Nina laughed. “Jack’s got plenty of venom of his own.”
Mercy Bennet had just reached her desk at LAPD’s West Bureau. Her desk was bare except for file folders and paperwork from a stack of new cases. She hadn’t had time yet to put up her picture of Tank, her chocolate Labrador, or her favorite quote. It said, “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems or as good as it sounds.” She’d written it herself soon after making detective. In the middle of her first case — the murder of a small-time dealer in Venice that she’d hoped would break open a whole drug ring — when the trail was getting cold, she’d scribbled it on a yellow sticky note. The maxim applied to every area of her life, so she’d had the little sticky note laminated and taped to her computer screen. Her eyes went to it every time she heard news, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
But it wasn’t there at the moment. She hadn’t bothered unpacking yet. West Bureau had been her first assignment as a detective, six years earlier. She’d managed to scratch and claw her way up the ladder, fighting past other up-andcomers reaching for the next rung and pushing against the weight of mid-career sloths who wouldn’t move aside for her, until she made it to the department’s prestigious Robbery Homicide Division. She’d spent two years there, working the meaty cases requiring the biggest budgets, until she’d attracted the attention of a deputy chief looking for sharp minds and go-getters in the post-9/11 era. The minute Homeland Security was established and the department needed a liaison to work with the Feds and the Counter Terrorist Unit, Mercy volunteered. She assumed the move would be an ascension, a step up from tracking cop killers and high-profile celebrity murders to hunting terrorists alongside secret agents.
But as with many departmental changes related to Homeland Security, this job had evolved — or, rather, devolved— into administrative and bureaucratic nonsense. Instead of participating in midnight raids on al-Qaeda safe houses, Mercy served as nursemaid to LAPD officials whining about jurisdiction while playing coy with Federal officials whose egos were bloated by their budgets. She didn’t like it, but for the first few months she did what any sane person does when confronted with intolerable government work: she gritted her teeth and bore it, knowing that eight more months of work would give her the Get Out of Jail Free card she needed to transfer to another department.
Unfortunately, all that had changed when she found herself on the receiving end of Ryan Chappelle’s very unpleasant personality. Chappelle was the Regional Director of CTU and a complete twit. Some of the other leaders there had oversized egos, too — George Mason and Chris Henderson among them — but at least they were competent. Chappelle was just a rule book dressed up in a suit, as far as she could tell, and she let him know it whenever his rules got in her way.
The only saving grace — although maybe it was a curse— to her time as CTU liaison was Jack Bauer. She had known from the first day she met him that they were kindred spirits. She also knew he was married, and so when they first started talking to each other, she studiously avoided anything flirtatious. That was her first clue, really: they both tried not to flirt and in doing so they got to know each other well. Jack was a straight line cutting through the maze of life. Though he was always on the move, Mercy’s image of him was that of a rock holding steady in the middle of a rushing stream. He had a sense of duty that belonged to another time and place, but he made it live and breathe here and now. She found herself spending more and more of her duty time with him.
Unfortunately, her own no-nonsense attitude had gotten her booted out of the job. This would have been okay with her, but Chappelle, toad fungus that he was, sensed that removal from his presence was more reward than punishment, and went after her career. Mercy found herself ejected from Robbery Homicide altogether; she landed back down to West Bureau, where her caseload had consisted of a ring of residential burglaries (high school kids, she was sure) and a missing persons report (a runaway wife, as far as she could tell).
To her surprise, Jack Bauer kept calling. They had coffee. They had dinner. They had…they had come close. But Mercy was smart enough to sense that Jack was keeping something to himself, and though he was inscrutable, she guessed that this “something” was his wife. Not his wife as the woman to whom he was married — that fact didn’t stop any man that she knew — but his wife as someone he actually loved. That stopped Mercy in her tracks. Jack had kindled in her the hope that she might actually meet someone who could match her spirit. She was willing to cross the line with him, to commit adultery, but only if he really loved her, really wanted her. If he still loved his wife, then Mercy would have none of it.
Those thoughts had consumed her for the past few weeks, far more than the purse snatchers and DVD thefts.
All that had changed when Mr. Gordon Gleed got himself murdered. As fate would have it, Bel Air fell under West Bureau’s jurisdiction, and thanks to a minor miracle, Mercy had been atop the rotation when the call came in. Even so, she wouldn’t have given the case much thought if the murderer hadn’t worked so hard to toss the house. The fake robbery theory had led her to investigate Gleed’s background, which was squeaky clean — well, at least as far as the law was concerned. Gleed’s ethics, on the other hand, were more than questionable. Seventeen interviewees, four bios written for four separate corporate boards of directors, and two articles in Business Week and Fortune magazine all indicated that Gleed was a ruthless businessman who, if he had ever had an empathetic bone in his body, had obviously pawned it for growth capital. Gleed had spent the last four years running an association of “rural natural resource providers”—which meant logging companies, oil companies, and ranchers — battling environmental regulations. A press release copublished by several environmental groups called Gleed’s Free Enterprise Alliance “the Gestapo of the U.S. industrial complex” and described Gleed himself as “a cowardly Faust, who has sold OUR souls to the devil instead of his own.”
Environmental groups, Mercy decided, were made up mostly of liberal arts majors who had taken too many writing workshops in college.
Mercy knew her basic premise was sound: radical environmentalists had ratcheted up both their rhetoric and their violence in the last few years. It was only a matter of time before they graduated to full-fledged terrorism, and Gleed would certainly be at the top of any tree-hugger’s list. The picture became clearer for the detective when she discovered that Gleed had launched a corollary campaign of his own. His Free Enterprise Alliance had funded several private investigations of the well-known environmental group Earth First! and its offspring. If the Sierra Club was Dr. Jekyll, Earth First! was Mr. Hyde. While other environmental groups chained themselves to trees to stop logging, Earth Firsters had (it was alleged) spiked trees to stop loggers. Tree spikes, apparently, chewed up the chainsaws the loggers used, and could conceivably cause serious damage.
Mercy had acquired a warrant to review the files created by the private investigators. The files indicated that Earth First! was too amorphous to pursue. Earth First! claimed to be a leaderless “nonorganization” with no official membership. In addition, this organization that didn’t exist had published several statements over the years. The first statement claimed that Earth First! neither condemned nor condoned tree spiking or other violent acts. The second encouraged Earth Firsters to not spike trees since other methods had proved more useful.