Jack felt the man struggle; he was big, looking fat but feeling solid. Jack rolled, and came up on top of him. He straddled the man and punched him once in the face, but before he could strike him a second time, the man bucked his hips and grabbed at Jack’s hands, rolling him over and reversing their positions.
“Wait, wait!” the big man yelled.
Driscoll came up behind and clipped him with the butt of his handgun. The big man winced and glared at Driscoll, yelling, “Stop! I’m with you!”
Jack back-rolled away. His gun was gone, but he readied himself to lunge. It was Dan Bender; Jack recognized his face from the photo he’d just seen.
“I’m on your side!” Bender claimed. “Talk,” Jack demanded. “Keep your finger on the trigger, Harry.”
Bender wisely did not move, but he waited a moment to catch his breath. “You’re Jack Bauer, with the CIA. My name is Dan Bender. I am Mossad.”
“Bullshit,” Jack said.
“The truth,” Bender replied. “I am Mossad stationed here in the United States. I was assigned to observe the conference. We got wind that there might be some trouble. We weren’t sure that your services were prepared to handle it.”
“Well, we were,” Jack said. “At least, so far. How can I believe you?”
“Who do you think it was who put you on the trail of the C–4 in the first place?”
That was good enough for Jack. He still called in Bender’s name, and they waited while Henderson routed it through various channels, but Jack was already sure. His original tip on the C–4 had come from the Israelis. Having worked with them before, Jack knew they were talented enough and arrogant enough to want to follow the trail on their own.
After a few minutes and a return call, they let Bender rise to his feet. “To be honest, we weren’t sure you guys were aware enough to believe there’d be an attack on U.S. soil,” Bender said. “We figured the lead on the explosives would get lost in the bureaucracy.”
“1993 was a wake-up call for us,” Jack said. “We know they’re out there. I followed the trail from Cairo back to Los Angeles. We had separate agencies working it. Did you know about the suicide bombers?”
“No idea,” Bender admitted. “I’m about all the resources we have here at the moment. There’s a lot going on back home, from Gaza all the way to Baghdad.”
“This is so far over my pay grade,” Driscoll muttered.
“That was nice work,” Bender said. “I saw you go over the wall; that had to be the end of you. You ought to be Israeli.”
“Or a cat,” Driscoll added. “Can we find somewhere else to stand?”
“I don’t think they’re done,” Jack said to Bender. “I think there’s one more bomber.” He explained his theory of the three attackers.
“We should get over to St. Monica’s,” Bender said. “Those Swiss Guards are good, but they don’t get enough practice. They should have carved me out of their group much earlier than they did. If something else is going down, they might not be ready for it. Hey,” he added. “How did you ID me?”
“You sent an e-mail,” Jack said. “Some kind of apology to your brother. We thought it was a goodbye note before your suicide.”
Bender laughed. “Funny how the little things trip you up. My brother’s a real rabbi. One of the most righteous men I know. I was apologizing for giving the rabbis a bad name.”
Maybe, if the cameras had been installed, Nina would have gone a little lighter. As it happened, there were no security cameras in the room that would eventually become a holding cell, so she was free to do her worst on Gary Khalid. She had handcuffed his wrists and ankles, and she spent her time walking around his prone body. Every time she circled around to his feet, she walked on the ankle she’d broken a short time earlier.
Gary himself suffered two kinds of torment. One was the physical pain, which was growing worse by the moment. The other was psychologicaclass="underline" to be under the control of a woman, of all things. It was ludicrous. Humiliating.
He had held out for several minutes already, but in the end, Khalid was no hero. He felt the bones grind in his ankles, and he knew that he was done.
“You performed the operation on Father Collins?”
“Yes.”
“And the guy who pretended to be Abdul al-Hassan.”
“Yes, I did.”
“How did you kill Diana Christie?”
Khalid explained quickly. He didn’t know Farrigian well. From what he understood, Farrigian had told the people Khalid worked for about her, and they’d set a trap. Khalid had been brought in to work on her. It had been brutal and quick. They’d captured her and anesthetized her, then planted the bomb in her arm.
“Was she told to give that false lead on purpose?”
Yes, Khalid sobbed, ashamed but unwilling to bear any more pain. His employers had set up a separate attack, hoping that if the authorities were following the C–4, they would travel in that direction. The NTSB agent had been used to validate that plot.
“How many people did you operate on aside from Christie?”
Khalid hesitated, but only until Nina rested her toe on his broken ankle. “Four. But there were only supposed to be three. One of them blew up accidentally.”
Abdul Ali. None of them understood how it happened. He was the first recipient, and he had been done early on so that his arm would have plenty of time to heal. He had come into Los Angeles for work and to prepare for the conference, but something had caused the receiver in his arm to trigger the detonator. The whole plane had gone down, and they had needed to find a replacement.
“Who was the replacement?”
“I don’t know. Really!” he pleaded when she raised her foot. “I didn’t know any of them. All I know is that one of them had no idea he was involved. They created credentials for me at Cedars and I went in to do the operation. He had no idea what had happened to him. The other two were part of the plan.”
“Tell me about them.”
“One of them was a Muslim. The other was American. He looked kind of familiar to me, but I don’t know where from.”
Nina crouched down beside him. “I need more than that, Khalid,” she said sweetly.
He looked up at her in fear and hatred. “I don’t know any more. I didn’t know them. I never knew their names.”
“Tell me who you worked for. Who hired you to do this?”
“It began with Yasin,” Khalid admitted. “But years ago. He got the idea to deliver a bomb this way, and he told me he wanted me to do it. I moved here, to the U.S., to be ready. And then one day I got the message to start the work.”
“Did Yasin come here to coordinate it?”
“I didn’t work with Yasin after that,” Khalid answered. “There was someone else. A non-Muslim.”
“What non-Muslim?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know. Yasin approved him. I didn’t ask any more than that.”
Nina tried to think of who was left. There were no non-Muslims on her original suspect sheet. She decided to call Bauer.
After flashing his badge, and with some additional help from Harry Driscoll, Jack had managed to scrounge a change of clothes from the hotel management. He was dry, but that was the best that could be said for him. Every muscle in his body was sore; every bone felt bruised. It occurred to him with great irony that he had recently told Christopher Henderson that he enjoyed overseas work with the CIA because that’s where the action was.
Driscoll’s phone rang again as he was dressing, and he listened to Nina debrief him on the Khalid interrogation. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jack had hoped that Khalid himself was the mastermind behind the whole plot, but that was not the case.
“We know there’s a third bomber out there, based on clues and the leftover C–4,” Jack said. “You can’t get any more information out of him?”