24 Veto Power (9 page)

Jack pulled himself up over the top of a wall for the second time that morning. This one couldn’t have been more different from the one at the Greater Nation compound. The inside of the wall was screened by twenty foot tall Italian cypress trees. Jack slid down between two of them, using them as a shield as he surveyed the backyard. To his right was a rectangular pool with a black bottom, and a cabana that probably doubled as a guest house, its windows dark. The left side of the yard was a wide expanse of grass sweeping gently upward to a marble patio and a row of glass doors leading into the three-story main house. He saw no movement in the house. If someone was watching him from a window, he was still and quiet.

Jack moved carefully behind the screen of cypress trees until he was even with the cabana, then bolted for it, staying low and moving in a straight line. He reached the cabana and pressed himself against its wall, which offered him cover from most of the windows of the house. He listened to the cabana wall. He couldn’t detect any sound or movement inside. He hoped it was empty. There was a space between the cabana and the side yard wall and he crawled there, ignoring the cobwebs and the beetles scurrying on the wall, as well as the skittering sound that could only be a rat. Even Beverly Hills had rats—maybe more than its fair share. He reached the far end of the cabana, and now there was nothing but open ground between him and the doors. He watched again, looking for any signs of movement. There was none. He bolted.

He reached the main house itself and melted into the wall. Carefully he peeked inside the nearest set of French doors, eight square panes of glass set in a white wooden framework. It was a den of some kind, and it was empty of people. He tested the door. Locked, which he expected. He hesitated, wondering what to do next. He could call CTU, but he wasn’t looking forward to convincing Ryan Chappelle or Kelly Sharpton that they needed to raid another Persian household because he thought Ramin Rafizadeh was alive. He could try to pick the lock, but that kind of work wasn’t his specialty and even if he could do it, it would take time. He could break the glass, but that would make more noise than he could afford.

A sound from inside the house made his choice for him. It was a muffled scream, loud enough to sound urgent but not loud enough to carry very far. Jack turned sideways to the glass panes and jabbed his elbow sharply through the pane nearest the door handle. It shattered in what seemed to Jack to be a thousand screaming pieces. If someone was listening, he’d heard him. He hoped the screams upstairs covered his entry.

Careful to avoid the glass, Jack reached through the now-empty rectangle and opened the door. He wasn’t worried about an alarm. Either the bad guys had disabled it and the rest of his entry would be quiet, or the alarm would sound, bringing the police. Either option was fine by him.

No alarm. He slid the door open enough to slip inside, then closed it. He heard one or two angry voices somewhere above him, and another short scream. They were on the second floor. Jack kept his gun in front of him as he moved through the house, clearing each room that he passed. A hallway led out of the den and past three or four other rooms—maid’s room, laundry room, downstairs office, before opening up into the biggest entryway Jack had ever seen. The floor looked like a single enormous piece of green marble filled with white swirls and gold specks. A chandelier as big as a Lexus hung down from a ceiling fifty feet above him. A circling stairway rose up to the next floor. Jack leaned out of the hallway, trying to see upward. All clear, as far as he could tell. He made for the stairs as an angry word and a sob filled him with urgency.

The stairs were carpeted so he went up fast and quietly. He reached the second floor and another long hallway, this one probably bedrooms and bathrooms.

“Sit there!” A harsh voice and more sobs, coming from the end of the hall. Jack crept down the hallway pressed against the wall, his eyes and his gun trained on the farthest doorway. He took his eyes away only long enough to glance into each room—empty, as far as he could tell, although some of them contained hallways stretching deeper into the house and out of sight.

He reached the end of the hallway and heard two voices talking to each other.

“Get her fucking feet, she keeps kicking.”

“Kick her back!”

He heard a thud and a squeal. Jack melted off the wall, “slicing the pie” as he rounded the corner so he could take in the whole room at once. His muzzle fell instantly on two men dressed in blue overalls who were kneeling over an old woman in a gray robe. They had bound her hands behind her back and were in the process of binding her feet. There were three others in the room—a woman and two men. One of the men was younger, and the others were the same age. Jack guessed: grandmother, husband, wife, and Ramin Rafizadeh.

“Federal agent! Get the fuck away from her!” Jack yelled, stepping fully into the room.

The two men in blue coveralls jumped like startled cats. They whirled around, reaching for guns that they’d laid to the side. “Don’t!” Jack yelled, firing a round into the couch an inch from one man’s hand. The people in the house shrieked at the sound of gunfire. Both men turned ghostly pale and froze. Jack recognized one of them from the Greater Nation meetings.

“Get down on your knees.”

The two men obeyed. Jack saw the entire room now. It was a library. Every wall space, right up to the door he’d just entered, was lined with bookshelves.

“Where is Frank Newhouse?” he asked. He didn’t know why he asked that, when Ramin and Ibrahim Rafizadeh should have been his immediate targets, but he went with the question.

“Fuck you,” one of the militia men said.

“You can say that to the friends you make in prison,” Jack growled. “Maybe you can finally get fucked by Brett Marks, because that’s where he’s at right—”

He saw it too late. One of the Greater Nation soldiers looked at him, then his eyes flicked over Jack’s shoulders for the briefest instant. Jack spun around, but it was the wrong move. He caught just a glimpse of the third militia man pushing with his arms, just before the book case came crashing down on top of him. Something heavy and sharp slammed into his forehead, and the world went dark.

6:41
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. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jessi Bandison skip-stepped up to Kelly’s office. She didn’t know why that man turned her on. She was twenty-five and fine by almost anyone’s standards, and her taste ran toward dark men with a little bit of street and a lot of education. But she was different—a black girl raised first in Amsterdam by diplomat parents who then moved to the United States when she was in middle school. She had dated every type, from thugs to jocks to Oreos. She’d maybe played around with a white boy now and then in college, just for fun, but only because college was for experimenting. None of them gave her that tingle in her belly. And she’d never dated an older man. So why this one?

But there she was, reaching the top of the stairs to his office just slightly breathless, and not from the climb. He was sitting in his chair, back straight, shoulders thrust out to the sides like the corners of a triangle that tapered down to the small of his back. The man wore fitted shirts, which was good, because for a forty-something white man he had a fine figure. His hair had a little gray on the sides, but it didn’t show much because he kept it short. It was only his face that showed his age, and he wore it well, with those wrinkles near his eyes that bunched up when he laughed.

“What do you need?” she asked. She was informal at his request. She’d have preferred it if he wanted to maintain the command structure—it would have been easier to mask her desire—but Kelly Sharpton didn’t stand much on ceremony as long as the job got done.

“Sit down,” he said, removing himself from the seat and offering it to her.

She took his place and looked at the computer. The screen showed a log-in page—for the Department of Justice.

“Okay, what?” she asked again.

“We’ve got an assignment. We need to run a fire drill on the Justice Department.”

“Fire drill” was Kelly’s nickname for fake hacks done on friendly networks to test their security apparatus. “We need to see if we can crack the Justice Department database and crawl inside their files.”

“Really?” Jessi said, genuinely surprised. “Doesn’t Justice have their own anti-hacking team for that?”

“Someone over there’s worried they’re getting stale. They want fresh eyes on the problem. We got picked, and I picked you. See if you can get me in.”

Jessi put her hands in her lap. “Well, I can tell you off the bat that I can’t do it. The encryption on the DOJ system is too strong. You’d need to be past the firewall, andwecan’t even do that.You rememberwhensomeone came close to hacking the DOD system a few years ago? Since then, it’s impossible to get past the first layer, andthenofcourseall theother layers are—”

“I can get you past the outer wall,” Kelly said. “My terminal’s already logged in, just like I did earlier when I wanted you to sort the FBI logs. It’s the outer ring, and we’re supposed to go a lot deeper, but it’s a start.” He smelt that jasmine smell on her again.

Jessi still didn’t touch the keys. “Kelly, I’m off shift in about a half hour. Can’t you have someone on the next crew do it?”

“No, I need you,” he said, placing special emphasis on each word. She felt her heart skip a beat. “Besides, the shift won’t be a problem. I need you to crack it in—” he checked the terminal’s clock—“fifteen and a half minutes.”

“You’re joking—”

“Fifteen minutes, twenty seconds...”

“Okay.” Finally, she put her fingers on the keys.

Guilt pinched his heart. But only for lying to her when he knew she liked him. He wasn’t exposing her to any trouble. It was his order, his terminal, and his access code.

His phone rang. “Debbie Dee again,” the operator announced, sending the call through.

“I’m on it,” he said without a hello.

6:47
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. PST Senator Drexler’s Office, San Francisco

In the half hour since they’d last spoken, Debrah Drexler had driven from her apartment to her San Francisco office, located across from City Hall. The office reminded her of the old days, when politics were simpler and the results clearer. She’d chosen a third-story office, rather than something higher, because when she gave interviews from her home state, her small conference room provided a backdrop of downtown San Francisco, which felt like “home” to her.

A news crew was there already, and two more were on their way up the elevator. She hadn’t called them, of course. They’d received a tip—“someone on her staff” was all anyone could say—that Senator Drexler had an important announcement to make, something big enough to rouse remote cam operators and still sleepy morning news reporters from their beds. The Attorney General had laid it all out for her.

Debrah had locked herself in her office. “I’ve got media here. They’re expecting me to say something at the top of the hour.” Panic crept into her voice.

Kelly pulled the phone away from his ear. “How you doing, Jessi?”

“Interesting encryptions here,” she murmured, in her own world. “Are they watching from their end to see how I do it?”

“Sort of,” Kelly said, getting back on the phone. “We’re doing our best over here. I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get the job done.”

“Don’t be a cynic!” Jessi protested.

“Shit!” Debrah Drexler said in her best Bronx accent. “I’ve got to go do this, Kelly. I’ve got to. It’s one vote out of thousand votes that will help people.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Kelly said, forcing his tones into neutral for Jessi’s benefit. “This is an awfully important operation. Some things shouldn’t be compromised.”

“It’s my goddamned career! It’s my humiliation!” she said. He heard the anxiety in her voice. She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to herself now, talking herself into it. She’d told him about the nights, long ago, when she’d used that same tone to talk herself into selling her body.

He heard noise in the background. “I’ve got to go. Call my assistant Amy at this number if you get anything.”

The phone went dead.

6:55
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. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

“Jessi?”

“I don’t think—oh, hey, I got it.” The girl sounded surprised. “That was easier than I thought. Those guys over there are really going to need to—”

“You’re right, thank you,” he said, checking the time: 6:52. “Okay, nice work. Can you excuse me, now? I’ve got to consult with them and it’s classified.”

“Classified?” Jessi said as he practically lifted her up and out of her seat. “But I’m the one that broke it, shouldn’t I—?”

“If they have any questions on the keystrokes, I’ll call you up,” he said. “Please, I’ve got a hard deadline on this.”

“Okay,” she agreed, although by the time she said it he’d already ushered her out the door.

Inside his office, Kelly reached for his remote and pressed a button. The clear glass walls seemed to fill with smoke and he was shielded from prying eyes. He grabbed a disc from his desk drawer. Through the clear plastic case he could read his own handwriting on the disc itself. It read: “Override.” He popped it open and practically rammed it into the E drive on his computer. As the disc booted up, Kelly scanned the DOJ database for the Attorney General’s personal drive. He found it quickly enough—once he was inside, he was inside, and nothing was hidden from him—and logged in. James Quincy’s computer now belonged to him.

The time was 6:55.

This was Kelly’s bloodhound program. It was designed to work like many other computer viruses, slipping into a computer undetected and wreaking havoc. This virus was particularly nasty because it not only wiped out all the data on the infected hard drive, it also had the capability of tracing the source of any data—the bloodline—to other hard drives, and going after them. As soon as the virus was ready, a crude query screen popped up. Kelly entered the data and properties of the pictures of Debrah Drexler, then hit go.