“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 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 30 °Cs. “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 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.”
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.
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 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.