Maybe it was because he had finally overcome the inertia in his life and cut loose from Roker and the deSalvos, or maybe it was because Jack Bauer was the one guy in the world who could actually understand what he had been through. “I signed on as security, as his driver, but it turned out to be a lot more than that. Repo work at first, with the emphasis on forceful recovery.” He started to talk, and it all began to fall out of him. “See, Roker’s got a lot of angles he works and one of them is selling cars to idiots who can’t afford them. Once his marks couldn’t make the vig, he rolled back the cars and sold them again to the next fool in line. But that action had the attention of the deSalvo syndicate, and they’ve got his dealership locked in as a way to launder some of their cash flow.” He took a long breath. “I just wanted to drive. But with this damn hand, there wasn’t a lot I could do.” Chase said the last words with more heat than he meant to, and what came next seemed to come from nowhere. “When they said you were killed in action, Jack … Hell, I didn’t believe it for a second, but Kim did. It was like she had been waiting for it, you know? After she lost her mom, it was as if she knew it would be inevitable that you’d follow. I hope … I hope she’s not in that place anymore, I really do. I mean, you said she’s got a kid now, right?” He paused for a moment. “That’s good. I wish it could have been different between her and me.” His eyes stayed fixed on the dark band of the road ahead. “The thing I regret … more than anything … is that I messed that up.” It came to Chase then, a sudden, sharp insight into his own motivation. Is this me settling that score? Is the reason I came running to help Jack Bauer because I owe his daughter for letting her down?
A police car going in the opposite direction rushed past, but there was no sudden flare of flashing lights, no screech of brakes.
“Look,” Chase began again, glancing over his shoulder to look the other man in the eye. “What I mean is…”
He halted, the rest of his words left unspoken as he realized he was talking to himself. Bauer’s eyes were closed and his breathing was even. The fatigue of the past hours had finally caught up with him.
“Yeah,” said Chase, and turned back to the road, heading deeper into the night.
* * *
The Cessna Citation X made a slow loop of the airfield, and as Kilner looked out of the oval window, the pilot’s voice came over the intercom to advise them they were about to land. Kilner fastened his safety belt across his lap as Markinson dropped into the seat next to him. “How far are we from the site?” he asked.
“Thirty minutes away, I reckon,” she replied. “Ground transport is already waiting for us down there.”
On the other side of the aisle, Hadley looked up from the document folder in his hand and shot her a look. “If these local yokels have touched that helo, there will be hell to pay.”
“You expecting to find a note pinned to the dash?” said Kilner.
“I’ve already heard all that Jack Bauer has to say to me,” Hadley replied. The small jet shuddered as it turned in for a final approach, the air brakes deploying to decelerate. “I’m more interested in what he did next.”
“The sheriff’s department is canvassing the area,” offered Dell from across the cabin. “Somebody will have seen him.”
“As good as everyone says he is,” Hadley said firmly, “he’s not invisible. We just need to keep the pressure up, keep pushing. Bauer will make a mistake, and when he does we’ll be there.”
There was no hesitation in the man’s words, Kilner noticed, not the slightest iota of doubt. Hadley had made the capture of his target into a personal mission. Kilner wondered how far the other agent would go in order to bring it to the conclusion he wanted.
The aircraft’s undercarriage hit the runway with a thud and the jets howled as the pilot reversed the thrust to slow them. The airstrip wasn’t really rated for something like the twin-engine Citation, more suited to smaller prop planes and lighter aircraft, but Hadley had forced through a temporary waiver from the FBI’s aviation unit that essentially allowed him to have the jet put down on anything short of a football field as part of the manhunt for Jack Bauer.
Hadley was out of his chair, gathering up his gear and making for the hatch even as the aircraft was still rolling to a halt before a brightly lit hangar. Kilner peered out of the window again and saw a pair of white-and-green cruisers from the Westmoreland County Police Department parked with an unmarked black SUV. Uniformed officers stood in a loose knot, waiting on the new arrivals.
Contrary to the way things were portrayed in the movies, in the real world the arrival of a posse of federal agents in a local jurisdiction didn’t automatically equate to an immediate rivalry and conflict over who was going to be in charge. In Kilner’s experience, the opposite was usually the truth. State or county cops with less manpower and typically with operational budgets that were already stretched to the limit would welcome the involvement of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the last decade, FBI resources had become increasingly focused on rooting out terrorist threats in addition to their other law enforcement remits, something beyond the reach of smaller police forces. The hunt for Bauer fell squarely in the middle of that category—even if Kilner felt it should be otherwise.
“I’m Sheriff Bray,” said the officer waiting for them at the foot of the jet’s stairs. He was a portly man with a thinning beard and deep-set eyes, and he nodded to a taller, thinner officer at his right. “This is Deputy Roe.”
Hadley gave them a nod and made cursory introductions for Kilner and the others. “I hear you have my helicopter, Sheriff.”
Bray nodded, frowning with it, and Kilner immediately got the impression that the man wasn’t comfortable with the situation that had been dumped on him. “That’s right. Green-and-brown Bell 206 Long Ranger, couple o’ bullet holes in the fuselage. Your doing, Special Agent Hadley?”
“Clearly I need some more time on the range to sharpen up my aim,” Hadley replied as they walked to the waiting cars. “Who found it?”
“A Mr. Todd Billhight,” said Roe, glancing at his notebook. “Chopper’s parked in the middle of a field on his land. Said he was out for a smoke, on account of his wife not liking his cigars … Saw the thing from across the way, then called it in.”
“He didn’t hear anything?” asked Dell.
Roe shook his head. “No, ma’am. It’s been pretty windy here tonight. Most folks have been indoors.”
“I want a copy of Billhight’s statement,” said Hadley. “Have you searched his property?”
“First thing we did,” Bray nodded. “Soon as we realized this was connected to your guy Bauer. But we came up empty. If the subject was there, he didn’t stick around.”
“The highway is close by,” added Roe. “We got units moving in both directions, checking in with local homeowners, looking for stolen cars, whatever.”
Bray hesitated as he opened the door of his vehicle. “Look … I gotta ask this before we get going here. I read the paper on Bauer and he’s clearly some serious son of a bitch. If he’s involved with that crap on the news, exactly how much of a danger is he going to present to my men and my constituents? His rap sheet makes it sound like I should be calling in the National Guard, for chrissakes.”
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Sheriff,” said Hadley. “He’s a trained killer, pure and simple. A class of fugitive I guarantee you have never come across before.”
Kilner watched the expression change on Bray’s face and his lips thinned. “But that’s why we are here,” he broke in, before Hadley could practically hand out a shoot-on-sight order. “To bring him in, cleanly and swiftly.” Hadley’s eyes flashed at Kilner’s interruption, but he let it pass.
“Let’s get you out to Todd’s place, then,” said the sheriff, clearly eager to get things over and done with.
* * *
Sleep had never come easy to Jack.
It was almost as if the ability to disengage and drop into true rest had been burned out of him som
ewhere along the line. Short of using chemical assistance—and there had been times in his life when he had done exactly that—Jack existed in a state where sleep seemed like a kind of little death. When he was out, the world turned on without him, but he had never been one to sit back and let things pass him by. If he could have literally slept with one eye open, he would have. It was hard to come down from the baseline state of alertness that he had learned to maintain back in Delta Force. He found it hard to disengage, and it was worse when he was riding in a plane or a vehicle. It was as if there was a small piece of his animal hindbrain that had been broken, a switch in his head that would forever be jammed in the “on” position. Some part of him wanted to be ready, to be prepared for the moment when action would be needed.
On the rare occasions when sleep—real, honest, deep sleep—did come upon him, it wasn’t a welcome experience. It was more like a silent assailant coming at Jack from the shadows, slipping a hand around his throat to drag him away, down and down into the darkness.
In the military, he had learned to snatch moments of rest wherever he could, small snapshots of it that he could grab in between watches or in the lulls before operations. Like an apex predator, he took it in pieces here and there. But going deep, really letting go … that was never easy. Sleep meant lowering his guard. It was allowing himself to become lost, to be vulnerable, just for a while.
But it would happen. And then he would bolt awake, skin filmed with a cold sweat, as if he were a drowning man who had broken free of bottomless waters. He remembered finding himself in snarls of bedsheets next to Teri, his fingers curled around the trigger of a gun that wasn’t there. She had made those moments easier for Jack, for a time. But then one day his wife was gone, and the peace that her presence next to him had brought went away, and he knew he would never get it back.
In sleep he went to that darker place. A wilderness of shadows, populated by ghosts and memories that refused to stay buried. Things from the here and now would become fluid and melt like hot wax, time would merge. Past and present spinning together.
In sleep, Jack went to every hell he had ever known, and he wondered if it was a kind of penance for each drop of blood he had spilled, each life he had been forced to end.
Sometimes it would be the heat and the sand of Afghanistan, and he would be the younger man, the one still new to it all, not yet so hardened by loss, not tempered by fire. He would walk through those dusty streets and come upon a house, knowing and not knowing all at once what he would find inside; the last seconds of a brother soldier, watching and never being able to stop the brutal act of execution as his friend’s head was taken from his neck.
Other times it would be the bloody ruin of what happened in Kosovo during Operation Nightfall. He would be there with Saunders, Kendall, Crenshaw and the others, secure in the knowledge that the man they were there to kill was a war criminal of the most ruthless stripe. And then he would see the perfect mission plan crumble around him, see his men perish in a hail of gunfire, and burn with the guilt of knowing the bomb he planted to kill Victor Drazen had ended the lives of innocents instead. Over and over it would play out, the horror of it embedded in him.
But on the worst nights, he would be in China again. Jack would wake from the dream of freedom to find his world inverted, the reality of it twisting inside out. It would always begin the same way, with his interrogator Cheng Zhi kicking him awake inside that reeking, decrepit cell. Jack spent twenty long and painful months there, stolen away from the world by the Chinese ministry of state security as payback for his part in the death of one of their diplomats. He felt a special kind of fear then, felt it rushing back over him in a cold wave as his mind told him that he had never really left that terrible place, that his memories of being released on the demands of the terrorist Abu Fayed were just a fantasy. And Cheng would study Jack with a pitiless gaze and tell him that no matter how far he went, no matter how long he lived, he could never truly escape the cage they had put him in. Sometimes, impossibly, Teri would be there too, and he would have to watch her die, forced to witness the murder of his wife that in reality, he had come too late to prevent.
So Jack Bauer did not sleep, not really. Instead, he skirted the edges of it and tried not to dream.
His eyes were open; he didn’t sense the transition from the doze he had fallen into in the back of the Chrysler. The car wasn’t moving anymore, the dull hum of the engine silenced. He felt chilly air on his face and he saw that the driver’s-side door was hanging open.
“Chase?”
The other man was gone, and as Jack leaned forward to reach for the seat in front of him, the inertia reel on the seat belt across his chest locked tight, jerking him back. He cursed and pulled at the latch, but it was rigid and he couldn’t move it. Jack’s hand slapped at the pocket in his jacket, feeling for the collapsible multitool he carried there, but he couldn’t find it. He was certain he’d had it before they left Hex’s hidden compound, and he searched the dim interior of the car in case it had fallen to the floor.
Jack found nothing, and his skin prickled as he realized that the black bag holding all the gear he had brought with him was also missing. Why would Chase have taken it? Where would he go? It made no sense.
A cold, horrible voice in the back of his mind told him his friend had betrayed him just like his former colleague Tony Almeida did, just like all the others Jack had foolishly believed he could trust. He shook his head, forcing the thought away, and looked out through the windshield, still pulling vainly at the immovable seat belt.
He didn’t recognize the landscape. The night was a curtain of featureless black and there were no stars. A white glow spilled from the Chrysler’s headlights, illuminating flat, dusty ground that faded away beyond the range of the beams. There was another car out there, a dark and blocky shape barely visible behind the dazzling flood of its own high beams.
Jack saw Chase walking toward the other vehicle, dragging the black bag across the ground behind him as if it were too heavy for him to lift. He called out his name, shouting at the top of his lungs, but if the other man heard him, he didn’t react. A second figure moved out from behind the other car, and a kernel of doubt grew in Jack’s chest.
Had Chase really betrayed him? Had something been done, some drug been slipped to Jack while his guard had been down? He believed that Chase Edmunds was still the man he had always been, even after the trials life had put him through, and Jack could not accept that his former partner would sell him out … But was that his greatest mistake? Was his sense of trust so damaged, so corroded that he had misplaced it once again?
Now he was pulling at the belt with all his might, and still it would not budge, still he could not slip out of it. He saw the other person moving to meet Chase in the middle of the spill of light, but they were unrecognizable, only a silhouette backlit by the headlights.
Chase halted, as if he had suddenly seen something, and he let the strap of the bag go, raising his hands. The other person raised a hand too, but there was something silver in it and a crack of thunder sounded.
“No!”
As if he had been kicked by a bull, Chase twisted away, an ugly stream of crimson jetting from his face. He crashed to the ground, falling out of sight. His killer turned toward the Chrysler and advanced on it with slow and purposeful steps, the big frame of the silver pistol glittering.
Jack’s fury translated to action, and he grabbed the jammed seat belt with both hands, wrapping it around his wrists to gain traction. With a wordless shout of effort, he pulled on the buckle with all his might and the metal tab suddenly shattered, setting him free. He slammed into the passenger door and burst out, scrambling from the car and across broken, drought-cracked earth. He felt dizzy and slow, as if he had been starved of oxygen.
Jack fought to regain his balance and looked back as a shadow fell across him. He saw a woman’s face framed with short, black hair, familiar pale skin and a wicked mouth. Once he had found a kind of solace
in her arms, before he discovered it was nothing but a lie. Her eyes were cruel and icy. “Jack,” she purred. “You can’t run. You must know that.”
“Nina…” He breathed. “You can’t be here. You’re dead. I shot you!”
“You did,” she agreed, and now blood was pooling across her neck, soaking through the white silk blouse she wore. Nina Meyers tapped a finger against her head and smiled. “But you can’t kill me up here, Jack.” The woman who murdered his wife, whose treachery had almost destroyed him, looked down at Jack with cold amusement. “That voice you hear in the back of your mind? That’s not Cheng, it’s not Drazen or Marwan or any of the others. It’s me.” She raised the gun and the muzzle yawned like a tunnel mouth. “It’s always me.”
The pistol discharged with a monstrous crash …
* * *
… and Jack bolted awake, a chill on his skin.
Light flashed over him from the tractor of a passing truck in the far lane, and he blinked, sucking in a deep breath.
“You all right back there?” From the driver’s seat, Chase shot him a glance over his shoulder. “Jack?”
“I’m okay,” he lied, grimacing as he adjusted the seat belt where it had tightened over his chest.
“Bad dream?”
He ignored the question. “How long was I out?”
Chase’s lip curled. “Don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything.” He nodded as an interchange sign hanging over the highway appeared in the glow of the headlights. “Not far now.”
24: Deadline (24 Series) Page 11