by John Whitman
From the room next door, he heard a crash and a thud. The Greater Nation thugs were prepping Ramin for some more intense questioning. They were going to torture him, Jack was sure. The irony didn’t escape him—that these zealots who believed the government overreached its powers now far overreached their own. In the end, he thought, people were all the same. They wanted what they wanted, and they made and broke rules to achieve their own satisfaction.
The burning smell grew stronger, and he heard something pop. But it was taking too long. The plastic was thick and the lamp was weak. It would never cut through before the militia men thought to check on their captives. Jack began to pull and wriggle his hands. If the plastic had been heated enough to stretch . . .
In the next room, one of the militia men said, “This is your last chance—”
“Fuck it, no last chances,” said another one.
A muffled scream of agony penetrated the wall. The desk lamp in the library flickered on and off. When the light became steady again, they could all hear a sob from the other room.
Jack slid his hands back and forth. The plastic had stretched. Now he needed lubricant.
Jack crouched down a little, which wasn’t easy with his ankles hobbled, and pressed his wrists against the edge of the desk. Gritting his teeth, he slid the side of his wrist along the edge. It hurt, but he could tell he hadn’t cut the skin. He rubbed his wrist up and down a few times, ignoring the pain, then he slid his arm across the desk edge again. This time the pain was sharp, like a sudden burn, then he felt warmth ooze down to his palms and fingers. Blood, until it started to dry, was very slick. He started to rub his wrists up and down again, letting the blood spread. He pushed his elbows as close together as possible, making a straight line up and down relative to the plastic strip, straightened his fingers and palms, and pulled. His right hand slid up and out of the rip hobble. He brought his hands around and rubbed his wrists. The cut he’d made was deep, and still oozing. He compressed it against his chest as he shook the hobble off his other hand. His legs would be easier. He searched the desk drawer, hoping for a letter opener. He was rewarded with a pair of scissors instead. He attacked the plastic binding on his feet—even though they were sharp, the scissors wore, rather than sliced, through the hobble. Nothing short of wire cutters would cut the cord in one snip. The scissors, in fact, broke at the hinge. Jack swore under his breath, sensing that his time was growing short. He picked up one of the scissors blades and sawed at the plastic. Finally it surrendered and he was free.
The others looked at him expectantly. “Now my wife,” the man said bravely.
Jack shook his head. There was no point in trying to cut them all free. It would take too long. Besides, he didn’t like being on defense.
Jack reversed his grip on the scissors and stalked toward the door.
“Tell me names, and tell me where they are,” one of the militia men ordered.
“Aaghh!” The lights flickered again and a muffled cry followed.
They were electrocuting him. Jack knew the procedure—the cord ripped from an electrical appliance but still plugged into the wall, the protective coating stripped from the ends of the wire, and a little water splashed on the most sensitive parts of the victims’ skin made for a simple but effective instrument of torture.
“You don’t like it on your balls. I can always put it in your eye instead.”
Jack started out the door.
“Okay, okay!” Ramin Rafizadeh yelled.
Jack stopped.
“I’ll tell you what I know.”
This is good, Jack thought. Let them do the dirty work. He listened closely.
“Tell us where your terrorist friends are. Tell us what they’re going to do.”
“I don’t have any terrorist friends—aghh!—I’m telling the truth, please, I’m telling the truth. I don’t know any terrorists. But I have heard some people talk, just talk, that’s all—aghh!—about some Saudis coming up from South America.”
There is a quality of sheer terror in the human voice that is hard for most people to imitate. The best counter-interrogation specialists can mimic it, but for most victims it is impossible to simulate. It swells up from the gut, rising through the body as it rises in pitch until it escapes from the mouth like the very soul is under pressure. And it is at that moment that the torturer knows, with his hands and his instruments only millimeters from an eye or a genital, that he has broken through the walls of defiance and heard the truth.
Jack heard that same quality of terror in Ramin’s voice. He was telling all he knew.
Jack felt eyes on him and he glanced backward. Nazila and the others were all staring in horror—not at the sounds coming from the other room, but at him. He focused on Nazila and he read her thoughts through her eyes and her expression. You monster, she was thinking, you’re letting them torture him. You’re torturing him through them to learn what he knows.
Yes, Jack thought. That’s what I’m doing. And he knew that in the world they came from, what he was doing was wrong.
“There’s more,” one of the torturers said. “That’s nothing.”
“No, no, no!” Ramin screamed as the lights flickered again. “That’s all I know, and I don’t even know if that’s true. I just heard someone talking, I swear!”
Jack moved. He slid out of the library door, across the short distance of the hallway and into the room next door. When attacking it was best to use surprise, speed, and overwhelming force. Two out of three would have to do, Jack thought. He burst into the room and drank in data without stopping. Three men. Two of them leaning over Ramin Rafizadeh, who was tied to a chair. One closest to Jack, by the door, with his back to the entrance. Jack moved fast, and by the time one of the two torturers had looked up and shouted in alarm, Jack had buried the scissors blade upward under the base of the near man’s skull. He jiggled it a little, scrambling the brains, and the man became a rag doll. He let the corpse fall, jerking the scissors blade out and lunging forward. It penetrated the throat of another militia man, who was just raising his weapon. The man shouted, but no sound came out except a gurgling from his throat. The third man, on Jack’s left, had his weapon leveled. Jack’s left hand shot out, grabbing the barrel of the pistol and pushing it off line. Two rounds thundered out of the muzzle. Jack ignored the deafening sound of gunfire close to his head and punched the scissors blade into the gunman’s sternum. It stuck there, so Jack let go of it and, still pushing the pistol away, elbowed the man in the throat. He dropped to his knees. Jack snapped the gun from his grip and whirled. The second man, one hand still clutching his throat, shakily raised his gun in the other and fired. Jack dropped to one knee and the rounds punctured the wall behind him. He fired twice and red blossoms appeared on the militia man’s blue overalls until he fell dead.
Jack waited on bended knee, listening for footsteps running toward them or away. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. But he could hear no one else in the house. Rising, he moved over to Ramin Rafizadeh and, with one eye still on the door, looked the young man over. He was thin, weak, and terrified. Blisters marred both cheeks, just below his eyes. His pants had been pulled down and his shoes had been removed. He’d been burned on the soles of his feet, his thighs, and his testicles. The gunfire had terrified him. He was sobbing.
Not a terrorist, Jack thought.
He moved back to the militia man he had elbowed in the throat. The scissors still protruded from his chest, but he was alive. He stared at Jack incredulously. “You stabbed me,” he whispered hoarsely. “You stabbed me.”
“Don’t forget the elbow,” Jack reminded him. “Right now your throat is probably swelling up like a grapefruit. In a few minutes you’ll choke to death. I’m the only one who can save you.”
The man’s eyes widened. His rasping breath told Jack that he agreed with that assessment.
“If you want me to call for help in time, you tell me where Professor Rafizadeh is right now.” The man started to shake h
is head. “Right. Now.”
“Need ...need me,” the militia man rasped. “I call...eight—thirty ...or he dies.”
Jack put his hand on the protruding scissors blade and leaned gently. “Where?”
The man gasped. “C-Culver City!” He rasped out an address off of Sawtelle.
“Thanks.” They’d taken his cell phone, so Jack ran to the bedroom phone and dialed quickly. When a CTU operator picked up, he said, “This is Bauer. Patch me through to Sharpton.”
Kelly picked up seconds later. “Jack, wh—?”
“No time. I’ve got Ramin Rafizadeh. I’ve also got possible terrorists inside the U.S., and dead bodies. I need field agents and a medical team right away.” He rattled off the address and hung up before Kelly could ask anything else.
He turned to Ramin. “You’re okay, now. I’m a Federal agent.”
Jack left the scissors in the militia man’s body— pulling it out would only cause more bleeding—and ran downstairs. There was a spare room off the kitchen, and there he found a simple tool kit that included wire cutters. He ran back upstairs, past Ramin’s room, and into the library. The four prisoners’ terror turned to relief when they saw him enter.
He snipped them free one by one. “Ramin’s okay,” he said to Nazila as he freed her.
“You sick bastard!” she said in reply. “You let them hurt him!”
“You’re welcome,” he said sarcastically, cold and defensive and still adrenalized from having guns fired at his head. “They’d still be doing it if I hadn’t stopped them.”
Her hate-filled eyes lingered on him a moment, then she rushed past him to help her brother.
Jack checked his watch. Almost eight o’clock. He had a little over half an hour to save Nazila’s father.
7:51 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Kelly slammed the phone down. Jack Bauer seemed hell-bent on pissing him off as much as possible today. Annoyed, he spouted orders at three different people to get medical team and law enforcement to the Beverly Hills address. He also ordered a holding cell to be made ready for Ramin Rafizadeh, the living dead man who was and was not a terrorist.
Kelly rubbed his temples. He felt a headache press against the inside of his skull like a dam wanting to burst. I need food, he thought.
Instead of getting up, he stared at his computer screen. He was still hacked into the Attorney General’s computer, and his virus program was still deleting files. He had taken no small amount of pleasure in watching the files disappear one by one. He didn’t know what they were, and he didn’t care. Any files important to the government would be backed up elsewhere. This was just Kelly’s own personal jab at the AG, who had tried to ruin the career of someone he lo—someone he liked very much.
His eyes meandered down the screen and tripped over the words Greater Nation. Kelly blinked. Greater Nation was the name of the militia group Jack had infiltrated. Why would the AG have a file on them?
Kelly clicked on the file. It opened up and he saw a list of notes—dates, names, times—all connected to the Greater Nation militia group. There was a lot of information recorded here.
“Holy shit,” Kelly murmured. He glanced at the corner of his screen, where the progress report for his virus showed that complete destruction of all files was nearly complete. He couldn’t stop it. He’d never built a stop command into his virus, not even a back door. It was going to eat that Greater Nation file along with everything else.
“Excuse me, Kelly?”
Jessi Bandison had come to his door. She was leaning against the frame, her head tilted slightly to one side. He smelled the scent of jasmine, freshly applied.
“Do you think—” she swallowed—“I’m off in a few. Would you want to grab a coffee before I go?”
“Not now!” he said. The anger in his voice had nothing to do with her, but it still hit her like a slap in the face. “I’m sorry,” he said, no less sharply, “I just have a problem here. Can we talk later?”
“Okay,” she said, and retreated out of view.
Kelly scanned the open document, his eyes searching for anything of value. Two phrases leaped out at him.
. . . GREATER NATION TIP REGARDING POSSIBLE ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALIST ACTIVITY IN UNITED STATES . . .
and
...AGENT FRANK NEWHOUSE SUCCESSFULLY INSERTED INTO GREATER NATION . . .
Then the screen went blank.
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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 A.M. AND 9 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
8:00 A.M. PST Culver City, California
Culver City is a stone’s throw from Beverly Hills— you can see it just to the south from the tops of some of the nicer mansions. But distance means nothing in Los Angeles. Los Angelenos do not measure distance by how many miles one location is from another. They measure everything by time. Beverly Hills is not fifteen miles from the ocean, it’s about a half hour. UCLA is not ten miles from the airport, it’s about an hour. Someone who lives over the Santa Monica Mountains, in the widespread San Fernando Valley, lives only eight miles from posh West Los Angeles.
But the miles meant nothing—it was the time it took
to arrive that was significant.
And the time, of course, depends on the traffic.
In the 1970s, and even through the 1980s, there had been a rhythm to L.A.’s traffic—morning rush hour was from around 7:30 a.m. to 10 a.m., and then it picked up again around 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. or so. The times in between were, for the most part, free. But by the mid nineties all semblance of rush hour was gone—it was gridlock on the freeways and surface streets from early morning until late evening. If you wanted open roads in downtown Los Angeles, then you had to wait until 5 a.m. on Christmas morning.
So at 8:05 on Wednesday morning, Jack found himself shucking and cutting through Beverly Hills, headed toward Culver City and an address he probably could have hit with a stone if he had time to bend down and pick one up.
He had recovered his gun and his phone, then waited until the medical team and the additional field agents had arrived. As the adrenaline levels in his body eased up, he asked Nazila if he could speak with her. The girl was reluctant to leave her brother’s side at first, but after a moment she relented and they went out to the front of the house. He wanted to speak to her there for two reasons. First, he’d know when his backup arrived. Second, she would be less inclined to make a scene on the front lawn.
“What do you have to say to me,” she said softly but angrily. “How dare you sit there and let them torture him?”
Jack nodded. “Yes, I did. I admit that. But I did it because I knew he was going to be interrogated by someone. Nazila, whether you like it or not, his name ended up on a contact list used by terrorists in a ter
rorist training camp.”
“But he’s not—”
“I believe you,” Jack interrupted. “I believe you.”
Nazila’s eyes widened like saucers. “You...do?”
“Yes,” he replied. “But only because of what I heard in there.” He thought again of the sheer terror in Ramin’s voice, the fear that did not allow for lies. “I know you hate me, Nazila, but just for a minute put yourself in my position. Finding terrorists is my job. And all of them, and all the people associated with them, lie all the time. Every one of them lies, and some of them are dressed up like normal people, like professors and grad students and journalists. It isn’t enough for me to have someone, even someone like you, say that he’s not a terrorist. I need proof, and it’s my job to keep working until I get that proof. Because if I stop too early, then somewhere in the world, maybe right here in Los Angeles, people die. If I had gone in there right away, then Ramin would end up right now in a holding cell being questioned by our people.”
The girl touched her fingertips to her mouth. “Are you saying ...are you saying that won’t happen now? That he can go free?”
Jack shook his head. “I�
�m sure they’ll want to question him. But they won’t put pressure on him. I’ll tell my people what I’ve learned, and he should be okay.”
Nazila’s shoulders dropped, and tension seemed to leave her as though exorcised from her body. But just as quickly, new worry filled her. “Am I . . . in trouble for lying? My father—”
Jack had considered that already. That would be up to Ryan Chappelle, not him, and Chappelle was a vindictive ass. He might pursue them for obstruction of justice simply for denying that they knew where Ramin was. But the truth was that the only person with a right to be angry was Jack himself. He’d pushed Ibrahim Rafizadeh to the extreme, sensing (correctly, it turned out) there was more to his story, only to get slapped down by his own department and sent into CTU exile. But of course during his exile he had already foiled an incident of domestic terrorism and come around full circle to the same leads that had made him an outcast. It was like a puzzle he’d finished by accident—completed but unsatisfying.
He struggled for something to say, caught unexpectedly in a maelstrom of emotions—compassion for her, anger at her deception, guilt in realizing that Ramin was probably innocent despite everything, primal anger at being shot at by the Greater Nation . . .
He looked at Nazila, who was already staring up at him, her dark eyes soft and deep. She watched him as though his emotional struggle was a drama played out clearly across his face. The warmth of her look gave him pause. He was a reader of looks and moods—it was vital to his profession. A poker player read bluffs, a psychologist probed for the secret release of emotions. Jack read the change of expression, the hardening of an eye that preceded the drawing of a gun or the start of a lie. In his career, he had read the looks of killers, madmen, and patriots. The expression on Nazila’s face was one he had not seen, at least not in a long, long time. She offered him a warmth that was more pure than compassion or sympathy. It was understanding. And in that moment Jack, who had wanted only to alter her emotional state, found himself being altered. He had not had someone, not even his wife, bless him with that look of pure, unconditional understanding, in as long as he could remember.