by John Whitman
Barry heaved a sigh of relief. “Thanks. I can’t believe it. I just did my first network piece. Screw that anchor position. This could take me national!”
8:02 P.M. PST 45,000 Feet Above Kansas
“Mustang 1-9 to Command, requesting bogey dope.”
“Mustang 1-9, alter course to zero-three-two, throttle to full. Relaying the target to your computer now.”
Lundquist turned his joystick, the F-16’s fly-bywire controls responding like a dream. His radar screen shivered and reset, and he saw the tiny blip his system hadn’t picked up before. That was it? He wasn’t picking up any heat signals, no electronics...
“Command, can you tell me—”
“It’s a weather balloon, Mustang. Shoot it down. Over.”
Lundquist read the target’s altitude and rate of ascent and didn’t need to be told the obvious. “Roger. Mustang 1-9 going supersonic.”
8:05 P.M. PST San Francisco Airport
Debrah Drexler walked away from the desk of her charter airline in frustration, reaching for her cell phone to make a call when it started ringing. The display flashed the number for her Washington, D.C., office.
“Drexler,” she said. “Did you guys know that flights were grounded?”
Juwan Burke said, “It just happened a few minutes ago, Senator. Do you have a television there?”
Drexler looked around. The charter service terminal wasn’t as large as the main terminals and gates at SFO, but was posh. There was a plasma screen set into the wall, currently broadcasting CNN. “Yes.”
“You should watch FOX right now.”
Drexler hung up. “Excuse me,” she said, walking back to the clerk at the counter. “Can you change that to FOX?”
The girl behind the counter made a face. “If you really want me to...”
She aimed a remote at the screen. The picture flashed and changed to FOX, and the sober image of Attorney General James Quincy appeared.
“. . . questions should be directed to Homeland Security more than Justice. But I can tell you this. My understanding is that the terrorists who’ve caused this crisis, if the threat is indeed real, have been in this country for months. In fact, the agents assigned to the case originally pursued them six months ago, but their investigation was hamstrung by legalities. I feel like I’m shouting at the ocean now, but if Congress can’t see why we need to pass the NAP Act now, I don’t know what they’re thinking.”
Debrah felt something inside her wither.
8:07 P.M. PST Santa Monica
Nina Myers decided it would have been easier to track down a ghost.
While the boys were playing with their toys back at CTU, she and Jessi Bandison had taken on the grunt work, pursuing the mysterious Frank Newhouse. Jessi had been poring over Newhouse’s CIA file, checking it for any loose ends. For the last hour, Nina had kept in touch with her by telephone while she tracked down leads pulled off the fingerprints. She’d gone back to the condominium and interviewed the maid and the maintenance workers. All three recognized a picture of Frank from his CIA file, all three knew him only as Pat Henry, owner of the condominium, and said he was rarely there. That was it. Almost all the other sets of fingerprints were dead ends. That was the frustrating aspect about having fingerprint or DNA evidence. To catch someone with biometrics, the person had to be in the system.
Meanwhile, her quarry’s life as Frank Newhouse was full of information, but none of it was helpful.
“I can’t find anything on him that doesn’t check out,” Jessi had confessed a half hour earlier. “The CIA record is pretty much what you’d expect. We had the FBI investigate all his points of contact, but he’s not there.”
“Has the CIA run down any more information on this Babak Farrah? The one who was supposedly his Iranian contact?”
“Nothing more than we’ve got already.”
Nina tapped her knuckles on the steering wheel. She didn’t believe this; it wasn’t logical. Frank Newhouse might have fooled the Greater Nation idiots easily enough, but no one could make this big a play with the United States government without making at least some mistakes. There was a loose end somewhere, and Nina was determined to find it.
“What about the guy Jack brought in, Farid something. Has he been interrogated?”
At her desk at CTU, Jessi looked around. Every eyeball she sought was glued to a computer screen. “I don’t think so.”
“Get someone on it. He knew this Farrah, maybe he’s a lead.” Nina pulled up in front of an apartment building off of Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica. “I’m at my next stop, Jess, one of the possibles on that partial print. Call me if Farid gives up anything.”
Nina hurried out of the car, wanting to get this over with. She had already burned through the likely leads and was now working on the unlikely. Forensics had pulled a partial print off a white tub Newhouse (or whoever he was) had used to make a bomb. The problem with a smudged print was that, even if the subject was in the database, it might not match. Jamey Farrell had run a program that brought up possible matches, but there were more than two hundred names in Los Angeles alone. On a hunch, Nina had broken the list down into names on L.A.’s West Side. She had no real reason for doing this other than her gut. The Frank Newhouse who worked with the terrorists seemed to prefer downtown and East Los Angeles, since that Newhouse had worked with Farrah, Farid, and Julio Juarez, and had rented an apartment for the terrorists near USC. But the other Frank Newhouse owned a condo (under the name Pat Henry) on the West Side.
One of the names on her possibles list was for Matilda Swenson. Nina reviewed her rap sheet, such as it was. Matilda was a pretty blond, younger in the mug shot but she’d be thirty-six now. In fact, Nina noticed, today was Matilda’s birthday. She was an artist who’d been busted twice. The first time was in ’94 for marijuana possession. This was hardly an indictment, but it was enough to get her into the system. What intrigued Nina most, aside from her West Side address, was the second arrest. This was for disturbing the peace during the recent World Bank conference in Los Angeles. Apparently, Matilda didn’t much appreciate the centralization of power. In that one line, Nina heard the faint echoes of Brett Marks’s Greater Nation platform.
Nina climbed the steps to number 204 and knocked.
8:09 P.M. PST 49,500 Feet Above Kansas
“Approaching maximum altitude.” Lundquist heard the voice of Sam Amato, his wingman, in his ear. Sam’s voice was steady and professional. But behind it, Lundquist sensed the danger Sam was feeling.
“Roger.” He looked at his readouts. He was right under the target, then past it. He banked hard left and came around, lifting his nose up. He couldn’t see the balloon in the dark, but his radar could. It was more than fifty-one thousand feet and climbing.
With his nose still pointed up, Lundquist selected AIM-9N Sidewinder missiles and, just like in a video game, guided the small square pointer right over the target. “I can’t get good tone,” he said. “Switching to guns.”
“Forty-nine thousand, eight hundred feet,” Sam warned.
“Roger. Pull back to forty thousand, Sam. I got this one.”
“Bobby—”
“Don’t worry,” Lundquist said with a laugh, “you think I’m going to let anything go wrong right before my kid is born?”
Sam Amato didn’t laugh. He broke right and tipped his nose to the ground.
8:10 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
No one spoke. Jack watched the screen as the fast-moving blip representing the F-16 pulled right on top of the smaller, slower blip that represented disaster.
8:11 P.M. PST 50,400 Feet Above Kansas
Lundquist felt his engines lurch. They’d been chuffing at him for the last ten seconds. He ignored them. He came up underneath the balloon, and when the crosshairs of his 20mm Gatling guns fell across the blip on his screen, he opened fire.
8:12 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack Bauer held his breath as the two radar blips came toge
ther briefly, then broke apart. One of the contacts—the F-16—fell away. The other vanished.
“Target destroyed.”
The room erupted in cheers. Hands slapped Jack on the back and shook his arms. Kelly Sharpton, his hands still bandaged, threw his arms around Jack in a friendly hug.
8:12 P.M. PST 50,200 Feet Above Kansas
The F-16 bucked slightly like a startled horse. Then the engines cut out all together. Jets feed on air, which is why the ceiling for most fighter jets is fifty thousand feet. To go higher than that, you need a rocket.
Lundquist had been flying nose up. When the power cut out, the F-16 tipped backward, and he found himself upside down, his plane flat on its back as it fell back toward home. He didn’t panic, but he did feel annoyed. He was a captain in the United States Air Force and this was his airplane. He was not about to have it scratched up by something as stupid as a lack of oxygen.
Lundquist initiated his relight procedure. Every display in his cockpit twinkled like Christmas. Then he felt the familiar rumble under his feet and heard the deep-throated roar of the engine behind him, and he grinned.
The grin fell away from his face the next instant when something clanged through the guts of the F-16. Lundquist knew immediately that it was foreign object damage, and he thought ironically that the only foreign object up this high was the goddamned thing he’d been shooting at. His engine groaned at him. “Command, this is Mustang 1-9,” he said calmly. “I’ve got FOD to the engine.”
Alarms went off like klaxons all around him. “My compressor is—shit!” He knew what was coming next and he hit the eject button. Small explosive charges popped the canopy off his plane, and a half second later his seat was blown out of the cockpit. At the same time, the F-16 turned into a ball of fire that enveloped him. He blew into the careening canopy and slammed his head, helmet and all, into the Plexiglas.
As the world went dark around him, Bob Lundquist wondered if it was a boy or a girl.
8:15 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
The entire staff of CTU Los Angeles watched in silent horror as the F-16’s radar signature plummeted toward the ground.
“Eject, eject,” someone whispered.
The radar screen gave no sign that he ever ejected.
“Oh my god,” Jamey Farrell whispered. “That pilot...”
They listened over the intercom as a control tower in Kansas tried to raise the F-16. The words “Mustang 1-9... Mustang 1-9 . . .” until the words became a lament.
Jack allowed himself a moment of silence, a moment of remorse. Then he steeled himself. He had sent men to die, and had watched them die, before. He reminded himself why that man had died, what he had died for. Then he said hoarsely, “Tell the other pilot to confirm the target is down.”
Jamey Farrell looked at him as though he was a monster. “Jack, that pilot . . .”
“Tell him!”
Someone relayed the query, which was relayed to the second F-16 pilot, Sam Amato, who confirmed.
Jack nodded in satisfaction. “Nice job everyone,” he said resolutely.
Then he turned away from everyone, down the hallway toward the holding cells. When he was alone in the dim passageway, he gritted his teeth to bite back tears.
8:20 P.M. PST Santa Monica
Nina walked around the building, then walked back up the stairs to Matilda’s apartment. There was no back door. Nina tried to peek into the window. Through a crack in the drapes, she saw an easel and the back of a canvas. Matilda was a painter.
“Can I help you?”
Nina looked up toward a young man, maybe twenty, in a BareNaked Ladies T-shirt and jeans.
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m looking for Matilda Swenson. This is her apartment, right?”
“Yeah,” the kid said in that sardonic tone that only the young can master. “I’m sort of the manager. I guess she’s not here, which is why the door doesn’t open when you knock.”
Nina smirked. “Thing is, when the doors don’t open, I usually knock them down.” She showed him her badge. “Federal Agent Nina Myers. Can you open the door for me, Mr. Manager?”
He did. Nina walked into a sparse but elegant apartment with hardwood floors, Roman shades, and minimalist furniture. There was a two-seat red velvet couch, an ultra-thin flat-panel television mounted on a stand on the floor. There was no dining table, just two stools pushed up against a built-in bar in the kitchen. Almost all the space had been designed to allow room for paintings, and paintings were everywhere. There were small canvases and large ones; some were framed but most just leaned against walls near corners. Oddly, none of them hung on the walls, which had been painted seafoam green.
“She’s a painter,” said Mr. Manager, hanging out in the doorway behind her.
“How well do you know her?” Nina asked.
“Just sort of hello,” he said, waving to show what he meant. “She stays in a lot when she’s painting, I guess.”
Nina thumbed through a couple of paintings. Matilda favored a Picasso-esque style, but her shadings moved a little more toward pastel. The effect wasn’t very pleasing. Horses had become a theme for her. There were galloping horses, horses at rest, and horses with foals. But all the horses were done in that piecemeal, surreal style, with each part of the horses treated as its own unique shape, rather than as part of the whole creature.
“I’m not sure I like it,” Nina said.
Mr. Manager laughed. “I don’t think her boyfriend does, either.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, he burned one of the paintings. It was a painting of him, I think. So either he was sacrificing it to the gods, or . . .” He didn’t seem to have enough energy to finish the sentence.
“He did? You saw him?”
“Yeah. He burned it in the alley. That’s where my apartment looks. I get the crappy one, but it’s free.”
“Can I see that painting?”
“Why’d you want to see it?” he said, looking at her like she was the idiot. “I told you, he burned it. It’s a bunch of ashes now.”
“Right. Have you seen Matilda this evening? Since he burned the painting?”
“Nope.”
Nina nodded. She opened the folder she was carrying and pulled out a picture of Frank Newhouse. “Any chance her boyfriend looks like this?”
8:41 P.M. PST Santa Monica
“Jessi, it’s Nina,” she said urgently. “I need your help right away.”
“Nina, I’m already searching as fast as I can. There’s nothing on Newhouse except his regular service record—”
“Forget that. I need you to get all the information you can on Matilda Swenson. What I want most is a tag on her cell phone. If it’s on, I want to know where she is right now.”
Before calling, Nina had dug through a small file drawer that held Matilda’s bills and found statements for her Verizon wireless account. Nina read off the account number. “Get linked up with them right away. And let’s just hope her phone is on.”
Nina paced back and forth, tapping her cell phone in her hand as she tried to think. Frank Newhouse had a second life, one that wasn’t on the grid, and Matilda was part of it. Find Matilda and you find Frank, or at least a little more about him.
Mr. Manager still stood in the doorway, leaning lazily against the doorjamb and watching her.
“Aren’t you going to ask what this is all about?”
The young man blinked at her with heavily lidded eyes. “You’re with the government right?”
“Yep.”
“Is it possible that what you’re looking for might kill me?”
“It’s possible.”
“Then I don’t want to know about it.”
Nina’s phone rang. “What have you got?”
Jessi spoke quickly. “We pinged Swenson’s cell phone. It’s on, but the signal is weak. It’s coming from somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains, about eight miles northwest of you, near a fire road off of Mulholland Drive.”
Nina knew the area. The entire Santa Monica Mountain Range was a wilderness corridor for Los Angeles. Although the mountaintops were only a mile or two from the city, they were wild and covered in brush. It was a nice place for a picnic, but how many people picnicked at eight o’clock on Wednesday evening? “Call L.A. Sheriff Mountain Rescue. We need to get up there right away.”
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 P.M. AND 10 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
9:00 P.M. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
Attorney General James Quincy returned to his hotel room. He wasn’t on the Secret Service’s short list for VIPs in case of a crisis, but he had been moved to a secure location by the rest of the security staff. Pulling at his tie, he sat down in a chair and turned on the television, flipping through the news stations. The lead story was, of course, the crisis itself, including details of the grounding of air traffic, the loss of the F-16, and theories (all wrong) about the nature of the threat itself. But slowly, over the course of the next few minutes, Quincy heard it start:
“...why weren’t these terrorists stopped at the border...”
“. . . in the country for months without being uncovered...”
“. . . current procedures inadequate to deal with the global threat...”
Quincy smiled. He couldn’t have said it better himself.
9:14 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Jack received calls from the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of the CIA, and the President of the United States.
“Nice work, Agent Bauer,” President Barnes said with a laugh. “You have the thanks of a grateful nation.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jack said.
“But no raise. I’m trying to reduce the debt.”
“I understand, Mr. President.”
Barnes hung up.
Kelly Sharpton whistled. “Jack Bauer, super spy!”
Jack shook his head. “Do we have a recovery team out there?”
Kelly nodded. “ETA is about five minutes.”