24 Veto Power by John Whitman Page B

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 A . M . 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