Face-to-face with the Special Agent in Charge of CTU, Edgar fought the urge to flee. Instead, he cleared his throat and spoke up. “I wanted to speak with you, sir. I think I have information that could help.”
Now Jack’s sharp eyes were fixed on Edgar, and the lowly computer technician shrunk under his intense, expectant gaze.
Edgar continued. “Do ...Do you know anything about the building the Chamberlain Auditorium replaced?”
Chet Blackburn was listening now, and so were the engineers.
“No, we don’t,” Jack replied. “What’s your name again?”
“Stiles, Mr. Bauer, sir. Edgar Stiles. I work in the computer services division—”
“Under Dan Hastings?”
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“Yes, sir, and for tonight also Milo Pressman.”
“So what were you saying about the Chamberlain Auditorium?”
“Actually, sir, I was talking about the site where the auditorium was built.”
One of the engineers remarked, “As I recall, this part of downtown was pretty depressed.”
“Yeah,” said Edgar. “But it had one of the greatest old movie palaces in the city. They tore the place down to build the Chamberlain.”
“How does this information help us?” Jack asked.
“The Crystal Palace was built in the 1930s, before the Great Depression,” Edgar replied. “It was one of those huge old theaters with balconies and everything. A real showplace.”
“I recall reading about that theater,” Blackburn remarked. “But I thought it was farther west.”
“No!” Edgar cried, again too loudly. “It was right here, at this intersection.”
“Really,” said Chet, suppressing a chuckle.
“My mother worked in that theater in the 1960s and ’70s, during the Cold War. She told me there were four or five sub-basements under the theater. The two lowest levels were used as air raid shelters by Civil Defense. They stocked the place with water cans, radiation detectors, the works.”
The engineers were the first to react. “That would explain that notation on one of the blueprints,” said Jon Francis. “Something about an existing underground structure, a wall or something.”
“You’re sure about this, Edgar?” Bauer asked.
Edgar nodded. “My mom saw Fail-Safe on television and had a lot of nightmares after that. She told me that if a nuclear war ever broke out, she would head right down to the Crystal Palace, where the basements were so deep she knew she’d be safe from radiation.”
“Jesus,” grunted Jon Francis. “If this guy’s right, those sub-basements may still exist. And even if they don’t, the air shafts that fed them may still be buried beneath the facility even if the basements are gone.”
“But what good does that do us?” Chet asked. “We don’t know where the shafts are, or the basements for that matter.
“No, but somebody does,” Francis replied. “The plans for the Crystal Palace are on file somewhere, probably with the County of Los Angeles House of Records, or maybe City Hall.”
“What about the old Civil Defense files?” Special Agent Evans asked. “There’s got to be blueprints for those air raid shelters filed with the Federal government.”
“We’ve got to locate all the information we can gather about this, ASAP,” said Bauer. “If these tunnels, those basements still exist, that’s our way in.”
Jack spun around. “Where’s the Mayor’s liaison?”
“Right here, sir,” replied a young woman in an immaculate pinstriped suit.
“I need you to locate some records, as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile the engineers spooled the digital schematics back several pages, trying to locate the existing wall one of them spied on the blueprints. Activity was now swirling all around Edgar Stiles, but he was not a part of it. He watched the men scramble for a few minutes, then assumed they didn’t need him anymore.
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Knowing that a new batch of paper files were probably already piled high on his desk, Edgar Stiles left the command center and returned to his workstation, unnoticed.
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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 A.M. AND 2 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
1:01:56 A.M.PDT CTU Mobile Command Center
Milo thought it was a total waste of time to mine the late Valerie Dodge’s computer. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Inside the PC there were lots of files about the modeling agency, but only one file that was secure. It took Milo only a few minutes to bypass the password system and open the file—a large multimedia affair full of bells and whistles.
“W00t,” he cried.
Milo quickly located a schematic of the Chamberlain, then found photos and profiles of female suicide bombers—Chechen women whose husbands had died
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or simply disappeared during the ongoing insurgency against the Russians. Next he found the photos and profiles of twenty Chechen gunmen smuggled into the United States by a company called MG Enterprises, then hired on as ushers for the Silver Screen Awards show.
As he moved through the file Milo found that it was all in here—the timing for the raid, the entry and exit points—most importantly, the position of the suicide bombers inside the auditorium.
Everything was here, a gold mine of intelligence.
1:07:19 A.M.PDT LAPD Mobile Command Center
Milo had just delivered the good news to Jack, when the engineers returned, all smiles.
“We’ve got something for you, Jack, and you’re going to like it,” said Jon Francis. He plugged a pen drive into the digital map table and called up a file.
“That little guy was right,” Francis began. “The old Crystal Palace movie theater was located on the site currently occupied by the Chamberlain, and that old theater had five—count ’em, five sub-basements. If you look hard enough, some of the old walls appear in the Chamberlain’s blueprints.”
“But can we get inside the auditorium through those basements?” Jack asked.
“We can cut a hole into the old sub-basement through this storm drain, right here,” a man from the Department of Water and Sewage explained. “That will put you under the Chamberlain. You’ll probably have to cut a hole somewhere else, but you’ll be inside.”
“It’s all completely underground,” Jon Francis interrupted. “The security cameras outside the auditorium, the ones the terrorists are using to watch us, they won’t see a goddamn thing.”
“The noise will be a problem, though,” another engineer cautioned. “We’ll need to use a jackhammer for five minutes or so to get through this wall—it’s over two feet thick. Normally we’d blast something this stout, but in this case . . .”
“That’s okay,” said Jack. “We’ll set up loudspeakers around the Chamberlain, blast music. It will drown out the sound of the jackhammer.”
“What will the terrorists think?” Francis asked.
“They’ll think we’re practicing psychological warfare techniques,” Jack informed them.
“Techniques that aren’t effective, and everyone knows it,” Secret Service Agent Evans interjected. “Won’t that make us look foolish?”
In the harsh white light of the map table, Jack held Evans’s eyes. “Let the terrorists think we’re helpless. If they underestimate us they’ll get careless, make a mistake. Then we’ll take the bastards down.”
1:18:06 A.M.PDT In the storm drains
Jon Francis brought in a digging team from Pacific Power and Light. Armed with picks, shovels, flashlights, and a portable electric jackhammer, they entered the sewer system three blocks away from the auditorium.
Led by a team of inspectors from the Department of Water and Sewage, they moved efficiently through the murky, ankle deep water that flowed through a maze of seven-by-ten-foot concrete tunnels. Bringing
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up the rear, two technicians from the telephone company unspooled a long te
lephone wire—a land line that connected the construction team to Jack Bauer in the LAPD command center.
The inspectors led the team to what seemed like a dead end.
“Yep, this is the place,” grunted Jon Francis, shining a mini Maglite on a paper map—he never used digital versions in the field. “There’s eight inches of poured concrete right here. Behind it two feet of solid brick. Think you can break through without dynamite?”
“Stand back,” said the man with the jackhammer.
Using the land line they laid on the way in, Jon Francis contacted the command center. “Cue the music,” he declared.
1:25:50 A.M.PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles
From his throne-like chair in the center of the massive stage, Bastian Grost maintained a confident facade in front of his men, and in front of the hostages. His headscarf dangled around his neck—he did not care who among this crowd saw his face, for they would all be dead soon. Casually but authoritatively, he clutched his Agram 2000 in the crook of his arm in a gesture that suggested power and confidence.
So far his strategy had worked. Even the high and mighty members of the Hollywood elite averted their eyes when he fixed his glacial gaze on them. Despite his cool exterior, however, inside Sebastian Grost was boiling with rage. As an operational mastermind, he cursed his men’s missteps and missed opportunities, their inability to follow even the simplest order without indulging in violence of every sort, including the violation of some of the female hostages. Indeed, everything had gone wrong from the start.
After the successful seizure of the awards show, his trained strike team had failed to capture Russia’s First Lady, Marina Novartov, or even the wife of America’s Vice President. Most of Grost’s team had been shot during their firefight with the American and Russian security teams, and none of his men had witnessed exactly where the women had fled. It was possible the women had gotten out before the fire doors had slammed shut. It was also possible the two had escaped into a service elevator.
That elevator, Grost subsequently discovered, had not been in the auditorium’s original blueprints, nor was it controlled by the facility’s computer. Grost could find no way to unlock and reactivate the elevator, but he didn’t waste much time on that effort. He knew from his study of the blueprints provided to him that this structure had only four floors to search: the mezzanine, the theater floor, the ground floor, and the basement.
Hours had passed now, and the few men Grost could spare from guard duty had failed to locate the women. He would have to accept that he could not show the women on camera. He could only bluff that he had them in his custody.
The second problem arose at 11 p.m., when Hasan had failed to contact them through a secure and secret landline that connected the Chamberlain Auditorium to the computer center in Tijuana, even though Hasan had promised he would make “a final statement to the martyrs,” as he put it.
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Then, at midnight came the final blow. The destructive virus that was supposed to destroy the West’s computer infrastructure had not been launched as scheduled. Grost knew that was true because he dispatched men to the auditorium’s roof, to watch the Los Angeles skyline beyond the blacked-out area around them. They reported that city lights still blazed, traffic lights functioned, and there were even passenger airliners lining up in the sky overhead as a prelude to landing at LAX.
At that point, Grost could no longer deny what he knew to be true.
The computer center at Tijuana must have been compromised, perhaps destroyed, which means that we are truly on our own—
Bastian Grost’s thoughts were interrupted by a curious sound—the throbbing beat of American hip-hop music. The sound was muffled, but still loud enough to be heard throughout the auditorium. He listened stone-faced for a minute, then he began to chuckle, inviting a curious stare from a lieutenant on stage with him.
One of the foot soldiers arrived on stage a moment later. “They have set up loudspeakers in the street outside,” he reported. “What does it mean?”
“It’s a tactic right out of the Americans’ counterterrorism text book,” Grost replied with a sneer. “They mean to drive us out of this place with bad music. A ridiculous tactic that has no chance of success.”
Bastian Grost shouldered his machine gun. He wrapped his head with the long, night-black scarf hanging at his neck. It pleased him to think that his enemies were so helpless.
If this is the best CTU can come up with, then the final phase of Hasan’s plan—the mass murder of everyone in this auditorium during L.A.’s morning rush hour, in front of a million eyewitnesses—is in no danger at all.
1:33:09 A.M.PDT LAPD Mobile Command Center
The pre-mission briefing was so populated it packed the vehicle from one end to the other. Every chair was occupied, and many stood, including Lonnie Nobunaga, who managed to hang around long after his active role in the proceedings had ended. Even Christina Hong was there, after being spelled by a well-known network journalist who was doing a masterful job of bogus reporting for his audience of terrorists.
Despite the air conditioner laboring overtime, it was sweltering inside the command center. The hatches and doors had been shut tightly to guarantee security, and block out the music blasting around the auditorium.
Most of the men who occupied the room were snipers, ten of them, culled from Chet Blackburn’s Tactical Unit, the FBI, and Captain Stone’s SWAT team.
Jack began the briefing without preamble. “The auditorium and over a thousand hostages are being held by twenty Chechen gunman, all well-trained, all armed with 9mm Agram 2000 submachine guns. Their leader is this man—”
A face appeared on the wall-mounted flat screen monitor.
“Bastian Grost. He’s not a Chechen by birth, but he is, as far as we can determine, fanatically dedicated to their cause.”
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The image on the screen changed again. Portraits of four women appeared, some in headscarves.
“More dangerous than the twenty gunmen are five suicide bombers placed in the audience—”
The women were replaced by the seating chart of the auditorium.
“—From the plans in Valerie Dodge’s computer, we know that the bombers have been positioned to do maximum damage to the structure’s five support columns when the explosives are detonated. You see from this chart that they are planted here and here, and two in the back of the auditorium. There is also a bomber close to the stage, seated among the celebrities.”
Jack paused. “The plan is simple. Five of our operatives—all female, all dressed in evening clothes, take out the female bombers. At the same instant, the snipers each take out two gunmen in quick succession. Our timing has to be perfect, and because the terrorists are jamming all radio signals, individual groups will be out of contact once we enter the auditorium and separate.”
“Jesus,” muttered an FBI sniper.
“The takedown has to be timed perfectly. We’ll prearrange a time for the strike, and everyone will have to act at the same split second.”
Groans and sighs greeted the news.
“Unfortunately, timing’s not the worst of our problems.” Jack paused until everyone quieted down. “While we have photos and names for four of the bombers, the identity of the fifth bomber is unknown—”
Outcry greeted this news.
“That means one bomb will most likely go off,” an FBI sniper shouted.
“Not necessarily,” said Jack, raising his voice to be heard over the mounting commotion. “We know where this bomber is located—down among the celebrities. We’re going to send the female strike team in ahead of the sniper attack. If we’re lucky, Nina Myers and her fellow operatives will locate and neutralize this unknown bomber along with the other four.”
“Wait a minute,” Lonnie Nobunaga cried. “You said the unknown bomber is in the celebrity seating area?”
“Yes,” Jack replied. “She has to be. That’s what the terrorists’ plans indi
cate and that’s also where the fifth support beam is located. If they miss just one support beam, the structure may not collapse even after the blasts.”
“And you’re sure it’s a woman?”
“That’s how the Chechens have done things up to now,” Jack replied. “Your point?”
Nobunaga took a deep breath. “Listen. This may have nothing to do with the terrorists—”
“Get to the point. We’re running out of time here.”
“Abigail Heyer rolled into Hollywood for the award’s show very pregnant—”
“No surprise,” said Christina Hong. “Gossip is she and Nikolai Manos are an item.”
Jack blinked. “Did you say Manos?”
Christina nodded. “It’s in all the tabloids, including that low-rent rag Lonnie works for.”
Nobunaga smirked. “I’m wounded.”
Jack fixed his gaze on Lonnie. “So you’re telling me Abigail Heyer is pregnant with Manos’s child?”
Lonnie shook his head. “I’m telling you that she’s been faking her pregnancy the whole time. Wearing a harness, just like she did in the movie Bangor, Maine. I have the photo to prove it. Shot it this morning on
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the woman’s estate.” He dangled the thumb drive from his key ring.
One of the snipers spoke up. “That’s crazy. How could Abigail Heyer get a belly full of explosives past auditorium security?”
Even Lonnie knew the answer to that one. “The celebrities walk the red carpet. They don’t pass through security. It would be like wanding the President and First Lady. You don’t screen the people you’re supposed to protect.”
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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 A.M. AND 3 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
2:09:03 A.M.PDT Chamberlain Auditorium Sub-Level Three
White House intern Adam Carlisle awoke with a start. He began to stir, but his back was stiff from sleeping on the cold concrete. His movements awoke Megan Gleason, who had been using his thigh for a pillow.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
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