24 Veto Power (28 page)

Then he turned away from everyone, down the hallway toward the holding cells. When he was alone in the dim passageway, he gritted his teeth to bite back tears.

8:20
P
.
M
. PST Santa Monica

Nina walked around the building, then walked back up the stairs to Matilda’s apartment. There was no back door. Nina tried to peek into the window. Through a crack in the drapes, she saw an easel and the back of a canvas. Matilda was a painter.

“Can I help you?”

Nina looked up toward a young man, maybe twenty, in a BareNaked Ladies T-shirt and jeans.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m looking for Matilda Swenson. This is her apartment, right?”

“Yeah,” the kid said in that sardonic tone that only the young can master. “I’m sort of the manager. I guess she’s not here, which is why the door doesn’t open when you knock.”

Nina smirked. “Thing is, when the doors don’t open, I usually knock them down.” She showed him her badge. “Federal Agent Nina Myers. Can you open the door for me, Mr. Manager?”

He did. Nina walked into a sparse but elegant apartment with hardwood floors, Roman shades, and minimalist furniture. There was a two-seat red velvet couch, an ultra-thin flat-panel television mounted on a stand on the floor. There was no dining table, just two stools pushed up against a built-in bar in the kitchen. Almost all the space had been designed to allow room for paintings, and paintings were everywhere. There were small canvases and large ones; some were framed but most just leaned against walls near corners. Oddly, none of them hung on the walls, which had been painted seafoam green.

“She’s a painter,” said Mr. Manager, hanging out in the doorway behind her.

“How well do you know her?” Nina asked.

“Just sort of hello,” he said, waving to show what he meant. “She stays in a lot when she’s painting, I guess.”

Nina thumbed through a couple of paintings. Matilda favored a Picasso-esque style, but her shadings moved a little more toward pastel. The effect wasn’t very pleasing. Horses had become a theme for her. There were galloping horses, horses at rest, and horses with foals. But all the horses were done in that piecemeal, surreal style, with each part of the horses treated as its own unique shape, rather than as part of the whole creature.

“I’m not sure I like it,” Nina said.

Mr. Manager laughed. “I don’t think her boyfriend does, either.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, he burned one of the paintings. It was a painting of him, I think. So either he was sacrificing it to the gods, or . . .” He didn’t seem to have enough energy to finish the sentence.

“He did? You saw him?”

“Yeah. He burned it in the alley. That’s where my apartment looks. I get the crappy one, but it’s free.”

“Can I see that painting?”

“Why’d you want to see it?” he said, looking at her like
she
was the idiot. “I told you, he burned it. It’s a bunch of ashes now.”

“Right. Have you seen Matilda this evening? Since he burned the painting?”

“Nope.”

Nina nodded. She opened the folder she was carrying and pulled out a picture of Frank Newhouse. “Any chance her boyfriend looks like this?”

8:41
P
.
M
. PST Santa Monica

“Jessi, it’s Nina,” she said urgently. “I need your help right away.”

“Nina, I’m already searching as fast as I can. There’s nothing on Newhouse except his regular service record—”

“Forget that. I need you to get all the information you can on Matilda Swenson. What I want most is a tag on her cell phone. If it’s on, I want to know where she is right now.”

Before calling, Nina had dug through a small file drawer that held Matilda’s bills and found statements for her Verizon wireless account. Nina read off the account number. “Get linked up with them right away. And let’s just hope her phone is on.”

Nina paced back and forth, tapping her cell phone in her hand as she tried to think. Frank Newhouse had a second life, one that wasn’t on the grid, and Matilda was part of it. Find Matilda and you find Frank, or at least a little more about him.

Mr. Manager still stood in the doorway, leaning lazily against the doorjamb and watching her.

“Aren’t you going to ask what this is all about?”

The young man blinked at her with heavily lidded eyes. “You’re with the government right?”

“Yep.”

“Is it possible that what you’re looking for might kill me?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then I don’t want to know about it.”

Nina’s phone rang. “What have you got?”

Jessi spoke quickly. “We pinged Swenson’s cell phone. It’s on, but the signal is weak. It’s coming from somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains, about eight miles northwest of you, near a fire road off of Mulholland Drive.”

Nina knew the area. The entire Santa Monica Mountain Range was a wilderness corridor for Los Angeles. Although the mountaintops were only a mile or two from the city, they were wild and covered in brush. It was a nice place for a picnic, but how many people picnicked at eight o’clock on Wednesday evening? “Call L.A. Sheriff Mountain Rescue. We need to get up there right away.”

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLAC
E
BETWEEN THE HOURS OF
9 P.M. AND 10 P.M.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

9:00
P
.
M
. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco

Attorney General James Quincy returned to his hotel room. He wasn’t on the Secret Service’s short list for VIPs in case of a crisis, but he had been moved to a se
cure location by the rest of the security staff. Pulling at his tie, he sat down in a chair and turned on the television, flipping through the news stations. The lead story was, of course, the crisis itself, including details of the grounding of air traffic, the loss of the F-16, and theories (all wrong) about the nature of the threat itself. But slowly, over the course of the next few minutes, Quincy heard it start:

“...why weren’t these terrorists stopped at the border...”

“. . . in the country for months without being uncovered...”

“. . . current procedures inadequate to deal with the global threat...”

Quincy smiled. He couldn’t have said it better himself.

9:14
P
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jack received calls from the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of the CIA, and the President of the United States.

“Nice work, Agent Bauer,” President Barnes said with a laugh. “You have the thanks of a grateful nation.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jack said.

“But no raise. I’m trying to reduce the debt.”

“I understand, Mr. President.”

Barnes hung up.

Kelly Sharpton whistled. “Jack Bauer, super spy!”

Jack shook his head. “Do we have a recovery team out there?”

Kelly nodded. “ETA is about five minutes.”

Jack sat down in an empty seat and let his shoulders slump a little. “It should never have come to this. We should have found them earlier, we should have stopped them before they ever got a weapon.”

Kelly looked up at the ceiling, its recesses hidden in shadows. The overhead lights at CTU hung down on thin bars, illuminating the computer room, but beyond the lights there was darkness. “What can you do? The society we live in, the way we want to be, leaves us open to infiltration. How are you going to stop someone like that coyote?”

Jack curled his lip. “Tougher laws. Better systems.”

Kelly sighed. “We’d only wreck what we’re trying to save.”

“So we let them destroy it?” Jack said skeptically.

“No. Our openness is our weakness. So we just have to be strong in other ways.”

9:20
P
.
M
. PST Pasadena, California

Tony Almeida wished he hadn’t volunteered.

Jamey Farrell had noticed two suspicious vans pulling into that particular lot. The first one was the blue van they had tracked to John Wayne Airport. The second was a white Ready-Rooter plumber’s van that apparently arrived twice but left only once. The blue van had already been accounted for. It had stood there, silent and waiting, when the CTU team arrived at John Wayne Airport to investigate the hangar from which the Cessna had flown. They were dusting and sweeping, but no one expected them to find much more than they already had.

Tony, on the other hand, had offered to visit Cal Tech and check out the scene there. He had arrived at the parking lot at Cal Tech three hours earlier, just as the sun was setting but before the streetlights came on. There were a few cars parked at this hour, but most of the lot was empty. At the far end of the lot, a group of boys used the empty space to practice curbjumping and acrobatics on their bicycles. The lot was right next to the physics buildings, which had given the thieves (in either the blue or the white van) perfect access to the EMP devices. First Tony looked for the van itself, but of course it wasn’t there. Then he searched for alternative exits that the van might have taken, a route that hadn’t been picked up by the security cameras. The parking lot in question had only one driveway—a combination entrance/exit with a white traffic arm that required drivers to stop and take a ticket (on the way in) and pay (on the way out). There was also a kiosk with an attendant. The parking lot was situated on the edge of a low hill that sloped down toward a side street. Tony parked in the lot and walked toward the edge to see if there was another driveway, but he saw only the curb, a sidewalk, and beyond that ice-plant covered slope.

Tony walked over to the kiosk. “Excuse me.”

The attendant, a young black woman with a tiny ring in the side of her nose, wearing an orange vest, had leaned out. “Uh-huh?”

“Is there any other entrance or exit to this lot?”

“Other entrances? Naw, this is the only entrance.”

Tony heard a soft whirring sound and turned to see the boys on their bicycles flash by. They hopped the curb and then, with whoops of daredevil joy, they launched themselves off the edge of the parking lot and down onto the plant-covered slope below. He went back and looked at the slope again. It wasn’t all that steep. A vehicle might just be able to do it.

Tony had phoned in his information: the Ready-Rooter van was gone, and he thought he’d found another way out of the lot. “Which means,” he had pointed out, “that someone didn’t want that van to be picked up on camera.”

Tony walked back to the sidewalk, then turned around. He could just make out the security camera recording the parking entrance. He was sure it didn’t reach this part of the parking lot. He stood at the edge of the curb again, staring down the slope. It wouldn’t be hard to drive down that slope, especially late at night if no one was around to see. Tony slid down the slope a few feet, crouched down, and began to snoop among the green, water-fat ice plants. It wasn’t long before he found what he feared: ice plants crushed by tire tracks. He stood up and looked out on the city of Pasadena, with the lights of Los Angeles glistening in the distance.

The other van had come this way, and they had no idea where the terrorists had gone.

9:29
P
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Ryan Chappelle caught Jack’s eye from across the room. The Director had just hung up the phone. His face was red, and the muscles in his jaw worked furiously. He pointed at Jack and then at the conference room.

A moment later, Jack and Kelly entered. Chappelle closed the door behind them, then spun around and put his face right up against Jack’s. “Do you realize what you’ve done!”

Startled by Chappelle’s aggression, Jack reacted instinctively and bumped his chest against him, knocking the Director off-balance. “What are you talking about?”

Chappelle was livid, ranting nonsensically. “A weather balloon. A goddamned weather balloon! And an EMP device!”

Kelly, as he had done before, stepped in to mediate. “Ryan, you’re not being clear. What’s wrong?”

Ryan wiped spittle from his mouth. He took a deep breath and spoke in short phrases. “Ground airplanes . . . creating a national panic ...we lost a man! And all for nothing!”

“What do you mean, nothing!” Jack shot back.

“Nothing!” Chappelle said, raising his voice. “I just got the word from the recovery team. There was no EMP device on that balloon. There was nothing but some kind of meteorological package!”

Jack froze. Everything stopped for him: the clock, his breath, even his heart. He had the sudden and terrifying sense that the floor might simply open up and swallow him, because the natural laws had suddenly been violated. “What?”

“Oh, now you look doubtful! Before, you were pretty damned sure!”

Kelly was just as shocked as Jack. “It’s got to be a mistake.”

“No, no mistake,” Chappelle sneered. “We just got off the phone with the team that launched the damned thing. You know when they launched it? This morning at eight o’clock local time. They’ve been tracking it all day—right up until the moment it was destroyed.” Chappelle closed the distance between them like a terrier ready to fight. “Do you get it, Bauer? You put the whole country into panic mode for nothing!”

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLAC
E
BETWEEN THE HOURS OF
10 P.M. AND 11 P.M.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME