24: Deadline (24 Series)

by James Swallow

  Swinging back around, he used the chain to haul himself up onto the roof of the dented VW, and from there he scrambled to the upper level.

  The second shooter was still looking down on the wrong side of the wagon, aiming into the shadows where he mistakenly thought Jack had fallen.

  Jack planted his feet against the deck plates, drawing and aiming his M1911. “Who sent you?” he shouted.

  The other Russian jerked in surprise, then slowly he turned to face Jack. His hands were still on his assault rifle, but the muzzle was aimed away. Plain-faced and ordinary, the second shooter glared at Jack and said nothing.

  “Suvarov?” Jack prompted, and that got him a slow, sullen nod in return.

  He wondered if the Russian could fully understand him. He could see the thoughts unwinding behind the gunman’s eyes, the calculations of survival versus termination. If either one of them moved, death would be the result.

  “How many of you did he send?” Jack demanded.

  The Russian smiled. “Enough. There is no path open to you, Bauer. No place for you to hide. No one you can go to. We will be there.”

  A signal pole flashed past the train, a bright crimson light glowing atop it, and the motion made Jack reflexively look away, just for a fraction of a second. The gunman had seen it coming, had been waiting for the moment, and now he flipped up his weapon, turning it toward his target.

  But Jack’s aim never wavered. He fired three times in quick succession, putting the shots into a line up the Russian’s chest. The man toppled off the side of the gantry and was gone.

  Jack turned as the ladder behind him rattled. Dragging her gear bag over her shoulder, Mandy emerged on the upper deck and glowered at him.

  “Always a party when you’re around,” she called out over the rushing wind. She pulled a spool of nylon line from the bag and connected one end to a fastener on her belt. “But if it’s all the same, this is where we part ways.”

  Ahead, Jack could see a blurry arch over the track speeding closer, another cable bridge like the one they had used outside Deadline. Mandy pushed past him and positioned herself at the end of the wagon.

  “Where are you going?”

  “This is my stop,” she said, unfurling a metal claw at the other end of the nylon line. “Next time you’re in trouble? Do me a favor and lose my number.”

  Jack ducked as the cable bridge passed over his head, and Mandy tossed the claw up to snag it as it went by. The line twanged and pulled her up and away from the train, jerking her backward. Dangling from the steel arch as the train rolled on, the assassin shrank into the haze. Jack watched her go, and then turned away to find some shelter.

  Los Angeles was still hours away, and he ached all over. He dropped back down to the lower deck and sank into the shadows, looking out along the railroad ahead and the miles yet to be covered.

  The gunman’s words nagged at him. We will be there. Jack grimaced and turned away.

  “I’ll see you soon, Kim,” he said to the air. “I promise.”

  21

  He awoke as the train shunted onto the tracks threading out across Terminal Island and the docks of the Port of Los Angeles. Sleep had taken Jack down, hard and quick, even as the storm had clattered all around him—and now, waking to see shafts of sunlight peeking through the gaps in the frame of the cargo wagon, he felt as if he had come to in another world. Jack moved fast, ignoring the aches and pains that ran though him as he got back to his feet. In moments he was at the hatch.

  Timing it carefully, Jack leapt from the slow-moving train and landed as if he was dropping in from a parachute fall, knees bent, letting the momentum bleed off into a forward tumble across the trackside shingle. Gathering himself, he slipped between the buffers of two tanker wagons on the next siding over. The big Union Pacific rolled on, and he saw the car carriers flash past. The police would be called when the dock inspectors came across the bloodstains and bullet holes in the vehicles, and he needed to be somewhere else when that happened.

  Keeping out of sight, he moved from cover to cover until he could see a highway on the far side of a rusting metal fence. Jack looked left and right to make sure he wasn’t being observed, and then stepped out, walking calmly in parallel to the barrier until it came to a break, the mouth of a service road that spilled out onto the street. There was nothing approximating security, not even razor wire or a drop-gate, nothing but a caution sign warning about the hazards of moving trains. But then there was little here for the attention of thieves, and across the four lanes of the highway there were only endless lines of scrapyards and parking lots for big rigs. Human traffic was nonexistent.

  Jack pulled his jacket closed and started walking east, in the general direction of Long Beach, waiting to find a place to cross the highway. Los Angeles welcomed him home with the same dusty, dry and fume-laden air that had become so familiar to him since the days of his youth growing up in Santa Monica. Despite his grave circumstances, there was something reassuring about being back in a city that he knew well, like a greeting from an old friend. It was home ground, he realized. Jack had fought and bled on the streets of this city, and held it back from the brink of chaos on more than one occasion. He felt a sting of regret as a nagging voice in the back of his mind reminded him that he would soon have to leave it again, perhaps never to return.

  No time to dwell on that, Jack told himself. He was close now, close to his objective, and he couldn’t lose sight of that even for a moment.

  It didn’t take him long to find an auto yard off East Anaheim Street and a beaten-up Hyundai Accent hatchback that he could hot-wire in short order. Jack slipped into the sparse traffic and headed northward, following the line of the Los Angeles River toward the 405 freeway. He checked his watch. His son-in-law Stephen was an oncologist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center up in West Hollywood, and finding him there would be Jack’s best option for getting to Kim without alerting anyone of his presence in the city. Or so he hoped.

  Jack willed himself to keep his driving casual, to do nothing that might draw attention even though everything in him wanted to mash the accelerator to the floor and dash across the city. He reached out and snapped on the dashboard radio, tuning to a news-only station, and caught the middle of a report coming live from the nation’s capital.

  The ripples from Allison Taylor’s shocking announcement less than a day ago were still echoing across the country. Having first walked out of the historic United Nations peace conference with the Islamic Republic of Kamistan, Taylor had gone on to resign her presidency only hours later. She had offered a confession of sorts about her knowledge of a plot against the IRK and its leader Omar Hassan. Killed on American soil as the result of a conspiracy by his own people, right now there were very few people who knew exactly what had happened—and Jack Bauer was one of them. He listened to the reporter asking the question that everyone else had to be asking: What happens now?

  Taylor’s honesty, the promise she had made to Jack and then kept, meant that she was liable to bear the full weight of any criminal charges that might be brought against her. No matter how things played out, her political career was in ruins, and she could face a lengthy prison sentence. Jack had not found it easy to trust the woman, and he still felt conflicted about the choices she had made … but Allison Taylor had kept her word, and that was something that was all too rare in the clandestine world where Jack moved.

  The discussion went on, first with a cursory mention of Charles Logan. Against all odds, the scheming politico was still alive. Jack’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as he listened. There was no justice there, he mused. Pushed to the point of committing a suicidal act by the revelation of his misdeeds, it was now slowly coming out that Logan had apparently botched an attempt to shoot himself, and that he might also be responsible for the death of his assistant Jason Pillar. Jack wondered if Agent Hadley was hearing this story too. How would the driven young FBI agent react to that revelation?

  If the world had been
a fair one, then Logan would be dead, or he would be paying for his crimes. But instead, doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center had announced that Logan was in a deep coma. If he was ever to regain consciousness, it was likely that severe brain damage would have destroyed whatever of the man he had once been.

  Too easy, Jack reflected. It was too lenient a punishment for someone who deserved to forfeit the full price for his treachery and greed.

  But it was not just the United States of America that was reacting to the fallout from what the media were now calling “the Hassan incident.” In the hours since Jack had fled New York, as he and Chase had found themselves caught up in the situation in Deadline, the murder of Omar Hassan continued to resonate around the world. From Russia there were fragmentary reports and rumors that President Yuri Suvarov had returned home to an icy reception, having raced back to Moscow ahead of suggestions that he had played a key role in Hassan’s murder.

  Jack carried a very particular kind of hatred for the Russian official, as it had been on Suvarov’s personal orders that Renee Walker was fatally wounded. Rationally, Jack knew that someone like Suvarov would forever be beyond his reach, but in his heart he wanted to see the man destroyed. Now he wondered if the ministers in Russia’s own government would be the ones to do that for him. According to the news report, some members of the Duma—the Russian state assembly, their equivalent to the US House of Representatives—were agitating for Suvarov to follow in Taylor’s footsteps and turn himself over for arrest. Suvarov’s involvement in the Hassan assassination was as certain to Jack as his part in Renee’s death, and it seemed that Russian fears over the reaction from the IRK might now accomplish what Jack could not. But even if Yuri Suvarov’s career ended in disgrace, even if he were to rot in some gulag for the rest of his days, it would not be enough. As with Logan, the price Suvarov paid would be a pale shadow of the true bloody cost he owed.

  And then there were the Kamistani people themselves. Adversaries to America for so long, the peace treaty their leader had come to New York to sign had meant much. Even someone who considered himself as apolitical as Jack did could not deny that making peace with the IRK was the right thing to do, a first step toward bringing stability to the troubled Middle East and a way to build bridges. But all those good intentions were dust now.

  Omar Hassan’s wife, Dalia, had taken up his role as president, and now the IRK’s leader was a widow whose husband was dead because of a conspiracy involving the very nation-states that had sued for peace. As the report came to an end, no one said the words, but Jack could hear the echo of another, more pressing uncertainty beneath it all. There would be many out there who would use the events of the past days as a spur toward hostility … perhaps even war.

  His jaw hardened. Once, that might have preyed upon him, but here and now Jack found it hard to connect with the thunder of global events happening elsewhere in the world. He had spent most of his life as a soldier of one sort or another, sacrificing much of himself to make sure his homeland remained safe and secure. He had trusted in the men and women who issued his orders, believing that they were honest and true. Jack had always believed that he was doing the right thing, no matter how hard that road was.

  It was different now. So much of that certainty had been burned away from him. He had been asked to do questionable things, time and time again. Betrayal and loss took their toll. Now, Jack understood that he was still that soldier, still ready to sacrifice and bleed red for what he believed in; what had changed was the nature of the things he fought for. Not for nations or for flags, not for a uniform or a badge, but for what was right. For that ideal and for those that he loved dearly.

  He blinked and swallowed a lump in his throat, for a moment recalling the faces of Renee Walker, of Audrey Raines, his wife Teri and his daughter Kim, his trusted friends Chloe O’Brien, Chase Edmunds and all the others. These were the people that he fought for, they were the weight that he carried and the strength that he drew from. Nothing else mattered to him.

  * * *

  Ditching the car in a side street off the Beverly Center, Jack turned up the collar of his jacket and kept his head down as he set off toward Cedars-Sinai. The hospital complex towered high over the neighboring buildings, sprawling across several city blocks, and Jack ran through his memory of everything Kim had told him about her doctor husband, thinking about how he would find him in there.

  Admittedly, he didn’t know Stephen Wesley that well, but Jack had always been a man who relied on his gut instinct to measure a person. Stephen made Kim happy, and that was the most important thing. Jack had only to see the two of them together to know that they loved one another, and he wanted that for his daughter. Kim deserved a good life, a normal life, and Stephen had helped her find it.

  Halting at an intersection, Jack scanned the street around him, the act coming to the former federal agent like second nature. His eyes flicked over faces, measuring and discarding them as potential threats or possible observers. He did it almost without conscious thought, a part of his mind looking for patterns and shapes that seemed out of place.

  He found something.

  A pale-colored Chevrolet Suburban was parked in the shadow of a sun-bleached palm tree, the hood pointing toward the hospital entrance. The windows of the SUV were tinted black, but the most obvious tell was the way the vehicle sat low on its shocks. The SUV was far heavier than a normal model, and that could only be from the addition of bulletproofed windows, body armor and a more powerful engine. Jack knew this kind of vehicle intimately. He had undergone tactical driving training in the same model.

  Which meant only one thing. The Suburban was a mobile from the LA division of the Counter Terrorist Unit.

  The lights changed and Jack crossed the road, keeping the SUV in sight, gauging his next move. Why would CTU be here? Then he remembered the last words he had spoken to Chloe back in New York, a conversation that seemed like a lifetime ago.

  My daughter … Her family … They’re going to try and use her to get to me.

  Chloe hadn’t hesitated. I’ll make sure they’re protected. I promise.

  She had been as good as her word, as she always was. Chloe must have used her last moments at CTU to deploy a team to keep Jack’s family safe, even as the hammer was falling.

  But now the protection detail posed a problem. Odds were, everyone in that SUV knew Jack Bauer’s face. They might even be agents that he had worked with or trained in the past. He couldn’t chance being recognized by any of them, not after he had risked so much to get away from his pursuers. All it would take was one person reporting in, and Los Angeles would be on lockdown and the hunt would begin all over again.

  The lights changed and Jack suddenly saw the solution to his problem. An ambulance on its way back to the hospital rolled to a halt at the intersection, engine idling. No lights or sirens were running, indicating that whatever emergency call the vehicle was returning from was not a time-critical one.

  Jack walked past the side of the ambulance, noting the two paramedics in the cab chatting about their plans for lunch. At the last possible second, he stepped aside as he reached the back of the vehicle and twisted the handle of the rear door. It came open easily, revealing the empty compartment within. Jack heard the engine rev as the lights shifted back to green, and he was inside, the door closing quietly behind him as the ambulance moved off. Keeping his head low, Jack peered out of the rear window as the ambulance passed the parked SUV on its way to the dispatch bay. He saw no movement from the inside of the CTU vehicle and let out a breath. In the clear, he told himself.

  Acting quickly, he ditched his dark coat and stole an EMT’s visibility jacket and baseball cap from a rack in the back of the ambulance. The vehicle had barely rolled to a halt as he slipped back out, his disguise in place.

  He didn’t run. Witnesses noticed when people moved in haste. Instead, Jack walked calmly across the ambulance bay, following a group leading a stretcher into the interior of the hospital.
Keeping the bill of his cap down low across his nose, Jack’s searching gaze found a sign directing him deeper into the building, toward the oncology wards.

  He shot a look at his watch. I still have time.

  * * *

  “This is an infirmary?” Bazin’s tone bordered on the incredulous as he looked around the private room. “I have been to whorehouses that were less extravagant.” He curled his lip at the well-appointed bedroom.

  Ziminova did not doubt that her commander’s estimation was correct. She moved to the window and looked down at the street below. With her back to Bazin, she stifled a yawn and blinked away a moment of fatigue. She had not slept on the flight to Los Angeles, and it was beginning to wear on her. “This is a gamble,” she offered. “We do not know if Bauer will come here.”

  Bazin snorted and nodded to the blond-haired man who had met them at the airstrip. “Keep watch.” The man nodded and stepped out into the corridor.

  His name was Lenkov. All she knew was that he was one of the SVR’s local operatives on the American West Coast, and it was his duty to help Bazin, Ekel and her find and terminate their target.

  “Bauer’s daughter is on her way here,” Bazin explained. “Her husband treats those with cancers … Such a worthy profession, eh?” As if in mockery, Bazin produced a lighter and a cigarette, raising it to his mouth.

  Ziminova took two quick steps to his side and snatched the cigarette from his fingers. Off her commander’s furious glare, she nodded at a pale green cylinder near the unoccupied hospital bed. “Oxygen,” she said by way of explanation.

  Bazin scowled and pocketed the lighter again. “He will come. And if he does not? We use his family as leverage to draw him out.”

  “You have placed much faith in the words of a dying coward.” Ziminova looked around. The room they had secured was hardly an ideal base of operations, but they were operating well beyond their mission remit now. Bazin had not made contact with the consulate in New York for hours, and she was starting to wonder about Yolkin and Mager, who were similarly silent.