She used the inter-office line and called over to Donovan Exley, a young analyst with graphics expertise. “Van, I’m going to feed you an image. Can you run FRS on it right away.”
“No prob,” he replied.
Jamey sent the file and nodded in satisfaction. The wonders of science would turn Jack Bauer’s Impressionist painting into the complete biography of a terrorist suspect.
Jack waited impatiently for Jamey Farrell to get off her ass and get him information. He knew that wasn’t fair — Jamey was one of the most capable analysts he’d met. But standing in the midst of ten thousand screaming protestors with clouds of tear gas wafting through the mob did not increase his empathy.
He looked to the east, where the tear gas had been fired. There was dark smoke there, too, probably a car fire, but he hadn’t seen people running from that direction. He guessed that the incident had been isolated. Tear gas had probably scattered the vandals, and so LAPD had backed off.
The blue-shirted man was still close by. Jack had spent the intervening minutes studying the people around him — they were a mix of Slavs and Asians, and they were definitely with the anti-China contingent. With nothing else to do except try to blend in, Jack joined in a chant (something about “China’s record doesn’t rate — keep them out of the G8”) while he formed theories about his subject. He decided that there was only one way the subject could and would be seen at the protest: he was expected to be there. There was no other explanation for why a man with terrorist connections had been seen twice. He wanted to be seen — at least, he’d wanted to be seen the second time. The first time, when the security cameras had caught him in the middle of his meeting with Muhammad Abbas, had been luck — Abbas had stayed away from Federal property like a vampire avoiding a church. But now the blue-shirted man was doing everything he could to get noticed.
He’s a member of an anti-China political group, Jack told himself. Someone who’d be expected to be here. Whatever’s going down at the summit, they know we’ll go after everyone when it’s over, and he doesn’t want to do anything out of the ordinary.
Jack smiled grimly at his own detective work. Who needed computers?
A moment later, he felt the change before he saw it. A wave of anxiety swept through the mob, moving like a murmur through a crowd, only stronger, more visceral. Row by row, lines of people turned their heads away from the Federal Building and toward the west. In the distance, someone screamed.
Jack stood as tall as he could, but saw nothing. At the edge of the plaza, near the sidewalk, was a row of short cement pylons. They were designed to look decorative, but their real purpose was to prevent car bombers from driving into the building. Jack pushed his way past murmuring, confused protestors until he found one of these pylons and stood up on it, raising himself a good two feet above the crowd. The screaming increased; the protest chants had turned to cries of fear and terror.
From his vantage point, Jack could see the far west edge of the crowd folding back in on itself like a riptide. And he could see why they were running.
A line of mounted policemen was charging down Wilshire Boulevard to scatter the crowd. It was archaic, but no less terrifying for that fact: a line of horsemen twenty strong, the horses charging at a steady lope, their eyes rolling in their heads, the riders holding riot clubs, herding the crowd of people like so much cattle.
At that moment, Jack’s phone rang. “Jack, it’s Chris,” Henderson said quickly. “Are you still in the crowd?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Get out,” Henderson commanded. “Some protestors just beat two cops nearly to death. LAPD is calling in the cavalry. They’re using rubber bullets.”
Jack hung up and looked for some escape route, but he already knew it was too late.
8. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Jessi Bandison’s line buzzed. “Yes?” It was CTU’s call center. “You’ve got a call from the
Russian Embassy.” “I’ll take it,” Jessi said. “Jessi Bandison,” she said as the connection was made. “Miss Bandison,” said a female voice in smooth English,
with only a hint of accent around the edges. “I am Anastasia
Odolova. Anna, if you like.” “Jessi, then. What can I do for you?” “A mutual friend suggested I call you. I might be able to
help you with what you’re looking for.” Jessi found herself wondering what Odolova looked like.
Her accent was almost cartoonish, and Jessi couldn’t help imagining a lean vamp in a slinky black dress. She herself was round and chocolate-skinned, the opposite of a Russian seductress. “Okay, thank you. I was hoping—”
“You wish to know about Marcus Lee.”
“Right,” Jessi said. She rolled her eyes. Maybe it was the smooth, almost studied lilt of the Russian accent, but Jessi felt ridiculously like a 1950s espionage agent. She ought to be wearing a trench coat. “I’m running down information on him and I noted that there’s been an information exchange between us and the SVR,” she explained, referring to Russia’s foreign intelligence service. “I’m curious to know if you have any additional information I can use to corroborate my own.” That was standard operating procedure when talking with foreign entities: never admit how little you know. But Jessi wasn’t well versed in deception, and the words felt large and clumsy as she spoke them.
A smile spread itself across Odolova’s words, as though she understood exactly what Jessi was not saying. “I am happy to help you,” the Russian said with a slightly aspirated “H” in each word. “In fact, I believe I have what you need. We have a more extensive dossier on Marcus Lee, including”— Odolova paused for dramatic effect—“including his real name.”
Jessi’s heart skipped a bit. There were no aliases in her file, and no aliases according to the Chinese dossier she’d seen. To an analyst like her, a name was like the single thread that, when pulled, could undo the knot. “Yes?”
“I suggest you pursue the name Nurmamet Tuman. You will find that he is not from Shenzhen, but in fact he was born in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.”
Jessi furrowed her brow. “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous…?”
“I believe the separatists refer to it as East Turkistan.”
Wilshire Boulevard had turned into a river of people, and Kasim Turkel was being carried east by the current. The mob surged en masse away from the charging horses. For a split second, Kasim considered resisting, but he nearly lost his footing. To fall meant being trampled to death by stomping feet and, afterward, galloping hooves. So he ran with the crowd, swimming his way toward its edge like a man struggling toward the banks of a river. But each person he tried to push past panicked and clawed at him. The protestors and their chants were gone, replaced by mid-brained primates fleeing a pack of predators. Screams and shouts of anger and fear filled Kasim’s ears, punctuated by the sharp report of gunfire.
Kasim had been in that place of terror before — in the streets of Urumchi when the Chinese soldiers charged the pro-independence demonstrators. Kasim had been a teenager then; that afternoon had become a jumbled memory of arms and legs and screams, smoke, and tear gas. In his panic, Kasim saw once more rifle butts raised up and brought down violently on the heads of wailing Uygur women, children screaming for their parents, and men being dragged into waiting trucks. Though the images had blurred into one long scene of terror, the emotions of that night were as sharply defined today as they were ten years ago. That was the night of Kasim’s metamorphosis. That was the night the independence-minded boy was transformed into a freedom fighter.