by John Whitman
“Gone,” Risdow gasped as though he’d been holding his breath. “He said he had something important to do.”
Jack put the gun to Risdow’s head. “I’m in no mood for games.”
“Okay, okay!” Risdow squealed. His eyes went nearly crossed trying to see the gun touching his forehead.
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“I know you know Zapata. I know you know what he’s up to,” Jack said, although in truth he wasn’t sure. All he really had was the word of an MS–13 gang leader. But he didn’t have much time left, so he had to push. “Tell me what his target is.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Risdow pleaded. Jack studied his face, listening carefully to his voice. There was a tension in the voice and posture of the innocent, a particular desperation caused by the fear of being misunderstood. Jack saw it in the stress on Risdow’s face and heard it in his trembling voice.
“Yes, you do,” he said anyway, leveraging the man’s fear. “You’ve worked with him before. He’s told you something.”
“Nothing!”
“Something,” Jack snapped back. “A place, a name.”
“Well . . .” That was it. Risdow hesitated, but he was already broken. Interrogation subjects often hesitated right before they gave up their secrets. It made them feel better afterward. “He said something about the Pacific Rim Forum. That’s all I know!” he added when Jack started to press further.
The conference, Jack thought. Tony was right. “Is he on his way there?”
“I guess,” the man said. “I swear I don’t know.”
He kept his eyes on Risdow while he reached for his phone.
“Look, can you let me go?” Risdow asked. “I’m not involved in this, I swear. I’m a businessman. I don’t do violence.”
Jack was about to ask him if he’d heard of conspiracy or aiding and abetting, then tell Risdow to go to hell, but he hesitated. He was on Zapata’s trail now, and it was very possible that Zapata didn’t know it. The anarchist had no reason to think MS–13 would have helped him, and in fact Smiley had tried to betray him even after Jack had gone way outside the lines to strike a deal. The last thing Jack needed now was to scare him off.
4:16 P.M. PST Boyle Heights
Peter Jiminez stood in Smiley Lopez’s living room and called headquarters. “Henderson? It’s me. Yes, I’m here. The guy’s dead.”
4:17 P.M. PST Temescal Canyon
Jack hurtled down Temescal Canyon, then swerved onto PCH, determined to get to Marina del Rey as soon as possible. If there was an attack there, Tony would need all the help he could get. The ocean was to Jack’s right, the sun just starting to drop down behind his right shoulder. He glanced in the rearview mirror. His eyes stung from dryness and fatigue. Forget it, he told himself. You’ve been here before. Energy was an act of will. Victory was an act of will. He would not be tired.
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His phone rang. “Bauer.”
He heard Ludonowski’s voice. “It’s Seth—”
“The Forum,” Jack interrupted. “It’s the Pacific Rim Forum.”
Jack heard white noise, then: “It can’t be.”
Bauer snapped, “I just told you it is. I got it from—”
“Jack, it’s Jamey on the line, too. The forum isn’t right. We tracked the communications between Zapata and Jemaah Islamiyah. They’re pretty one-way. It was Zapata who initiated the conversations. He’s the one who put the idea out there. The e-mail that mentioned ‘Papa Rashad’s factory’ came from an IP address at a Starbucks a block from the Biltmore where Zapata was staying. Another came from a café in Pacific Palisades, less than a mile from Risdow’s address.”
Jack absorbed this information quickly. “You’re talking about what I was talking about. Zapata making us chase our own tails.”
“Giving us a pattern to follow,” Seth observed.
“Then he lied to Risdow, too,” Jack said, accelerating through a yellow light. “He seemed sure it was the forum.”
“How do you know?” Seth asked.
“We can ask him when he gets in,” Jamey said.
“I’m not bringing him in,” Jack replied.
“I know,” Jamey replied, sounding a bit confused. “The police are.”
Her bewilderment was contagious. Jack felt it creep through the phone into his chest. “What are you talking about?”
“The police. They collared Risdow. We put an APB out automatically, even though you were headed for his house. Santa Monica PD picked him up on Lincoln.”
Jack swerved out of his lane and onto the sidewalk, standing up on the brakes and bringing the borrowed Mercedes to a halt inches from the fence of a public parking area.
“Are you saying Kyle Risdow was on Lincoln Avenue five minutes ago?” Jamey was now impatient as well as confused. “Well, yeah.” “I just came from his house. I was talking to him five minutes—”
Pressure welled up in Jack’s chest, threatening to burst like a capped volcano. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t have made such an amateurish—
“Bring up a photo of Risdow. Tell me what he looks like.”
Seth answered. “Hold on. Driver’s license photo from a couple of years ago. Caucasian, pretty typical WASP-y type. Blond hair, blue eyes. Six-foot-one according to this—”
“Damn it!” Jack yelled. Stupid. Bush league. Weak. Letting fatigue make him so sloppy.
“Jack, what’s wrong?”
He was too angry at himself to be embarrassed. “I think I just let Zapata go.”
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4:24 P.M. PST Sunset Boulevard, Pacific Palisades
That had been interesting.
Zapata was driving a rented Ford Mustang down Sunset Boulevard, careful to accelerate to the speed of the traffic around him. His heart was still beating rapidly, though with excitement or fear, he wasn’t sure. Maybe they were the same.
He was forced to acknowledge the presence of luck. As a general rule, he did not believe in it. Luck was the name given by the uneducated to unaccounted-for variables that happened to unfold in their favor. He, Zapata, had always believed that all variables could be calculated if one were meticulous.
This particular event, however, could only be fortune smiling down on him. He had not in his wildest dreams expected any government agent to make the connection between Kyle Risdow and himself. There was, quite literally, no connection that anyone could follow. For the first time in his adult life, Zapata had been utterly and completely shocked by the appearance of the blond man (his ID had said “Bauer”) at the back of the house, and because he believed in coincidences even less than he believed in luck, he knew for certain this was the same man who had killed Aguillar, the same blond man described by Franko, who . . . Ah.
That was it.
Synapses fired across his brain, bridging the gaps in the story. The blond man who “hadn’t acted like a cop” had saved Lopez. He was a government agent with some sort of special license. Maverick behavior. Zapata understood the premise without needing to know the details. They had sent a maverick after him, someone who did not follow the normal patterns of law enforcement behavior. Zapata saw all the events laid out before him like a storyboard. The agent was thrown in jail, befriended Ramirez, gotten close— literally, a door away. But Zapata had seen that coming. The minute Ramirez broke out of jail with a “friend,” Zapata had ordered Aguillar to kill him and Vanowen. But Aguillar had died, too, and Aguillar had an MS–13 tattoo. Bauer had tracked it to Lopez, and managed (again, luck!) to reach him before Franko could do his work.
Zapata could not see how or why Lopez would have cooperated. Lopez could not have known that he had contracted Franko to kill him. As far as he knew, Lopez hadn’t even known about Risdow. But then, Zapata thought, Smiley was sharper than he showed and he kept his ears open. He could have heard Kyle’s name mentioned, and hoarded the information like a pack rat. But even if Lopez had information, why would he give it to a Federal agent? That part, Zapata could not fathom. There were not enough data.
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Briefly, very briefly, he considered abandoning his plan. He’d done so before. No particular scheme held any special place in his heart. His goal was anarchical, not political, and he had always adhered to the maxim that discretion was the better part of valor. There would be other targets.
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Yet, he had to admit, he was feeling something else; something new. Pride. That was it. His ego was now involved. No one had ever come close to laying a hand on him, and here this Agent Bauer had come within arm’s reach of him twice in less than twenty-four hours. He was proving to be a formidable opponent.
4:37 P.M. PST Century Plaza Hotel
“Gentlemen, we have to wrap up,” said Martin Webb, rising from the conference table.
The three other men at the table also stood up. The nearest, Frank Nye, from the Board of Directors of Dow Jones, looked aghast. Martin had never seen him in anything but a three-piece pin-striped suit done for him in Bond Street in London. Today he was wearing khaki slacks and a polo shirt. “Marty, you can’t be serious.”
“Why not?” the Fed Chairman asked.
“Well, well,” Nye huffed, “the problem’s still in front of us.”
Martin nodded seriously. “And it won’t be solved on a Saturday night.”
One of the other men, Marion Zimmer, staggered forward. Old enough to have been born when Marion was still a man’s name, his body creaked but his mind was still sharp. “Come Monday, if the markets crash, the country will go with it. You’re the one with your finger in the dike, Webb, and you want to go? We were scheduled for another hour. I flew all the way from—”
“I think we’ve covered everything,” Martin said. He wanted to see his grandson’s fight, although, truth be told, they really had covered everything. They were four old men who wielded great power, but because they were so old, and had wielded power for so long, they’d forgotten that power had its limits. At a certain point, the markets had to be left to chance. “I know what to say tomorrow in the news. I’ll put a brave face on for Monday’s bell, and the rest will take care of itself.”
He left them behind, their faces frozen like old, wrinkled stone, and headed down to a car waiting to drive him to Staples Center.
4:41 P.M. PST 405 Freeway, Sepulveda Pass, Los Angeles
Pan needed the money, so he’d taken one part of the Zapata job himself. That way he could keep his overall cut, plus one-sixth of the share for the drivers.
Besides, this was the weirdest thing he’d ever heard of, and he wanted to see it up close.
He was driving northbound on the 405 Freeway, one of the main arteries that carried traffic into and out of Los Angeles, and even on a Saturday, it was packed. However, because it wasn’t a work day, there was just enough space to gather speed, which was what Pan did as he moved toward the top of the pass.
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Zapata had given explicit instructions as to where he should do the job—at least a hundred yards below the Mulholland Avenue exit. So just as he drove underneath the sign that said MULHOLLAND EXIT ¼ MILE, Pan did his job: he gunned the engine and swerved hard into traffic, shutting his eyes tight. He heard the shrill squeal of tires, felt the jarring impact of another car before he heard the horn sound, and then his world went white as the airbag exploded outward. Vaguely he heard crash after crash after crash as the Saturday drivers on their way out of the city smashed into one another.
At almost exactly the same time over on the 101 Freeway, Pan’s friend Doogie did almost exactly the same thing.
This happened six times, on two other major freeways, and on two main surface streets in West Los Angeles. At the moment, as far as anyone knew, they were just six separate accidents on the Los Angeles freeways.
4:49 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
If there was anything Jack hated worse than Chappelle’s tirades, it was Chappelle being right when he went on one.
“All this goddamned work for nothing!” the Regional Director fumed. “You let him walk out the front door.”
Jack had learned long ago to face his mistakes, not to garner sympathy but in order to move beyond them toward a solution. “I’ll fix it.”
“How?”
“Still working on it.”
Jack pushed past Chappelle and into the main part of the headquarters. “Jamey! Seth!” But he had already reached them by the time they jumped to their feet.
“He’s here, he’s after something,” Jack said without a hello. “I need to know what it is. Now.” Jamey said, “We’ve already run down our list of possible targets. The Pacific Rim Forum fit all the criteria.”
“We’re missing something,” Jack said. His mind was racing. There was a pattern here, the kind of pattern Zapata would have seen. He was missing it, and that made him angry. “We have to find it.”
“Uh . . .” It was Seth. “Can I go?”
Jack was startled. “What? No!”
Seth glanced from Jack to Jamey, hoping she’d be more sympathetic. She was his direct superior, but this Jack Bauer seemed to take charge of whatever situation he was in. “Um, I want to go. I’ve been here since yesterday.” Jack and Jamey continued to stare at him. “Yesterday being a whole day ago. I haven’t seen the sun.”
“We’ve got a job to do, Seth,” Jamey said. “I’ve been doing it,” the young man replied. “I have plans tonight.” Jack curled his lip. “Tell her you can go out tomorrow night.”
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“It’s not that. I’m going to the fights tonight. Silva versus Harmon, baby!” he said excitedly, but he saw that they didn’t understand what he was talking about. He pleaded to Jack. “Oh, come on, you must watch mixed martial arts fights.”
Jack shook his head.
“Well, there are huge fights tonight, and I have tickets. It’s the Professional Reality Fighting championships. I really don’t want to miss it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Jack said.
“No, I’m not. Those tickets cost me two hundred bucks.”
Jack shook his head. “Not that. The name. Did you say Professional Reality Fighting?”
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 5 P.M. AND 6 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
5:00 P.M. PST Staples Center
Mark Kendall was sitting on the floor of the room that served as his waiting room and training room as his corner, Max Kominsky, wrapped his hands. Kominsky wasn’t big on pep talks, so he kept quiet while Mark brooded. He wanted to call home again, but Kominsky had drawn the line at three calls. Fight time approached.
Someone knocked on the door and then opened it. A black face with an infectious toothy grin popped in and spoke in Portuguese. Mark recognized him immediately: Salvatore Silva, the current heavyweight
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champion. An older face appeared beside him, square-jawed and missing several teeth. Ramon Machado, the trainer they called the kingmaker.
“He says good luck,” Machado translated.
Kendall nodded, not standing up so that Kominsky could finish his work. “Tell him I said thanks.”
More Portuguese. The big black man’s dark, gleaming eyes studied Mark over his toothy grin. “The champion says he hopes you will win . . .”
“Thanks again,” Mark said.
“. . . because he’d rather fight you than Jake Webb!” Salvatore Silva roared with laughter and disappeared.
Mark heaved a huge sigh. “They’re all against us, Maxie,” he said.
Kominsky shrugged. “Me, I get nervous around company anyway.”
5:04 P.M. PST Staples Center
Martin Webb reached downtown Los Angeles just ahead of what looked like unbelievably bad traffic. His driver, Johan, said there were bad accidents all over the freeways, and that the traffic was snarled all across the city. They parked across the street from the Staples Center and walked to “will call,” where Jake had left tickets for them.
The big black lady beh
ind the counter took his name and plucked the tickets out of a file box. She eyeballed Martin as she put the tickets in his hand. “You’re Martin Webb, the Fed guy.”
Martin nodded with a wink and a confidential smile. “Tonight I’m just a grandfather.”
She bobbed her head at him. “Well, you better come back as the Chairman come Monday mornin’, ’cause I’m countin’ on my stocks to help me climb outta here.” She motioned to the four beige walls of the tiny ticket office.
Martin smiled. “Ma’am, I don’t really control the stock market—”
“Oh, I know you do.” The big lady laughed, ignoring customers that were coming up behind them. “You wave your magic wand and make it all better. Enjoy the fights, ya’ll.”
The Fed Chairman nodded at her and went inside, accompanied by Johan. Jake had reserved great seats for them. They weren’t floor seats because, according to Jake, you really couldn’t see the raised cage from down there. They sat in the first row of the raised seats, with an eye-line view of the fenced cage where the fighters would meet.
“Do you ever watch these fights, Johan?” Martin asked.
Johan, who acted as the Fed Chairman’s bodyguard and driver, nodded. “Machado is going to take him apart in the first minute, I think.”
“Excuse me, excuse me!” someone said, pushing past the Fed Chairman. A man with a shaved head slipped past them and sat down a few seats away. “Oh, I’m glad I made it,” he said with a grin at Martin. “The traffic’s terrible!”
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5:14 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Chris Henderson was sitting in his office when the call he’d been dreading came in. “Agent Henderson, this is Anthony Becker, Internal Affairs.”
Henderson’s heart sank, but he was a professional. His voice was steady. “Internal Affairs? Don’t they give you guys weekends off?”
“We need to interview you, Agent Henderson,” Becker returned. “I think you know what it’s about.”
Henderson squeezed the handset next to his ear until his knuckles turned white. Damn, damn, damn. “Well, okay. First thing Monday. Do you want me to come to you?”