by John Whitman
“For a man’s man, you eat like a girl,” Martin joked.
“One more day, Grandpa,” Jake said. “Tomorrow I’m going to stuff my face. But I can’t feel heavy today.”
“Then you’re going to quit this stuff and go into finance like your grandpa and your dad, right?” Martin said lightly.
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Jake laughed. It was a long-running joke between them. They both knew well that Jake had neither the brain nor the temperament for financial matters. He had inherited all of his grandfather’s athletic genes and none of his financial ones. He was ready to let the joke pass, as it usually did, but his grandfather turned suddenly serious.
“Actually, Jakey, I have to say at this moment I’m jealous of you. This life you’re leading right now, it’s a good life. Stick with it for a while. I can’t say that having a lot of responsibility is all that fun.”
Though not a CPA, Jake was no idiot. He understood the responsibility on his grandfather’s shoulders. “You’ll find a way out of it, Grandpa. You’re the Wise Old Man of the Fed, right?”
“Old,” Martin agreed. “And I’m what’s left of a man. But wise?” He sighed. “Well, I have to go on the TV tomorrow and sound like it, anyway. I lost sleep last night, thinking of it. Oh, hey,” he said, brightening. “I saw you. ESPN was doing some late night preview of the fighters for the Professional Reality Fighting matches tonight. They did a big story on you.”
Jake smiled. “They like pumping up the young guys sometimes.”
“The ones with a future,” Martin said. “I know how business works. They think they can market you.”
“If I win tonight,” Jake agreed. “Are you going to watch on TV?”
Martin sighed. “You know, my boy, I’m going to do one better. I’m going to come to the fights.”
“Great! I mean, don’t feel like you have to, Grandpa, I know what’s going on—”
Martin held up a hand to stop him. “I already made some calls. I canceled my dinner, and I got a ticket. As for tomorrow” —now he waved his hand dismissively— “I’ve been saying what I say for years. No one’s going to surprise me with a question. Tonight, I’m coming to watch my grandson.”
Jake was genuinely excited. He loved being a professional fighter, but he had always felt a twinge of guilt that he could not follow the family path. His grandfather’s endorsement meant a lot to him. “I’m excited now. I’m definitely going to win this one for you. And you can come to the back after the fights, and meet some of the other big names.”
“I’d be honored,” Martin said. “So who is your opponent? Does he know what he’s gotten himself into?”
Jake laughed. “He’s a tough guy, but he’s older. A former champ named Mark Kendall.”
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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 A.M. AND 12 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
11:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Dan Pascal walked into CTU Headquarters like a bull slotting up for his rodeo rider—all calm and still, but tense and ready to buck. He made and received the obligatory introductions with various personnel there: George Mason, whom he recognized from last night; Chris Henderson, who looked like a no-nonsense fellow; Ryan Chappelle, who looked like a walking corpse; Tony Almeida, a good-looking fellow who stared at him out of sleepy eyes, and some others. Pascal heard himself make short, charming quips at them in his usual Louisiana style, but inside, he was seething. He was pretty goddamned tired of chasing this Jack Bauer around, and the fact that Bauer had beaten him up had not improved his mood. Once he’d recovered, Pascal had grilled Talia Gerwehr, but gotten nothing from her except the fact that her work was top secret. He had no choice but to accept her story that she thought she was helping a Federal agent. At that point, Pascal had gotten tired of playing games and gone right to the source.
“Enough with the how-do-you-do’s,” Pascal said, sitting down on the edge of a table that creaked under his weight. “I’ve got local law enforcement and U.S. Marshals running around all over this city looking for Jack Bauer. I’ve had that sumbitch kick me in the testicles and I’ve had one of your own people smash my nice government-issue car. I need someone here to tell me what the hell’s going on, and I need it right now!”
Pascal hadn’t actually raised his voice much, but the angry rumble from his chest, combined with his size, made him intimidating.
Unfortunately, he was in a room full of people who did not intimidate easily. “I’m not sure we can tell you, Marshal,” Henderson said calmly. “But we are working on a case of a sensitive nature.”
“Jack Bauer is out in the field,” Chappelle added. He’d been recovering slowly but steadily. “We expect him to be out for some time, under deep cover. He may not be able . . . to . . . contact us . . . for . . .”
Chappelle’s voice trailed off in astonishment, because Jack Bauer had just walked through the door.
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11:07 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack walked into CTU Headquarters tired, hungry, and wounded. He’d been shot twice in the same arm, and on top of that he’d been punched, kicked, and smashed by a car. He was ready for a little more down time.
So he could be forgiven for feeling a moment’s dread when he walked past the astounded faces of analysts at CTU and into the conference room to find Marshal Pascal waiting for him. The big man jumped up from the table where he sat and lumbered toward Jack like an avalanche.
Jack pulled his gun from his belt and pointed at Pascal’s barrel chest. “Stop,” he said calmly.
All two 270 pounds of U.S. Marshal froze.
“I’m not guilty,” Jack said simply. “And I’m sorry I kicked you. But I’m also in a bad mood, so if you take one more step I’m going to shoot you.”
Pascal didn’t back down, but he didn’t advance, either. Finally it was George Mason who stepped between them. “Easy, boys. You were both doing your jobs. Let’s leave it at that.”
Chappelle didn’t seem to care about the tension between the two men. He was glaring at Jack, so angry that some of the color actually returned to his face. “Bauer, what the hell are you doing back in?”
Jack expected that. He didn’t even mind Chappelle’s irritating tone. “It was time. I need to find someone now.”
As quickly as he could, Jack summarized the events of the last fifteen hours. It was a long story, but Jack had been called before enough special committees to know how to summarize his actions, and after four or five minutes the CTU team had a clear picture of what was going on.
“It almost worked,” Chappelle said. “You came close.”
“One room away,” Jack agreed. “I’ll still get him.”
Tony Almeida had listened closely to Jack’s story. A few details still bothered him. “There are still holes, though. Why was MS–13 after you in prison? Was Zapata after you even then? Was it coincidence?”
“Didn’t MS–13 have a grudge against you from before?” Henderson suggested.
Jack nodded his head. “Yeah, I just don’t know why they’d come after me this hard. Could be just coincidence. If that’s the case, then I just lucked out with the tattoo. Whatever is going on, right now they’re my only link to Zapata. Ramirez didn’t know much, but he knew something was going on tonight. I’m going to get Lopez what he needs.”
Dan Pascal had listened to Bauer’s story with growing incredulity. He was a man’s man and a tough cop, but what Bauer had been through sounded beyond belief. But this last statement wasn’t just astonishing, it was criminal. “Hold on there, Captain America,” he drawled. “You ain’t really going to steal crystal meth from one gang and give to another?”
“Yes, I am,” Jack said.
“Don’t you think that’s criminal?”
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Jack nodded. “What do you expect from a guy who just broke out of jail?”
“There are still a whole lot of questions,” Tony s
aid stubbornly. “Only three people had direct knowledge of Jack’s innocence: Chappelle, the warden, and the corrections guard. All three of them were attacked or put out of commission when Jack was attacked. Who did that? Zapata?”
“Not Zapata,” Jack said. “If he was on to us then, we’d never have gotten as close as we did.”
Henderson jumped in. “Besides, there’s something more urgent to focus on. We don’t know what Zapata is targeting.”
This observation triggered an eruption of voices all talking at once. Several theories bubbled to the surface, the most immediate of which was espoused by Tony Almeida. Tony had a calm, steady voice, but somehow he made it cut through the din.
“It’s got to be something to do with the Pacific Rim Forum,” he insisted. “The Jemaah Islamiyah guys were for real. They were using a code that we” —he nodded toward Seth— “that repeated the letters PRF. We think it stood for Pacific Rim Forum.”
“Do we even know if those e-mails were going to Zapata?” George Mason said skeptically.
“Gmail accounts bouncing off ISPs in public networks in libraries,” Jamey replied. “We couldn’t trace them.”
Jack considered this. “Well, we were both working with middlemen, and that’s definitely Zapata’s style.”
“But Zapata also walks away when there’s trouble,” Nina pointed out. “Maybe our job’s already done.”
Chappelle was unsatisfied. “We don’t know that for sure. There could have been trouble on every one of his other bombings or attacks, we just didn’t know about it. Besides, he might think he’s closed the door on us by killing those two middlemen. We need to work on the assumption that Zapata is still moving toward his goal. Any suggestions besides the Southeast Asian forum? Any other targets?” A cacophony of voices erupted. “One at a time!”
Jamey Farrell declared over a few other raised voices, “The Chairman of the Fed is in town. I’m not sure he’s much of a target . . .”
Pascal snorted. “Right now he is!” Everyone looked at him, and he shrugged. “Ain’t any of you that buy stocks? My 401(k)’s goin’ down the tubes. Right now, I had a choice between savin’ my mama and savin’ Webb, I’d have to give it some thought.”
Jamey thought of herself as a thorough analyst and didn’t appreciate this slow-talking newcomer on her turf. “He’s been on our list since the beginning,” she sniffed. “But he’s not a visible target. Four-fifths of the population couldn’t even name the Chairman of the Fed.”
“The rest listen to every word he says,” Pascal replied.
Tony took Jamey’s side. “But there’s nothing about the Chairman or his schedule that matches the PRF code. “
“I ran it twice,” Seth confirmed.
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“Besides,” Tony pointed out, “it seems like Zapata has been trying to get ordnance. I doubt he’d need that much armament to go after the Fed Chairman.”
“But,” Nina said, “you’re saying Jemaah Islamiyah, but they weren’t after explosives, they wanted some computer virus.”
“What’s the status of Jemaah Islamiyah?” Chappelle asked.
Tony said, a little unhappily, “Down but not out. We caught or killed two men in the gun battle, but Encep Sungkar got away.”
“That was our fault,” Pascal confessed. “My people jumped in to get Bauer. We didn’t know there was an operation in progress.”
Jack had been silent for a moment, listening. The analysis was bouncing all over the place. Explosives, Jemaah Islamiyah, the Pacific Rim Forum, computer viruses, MS–13. It was . . . chaos. “A butterfly flaps its wings in China,” he muttered.
“Huh?” Nina said, overhearing him. The others stopped talking, too.
“Just something this analyst at RAND said,” Jack explained. “Chaos theory. When a system is so complicated that it looks like chaos, but there’s some order hidden in the middle of it. That’s what Zapata does. That’s why he’s hard to track. He’s got us chasing our tails.”
Tony frowned. “Are you suggesting we ignore JI?”
Jack nodded. “I think we should ignore anything Zapata lets us get close to. He didn’t care about Ramirez or Vanowen and walked away from the weapons we brought him at the hotel. If PRF was that easy to crack—”
“Gee, thanks,” Seth interjected.
Jack ignored him. “—then we should throw it out because Zapata didn’t think it was important. The only thing I think that has knocked him off balance was when I got near him at the hotel and killed Aguillar. We know from phone records and card key files that he was in the next room right before then. Killing Aguillar was the closest we’ve come to him, and Aguillar led us to MS–13. I want to stay on that trail.”
“Then do it,” Chappelle said. “Get what you need and get back in the field. Tony and Nina, you support him. Everyone,” he said, standing up to gather their attention. “I know you aren’t used to hearing this from me, but don’t think inside the lines on this one. Zapata will spot us like he’s spotted everyone else. Now go.”
The next fifteen minutes were filled with the less glamorous but vital work of the data analysts. Jack needed as much information as he could get on a Russian or Ukrainian gang operating in West Los Angeles. CTU tapped into the computers of LAPD, Santa Monica PD, the Federal anti-gang task force, Immigration, and Customs. Getting the general information was easy—LAPD had formed a joint task force with the FBI to investigate a gang of Ukrainian immigrants suspected of criminal activity. The man Jack needed to get to was Sergei Petrenko, head of the Ukrainian outfit. Thanks to the Patriot Act, the NAP Act, and its successors, CTU tapped into Petrenko’s
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cell phone and e-mails immediately. Inside of ten minutes, Jamey Farrell and her crew were analyzing his phone records, his e-mails, every shred of electronic communication that Mr. Sergei Petrenko had used recently.
“He’s a careful one,” Jamey told Jack as the analysts continued their review. “He doesn’t say much or write much. But he has been talking to someone a lot.” She checked her notes. “Felix Studhalter. Looks like he’s a buyer and distributor.”
“Have they ever met?” Jack asked.
“Phone records wouldn’t show that, of course, but I don’t think so. It looks like we have a different kind of break. The FBI’s joint task force has been on these guys for a while. It looks like they have someone undercover in the group. Code name Ivan of all things. Looks like Ivan’s been feeding them bits of information. Felix is new business for them, and the buy is supposed to go down today. I guess that’s what your gang-banger friend heard about.”
Jack formed a plan immediately. First, they would track down Felix Studhalter and detain him. Jack would go to the buy in his place, steal the drugs, and get them to MS–13.
He checked his watch. It was almost noon. If Ramirez was right, then whatever Zapata was planning would happen sometime today. And, Jack realized with a pang of frustration, Zapata still had him running around in circles.
He walked down the hall to clean his wounds and found himself side by side with Chris Henderson.
“Thanks for all the help last night,” Jack said sarcastically. “You have no idea how much I’ve helped you,” Henderson spat back.
Jack stopped. “What kind of help did you give me last night when I called you at four o’clock in the morning!”
“I had no idea you were on an operation—”
“But you know me,” Jack retorted. “And you still left me out in the cold. I never thought you’d want so badly to get even.”
Henderson squared up on Jack. The two agents faced each other like boxers just before the fight. “This has nothing to do with that Internal Affairs thing. I don’t give a damn who you dropped my name to. I’m not guilty of anything.”
Jack’s eyes drilled into him. “When I mentioned your name I was doing my job. If I find out you’re trying to screw me, this will get really, really personal.”
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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 P.M. AND 1 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
12:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
For the first time in a long time, Jack climbed into a car that he hadn’t stolen. He’d taken a minute just before the hour to clean himself up and dress his wounds—the second bullet wound on his right forearm stung like hell and would require attention eventually, but his arm functioned—then found a change of clothes. Jamey had downloaded a picture of Felix Studhalter, and Jack compared himself to it in the mirror. They looked nothing alike, but Studhalter’s hair was light brown, not so far off from blond, and according to information from a prior arrest, Studhalter was roughly the same height. If Sergei knew his buyer only from description, the sting might work.
Now he started the engine of a borrowed black Chevy Tahoe and started the engine. It was at that moment that another car pulled into the secure parking area at CTU. Jack saw Peter Jiminez behind the wheel with an enormous purple bruise on the left side of his swollen face.
Their two cars, facing opposite directions, pulled up to one another. Peter’s eyes flashed as he saw Jack, and the parts of his face that weren’t purple turned an angry red.
“Peter,” Jack said out the window of his car. “Jack,” the younger agent grunted through a nearly immobile jaw. “It wasn’t personal,” Jack explained. “It was part of the job. Chappelle or Henderson will catch you up.”
“We’ve all got jobs to do,” Jiminez said coldly.
As Jack drove out, Henderson parked and entered CTU. He received two types of looks as he walked toward Henderson’s office: surprise and sympathy from those who hadn’t heard about his encounter with Jack; and amusement and sympathy from those who knew how he felt. He walked up the stairs to Henderson’s office and entered without knocking, then closed the door.
“Where the hell have you been?” Henderson asked, looking up from the files on his desk. He was digging through all the information he could get on MS–13.