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me where I can find these terrorists.”
    “Absolutely.” The immediacy of his answer surprised Jack. “There’s a family in Beverlywood. A father and a daughter. One of the terrorists is linked to them and we’re sure they know what he’s doing. Our plan was to start with them.”
    Jack felt the same cold groping in his stomach, like an ice-cold eel swimming through his guts. “A father and daughter. What name?”
    “It’s all in there,” Marks said. “The address and everything. The name is Rafizadeh.”
    The eel in his gut found its home and settled heavily. “Shit,” Bauer said.
    ***
    Six months ago. A holding cell inside CTU headquarters, with a bare steel lamp hanging down from the darkness and bright, directed bulb that illuminated an uncomfortable steel table and left the rest of the room in darkness. Jack Bauer stood at the edge of the light, staring down at the man handcuffed to the table. He was an older man, his hands softened by a scholar’s life and his belly rounded by many comfortable meals. The handcuffs weren’t necessary for security—this old man offered risk of neither fight or flight—but they added to Jack’s psychological advantage. The man in the chair was a prisoner. Jack was the jailer.
    “Stop protecting them,” Jack growled. “We’ll find them anyway. Then we won’t need you anymore.”
    The old man blinked at Jack. His glasses had been taken away—another small part of the psychological war—and he could barely see past the bright lights in his eyes. His cheeks above his thin, gray beard were sunken with fatigue, and three days of questions had bent his back and slumped his shoulders. But his voice was still as firm as the day Jack had brought him in.
    “I hope you do them find, whoever they are,” said the old man with a gentle Farsi lilt in his speech. “In the meantime, I once again ask for my lawyer.”
    “No.”
    Jack let the denial hang in the air. He didn’t explain that the Patriot Act gave him permission to detain suspected terrorists—even U.S. citizens—indefinitely. The denial held more power without the rationale behind it. Of course, he also didn’t explain that even with the broadened powers the Patriot Act gave him, Jack’s hold on this old man was tenuous, and based on little more than one email picked up by the FBI’s Internet-searching
    Jack straddled the chair across from his captive so that their eyes were level. He smiled. “Professor Rafizadeh, you’ve had a fairly unpleasant time here with us. But this is the honeymoon. I can promise that the marriage will be really ugly.”
    The old man shrugged his shoulders. “You are threatening me, sir, but with what? Do you think I don’t know what is waiting for me out there? My job will be gone. My tenure, it is nothing now. My daughter will suffer from this also. You have already ruined everything I have, just with what you have done. What will you do, send me back to Iran?”
    “At a minimum,” Jack said. He stared at the scholar. He refused to ask again. Rafizadeh knew what he wanted.
    The investigation had been fairly straightforward. A contact in Lebanon had pointed Israeli security to a training camp on the Syrian border. Israeli commandos had raided the camp a month earlier. There wasn’t much there, but the commandos came across a few names that hadn’t been deleted from computer lists. Some of those names turned up on Homeland Security’s watchdog list of possibles who had entered the United States. Inside the country, they’d disappeared. That’s where Bauer and CTU had come in. Like bloodhounds sniffing a cold trail, they’d tracked most of the names to dead ends. Only one lead had played out—the name of a suspected terrorist training at the Syrian camp turned out to be the son of Ibrahim Rafizadeh, professor of middle eastern history at the University of Southern California. From the moment he’d met the professor, Jack believed Rafizadeh was a prime example of a criminal