24 Declassified: 06 - Chaos Theory

by John Whitman

  “Jiminez coming?” she asked quickly.

  “Jiminez is in some hot water,” Henderson explained. “It looks like he tried to free Jack from custody.”

  “That may have been a good thing,” Nina replied.

  Henderson shrugged. “We’ll see. Go ahead.”

  “Okay, here’s what we know,” she summed up for all involved. “Jack didn’t kill Tintfass. We know that because Tintfass is alive and being handled by the FBI. Jack broke out of jail with a guy named Emil Ramirez. We assume it wasn’t a coincidence that they broke out together. Jack seemed to be following some kind of trail, which deadended when Ramirez and

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  another business associate got shot, along with one Francis Aguillar. When that trail ends, Jack goes to Chappelle, pumps him full of uppers to kick him out of a coma, and asks about . . .” She paused to make sure they were all listening, “Zapata.”

  Murmurs rippled around the room, but it was Tony who spoke up. “Zapata? The anarchist? Is that who Jack’s after?” His question was directed at Chris Henderson.

  The Field Operations Director rubbed his hands in an act of ablution. “I’ve got no part in this. If I did, I’d be filling you all in right now.”

  “Well, Chappelle did, because he had some resource on Zapata. It looks like they were making a run for him.”

  Another murmur filled the room, and this time it contained an undercurrent of admiration. Every analyst and operator in the room had heard of Zapata. He was unique in the world of international terrorism because he was not, strictly speaking, a terrorist, at least not according to the most current definition. If he could be called a terrorist at all, Zapata was a throwback to the Weathermen and the Red Brigade of the seventies, not fighting for any particular cause or homeland, simply looking to destablize the status quo. But even the Red Brigade had wrapped themselves in the flag of socialism. Zapata was a pure anarchist: he endorsed no cause, he took no side.

  “He isn’t an Islamic fundamentalist. He’s not a fascist or a communist,” Nina was saying, rounding out a picture of Zapata for anyone who needed it. “We think he helped the Basques bomb a train station. But then he gave the Spanish government information that helped them arrest a couple of ETA members. He blew up polling places during the last Venezuelan elections, and that helped the new leftists there gain power. But then he bombed power stations of the leftist government in Venezuela.

  “He’s famous,” she continued, “for having no patterns. Impossible to trace. Makes lots of associates and then drops them. They say he spent a year helping the Chechens fight the Russians, but just because it helped destabilize the Russian government. Then all of a sudden he stopped. We think it was because he realized the Chechnya crisis was actually helping the Kremlin solidify power. If it’s true, he saw that coming a year before anyone else did.”

  “Which brings us to the last thing,” Tony Almeida said, taking over for Nina at her signal. While she’d raced over, he’d gathered more information on Zapata. “We should all start with the idea that Zapata is a genius. He started out life as Jorge Rafael Marquez.”

  Seth Ludonowski, who’d been slumped in his seat, sat up with a start. “Oh shit,” he gasped.

  8:34 A.M. PST Talia Gerwehr’s House

  Jack sat in one of Talia’s living room chairs and drank the coffee she made for him, but he didn’t let himself

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  relax. According to Talia, the Marshal had said he’d contact her later, at her office, but he wouldn’t put it past them to send units to her house anyway. The Marshal running the manhunt was clearly squared away, since he’d pounced on the arms trade so quickly.

  “Chappelle told me about you, but I didn’t know what to expect,” she said.

  Jack laughed. “You’re not exactly seeing me at my best.” Sitting in her clean house, drinking coffee, he was now painfully aware that he stank of dirt and sweat and the sulfur smell of firearms. He hadn’t even managed his shower the night before, when all this had started.

  Talia Gerwehr, on the other hand, was immaculate. If she worked at a think tank, Jack knew what thoughts the men there were thinking. She was in her mid-thirties, with flawless olive skin and smooth dark hair swept away from her face. Her appearance was very much like the appearance of her yard and her house: plainly but elegantly designed, simple but rich.

  “I saw the news. They didn’t give your name, but they gave Ramirez’s, so I assumed—well, I assumed it was all part of the plan.”

  Jack sipped his coffee. As the hot liquid went down, he realized how empty his stomach was. “It is now. I had to get out quickly, and everyone who knew why I was in was out of action. It was either you or the FBI guys who had Tintfass, but I figured you’d be easier to get to.”

  Talia nodded. “I’m just glad Chappelle told me

  about you. He didn’t give much more information.” “This operation has a tight lid,” Jack agreed, “which is making all kinds of trouble.” “The truth is, that was my idea, not Chappelle’s. You’re not going to catch Zapata any other way.”

  “I’ll manage,” he said.

  Talia Gerwehr studied him for a moment. She found herself instantly fascinated by Jack Bauer, suddenly standing there in her house, strong and certain and utterly physical. He was action to her thought. If she was the electrical pulse firing between synapses, he was the muscle that flexed.

  Because Talia Gerwehr, despite her good looks, was a creature of the mind. A member of Mensa, captain of the debate team, wannabe poet with a few scribblings in the Hudson Review and the Atlantic Monthly, she had a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT, where she had published extensively on chaos theory. She’d assumed she’d gain tenure at some university somewhere, but a trick of fate introduced her to the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California. Soon after that, she’d begun to learn about a particular terrorist—anarchist, really—called Zapata, and she had made him the focus of her studies.

  8:36 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  “No, no,” Seth Ludonowski repeated. “I don’t know anything about Zapata. I don’t even know what an

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  anarchist is. But I sure as hell have heard of Jorge Rafael Marquez. Every computer geek this side of 1995 knows him.”

  Tony scanned through his Zapata notes. “He made a fortune in computers.”

  “He raked in huge dollars!” Seth said admiringly. “And he deserved it. He wrote algorithms that were pure genius. Half the systems we run in here use software built on his ideas. I had no idea that Jorge Rafael Marquez had become a terrorist.”

  8:38 A.M. PST Talia Gerwehr’s House

  “Of course,” Talia continued, “knowing his original name means nothing. Sometime in the late 1990s he managed to disappear, and I mean completely. The fortune in his bank accounts vanished. They found his car and identification on the side of the road in Central California. No one has ever heard from Marquez again.”

  “How do we know it’s the same person?” Jack asked.

  “Truth is, we don’t,” she admitted. “But again, it doesn’t matter. The Marquez identity is a dead end anyway.”

  8:39 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Tony continued, “No one’s come close to catching him. He never follows any patterns, and he isn’t attached to any cause. Totally unpredictable. Conventional wisdom says that the usual policing techniques won’t work.”

  8:40 A.M. PST Talia Gerwehr’s House

  “. . . so they recruited you to apply chaos theory to tracking him,” Jack finished for her. “It’s an interesting idea. And it almost worked. I was one room away, but he escaped.”

  “He’s smart,” Talia said. “Maybe one of the most brilliant minds on the planet, at least in his field. If his computer work is any indication—and pretty much it’s all we have—he has an incredible aptitude for deduction; he takes small bits of data and extrapolates them, reaching fairly huge conclusions that are usually right. At least, we assume they
’re right because he keeps succeeding in his plots, and no one catches him. That’s what his computer programs did, you know. He wrote them for Internet search engines. You type in one or two words and, based on those hints, the search engines find what you need. The same technique feeds right into voice recognition systems, deep space exploration satellites, and pretty much, if we

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  ever develop real artificial intelligence, some of his work is going to be at the foundation of it.”

  “You sound like you like him,” Jack said. “He blows people up.”

  Talia had clearly heard this criticism before. “My job has been to get to know him. There’s no sense letting my ethics get in the way of that, because he doesn’t. I don’t approve of him at all. But if you ignore his intelligence, you’ll never catch him.”

  “So where does chaos theory come in?” Jack asked.

  Talia smiled, and her skin actually seemed to glow. “Ah, now that’s the interesting part. The working theory on Zapata is that he uses his ability to recognize patterns in order to avoid them himself. If there are no patterns, any leads you get don’t matter, because there’s no path to follow. It’s all random.”

  “Anarchy,” Jack said. “Chaos.”

  Talia held up her finger. “That’s just it. There’s no such thing as chaos.”

  It occurred to Jack that Talia Gerwehr had never stood in the middle of a rioting mob, but he let it slide. She continued. “Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy literally means ‘without leaders.’ That’s definitely what Zapata is after. He seems intent on breaking down structures, all structures of any kind. But chaos, well, chaos doesn’t exist.”

  “So what’s chaos theory?”

  “A cool-sounding name for exactly its opposite,” Talia said. “To make a long story short, chaos theory says that events that seem chaotic are really the result of a huge series of small events that, happening one after another, make the outcome seem like chaos. The popular example is this: a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and you get a storm in Los Angeles. The butterfly makes a tiny puff of air, which contributes to another tiny event, et cetera, et cetera, and then you have a big event.”

  Jack may not have been a Mensa member, but he could follow this. “You’re suggesting that there’s a pattern somewhere in Zapata.”

  “Somewhere,” she agreed. “It’s just too complex for us to find it yet. Nature does not abide chaos, Agent Bauer. All things fall into some sense of order. Frankly, he does have one obvious pattern: he follows no patterns.”

  Jack said, “Well, I’ve got one lead to follow, whether it fits into your theory or not. I need you to help me get information on a gang tattoo. Zapata’s guy had one, and it’s the second one that I’ve seen since last night. Can you access confidential records?”

  Talia said, “Yeah, but not here. My office computer can.” “Let’s go.”

  8:55 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Henderson, for some reason, was the lone holdout in the room, and since he was Director of Field Operations, his opinion held sway. “I get all this interest in

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  Zapata,” he was saying. “But there’s still no direct evidence that this Ramirez was involved with him. None of the victims at the Biltmore have any connections to him. For all we know, it was an arms deal gone bad, and that’s that.”

  “Then why would Jack go to the hospital to get information from Chappelle?” Nina replied, her neck turning red.

  Tony agreed. “We need to put the word out that Jack isn’t a suspect. He didn’t kill anyone, so there’s no crime. We need to reel him in so we can help him.”

  “Absolutely not!” rasped a thin, wraithlike voice.

  They all turned to see Ryan Chappelle standing in the doorway looking like a harbinger of death. He slumped against the wall weakly, but his eyes stared defiantly out of his bloodless face. “No one contacts Bauer. No one!”

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 A.M. AND 10 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  9:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Chappelle limped forward, and someone vacated a seat so he could sit. It was a measure of his popularity that, although they would move out of his way, no one offered to help him sit down. He slumped back in the chair, gasping for breath. He did not speak.

  Finally Tony couldn’t wait any longer. “Chappelle, we have to get him in. The police are hunting him. He’s got no resources. He’s—”

  Chappelle nodded. “Right. That’s it. That’s what we need.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Surprised questions popped up from several agents.

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  Chappelle gathered his breath again and they waited like so many impatient children attending an old man. “He needs to be . . . outside the system. It’s the only way we’ll catch Zapata. If we work with the usual methods, we’ll get made. It’s happened every time.”

  “It happened this time, too,” Henderson pointed out.

  Chappelle managed a weak smile. “Close. Arm’s reach, what I heard.”

  Henderson was caving at last, but he looked unhappy about it. “I still don’t get it. You hate Bauer. Why were the two of you running this and not any of us?”

  Chappelle’s chest jumped up and down slightly. He was laughing, but didn’t have enough breath to make noise. Finally the tremors subsided. “Hate Bauer. Yes. Goddamned loose cannon. Doesn’t follow orders. Rules. Right guy for this job.”

  And they all saw the logic of it without further explanation. If Zapata was a genius for seeing patterns and predicting the actions of his opponents, who better to send after him than Jack Bauer, who infuriated his superiors with his habit of playing outside the lines?

  “How’d you know that this Ramirez was working with Zapata?” Tony asked.

  Chappelle heaved a huge sigh. The deep breath seemed to lend him more strength. “Didn’t. Not really. Some minor intelligence that Ramirez had worked with a middleman named Vanowen. We had hints that Vanowen had done a job for Zapata, planning something here in the U.S. Water, please.”

  Someone opened a bottle of water. Chappelle wet his lips and continued. “Truth is, Zapata never seems to work with the same people for long. We figured Ramirez and Vanowen would be out of the loop by the time we got to them. I figured the case would dead end, but the worst-case scenario was that Jack Bauer spends a few weeks in jail, and that was all right with me, too.”

  A few people chuckled at that.

  “And the jailbreak?” Nina asked.

  Chappelle threw up his hands feebly. “That’s all Bauer. Only that guy would take an undercover investigation and turn the city upside down.”

  9:17 A.M. PST RAND Corporation

  The name RAND was simply a contraction of “Research and Development.” RAND itself was a massive nonprofit project dedicated to improving public policy through research. RAND had its hands in every aspect of government consultation, from environmental issues to broad-based discussions of the “new” military to endorsements or criticisms of specific pieces of hardware.

  RAND had several restricted areas, but the office space required little more than an employee badge and a guest signature. The security guard gave Talia

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  a familiar wave and asked Jack to enter his name on a sign-in sheet. Bauer made up a name and scribbled “A. Predolin” on the sheet in sloppy writing, then they were through.

  Talia’s office was on the second floor of a quiet building where Jack imagined dozens of brilliant minds behind closed doors, brooding and contemplating.

  “That’s what it’s like,” Talia quipped. “Lots of us just sitting around thinking brilliant thoughts.”

  “Where I work, too,” Jack added.

  Talia laughed. “Actually, there are a lot of meetings. Informational meetings given to us by intelligence agencies; we give presentations to them. There’s a lot of dialogue. Here.�
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  They reached her office, a small but functional space with a desk set against a wall, a computer screen, and shelves full of books. Jack recognized The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters by Gary Zukav, neither of which he’d read. The rest of the books were way over his head. There was a Rubik’s Cube on the desk next to her mouse.

  “I don’t have access to LAPD information,” Talia said, sitting down at her computer, “but if it’s in a Federal database, I should be able to find it.” She spoke succinctly, but without enthusiasm.

  “You don’t think this is going to work,” Jack said.

  “I hope it will,” she corrected, putting a positive spin on his comment. “It just doesn’t fit Zapata. I can’t imagine anyone he worked with having a tattoo that could lead back to him.”

  “He wasn’t expecting the guy to get shot twenty yards from his hotel room,” Jack pointed out. “And remember, this was all right when we got close to him.”

  She accepted his point with a small shrug. A few quick strokes and two different passwords later, she was inside an enormous government registry. At Jack’s direction, she did a search for “Emese.” Nothing came up.

  “Try getting information on MS–13,” Jack requested.

  Talia didn’t type anything.

  “MS–13,” Jack repeated. “The letters ‘M’ and ‘S,’ and—” “I know what it is,” she said at last. “Zapata was part of that gang.”

  “No kidding.” Jack felt a tiny knot form just below his lungs; it was a good feeling, an exciting tension, the feeling the hound gets just before the start of the hunt.

  “If Zapata was Marquez, yes, I think Marquez was part of MS–13 in its early days. Not for long. And I don’t know why he left, but . . .” Her voice trailed off as she began typing. A moment later, her computer screen altered and they were looking at an image of the tattoo Jack had seen twice before: “Emese” was a conjunction of the Spanish letters “eme” and “ese.” This one had a tiny “WB” connected to the bottom right part of the number three, which a caption explained stood for “West Baltimore,” but otherwise it was identical to the tattoos Jack had seen on Oscar and Aguillar.