24 Declassified: 04 - Cat's Claw

by John Whitman

  Jack climbed into his black SUV as his cell phone rang.

  “Hey, Jack,” Teri said. “How’s it going out there?”

  “Hey,” he replied. “It’s going fine. Listen, can you call Kim on her cell and tell her I’ll be right back? I have to run over to the office for a minute.”

  The wireless connection went suddenly cold. “Jack, you’re supposed to be with her.”

  He defended himself. “She’s with the chaperone. And this is a quick trip. I just have to check on something. Do you mind calling her?”

  “Fine,” she said in a tone that indicated it was anything but. “I’ll talk to you later.” The call ended.

  He would pay for that later, he could tell. But there was nothing to be done at the moment. Jack fired the engine, then rolled out of the lot and turned south on Federal Avenue. It would have been easier to turn north and take Wilshire Boulevard toward downtown, which would have led him closer to CTU headquarters, but Wilshire was, of course, blocked, so the only way to get away from the building was to follow a maze of detours through the narrow streets lined with tiny, well-kept Spanish bungalows that had sprung up just off the main thoroughfares. It was really just Los Angeles, but they called it Holmby Hills, or Rancho Park, or something else that sounded exclusive and desirable, so that the residents all felt good about their inflated property values.

  He should have been focused on Ayman al-Libbi, or even Mercy’s take on the eco-terrorist theory. But instead he was focused on Mercy Bennet herself, although his mind alternately, almost guiltily, went from Mercy to Teri Bauer and back, like a bad news reporter giving equal time even when the topics did not merit equal weight.

  Mercy was right to hold him at arm’s length. He knew that, and not because he subscribed to some outmoded sense of decency. Half the men he knew admitted cheating on their wives, and the other half were liars. Mercy didn’t demand that he do the right thing—she just wanted assurance that she was making more than just a guest appearance in Jack’s own personal drama.

  And the truth was, he couldn’t give her that assurance. He liked her. He knew that. But he loved Teri, even when she drove him crazy. Even in the depth of his discontent he had never thought of leaving her for another woman, until Mercy appeared. She was a new temptation, different from the others that Jack had resisted, a temptation that was more than distraction, a lure that seemed to be not just temporary relief but . . . an alternative.

  And the truth was, Jack knew that in the end he was using her.

  “You know what’s really screwing you up,” Jack growled to himself. “The fact that you’re thinking of this at all. You need to focus on your job.”

  He had just finished speaking those words out loud when the pickup truck slammed into the passenger side of his car.

  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. Four Seasons Hotel, Beverly Hills

  Kasim Turkel walked into the hotel lobby with the same sense of stupefied wonder he’d felt upon entering every building since his arrival in the United States. The evidence of abundance was overwhelming. The double doors were fashioned of wrought iron and glass. The tiles in the lobby were wide and smooth, with heavy stone tables supporting enormous porcelain vases filled with flower arrangements that towered over him. Beyond the tables stood a small wooden lectern, behind which stood a tall young man in a blue jacket who smiled at him professionally.

  Instinctively Kasim hesitated until he felt Nurmamet Tuman’s hand touch his arm reassuringly.

  “Relax,” Nurmamet said softly in Uygur. “We are just visiting the bar. It is done here all the time.”

  To the man in the blue coat, Nurmamet spoke in gently accented English. “Good morning. Where is the bar please?”

  The young man pointed over Nurmamet’s shoulder. “It’s that way, sir. But I’m sorry, they’re not serving.”

  “That’s all right,” Nurmamet replied, “we are just looking for a quiet place to sit for a few minutes.”

  Kasim nodded and summoned a smile as he passed the man in the blue coat, following Nurmamet’s lead, and turned right. In this direction lay another set of double doors, this time of hand-carved wood, that opened on an opulent bar of gleaming wood flanked by deep-cushioned stools. Across from the bar, squads of tables guarded by leather chairs formed a small army. As the hotel employee had said, the bar was not open and the room was empty except for a man sitting at one of the tables, one leg crossed lazily over the other, a newspaper laid out before him and half lifted in his hands. He seemed not to have noticed the two men enter.

  Undaunted, Nurmamet walked over to him and sat down, indicating that Kasim should do likewise. The man in the chair did not look up from his newspaper. He wore a blue silk suit with pinstripes so thin Kasim had not seem them from a distance. His tie was light green and knotted into a perfect triangle. In that opulent hotel, sitting across from the man in the expensive suit, Kasim felt uncomfortably under-dressed, but Nurmamet had assured him that in Los Angeles it was sometimes fashionable to dress poorly. Attitude, he said, counted almost as much as appearance.

  Kasim watched Nurmamet, who for the first time seemed the slightest bit nervous as he recited awkwardly: “Is this your first time at the Four Seasons?”

  The well-dressed man let the newspaper fall flat and looked up at the two newcomers. His eyes bulged slightly, his lids were heavy, and there were small bags of skin beneath each one that gave him the look of someone who had recently been crying. “Enough of the code words,” he said dryly. “It’s not necessary.”

  Nurmamet looked flustered. “But Mr. al-Libbi made it clear that we needed to identify ourselves.”

  “You are not the FBI,” the man said with a smile. “I know this because you have not arrested me.”

  “We could be agents,” Kasim blurted. “We could be trying to get to your employer through you.”

  The well-dressed man turned his sad eyes toward Kasim. “Are you?”

  Kasim fidgeted and the man laughed again. “I did not think so. If you were the FBI, I would already be somewhere very unpleasant being asked questions in a very unpleasant way.” He held out his hand lazily and when, after a moment, Nurmamet and Kasim each shook it, he said casually, “I am Muhammad Abbas. If you have the rest of the money, then I can take you to Mr. al-Libbi.”

  Kasim was baffled. This wasn’t right. He looked at Nurmamet, who appeared equally confused. “This is not right. I understood that we were to meet Mr. al-Libbi here, not his assistant.”

  “Yes, but you are amateurs. Ayman al-Libbi does not take chances with amateurs.”

  “We are not—!”

  “Don’t deny it,” Abbas said calmly. “You are rank amateurs. You tell me that you might be agents. What about me? I could be an agent trying to trick you.”

  Kasim stared at him, willing his heart to stop pounding. “Are you?” he said, his voice almost steady.

  This amused Abbas. “Not bad! This one is good, Nurmamet. He is a leader where you come from, eh?” Nurmamet nodded. “Well,” he said to Kasim, “don’t be insulted. Mr. al-Libbi had urgent business to attend to, something that will make all this go more smoothly.”

  9:16 A.M. Culver City, California

  Jack woke, feeling as though he had overslept and urgently needed to be somewhere. A moment later he remembered a glimpse of a red pickup truck hurtling toward him, the spine-shivering sound of metal contorting metal, followed instantaneously by the pop of his air bag and then white blindness.

  He opened his eyes, or thought he did. He was in complete darkness. He was lying down on a hard, cool surface, rough with pebbles and coarse dirt—a concrete floor. He sat up, carefully reaching his hands outward, upward, backward into the blackness. Wherever the ceiling was, it seemed high enough, so he stood. His knees wobbled a little beneath him. Jack used his hands to give himself a cursory search—he
didn’t seem to be bleeding, although his face felt tender, probably from the air bag. His left shoulder and his abdomen ached, most likely having been pressed into the seat belt during the crash. He felt another pain, this time on his left arm, but this was different. It was extremely localized and sharp, like a dime-sized bruise at the crook of his elbow.

  Okay, Jack thought. A car crash. Now I’m here, and “here” definitely does not feel like a good place. He reached for his handgun but found that the SigSauer 9 mm was gone from his shoulder holster.

  “Your weapon will be returned to you before we are done, Agent Bauer,” said a firm but polite voice.

  Who are you? Where am I? These were the questions that popped instinctively into Jack’s mind. He didn’t ask them. The person who had put him in a dark hole would not be inclined to answer either question. Jack chose one that would get an answer. “What do you want?”

  He heard a short grunt—somewhere above him—a sound of approval. “Right to the point. I like that. The truth is, Agent Bauer, I want nothing. I mean that literally, I want nothing. To be more specific, I want you to do nothing... for, let’s say, the next twenty-four hours.”

  I’ve been kidnapped, Jack realized. Stuck in a hole somewhere. Shit.

  “So I guess I’m staying here for a while?” Jack stared up, although he could see nothing. He was trying to gauge the height from which the voice originated.

  “No,” his captor replied. “No, although I confess I considered it. It was tempting, but not really workable. I suspect that if you go missing, people will come looking for you. So I’m going to have to release you in the next few minutes.”

  “Good,” Jack said.

  Who was this guy? Unconsciously Jack recorded information gathered from the man’s speech: he was educated, confident, forward-thinking; his English was perfect, but there was a slight cadence to it, as though he was accustomed to speaking a different language.

  Holding his hands outstretched, Jack took a step forward, trying to stay light on his feet. The room did not echo, which meant it wasn’t very large. If he could find a wall, then he could find a way out.

  “Before I release you, though, I’m going need a guarantee that you do absolutely nothing for the next day.”

  “Okay. I promise.”

  The man laughed. “In a better world, that would mean something, wouldn’t it? But I’m afraid we live in this one, so I’m going to need some more assurance. Your reputation with the Counter Terrorism Unit is that you are tenacious. And I suspect you are not the kind of man who can be intentionally assaulted and kidnapped, and then simply forgive and forget.”

  Jack allowed himself to laugh. “It does put a crimp in our relationship,” he quipped. His captor was urbane and seemed to appreciate dry wit. Jack would have preferred to put a bullet in his brain, but that could come later. He took another step, then another. His shoes crunched lightly on the dirt-sprinkled concrete.

  “We are not destined to be friends,” his captor agreed. “To explain how I am going to extract a guarantee from you, I need to tell you about a virus.”

  Jack froze. At the word virus, his focus changed. Escape was now secondary. Information was a priority.

  “This virus comes in several strains. One of them, when injected into the bloodstream, begins to replicate within twelve to twenty-four hours but doesn’t show any symptoms until then. After that, it is infectious and all but incurable and it is decidedly fatal.”

  Jack became conscious of the small, unique bruise on his left arm. “You injected me with the virus,” he growled.

  The man, wherever he was, laughed. “No. From what I understand, you are not the kind of man to be blackmailed by a threat to your person. I injected your daughter.”

  9:30 A.M. CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Chris Henderson sat at the end of the conference table, staring down the row of faces on either side. He’d gotten to know most of the team members well during his stint as Director of Field Operations. They were a good team. He’d watched them perform well under severe strain in the months since he’d come on board, and he’d read case files on some of their activities before his assignment. They were an impressive bunch.

  “Tony,” he said to the speaker box squatting on the center of the table like a miniature spaceship. “Can you brief us on current activities at the Federal Building?”

  Tony Almeida’s voice resonated from the box. “We’re approximately one hour into the demonstration, and so far so good as far as riots go. LAPD estimates the crowd at over ten thousand, but they figure on twice that before noon. It’s going to start getting hotter then, too, so we may see tempers flare.”

  Tony Almeida was a sharp one, Chris thought. Even though the higher-ups in CTU continued to pressure him for budget cuts, he couldn’t imagine letting Almeida go. The guy had Agent in Charge written all over him.

  “How about your lead on Muhammad Abbas?” Chris asked. “Has Jack finished beating up cops?”

  Almeida laughed. “We lost Abbas. Jack is on his way into the office to do follow-up.”

  Nina Myers, another first-class agent, spoke up. “If that was Abbas, and if he is still doing gruntwork for al-Libbi, then Jack’s right and al-Libbi is in town. His target has to be the G8, right?”

  “Or part of it,” Almeida said. “Does it make sense for him to attack the whole summit? Al-Libbi’s last client was Iran, which has been trading arms from France, so why would they allow France to get bombed?”

  Nina Myers said, “We have to figure out who al-Libbi is working for.”

  Chris nodded. “What’s al-Libbi’s alignment these days?”

  “Money,” Nina said. “The CIA says he lost religion years ago, and now he just works for the highest bidder. Last known base of operations was Iraq, but he was booted out in early 2001 for taking a job with the Iranians. He’s pretty much a hired gun, now.”

  “Which means he could be working for anyone,” Almeida piped in. “We’re a target, of course, but with Russia here, too, I wouldn’t put it past the Chechens to go after the summit. They could easily have contacted al-Libbi.”

  “Don’t forget China,” Nina said. “Half the protestors out there are upset that the G8 is considering letting China into the club.”

  “Where’s our short list of active anti-China groups?” Chris said.

  Nina reached for the remote that controlled the conference room’s display screen. She tapped a few buttons and a list popped onto the screen. “There’s Free Taiwan and the religious group Falun Gong. According to the Chinese, there are also about forty groups in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, or what the locals like to call East Turkistan. They vary in size, and some are more violent than others, but all of them are pretty localized.”

  Chris nodded. All this had been covered in the advance work done several weeks prior to the summit. Most of the agencies involved—the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, and CTU—believed that China’s presence would cause a huge political firestorm, but not a terrorist attack. Organizations with enough muscle and sophistication to launch an attack on U.S. soil, such as al-Qaeda, would go after the United States itself or Russia. Still, it had bothered Henderson during the advance meeting when no one seemed to know anything about these eastern Chinese groups.

  “Have we gotten any more intelligence on them?” he asked.

  Jessi Bandison, one of the analysts, spoke up, but she didn’t look at Chris. “Not really. The Chinese government plays an interesting game. They work very hard to report on the horrible things that these separatist groups do, but they refuse to give out any real information about them.”

  “Do we know if any of them operate in the U.S. at all?” Chris asked.

  “Only one,” Nina said. “ETIM, or Eastern Turkistan Independence Movement. But they’re small-scale, never done anything big even in their own region, and the CIA says they have no funding. Their cause isn’t close enough to al-Libbi’s heart to get him to work for free, and there’s no way they ca
n pay his salary.”

  Chris sighed. “Well, let’s put someone on it anyway. Where’s Jack?”

  9:39 A.M. PST Culver City

  Blood pounded in Jack’s ears. He felt his fingers flex involuntarily as he imagined squeezing the life out of this man, whoever he was.

  “She’ll be perfectly all right, Agent Bauer,” said his captor. “I have an antidote.”

  “Let her go. Let me see her,” Jack demanded.

  “I don’t have her. You’re missing the point. I know how these stories go. There’s a murder, or someone goes missing, and all of a sudden the cat is out of the bag. No one is going to go missing, Agent Bauer. Your daughter is going to go about her day. She doesn’t know she has been exposed to the virus. She won’t even become contagious for twenty-four hours. I am going to release you now, and you’re going to go about your day. You are going back to your office, and you are going to sit there for the rest of the day. But you are going to stop your line of investigation. Tomorrow you will receive a small package with the antidote. Give it to your daughter by seven o’clock tomorrow morning, and all will be well. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I understand,” Jack growled.

  “Good. I would like to tell you one more thing, and then our business will be concluded. I will be watching you, Agent Bauer. And I will be watching your daughter. I will know where you go, and where she goes. So what I expect you to do is go back to your office and sit there all day. If you leave it, I will know. If you try to get your daughter to a hospital, I will know. You will never hear from me again, and your daughter will die. Goodbye.”

  Jack heard a faint scuffle—clothing sliding along wood. A few seconds later there was a heavy thud, the sound of a circuit breaker being thrown. Then bright lights came on. Jack, after sitting in the dark, was blinded. He blinked, waiting for his pupils to contract. When he could see again, he found himself in a small, bare basement with a concrete floor. Dust covered the floor, and cobwebs hung in the corners. The stairs, or what was left of them, were broken and rotted, but a brand-new aluminum ladder climbed from the dusty floor to the next level.