by John Whitman
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, dropping to his knees and pressing his hands into the carpet. He didn’t see any flames, but his hands were still burning. It felt like someone was pressing fiery coals into his palms. He jumped to his feet again and ran to the sink. He pushed the faucet on with his forearms and stuck his hands under the running water. It didn’t help. His hands were burning on the insides now.
He ran to his cell phone, which he’d dropped on the floor. He couldn’t pick it up. Kelly lay down next to it and pressed his cheek to the device. He could hear Schneider on the other end calling his name. “Get someone up here!” He yelled. “This shit is burning my hands off!”
1:16 P.M. PST East Los Angeles
Jack Bauer had taken the 10 Freeway past the gathered skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles and into East L.A. He turned north and entered Boyle Heights. The address matched a rundown duplex with dirt for a front yard, cracked plaster, and a car on cinder blocks settled in the driveway. As he drove, he noted the faces he passed were brown, and the style of dress tended toward baggy black pants and wife-beater T-shirts. The billboards and storefronts were exclusively in Spanish. In this neighborhood, blond Jack Bauer and his SUV stood out like white socks with black shoes, but there was nothing to be done now.
He parked half a block away from the house and walked back. Heavy drapes hid the inside from view, and heavier iron bars protected the windows from the outside. Julio Juarez did not keep a very welcoming home. The whole place was still, and gave the impression that it was deserted. But Jack knew Julio was home. At least, Julio’s cellular phone was home. The LAPD printout had given Jack access to all kinds of information about Julio, including his cell phone number. Jack had the mobile number’s signal traced — as long as the phone was on, CTU’s satellites could find it — and sure enough, the eyes in the sky had pinpointed Julio inside his own home.
Jack walked up the cracked blacktop driveway to a green door splattered with yellow paint and knocked.
“Hola?” someone yelled from behind the door.
Jack knocked again without saying anything. To the right of the door was a window, again with heavy curtains on the inside. Jack pressed himself against the door just as that curtain was drawn back. Someone was trying to see who was knocking. Jack was also careful to duck below the little peephole in the door front. But he knocked again.
The door opened to the length of the guard chain and someone whined, “Who’s fucking with me?”
Jack drove his shoulder into the door, his weight snapping the chain. The man inside stumbled backward. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
The room inside was the complete opposite of the building’s exterior. It was painted cool blue, and one whole wall was devoted to a graffiti-style painting of zoot suiters and tattooed esses in Ray-Bans and plaid flannel shirts. The carpet was plush gray and the furniture was leather. Ranchero music tripped out of unseen speakers and a fifty-inch plasma screen was broadcasting “Sports Center.”
“What the fuck—?” the man on the floor said.
He looked like the mug shot. He was small and wiry, somewhere between twenty and forty, with a pathetically thin mustache, pockmarked skin, and short, dark hair. He picked himself up and puffed out his chest, but he didn’t advance on Jack.
“What you doing?” he challenged. “You know who I am?”
Jack nodded. “You’re Julio Juarez. You’re a two-bit coyote who makes a living smuggling illegals over the border at San Diego and sometimes up through the desert in Arizona.”
Julio scowled at Jack. His face seemed set into a permanent glare, with one side of his mouth drooping lower than the other. The eye on that side also looked eternally tired. “Yeah, that’s me. I got friends in MS13, bitch, so unless you want you and your family to end up in someone’s trash can, get the fuck out.”
Jack recognized MS-13 from CTU’s daily threat assessments. It was a street gang that had started in El Salvador and quickly spread to the United States. They were active in California and Maryland and Virginia. The situation had gotten so bad that those three states had formed special task forces to deal with them. The fact that Julio was connected to MS-13, and MS-13 was active near the U.S. capital, bothered Jack somehow, but he couldn’t figure it out at the moment.
“Relax, Julio,” Jack said. “I’m just here to ask you a couple of questions. I’m a Federal agent, and I have a lot bigger problems to deal with than a chickenshit like you. You answer my questions, I leave, and you get to go about your business.”
Julio’s weak eye drooped even farther. “Okay, ask your question.”
Jack nodded. “First, I want to know if you’ve ever smuggled anyone—”
He didn’t finish the question, because Julio Juarez kicked him hard in the groin. He moved fast for a man with a droopy eye, and the kick caught Jack almost square. He felt his midsection explode and the air went out of him. The edges of the room turned black for a moment, and Jack barely saw Julio bolt down the hallway. Ignoring the pain, Jack sprinted after him.
1:40 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Ryan Chappelle sat in Kelly Sharpton’s office, thinking of ways to distance himself from Jack Bauer’s blundering activities. He had a promising career ahead of him, but unfortunately he’d been linked with that heavy-handed ex-soldier who thought the only way to deal with a wall was to knock it down. Chappelle preferred to build a door.
His phone rang. “Chappelle,” he said.
“Chappelle, this is Walsh,” said Walsh from Washington, D.C. “What the fuck is going on?”
“I’m sorry?” Ryan looked around as though the problem might be right there in the room with him. “What?”
“It’s all over the news! Who leaked it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Turn on your news, then figure out who leaked this story!” Walsh slammed the phone down.
There was a television in Sharpton’s office. Ryan searched for the remote, found it on top of the television itself, and fired it up. He flipped on CNN. The main story was something about an earthquake in Tunisia, but the running banner told Chappelle what he needed to know: “Intelligence officials acknowledge credible threat to President Barnes. Sources suggest foreign terrorists on U.S. soil.”
Chappelle felt the blood rise up into his cheeks. It hadn’t been an hour, and the story was already in the press.
1:45 P.M. PST Boyle Heights
Julio Juarez had gone out the back door and over the fence. Jack followed, nearly vomiting as his gut and groin bumped against the fence top. He made it over and sprinted down a dusty alley after the coyote.
His quarry turned left at the street, and Jack rounded the corner twenty feet behind him. He slammed into an old lady and spun around her without apologizing, trying not to lose sight of Julio. The wiry little smuggler ran two blocks down, dodging the cars. Jack gained on him slowly — Julio might have been quick with a kick, but he wasn’t all that fast. Jack gained enough ground to see Julio duck into a yellow adobe building with faded writing across the top.
Jack entered the doorway right behind him, racing out of the sunlight into a cool, dark room, very wide and scattered with small tables and benches. There was a stage at the far end of the room, over which hung a banner that read “Viva Ranchero!”
Julio was right in front of him. Jack dived, catching the coyote by the backs of the knees and bringing him down in a tumble of chairs. Julio squealed and struggled. Jack caught him by the waist and rolled him backward, slamming Julio’s head into the tiled floor. Some of the life went out of him then. Jack grabbed him by the hair and lifted his head off the tile, drawing his gun and putting it to the coyote’s temple.
At the same time, he heard four or five hammers click back. Jack looked up. Five gang-bangers stood around him, their faces turned down in angry frowns and their weapons all pointed at him.
“What the fuck, esse?” one of them, a heavyset man with a thick black mustache said.
“Cesar, shoot this puta!” Julio squealed. “He’s a cop!”
Jack rolled onto his back, pulling Julio on top of him and keeping the muzzle of his Sig pressed against the little man’s temple. He didn’t have to say anything. The big man, Cesar, was smart enough to understand.
“You got nowhere to go, white boy,” he said.
“They kill you!” Julio said, trembling.
“But I’ll kill you first, Julio,” Jack replied.
12. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
2:00 P.M. PST Boyle Heights
“Listen, I don’t want to arrest him. I don’t care about any of you. All I want is to ask Julio a couple of questions and I’m gone.”
“We don’t give a shit what you want,” one of the other gang-bangers said.
“I bet Julio wants to live, though,” Jack said. His heart was racing, but he kept his voice calm.
The second gang-banger said, “I don’t give a fuck about Julio. This white boy comes into our place with a gun? He’s dead, esse!”
But Cesar shook his head. “No, tio, we like Julio.
He brings my people up when I need him to. I don’t want to lose him.”
Jack slid out from under Julio, careful to keep his finger on the trigger and the muzzle on Julio. He stood slowly. Some of the gang-bangers clearly wanted to fire, but Cesar waved them off.
“Listen, Julio, this is all I want from you,” Jack said, moving to keep the little man between him and the other guns. “I saw your picture on a driver’s license by the name of Richard Brighton.”
“Never heard of no Brighton,” Julio said, his eyes straining to their corners to see him. “But if he looks like me he must be a handsome bitch.”
“I’m thinking you helped some people cross the border a while ago. Maybe about six months ago, maybe a little longer. Maybe you helped some men cross over, guys who weren’t Latino. Jog your memory?”
Julio hesitated. “Yeah, I did that. But it wasn’t no six months ago. Maybe two.”
“How many guys? What’d they look like?” Jack was inching backward toward the door. The gangbangers sauntered after him.
Julio said, “Eight, I think.” Jack pushed the muzzle into his cheek. “Eight, eight! They were Arabs or something like that.”
Jack stifled a desire to blow Julio’s head off right there. The U.S. spent billions of dollars to protect itself from enemies that wanted to tear it apart, rooting out terrorist training camps in Pakistan, buying off weapons-grade uranium in the former Soviet bloc, and spending countless man-hours snatching cell phone calls and radio signals out of the airwaves using the most complex technology on the planet. And here was Julio from Boyle Heights, tearing their carefully constructed fences into shreds with a beat-up van and a path through the mountains.
“Where’d you take them?”
“Shit, I don’t rem — okay! I dropped them off downtown. At a building on Flower. One of those new renovations with the apartments on top. I don’t remember which one. But the guy who paid me was named Farrah.”
“Thanks, Julio,” Jack said, reaching the door. “You’re a real patriot.”
He shoved Julio back toward the gang-bangers and bolted out into the street.
2:13 P.M. PST Westwood
Kelly kept sobbing until the Demorol kicked in. The paramedics had arrived fifteen minutes after his plea for help, along with Nina Myers and several other CTU agents. By the time they treated him the pain had made him delirious, and all he could imagine was hot, burning coals entering his bloodstream and coursing through his body.
The medics poured some kind of powder on his hands to snuff out the burning material. Then they washed his hands with some kind of antiseptic that stung like hell, and finally they wrapped his burned hands and shot him full of Demorol.
Glenn Schneider had arrived with the CTU team. He was bald, with wide shoulders and a wide belly, too. Spaced out on pain and painkillers, Kelly imagined him to be a human shield against bombs.
The bomb squad leader looked at Kelly’s bandaged hands and said, “Whoever did this is a real bastard. That’s homemade napalm they used. I guess they didn’t want anyone messing with their bomb. You know, if you’d tried to pick it up instead of kicking it, it would have burned your hands and your face right off. It’s also lucky it didn’t hit the Solidox.”
“Oh, I feel lucky,” Kelly said dryly.
Nina Myers sat down beside him. “Nice work,” she said. “You know they found more of this Solidox planted in the heating system in the hallway. This bomb would have taken out this whole floor, and probably started a fire that would have killed more people.”
“We find anything here?” Kelly asked. He didn’t mind saving lives, but he was hoping his burned hands had helped to advance their case.
“One thing,” Nina said. “Bits of wire. Looks like someone tried to clean it all up, but they were in a hurry—”
“Yeah, well, they needed time to leave me that present.”
“Right. Anyway, they missed some. The wire is just wire, same as you’d use in a computer or stereo. But the insulation is weird, and there are a couple of connectors that are also weird. We’re taking it back to study.”
“Bits of wire,” Kelly said grimly, staring at his bandaged hands. “Well, I guess it’s better than bits of me.”
2:29 P.M. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco
President Barnes never got angry in public, and he rarely lost his temper even in private. His self-control had nothing to do with temperament and everything to do with self-preservation; when Harry Barnes lost it, he lost it completely. The Presidential Suite at the Westin bore witness to that fact.
Barnes began with the telephone on his desk and progressed to the wooden guest chair. Those two objects and several others struck the desk with force, courtesy of Harry Barnes’s temper.
“What the goddamned hell does that asshole think he’s doing!” Barnes raged.
Mitch Rasher weathered the storm better than the shattered chair (it helped that he was neither the object nor its target). He stood to one side, serene as a stone, letting the storm blow over him.
“Who leaked the fucking story!” Barnes demanded.
“Well, offhand, I’d say it was him,” Rasher said.
“He wouldn’t dare!” the President said. His initial rage was passing. He felt it drain away, emptied into the sacrificial pieces of furniture. Everyone thought Mitch Rasher’s greatest contribution to his presidency was his political strategy. It wasn’t; it was this — this ability to manage Barnes as he passed through these infrequent but dangerous rages.
Barnes straightened his tie and smoothed his dress shirt. He picked up the remote and rewound, replaying comments from Attorney General Quincy at a press conference. “I assure you that the FBI and other agencies are investigating these threats and taking them quite seriously. I would like to point out that I have spoken directly with agents in charge of this investigation and I was told in no uncertain terms that these potential terrorists were under surveillance six months ago. However, the case was dropped due to an inability to gather evidence. If the NAP Act had been enacted back then, I’m sure these terrorists would have been apprehended long before they became a threat.”
Barnes took one more deep breath. Drained, calm, he returned to the stone-faced deal maker everyone outside that room believed him to be. “He’s using a terrorist threat against me to scoop up a little more power.”
Rasher nodded. “But a little more power for him is a little more power for you.”
Barnes waved that off. “If I don’t have enough power now then I’m a sick man, and so are you. This privacy act is either good for the country or it’s not.”
Rasher smiled. He put his fingers together in front of him, adopting that strange angelic pose so out of sync with his schemes. “Jim seems to believe in it enough to use this so-called threat against you as a soapbox.”
&nb
sp; Barnes leaned against his desk. “There is no threat, right? That’s confirmed.”
“None,” Rasher said. “The source itself is questionable, and they don’t even have the right city.”
“You know, he’s forcing our hand. If I don’t get out in front of this thing, I won’t get any of the credit if it passes. I’ll look like I sat on the sidelines while important legislation was enacted by him.”
Rasher walked over to the coffee table and began to pick up pieces of broken chair. “Mr. President, do you recall who wrote the much ballyhooed campaign finance reform bill that proved useless?”
“McCain-Feingold.”
“Exactly. And, by any chance, do you recall who wrote the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, commonly called the Welfare Reform Act,
that was so popular a few years ago?”
Barnes searched his memory. “No.”
“Exactly. When it comes to issues like this, people don’t remember successes, they remember failures. Let Quincy be the pioneer, sir. Either he’ll get shot full of arrows or he’ll found a city. Then you’ll come in and run it. Or if the people don’t like it, you can veto the whole thing and be the people’s champion.”
Barnes frowned. He was too competitive to enjoy that advice, but he couldn’t deny its logic. He decided to make a short list of replacements for the office of Attorney General.
2:40 P.M. PST Downtown Los Angeles
The last half hour had been a frantic one for Jack Bauer and the support staff at CTU. Two minutes after reaching his SUV, Jack was driving on surface streets into the downtown area and receiving a detailed description of Babak Farrah. Farrah was a legal emigre from Iran, working in the import/export business, and information from Customs suggested that while most of his business was legal, Farrah had a taste for the illegal, from exotic antiquities to Prada knockoffs to drugs. He didn’t seem to need the money. He enjoyed being a gangster.
Jack ordered CTU’s clandestine operations team to build him an identity. He needed to be someone Farrah might want to work with — no one large enough to be a rival, but not so small that he was beneath notice. By the time Jack pulled to the public parking lot at Pershing Square, he knew who he was: Jack Knudson, low-level businessman who’d made some money trading weapons for cash. It wasn’t a great cover, but it was the best they could do in fifteen minutes. Dummy phone lines were set up, and calls were made to several dealers who worked both sides of the fence, cooperating with CTU when the cash or the circumstance was right. They would back Jack’s story.