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Tony contemplated Dobyns’s claims. The man was unreliable at best and likely to say just about anything to save his own life. Glancing around, Tony figured the answers to a lot of questions were probably right here in this room—including evidence of Dobyns’s veracity where Lesser was concerned.
“Please don’t kill me, Tony. I can help you. I can get you out of here, across the border. You’d be crazy to off the only guy who can help you. You know you don’t want to kill me...”
Dobyns kept talking, but Tony had stopped listening. There were a lot of reasons to shoot the man. His betrayal. Fay’s brutal murder. Turning Tony over to be tortured at the hands of the Chechens. His part in whatever scheme of terror was about to go down.
Yeah, Tony had a lot of reasons to kill Ray Dobyns. But in the end, the reason he finally pulled the trigger was to shut him the hell up.
6:29:53 P.M. PDT Valerie Dodge Modeling Agency Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills
Rush hour traffic was heavy on Tinsel Town’s glorified strip mall for obscenely expensive shopping. If you wanted a fifteen hundred dollar pair of shoes or a ten million dollar necklace, Rodeo Drive was the street for you. It was also the address for the lead Frank Castalano had given him.
Six blocks from the Valerie Dodge Modeling Agency, Jack dialed a number. The phone was answered on the first ring.
“Hello,” said Jack. “I need to speak with Ms. Valerie Dodge. It’s a matter of some importance. My name is—”
“Ms. Dodge is unavailable. Please call during business hours.”
The line went dead. The next call Jack made was to Jamey Farrell. “I need to you to check the IRS records for a Valerie Dodge Modeling Agency, CEO Valerie Dodge.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I need to know the name of a supplier. Someone Valerie Dodge’s agency works with often. Maybe the name of a company she uses as a major deduction.”
Jamey paused. “How much time can you give me? Ryan’s on my back. We’re about to run a diagnostic on Lesser’s virus program.”
“I need the information, Jamey, and I need it now.”
“Wait!” she cried. “I can use Fay Hubley’s bloodhound program. With Lesser here, all those megabits are going to waste. Let me just change the search parameters...”
A minute later, Jamey had the files Jack needed. “This program is amazing. ...Okay, I have an A.J. Milne Fashions, on Sepulveda.”
“Can you possibly cross check that company’s records with the overnight carriers, Federal Delivery, that kind of thing?”
“With Fay’s program I can . . .” After a moment’s pause, she said, “Okay, I have a match. Federal Delivery had nine priority packages in Valerie Dodge’s name, all of them delivered today to the Chamberlain Auditorium.”
“Today?”
“Yeah, Jack.”
“That will do. I’ll get back to you.”
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Jack pulled up and parked in front of Valerie Dodge Modeling. The woman’s office occupied the first floor of a faux-adobe building. There were no windows in the front of the building and the door was locked. Jack saw the intercom and pressed the bell. He buzzed three times before a voice crackled from the speaker. Jack recognized the woman’s voice. It was the same person he’d just spoken with on the phone.
“We’re closed,” she said.
“This is Federal Delivery. A delivery to the Chamberlain Auditorium was refused. We’re returning the package to the sender.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Jack moved close to the door, drew his Tactical. A woman walking her poodle saw the gun and moved quickly from the scene. Jack heard the lock click. The knob turned and the door opened a crack. There was no chain in place and Jack kicked open the door. It crashed against a blond woman and she flew backward, striking her head against the wall. Jack moved through the doorway, weapon ready as he scanned the office for threats.
There were two people in the whole place: the blond woman he’d knocked senseless, and a female corpse that had been unceremoniously dumped in a corner. The blond woman was lying still. Jack leveled his weapon at her, kicked the gun out of her hand.
He searched the office, saw a handbag on a chair. He rifled through it, found a wallet, and ID. The picture of Valerie Dodge matched the face of the corpse.
He noticed the computer on the desk, print outs stacked up around it. On the monitor he saw a schematic similar to the one they’d printed out at architect Nawaf Sanjore’s home. He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, saw the woman on the floor shifting, heard her groan.
“What are these plans on the screen?” he called to her. “What are you up to?”
The woman wiped a trickle of blood off her cheek, saw her gun was gone. She seemed to realize she was helpless, trapped.
“Why did you murder Valerie Dodge? What are these plans for?” Jack repeated.
The woman moved to sit up, adjust her clothing.
“Answer me,” barked Jack. He moved toward her, pointing the Tactical.
The woman simply smirked. “You can kill me, but you’re too late to stop us.”
Her smile turned radiant, eyes bright. Suddenly she looked away, bit down on something. Jack saw her jaw move, heard the crunch of the capsule in her mouth. With a gasp, the blond woman began jerking spastically, legs kicking wildly, foam flecking her mouth.
“No!” Jack shouted. He leaped toward her, reached into her mouth to pull out the poison. He found bits of glass on her bloody tongue. The woman’s eyes went wide and she gurgled. With a final spasm, she died. Jack checked for a pulse, found none.
He gazed at her young, lovely face, and the smile of pure ecstasy that remained after all life had fled.
Then Jack stood up, crossed the room. He slumped down in the office chair and studied the computer screen. Within a few seconds, he found the text box that identified the plans he was looking at. Heart racing, he called Ryan Chappelle.
“Ryan. Valerie Dodge is dead—murdered. Someone was in her office, using her computer. There are
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schematics on the monitor, part of the same plans Nina found—”
“We’ve already got a situation here, Jack. Can’t this wait?”
“Ryan. You have to listen to me. These plans. They’re blueprints for the Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium. Whatever is happening there is already in motion. Our time may have already run out.”
6:42:07 P.M. PDT CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Richard Lesser leaned back in an office chair. He sat at a vacant computer station, behind Jamey, Milo, and Doris Soo Min, observing their activity with detachment.
The three CTU analysts were busy isolating a computer, physically disconnecting it from the mainframe and all other networks so Lesser’s virus could not escape. Ryan Chappelle stood behind them, watching them work. When the team was sure the single server was secure, Doris plugged Lesser’s thumb drive into a USB port.
“It’s loaded,” she said after a few minutes.
The group was about to take their first look at the virus when Ryan’s cell phone chirped. The Regional Director checked the identity of the caller, then answered. He stepped away from the group to talk in private.
Doris decided not to wait for Ryan and punched up the diagnostic analysis program she’d built into Frankie.
“Looks like a pretty straightforward start and stop protocol here,” she said as data popped up on the monitor. “That kind of thing is annoying, but most servers can deal with them.”
“This virus is complex, though. A real mother,” Milo observed as more data appeared.
“Good thing we have a copy,” said Doris. “In the next five hours, I’m sure we can create some kind of firewall. That way the major ISPs will be shielded, at least...”
While the others were busy watching the screen, Lesser turned toward the computer at the vacant workstation—a computer still hooked into CTU’s mainframe. He quietly established a quick li
nk to the CIA’s system in D.C., then smiled to himself.
The more chaos, the better.
He took one last glance around. Chappelle was still on the phone, talking intently. The others were hypnotized by the data unspooling on the monitor.
Reaching into his boot, he found the hidden pen drive. He pulled it out and plugged it into the computer’s USB port. He called up the execute file stored inside the drive and launched it.
With a satisfied grin, he unplugged the drive and tucked it back into his boot. Then Lesser faced the others again. The blind idiots hadn’t noticed a thing.
6:55:01 P.M. PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles
Comedian Willy Diamond finished a hilarious monologue, the highlight of the evening. Special Agent Ron
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Birchwood hadn’t laughed or even smiled. In fact, he had barely uttered ten words since the Silver Screen Awards had begun.
Sitting in the Presidential Box directly behind the Vice President’s wife, he could see she was getting along well with Marina Katerine Novartov, whose English was better in a private conversation than in a public forum. The First Lady of Russia had discussed many topics with the Second Lady of the United States during the long, boring lags in the awards show.
At Birchwood’s side sat his counterpart, Russian security chief Vladimir Borodin. Like Birchwood, he hadn’t laughed at a single joke since the awards ceremony began—and he’d uttered even fewer words. Language wasn’t the issue. Borodin spoke excellent English. Both men were absorbed in their jobs, watching the crowd, listening to the chatter in their earbuds, all channels open.
On stage, Willy Diamond bowed to thunderous applause. Then the orchestra struck up a reprise of the night’s ubiquitous Silver Screen Awards theme, and the event’s broadcast cut to a commercial.
As the audience buzzed with gossip, stagehands guided the giant camera prop to center stage on a motorized platform—the signal that another award was about to be presented after the commercial break.
Birchwood noticed a well-known movie star step out on stage for a moment to check the prompter’s position before returning to the wings. He couldn’t remember the actor’s name—Chad or Chip? That was it, he thought, Chip Manning. His preteen daughter had a poster of the handsome actor on her bedroom wall, next to a popular boy band group and a half-dozen photographs of rainbows.
She’d been so excited to hear that her dad would be at the famous awards show, taking care of security for the Vice President’s wife. He knew she was watching at home in Maryland, right now, with her mother and baby brother. He could just picture them, trying to spot him in the split-second shots of the awards show crowd. For the first time that evening, Ron Birchwood smiled.
The orchestra struck up again. As the broadcast came back from commercial, one of Birchwood’s detail, standing behind him in the Presidential Box, touched his shoulder. “Channel one, sir.”
An outside line? Birchwood thumbed the transmitter, turned up the volume in his headset.
“Special Agent Birchwood? This is Ryan Chappelle, Regional Director, Counter Terrorist Unit, Los Angeles.”
To prove his identity, Chappelle gave the Secret Service agent his authorization code, which Birchwood confirmed on his PDA.
“What can I do for you, Director?”
“We have a credible threat that an attempt is about to be made on the life of the Vice President, or on the wife of the Russian President. Probably both.”
“How credible?”
“In the last hour, a CTU agent killed a terrorist who was in possession of elaborate blueprints of the auditorium you’re in. We have reason to believe the strike is imminent.”
Birchwood turned to Vladimir Borodin. “Sir, I—”
“Yes, I heard,” the Russian said, frowning. “I suggest we move now.”
Birchwood stood up, addressed the agent behind him. Borodin did the same.
“Get the women out of here now,” Birchwood
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commanded. “Orderly evacuation. No panic. Quick as you can.”
6:57:20 P.M. PDT Avenue de Dante Tijuana, Mexico
For nearly an hour, Tony had been investigating the evidence in the room where he’d silenced Ray Dobyns.
He finally managed to crack the security protocol that guarded the system. He couldn’t go very deep into the files—too many of them had secondary security—but a few were not secured and Tony perused them.
He learned Richard Lesser had created the virus he claimed Hasan had given him. He’d done it right here at this console; the set up at the brothel had been a ruse, or a back up system. From some unsecured notebook files Tony found Lesser’s notes. Most of them made no sense, but one file’s title grabbed Tony’s attention: ACTIVE CTU.
Amazingly the file was not locked. Someone had used it recently, and burned this data onto a disk, which was missing—the system was already asking if the user wanted a second disk burned. Tony opened the file and found a comprehensive dossier on Jack Bauer, taken right out of the CIA’s database.
“Son of a bitch.”
Another file, called TROJAN HORSE PART TWO, was also unsecured. Tony scanned the file, and his blood turned to ice.
This was it, the evidence that confirmed Dobyns’s claim was true. He snatched up the cell phone Dobyns had dropped on the carpet, punched in Ryan Chappelle’s number, and got Nina Myers.
“Nina, where’s Ryan?”
“He’s with the Crisis Management Team. I was on my way there when your call was forwarded to me—”
“Richard Lesser is a traitor. I’ve got hard evidence here. He’s only pretending to flip. He’s about to take down CTU’s computers, phones, and electronic communications. Everything. You’ve got to—”
The line went dead. Tony punched redial and got a busy signal. He punched in CTU’s emergency number. It was also busy—which was never supposed to happen.
Tony cursed, realizing his warning had come too late. CTU’s computer system was down. Lesser had unleashed his virus.
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 7 P.M. AND 8 P.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
7:03:00 P.M. PDT Television Control Booth Chamberlain Auditorium
“Cue camera three, pull back camera one. Get ready for a close up, camera five. On three, on two, one...”
From his cushioned chair, director Hal Green watched the main monitor that displayed the feed as it was going out to the network and millions of viewers. He ignored the huge picture windows a few feet in front of him, though they offered a vista of center stage and almost the entire auditorium. He wanted to see what everyone else was seeing on their TV screens.
At the moment, the camera was focused on Chip Manning as he strode into view from stage left and moved toward the main podium. Manning was a popular actor, tall and muscular with dime-a-dozen cover-boy model features capped with hair in a Caesar cut. He’d paired his exquisitely tailored Helmut Lang suit with a white shirt, open at the collar, ostrich-skin cowboy boots and a salon-trimmed five o’clock shadow. The entire look had been carefully calculated by his stylist to accent Manning’s “casually-aloof-yet-elegant tough guy” persona.
“Cue camera five. Two, one...”
The camera focused on Ava Stanton, a long-limbed beauty in a daring fuchsia gown. The eyes of every technician in the control room remained fixed on Ava’s strapless décolleté, riding low on her ample cleavage. As the glammed-up actress teetered on her high heels in a shaky journey from stage right to center stage, the crew braced for a “costume malfunction” with a combination of FCC fear and hopeful anticipation.
“Cue camera one on the podium...”
Hal Green lowered one hand and rested it on the control board. With the other he sipped coffee from a thermal cup. Under bushy gray brows, his alert hazel eyes almost never left the main screen. When they did, it was only to check the view from another camera in one of six seco
ndary monitors.
Ben Solomon, at the next console, groaned. “It’s going to get dicey here. Ava never gets it in one. And she flubbed her lines at both rehearsals. And look who she’s paired with. Chip Manning—”
Hal smiled at the remarks of his sixty-year-old assistant director. He’d heard several like it in the past ninety minutes. But that was Ben. After hiring the
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man for this job consistently for the past nine shows, Hal knew what to expect.
“It’s a crying shame what this business has come to,” Ben muttered. “Chip Manning teaches a couple of government trainees a few karate chops at a Sunset Strip dojo and his press agent calls him ‘a career martial artist who advises members of America’s intelligence community.’ And Ava Stanton is nothing more than a glorified supermodel. She’s no Elizabeth Taylor, that’s for sure.”
“She’s no Elizabeth Berkeley,” Green replied, suppressing a laugh. “But that’s what we’ve got now, Ben. Ava Stanton wiggles her assets on a prime time soap and she’s a star.”
“Please,” Ben muttered in genuine horror. “Don’t use that term with me. I remember the real stars— Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Bergman—”
“What the hell is that?” Hal suddenly cried.
Rising to his feet, he lifted his gaze from the monitors to stare through the immense windows overlooking the auditorium. Ben tried to rise but got tangled in his headset. He heard confused cries, shouts, even nervous laughter from the audience.
Chip Manning and Ava Stanton had just launched into their scripted “off-the-cuff-sounding witty banter” when they’d been upstaged by a prop. Behind their backs, the top of the huge Silver Screen Awards sculpture had opened up and eight armed men wearing black masks had slid down short ropes to the stage.
This absurd, ridiculous, almost surreal scene had been greeted by nervous titters of laughter mingled with cries of surprise and alarm. Is this all a part of the show? the audience collectively wondered. Maybe a publicity stunt for Chip Manning’s new movie?
“Clear the stage!” Hal Green shouted into his headset. “Security, get them off, now—”
Obeying the director, several security men rushed onto the stage to intercept the masked invaders. Armed only with nightsticks and electronic stunners, they’d never had a chance. Every trained assassin had dropped to one knee, raised his weapon, and fired into the uniformed ranks.
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