the truth out of him.

The professor shrugged again. “If the fatwa is still in effect, it may be a short visit.”

“Where is your son!” Jack yelled, slamming his fist on the table. He was surprised at the level of his anger, but he went with it. A change of rhythm might meet with success.

“I don’t kn—”

“Yes, you do! He’s here, in the U.S., and he’s a threat to innocent lives. You tell me now or I swear I’ll bury you so deep they’ll—”

The door to the interrogation room had burst open. Ryan Chappelle had entered, flanked by two uniformed security men. Chappelle’s face looked more pinched and angry than usual.

“Release this man,” Chappelle wheezed. The two uniforms entered and immediately begun unlocking the old man. “See that he’s escorted safely home. If he’s hungry or thirsty, get him anything he wants. Mr. Rafizadeh—”

“Professor,” the old man said, rising to his feet and rubbing his wrists. He looked uncertain, as though he thought this might be one of Bauer’s tactics.

“Professor Rafizadeh,” Chappelle restarted, “on behalf of this agency I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience we’ve caused. I hope you’ll trust that we try to act in the best interest of the country—”

“Inconvenience!” Rafizadeh said.

“What’s going on?” Bauer said, turning on Chappelle. Chappelle glared back, his ears turning slightly red. “He’s clear, Bauer. The connection didn’t pan out.”