“But he can’t have our manpower. Give me the other names. I’ll get teams to bring them in right now.”
Jack recited the two other names they’d gleaned from Copeland’s annotations: Sarah Kalmijn and Pico Santiago. “On it,” Henderson said. “I’ll call you back.”
Teri Bauer picked up the phone before the first ring had finished.
“Honey, it’s me,” Jack said.
Her voice was cold and quiet. “Great, how nice of you to call.”
The tone of her voice stabbed Jack in the chest. “Teri, I’m sorry—”
“You’re not!” his wife replied, her voice rising slightly. But she wasn’t frantic or passionate. She was earnest. “Jack, you’re not, that’s the thing about it. You’re out there doing your job. I know that. But it doesn’t make it any easier to be the person sitting here. There was a riot today, Jack. Our daughter was in the middle of a riot. My husband was in the middle of a riot. I haven’t even been able to process that, and you’re probably already doing god knows what else.”
Trying to stop a virus from killing half the city, he thought. Trying to save the President of the United States and our daughter. But of course he said neither of those things.
“How’s Kim?”
“Sleeping,” Teri said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “She has a little fever and went to bed early. I’m hoping it was just all the craziness today.”
The phone was silent for a minute. “Jack?”
“Sorry,” he said after a second. “The connection dropped out. Just a fever, though? Anything to worry about? One of the protestors they arrested today had some kind of rash. Nothing serious, but some FBI guys caught it and said it itched like crazy.”
“No, I didn’t see a rash.”
“Okay.”
“Jack, what time are you coming home?”
Another pause. “I don’t know, Teri. As soon as I can, I promise. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, in the same voice she’d used to answer the phone.
Jack ended the call and put his head down for just a minute. It was a moment of indulgence he could hardly afford, but he took it anyway. Teri was upset with him, but she didn’t know the half of it. He would have to tell her the truth soon. By his watch he still had a few hours, even allowing for a margin of error…but in the end he’d have to get Kim quarantined. She would hate him then.
“You really do love her,” Mercy said. She’d watched the pain on his face when he made the call, and the nearly incomprehensible anguish in his thoughts afterward.
Jack shrugged. “We’ve had a life, you know?”
“I guess,” she said, then added, “but not really.”
He had no response for that. He’d spent his savings of emotional currency on others already, including her. He had nothing to spare for a life and career that had kept her from a husband and family.
The mobile phone rang, saving him from his obligation to respond. “Bad news,” Henderson said. “Santiago and Kalmijn are both gone.”
“Al-Libbi?” Jack asked.
“There’s no knowing for sure, but there are no signs of struggle, and certainly no bodies,” the field operations chief replied. “And phone records show that each residence received a call from Todd Romond’s location not long ago.”
“He was already packed to go,” Jack guessed. “He warned them.”
“Which means they’re in hiding. Let’s work on friends and family and try to find them.”
Henderson said, “I’ll have Jamey Farrell run through video footage and electronic data. Maybe a traffic cam picked up their directions. Long shot, but we’ll try everything.”
“I’ve got an angle I can work,” Jack said.
He hung up and relayed the information to Mercy. “What’s your angle?” she asked.
“I’ll take you there,” he said. This was a moment he’d been dreading.
They drove in semi-silence, punctuated now and then by brief questions filling in bits and pieces of the day. Frankie must have been exposed to the virus at the same time Mercy was, but she’d received the weaponized version, the same one that had been used on the President. They made sure that NHS had tented that safe house as well. So far, they’d been lucky: the virus had been contained at several relatively controllable locations. Mercy herself had been lucky. It appeared she’d absorbed the slower-acting strain.
Mercy didn’t realize where they were going until they pulled up in front of 16150 West Washington. Jack got out and she followed suit, a look of confusion settling on her face. “This…you know what this address is? This is my informant inside the eco-terrorist movement.”
“I know,” Jack said. He climbed the exterior steps to the second floor with Mercy in tow and went straight to the apartment of Ted Ozersky, a.k.a. Willow. He knocked, and the door opened almost immediately. Willow shook hands with Jack and let them both in.
Mercy sat down gingerly, as though she thought the floor might suddenly disappear beneath her. “What’s going on?”
Jack took a deep breath. “Mercy, this is Ted Ozersky—”
“I know him, don’t be an idiot,” Mercy said, suddenly irritable.
“Ted Ozersky is a CTU agent.”
The sentence was such a non sequitur to Mercy that it barely registered. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m a CTU agent, Detective,” Ozersky said. The California drawl was gone. He spoke in crisp, efficient clips.
Jack had been waiting almost a month to tell Mercy the truth, and he’d known since the moment she showed up at the Federal Building that the day had arrived. But he hadn’t had time to consider how to tell her, and there was very little time to spare, so it came out now in a rush.
“Mercy, all the stuff you tried to tell me this morning, about radical eco-terrorists. I knew it was all true. CTU has had its eye on them for a while, but they were tough to get inside.”
Ozersky (she had stopped thinking of him as Willow the minute his voice changed) said, “I had managed to infiltrate Earth First! but I could see that they weren’t a real target for CTU. It was their radical fringe that was the threat. Those guys are paranoid, and I couldn’t get any closer. But I passed along what I did hear.”
“Including, several months ago, that someone in a fringe group had contacted Ayman al-Libbi, trying to learn how he operated,” Jack jumped in. “That’s when Tony Almeida and I got seriously involved.”
“A couple of months ago…” Mercy said. She was in shock.
“One piece of information that Ted passed on was the rumor that the eco-terrorists had someone inside the security services, but we didn’t know who. It could have been FBI, even CTU. It could have been more than one person. At the time, I was nervous about giving our operation too high a profile.
“When Gordon Gleed was murdered, I knew the ecoterrorists were making a move. I needed someone to investigate, someone I knew was good, and that I could keep an eye on without the word getting out that CTU was involved.”
“That you could keep an eye on…” Mercy repeated dumbly. Jack sat ramrod-straight, ready to take the brunt of her anger as soon as the meaning of that phrase seeped in. But she passed it over for the moment. She said, “Are… Jack, are you telling me that you arranged for me to get on the Gordon Gleed case?”
Jack nodded. “And I made sure that Ted became one of your contacts. He was able to feed you information you could use, and it never appeared that the Federal government was involved. Copeland — I didn’t know his name until you found it out — Copeland was paranoid about the Federal government. One whiff of us and I was afraid he’d vanish.”