Mercy inched her car up Federal Avenue, which had shrunk down to a narrow aisle in the center of the street with police cars, paramedic trucks, and ambulances parked and double-parked all the way up to Wilshire Boulevard. She spotted an open space and double-parked next to another slick-topped car with the government “E” on the license plate. She got out and wove her way through small crowds of police officers taking breaks from their time on the line.
Willow’s laid-back style of speech had been to Mercy’s advantage. When he had called his friend Frankie Michael-mas, there had been no hint of nervousness in his voice, and in a few moments Mercy knew what Frankie looked like and where she was. She and a few of her friends had gathered in Sepulveda Park on the south side of Federal Plaza and across the street. Sepulveda Park was so crowded that the grass had disappeared. Finding a single person would be like looking for a needle in a stack of needles, but Willow had kindly arranged to meet Frankie at the drinking fountain next to the soccer field.
Across the street and half a block up, right in front of the Federal Building, protestors were chanting protest slogans.
Mercy couldn’t make out the words but the sound suggested that it was something like “One-two-three-four, there’s no G8 anymore!” She wondered why protesters always resorted to childlike rhythms. Were they as naïve as children? Or were they smart enough to know that the best messages were simple messages?
Over here in the park no one was chanting. This felt more like a sit-in, or even a picnic, than a protest. Twenty- and thirty-something Caucasians mingled with short, dark-haired men and women with Latin and Incan looks. Mercy thought wryly that the whole scene appeared as if someone had laid a J. Crew ad over the top of a Benetton ad. She passed through clouds of clove and marijuana and smiled at the image of a couple of uniforms barging through ten thousand people to arrest someone for possession of a baggy with two grams of pot. No one person, she thought, made the laws, but the people definitely did, and these ten or twenty thousand people had decided that a little ganja was okay.
Mercy reached the drinking fountain. There was a young woman standing there, her eyes scanning left and right, looking right past Mercy. She was short and broad but fit, like a gymnast, and wore her curly hair long and (Mercy suspected) artificially blond. She wore a ruby-red stud in her left nostril. These details matched Willow’s description, so Mercy said, “Frankie Michaelmas?” and held out her badge.
Frankie’s searching eyes focused in sharply. Mercy exercised Gladwell’s Blink theory on Frankie as the other woman reacted to her: thinks on her feet, dislikes authority, violent. These were the instant impressions she felt when she saw Frankie’s reaction, the last especially noticeable because of the flash in her eyes that Frankie hid so quickly Mercy nearly thought she’d imagined it. But if Mercy was going to stick to her theory, then she had to admit it was there — a moment of spite begging for a physical outlet.
Frankie didn’t say anything.
“Detective Mercy Bennet, Los Angeles Police Department. You and I need to have a word.” Mercy had learned long ago not to ask permission. Asking permission gave the subject the feeling she could object, and Mercy was beginning to suspect that she had very little time left for objections.
“I’ll give you a few words. How about fu—”
“That’s cute,” Mercy interrupted, her voice intentionally thick with sarcasm. “I’ve never heard that before. I want to talk to you about the Earth Liberation Front.”
A few of the people standing around them were now staring at Mercy, but none of them looked hostile. Mercy guessed that none of them were Frankie’s friends. In fact, based on her tough grrrl appearance, Mercy suspected that she didn’t want any of her friends to meet Willow, and therefore had brought no one to this meeting spot.
“Willow sold me out,” she said with a shrug. “I should have figured. But you’re barking up the wrong tree, you know?”
Mercy took a step closer. She wasn’t used to being taller than her subjects. It was a good feeling. “I know that you told Willow something big and violent was going to happen here. I want to know what it is.”
Frankie pushed her bleached blond hair back on her head. “Well, if you find out, will you tell me?”
“I figure your friends in the Earth Liberation Front already did.”
Frankie smiled. “I’m not a member of the Earth Libera—”
“—not a member of the Earth Liberation Front,” Mercy mocked. Supporting information was filling out her first impression of Frankie Michaelmas. The “fuck you” attitude wasn’t exactly a false facade, but it wasn’t the foundation of her personality, either. Mercy decided that Frankie floated on a wide but shallow sense of self-esteem.
“I didn’t think you were dull enough to try that crap with me,” she said disdainfully. “The ELF doesn’t keep a membership, so technically no one is a member. But I’ll tell you this.” Mercy leaned even closer, until her chin nearly touched Frankie’s forehead and she had to look down to see her. “You can all talk about how you’re not members of the same club when you’re serving time together. Because I’m taking you into custody, and the minute something bad happens, you’re an accessory.”
Frankie’s eyes dimmed just a bit, but she straightened her back and said, “Like you’re going to arrest me here, in the middle of all this? I don’t think so.”
She spun and pushed her way through the crowd.
Mercy smiled and followed.
Jack stormed back into CTU Headquarters feeling enraged and humiliated. Chris Henderson saw him from his loftlike office overlooking the analysts’ bullpen and was halfway down the stairs as Jack approached him.
“The techs messed up!” Jack snarled. He held up his cell phone as if it said everything. “The son of a bitch called me on my cell phone! Even when I got out of my car he knew I was walking!”
Chris’s shoulders sagged. “All right, we’ll have them test again—”
“We don’t have to, sir.”
The tech who’d helped Jack before reappeared. His face was screwed up, as though he was having trouble expressing surprise, admiration, and fear all at once. “We just finished a blood test on Agent Bauer.”
“You better have found the damned transmitter. I don’t care how small it is,” Jack said.
The tech nodded. “We did, sort of. But it’s not just small. It’s. ”
“I don’t care what it is,” Jack barked. “Get it out!”
“We don’t know how,” the tech admitted. “It’s not a device somewhere in your body. The transmitter is laced throughout your entire body. It’s in your blood.”
5. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 A.M. AND 12 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
It wasn’t easy, following a pint-sized twenty-something girl through a crowd of protestors at Federal Plaza. The blond hair helped, but Frankie was so short that several times Mercy lost her bobbing yellow head in the crowd. The good news was that the sea of people made it hard for Frankie to spot a tail. She did glance back once or twice, but Mercy had shifted off to one side, moving parallel to Frankie instead of behind her, and so the girl hadn’t noticed her.
Eleven o’clock, and the sun had already turned the protestors into twenty thousand sweating bodies. Mercy’s nose told her that more than a few of the people she passed kept personal hygiene fairly low on their lists of priorities. She rubbed up against one man with curly brown hair, his arm slick with sweat, and his stink clung to her like a plastic wrapper clinging to her fingers.