24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009) (3 page)

No such plot had been detected by CTU/L.A. Which didn’t mean that none existed. Such a conspiracy might have evaded their notice, or could be hatching somewhere in a different jurisdiction.

Chappelle’s information certainly put a new and sinister slant to the possibility.

Jack said, “The person or persons betting those stocks will take a sudden and dramatic fall may not be gambling at all. It could be a sure thing. A terror strike or other catastrophic event at Sky Mount could send those stocks tumbling. It could wreck the national economy. What’s left of it, that is.”

Chappelle said, “A logical conclusion. There was a lot of short selling of airline and insurance stocks in the days before 9/11. Somebody knew in advance that those stocks were going to take a big hit and reaped several billions of dollars due to that inside information.
We’ve never been able to pinpoint the profiteer but there’s no doubt about the pattern.”

He’d been pacing back and forth in front of Jack’s desk. He stopped abruptly, turning to face Jack and point a finger at him. “Now couple that with those Colorado cultists suddenly dropping off the board.”

Reports about the disappearance of Abelson Prewitt and two dozen of his most fanatical followers from the Red Notch compound had already come to Jack’s attention as part of his daily intelligence summary.

Jack said, “I don’t doubt that Prewitt would like to bring a mountain crashing down on the Round Table’s guests, but I can’t see him playing the market to make a profit off it. That goes against his whole crackbrained ideology, what little I understand of it. His theories are a bit too opaque for me.”

Chappelle made a hand gesture like he was shooing away gnats. “Maybe he decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. He may be cracked but he knows the financial system inside out. Remember, he used to be an economics professor before he went all political.”

“Where would he get a couple of million dollars to invest?”

“Good question. Maybe he’s found a sponsor; a hostile foreign power, say. Interests inimical to the United States could be backing him.
Using him for a cat’s-paw to do their dirty work while they turn a big fat profit at the same time.”

“Possibly.”

“And I know just the man to find out the answer, too, Jack.”

“Who?”

“You.”

Jack had seen that one coming but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He’d try, though. He said, “That’s CTU/DENV’s turf.”

Chappelle said, “The SIU’s findings about the short selling gives us an in.”

“I don’t think Lando Garcia’s going to want us
com
ing in.” Garcia
said

Chappelle said, “You let me worry about Garcia.”

Jack said, “I can’t just drop everything here and take off for Colorado— ”

“Sure you can. Nina Myers can hold down the fort while you’re gone.”
Nina Myers was the assistant SAC of CTU/L.A. and Jack’s chief of staff, fully qualified to take over in Jack’s absence.

Chappelle said, “Things are relatively quiet here. Sky Mount is where the action is. You’re a top field man, Jack. Garcia hasn’t got anybody in your class.”

“He’s got some good people out there— ”

“Not like you. You could make a difference. This is important, Jack. Big. I’m surprised you’re not jumping at the chance.”

“I’ve got a full plate here, Ryan. I don’t like to leave in the middle of things.”

“Nothing that won’t keep for a few days. And that’s all it’ll take, a few days. The Round Table ends on Sunday, and by Monday the guests will all have gone their separate ways.”

There was no way out. Jack had to say yes. Chappelle was his superior officer in the chain of command; he could order Jack to take the assignment. It didn’t matter that Jack was in charge of CTU/L.A. with its mountainous workload, awesome responsibilities, and important ongoing projects and investigations. It didn’t matter that Jack had recently ended a long and painful separation from his wife, Teri, and had moved back home with her and his teenage daughter, Kimberly, a delicate situation that was an emotional minefield of raw sensitivities, resentments, and bruised feelings.

It didn’t matter that Garcia and his whole CTU/ DENV outfit would see Jack as Chappelle’s creature, giving the notoriously ambitious Regional Division Director an opportunity to extend his authority by injecting himself into their operations.

It was a classic Chappelle ploy. The SIU’s discovery of the money manipulations gave him the opening wedge he needed to put Jack on temporary duty and strap him on Garcia’s CTU/DENV as a consultant. If Jack turned up something at Sky Mount, Chappelle could claim a share of the credit. If things went sour, he could wash his hands of all responsibility and hang it on Jack. And if nothing happened and it all worked out a draw, Chappelle would still have the pleasure of having intruded on the turf of his longtime rival Orlando Garcia.

The hell of it was that Chappelle might just be on to something with the discovery of the suspicious stock manipulations being a warning sign of an anti–Round Table plot. But he couldn’t just pass the information along to CTU/DENV for them to handle in their own way. No, he had to use it as a way to get his foot into Garcia’s door, like a pushy salesman who won’t take no for an answer. He certainly wouldn’t take Jack’s no for an answer.

Jack accepted the inevitable, stifling the sigh that sought to escape him and keeping a poker face. “When do I leave?”

Chappelle said, “Immediately.” He rubbed his palms together, a gesture somehow suggestive of a fly anticipating a choice morsel. “I’m counting on you, Jack. They need you out there. I know you’ll make Garcia and his crew look sick.”

Jack smiled wanly. Chappelle said, “And stay in close contact with me here. Keep me posted on all developments at all times.”

Chappelle had gotten what he wanted. The interview was over.

That was the prelude. Jack was now in the center of things, probing the Red Notch compound. The buildings were grouped close together, within walking distance. Neal indicated the central structure, a white, wooden frame two-story building. He said, “That’s the admin building, Prewitt’s headquarters.”

They crossed toward it. It fronted east, its long axis running north- south.
A television satellite receiving dish was mounted on the roof, pointed at a forty-five-degree angle at the sky. Floodlights were mounted at the tops of the building’s southeast and northeast corner posts where they met the front ends of the second-floor balcony.
The lights on the northeast post were dark.
Lights were on inside the first and second floors, shining through the windows.

The northeast corner post floodlight hung at a twisted angle. Broken glass littered the ground below it. Jack stood under it, looking up. Neal said, “It was shot out. The lab crew recovered one of the bullets. It’s from a handgun but they haven’t typed it yet.”

Jack nodded.

Four wide wooden stairs led to a porch, a veranda that fronted the building on three sides, all but the west side. The second-floor balcony was similarly constructed. It was as if the builders had shunned the rear of the building, its west face. Behind the back of the building, behind the entire cluster, rose a jumble of sandstone formations, pillars and needles and boulders, all eroded into angular, distorted shapes.

Jack and Neal climbed the stairs to the porch. The front door hung at a tilted angle, half torn off its hinges. The second-floor balcony roofed over the veranda.

A row of tall windows were set in the walls on either side of the doorway. A window to the right of the doorway was broken, leaving a mostly empty frame. Shards of broken glass were strewn on the porch below it. Dark reddish- brown stains, long-dried, mottled the outside of the windowsill and the wall beneath it. The porch planks under the window were stained, too. The stains were pretty big, the largest being bathmat-sized. White chalk markings had been drawn around the stains by the crime lab team. Each marking was tagged with an identifying letter-number combination written in chalk.

Jack said, “Looks like it was broken from the inside out. Like somebody jumped or was thrown through the window. Whoever it was must’ve been cut up pretty badly. Bad enough to have bled to death, if all that blood came from one person.” He looked at Neal. “No bodies were found?”

Neal said, “None.”

Jack took a closer look, while avoiding stepping on the chalked-off bloodstains. The stains went to the front edge of the porch. What looked like bloody handprints showed on the top rail of the waist-high balustrade bordering the edge of the porch.

He switched on his flashlight, shining it down on the ground below the porch. Bloodstains extended out in dribs and drabs for a dozen yards or so before coming to an abrupt halt. He said, “The injured party managed to get that far before dropping. Then what happened?”

Neal said, “Your guess.”

Jack edged north along the porch, carefully picking his way through, trying to avoid treading on the broken glass and bloodstains. Neal followed, saying, “The lab crew’s already photographed and diagrammed everything, so you don’t have to worry about messing up anything or altering the scene.” Jack noticed that Neal, too, despite his words made an effort, conscious or not, to avoid stepping on glass or bloodstains.

Jack turned left at the corner, following the north branch of the veranda to its end at the building’s no
rthwest corner. He shone the fl
ashlight around, noticing a cluster of propane gas tanks connected by pipes to the building’s rear.

An open space about twenty yards wide stretched from the backs of all the buildings in an arc to the foot of the jumbled sandstone formations. It was bordered by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The fence extended in both directions, north and south, enclosing the western edge of the oval before curving eastward on both sides to complete the encirclement of the rest of the space.

Jack said, “The compound is completely fenced in?”

Neal, at his shoulder, said, “Yes.”

Jack gestured with the flashlight so its beam played across the jagged rock rim beyond the fence. “Any roads back there?”

“A couple of game trails, maybe. Nothing you could get a vehicle through, not even a dirt bike.”

“So the front gate’s the only way in or out?”

“I suppose there’s places along the fence line that could be hopped, if you were determined and athletic enough. But whoever did it would be walking, not riding. And they’d be in for a hell of a hike. Why?”

“No particular reason, just trying to get the lay of the land.”

Jack turned, starting back the way he came, Neal falling into step behind him. Neal said, “The Zealots didn’t troop out of here on foot, if that’s what you’re thinking. We know how they left.”

Jack said, “How?”

“They’ve got an old school bus that they use to get around in. They’re always driving in a group to the county seat or down into Denver or wherever to hold protest demonstrations or stage media events. Prewitt’s big on that. A natural- born pest. The bus is painted blue, kind of a trademark so people’ll know they’re coming. They keep it in a garage up here and it’s not there now, so we figure that’s how they left the scene.”

“A blue bus, eh? Sounds like it’d be hard to hide.”

Neal said grimly, “You’d think so.”

They went to the front of the building and went inside into a long, narrow hall. It ran straight through the building from front to back.
There were four rooms on the first floor, two on either side of the hall. A staircase led up to the second floor.

The front room on the right was a kind of communications center. That was the room where the window was broken from the inside out. Not much seemed disturbed, apart from that. A floor lamp was knocked over and lay on its side. A mass of moths flew in circles under an overhead light. A couple of workstations were placed around the space, complete with computers, phone banks, printers, fax machines, and the like. A Styrofoam cup of coffee stood on one of the desks. It gave the impression that the desk’s occupant had just stepped away for a minute, except that the cream in the coffee had curdled and the cup’s contents were a gray- brown sludge.

Each workstation featured a hardcover book in a prominent position. They were all the same book. Jack picked one up and examined it. The title was: Whip Them with Scorpions. It was subtitled,
driving
the Money-Changers from the Temple.

It was a very thick book, a real doorstopper, with lots of fine print and charts and graphs but no pictures. Its author was Abelson Prewitt. The back cover displayed a black-and-white photo of Prewitt. A big, double-domed cranium topped a long, bony face. A few thin strands of black hair were plastered across his oversized skull. Dark, intent eyes glared behind thick-lensed black glasses. Thin lips were tightly compressed.

Neal said dryly, “His magnum opus. Ever read it?”

Jack said, “I’m waiting for the movie. You?”

“Part of it.
I got farther through it than anybody else in my outfit.
That’s what makes me the expert.”

“What’s it like?”