by David Jacobs
Hickman stood at the edge of the landing, leaning over the top rail of the banister to point his gun down into the front hall. “FBI—freeze!”
Sylvia Nordquist lay sprawled nearby. One bare leg was folded underneath her, the other was extended straight out. Her palms were pressed flat into the deep-pile carpet, raising her upper body, holding it upright. She reached out one hand toward Hickman, crying, “My daughter!”
“Stay down, ma’am,” he said, not looking at her. He ducked as Arnot pointed the gun at him and fired.
Arnot held the girl in front of him as a shield, backing away toward the front door while he blasted away at Hickman. Hickman went down on one knee, gun hand reaching between the banister rails. He didn’t have a clear shot at Arnot; the girl was in the way.
Sylvia Nordquist whimpered, started crawling on her hands and knees toward Hickman.
Arnot held the gun to Kendra’s head, muzzle pressed against her temple. “Back off!” he called up to Hickman.
“Put down your weapon and let the girl go,” Hickman said.
Arnot barked a mirthless laugh, then told Hickman what he could do with himself.
“Throw down your gun or I’ll kill her,” Arnot shouted.
Sylvia Nordquist shrieked.
“Then I’ll kill you sure,” Hickman said.
Arnot believed him but was unimpressed. He had the whip hand. He had the girl.
“I’ll be dead and she’ll be dead and what’ll that get you? You ain’t gonna shoot. It’s a standoff,” he said. The hell of it was, he was right.
All this time he’d been moving backward, carrying the girl along with him. He bumped his back against the front door. “Let her go and I’ll let you go,” Hickman offered.
Arnot smirked. “Sure.”
“You have my word on it.”
Arnot told Hickman what he could do with his word. Sylvia Nordquist was behind Hickman, at his feet. She begged him to save her daughter, her pleas shrilling into hysteria. She grabbed hold of his leg, trying to pull herself up.
Arnot threw the bolts on the front door, unlocking it. “Stay where you are or she dies.”
Now came the payoff. If the law was outside in force, he’d really be in a tight spot. He guessed they weren’t. Otherwise they would have come crashing in by now.
He figured the guy on the landing was alone. There was one way to find out.
Arnot went through the doorway, stepping outside, taking the girl with him.
He would have liked to have fired a few more rounds at Hickman, but he might yet have need of every bullet in the clip.
He stepped to the side, removing himself from the firing line of Hickman’s gun through the open doorway. He stood with his back to the wall, cowering behind the girl, trying to see everywhere at once.
No lawmen barred the way, no police cars massed in the court to seal it off. He’d guessed right!
The Fed was alone after all. He must have been following up a tip or something on his lonesome and gotten lucky.
A welcome sight met Arnot’s eyes. The getaway car sat nearby at the top of the driveway, its front pointing at the street.
Arnot laughed out loud. His lucky streak was holding up. Say what you would about that lousy half-breed Cisco, he was a hell of a wheelman! He must have heard the shots and instead of taking off, he’d backed the car into the driveway where the others could reach it if they made a breakout.
The getaway car’s horn tapped a couple of light beeps to get Arnot’s attention but that was unnecessary, Arnot had seen it and was already in motion. He half carried, half dragged the girl across the lawn toward the car. The passenger side was facing him and its front door gaped open, ready and waiting for him.
Arnot glanced over his shoulder, looking to see if the Fed had made it downstairs and outside. No sign of him yet—
The car’s headlights blazed but its interior was dark. The man behind the wheel gestured in a beckoning motion, as if urging Arnot to hurry. Arnot needed no encouragement. He and the girl crossed to the car.
He flung her inside, down into the well between the passenger seat and the dashboard. Kendra vented a wordless cry of fear and pain.
Arnot ducked his head beneath the door frame as he started to climb into the car. Then he saw what the dark interior dome light had prevented him from seeing up to now.
The driver was not Cisco. The driver pointed a gun at Arnot and fired twice.
Kendra’s screams came a beat behind the gunfire.
Arnot fell backward. Lucky streak? His luck had run out. That realization expired in an instant along with Arnot himself.
Jack Bauer leaned out from behind the steering wheel and across the passenger seat to look outside the door. Arnot lay faceup on the lawn. Jack’s gun covered him but the precaution was unneeded. Arnot was dead.
Cisco was dead, too. His body lay on the ground at the curbside where the getaway car had been standing.
Earlier, when Jack and Hickman had heard the scream coming from inside 19 Colony Court, they’d split up, Hickman approaching the house from the rear while Jack went around to the front.
Jack spotted the dark car before Cisco could spot him. He sneaked up on it, catching a glimpse of assault rifles and a machine gun on the backseat. The driver’s side window was rolled down. Cisco stuck his head out of it from time to time to peer at the house from a different angle.
Jack low crawled around to the driver’s side, crouching there just out of sight. The next time Cisco stuck his head out the window, Jack popped up, hooking an arm around Cisco’s neck. Cisco grabbed for his gun but by then it was too late. A sudden sharp, wrenching twist, and Cisco’s neck snapped with a loud cracking noise, inflicting sudden death.
Jack hauled the body out of the car. He hooked his hands under Cisco’s arms and dragged the corpse across the pavement, dumping it on the curbside ground.
He’d noticed when opening the door that the interior dome light had stayed dark.
A timeworn crook trick, to avoid revealing themselves in the light while doing dark deeds. It saved him the trouble of switching off the dome light himself. He got behind the wheel.
By that time, Hickman had broken into the house through a back door. He didn’t know that Wade had gimmicked the alarm system, neutralizing it, but he had benefitted by it all the same since it allowed him to make a surreptitious entry. He went up the back stairs and surprised Wade on the landing.
Gunfire sounded inside the house, prompting Jack to put the car in drive, making a K-turn into 19’s driveway and backing up to the head of it. Any of the gang exiting the house would make a beeline for the getaway car, running right into Jack’s planned ambush.
When Arnot emerged with his female captive, the stakes had escalated dramatically. The kidnapper was dead and the girl was alive. Kendra lay huddled and trembling on the car floor, her long slender limbs pale in the dimness.
“It’s okay, miss. You’re safe now,” Jack Bauer said.
14
* * *
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 A.M. AND 1 A.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME
* * *
12:23 A.M. MDT
97 Meadow Lane, Shady Grove
Jack Bauer was at the Parkhurst residence. Vince Sabito was on-site, along with the FBI forensics team that had come down from Santa Fe. The crime scene lab crew had already had a busy day, and between the Parkhurst place and the Nordquist house they had their work cut out for them for this night. Plenty more could happen between now and dawn, too.
Jack and Sabito were outside the house, off to one side by themselves where they couldn’t be overheard by others.
“I’ve got reinforcements coming from Albuquerque, including a Tac Squad,” Vince Sabito said.
“Why not call out the National Guard, too, while you’re at it?” Jack Bauer said.
He was joking—he knew only the governor of the state could call out the National Guard. But there was an element of truth in his offhand rema
rk and Sabito picked up on it.
“I would if I could. What with the fire and wholesale murder and all, it’s like the lid blew off the county today. And it shows no sign of stopping. Instead, it’s increasing,” Sabito said.
He looked darkly at Jack. “And I keep finding you in the middle of most of it. Why is that?”
Jack shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”
Sabito snorted. He gave the impression of a man doing a slow burn. “Don’t give me that, Bauer. You’re holding out on me. You’ve been playing it cute all day—from day one, the first time you got here last week.”
Jack tried to look innocent, guileless. What Sabito said was true, of course. Jack had been holding out on him, keeping his knowledge of the Annihilax connection to himself. He would continue to do so for the time being. He didn’t see where Sabito had any need to know about the international master assassin yet.
Jack held out his hands palms-up in a give-me-a-break gesture. “I shared the detector and Kling and Rhee’s operational diary and file with you, didn’t I?”
Sabito sneered. “You had to. Hickman knew about them, too.”
“I could have declared them restricted data and kept them off-limits to you. My agency has priority over the Bureau on this assignment.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Bauer.”
“Call Washington and be sure before you get into a pissing contest, Vince. CIA has ultimate jurisdiction over all lab-related matters and CTU is CIA.”
“Think again, hotshot. You didn’t read the fine print. Central has jurisdiction over all lab-related matters involving nuclear weapons. Perseus isn’t nuclear. There’s no atom-smashing needed to fire a laser.”
“Perseus isn’t nuclear but Ironwood has done plenty of nuclear weapons research so that puts it right back under the CIA aegis,” Jack countered.
He switched gears, coming at Sabito from a different tack: conciliatory. “I said I could have done it but I didn’t. I’m not trying to throw my weight around here. I’m working with you. Hey, I’m sticking my neck out here. There’s some higher-ups at CTU who won’t be happy that I didn’t insist on sole possession of the detector material.”
Such as Regional Division Director Ryan Chappelle, Jack’s immediate boss. Chappelle was a miser when it came to sharing intelligence with outside agencies. Not that Jack’s attitude was so different, but he had a veteran field operative’s flexibility on the subject. He’d made a judgment call about passing the detector and the Kling/Rhee documents to Sabito.
He was CTU’s lone agent on the scene. He needed FBI cooperation to move his investigation forward, and there’d be no getting along with Sabito if he tried to freeze him out on this matter. Besides, the Bureau had the resources to secure and process the machine and documents.
“Gabe McCoy at OCI won’t be thrilled that we didn’t immediately turn the detector material over to him,” Jack pointed out. He had inserted that we in there deliberately.
It was we, namely he and Sabito, who were tacitly denying the machine and the product it had generated to McCoy—the fruits of an OCI investigation that had been initiated by Rhodes Morrow, McCoy’s predecessor, and that had been conducted by Kling and Rhee without McCoy’s knowledge.
Sabito’s eyes narrowed as he considered the possibilities of the situation.
“Considering the compromised position of OCI, maybe it’s best that we keep knowledge of the discovery between you, me, and Hickman for now,” Jack pressed.
Sabito gave a curt nod. “My thoughts exactly.”
On the subject of withholding the intelligence from a third party, he and Jack Bauer could find common ground.
“So we’re on the same page, Vince?”
“As far as that goes, yeah.”
“And Ross?” Jack asked.
“He knows how to keep his mouth shut. He’s my man in the Sheriff’s Department. That’s why he’s in charge of taking the Nordquists to the clinic,” Sabito said.
Sylvia and Kendra Nordquist had been scared to within an inch of their lives but had come through their ordeal pretty much physically unscathed. Both, however, were suffering from the effects of extreme shock. Ross had been delegated to deliver them to a small private clinic and had already departed with a well-armed escort of deputies on that errand.
Sabito went on. “The clinic’s a modest-sized facility with plenty of privacy. It can be more easily secured and guarded than one of the bigger hospitals, in case somebody wants to make another try at snatching the Nordquist females.”
“That’s a concern,” Jack agreed.
“Ross knows what to do. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, unlike some of the jackasses working local law enforcement in this area. He’ll make sure that mother and daughter both are guarded by special deputies so nobody gets to them. The specials are an elite unit directly under Ross’s control. He’ll see that everything’s handled quietly—with discretion.
“God forbid that Sheriff Bender gets a whiff of what this is really all about! Buck’s a good old boy but he never met a TV camera he didn’t like. Luckily he’s too busy giving interviews about how his department is handling the fire to get involved in this.
“The clinic’s outside city limits so the Sheriff’s Department has jurisdiction. That’ll keep the Los Alamos Police Department out of the loop. We sure as hell don’t need them getting wind of this thing. The fewer people that know about it the better.”
“What about Dr. Nordquist?” Jack asked.
“What about him?” Sabito demanded belligerently. “He’s still at Ironwood, the last I heard. And that was pretty recently.”
“Got a man inside there, too, Vince?”
“I have my sources.”
“So Nordquist doesn’t know about the kidnap attempt on his wife and daughter?”
“He didn’t hear it from me. The first thing I did when I got here was to pull down the curtain on the whole mess. It’s under a blackout—my people have been instructed not to divulge it. Ross slapped a hush on his specials so it won’t leak out from them, either.”
“What Nordquist doesn’t know won’t hurt him, eh?”
“The last thing we need right now is for him is to get frantic and go tearing out of Ironwood like a bat out of hell.” Sabito smiled toothily. “Besides, he’s given standing orders not to be disturbed while he’s running a test.”
“I suppose Carlson is unaware of his wife’s disappearance, too?” Jack asked.
The toothy smile widened. “That would be a fair assumption, yes.”
“McCoy and OCI are also in the dark?”
The smile turned into a snarl. “You got a problem with that, Bauer?”
“Frankly, no. It’s best that Nordquist and Carlson be contained at INL until we get control over who has access to them.”
“I’m glad that meets with your approval,” Sabito said sarcastically. “But what’s this we stuff?”
“You and me, Vince. The copter in the schoolyard could whisk us over to Ironwood.”
Sabito shook his head. “No can do. I’ve got to stay here to meet the bunch from Albuquerque. Hickman will go in my place. By the way, when the public is finally told about how Sylvia Nordquist and her daughter were heroically saved from brutal kidnappers—and they will be, sooner or later—the Bureau should get a pretty big play, huh?”
“Tell it any way you like.”
“You’d make some friends around here if the FBI gets the lion’s share of the credit.”
“I could use some friends.”
“You sure could, with some of the stunts you’ve been pulling today, Bauer. Maybe we should leave CTU out of the media version altogether—when it finally gets told, I mean. To avoid confusing the public.”
“The sooner I get to Ironwood the better,” Jack said, through gritted teeth.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Sabito said. “Here comes Hickman now. Ferney will drive you two to the schoolyard where the copter’s waiting.”
The tooth
y smile was back in place, beaming. It made Sabito look something like a well-fed crocodile basking in the contentment of a full belly.
12:47 A.M. MDT
Rancho Loco, Rio Grande Road,
Los Alamos County
Rancho Loco was a roadhouse located on the wide sprawling flat of the Rio Grande river valley east of the area’s distinctive finger-shaped mesas. It sat far south enough of the Hill to be outside Los Alamos city limits. The County Sheriff’s Department was more tolerant of dives like Rancho Loco than the city police.
“Folks have got to have a place to blow off steam somewhere. Close up the honky-tonks and the joints and they’ll just set up shop across the county line and some other county will be getting the benefit of the revenues they provide. Lord knows taxes are high enough already without having to raise them to make up the difference,” Sheriff Buck Bender had frequently opined on the subject to reporters.
The folks kept reelecting him and the dives stayed open. The owners of said roadhouses, honky-tonks, and joints all contributed generously to Bender’s campaign fund at election times and during the off-years, too.
Rancho Loco squatted on a lot east of a strip of two-lane blacktop running north-south out in the middle of nowhere. Respectable citizens knew it for a good place to get your throat cut and steered clear of it.
A big red barnlike structure sat on a patch of sun-baked ground that was as hard as rock. The parking area was covered with gravel to keep down the dust.
Behind the back of the building was a row of mobile home trailers, modest-sized jobs that could be hitched up to the back of a car or pickup truck and towed from place to place. They also served as handy cribs for the brisk prostitution trade that operated out of the roadhouse.
It was Saturday night—early Sunday morning, actually—and folks were letting off steam at Rancho Loco. The parking lot was filled with cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and motorcycles.
The red barn was filled with noise, heat, smoke, and rowdy characters. Its wooden frame walls shook from the pounding beat of electronically amplified rock and country-western music.