24 Veto Power (8 page)

“I hope you don’t mind meeting early, but otherwise the day’s full,” Mitch Rasher said as he stepped out of the way and let the Attorney General into his hotel suite.

Quincy was wearing a two-piece suit and tie to Rasher’s wrinkled polo shirt and jeans. “No problem,” he said crisply, “I was up anyway. No thanks,” he added as Rasher motioned to the pot of fresh coffee on the table.

The suite was big, but not opulent. Rasher habitually rejected any show of status. The man who had been called “Barnes’s brain” lived like he had no body. Staffers in the West Wing called him “the Hermit” because he sometimes spent days closed up in his office, working on arcane political strategy, sacrificing sleep (which everyone admired) and personal hygiene (which everyone regretted). He would show up to strategy sessions with his shirttails half-tucked and his tie askew, three days’ worth of beard shading his face. He cleaned up for the cameras when he had to, but he preferred to avoid the limelight altogether. Rasher derived some perverse personal joy from being the man behind the curtain, and wanted no media dogs exposing him as he tugged at the strings of power.

Rasher bit off a chunk of bagel and flopped down on the couch.

“Two days, Mitch,” Quincy said, settling himself easily into a chair opposite. “That’s not much time, even for you guys.”

“It could be two hours,” Rasher replied through a mouthful of bagel. “We’ve done all the arm twisting we’re going to do, Jim. I told you that before Frisco. No more going out on a limb for this one. We’ve already taken too much heat on military spending and the tax thing.”

Quincy tugged at his shirt cuffs, fingering his cuff-links. “It doesn’t make sense, you know. You’ve made this Administration all about homeland security. You told me to go after this bill. Now you guys are benching yourselves in the fourth quarter when you should want to win the game more than anyone.”

Rasher liked sports metaphors as much as the next guy. “Yeah, but sometimes when the game is lost, you sit your starters down so they don’t get hurt.”

The Attorney General stared at Rasher, who just chomped his bagel and smiled back. Rasher’s balding head gleamed in the light of the corner lamp, giving him an angelic aura. But the grin beneath it was from another place. It was the juxtaposition of the halo and the leer that bent Quincy’s thoughts at just the right angle. “Oh shit,” he said.

Rasher’s grin widened. Quincy knew him for what he was, of course. He was Mephistopheles. He was Iago. He was Machiavelli. He was the engineer within the White House fortress who kept the hapless other side constantly in disarray. But Quincy hadn’t considered, until that moment, that Rasher’s formidable powers could be directed inward as well.

“You want the bill to get killed,” he said.

“Come on, Jim, I never said that.”

“No, you wouldn’t say it. But it’s true. You want it killed. But what if something actually happens? What if there is a terrorist attack and it turns out we could have prevented it with more powers of investigation. What then?”

Rasher examined his bagel and flicked away a sesame seed. “That’s the good part. We just blame the other side for denying us the powers we clearly needed.”

“But if it goes down right now, you’ll look like—” He was going to say,
look like losers
. But of course, they wouldn’t look like losers.
He
would look like a loser. He was the poster child for the NAP Act. He was its architect. Quincy shook his head. Like all good plans, it was too simple to be seen, and he’d fallen for it like a hayseed in a poker game.

Lucky for him, he had a few aces up his sleeve. He recovered himself. “It may not work out how you think. I think I’m going to get the bill passed.” He checked his watch. Almost twenty after. “In fact, I can almost guarantee it.”

Rasher shrugged. “Okay. Then when it passes we just take the country’s temperature. If they’re still against it, we veto it and look good. If they’re for it, then we sign it and look good.”

Quincy said, “Then you’ll look like tag-alongs. My suggestion would be to let the President get out ahead of the issue. He needs to see which way the parade is headed so that he can get in front and lead it.”

Rasher lost interest in his bagel. “Thanks for the political advice, but you can’t guarantee squat. You’re down fifty-two to forty-eight and that’s
if
Robinson and McPherson don’t break ranks and go to the other side. All our guys tell us that there aren’t any votes to turn around.”

“Your guys have been wrong before,” Quincy said.

“No,” Rasher replied coldly, “they haven’t.”

“Well, they are this time. I’m predicting a flood of last-minute switches. I think it’ll surprise you, and you’ll get caught flat-footed. I’ll get this thing through, and I’ll get the credit, and there’s no way you’ll consider a veto.”

Rasher yawned. “Anything else?”

“No.” Quincy stood up, willing himself to walk casually to the door. He opened and closed it without saying goodbye, and only in the hallway did he allow his face to collapse into a scowl of rage. That bastard. Quincy had known they were abandoning him on NAP, but he’d never considered that they were actually going to let him hang for it.

Well, he thought, he had some surprises for them. His first plan sounded like it would work. And if it didn’t, Plan B was already falling into place.

6:18
A
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M
. PST Beverly Hills, California

It had taken a few minutes for Nazila to throw on some clothes, then she and Jack had driven north from Pico into Beverly Hills. Beverly Drive took them up through the heart of the little enclave, and Jack followed Nazila’s directions into the actual “hills” themselves—a group of low rises and high trees that managed to hide several hundred immense mansions north of Sunset Boulevard. Soon enough, as the sky turned from dark to pale yellow, they pulled up in front of an enormous, flat-fronted monolith, one of dozens that had sprung up in the past few years. Locals called them “Persian palaces” because they were the preferred residences of wealthy Iranian immigrants.

Jack stared at the mansion, then looked at Nazila. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“He is not a terrorist,” she said for the thousandth time. “He has friends who sympathize with his troubles.”

“We searched for him for six months and he was living here.” Ramin Rafizadeh, fugitive from justice, lying in the lap of luxury.

She turned toward him in her seat. “You don’t understand, Jack. The people who live here came to the

U.S. to get away from politics. None of them are terrorists. A lot of them are no more Muslim than you are. They don’t feel any connection to the Taliban and they’ve never set foot in a madrassa. You show them a terrorist and the first thing they will do is turn the other way. The second thing they will do is call the police. But do you know what makes them more afraid? You. People like you who arrest their sons.”

Jack’s lip curled. “Don’t start with that politically correct bull. I’m not going after some grandmother from Boise when most of the danger is coming from the Middle East.”

“We know that!” Nazila said. “That’s why we put up with the looks on the airplanes, and the double-takes in restaurants, and the questions from the police. But your laws go too far, and you know it.”

Jack had stopped listening to her. Standard operating procedure had become second nature to him, and while they both talked he had been scanning the street. At first nothing looked out of place—wide lawns, quiet houses, a few cars and a satellite dish installation van parked on the street. The cars were mostly expensive, but there were a few low-end Toyotas and Kias. These would be housekeeping staff arriving to wake the household up for breakfast...

He stopped. It was so obvious he almost missed it. He’d been up all night and his circadian rhythms were screwed up.

A satellite van. There wasn’t a dish or cable company in the world that came when you wanted them. There certainly wasn’t one that made 6:30 A.M. repair calls. He started the engine.

“Where are we going?” Nazila asked.

“Around the back.”

Jack rolled his SUV gently, even sleepily, away from the mansion. As soon as it was far enough up the block, he gave it more gas and made a quick right turn. Most of these Beverly Hills houses had wide alleys separating them from their backyard neighbors. This allowed the city to collect the garbage without the bins or the garbage trucks being seen. Jack made another right into the alley and hurried down as quietly as possible, counting houses until he came to a high cinder-block wall that was his target.

He drew his gun. “Stay here,” he ordered, and slipped out of the car.

6:26
A
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M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Kelly Sharpton’s heart had known, from the moment Deb had asked, that he would help her. But his head struggled with the idea for a full twenty minutes.

What he was contemplating was criminal. It was worse than anything Jack Bauer had ever done. Jack, for all his brashness, was just a field operative, and in the field you made decisions on the fly based on experience and most recent data and then you fought like hell to win. Despite the flak he threw at Bauer, Sharp-ton had always admired him for coloring even close to the lines in his efforts to see the big picture.

But this...this was suicide.

His phone rang again. “Same caller, Kelly,” the operator said.

“What?” Kelly snapped when the line went live.

Debrah Drexler sounded like she was pacing. “I’m running out of time here, Kel. I have to speak to someone from the press in about half an hour. If I don’t, that news goes public and I’m ruined. I need help and I need it now.”

“Do you know what you’re asking me to do?” he hissed back at her, forcing his voice down.

“No,” she said, quite honestly. “I have no idea. But I do know that you’re the only one with access to information like this, and the only one who might be able to stop it.”

Kelly looked around. The walls of his office were glass. He could have darkened them with a switch, but it was still early and the gravediggers were the only ones on. They were down on the deck, manning their terminals. He continued. “You don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”

“Yes, I do—”

“It might be a live witness. It might be a hard copy of a photograph in a safe somewhere. I can’t touch that, period. I certainly can’t do it in thirty minutes.”

“I know what it is,” Debrah repeated. “I just got a copy of it on my e-mail. It’s a reminder to do what I’m told.”

Sharpton had the queasy feeling that his stomach was sinking and his heart was leaping at the same time. “You got an e-mail? Send it to me.”

He hung up.

The e-mail came through a few seconds later. Kelly went straight for the attachment and opened it, and there it was. A series of black-and-white photos of a man with a woman who was definitely Debrah Drexler, twenty years younger than today and probably ten younger than when Kelly had first met her. The shots were grainy but clear, and they told a simple story. Manand womanenter hotelroom. Manputs money on nightstand and undresses. Man needs to lose weight and shave his back. Woman takes money and undresses. Woman needs to eat more. Woman lays a pillow on the floor and drops to her knees . . .

Kelly recognized the style. These were screen grabs from gotcha footage from a sting operation. The man was clearly the target, not Deb, and he could guess why it had never surfaced before. The man, whoever he was, had cooperated, or become irrelevant, or the law had just forgotten about him, and the footage was filed away for years. The man, most likely, never rose to prominence, and the hooker was just the hooker. Without Debrah’s name attached to the file, there was nothing to find, even when digital databases replaced card files. The greatest danger to Debrah Drexler’s career had lain dormant in some catalog in a local archive for twenty years. Until now.

Kelly turned his attention to the e-mail itself. It was a forward, from Deb’s e-mail, naturally. She’d received it from “
[email protected]
”, which would be a blind, of course, but that didn’t worry him. He was the Federal government.

Kelly fired up a search program on his desktop and sent the e-mail, forward and all, into it. The search software was nicknamed “Sniffer” and it was the nephew of the Carnivore program, the FBI’s daunting powerhouse that could track and monitor any e-mail sent anywhere over the Internet. Sniffer wasn’t nearly so powerful, but it was a lot more focused.

The first thing Sniffer did was easy—it broke open the IP numbers, including the one for “oldfriend1604.” Now Sniffer really went to work, a digital bloodhound on an electronic trail. Kelly sent him back upstream to find where this particular collection of bytes had first come from. As the minutes ticked by, Sniffer sent him regular updates: a server in Los Angeles had relayed from a server in Arlington, Virginia, which had in turn relayed from a server in Washington, D.C. After chasing its tail in circles for a while inside the Beltway, Sniffer finally straightened out and pointed its nose at a computer terminal in the Attorney General’s office registered to “Bigsby, Shannon.” Kelly looked up that name in CTU’s (rather extensive) listing of government employees, and learned that Shannon Bigsby was the assistant to the Attorney General.

“Kim, Kim,” Kelly muttered, “what are you doing sharing dirty pictures?”

He heaved a sigh, but it was not relief. Using Sniffer was the easy part. Sniffer could trace, but it couldn’t hack into computers, any more than a bloodhound could both find a fugitive and put handcuffs on him. For that, Kelly needed help.

He punched an extension into his phone.

“Bandison,” came the voice.

“Jessi, can you come up here. I’ve got an exercise for you.”

6:33
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M
. PST Beverly Hills