24 Declassified: 03 - Trojan Horse by Marc Cerasini Page B

back here.”
    Dobyns led Tony across the bar to a narrow hallway. Beyond the single rest room another door opened into a stairwell. A trio of leaping silver-gray fish, stuffed and lacquered, were mounted above that door, which gave the brothel its name, El Pequeños Pescados —“Little Fishes.”
    Dobyns, in the lead, squeezed through the narrow doorway and slowly lumbered up the steep staircase to the second, then third floor.
    Through another door, another narrow hallway flanked by peeling wallpaper, a floor of stained, avocado-green linoleum. From somewhere behind a wall, a man grunted, a woman laughed.
    They went to the wooden door at the end of the hallway. Dobyns knocked twice. “Come,” a muffled voice called from within. Dobyns winked at Tony and opened the door.
    The room was dark, the curtains drawn, but Tony could see two computer monitors flickering brightly, a figure seated in a chair facing them, his back turned to the door. Computers and components were scattered about on tables and chairs, even on the floor.
    Dobyns opened his mouth to speak; Tony silenced him, stepped over the threshold.
    “Richard Lesser? I need to speak—”
    Tony never saw the truncheon that came down hard on the back of his head. Mercifully, he never felt the blow, either.
    That pain, and more, would come later.
    10:34:09 A . M .PDT LAPD Central Facilities, Los Angeles
    Jack Bauer observed the suspect through a one-way mirror. The Middle Eastern youth was locked in an interrogation room in the LAPD’s Central Facilities. Routine prisoners were taken to one of the city’s jails and booked there. But celebrity criminals—or soon to be celebrity, as was the case with this man—were often brought here because the press had not yet tumbled upon the existence of cells and interrogation rooms in what was basically a garage and repair facility a block away from the Los Angeles bus station.
    The interrogation room was dim, the man pinned in a single column of bright white light as he sat immobile on a restraining seat, staring straight ahead, arms and legs shackled. His torn, bloodstained clothing had been collected as evidence. Now the killer wore virgin white overalls, white tube socks sans shoes. He’d been scrubbed clean, too. Blood samples and bits of human flesn had been collected from his skin, from under his fingernails, from between his teeth. His raven-black long hair was still damp.
    Detective Frank Castalano stood at Jack’s shoulder, his partner Jerry Alder a discreet distance away.
    “I might have called you in even if this wasn’t personal, Jack,” Castalano was saying. “This man’s a Saudi national. He’s been talking jihad, praising Allah, and claiming he was doing the will of a terrorist named Hasan. When we ran his fingerprints, his education visa gave him away, and his name turned up on a Department of Homeland Security memo as a person of interest.”
    Jack took the file from Castalano’s hand, flipped through it.
    “His name is Ibn al Farad, twenty-two years old,” Castalano continued. “His father is Omar al Farad, a millionaire vice president of the Royal Saudi Bank of Riyadh and a Deputy Minister in the government. He sent Ibn to America to study at the University of Southern California, but the boy vanished a year ago. The Saudi Arabian Consulate is looking for this kid and they may get word of his capture at any time...”
    Jack’s studied the suspect. “So now Ibn al Farad has resurfaced, this time as the suspect in a heinous multi-murder.” Bauer shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Has he given any sort of statement?”
    Castalano frowned. “He was ranting when we caught him, babbling in the helicopter, and chattering all the way down here to the interrogation room. But as soon as we started asking real questions, taping his words, the suspect stopped talking.”
    “You say he spoke of a man named Hasan,” said Jack, recalling that same name had cropped up in the past