Jessi felt all the life go out of her legs and she nearly fell. “Are you — are you sure?”
“Jack was with the body when he called in. He was— Jessi, I’m sorry. I heard you were close with him.”
Jessi felt the tears start coming. She turned and walked out of Henderson’s office.
His name was Todd Romond, and he was getting the hell out of Los Angeles.
“Gone too far, it’s gone too far,” he muttered to himself over and over again as he stuffed clothes haphazardly into a red wheeled suitcase. There was a redeye from LAX to JFK, and he planned to be on it. In New York he could take up with some friends and disappear for a while. His New York friends were old friends, from before his Earth First! days. No one could trace him there.
Someone knocked, and Todd nearly jumped out of his skin. He ran to the door as quietly as he could and peeked through the spy hole. It was only Mrs. Neidemeyer. He opened the door and looked down on her four-foot, ten-inch frame topped with wisps of white hair. She was wearing a pale blue dressing gown.
“Todd,” she said in her deceptively frail-sounding voice. Todd, a sometimes delinquent tenant, had heard how determined and persuasive that voice could be. “Your car is blocking the drive. The tenants will complain.”
“It’s only for a few minutes, Mrs. N,” he promised. “I’m almost out of here. Please excuse me.” He closed the door.
“Well, be sure it’s moved!” she called a little sharply.
He’d be sure. He had more incentive than she did. All she cared about was making sure Junior Merkle didn’t honk his horn and shout when he got home at three o’clock in the morning after playing drums in whatever band he was part of. Todd, on the other hand, was trying to stay alive.
Frankie had done it. She’d contacted terrorists, real terrorists, not people who spiked trees and chained themselves to bulldozers, not people like him. She’d always campaigned for their group to learn how real terrorists operated, but real terrorists blew up babies and old women. All Todd had ever wanted to do was see the rain forests survive his lifetime. He’d been willing to do a lot to make that happen, even shake the government to its own tangled roots.
Todd was an MIT graduate and had come this close to a Fulbright scholarship. He could certainly see the writing on this wall. Smith (Todd had thought of him as Smith rather than Copeland from the minute he adopted the nom de guerre) had dropped out of sight, and his house had looked like a crime scene until the big plastic tent was dropped over it. Frankie had called him less than three hours ago. All she had told him was that she was in charge now, she had backing from powerful friends, and she would get them all out of this. But Todd had listened carefully, and he guessed what she wasn’t telling him. She’d thrown her lot in with murderers and terrorists, and she had given them the vaccine. Todd was sure of it — why else would they work with her?
For Todd, it was only a small leap into the mind of the terrorists: now that they had the virus and the vaccine, they would begin to wonder who else knew how to make it, and conclude that that person should probably stop breathing very shortly.
Todd was one of three people who knew how to create more vaccine. He had no intention of waiting around until the police made a connection between him and Dr. Bernard Copeland, and he certainly was not going to wait for the terrorists to blow him up. He finished packing and rolled his suitcase into the small living room. He stopped to make two phone calls, dialing and speaking quickly.
There was another knock. “Todd?” Mrs. Neidemeyer called.
Todd sighed. He swung open the door. “Mrs. N, I told you it’d be a minute. I was just—” he stopped cold. Mrs. Neidemeyer was not alone.
It should have taken ten minutes on surface streets to run south from Santa Monica to Venice, but an accident on Wilshire Boulevard slowed their progress. Jack tapped the side of the car impatiently until at last they were past the accident and rolling. Mercy shook her head. “This has got to be the only city where you can find a traffic jam at ten o’clock at night.”
They turned down Lincoln Boulevard and crossed Colorado, then Pico, and soon they were in the beach community of Venice.
The first name on the list was Todd Romond, his information scribbled on page thirteen. An MIT graduate and an expert on the behavior of viruses, he had discontinued a lucrative grant with a dominant pharmaceutical company to become a tour guide organizing eco-vacations in Costa Rica. He was also one of three people who had helped Copeland mutate his virus and develop a vaccine.
This was going to work, Jack thought. They were going to find this Todd Romond and he was going to cure Kim.
Romond’s apartment was a small seventies model shaped like the letter “U.” The empty middle of the shape was a grass yard open to the sidewalk, with a driveway on one side that led to a carport that supported the upper-story apartment at the back. There was a car parked diagonally across the driveway.
“That Romond’s car?” Jack asked, already knowing the answer.
Mercy conferred with the stats she’d written down after calling in for Romond’s profile. “Yep. Looks like he’s coming or going in a hurry.”
“Guess which.”
Jack stopped in the middle of the street and jumped out, Mercy close behind. Jack nearly stumbled at the curb, reminding himself how hard he’d pushed it all day. Jack checked the car quickly, his weapon drawn but held low at his side. Sure the car was empty, he ran to the apartment number that matched Romond’s. There were lights on in the living room.
Jack pounded on the door. “Romond! Federal agents!”
No answer. Jack didn’t want to wait for another warning. He stepped back and then kicked the door hard right where the bolt met the frame. The thick door held until the third try, when the wood shattered and the door swung open.
Mercy, who’d come up behind, now slipped around him as he recoiled his foot. She stepped into the room and faded left. Jack followed, his own weapon now chest-level. But it wasn’t necessary.
Todd Romond lay on his back on the living room floor. There was a small hole in his forehead, from which blood slowly trickled. Beside him was an old lady, facedown, as dead as he was.
Mercy checked the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom, and that was the end of that small apartment. She came back to stand over Romond’s body.
“Al-Libbi,” Jack said hoarsely. “We’re in a race now.”
16. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 P.M. AND 11 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Christopher Henderson watched technicians from National Health Services carefully wheel a hermetically sealed coffin out of the holding room. They had sprayed the room down with powerful chemical cleansers and collected the soiled chemicals into special vats. They had gathered up what was left of the girl’s body, which wasn’t much considering that she’d been alive and actually participated in a firefight not two hours earlier. That was the fate that awaited the President if they didn’t do their jobs right.
A call came through from Jack Bauer. Henderson took it at a spare computer station. “Tell me you found something.”
“We did,” Bauer said from the other end of the line. “We have the names of three people who worked with Copeland.
We think they know about the vaccine.”
“Good! Let’s round them up.”
“Agreed,” Bauer replied. “We have to move fast. The first one was just murdered. I’m standing over his body.”
“Al-Libbi,” Henderson surmised.
“The girl gave him the names. He’s ahead of us.”