Ray Dobyns described Number Five Albino Street as a warehouse, but it was obvious to Tony that the building had been an ice house in the 1940s and ’50s before it was converted to industrial use. The warehouse was a flat-roofed, windowless rectangle of dingy red brick. A three-story wooden clapboard tavern and inn had been built against the older brick structure sometime in the 1950s. Over the rough wooden porch that fronted the tavern, a faded billboard for Azteca beer and a neon Cuervo sign in the window were the only indication this place was more than another tenement. A battered Ford van was parked in front of the building, locked tight. No one was visible on the porch, or on either of the narrow wooden balconies fronting the second and third floors.
“Do we go in?” Tony asked.
Dobyns shook his head. “Listen, Navarro. I don’t want to blow this deal — I need the money bad. Let me go in first and check the place out. I’ve been here before. They know me. I’ll be back in five minutes or less. You can time me.”
Tony considered the man’s plan. While he didn’t trust Dobyns, Tony knew the con man would gain nothing by double-crossing him. Above all, Dobyns loved money, and he seemed to be in desperate need of some right now.
“Okay,” grunted Tony. “I’ll meet you right here in five minutes.”
Dobyns waddled across the street, pushed through the wooden screen door and into the seedy tavern. Tony watched for a moment, then went into a tiny store and purchased a cold bottle of Jarritos. Sipping the sugary Mexican soda, he waited, glancing at his watch from time to time.
Dobyns reappeared exactly five minutes later. But instead of crossing the street, he motioned to Tony from the porch.
Tony chugged his drink, tossed the empty bottle into a garbage can and crossed the dusty street.
“It’s Lesser, all right,” said Dobyns. “He’s upstairs on the third floor. He’s not even hiding. The bartender spilled when I slipped him an Andrew Jackson.”
“Is he alone?”
Dobyns nodded. “Come on. The faster you find him, the faster I get my money.”
Tony hesitated. As tactical situations went, this whole set up stunk. He was heading into an unknown environment armed with only the Gerber Mark II serrated combat knife in his boot. On the other hand, Lesser was small potatoes and had no clue anyone from the U.S. government was looking for him, and he was not a violent felon. He was, in fact, a computer nerd. Plus Dobyns had nothing to gain and everything to lose if the deal fell apart.
“Lead the way.”
Dobyns grinned and pushed through the screen door.
The interior was dim and nearly empty. Behind the bar, a squat bartender nodded at Dobyns, then went back to watching the jai alai match on the television above the bar. At a corner table far from the door, two middle-aged men were partying with two young prostitutes. The men were hang-dog drunk, the women clinging. Two more women sat in the corner, gossiping and polishing their nails. They looked up when the door opened, but when they saw Tony was with Dobyns, they returned to their conversation.
“The stairs are back here.”
Dobyns led Tony across the bar to a narrow hallway. Beyond the single rest room another door opened into a stairwell. A trio of leaping silver-gray fish, stuffed and lacquered, were mounted above that door, which gave the brothel its name, El Pequeños Pescados—“Little Fishes.”
Dobyns, in the lead, squeezed through the narrow doorway and slowly lumbered up the steep staircase to the second, then third floor.
Through another door, another narrow hallway flanked by peeling wallpaper, a floor of stained, avocado-green linoleum. From somewhere behind a wall, a man grunted, a woman laughed.
They went to the wooden door at the end of the hallway. Dobyns knocked twice. “Come,” a muffled voice called from within. Dobyns winked at Tony and opened the door.
The room was dark, the curtains drawn, but Tony could see two computer monitors flickering brightly, a figure seated in a chair facing them, his back turned to the door. Computers and components were scattered about on tables and chairs, even on the floor.
Dobyns opened his mouth to speak; Tony silenced him, stepped over the threshold.
“Richard Lesser? I need to speak—”
Tony never saw the truncheon that came down hard on the back of his head. Mercifully, he never felt the blow, either.
That pain, and more, would come later.
Jack Bauer observed the suspect through a one-way mirror. The Middle Eastern youth was locked in an interrogation room in the LAPD’s Central Facilities. Routine prisoners were taken to one of the city’s jails and booked there. But celebrity criminals — or soon to be celebrity, as was the case with this man — were often brought here because the press had not yet tumbled upon the existence of cells and interrogation rooms in what was basically a garage and repair facility a block away from the Los Angeles bus station.
The interrogation room was dim, the man pinned in a single column of bright white light as he sat immobile on a restraining seat, staring straight ahead, arms and legs shackled. His torn, bloodstained clothing had been collected as evidence. Now the killer wore virgin white overalls, white tube socks sans shoes. He’d been scrubbed clean, too. Blood samples and bits of human flesn had been collected from his skin, from under his fingernails, from between his teeth. His raven-black long hair was still damp.
Detective Frank Castalano stood at Jack’s shoulder, his partner Jerry Alder a discreet distance away.
“I might have called you in even if this wasn’t personal, Jack,” Castalano was saying. “This man’s a Saudi national. He’s been talking jihad, praising Allah, and claiming he was doing the will of a terrorist named Hasan. When we ran his fingerprints, his education visa gave him away, and his name turned up on a Department of Homeland Security memo as a person of interest.”
Jack took the file from Castalano’s hand, flipped through it.
“His name is Ibn al Farad, twenty-two years old,” Castalano continued. “His father is Omar al Farad, a millionaire vice president of the Royal Saudi Bank of Riyadh and a Deputy Minister in the government. He sent Ibn to America to study at the University of Southern California, but the boy vanished a year ago. The Saudi Arabian Consulate is looking for this kid and they may get word of his capture at any time…”
Jack’s studied the suspect. “So now Ibn al Farad has resurfaced, this time as the suspect in a heinous multi-murder.” Bauer shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Has he given any sort of statement?”
Castalano frowned. “He was ranting when we caught him, babbling in the helicopter, and chattering all the way down here to the interrogation room. But as soon as we started asking real questions, taping his words, the suspect stopped talking.”
“You say he spoke of a man named Hasan,” said Jack, recalling that same name had cropped up in the past twenty-four hours in connection with the fugitive Richard Lesser.
“He kept referring to this Hasan as ‘the old man on the mountain.’ Claimed that’s what he was doing driving like a madman all over the San Gabriels— trying to find the old man.”
Bauer frowned. The reference to the old man on a mountain jogged something in Jack’s brain, but he could not isolate the memory thread and gave up. “You said he was high on some drug?”