“Sleeper cell?” Henderson thought aloud.
“It looks that way. And a really patient one.”
“Okay, I’ll put a team together. Let’s revisit our database for this cleric and round up everyone we think is a possible suspect.”
“Last one,” Tony Almeida said.
“Too bad,” Nina replied. “I’m getting to like waking people up.”
While Jack had gone to track down Pico Santiago, Nina and Tony had been given a list of three names — people who might know where Sarah Kalmijn was hiding. The first two had been dead ends, the individuals clearly having little or no idea what Sarah did in her spare time. This was the last address, a small house in the bohemian Silverlake area that looked down on Hollywood and central Los Angeles.
Nina walked up to the door of the little Craftsman bungalow while Tony stood farther back by one of the wooden pillars that marked a Craftsman. But before she reached for the bell, Nina drew her pistol. Tony mimicked her movement and stepped forward where he could see what Nina had noticed: the door was closed but the jamb was shattered. Someone had broken into the house.
Using hand signals, Tony indicated that he was going around the back. Nina nodded and counted to five silently, giving Tony time to get around. Then she eased the door open slowly. The house was dark. She listened, but heard no sound until a barely audible creak came from the back of the house. Tony was inside. Nina pulled a tiny Surefire flashlight from her belt and fired it up. The beam swept the living room and came to rest almost instantly on a figure lying on the floor. She swept her hand along the nearest wall and flipped up a light switch, illuminating the room.
A woman lay on the floor, a piece of electrical cord wrapped around her neck. Nina knelt beside the body without touching it. The woman’s tongue was enlarged and her eyes bulged slightly. She’d been strangled to death.
Tony entered. “Damn it. I’ll the call the PD. Let’s get a forensics team out here.”
“These guys are a step ahead of us,” Nina said.
A door creaked behind them and both CTU agents whirled around, weapons ready. “Don’t shoot!” someone yelled from the closet.
“Come out slowly!” Tony ordered. “Hands first, hands where I can see them!”
A pair of thin female hands appeared in the half-open doorway, followed by two graceful arms and then the complete figure of a young woman in her thirties with short black hair. She looked terrified.
“Don’t shoot me!” she pleaded. “I heard you say to call someone. Are you…are you the police?”
“Federal agents, ma’am,” Tony said. “What happened?”
“Thank god, thank god,” she said, shuddering as though releasing hours of pent-up tension. She broke down in tears for a minute, falling beside the body of the other woman as tears poured down her cheeks. “I just left her there. I was so afraid, I thought they might still be here.”
“Who was it?” Nina asked. “Who did this?”
“Two men,” the woman said. “They broke in. I was in there.” She pointed to the closet. “They attacked Susan. They hit her until she told them what they wanted, and then they— they…” She started to cry again.
Tony checked the closet and realized why the terrorists had missed the woman. In the back of the closet, half-hidden by a couple of coats, was the door to a tiny darkroom.
Nina put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s important that we know what she told them. What were they asking?”
The woman wiped her eyes. “Th-they were asking about Sarah. Sarah Kalmijn is a friend of ours. They wanted to know where to find her. Susan told them, she did, and they
killed her anyway.”
“Where did they tell her to go?”
“What do you want with Sarah?”
Tony curled his lip unhappily. “Right now we just want to save her life. Where would she be if she’s not home?”
The woman had started crying again, but between sobs she gave them the answer Susan had given her tormentors. Sarah blew off steam at underground parties — raves. She was a lawyer now but she hated her job and forgot her troubles by attending the raves thrown by a college friend who ran a DJ company called Goodnight’s. That was all she knew.
“Jamey, I need to leave,” Jessi said.
Jamey Farrell looked up from her work, bleary-eyed and brain-fried. She’d been through some long days at CTU, and this one matched them all. “Can you stay a little longer? I’m just getting a call from Tony Almeida and I’m going to need some research.”
“No,” Jessi said. “I mean I need to leave CTU.”
Jamey put down her pen. “You mean for good.”
Jessi nodded. “I lost someone today—”
“I know, I heard. I’m sorry. It comes with the territory here sometimes—”
Jessi shook her head. “That’s everybody’s attitude. No one’s even stopped to think about it. Kelly worked here. Okay, not as long as Jack Bauer or some of the others, but he had friends here. But everyone goes on like nothing happened.”
Jamey set her jaw. If Jessi had been hoping for sympathy, she was going to be disappointed. “Listen, ’cause I’m only going to tell you this once. No one here pretends like nothing happened. But if you want to work in this unit, then you have to get tougher than this. In this line of work, people die. And do you know what happens if we stop to mourn them right away? More people die. Those agents out in the field can’t stop to bury every body because they’re busy stopping the bad guys from killing more people. Same goes for us in here.”
“I–I know. that’s why I think I need to leave.” Jessi crossed her arms like a shield. “Jamey, I missed something earlier. I was going over security footage that I’d downloaded and I saw one of those people they’re looking for, Pico Santiago. I could have tracked him, I could have led Jack straight to him, but I missed it because I was upset.”
“Then you screwed up. Now fix it.”
“He’s dead! I can’t make him alive again—”
“No, but you can do your job so the agents in the field do their job and keep more people alive.” She crossed her own arms. “You want to mourn the guy you had a crush on, then do it by getting the guys who killed him.”
With no fear of an ambush, Jack and the others made better time down the hill. They had waited for the mountain rescue helicopter and lost a few precious minutes while Jack explained what had happened to the stricken pilots surveying the carnage, and then double-timed back down the trail.
As Jack, Mercy, and Ted Ozersky climbed back into the car, Jack’s phone rang. It was Jamey Farrell. She briefed Jack on the events Almeida had reported. “Thirty more seconds and I’ll have an address for you. You’re taking one and Tony and Nina are taking the other. They’re the two most probable locations for Sarah Kalmijn.”
“Where’s Henderson? Why isn’t he briefing me?”
“He’s out. The guys you killed may be part of an Iranian sleeper cell. Henderson is leading a raid.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “We keep swinging and missing. We have to hit a home run this time.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Jamey said. She told Jack about the call on his cell phone from al-Libbi.
“Has he made any demands?” Jack asked.
“Not yet, but Henderson and Chappelle are sure he will.”
“We’ll get him first.”
“Here’s the address.” She read off a location.
Christopher Henderson sat in the back of a CTU van studying a hastily generated blueprint of the house owned by Ah-mad Moussavi Ardebili. The easiest way to botch a raid was failure to plan, and Henderson’s five-minute pep talk with his squad hardly counted as planning. But it couldn’t be helped. They were running out of time.