“I said don’t move. I meant don’t move.”
“Okay, okay,” Milo’s hands went up higher. “It’s just that you asked me a question.”
“And you had to move to answer it?”
The biker lowered the shotgun, whacked Milo in the gut. Air shot out of his lungs and Milo doubled over. The man crossed the room, opened the front door. Through a haze of pain, Milo heard someone else step over the threshold. The door closed behind the newcomer. The man with the shotgun tried the light switch. It didn’t work. He moved to a bedside lamp, turned it on, knocked the shade off. Milo stood straight again, blinked against the glare.
“Well, well,” said the man who came in. “If it isn’t my old pal, Milo De-Pressman.”
Despite the scruffy-looking armed man still waving a weapon at him, Milo bristled at the sound of his hated college nickname. “Blow it out your ass, Lesser.”
Lesser smirked. “That earring is bad enough. But my God, De-Pressman, what’s with the soul patch?”
A head taller than Milo, Richard Lesser was bone thin, with curly brown hair coiled into a crown atop his high forehead, a sallow complexion, crud-brown eyes, and, in Milo’s opinion, a chin as weak as ever.
“Look, Lesser. ” Milo tried to step away from the wall but the big man slammed him back again.
“Down, boy. Heel, Cole,” said Lesser. The armed man stepped back, lowered his weapon. “This is my bodyguard, Cole Keegan. Cole, meet my dear old classmate, Milo De-Pressman.”
Lesser turned his back on the pair, examining Fay’s network configuration. “I believe you or your colleagues were monitoring my Internet activities from here, am I correct? It’s a nice setup, and the software is something I’ve never encountered before. But you have to have a big mainframe somewhere, feeding you this stuff.”
Lesser gestured contemptuously at the computers linked to the tiny server in the middle of the room. “This Mickey Mouse set up just won’t do. Are you working for a corporation? Boscom perhaps?”
Lesser poked the wireless mouse and the computer came out of hibernation. He blinked when he saw his own Internet accounts, banking records on the screen. “I’d like to meet the individual who invented this search program. Very clever.”
“She’s in the bathroom,” said Milo with contempt. “Why don’t you go in and introduce yourself.”
Cole Keegan shook his shaggy head. “You don’t want to go in there, boss. It’s a mess.”
“Listen, Richard,” said Milo, his tone reasonable. “I was sent down here to bring you back.”
“Sent? By whom? To take me back where? To prison?”
“I work for the CIA’s Counter Terrorist Unit.”
Lesser laughed. “You work for CTU? That’s rich. I see the old saying, ‘good enough for government work,’ still applies if they’re hiring you.”
“And I see you’re still as arrogant an asshole as you ever were, Little Dick.”
“Watch it, Milo. I’ve got the bodyguard and Cole has the shotgun.”
Cole Keegan touched Lesser’s arm. “Remember why we came.”
Lesser sighed. “Yes, of course. You’re right.”
“Why did you come, Lesser?” Milo asked. “To gloat over murdering Fay?”
“I murdered no one,” said Lesser. “I came here to make a deal because someone named Hasan is trying rather hard to murder me.”
Milo stared. “Gee, I can’t imagine why.”
Jack Bauer followed Ibn al Farad and his captors to Beverly Hills. As he hoped, the kidnappers assumed they’d made a clean getaway. The farther away they got from the shootout, the more they relaxed their guard. By the time the kidnappers rolled through West Hollywood, Jack was less than a block away.
The vehicle finally swerved into a gated estate on Palm Drive, just a few doors down from Jean Harlow’s mansion, and the house Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe shared during their ill-fated marriage. Jack cruised past the three-story Spanish-style house and down the street.
When he was around a curve and out of sight, Jack rolled to a halt under a knot of palm trees. Here in the hills, he was just five miles from the ocean, yet no cooling breezes reached even this elite enclave. The lawns may have been greener in Beverly Hills, the air conditioners more expensive, but even the wealthy had to step outside sometime and nothing could save them from the punishing heat now scorching all of LA.
Head throbbing, Jack called Jamey Farrell. He reported his position and asked for the property records of the house on Palm Drive. Jamey had an answer for him in less than three minutes.
“The home belongs to Nareesa al-Bustani. She’s the widow of a Saudi billionaire named Mohammed al-Bustani.”
“What’s his background?”
“He went missing during a recent purge of political dissidents.”
Jack chewed on that a moment. In recent months the Royal Saudi intelligence service had begun to investigate citizens suspected of funding terrorism. During the course of their inquest, the secret police rounded up dozens of businessmen, government ministers, imams, and prominent citizens. Most were never seen again. There were no public trials, they just disappeared— tortured to death or shot, or dumped in the desert to perish. Mohammed al-Bustani had been one of them.
“Do the files contain any intelligence to suggest why al-Bustani was arrested?”
“Nothing.”
“What about Mohammed’s wife?”
“Naressa was living in her Beverly Hills home at the time of her husband’s disappearance in Saudi Arabia. The couple’s been estranged for decades, according to CIA intelligence.”
“If that’s true, then why is she helping a known terrorist now? And could Nareesa al-Bustani have a connection to Hasan? Or is there some connection to Ibn al Farad that we don’t know about yet? Maybe he’s a member of the woman’s family—”
Jamey interrupted his verbalized speculations. “Nina’s here. She wants to know what you plan to do next.”
“Tell her to dispatch Chet Blackburn’s team to Olympia Boulevard, but no closer than that. They’ll be minutes away. I’ll call if I need them.”
“Jack? What are you going to do?” It was Nina’s voice on the phone this time.
“The al-Bustani mansion has a man at the gate, armed. Otherwise the home security doesn’t seem particularly daunting. I’m going to break in.”
“But the kidnappers are still in there,” Nina countered. “They’re trained and armed.”
“They think they’ve won. I’m sure they’ve let their guard down.”
“But—”
“I can’t wait, Nina. I’ve got a feeling time is running out.”
“At first it sounded pretty good. Rip off the digital files of a yet-to-be-released tent pole film from a secured server at a special effects studio in San Francisco. A piece of cake, and money in the bank for me and Cole here.”
Lesser leaned back on his chair, a self-satisfied grin on his narrow face. “Secured server! What a joke. The studio’s computer system was easier to crack than that lockout code you put on your computer back in grad school.”
The two men spoke in Tony and Fay’s darkened hotel room. Milo sat on the edge of one of the two narrow beds, Lesser on the wobbly desk chair. Cole Keegan stood near the only exit, shotgun in hand, ear pressed to the door.
Milo narrowed his eyes. “Let’s not relive our old school days, Dick. You’re still not telling me about the virus you created, and why you chose to stick it in the movie download file.”
“Don’t be so impatient. Have you no sense of drama?”
Milo folded his arms and waited.
“Well, as I was telling you,” Lesser continued, “I had a copy of the film when suddenly I get a knock at my door. Turns out my former associate Guido—”