24 Declassified: Cat's Claw 2d-4

by John Whitman

  Mercy barely heard him. Something about the waiters bothered her. She studied their backs, trying to put her finger on the problem. The waiters strode almost lock-step across the floor and laid their trays on the table. With long, graceful motions, they placed precious porcelain dishes full of food onto the table.

  Not all the waiters, Mercy thought. Just that one. Her eyes narrowed as she focused on a waiter with dark hair. She’d seen his back before. She’d seen it. And as he turned, his eyes fell on Mercy. In a split second his look of confidence turned to one of sheer terror, a look Mercy had seen on his face before — when she’d crashed into the vials of virus.

  “Him!” Mercy yelled. “That’s him!”

  7:35 P.M. PST Vanderbilt Complex

  Stan felt like someone had kicked him in the liver. Seeing the LAPD detective standing there knocked the wind out of his lungs. She shouldn’t be here. She couldn’t be here. How could she have figured it out?

  Her shout broke the spell, and Stan knew what he had to do. He bolted. But he didn’t run for the exit. He ran straight to the nearest masterpiece, the portrait of Louis XIV that was taller than he was. With all his might, Stan grabbed the frame and yanked the picture off the wall. He knew the picture frame was bolted to the wall. He knew that, even bracing his feet against the wall, he would most likely fail to pull it entirely free. He also knew that it didn’t matter. He didn’t care about the picture, nor did he need to pull it entirely free. He just needed to trigger the security measures.

  7:36 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

  Jack moved through the foyer of the Mountaingate house. He and Sharpton had spared a few moments to clear the large front yard, and Jack had made short work kicking in the door. The house was dark except for a pale light from the kitchen shed by fluorescents built under the cabinets. Jack motioned for Sharpton to go upstairs. He cleared the kitchen and the garage quietly, not really expecting anyone to be there. If the Vanderbilt Complex was the target, then the backyard would be the best position. But Jack didn’t want anyone behind him when he reached the back of the house. He moved toward the living room.

  7:37 P.M. PST Vanderbilt Complex

  Alarms shrieked the moment the waiter grabbed the painting. The sirens were so loud that even the best-trained agents flinched for a moment. The Secret Service agents in the room were already moving, two of them going after the waiter and two of them covering President Barnes, dragging him toward the exit. Agent in Charge Carter moved forward, his weapon already in his hand, when he realized something unexpected was happening. A sheet of thick Plexiglas was dropping down from the top of the arched entrance to the Main Gallery.

  “What the hell is this!” he shouted. The Plexiglas barrier was halfway down. He dropped underneath it and rolled into the gallery, scanning the room past his gun sights, seeing several Chinese agents eyeing him over the barrels of their own weapons.

  It all happened fast after that. The two Secret Service agents reached the waiter and laid hands on him. He struggled for a moment, raising his hand. For a heart-stopping moment Carter thought he was holding a detonator. That was impossible; their security sweeps would never have missed anything explosive.

  He was right. The waiter held only a palm-sized glass vial. He hurled it to the ground at the feet of the two world leaders. Security agents instinctively threw their bodies over the bodies of Barnes and Xu, but it didn’t matter. The glass vial shattered, and for a fraction of a second everyone flinched. But nothing dramatic happened. Glass shards sprayed, and a tiny puff of white gas drifted up in the air and dissipated quickly. The Plexiglas shields closed down on the floor with a soft but definitive click. There was a split second of pure silence.

  The next second was complete pandemonium. The two agents put the waiter facedown on the ground. The other two agents, handling Barnes, reached the Plexiglas barricade on the far side of the room and kicked at it angrily. Agent Carter leveled his pistol at the shield, then, thinking of the ricochet, lowered the muzzle. The Chinese agents were screaming in Mandarin.

  Outside the gallery, Mercy, along with a crowd of other agents and staff, looked on in sheer amazement. The room must have been sealed airtight because they could hear nothing that Carter or the others were saying, but they could see them moving frantically. A moment later Carter spoke into his radio, and an agent near Mercy responded.

  “Yes, sir,” the agent said. “We’ll get the glass lifted immediately.”

  “No!” Mercy yelled. The agent scowled at her. “Let me talk to him.”

  The agent consulted with Carter, then pulled the bud from his ear. Mercy leaned in close to him, located the speaker, and grabbed the agent’s hand like it was a microphone. “Carter, it’s Detective Bennet. If I’m right, that entire room is now contaminated with the virus. You can’t open the doors.”

  “Bullshit,” Carter said. He had approached the Plexiglas near her and stood there, his face red with anger. “This is the President of the United States in here and I’ll blow the side of the goddamned building away to get him out, virus or no virus!”

  “Then you risk spreading the thing all over the city,” Mercy said.

  President Barnes appeared at Carter’s side. It was a surreal moment for Mercy — an LAPD cop suddenly finding herself talking to the leader of the free world through a sheet of Plexiglas. He looked exactly as he did on television, except that his face was turning pink and a vein had started to pulse in his forehead.

  “What the hell is this?” he demanded. “Who are you?”

  Carter listed her credentials succinctly.

  “There’s a virus, sir,” Mercy said.

  Barnes blanched. “Are you sure—?” he started to ask, but discarded the question. Of course she was sure. She wouldn’t be there if she weren’t sure. “How bad?”

  “Fatal,” she replied. “But not for a few hours at least. And I think there’s an antidote. But if we open these doors it will spread—”

  Barnes was nothing if not decisive. He turned to Carter. “Get rid of anyone nonessential. Seal off the whole complex. Get National Health Services on the line, tell them to prepare some kind of contained transportation for all of us to a safer location. Keep these doors sealed until we know the entire building is evacuated.”

  “But, sir—” Carter protested.

  One of the other Secret Service agents shouted something to Carter, who turned to see the man holding up a small device. As Carter’s had earlier, Mercy’s heart stopped for a moment as she thought bomb, but a second later it was revealed to be a portable DVD player.

  “The guy who did this is a political activist, not an outright murderer,” Mercy said to Carter. “I’m guessing there’s a message there for you.”

  Carter activated the DVD player, and an image came on the screen. Mercy could just see it between Carter and President Barnes, and Carter’s mike carried the message to her ears.

  The image was little more than a silhouette, but Mercy recognized it as Copeland. “Hello,” he said in a gentrified voice. “You can call me Seldom Seen Smith and, if you’re watching this, Mr. President, you’ve just been infected with a deadly virus. You have approximately twelve hours to live.”

  Carter glanced at Mercy with a damn-you-were-right look on his face.

  The DVD continued. “Our purpose here is simple. To save the rain forests of the Amazon. Your first question, of course, will be to wonder what the connection is between our cause and your infection. Let me assure you that the connection is very direct. The virus that is now replicating in your system is called Cat’s Claw. It exists naturally in the Amazon. Of course, I have to confess, I’ve done a little tinkering with the virus. In its natural state, it kills human beings in about twenty-four hours. The strain that I have developed for you kills in half that time. I discovered it by lucky accident, but rest assured that loggers and developers will stumble upon it and carry it back to civilization soon enough. More importantly, there is an antidote…and the antidote also gr
ows naturally in the Amazon. To date, I am the only person who knows from what plant the vaccine can be synthesized, and how to do it.

  “My proposition to you is very simple. Go on television right now and announce that the rain forests must be secured immediately, and that all development and logging must halt. I will give you the antidote, and you will live.

  “If you don’t, you’ll never hear from me again, and you will die. I would like you to note that I have gone to a great deal of trouble to keep the virus contained. Your location is isolated. The security system acts as a sort of quarantine zone. I have no wish to kill people unnecessarily. But you are destroying the planet, and I have to stop you. So if it comes down to it, I will spread the virus into the population, forcing them to preserve the Amazon until they can discover the vaccine for themselves. I expect my associate to be released unharmed. He knows how to contact me.”

  The screen went blank.

  7:41 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

  The moment the alarms sounded from the complex below, Jack shifted from his slow and steady pace to a sprint. He was through the living room in a flash. He opened the sliding glass doors to the backyard as quickly and quietly as he could, and then he was out onto the patio of the backyard.

  If there were lights in the backyard, they’d been killed. A line of tall shrubs along the perimeter shielded the yard from the city lights below, so the yard was almost completely in shadow. Jack crouched down, waiting for his eyes to adjust, scanning the deep pools of darkness along the edge of the yard. Finally he saw what he was looking for — a hunched figure almost invisible against the tree line. Jack didn’t bother with warnings. He leveled the SigSauer and exhaled as he squeezed off three rounds. Noise and fire shattered the silence and darkness, mixed with a startled cry of surprise and pain. Jack fired again. This muzzle flash left an afterimage seared on to his eyes, an image of Ayman al-Libbi on one knee, his face contorted in pain, an RPG pointing straight at Jack.

  Jack dived to the side as he heard the familiar hiss and whistle of the launching rocket. The rocket-propelled grenade smoked across the short distance and exploded into the house behind Jack. The CTU agent felt himself lifted off the ground by tongues of fire and glass fragments glittering like a starburst as the sharp, short thunder of the ordinance enveloped him. He landed in the grass, barely keeping his hands on the SigSauer. Jack forced himself up to his knees, shaking his head and ignoring the roaring echo in his ears. Something in the house was on fire, casting uneven light out onto the yard. It was enough to see by. Jack raised his weapon one-handed and found Ayman al-Libbi on the far side of his sights. Before he could squeeze the trigger, someone body-slammed him from the side and Jack went over, landing heavily in the grass. This time he lost the SigSauer completely. The person on top of him was unskilled, but an animal, throwing violent knees into his body and tearing at his face. Jack caught the assailant’s arm, hooked his leg around the man’s leg, and bucked his hips, rolling over and ending on top. Without looking he threw a head butt downward and felt the hard bone of his forehead smash through lips and teeth. He raised his head back and slammed his elbow down onto the same spot. Only then did he look and see Muhammad Abbas’s face, now all blood and pulp.

  Jack’s eyes were intent on Abbas but his senses were alert, aware of his surroundings. The movement was three-quarters behind him but he saw it nearly in time, rolling away as the shovel swung at his head. The shovel head glanced off his skull, making his head ring again. There were two accomplices with al-Libbi. Where the hell was Sharpton?

  Jack rolled in the semi-darkness, groping for his weapon, but then he heard someone else tap and rack the SigSauer and he knew his attackers had found it first.

  “Stop,” said a male voice. Abbas. Jack looked up. Abbas was on his feet, half his face illuminated by a half-dozen small fires burning in the damaged house. Beside him, holding the shovel, was a short girl with curly blond hair. She was holding Jack’s pistol in her hands. She didn’t hold it well, but her hands were steady and her eyes were clear and determined. She had cleared and racked the weapon. She could certainly pull the trigger.

  Al-Libbi shouted in Arabic from across the yard. He sounded as if he was in pain. Abbas stepped behind the girl, out of her line of fire. “I’m going to check on him. Kill this one.” He ran into the shadows.

  The girl stepped forward. One shot rang out and Jack flinched, but at the same time he knew that the girl had not fired. A hole erupted in the girl’s shoulder and she screamed, dropping the weapon. Sharpton, it had to be. Jack lunged forward, grabbing his SigSauer. He grabbed her by the hair and shoved her down onto the ground, making her eat grass as he turned to reacquire the terrorists. He saw them, two shadows moving in and out of the darkness. Jack fired, tracking them, but the shadows kept moving until they reached the corner of the house.

  The girl. Sharpton. Al-Libbi. Jack had three elements to prioritize. Jumping to his feet, he stepped toward the girl’s feet and stomped hard on her ankle, hearing it crack. She screamed, and he knew she wouldn’t be going anywhere fast. Jack ran across the yard, parallel to the house, and saw Sharpton on the ground, his body lying across the threshold. His clothing was shredded on his body and his skin had been half flayed from his bones. His arms were stretched out, the gun lying under his right hand. He ran past Sharpton and reached the corner of the house. Firelight illuminated the corner, and Jack knew he’d be visible. He leaned around the corner quickly, then pulled his head back as someone discharged rounds from a pistol. Two of them tore chunks of wood from the frame of the house. Jack kept his body on the safe side and stuck his gun around the corner, firing several rounds. Then he dropped low and sprinted down the side of the house. He zigzagged forward, but no more shots came. Jack reached the front end of the house where an open gate led to the front yard. Jack hoped for more gunfire; if al-Libbi and Abbas stood and fought, it gave him a better chance of getting them. But the front of the house was quiet. Jack ran to the sidewalk. Lights were on in the houses down the block, and a few people stumbled out with cell phones in their hands and shocked looks on their faces. Jack saw the lights of a car hurrying away, but it was too dark to catch the make or license plate.

  7:49 P.M. PST Vanderbilt Complex

  The last of the food servers and administrative staff for the Vanderbilt had been evacuated. Ambulance sirens approached, and Mercy heard Secret Service agents confirm that National Health Services personnel were en route.

  Inside the sealed Main Gallery, the Chinese security officers were shouting into cell phones and radios. Agent in Charge Carter was alternately talking and listening on his radio incessantly, while the other two Secret Service agents kept the waiter pinned down and peppered him with questions. But the waiter had sealed his mouth and refused to speak, smiling smugly as though the questioning was all part of the plan.

  Mercy knew something had been happening for the last few minutes. A sound rolled through the Vanderbilt Complex, a muffled roar like distant thunder that resounded off the mountain canyons around them. Half the agents in the complex had suddenly rushed off, weapons drawn.

  Surprisingly, the two calmest men in the entire complex were President Barnes and Xu Boxiong. Mercy, who had never been so close to real power, watched them intently. They seemed to find their focus in the midst of the crisis; their answers to questions succinct, their decisions made quickly and surely. Mercy had no idea what sort of man the Premier of Communist China was, nor did she really know much about Barnes, but this, she decided, was leadership: the ability, in fact the desire, to make decisions when decisions needed to be made.

  Suddenly President Barnes was standing in front of her, his eyes studying her through the glass. He spoke to her through a radio. “Who are these people? If we capitulate to their requests, will they give up the vaccine?”

  “That’s — that’s a problem, sir,” she stammered “The man who organized this is already dead. Murdered by one of his people.”

  Ba
rnes scowled. “Are you telling me there’s no one to negotiate with?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  7:52 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

  Jack hung up the phone after a thirty-second conversation with Henderson telling him that al-Libbi was at large, that the explosions were caused by a stray RPG, that he had one suspect in custody, and that he needed an ambulance immediately. He ran through the house to the back patio. The blond girl was curled up in a ball, bleeding from her shoulder and holding her ankle.

  Bauer knelt down beside Sharpton. The former agent had rolled onto his side, his chest heaving. The skin on his neck and one side of his face was seared. One of his eyes was closed. The other looked up at Jack.

  “Kelly,” Jack said, “hang on. You’re going to be okay.”

  Sharpton coughed. “Lie — liar.”

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “You got her for me.”

  Sharpton nodded as his good eye closed. “That’s…two times.” He never spoke again.

  Jack paused, though he did not have a moment to spare. Sharpton had been a good man. Then he walked over to the girl, who looked up at him. Her eyes were moist, but she wasn’t crying. “You broke my fucking ankle!” she spat at him.

  He knelt down and checked her shoulder. Sharpton’s round had passed through her shoulder blade and exited the hollow of her clavicle. Her shoulder was probably shattered, but she was going to live.

  Jack’s phone rang. He answered and heard Mercy’s voice. “Jack, they told me there’s something going on up the hill from here. I have a feeling you know about it.”

  “You could say that. You talked about a girl before,” Jack said. “I think I have her.”

  Mercy paused. “I’d like to talk to her again,” she said ominously. “There’s an emergency down here. The Presi

  dent and the Chinese leader have been exposed to the virus.” Jack swore under his breath. “Jack, you there?” “Yeah,” he said. “We need to get this girl into an interroga