24 Declassified 09 - Trinity by John Whitman

Author:John Whitman [Whitman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061431197
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

10

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 A.M. AND 4 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

3:00 A.M. PST Santa Clarita, California

His real name was Dean Schrock, but he’d just been Dean for so long that even he had mostly forgotten the last name. He was old enough to feel a long day’s ride in his ass and lower back, but he was still young enough to bully the one-percenters who were part of his gang, and hell of bad enough to terrify the crap out of any cagers he saw on the streets.

Dean was part of a dying breed, and he knew it. Hell, he took pride in it. He’d been a kid during the heyday of Altamont, so he hadn’t been busting heads back then, but he was old enough to remember when whole towns would head for the hills when the Hell’s Angels rode down Main Street. These days most people calling themselves Hell’s Angels were wannabes or squiddies who’d just as soon ride a rice burner as a Harley and pretend to be badass. Sure, there were still a few throwbacks; Dean had heard about a Hell’s Angels club in New York City, and another up in Canada (friggin’ Canada, of all places!) that were hard-core and full of one-percenters, but they were few and far between.

Dean pushed an empty beer bottle off his belly and sat up. They were in a house on the outskirts of Santa Clarita, in the upland valleys north of Los Angeles. He’d forgotten—or, more to the point, he never really cared—whose house it was. Four or five of his boys were sprawled out on couches or chairs or on the floor. A couple of women were there, too— nothing to look at, or he’d have taken them into one of the bedrooms and had them himself. A few more of his boys were crashed in the bedrooms or the hallways, sleeping off the ride down from Bakersfield and the six-packs they’d swallowed since then.

All Dean’s boys were one-percenters—that is, part of the “one percent” of bikers that were outlaws, rather than the ninety-nine percent that the Hell’s Angels claimed were law-abiding citizens—and in just a few hours they were going to prove that even if only one percent of the biker population were outlaws, it was one hell of a one percent.

Bleary-eyed, he checked his watch. Little bit of time left. That puke Dog Smithies was supposed to show up before sunrise. Dean was looking forward to meeting him face to face, see what that bullshitter was really like. But right now he could close his eyes a little bit and dream of the big explosion.

3:06 A.M. PST Parker Center, Los Angeles

As far as LAPD was concerned, Cardinal Mulrooney was a candidate for beatification. They maintained a small dossier on him, but the contents might as well have been provided by the Catholic Church’s public relations department. The report discussed Mulrooney’s upbringing in a poor Irish neighborhood of Chicago, his travel

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